Deforestation in Amazon has risen by 20% this year, monitoring group warns: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/deforestation-amazon-20-jair-bolsonaro-a8932746.html #ClimateChange #Politics #Regenerative
Deforestation in Amazon has risen by 20% this year, monitoring group warns: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/deforestation-amazon-20-jair-bolsonaro-a8932746.html #ClimateChange #Politics #Regenerative
World's biggest firms foresee $1 trillion climate cost hit, report finds: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/06/04/worlds-biggest-firms-foresee-1-trillion-climate-cost-hit-report.html For comparison, the financial cost of the Iraq War is estimated at $2.4 trillion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War #ClimateChange #Economics
"Am I a denier, a human extinction denier?": https://mikehulme.org/am-i-a-denier-a-human-extinction-denier/ #Regenerative #Politics #SE
As the world gets louder, we combat sound with more sound, searching for an illusion of control: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-noises-we-try-not-to-hear
#FFHCI #Culture #Technology #Urban
Lengthy essay by ecologist and philosopher David Abram titled "Magic and the Machine":
https://emergencemagazine.org/story/magic-and-the-machine/
"PERHAPS IT IS EASIER to understand, now, why we’re so enthralled by our digital technologies, such that once we’re online and synapsed to the screen, it’s remarkably difficult to tear ourselves away. For all these technologies awaken something primordial in us, a biophilic proclivity layered deep in our genome, a penchant for animate interchange with bodies whose shapes are very different from our own. The renewal of that age-old animistic sense of a world all alive, awake, and aware brings an upwelling of wonder, or at least an anticipation of a wondrous possibility waiting just around the corner. And so we remain transfixed by these tools, searching in and through our digital engagements for an encounter they seem to promise yet never really provide: the consummate encounter with otherness, with radical alterity, with styles of sensibility and intelligence that thoroughly exceed the limits of our own sentience. Yet there’s the paradox: for the more we engage these remarkable tools, the less available we are for any actual contact outside the purely human estate. In truth, the more we participate with these astonishing technologies, the more we seal ourselves into an exclusively human cocoon, and the more our animal senses—themselves co-evolved with the winds, the waters, and the many-voiced terrain—are blunted, rendering us ever more blind, ever more deaf, ever more impervious to the more-than-human Earth."
Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou in their Berlin flat, 1923 or 1924:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Lang #Culture #Art
A City Is Not a Computer: https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-computer/
This seems an obvious truth, but we need to say it loud and clear. Urban intelligence is more than information processing.
'Call their bluff': Shut down social media platforms, ex-Facebook adviser urges:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/facebook-grand-committee-tuesday-1.5152436
#Technology #Politics #Military
The world’s most beautiful headphones are here, and they’re made of fungus:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90354704/the-worlds-most-beautiful-headphones-are-here-and-theyre-made-of-fungus #Biophilia
A 50-million-year-old fossil captures a swimming school of fish: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/50-million-year-old-fossil-captures-swimming-school-fish #Biology
Chinese Military Wants to Develop Custom OS, not move to Linux:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/06/chinese_militar.html https://www.zdnet.com/article/chinese-military-to-replace-windows-os-amid-fears-of-us-hacking/ #Military #OS
Paul Robeson: The First Black Star: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Robeson
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/CIA-Robeson.html #Culture #Politics
People who meditate could end up decreasing negative emotions not only in themselves but in their relationship partners as well, suggest new research:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.2599 https://www.psypost.org/2019/06/your-meditation-practice-may-reduce-negative-emotions-in-the-people-you-interact-with-53770 #Science #Mindful
Is Facebook Already Working On An Encryption Backdoor?
https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/06/01/0035255/a-german-minister-wants-to-ban-end-to-end-chat-encryption #Technology #Politics #InfoSec #Comedy
Horst Seehofer, Germany's federal interior minister, wants to require encryption companies to provide the government with plain text transcripts. One security expert says Facebook is already working on a way to make it happen.
'A white-collar sweatshop': Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/a-white-collar-sweatshop-google-assistant-contractors-allege-wage-theft #Technology #Politics #ML
Russian military moves closer to replacing Windows with Astra Linux:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/russian-military-moves-closer-to-replacing-windows-with-astra-linux/ #OS #OpenSource #Military
AI beats humans in multiplayer shooter: https://news.yahoo.com/rise-machines-ai-beats-humans-multiplayer-shooter-104704160.html #ML #Military
The team did not comment, however, on the AI's potential for future use in military settings. DeepMind has publicly stated in the past that it is committed to never working on any military or surveillance projects, and the word "shoot" does not appear even once in the paper (shooting is instead described as tagging opponents by pointing a laser gadget at them).
GM fungus rapidly kills 99% of malaria mosquitoes, study suggests:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48464510 #Military #Biology
A fungus - genetically enhanced to produce spider toxin - can rapidly kill huge numbers of the mosquitoes that spread malaria, a study suggests.
US energy department rebrands gas exports 'molecules of freedom':
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48454674 #Politics #ClimateChange
67th Bilderberg Meeting to take place 30 May - 2 June 2019 in Montreux, Switzerland:
https://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/press/press-release/press-release #Military #Politics