The history of religion
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1901: Monsanto is founded by John Francis Queeny, a member of the Knights of Malt
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The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud
"The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes."
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The mushroom tunnel of Mittagong, photo by Nicola Twilley “Japanese researchers are closing in on understanding why electrical storms have a positive influence on the growth of some fungi,” Physics World reported last month, with some interesting implications for agriculture.
These electrical storms do not have to be nearby, and they do not even need to be natural: “In a series of experiments, Koichi Takaki at Iwate University and colleagues showed that artificial lightning strikes do not have to directly strike shiitake mushroom cultivation beds to promote growth.” Instead, it seems one can coax mushrooms into fruiting using even just the indirect presence of electrical fields.
As the article explains, “atmospheric electricity has long been known to boost the growth of living things, including plants, insects and rats,” but mushrooms appear to respond even to regional electrical phenomena—for example, when a distant lightning storm rolls by. “In Takaki’s previous studies, yield increases were achieved by running a direct current through a shiitake mushroom log. But Takaki still wondered—why do natural electric storms indirectly influenced [sic] the growth of mushrooms located miles away from the lightning strikes?”
Whether or not power lines or electricity-generation facilities, such as power plants, might also affect—or even catalyze—mushroom growth is not clear.
For now, Takaki is hoping to develop some kind of electrical-stimulation technique for mushroom growth, with an eye on the global food market.
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Editorial: Electromagnetic field theories of consciousness: opportunities and obstacles
Fun to see EM field theories of consciousness become more popular after decades of ridicule. Ultimately though just yet another entertaining way how the snake bite its own tail in this fundamentally inexplicable reality.
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Isn't it interesting how the AI scene is mostly ignoring the Halting Problem for Turing machines & the countless other unresolvable paradoxes of NP-hard complex systems? Instead of earnest grappling with the edge of chaos, we are optimizing shareholder value with sci-fi marketing
