Linklist: April 21, 2024
recommended: 1, 2, 5, 9, 13
links (links with excerpts below):
Artist evicted by London landlord cuts rent by commuting from Argentina
Wikipedia has Cancer (2020)
Flying Aircraft Carriers (2019)
Clickbait Capitalism – Or, The Return To Libidinal Political Economy
The Algorithmic Ocean: How AI Is Revolutionizing Marine Conservation
links with excerpts:
"On December 28, 1966, China successfully conducted its first hydrogen bomb test—only two years and two months after the successful explosion of its first atomic bomb. In so doing, China became the fastest among the five initial nuclear-weapon states (the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France, collectively known as P5) to pass from its first atomic bomb explosion to a first hydrogen bomb detonation.
There is still very limited knowledge in Western literature about how China built its first H-bomb. Based on newly available information—including Chinese blogs, memoirs, and other publicly available publications—this account reconstructs the history of how China made a breakthrough in understanding hydrogen bomb principles and built its first H-bomb—without foreign help.
Beyond the previously untold story of China’s early exploration of the hydrogen bomb theory, the article also explores in detail the so-called “100 days in Shanghai”—a milestone of China’s hydrogen bomb development—and describes the efforts that led to a series of three nuclear tests that happened in 1966 and 1967 and that are often called “the trilogy” of the H-bomb development in China."
"In the spring of 2002, Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 201 drilled in two locations, one on the continental margin off Peru and the other in the equatorial Pacific. The subsurface ecosystems turned out to have a great diversity of microbes, including not only the sulfate-reducing bacteria found at the vents but a new type that got its energy from carbon reactions. The microbes were “alive” in that they engaged in metabolic activities such as repairing DNA and undergoing cell division. They included all three domains of life: archaea (one-celled organisms), bacteria, and eukaryotes (cells that have a nucleus). By this time, scientists estimated that subsurface bacterial life could amount to one-third that of Earth’s total living biomass. In 2003, ODP Leg 210 drilled the seafloor off Newfoundland and upped the ante once again. It found living bacterial cells 1,626 meters below the seafloor, in rocks 111 million years old, at temperatures of 113 degrees Celsius. This led the authors to estimate that bacteria in subsurface sediments may make up as much as two-thirds of total bacterial biomass.
In October 2010, expedition 329 of the Integrated Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), which followed the ODP, drilled in the South Pacific Gyre, some of the deepest water on Earth. It is the largest of the five giant oceanic systems of rotation that move enormous volumes of seawater. The South Pacific Gyre rotates counterclockwise, bounded by the equator to the north, Australia to the west, South America to the east, and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to the south. Its center is the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility”: the location farthest from any continent. The South Pacific Gyre has one of the lowest sedimentation rates in the oceans and its bottom sediments have the lowest cell concentrations and the least metabolic activity of any. To discover the most extreme conditions under which life can exist on Earth, this is the place to go.
Aboard the JOIDES Resolution, still hard at work after all these years, in water nearly 6 kilometers deep, the scientists drilled 100 meters into the seafloor. They found microbes all the way to the bottom of the cores, albeit not as many as in the richer areas closer to the surface. The scientists estimated that the deepest microbes were at least 100 million years old, making it seem they could only be fossils. Surely nothing could “survive,” whatever that means exactly, for 100 million years. But when brought back to the lab and offered nutrients, the microbes began to grow and multiply.
This seemingly fantastic discovery raised the question of what the microbes beneath the gyre had been doing for 100 million years."
"When I was a grad student, I attended a talk at my university given by the famous string theorist Michio Kaku. I was hoping to hear something new about the universe, something interesting, something mind-expanding, especially. Also the ticket was free and I was on campus in the evenings anyway. What I got instead was a lecture about biofuturism that Kaku seemed to have mostly spun from theoretical conversations he once had, including a long digression on toilets that will analyze poop in real time for disease (something that, I’ll admit, actually exists now, even if I doubt anyone will ever own one). I don’t think he wasn’t there to educate anyone, he was just there to sell a book. I left halfway through.
I doubt these revelations will do much to dent Huberman’s science communications career. Neil deGrasse Tyson faced credible sexual assault charges and continues publishing best-sellers, directing the Hayden Planetarium, and cheerfully appearing on Joe Rogan podcasts. If you enjoy Huberman’s work and have found it benefits you (something even Howley admits), that’s great. Life is hard and I would never begrudge anyone their sources of comfort.
This article that I’m writing right now, and the NY Mag piece too, are just a lot of words to say that a person with a PhD is an expert in the thing they study, and nothing else. Scientists are the same mix of earnestness and sleaze as any other person. This is the kind of person that I’d like Sequencer to focus on. Scientists deserve a level of scrutiny they often avoid. They use “science” as a shield to deflect distrust. Nearness to science is not equivalent with morality or wisdom. It's not that science or scientists shouldn't be trusted; they should be trusted or not trusted in the same measures as any other human activity like "the law" or "literature.""
"An artist who was made homeless after being evicted by his private landlord in London has started effectively commuting from Argentina where the rent is so much cheaper that it covers the cost of air fare.
Andy Leek, 38, whose Notes to Strangers works are pasted on to walls and junction boxes across more than 20 British and European cities, has moved to Buenos Aires where the rents are several times cheaper and he travels back to the UK roughly every two months for work. The flight costs less than a monthly train season ticket between Bristol and London.
His move is an extreme, and carbon intensive, example of what happens when people are priced out of the UK’s rent hotspots, and comes as the average UK private rent increased by a record 9.2% in the last year (11.2% in London), according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, released on Wednesday."
📚 Wikipedia has Cancer (2020)
"From 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 donations went from $5,032,981.00 USD to $104,505,783.00 USD -- 20.76 times higher.
From 2007–2008 to 2017–2018 spending went from $3,540,724.00 USD to $81,442,265.00 USD -- 23 times higher.
In 2008 Wikipedia had over 5 million registered editors, 250 language editions, and 7.5 million articles. Wikipedia.org was the 10th-busiest website in the world. We had already started Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity and Wikispecies, we had already opened chapters in multiple countries, and we had already moved from Florida to San Fransisco.
I was here in 2008. I did not notice any pressing needs that were not funded because we were spending 4.3% of what we are spending now. What, exactly, are we doing now that we were not doing ten years ago that justifies us spending twenty-three times as much money?"
🛩️ Flying Aircraft Carriers (2019)
"Such practicalities don’t bother us ‘punks. Let’s move on to the fictional examples!
The best-known is S.H.I.E.L.D.’s helicarrier from the Marvel comic books and movies. It has gone through various iterations, from literally a flying ship to the rotor-blade version of the most recent cinematic adaptations.
Spectrum, the international security agency in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68), has a similar skyborne headquarters called Cloudbase.
So does the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) in Doctor Who. Its flying aircraft carrier is called the Valiant.
Peter McKinstry’s concept art for the Valiant looks remarkably similar to Kevin Conran’s for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). I’m not sure if that was deliberate."
"While Western foreign policy seeks to limit the damage and preserve Israel’s normalisation, all activist efforts should be aimed at accelerating Israel’s de-legitimisation. Stopping the flow of arms to Israel, 99 per cent of which come from the US and Germany – where, not coincidentally, regimes of repression based on ‘new antisemitism’ discourse are at its most pathological – will be the most difficult yet efficacious contribution to this struggle.
Yet the war on Gaza has wider consequences for the global Left. The affiliation of liberal capitalist states with the Zionist project will tend to enmesh them in the internal dynamics of what is otherwise a minor, unstable capitalist state in the Levant. The decision, more or less conscious, to endorse and normalise genocidal violence against the Palestinians is a bonus for every ethnonationalist movement in the world. The effort to constrain pro-Palestine protest has catalysed the existing drift of liberal states toward authoritarian irrationality, Islamophobic crackdown, violent policing and aggressive border regimes. The insulation of decision-making from popular will and the decomposition and paralysis of weak parliamentary regimes has strengthened the authoritarian legal-police networks. In the context of capitalist instability, intensified geopolitical competition and ecological blowback raising production costs, the assault on democracy is likely to accelerate. Meanwhile, the repressive apparatuses are quick to learn from and profit by Israeli repression. What Antony Lowenstein calls the ‘Palestine Laboratory’ – in which weapons systems, surveillance and border walls tested out on the most infrahumanised population on the planet are then implemented in border systems, surveillance of activists, and militarised police tactics – is likely to increase its salience after this genocide.
Palestine is, in short, the symptom of the world system, the point where all its putative norms are openly inverted, where its racist violence, exploitation, and hatred of democracy exists in concentrated form – and, consequently, where the system is most perceptible as a totality, and where resistance ramifies into every aspect of the ecologically degraded, imperialist, world capitalist system."
"To say that economy is a matter of desire means that it entails more than labour, production, or exchange; more than calculating costs and benefits. It is to say that economic life is organised by a range of unconscious processes and psychic drives. Libidinal political economy wants to bring these kinds of considerations to bear on economic analysis, to map “the flows of desire, the fears and anxieties, the loves and the despairs that traverse the social field”, as Foucault so memorably put it in the preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (p. xviii). When Lyotard published his own book on the theme, simply called Libidinal Economy, he went one step further: “Every political economy is libidinal” (p. 111). With this provocation, he meant to say not only that every mode of production is libidinal (feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism), but also that so too is any attempt to codify these theoretically (classical political economy, Marxist political economy, Keynesian economics). In other words, both the institutions and the concepts of contemporary capitalism must be read as vital aspects of its psychic life.
The aim with Clickbait Capitalism was to take Lyotard at his word and undertake just such a reading. To trace the psychological currents that underwrite the political and economic order of our times, even if libidinal-economic thinking is part of that order. I address this meta-theoretical level in my introduction to the volume, where I develop a preliminary account of the relations between libidinal economy and capitalism in three ways. First, by positioning libidinal economy at the intersection of economic and psychological thought. Second, by relating the development of libidinal-economic thought to the historical development of capitalism. And third, by emphasising the role of libidinal dynamics in the social reproduction of contemporary capitalism."
"While the liberty cap’s “magic” properties seemed to go largely unacknowledged, the idea that fungi could provoke hallucinations did begin to percolate more widely in Europe during the nineteenth century — though it became attached to a quite different species of mushroom. In parallel to a growing scientific interest in toxic and hallucinogenic fungi, a vast body of Victorian fairy lore connected mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills, and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland, a world of shifting perspectives seething with elemental spirits. The similarity of this otherworld to those engendered by plant psychedelics in New World cultures, where psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used for millennia, is suggestive. Is it possible that the Victorian fairy tradition, beneath its innocent exterior, operated as a conduit for a hidden tradition of psychedelic knowledge? Were the authors of these fantastical narratives — Alice in Wonderland, for example — aware of the powers of certain mushrooms to lead unsuspecting visitors to enchanted lands? Were they, perhaps, even writing from personal experience?
The J. S. family’s trip in 1799 is a useful starting point for such enquiries. It shows liberty caps were growing in Britain at the time, and commonplace even in London’s parks. But also, the trip evidences that the mushroom’s hallucinogenic effects were unfamiliar, perhaps even unheard of: certainly unusual enough for a London physician to draw them to the attention of his learned colleagues. At the same time, however, scholars and naturalists were becoming more aware of the widespread use of plant intoxicants in non-western cultures. In 1762 Carl Linnaeus, the great taxonomist and father of modern botany, compiled the first-ever list of intoxicating plants: a monograph entitled Inebriantia, which assembled a global pharmacopoeia that extended from Europe (opium, henbane) to the Middle East (hashish, datura), South America (coca leaf), Asia (betel nut), and the Pacific (kava). The study of such plants was emerging from the margins of classical studies, ethnography, folklore, and medicine to become a subject in its own right.
The interest in traditional cultures extended to European folklore. A new generation of folklore collectors, such as the Brothers Grimm, realised that the migration of peasant populations to the city was dismantling centuries of folk stories, songs, and oral histories with alarming rapidity. In Britain, Robert Southey was a prominent collector of vanishing folk traditions, soliciting and publishing examples offered by his readers. The Victorian fairy tradition, as it emerged, was imbued with a Romantic sensibility in which rustic traditions were no longer coarse and backward but picturesque and semi-sacred, an escape from industrial modernity into an ancient, often pagan land of enchantment. The subject lent itself to writers and artists who, under the guise of innocence, were able to explore sensual and erotic themes with a boldness off limits in more realistic genres and to reimagine the muddy and impoverished countryside through the prism of classical and Shakespearian scenes of playful nature spirits. The lore of plants and flowers was carefully curated and woven into supernatural tapestries of flower-fairies and enchanted woods, and mushrooms and toadstools popped up everywhere. Fairy rings and toadstool-dwelling elves were recycled through a pictorial culture of motif and decoration until they became emblematic of fairyland itself."
"Her startling findings touched a nerve. Tens of thousands of boats commit fishing crimes every year, but no global repository of fishing crimes exists. A fishing vessel will often commit a crime in one jurisdiction, pay a meager fine, and sail off to another jurisdiction, thus operating with impunity. If a global database of fishing vessel criminal records could be created, Belhabib realized, there would be nowhere left to hide. She suggested the idea to a variety of international organizations, but the issue was a political hot potato; national sovereignty, they argued, prevented them from tracking international criminals. Undeterred, Belhabib decided to build the database herself. Late at night, while her infant son was sleeping, she began combing through government reports and news articles in dozens of languages (she speaks several fluently). Her database grew, word spread, and her network of informants — often government officials frustrated with international inaction on illegal fishing — began expanding. She moved to a small nonprofit and began advising Interpol and national governments. The database, christened Spyglass, grew into the world’s largest registry of the criminal history of industrial fishing vessels and their corporate backers. But the registry, Belhabib knew, was useful only if the information made its way into the right hands. So in 2021 she cofounded Nautical Crime Investigation Services, a startup that uses AI and customized monitoring technology to enable more effective policing of marine crimes and criminal vessels at sea. Together with her cofounder Sogol Ghattan, who has a background in ethical AI, she named their core algorithm ADA, in homage to Ada Lovelace — the woman who wrote the world’s first computer program.
Belhabib is attempting to tackle one of the most intractable problems in contemporary environmental conservation: illegal fishing. Across the oceans, the difficulty of tracking ships creates ideal cover for some of the world’s largest environmental crimes. After the end of World War II, the world’s fishing fleets rapidly industrialized. Wartime technologies that had been developed for detecting underwater submarines were repurposed for spotting fish. The size of nets grew exponentially, and offshore factory ships were outfitted so they could spend months at sea, extending the reach of industrial fishing into the furthest reaches of the ocean. As the world’s population grew, fish protein became an increasingly important source of food. But warning signs soon appeared: crashes in key fish populations, an alarming trend of “fishing down marine food webs,” and a series of cascading impacts that rapidly depleted marine ecosystems."
"Besides quantification, classification – a key instrument of knowledge generation and governance for centuries – is another hallmark of modern and contemporary surveillance and identification technologies. As noted by many scholars from Foucault13 to Zygmunt Bauman14 and Denise Ferreira da Silva15 , classification is a central tool of the European Enlightenment, evidenced most iconically by Carl Linnaeus’ taxonomy. In his graduated table, Linnaeus named, classified and hierarchically ordered the natural world from plants to insects to humans, dividing and subdividing each group according to shared characteristics. Classification and taxonomies are widely seen as an expression of the fundamental epistemological shifts from a theocentric to a rationalistic epistemology in the early modern era, which enabled scientific breakthroughs but were also tied to colonization and enslavement.16 In their book on the theme, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star underscore classification’s use as a powerful but often unrecognized instrument of political ordering: ‘Politically and socially charged agendas are often first presented as purely technical and they are difficult even to see. As layers of classification system become enfolded into a working infrastructure, the original political intervention becomes more and more firmly entrenched. In many cases, this leads to a naturalization of the political category, through a process of convergence. It becomes taken for granted.’17
Today, classification is central to machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence designed to discern patterns in large amounts of data. This allows it not only to categorize vast amounts of information but also to predict and classify new, previously unseen data. In other words, it applies learned knowledge to new situations. While research on machine learning began in the middle of the last century, it has come to unprecedented prominence recently with applications like ChatGPT.
Machine learning is also increasingly applied in border work."
"Yet, forty years after its inception, Cyc is still here. It has grown to a knowledge base of 25 million rules, 1.5 million concepts, and more than a thousand specialized inference engines. Cycorp employs 50 technical staff members and is completely funded by its commercial contracts. Nevertheless, to the extent that Cyc is remembered at all in the AI community, it is as a cautionary tale of tremendous effort wasted on a misguided approach.
The verdict is harsh – but the expectations were high. In 1989, Lenat and co-author R. V. Guha wrote "we hope that by 1999 no one would even think about having a computer that doesn't have Cyc running on it". They have had to settle for more modest victories. Surviving for forty years in an industry notorious for its boom-and-bust cycles is a noteworthy achievement, but Cyc's impact has failed to be revolutionary. While outsiders cannot assess the capabilities of the proprietary system, it is fair to infer that if Cyc had achieved an epoch-making breakthrough, the wider world would have heard about it."
"Most such scores are simplifications that don’t tell the whole story. For instance, sleep trackers only measure what’s easy to measure, like movement, which says nothing about crucial facts like time spent in REM sleep. A more accurate measure of how well you slept would be how refreshed you feel in the morning, but since this can’t be quantified, it tends to be ignored.
Further, if increasing one’s youthfulness score requires a daily 2-hour skincare routine, a diet of 50 pills each morning and night, abstention from many of life’s pleasures, and constant fixation on one’s vital metrics, is it really worth it? Of what value is adding a few years to your life if the cost is a life worth living? The scores we use to chart progress can’t articulate the nuances of reality, and yet we often tie our life goals and even self-worth to such arbitrary numbers.
In the end, even Kaczynski, with his IQ of 167, was led astray by red herring goals. In 1995 he enacted his endgame, demanding the New York Times and Washington Post print his anti-technology manifesto to prevent further bloodshed. All along, his goal had been to get the widest possible newspaper coverage, to maximize how many people would see his manifesto, but like McNamara he didn’t account for what couldn’t be quantified, such as how people would see his manifesto. Skinner’s pigeons had learned to desire the click of the food dispenser because it had been accompanied by food, and Kaczynski’s intended audience learned to hate his arguments because they’d been accompanied by violence. By maximizing audience size at the expense of everything else, Kaczynski gained a massive audience unwilling to give him a fair hearing."