“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
tag > Philosophy
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Is Space-Time Quantized Or Analog? (space.com)
"What are the implications if 'space-time' (as conceived of in the Einstein Theory of General Relativity) is quantized like all other aspects of matter and energy?" Space.com reports of a new study that tried to find out.
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“Don’t fool around with the masks of reality until you can handle the reality of masks.” - Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger 3: My Life After Death)
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The Focus of Designers. Slide my talk "Augmentation, Amputation, Dehumanisation - Towards Life Centered Design" (2019)
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In this article, I will elucidate the Indian government’s two primary discourses concerning yoga since 2014 as right-wing Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu Nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have interacted with both international and domestic audiences. These discourses can be broadly grouped into two categories, or what I refer to as Modi and the BJP’s “double discourse”: (1) Yoga as a global soft power solution to counter the Global North’s climate change privilege on the international stage and (2) Yoga as biopower for the advancement of India’s depressed economy on the domestic front. Relying on yoga’s polyvalent character, Modi and the BJP are able to frame yoga in these two particular ways—which together signal their commitment to neoliberal economic ideology—by drawing from historical and contemporaneous precedents which I also outline in the article. I conclude with a brief visit to the preparations for the BJP’s 2019 International Day of Yoga, where this double discourse becomes most evident in the two divergent themes announced for the event.
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Robert Anton Wilson talks about optimism, and stupidity
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Scientists Create 'Xenobots' -- Virtual Creatures Brought to Life (nytimes.com)
Strictly speaking, these life-forms do not have sex organs — or stomachs, brains or nervous systems. The one under the microscope consisted of about 2,000 living skin cells taken from a frog embryo. Bigger specimens, albeit still smaller than a millimeter-wide poppy seed, have skin cells and heart muscle cells that will begin pulsating by the end of the day. These are all programmable organisms called xenobots, the creation of which was revealed in a scientific paper in January, by Sam Kriegmana, Douglas Blackistonb, Michael Levinb, and Josh Bongarda,
A xenobot lives for only about a week, feeding on the small platelets of yolk that fill each of its cells and would normally fuel embryonic development. Because its building blocks are living cells, the entity can heal from injury, even after being torn almost in half. But what it does during its short life is decreed not by the ineffable frogginess etched into its DNA — which has not been genetically modified — but by its physical shape. And xenobots come in many shapes, all designed by roboticists in computer simulations, using physics engines similar to those in video games like Fortnite and Minecraft...
All of which makes xenobots amazing and maybe slightly unsettling — golems dreamed in silicon and then written into flesh. The implications of their existence could spill from artificial-intelligence research to fundamental questions in biology and ethics. "We are witnessing almost the birth of a new discipline of synthetic organisms," said Hod Lipson, a roboticist at the Columbia University who was not part of the research team. "I don't know if that's robotics, or zoology or something else."
An algorithm running for about 24 hours iterated through possible body shapes, after which the the two researchers tried "to sculpt cellular figurines that resembled those designs." They're now considering how the process might be automated with 3-D cell printers, and the Times ponders other future possibilities the researchers have hinted at for their Xenobots. ("Sweep up ocean microplastics into a larger, collectible ball? Deliver drugs to a specific tumor? Scrape plaque from the walls of our arteries?")
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Eating Animals is the root cause of many of our current global challenge.
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Karl Brandt on trial, 20 August 1947 The Nuremberg Code (German: Nürnberger Kodex) is a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation created as a result of the Nuremberg trials at the end of the Second World War. The origin of the Nuremberg Code began in pre–World War II German politics, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s. The pre-war German Medical Association was considered to be a progressive. On August 20, 1947, the judges delivered their verdict against Karl Brandt and 22 others. The verdict reiterated the memorandum's points and, in response to expert medical advisers for the prosecution, revised the original six points to ten.
The ten points became known as the "Nuremberg Code", which includes such principles as informed consent and absence of coercion; properly formulated scientific experimentation; and beneficence towards experiment participants. It is thought to have been mainly based on the Hippocratic Oath, which was interpreted as endorsing the experimental approach to medicine while protecting the patient.
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Human Capital Markets, Digital Identity, & the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (wrenchinthegears, 2020)
My current efforts are focused on raising awareness around pay for success deals, privatized welfare, Blockchain contracts, smart cities, and predictive analytics derived from Internet of Things sensors. These elements are combining to create predatory human capital investment markets within the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. I’m excited to talk to you about these goals, particularly target 16.9, digital identity, and how it relates to global finance and the profiling of families.
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Latin phrase attributed to Julius Caesar, indicating events have passed a point of no return.
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"Winners" and "losers" of wars are frequently confused. The perceived loser might have actually won the war, just not on the battlefield but during what Prussian military theoretician Karl von Clausewitz called “The postwar”. In actually, in war there are only losers.
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“Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.” ― George Carlin
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Different Times, Different People - The tricks of psychopaths are timeless.
Pig Dicator, From Animal Farm "If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." - Joseph Goebbels
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." - Hermann Goring
The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear. - Heinrich Himmler
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“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.” ― Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
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Global citizenship is the idea that one's identity transcends geography or political borders and that responsibilities or rights are derived from membership in a broader class: "humanity". This does not mean that such a person denounces or waives their nationality or other, more local identities, but that such identities are given "second place" to their membership in a global community. The idea leads to questions about the state of global society in the age of globalization.
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Grey relational analysis (wikipedia)
Grey relational analysis (GRA), also called Deng's Grey Incidence Analysis model, was developed by a Chinese Professor Julong Deng of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. It is one of the most widely used models of Grey system theory. GRA uses a specific concept of information. It defines situations with no information as black, and those with perfect information as white. However, neither of these idealized situations ever occurs in real world problems. In fact, situations between these extremes, which contain Dispersed knowledge (partial information), are described as being grey, hazy or fuzzy. A variant of GRA model, Taguchi-based GRA model, is very popular in engineering.
Introduction to Grey System Theory - by Deng Julong (PDF)
Grey System theory was initiated in 1982 [7]. As far as information is concerned, the systems which lack information, such as structure message, operation mechanism and behaviour document, are referred to as Grey Systems. For example, the human body, agriculture, economy, etc., are Grey Systems. Usually, on the grounds of existing grey relations, grey elements, grey numbers (denoted by 8 ) one can identify which Grey System is, where "grey" means poor, incomplete, uncertain, etc. The goal of Grey System and its applications is to bridge the gap existing between social science and natural science. Thus, one can say that the Grey System theory is inter- disciplinary, cutting across a variety of specialized fields, and it is evident that Grey System theory stands the test of time since 1982. As the case stands, the development of the Grey System-as well as theoretical topic-is coupled with clear applications of the theory in assorted fields.
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The Chinese characters for crisis 危機 mean “danger” and “opportunity,”
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Information And Complexity - Book by Mark Burgin & Cristian Calude (2016)
The book is a collection of papers of experts in the fields of information and complexity. Information is a basic structure of the world, while complexity is a fundamental property of systems and processes. There are intrinsic relations between information and complexity. The research in information theory, the theory of complexity and their interrelations is very active. The book will expand knowledge on information, complexity and their relations representing the most recent and advanced studies and achievements in this area. The goal of the book is to present the topic from different perspectives — mathematical, informational, philosophical, methodological, etc.
