Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment -
computational ecology -
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence.
To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.
‘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:
Consciousness and the Illusion of Continuity
The Danger of Fact-ist Politics
The Coronavirus and the Right’s Scientific Counterrevolution
Articles:
Four measures to limit the dominance of platforms like YouTube and Facebook
The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy
Minuscule drums push the limits of quantum weirdness
Tesla remotely disables Autopilot on used Model S after it was sold
These cellular clocks help explain why elephants are bigger than mice
Researchers Read the Sugary ‘Language’ on Cell Surfaces
3D printing company Desktop Metal will now use wood to print
There’s a better way to protect yourself from hackers and identity thieves
Intuition can only be leveraged through practice. To be really good at something requires 10,000 hours of participatory experience. Humans do not master a skill by reading an instruction manual. To leverage the massive processing in the brain, the performance of skill must become unconscious. In other words, skills must become ‘second nature’ and thus run ‘in the background’.
Consciousness and the Illusion of Continuity
the threat to democratic, “open” societies is not misinformation or ignorance but rather fanatical certainty.
Popper’s political ideas were informed by his philosophy of science. He emphasized the tentativeness of scientific knowledge, contending that we never know whether theories are true in an ultimate sense, but only whether they have survived previous attempts to disprove them. Scientific “objectivity” emerges not from the unique cognitive qualities or neutrality of researchers but from their critical engagement with each other’s work. Progress in knowledge relies on an environment that fosters lively criticism, a system that encourages productive dissent. The enemies of this system are those who insist on perfect certainty.
The belief that misinformation is today’s main threat to democracy blinds us to the pernicious effects of a broader preoccupation with certitude. This obsession has been tearing at American politics throughout the Covid pandemic, and continues to imperil debates over vaccination, masking, and lockdowns. But the problem will remain with us long after the virus has been beaten.
The Danger of Fact-ist Politics
In an insightful 2013 essay, M. Anthony Mills drew on G.K. Chesterton’s claim that it is not quite right to view a conspiracy theorist as someone with a flaw in his reasoning. Talk to a committed anti-vaxxer or just-the-flu-er, and you may well be flummoxed at the discovery that he has a better command of the research than you do, that he can answer and dodge and weave until you quit in exhaustion. He may even be capable of “saving the appearances”—of offering an explanation for all the observable facts. “The problem,” Mills writes, “is not so much a flaw in his reasoning but that his whole reasoning process has become unmoored. ‘The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.’”
The trouble with the Galilean right is not that its partisans have lost their reason—really they have it in perverse excess—but rather that in their war against the establishment they have lost their sense. Judgment has given way to technique, coherence to deconstruction, the picture of the whole has broken apart into skillful scribbles. Cast out of the hall of scientific power, intoxicated and giddy, they discover that science has given them the tools to blow it up.
The Coronavirus and the Right’s Scientific Counterrevolution
Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.
The features of successful systems, Ostrom and her colleagues found, include clear boundaries (the ‘community’ doing the managing must be well-defined); reliable monitoring of the shared resource; a reasonable balance of costs and benefits for participants; a predictable process for the fast and fair resolution of conflicts; an escalating series of punishments for cheaters; and good relationships between the community and other layers of authority, from household heads to international institutions.
The miracle of the commons
This is an important idea from the European equivalent of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF).
Four measures to limit the dominance of platforms like YouTube and Facebook
For our public debate, we are far too dependent on the whims of dominant companies such as Google and Facebook. The time is nigh for politicians to step in, and here are four measures they should take.
It is crucial that we can speak freely, which allows us to sharpen our thinking and ideas. A healthy public debate is essential for a functioning democracy. Yet, this is only possible if the platforms we use for that debate are a reflection of our society. Unfortunately, this is not the case right now on the internet. Our public debate takes place on a limited number of very dominant platforms. And they have their toxic business model and dominance to thank for this role. With this role, those platforms have a major influence on the form and content of our conversations. Technology companies such as Google and Facebook are thus the gatekeepers of our public debate online.
Dominant platforms must be interoperable.
Dominant platforms must allow third parties to access certain parts of their services.
Basing advertisements on user behaviour should be prohibited.
The use of so-called dark patterns should be prohibited.
From the founding creator of Ethereum who's initial vision was 'trustless' systems. This is an interesting 'state of the blockchain' piece - is it just me or does legitimacy seem like a metaphor for trust?
I will give this powerful social force a name: legitimacy.
What's going on here is a pattern of a similar type to what we saw with the not-yet-issued Bitcoin and Ethereum coin rewards: the coins were ultimately owned not by a cryptographic key, but by some kind of social contract.
The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy
The Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain ecosystems both spend far more on network security - the goal of proof of work mining - than they do on everything else combined. The Bitcoin blockchain has paid an average of about $38 million per day in block rewards to miners since the start of the year, plus about $5m/day in transaction fees. The Ethereum blockchain comes in second, at $19.5m/day in block rewards plus $18m/day in tx fees. Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation's annual budget, paying for research, protocol development, grants and all sorts of other expenses, is a mere $30 million per year. Non-EF-sourced funding exists too, but it is at most only a few times larger. Bitcoin ecosystem expenditures on R&D are likely even lower. Bitcoin ecosystem R&D is largely funded by companies (with $250m total raised so far according to this page), and this report suggests about 57 employees; assuming fairly high salaries and many paid developers not being counted, that works out to about $20m per year.
I think we have to understand that it's our institutions that provide robust strength and the chemistry of trust in a society - yes personal behavior and good faith acting are vital - but it's our institutions that compensate for the whimsy of leadership and individual influence.
Science Doesn't Work That Way
Its authority derives not from unbiased scientists but from the institutions and norms that structure their work. Fighting mistrust requires more public engagement with policy, not unqualified deference to experts.
The COVID-19 pandemic seems to take every public problem—vast social inequality, political polarization, the spread of conspiracy theories—and magnify it. Among these problems is the public’s growing distrust of scientists and other experts. As Archon Fung, a scholar of democratic governance at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has put it, the U.S. public is in a “wide-aperture, low-deference” mood: deeply disinclined to recognize the authority of traditional leaders, scientists among them, on a wide range of topics—including masks and social distancing.
This is an excellent signal of our times - the nature of The Truth - versus honest accounts - multiple lines of evidence - multiple ways of reasoning and wayfinding paradoxes and contradictions through institutions of conversation.
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.” Since this inherited framework works well enough to get new researchers started, the question of what it all means is usually left alone.
Inventing the Universe
Are quantum physicists making things up as they go along?
with Carroll claiming quantum mechanics as literally true and Smolin claiming it as literally false, there must be some underlying disagreement. And of course there is. Traditional quantum theory describes things like electrons as smeary waves whose measurable properties only become definite in the act of measurement. Sean Carroll is a supporter of the “Many Worlds” interpretation of this theory, which claims that the multiple measurement possibilities all simultaneously exist. Some proponents of Many Worlds describe the existence of a “multiverse” that contains many parallel universes, but Carroll prefers to describe a single, radically enlarged universe that contains all the possible outcomes running alongside each other as separate “worlds.” But the trouble, says Lee Smolin, is that in the real world as we observe it, these multiple possibilities never appear — each measurement has a single outcome. Smolin takes this fact as evidence that quantum theory must be wrong, and argues that any theory that supersedes quantum mechanics must do away with these multiple possibilities.
So how can such similar books, informed by the same evidence and drawing upon the same history, reach such divergent conclusions? Well, anyone who cares about politics knows that this type of informed disagreement happens all the time, especially, as with Carroll and Smolin, when the disagreements go well beyond questions that experiments could possibly resolve.
But there is another problem here. The question that both physicists gloss over is that of just how much we should expect to get out of our best physical theories. This question pokes through the foundation of quantum mechanics like rusted rebar, often luring scientists into arguments over parables meant to illuminate the obscure.
Another signal of a looming paradigm change in fundamental science - a phase transition in ‘magic’.
The quantum-drum techniques could lead to the development of instrumentation that beats the limitations that quantum mechanics imposes on measurement.
Minuscule drums push the limits of quantum weirdness
Vibrating aluminium membranes provide the first direct evidence of quantum entanglement in macroscopic objects.
By playing two tiny drums, physicists have provided the most direct demonstration yet that quantum entanglement — a bizarre effect normally associated with subatomic particles — works for larger objects.
The findings, described in two Science papers on 6 May, could help researchers to build measuring devices of unprecedented sensitivity, as well as quantum computers that can perform certain calculations beyond the reach of any ordinary computer.
The counter-intuitive rules of quantum mechanics predict that two objects can share a common, ‘entangled’ state. Measurable properties of one object, such as its position or velocity, are then correlated to those of the other, with a degree of correlation that is stronger than what can be achieved in classical, or non-quantum, physics.
This is an important signal of an emerging business model in the digital environment that will enslave us to particular devices - unless we create legislative protections for users - rather than corporations.
Tesla remotely disables Autopilot on used Model S after it was sold
Tesla says the owner can’t use features it says ‘they did not pay for’
Tesla has remotely disabled driver assistance features on a used Model S after it was sold to a customer, Jalopnik reports. The company now claims that the owner of the car, who purchased it from a third-party dealer — a dealer who bought it at an auction held by Tesla itself — “did not pay” for the features and therefore is not eligible to use them.
The features were enabled when the dealer bought the car, and they were advertised as part of the package when the car was sold to its owner. It’s a peculiar situation that raises hard questions about the nature of over-the-air software updates as they relate to vehicles.
Cars sold with hardware-based upgrades, such as four-wheel drive versus all-wheel drive, or advanced adaptive cruise control, do not lose those features when they are resold on the used car market. But because Tesla can update its vehicles remotely, the Model S and other Tesla vehicles can apparently lose key features. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is a fascinating signal of progress in domesticating DNA, understanding biological time - and perhaps toward increasing longevity.
Speed matters when it comes to building species. Evolution didn’t give giraffes long necks by adding extra bones; they have the same number of vertebrae as their stubby-necked okapi relatives. Rather, neck vertebrae in giraffes grow over longer periods of time, which allows them to reach bigger sizes.
These cellular clocks help explain why elephants are bigger than mice
Biologists are uncovering how tiny timekeepers in our cells might govern body size, lifespan and ageing.
In her laboratory in Barcelona, Spain, Miki Ebisuya has built a clock without cogs, springs or numbers. This clock doesn’t tick. It is made of genes and proteins, and it keeps time in a layer of cells that Ebisuya’s team has grown in its lab. This biological clock is tiny, but it could help to explain some of the most conspicuous differences between animal species.
Animal cells bustle with activity, and the pace varies between species. In all observed instances, mouse cells run faster than human cells, which tick faster than whale cells. These differences affect how big an animal gets, how its parts are arranged and perhaps even how long it will live. But biologists have long wondered what cellular timekeepers control these speeds, and why they vary.
A wave of research is starting to yield answers for one of the many clocks that control the workings of cells. There is a clock in early embryos that beats out a regular rhythm by activating and deactivating genes. This ‘segmentation clock’ creates repeating body segments such as the vertebrae in our spines. This is the timepiece that Ebisuya has made in her lab.
The domestication of DNA continues to expand the domains of knowledge.
“It turns out in almost any of these cases, it is through interactions of glycomolecules that microorganisms and parasites cause human disease,”
Researchers Read the Sugary ‘Language’ on Cell Surfaces
Now scientists may be verging on a breakthrough in the understanding of glycans and glycobiology. After analyzing a comprehensive data set of glycan structures and their known interactions, researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found a shared structural “language” that all organisms use when making glycans, like a municipal building code that ensures consistent, compatible architecture. The researchers have released a set of online tools that anyone can use to analyze glycan structures and functions.
Varki and his team had found that, more than 2 million years ago, a mutation in humans’ ancestors inactivated a gene that modifies sialic acids in all other primates and most other mammals. As a result, hundreds of millions of sialic acid glycans that are present in other primate cells are missing from human ones.
To Varki, glycans are still one of the greatest enigmas of the biological universe. They’re “actually so prominent, they’re a major component of biomass on the planet.” In fact, glycans make up most of the organic matter by mass: Cellulose and chitin, the major building material of arthropod exoskeletons and fungal cell walls, are nature’s two most abundant organic polymers. And yet in contrast with the overabundance of glycans, “this whole field has been left behind,” Varki said.
A small signal of some progress in 3D printing.
3D printing company Desktop Metal will now use wood to print
The 3D printing company Desktop Metal has just announced the release of Forust, a new tool using wood to 3D print objects. The company, founded in 2019, focuses on 3D printing for interior design. With printing methods deemed "non-destructive", they haven't come under much scrutiny for safety or environmental concerns, making them an attractive prospect for acquisition.
Now, Desktop Metal has introduced Forust as its new portfolio manufacturing process. The technology uses cellulose dust and lignin, byproducts from both the paper and wood industries.
Lauding Desktop Metal, Forust CEO Andrew Jeffery states that the interior design company enables architects, designers and manufacturers to utilize design-forward technology in order to re-consider the use of wood waste streams, from just one piece to over a million pieces. In turn, Jeffery reports that Forust does its part by offering sustainable, 3D-printed wood designs for both businesses and consumers to develop beautiful, strong wood products suited for a variety of industries, including consumer home goods, furniture and interior design.
This is an important signal of the increasing complexity of how we navigate our lives with our devices and soon with our households and vehicles (I’m sure some people are already there).
There’s a better way to protect yourself from hackers and identity thieves
If you’re using texts for two-factor authentication, it’s time to change to an app. Here’s what you need to know.
When people ask me for security tips, I give them the basics. One is a strong and long password with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. (No, “Passw0rd!” is not good enough.) Each password should also be unique to each account (We love a good password manager!). And you always use two-factor authentication, or 2FA. (Don’t be like me, who didn’t have 2FA on her bank account until a hacker wired $13,000 out of it.) But the type of 2FA you use is also increasingly important.
Text-based 2FA, where a text with a six-digit code is sent to your phone to verify your identity, is better known and better understood because it uses technology most of us use all the time anyway. But it’s a technology that wasn’t meant to serve as an identify verifier, and it’s an increasingly insecure option as hackers continue to find ways to exploit it.
That’s why I recommend using an authenticator app, like Google Authenticator, instead. Don’t let the name intimidate you: There are a few extra steps involved, but the effort is worth it.
#micopoem
what difference -
does it matter -
what lane -
a pedestrian is walking in -
? -
When ambling for the joy -
or watching river life -
it matters for pedestrians -
mhm -
writing is not only re-writing -
it’s writing the same thing -
over and over -
maintenance -
renovations -
yard work -
garden-shaping -
aspiration shaping-
then what? -
process of living -
creating -
home-making -
and
relationship -
why is that so last priority -
but like a ground for -
my shadow in all i enact -
Emotions -
are experiences -
of -
enacting complex-relational-chemistry -
to manage emotions -
needs -
reframing apophenia -
mhm -
writing is not only re-writing -
it’s writing the same thing -
over and over -
it’s all me i felt -
then realized -
how much them -
becomes me -
the-mees-that-is-them -
the chemistry of chemistry -
homeostatial -
complex evolving adaptive attractors -
attractors -
are patterned fields -
of flowing intensive boundaries -
not blurry -
but gradients with phase-change thresholds -
needing to transform -
media enactments of patterned content -
emotions are -
the enactment of meaning -
basic or archetypal -
accountings for-or-by -
contingencies-of-relationship -
virtual-or-actual -
#micropoem
