-
“One Half A Manifesto” - written by Jaron Lanier in the year 2000:
“There is a real chance that evolutionary psychology, artificial intelligence, Moore’s Law fetishizing, and the rest of the package, will catch on in a big way, as big as Freud or Marx did in their times. Or bigger, since these ideas might end up essentially built into the software that runs our society and our lives. If that happens, the ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals will be amplified from novelty into a force that could cause suffering for millions of people.”
-
What is Information? - Interview with Peter Tse
More talks by Peter Tse:
-
Inauguration of a new US$55 billion gas pipeline "Power of Siberia" helps cement increasingly close Beijing-Moscow ties that are moving beyond economics into security.
Nordstream 2 is nearing completion but controversy remains (DW)
"The Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline being built by Russia's Gazprom is nearing completion. Critics of the project, including the US and Poland, fear that the EU will become too dependent on Russian gas."
Power of connection: why the Russia–Europe gas trade is strangely untouched by politics (nature)
"Thane Gustafson argues that fuel pipelines foster stability."
Texas Oil Explorers Say Predictions of Growth Contradict Dire Reality (bloomberg)
"Then there’s the rapid decline of shale-well production. In the top five shale basins, wells that came on in 2018 are declining at their fastest rates yet, according to David Ramsden-Wood, the former COO of Permian producer Franklin Mountain Energy."
Fracking Blows Up Investors Again: Phase 2 of the Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust (wolfstreet)
"In 2019 through third quarter, 32 oil and gas drillers have filed for bankruptcy, according to Haynes and Boone."
-
Hans Selye (1907 - 1982) was a pioneering endocrinologist of Hungarian origin. He conducted important scientific work on the response of an organism to stress. He is considered the first to demonstrate the existence of biological stress, both negative and positive (Eustress).
Selye International Institute for Advanced Studies
Docu on Selye and his ideas of medicine based on stress reduction - by Desire' Dubounet
Images from "The New Science of Stress and Stress Resilience" - talk by Elissa Epel
-
The ‘Amazon effect’ is flooding a struggling recycling system with cardboard.
"This holiday season, the popularity of online shopping collides with upheaval in cardboard recycling. China’s 2017 decision to turn away America’s trash has left the recycling industry reeling as it figures out what to do with all the packaging online shoppers leave behind.
Some municipal recycling programs have closed. Even the ones that haven’t still have headaches: specifically, filthy recyclables. All of that leads to more cardboard in landfills. The rise in curbside cardboard waste coming from packaging is “the Amazon effect”. Last year, Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day for Amazon in the history of the company. The trend extends beyond the holidays: US Postal deliveries have doubled to 6.2 billion in 2018, from 3.1 billion in 2009."
"There’s been a more than 50% decline in the price of recovered cardboard in the US since China’s decision. Coupland believes there’s actually been as much as an 80 to 100% devaluation in some markets. That’s a big reason why cities across the country are scaling back or completely dumping their recycling programs."
-
Advances in neuromorphic computing technology - talk by Steve Furber
-
Universality and diversity in human song (science)
Conclusion: "Music is in fact universal: It exists in every society (both with and without words), varies more within than between societies, regularly supports certain types of behavior, and has acoustic features that are systematically related to the goals and responses of singers and listeners. But music is not a fixed biological response with a single prototypical adaptive function: It is produced worldwide in diverse behavioral contexts that vary in formality, arousal, and religiosity. Music does appear to be tied to specific perceptual, cognitive, and affective faculties, including language (all societies put words to their songs), motor control (people in all societies dance), auditory analysis (all musical systems have signatures of tonality), and aesthetics (their melodies and rhythms are balanced between monotony and chaos). These analyses show how applying the tools of computational social science to rich bodies of humanistic data can reveal both universal features and patterns of variability in culture, addressing long-standing debates about each."
-
Biophoton are photons of light in the ultraviolet and low visible light range that are produced by a biological system (wikipedia).
The International Institute of Life Energy (IILE) is an organization that stands for holistic and sustainable research and strategies for a vital environment.
Meluna Research - Providing Biophoton Research Strategies, Measurement and Applications
Are We Communicating Using Invisible Light? Biophotons and DNA (Part 2)
Biophoton theory: German scientists discover light shatters cancerous cells & other diseases. Biophoton theory postulates that within the nuclei of DNA molecules in cells of every living thing, biophotonic light is stored.
"We are still on the threshold of fully understanding the complex relationship between light and life, but we can now say emphatically, that the function of our entire metabolism is dependent on light." ~ Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp
Biophoton Manipulation: Scientific Explanation of Energy Manipulation
-
Psychological effects of Plasma (wikipedia)
"Research indicates that magnetic fields created by plasma during a thunderstorm can induce hallucination in the human mind. A declassified Ministry of Defense report states that it is "medically proven" that magnetic fields related to plasma cause hallucinations and that "the close proximity of plasma-related fields can adversely affect a vehicle or person". The report also indicated that scientists in the former Soviet Union are pursuing related technology for military purposes."
Magnetically Induced Hallucinations Explain Ball Lightning, Say Physicists. (MIT tech review): "Powerful magnetic fields can induce hallucinations in the lab, so why not in the real world, too?" #Science #RadioBio #NeuroScience #Biology #Military
-
Big Brother is watching: Chinese city with 2.6m cameras is world's most heavily surveilled (guardian)
Chongqing has 1 camera per 6 residents, but “Singapore has plans to install 100,000 facial-recognition cameras on lampposts, Chicago police have asked for 30,000 more, and Moscow intends to have 174,000 by the end of this year.”
-
Will the China of tomorrow run on the technology behind bitcoin? (scmp)
"I worry that people have oversold blockchain to Xi as a magic cure-all" - James Andrew Lewis, Centre for Strategic and International Studies
China's blockchain tech adoption inflated? New expose reveals truth behind tall claims (ibtimes, via "China: Marketing Blockchain")
“According to the Global Times, which is a Chinese state-run media house, numerous companies in China seem to find it simpler to claim that they are utilizing blockchain technology than to truly practice its application. Various Chinese firms across a variety of industries reportedly state that they are employing the use of blockchain tech in some form or another, but lack real evidence to prove that they are doing so. Global Times in their expose report that out of over 3,000 registered businesses, about 500 firms claim to be incorporating blockchain tech in their day-to-day operations, but only about 40 of these have been able to demonstrate that they are actively doing so.”
-
From Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", developer of Logotherapy (slides)
According to Frankl, "We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering" and that "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances"
Documentary: Viktor Frankl und trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen (DE only)
-
Ningishzida is a Mesopotamian deity of vegetation and the underworld.
-
"Implicate and explicate order" are ontological concepts for quantum theory coined by theoretical physicist David Bohm during the early 1980s.
Book: Science, Order, and Creativity by David Bohm and F. David Peat (1987).
#Science #Space #Philosophy #Religion #Complexity #Creativity -
Human-animal hybrids to be developed in Japan after ban controversially lifted
“If the goal of such studies is to discover a therapeutic application for humans, experiments on rats and mice are unlikely to produce a useful result because the size of the organ will not be sufficient and the result will be a far cry from humans anatomically” - Jiro Nudeshima, a life science specialist.
-
Quasicrystals - Israeli Found New Form of Matter Imagined in Islamic Art (2011)
"This year's Nobel prize in Chemistry will be awarded to Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman for his discovery of quasicrystals, metallic alloys with atoms arranged in orderly, infinite, aperiodic, crystal-like patterns with theoretically forbidden (typically 5 fold) symmetry. This form of matter was believed to be impossible to create."
