Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Channeling Jeremy Bentham
11 years ago, yours truly wrote about ... a most ingenious "device" to keep prisoners in check by making it impossible for any of the denizens of such prison to see if they were, in fact, being spied upon via a visionary approach to surveillance known as the panopticon.
To whit ...
Fast forward to 2012 & beyond where Palantir's digital version of the panopticon is alive and well, not only operating in Afghanistan but also now in the states as surveillance and the art of tracking behavior is big business 24/7 due to Palantir's unique ability to sift through vast amounts of visual and textural content to enable the military and police, among significant others, to find specific skeins of data impossible to locate by any other means.
It gets better.
Activity-based intelligence began in the war theater with the presumption You are what you do, but it is now being pushed into a new realm, says Biltgen. One that asserts: Because we know what you did, we think we know what you are going to do next. “Just like [the film] Minority Report predicted in 2002.” Today, some of these same methodologies are being used by the US federal government, including the Department of Health and Human Services, to tag, track and locate people who might carry the coronavirus. This raises concerns among legal scholars of a burgeoning biometric cybersurveillance state.
The question to ask here is ...
Who controls what data gets saved as potential evidence, and what data gets deleted—including data that could potentially act in a defense? What happens to the rule of law when individual citizens are persistently surveilled without knowledge of, or access to, the information that is being collected on them? - Annie Jacobsen - Wired
End of Empire ...
Empires, at their zenith, present themselves to the world in grand fashion as seen in the Thomas Cole painting depicting why this is so but this illusion doesn't last forever ...
With this in mind, channel 2021 and the state of America with yet another Cole work.
The inevitable decline starts with inequality and corruption, the two headed construct
that leads every empire to decay without question.
To whit ...
And this
Read Rebecca Gordon's detailed piece titled The Rubble of Empire in its entirety as it delineates why the US empire is crumbling as we speak.
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Nothing else needs to be added ...
Nothing else needs to be added for this craven, corrupt but competent pol by the name of Mitch McConnell aka the Turtle. Judges, tax cuts and abiding and supporting Agent Orange while getting kickbacks, he will go down in US history as one of the worst politicians ever in harming this nation in ways most astounding and depressing.
Exactly ...
Saturday, January 16, 2021
99.5% ...
Had to do a quick return to Surrey Nano Systems, the creators of Vantablack, a carbon based nanotube paint that absorbs 99.5% of light, something high end imaging companies of all stripes are flocking
to in order to enhance sensitivity to all things related to light as seeing how this
amazing material works shows why this fact rings true.
Friday, January 15, 2021
Fleeting Winter
CT winters are no longer the same. Cold snaps in early January are but a memory with little snow and thin ice but one can sense winter is still around but now it's a fleeting winter without question. Enjoy.
We have lost control/rev II
8 steps to control AI ... we hope.
In other words, we don't know how neural net driven AI works and ... real time evolving code must be written by code, not humans, this is why we have lost control.
Thursday, January 14, 2021
It tastes like veal ...
A deliciously long and wonderful piece from Wired discussing the finer points of cannibalism, points out the advantages of being old, sick and lazy in trying circumstances vs being young, vigorous and hard working, is both a hoot and a teaching tool, not only in terms of learning more about the Donner Party but also about cannibalism and how it became a taboo. Thank Polyphemus and Odysseus for that one. :)
Winter bites ... and the lack of knowledge will kill you
Best be old & sick and do nothing ...
Regarding cannibalism ...
Blame it on the ancient Greeks ...
If you're gonna ...
Lastly ...
Migrations 101 :)
We all know animals, large and small, fliers and swimmers, make trips to find water, food, breed and better habitats in order to survive but man doesn't know just how far and what routes they take to do something they have done since the beginning of time, until now.
Last fall, teams of scientists began fanning out across the globe to stalk and capture thousands of other creatures — rhinos in South Africa, blackbirds in France, fruitbats in Zambia — in order to outfit them with an array of tracking devices that can run on solar energy and that weigh less than five grams. The data they collect will stream into an ambitious new project, two decades in the making and costing tens of millions of dollars, called the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, or ICARUS, project. Each tag will collect data on its wearer’s position, physiology and microclimate, sending it to a receiver on the International Space Station, which will beam it back down to computers on the ground. This will allow scientists to track the collective movements of wild creatures roaming the planet in ways technically unimaginable until recently: continuously, over the course of their lifetimes and nearly anywhere on Earth they may go.
But over the last few decades, new evidence has emerged suggesting that animals move farther, more readily and in more complex ways than previously imagined. And those movements, ecologists suspect, could be crucial to unraveling a wide range of ecological processes, including the spread of disease and species’ adaptations to habitat loss.
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