Hello all – Here’s today’s Friday Thinking - dedicated to illuminating tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
This will be my last Friday Thinking - I can’t remember exactly when I first began this little curation of curiosities of possibility. I believe it was at least around 2012. So it’s been almost a decade. I think it has served its purpose. There was too much to know when I started and the ‘too much to know’ keeps growing exponentially.
The uncertainty of our future has also grown in the same way. But we must all remember that - “To be lucky, it’s essential to be open and alert to the unexpected.”
I want to thank everyone who enjoyed Friday Thinking even if only sporadically - or in fondness of the weird guy that bothered to keep sending it out week after month after year. :)
john
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’
“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon
Content
Quotes:
How Big Can the Quantum World Be? Physicists Probe the Limits.
The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does
Too many scientists still say Caucasian
Articles
Preprint ban in grant applications deemed ‘plain ludicrous’
Do passengers want self-driving cars to behave more or less human?
Detecting an unprecedented range of potentially harmful airborne compounds
Protecting gardens and crops from insects using the 'smell of fear'
World's biggest wind turbine shows the disproportionate power of scale
Janus graphene opens doors to sustainable sodium-ion batteries
“Once we can study a situation where quantum theory would suggest that space-time itself should be in a superposition of two measurably different states,” said Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum physicist at the University of Toronto, “all bets are off, and we have nothing but experiment to guide us. It’s reasonable to keep an open mind to the possibility that we will discover something new.”
In other words, expanding the quantum scale up to sizes where gravity matters might teach us new things about quantum mechanics, gravity and hidden aspects of the universe.
How Big Can the Quantum World Be? Physicists Probe the Limits.
Fichte understands human embodiment and finitude as a call to action. So long as we can feel and exist in a community with others, then we can learn and continue becoming better versions of ourselves. To think that we could find the truth that would cease our strivings and settle our worries is to deny the necessary limitations of human existence. Though we cannot know whether what we feel is ‘really’ true (because all we know must come from feelings), we contribute to the collective progression of humanity towards perfection through following where our feelings lead us.
A pragmatist ethics … aims to cause feelings that lead others to reconsider what they take to be true, or authoritative, rather than convincing them to accept some pre-established truth on our say-so. Authority is not ‘out there’ baked into the world in virtue of it being non-perspectival or objective, just as it is not transparent what God’s commands permit (hence all the disagreement). Pragmatism excises God, Truth and even appeals to the universal authority of science, and begins again with a commitment to unforced social cooperation, an attitude towards others that emulates what Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘the seriousness of a child at play’.
Democracy is sentimental
a brain map with neat borders is not just oversimplified — it’s misleading. “Scientists for over 100 years have searched fruitlessly for brain boundaries between thinking, feeling, deciding, remembering, moving and other everyday experiences,” Barrett said. A host of recent neurological studies further confirm that these mental categories “are poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.”
Neuroscientists generally agree about how the physical tissue of the brain is organized: into particular regions, networks, cell types. But when it comes to relating those to the task the brain might be performing — perception, memory, attention, emotion or action — “things get a lot more dodgy,”
Recent work has found, for instance, that two-thirds of the brain is involved in simple eye movements; meanwhile, half of the brain gets activated during respiration. In 2019, several teams of scientists found that most of the neural activity in “perception” areas such as the visual cortex was encoding information about the animals’ movements rather than sensory inputs.
The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does
A common theme of this scholarship is that groupings depend more on dominant culture than on ancestry. In Singapore, the government mandates that individuals are identified explicitly as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other, which affects where they can live and study. In the United States, people with ancestry from the world’s two most populous countries, India and China, along with every other country on the continent, are collapsed into a single racial category called ‘Asian’. Similarly, the term ‘Hispanic’ erases a multitude of cultural and ancestral identities, especially among Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Erroneous ideas about genetic ‘races’ live on in the broad, ambiguous ‘continental ancestry’ groups such as ‘Black, African’ or ‘African American’, that are used in the US Census and are ubiquitous in biomedical research. These collapse incredible amounts of diversity and erase cultural and ancestral identities. Study participants deemed not to fit within such crude buckets are often excluded from analyses, despite the fact that fewer and fewer individuals identify with a single population of origin.
One practical way forwards is to move away from having people identify themselves using only checkboxes. I am not calling for an end to the study of genetic ancestry or socio-cultural categories such as self-identified race and ethnicity. These are useful for tracking and studying equity in justice, health care, education and more. The goal is to stop conflating the two, which leads scientists and clinicians to attribute differences in health to innate biology rather than to poverty and social inequality.
Too many scientists still say Caucasian
Human beings find comfort in certainty. We form governments, make calendars, and create organisations; and we structure our activities, strategies and plans around these constructs. These routines give us the satisfaction of knowing that, by having a plan, there’s a means of it coming to fruition.
But there’s another force, constantly at play in life, that often makes the greatest difference to our futures: the ‘unexpected’ or the ‘unforeseen’. If you think about it, you already look out for the unexpected every day, but perhaps only as a defence mechanism. For example, whenever you use a pedestrian crossing on a busy road, you look out for the unexpected driver who might race through the red light. That ‘alertness’ to, or awareness of, the unexpected is at the centre of understanding the science of (smart) luck and exploiting it to your benefit.
In my research into what makes individuals and organisations fit for the future, one insight has come up again and again: many of the world’s leading minds have developed a capacity, often unconscious, to turn the unexpected into positive outcomes. Developing this ‘serendipity mindset’, is both a philosophy of life and a capability that you can shape and nurture in yourself.
You might think of serendipity as passive luck that just happens to you, when actually it’s an active process of spotting and connecting the dots. It is about seeing bridges where others see gaps, and then taking initiative and action(s) to create smart luck. Serendipity is a guiding force in great scientific discoveries but it’s also present in our everyday lives, in the smallest of moments as well as the greatest life-changing events. It’s how we often ‘unexpectedly’ find love, a co-founder, a new job, or a business partner – and it’s how inventions such as Post-it Notes, X-rays, penicillin, microwaves and many other innovations came about.
How to be lucky
A signal from the 80’s about the future that’s still coming.
Neuromancer --- Radio Drama
A radio play of William Gibson’s breakout novel.
Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price..
If the quest of the ‘Grail’ of knowledge is the journey that all scientists undertake - the natural question they must ask is “Who does the Grail serve?” This is a signal for the choice humanity must face to share knowledge or to let privateers enclose a knowledge commons.
researchers have taken to Twitter in outrage, calling the blanket ruling “short sighted”, “plain ludicrous”, “cruel”, “astonishing”, “outdated” and “gut-wrenching”.
Preprint ban in grant applications deemed ‘plain ludicrous’
Australia’s major research funder has ruled more than 20 fellowship applications ineligible because they mentioned preprints and other non-peer reviewed materials, sparking an outcry from scientists who say the move is a blow to open science and will stymie careers.
At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the use of preprints to the fore, researchers say the stance by the Australian Research Council (ARC) — which limits applicants’ ability to refer to the latest research — is out of step with modern publishing practices and at odds with overseas funding agencies that allow or encourage the use of preprints.
This is an important signal for the future of self-driven transportation. It’s not just the technology that is important - it is the human-centric design and enables easy use and trust. On a personal note I’ve seen the detrimental impact on people when their driving license had to be revoked due to disability or aging. The loss of autonomy can have serious impact on well-being. The question is how do we enable that sense of autonomy and agency - while enabling automation. This is also another signal of the extended mind.
Interestingly, results showed that most people prefer a self-driving car that drives like a less aggressive version of their own driving behaviors. Participants who reported that they trust or somewhat trust artificial intelligence, autonomous technologies, and self-driving cars expected a car with behaviors similar to their personal driving behaviors.
Do passengers want self-driving cars to behave more or less human?
Recent studies have shown that people have negative attitudes about using autonomous systems because they don't trust them. Moreover, research shows a human-centered approach in autonomy is perceived as more trustworthy by users. This begs the question: "Do passengers want self-driving cars to mimic their personal driving behaviors or do they hold these autonomous vehicles to a different standard?"
To explore this quandary, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science conducted a study asking 352 participants about their personal driving behaviors such as speed, changing lanes, distance from a car in front of them, accelerating and decelerating and passing other vehicles. They also asked them the same questions about their expectations of a self-driving car performing these very same tasks. The objective of the study was to examine trust and distrust to see if there is a relationship between an individual's driving behaviors and how they expect a self-driving car to behave.
For the study, published in the proceedings HCI in Mobility, Transport and Automotive Systems, researchers asked the participants 46 questions to gain a better understanding of driving behavior and driver's expectations of self-driving cars in a variety of driving scenarios. Ultimately, information from this study can be used to construct driving models for self-driving cars.
The development of the extended mind can also include a new sort of ‘sensorium’ - and in a world filled with all manner of new material this may be important.
Detecting an unprecedented range of potentially harmful airborne compounds
Many of the products we encounter daily—from deodorant to pesticides to paint—release molecules that drift through the air. Breathing in enough of the wrong ones can cause serious and potentially long-term health problems. However, it can be hard to estimate exposure because current devices are limited in what they can detect. Today, researchers report development of a new personal air-sampling system that can detect an unprecedented range of these compounds from a special badge or pen attached to someone's shirt or placed in a pocket.
The researchers will present their results today at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
"In every situation there's a unique set of compounds that could be present in the air, including potential hazards that we do not know about," says Allen Apblett, Ph.D., the project's senior researcher, who is presenting the research. "Using a single material, we can capture many classes of these compounds, called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and potentially offer a much more comprehensive picture of exposures."
When I was a child my step-grandfather would feed squirrels peanuts in the shell - they became so friendly they would actually go into his pant pockets to pull out peanuts. Who wouldn’t just find them to be sooo cute.
Then as an adult I started growing things like grapes. That’s when I really learned the meaning of varmints - the squirrels would season after season - simply trash the grapes just as they were ripening. I understood the old movie images of an old man on his porch with a shotgun shooting salt - waiting for those varmints to show up.
Protecting gardens and crops from insects using the 'smell of fear'
For home gardeners and farmers, herbivorous insects present a major threat to their hard work and crop yields. The predator insects that feed on these bugs emit odors that pests can sense, which changes the pests' behavior and even their physiology to avoid being eaten. With bugs becoming more resistant to traditional pesticides, researchers now report they have developed a way to bottle the "smell of fear" produced by predators to repel and disrupt destructive insects naturally without the need for harsh substances.
The researchers will present their results today at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
"It is not uncommon to use our senses to avoid risky situations. If a building was on fire, we as humans could use our senses of sight or smell to detect the threat," says Sara Hermann, Ph.D., the project's principal investigator. "There is evidence for such behavioral responses to risk across taxa that suggest prey organisms can detect predation threats, but the mechanisms for detection aren't very well understood, especially with insects."
This is definitely a signal to watch in the transformation of global energy geo-politics.
World's biggest wind turbine shows the disproportionate power of scale
China's MingYang Smart Energy has announced an offshore wind turbine even bigger than GE's monstrous Haliade-X. The MySE 16.0-242 is a 16-megawatt, 242-meter-tall (794-ft) behemoth capable of powering 20,000 homes per unit over a 25-year service life.
The stats on these renewable-energy colossi are getting pretty crazy. When MingYang's new turbine first spins up in prototype form next year, its three 118-m (387-ft) blades will sweep a 46,000-sq-m (495,140-sq-ft) area bigger than six soccer fields.
Every year, each one expected to generate 80 GWh of electricity. That's 45 percent more than the company's MySE 11.0-203, from just a 19 percent increase in diameter. No wonder these things keep getting bigger; the bigger they get, the better they seem to work, and the fewer expensive installation projects need to be undertaken to develop the same capacity.
these mammoth turbines is the key reason why industry experts are predicting that the cost of offshore wind will drop by between 37 and 49 percent by 2050.
the MySE 16.0-242 is just the start of its "new 15MW+ offshore product platform," and that it's capable of operating installed to the sea floor or on a floating base. The full prototype will be built in 2022, installed and into operation by 2023. Commercial production is slated to begin in the first half of 2024.
Another signal on the future of global energy geopolitics.
"It was really exciting when we observed the sodium-ion intercalation with such high capacity. The research is still at an early stage, but the results are very promising. This shows that it's possible to design graphene layers in an ordered structure that suits sodium ions, making it comparable to graphite,"
Janus graphene opens doors to sustainable sodium-ion batteries
In the search for sustainable energy storage, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, present a new concept to fabricate high-performance electrode materials for sodium batteries. It is based on a novel type of graphene to store one of the world's most common and cheap metal ions—sodium. The results show that the capacity can match today's lithium-ion batteries.
Even though lithium ions work well for energy storage, lithium is an expensive metal with concerns regarding its long-term supply and environmental issues.
Sodium, on the other hand, is an abundant low-cost metal, and a main ingredient in seawater (and in kitchen salt). This makes sodium-ion batteries an interesting and sustainable alternative for reducing our need for critical raw materials. However, one major challenge is to increase the capacity.
Typically, the capacity of sodium intercalation in standard graphite is about 35 milliampere hours per gram (mA h g-1). This is less than one tenth of the capacity for lithium-ion intercalation in graphite. With the novel graphene the specific capacity for sodium ions is 332 milliampere hours per gram—approaching the value for lithium in graphite. The results also showed full reversibility and high cycling stability.
Shameless self-promotion
Re-imagining the Local
Response-Able action to the challenges of the 21st Century
Three paradigms enabling response-able action to the challenges of the 21st Century — where everything that can be automated will be.
And
There will never be a shortage of Work and Activity to Do and to Value — When we are Engaged in the enterprise of a Flourishing Life, Community and Ecology.
Paradigm Two — Enabling a person to flourish as a citizen — Universal Basic Assets (UBA) and Guaranteed Job rather than unemployment insurance.
Paradigm Three — Enabling community to be response-able in a changing world — Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD).
And a signal of our epistemological times.
A Eulogy to Truth
The Truth is Dead - Long Live Honesty
Intro - Motif
The truth is dead - long live honesty
Entailing honest accounts and holding accounts honest
Entailing honest accounts and holding accounts honest
Science teaches us skepticism -
Entailing multiple lines of evidence
For reliable knowledge
Entailing multiple lines of evidence
For reliable knowledge
Complexity teaches us relative perspectives -
Entailing multiple ways of reasoning
For relevant wisdom
Entailing multiple ways of reasoning
For relevant wisdom
Collective wisdom emerges in our institutions of conversation
Entailing good faith speaker-hearers -
with honest accounting -
Entangling complex reasonings -
For adaptive evolving
We barely know what we know – but we don’t even know what we don’t know
#micropoem
yeah -
the complexity -
of our challenges -
drives our evolution -
even when -
we are part of -
our challenges -
the complexity -
of our challenges -
drives our evolution -
even when -
we are part of -
our challenges -
commons governance -
social hormones entangle community of I's -
like organs with an -
allostasis metric -
like the price mechanism -
becoming displaced -
perhaps -
by distributed ledgers -
self-care is other-care -
other-care is self-care -
mimesis of entanglement -
social hormones entangle community of I's -
like organs with an -
allostasis metric -
like the price mechanism -
becoming displaced -
perhaps -
by distributed ledgers -
self-care is other-care -
other-care is self-care -
mimesis of entanglement -
mhm -
with distributed ledgers -
price mechanisms level up -
in complexity -
enabling -
allostatic self-governance -
and diversity of commons -
and exchange accounting -
architectures -
enabling collective -
exploration of afford-dancing -
the valuing of values -
with distributed ledgers -
price mechanisms level up -
in complexity -
enabling -
allostatic self-governance -
and diversity of commons -
and exchange accounting -
architectures -
enabling collective -
exploration of afford-dancing -
the valuing of values -
mhm -
yes -
the perfect beauty of cubs at play -
a perfecting of moments -
entangled -
over the time of memories -
of one summer -
a time of paying -
without roles -
but with each other -
the beauty enacted -
as we played -
outside the roles -
yes -
the perfect beauty of cubs at play -
a perfecting of moments -
entangled -
over the time of memories -
of one summer -
a time of paying -
without roles -
but with each other -
the beauty enacted -
as we played -
outside the roles -
we have no ‘self’ -
we are allostatic -attractor-processes -
in-environments -
enabled to maintain -
narrationing -
sustaining viable coping -
crisis-growth emerge -
narrationing-about-narrationing -
learning to learn about learning -
en-act-play -
is wicked hard -
