-
Secretive Bill Gates-backed solar startup announces major breakthrough
"Heliogen is able to achieve these breakthrough temperatures as a result of its technology that uniquely uses advanced computer vision software to hyper-accurately align a large array of mirrors to reflect sunlight to a single target."
-
Subcutanean: a novel where each copy is different.
A print-on-demand horror novel that changes for each new reader: no two copies are the same. The author talks about his techniques in his blog. #Generative #Art
-
"Deutschland kriegt das Problem nicht in den Griff: Es ist nicht nur so, dass der Abwärtstrend ausbleibt. Es gibt sogar wieder mehr Müll."
"E-Mobile ähneln inzwischen der Situation bei einem Kernkraftwerk, wenn es um die Entsorgung von Havaristen geht" #Regenerative #Upcycling #Circular
-
“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” - Lao Tzu
Daoist Political Theory Links
Governing Through the Dao: A Non-Anarchistic Interpretation of the Laozi:
https://sci-hub.tw/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11712-010-9176-z"Given the origins of anarchism, it is important to recognize that claiming the political philosophy of the Laozias a form of anarchism requires placing a Chinese world-view into a Western framework that postdates it by over two thousand years and is understood vis-à-vis a particular Western concept (i.e., the modern state). This alone should raise initial skepticism about the anarchist conclusion regarding the Laozi. Beyond Daoism’s historical past, there are three theoretical reasons for skepticism: (1) the fact that the Laozi is clearly a political treatise addressed to the ruler and providing him with a philosophy of governance; (2) the Chinese conception of personhood, which creates aproblem for traditional anarchist arguments that utilize a notion of the atomistic individual;and, (3) the fact that the skepticism of the Laozi is aimed at a different target than that of anarchism."
"Common to both individualist and social anarchists alike, however, is a perceived tension between individual liberty and the collective will. In Daoism and in Chinese political thought generally, this tension does not exist”(Ames 1983: 32). This lack of tension results from the Daoist, and more generally Chinese, conception of the person. Rather than conceiving the self as autonomous and discrete, Daoists understand the self as interdependent and contextualized."
The General Principle Of Lao Zi's Political Philosophy: The Concept of "Inaction" (Wuwei): https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2753/CSP1097-146726010213The Journal of Daoist Studies: https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/711
The rise of the Tao: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/magazine/07religion-t.html
China's Apolitical Political School of Thought: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-apolitical-political-school-thought-12823 -
The Vectoralist Class - by McKenzie Wark. p1: http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-vectoralist-class/ p2: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60567/the-vectoralist-class-part-ii/
#Comment: At the top row, instead of saying "property, wealth and power", we can have "ecology, health and wisdom". An achievable goal.
-
NASA Scientists Confirm Water Vapor on Europa: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-scientists-confirm-water-vapor-on-europa #Space
-
Japanese archaeologists have discovered 143 previously unknown geoglyphs in the Nazca Plateau of Peru. They used machine learning for the ground imaging research: https://www.yamagata-u.ac.jp/en/files/5315/7381/2668/press2019115_02.pdf
-
#Comment: The Nazi elites, which by and large continued to govern the German economy in the decades after 1945, often had peculiar biographies and beliefs - Hermann Josef Abs illustrate this nicely. Similar patterns can be observed in Italy and across Europe. One can only wonder, why ultra-rich sociopaths are so drawn to far-right politics, which dominated the 20st century in the west.
-
Cost of War: Estimated economic impact of the US war on terrorism 2001-2020: $6.4 trillion. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2019/budgetary-costs-post-911-wars-through-fy2020-64-trillion Enough money to end poverty, stop environmental destruction, and launch humanity into space. #Military #Economics #Politics
Related: Swiss ETH study from 2011 which showed that 737 people control 80% of the world’s transnational corporations: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.5728.pdf
-
New research from Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research: "Ayahuasca compound changes brainwaves to vivid ‘waking-dream’ state": https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/193993/ayahuasca-compound-changes-brainwaves-vivid-wakingdream/
"A total of 13 participants were given an intravenous infusion of DMT. DMT affects human consciousness by significantly altering the brain’s electrical activity."
#Comment: The comedy show which is psychedelic science continues. Ever since Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris fell in love with Friston and they are seriously trying to explain subjective experience of highly isolated agent brains with probabilistic (machine learning) models, things are rapidly becoming full Monty Python. Their approaches rely so heavily on myriads of highly arbitrary reductionist choices, it would make any renaissance alchemists giggle. Even DARPA is taking a much more interesting approach at this point and people like Dr. Michael Persinger must be laughing from their graves. I suppose let them dive down the fractal of knowledge in search of some illusive "final hard truth". If mathematicians and neuroscientists would only accept that the thing-in-itself is infinite (not a bug, but its essence) - and that there is everything in infinity (incl. nothing) - their entire house of cards would collapse. The only thing left to-do at that point, is to live a simple, humble and compassionate life.
-
From the Tao Te Ching, translated by Red Pine. Red Pine: Dancing With Words: https://kyotojournal.org/fiction-poetry/dancing-with-words/
The Problem of Translation: https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2014/02/the-tao-te-ching-addendum.html #Mindful #Philosophy
-
"What Would the Father of Cybernetics Think About A.I. Today? Looking back on Norbert Wiener’s seminal 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings": https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/norbert-wiener-cybernetics-human-use-artificial-intelligence.html
"The human use of human beings: Interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and all that in biophysics and beyond": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030146221730162X #HCI #Technology #Philosophy #ALife
-
"Homo Cyberneticus: The Era of Human-AI Integration" - position paper by Jun Rekimoto, University of Tokyo, Sony CSL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.02637.pdf
#Comment: Generations of researchers feverishly chasing the dream of "merging" with inanimate matter (silicon etc.), eager to trade the living for the dead. From Golem and Frankenstein to Cybernetics and A.I: Necrophilia is the name of the game.
-
Scientists ‘May Have Crossed Ethical Line’ in Growing Human Brains: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/21/scientists-may-have-crossed-ethical-line-in-growing-human-brains #NeuroScience #Ethics #Biology #BCI
Neuroscientists may have crossed an “ethical rubicon” by growing lumps of human brain in the lab, and in some cases transplanting the tissue into animals, researchers warn. The creation of mini-brains or brain “organoids” has become one of the hottest fields in modern neuroscience. The blobs of tissue are made from stem cells and, while they are only the size of a pea, some have developed spontaneous brain waves, similar to those seen in premature babies. Many scientists believe that organoids have the potential to transform medicine by allowing them to probe the living brain like never before. But the work is controversial because it is unclear where it may cross the line into human experimentation. On Monday, researchers will tell the world’s largest annual meeting of neuroscientists that some scientists working on organoids are “perilously close” to crossing the ethical line, while others may already have done so by creating sentient lumps of brain in the lab. “If there’s even a possibility of the organoid being sentient, we could be crossing that line,” said Elan Ohayon, the director of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in San Diego, California. “We don’t want people doing research where there is potential for something to suffer.”
-
Objects Suggesting Longevity: Fan with Pine Trees, Inro with Crane, and Netsuke in Shape of Turtle. 松の扇、鶴の印籠、亀の根付 - Totoya Hokkei (Japanese, 1780–1850).
Shoulao, the God of Longevity. 鐵嶺道人指畫冊 (高其佩). Gao Qipei (Chinese, 1660–1743)
Embroidered Screen with Design of Longevity Symbols, 18th century - Unknown (Korean)
-
"At Replica, we’ve developed an AI that can replicate the human voice with a few minutes of speech": https://blog.usejournal.com/introducing-replica-studios-5afbb4455818
"You can train an AI to fake UN speeches in just 13 hours": https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613645/ai-fake-news-deepfakes-misinformation-united-nations/ https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01946 #Generative #ML #Creativity
-
Long Beach Container Terminal is using $1.5B to build a fully-automated system by 2021. It will handle 2x the freight volumes than before and cut pollution to help reach zero emissions by 2030: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-20/in-middle-of-trade-war-america-s-busiest-port-gets-ready-for-robots
PROWLER.io released a whitepaper that shows how probabilistic modeling can be used to solve the supply chain trade problem posed by the logistics of pooled palettes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/182ulJ9LA580wS3btnzTKzSywzbQdoslH/view
