It’s Official: Screens Are Bad For Young Brains (parentology)
China’s Smartphone Shipments Could Drop 30% in Q1 Due to Coronavirus: IDC
China’s smartphone shipments are likely to suffer a year-on-year drop of more than 30% in the first quarter of 2020 due to the novel coronavirus that has led to the shutdown of countless handset manufacturing plants in the country, according to research firm IDC.
Will Quantum Supremacy Start the Modern-Day Industrial Revolution? - talk by Hartmut Neven (Engineering Director at Google) - at Google Zeitgeist 2019
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.
"Remote login is a lot like astral projection."
Comedy of the day: Lockheed Martin Will Replace F-35’s Faulty Computer System With Cloud-Based Programs. Between the F-35 & Boeing's 737 MAX, the US is leader in comedy.
Toshiba Touts Algorithm That’s Faster Than a Supercomputer (Bloomberg) (alt source)
"Toshiba's "Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm" is designed to harness the principles behind quantum computers without requiring the use of such machines, which currently have limited applications and can cost millions of dollars to build and keep near absolute zero temperature. Toshiba says its technology, runs on PCs made from off-the-shelf components."
"I am not a tekkie; I call myself a systems humanist." - Ted Nelson
WikiLeaks reveals Bin Zayed’s opinion on Saudi royal family
The New York Times reported that Bin Zayed: “Put much of his enormous resources into the counter-revolution, and he cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood and built a hyper-modern security-based state, where everyone is monitored in search of the slightest whiff of Islamic inclinations.”
“The nations, of course, that are most at risk of a destructive digital attack are the ones with the greatest connectivity. Marcus Ranum, one of the early innovators of the computer firewall, called Stuxnet 'a stone thrown by people who live in a glass house'.” ― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
News from Boeing: In one message, an employee is quoted as saying the Max was "designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys."
Related: Fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg gets $80.7 million on exit from Boeing
Apple AirPods Make More Money Than Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat & Shopify Combined
#Comment: Given that Apple's Airpods are an absolute environmental disaster (very short lifespan & many components are un-recyclable), this story is a wonderful illustration of the mechanics of late capitalism: the bigger the pollution, the bigger the profits. Future historians will come to see Apple & co as deeply regressive entities, ridding the tail-end of collapsing mass-consumerism culture.
Britain's electricity generation mix over the last 100 years (via)
New demand for very old farm tractors specifically because they're low tech
Farmers are increasingly sick of high-tech tractors that are expensive to buy and usually impossible to fix yourself due to their integrated digital technology. Tractors built in 1980 or earlier cause bidding wars at auctions.
Digital Mania
CERN switches from Microsoft to Open Source Software (2019) (news reports).
#Comment: That CERN was using Microsoft to conduct their "cutting edge science", is pure brain-dead #Comedy gold. Remember this and smile, the next time they announce "a groundbreaking discovery", release an esoteric advertising video or perform exotic rituals.
Google and Amazon are now in the oil business (Vox, 2020)
Zhongyong (中庸) (Doctrine of the Mean)
The Doctrine of the Mean is both a doctrine of Confucianism and also the title of one of the Four Books of Confucian philosophy.
The mean is also described as the 'unwobbling pivot' or zhongyong. Zhong means bent neither one way or another, and yong represents unchanging. Zhongyong represents moderation, rectitude, objectivity, sincerity, honesty and propriety. The guiding principle is that one should never act in excess.
The Doctrine of the Mean is divided into 3 parts: The Axis (Metaphysics), The Process (Politics) and The Perfect Word (Ethics). It instructed three Guidelines: Self-watchfulness, Leniency, Sincerity.
Slide from "Doctrine of the Mean" - by Adela Ilene Underwood
Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People's Republic of China, viewed Doctrine of the Mean as a mutation of eclecticism, which draws upon multiple theories/styles/ideas to gain complementary insights into a subject.
According to Mao's comments, Doctrine of the Mean is an eclecticism which simultaneously opposes the abolishment of exploitation. According to Mao, it failed to realize that something deserves absolute negation, and in compromise, Doctrine of the Mean prevented China from progress.
In his comment, Mao said that Doctrine of the Mean also goes against dialectics as it stops qualitative change by emphasizing maintaining balance and harmony. Lu Xun, a leading figure of modern Chinese literature, saw Doctrine of the Mean as major contributing factor of the abject ethnic stereotype in modern China, believing it prevented reform from happening."