Skies go black in Africa’s worst locust plague in decades (SCMP)
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Ted Nelson VS The MIT Media Lab
"From that moment i figured he (Nicholas Negroponte, lab founder) was really a con man [...] The whole point of the Media Lab is "we know something that you don't know!" - to have strange projects no one could understand. [...] Negroponte is a politician, exchanging favours. [..] One day i asked Negroponte for his definition of media and he finally said 'Media is like Air!'. Con men and politicians aren't necessarily held to telling the truth at all." - Ted Nelson
"For over thirty years, the MIT Media Lab has done strange and mysterious things, using hype and hokum to impress the unwary and raise ever more money. Whereas the principles of interaction and media, as far as I'm concerned, are and always have been simple and powerful, with human creativity at the centre. The creative mentality of the film director is exactly what is needed in software - anticipating the user's understandings and expectations, and fulfilling them elegantly." - Ted Nelson
#Comment: It's worth adding that besides the (ongoing) onslaught of "strange projects know one could understand" (aka "Bullshit", as defined by Harry Frankfurt in his essay "On Bullshit" (PDF) ), the Media Lab (and the wider MIT) has been a premier "think tank" for the US military industrial complex. And thus, the media lab has proven the marvellous fact that fictitious techno-utopian bullshit pushed by con man politicians, is highly capable of killing a great many people in the real world.
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I Tried Listening to Podcasts at 3x and Broke My Brain - by Steve Rousseau (medium)
At 2x, the experience of listening to audio began to change: Though I could understand the words, they seemed to have less emotional resonance. At these high speeds, my brain seemed to shift away from assessing people's feelings towards baseline comprehension. At the end of each sentence, I'd feel a little twinge of joy, not because of anything happening in the podcast, but just because I had understood the words.
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Book: "Moment to Moment Mindfulness. A Pictorial Manual for Meditators" - by Achan Sobin S. Namto (1989) (PDF)
"Those who perceive the arising and ceasing of mental and Physical states, even though they live for a day, are far better than those who never see the arising and ceasing of mental states and physical live a hundred years." - Dhammapada
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Fractal Animation
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ODYM - An open software framework for studying dynamic material systems: Principles, implementation, and data structures - by Stefan Pauliuk & Niko Heeren (2019) (Code)
The ODYM model framework is a software library for dynamic material flow analysis (MFA) for modeling biophysical stock-flow relations in socioeconomic metabolism.
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Role of 'the Preacher' confirmed at CIA waterboarding hearing in Guantánamo (theguardian)
Guantánamo: "Honor bound to defend freedom" In the courtroom of the military commission, the CIA officer was referred to only by three-digit code NZ7, or simply as “the Preacher” – a nickname he was given because of his peculiar way of terrorising detainees. The Preacher “would at random times put one hand on the forehead of a detainee, raise the other high in the air, and in a deep Southern drawl say things like, ‘Can you feel it, son? Can you feel the spirit moving down my arm, into your body?’”
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List of largest companies by revenue - 9 of the top 10 are in the oil business (2019)
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Horizontal and Vertical Integration.
Horizontal integration is the process of a company increasing production of goods or services at the same part of the supply chain. Via expansion, acquisition or merger. Vertical integration is an arrangement in which the supply chain of a company is owned by that company.
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Event 201 - A Global Pandemic Exercise (2019)
"The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. The exercise illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences."
Health experts issued an ominous warning about a coronavirus pandemic 3 months ago. Their simulation showed it could kill 65 million people. (Business Insider, 20.1.2020)
"Toner’s simulation imagined a fictional virus called CAPS. The analysis, part of a collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, looked at what would happen if a pandemic originated in Brazil’s pig farms."
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Can Mindfulness Evolve From Wellness Pursuit to Medical Treatment? (nytimes)
"It may be the case, that scientists need to develop new metrics to analyze a potential medical intervention that’s rooted in ancient Buddhist philosophy."
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PERDIX - Fabricate any free-form 2D drawing at the nanometer scale using DNA (MIT)
PERDIX (Programmed Eulerian Routing for DNA Designs using X-overs) is a free, open-source resource for the fully autonomous design of arbitrary 2D scaffolded DNA origami nanostructures.
TALOS (Three-dimensional, Algorithmically-generated Library of DNA Origami Shapes) is a open-source, fully autonomous design algorithm for generating 3D nanometer-scale structures using DNA.
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Reflow - Co-creating circular and regenerative resource flows in cities.
REFLOW is an EU H2020 funded project, from 2019 to 2022, that seeks to understand and transform urban material flows and to co-create and test circular and regenerative solutions at business, gov and citizen levels.
Who creates the circular economy? - by Sally Bourdon from @REFLOW_project
One piece of inspiration comes from Alexander Lemille who advocates for not Circular economy but a ‘Circular Humanosphere,’ a Circular Economy 2.0 which emphasises the need for intergenerational and interspatial decision-making. That’s what we’re doing with REFLOW: bringing together representatives from a variety of organisations, initiatives, lines of thought and work to co-create the holistic definition of the circular economy – in short, society.
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Thinking about Practices - by Caminao (2013)
A theory (aka model) is a symbolic description of contexts and concerns. A practice is a set of activities performed in actual contexts. While the latter may be governed by the former and the former developed from the latter, each should stand on its own merits whatever its debt to the other. "Good practices hold sway without showing off theoretical subtext" - D.Chiparus.
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#Music: Succotash - by Herbie Hancock (1964, Bluenote)
Succotash - by Kyoto Jazz Sextet (2015, Bluenote)
