Moving to Bits

Christopher Steiner of the Guardian, writing about tech and surveillance, talks about a rather chilling thought in a brilliant article titled Edward Snowden may be the last of the human spies... something that will happen, whether we like it or not.

Human nature makes it predictable that organisations such as the NSA would be cataloguing phone calls and other electronic interactions between humans. But Edward Snowden's revelations also tell us how far electronic snooping has yet to go. While the din of outrage still resonates, we should be thankful that Snowden – a human being – actually exists. In the future, the world may never be alerted to such breaches of privacy because there will be no humans involved in spying at all. Just as algorithms have conquered our stock markets and our musical tastes, so too will they conquer surveillance. Even the most human of tasks, snooping, will become the province of the bots.

BRT touches upon this in Big Data - With a Twist with mention of Minority Report and the human frailties of Agatha, the most prescient of the Pre Cogs used by Pre Crime, a special police squad dedicated to solving crimes before they happen, a notion the NSA might actually be trying to do using predictive analytics combined with big data in order to "protect us" from the vagaries of reality whether we like it or not.

Burning Man

Spark Pictures did a documentary on Burning Man, an annual event described by many participants as an experiment in community, art, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance. The trailer, seen above, will make you think about the implications of something akin to Woodstock, where people came together, way back when, to participate in an event larger then themselves.

Behavior Modification

A must read about Surveillance by Alternet's  Lynn Stuart Parramore. Chilling to say the least.

When I moved to a Czech village in 1994 to teach English, I was fascinated by the cultural difference between Americans like me and my new community. At that time, the oppressive memory of the dreaded Communist secret police, the StB [3], was still fresh. (Check out a haunting series of street photos [4] snapped by agents in their heyday.) As a brash young ex-pat, born after the era of McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, I understood little of what it felt like to live under constant surveillance.

The Czechs knew better. Several decades under the watchful eyes of the StB (and before that, the spies of the Habsburg Empire) had molded their attitudes and behavior in ways that were both subtle and profound. They were on their guard with newcomers. When you got to know them, you might sense a tendency toward fatalism about the future. Signature Czech traits included a sophisticated gallows humor and a sharp sense of the absurd, honed by a lifetime of experiencing Kafka-esque political conditions (Kafka himself was a Czech).

Then there was that subversive streak. When you gained their trust, Czechs would often gleefully show you their old smuggled rock-and-roll records or describe a forbidden radio set up in some corner of the house. These proud tales of rebellious triumph over the StB were cast against stories of horror, like a student who told me of the day her daddy disappeared after “talking to the oven” where a radio was hidden. For most Czechs, the salient lesson of the police state was an us-against-them mentality. Only sometimes you didn’t know who “they” were.

Seen below is a pix taken by the former Czech Secret Police. Gives you the warm fuzzies don't you think? 

A Map of a Different Kind

Amazing video showing the local universe in 3D is simply astounding. Worth watching without question to see just how wondrous nature truly is. 

What Tully has done is less dramatic but no less important. He has mapped the universe in detail out to a distance of about 100 million light years. To put that in more human terms: Columbus’s maps of the New World described a land 3,000 miles from home, but Tully’s map extends 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles out. No wonder he is often referred to as a cosmic cartographer. By filling in the details, Tully has made it possible to discern the true structure of the universe: clusters of galaxies arranged into enormous filaments, bound together by invisible strands of dark matter, and tremendous lonely voids where galaxies are sparse.

Currents of galaxies (white spheres) are drawn by gravity toward galaxy cluster and even more massive cosmic pileups like the “Great Attractor.” Red and yellow show zones of attraction; dark blue shows the voids that galaxies flow away from. (Credit: Courtois, Tully, et al.)

Silence

Aeon is a terrific site, dealing with deep concepts in elegant fashion ranging from the limits of science to the notions of being human in a reality we struggle to understand. In Robert Twigger's thoughtful piece titled Desert Silence, he touches upon a subject both profound and right, the power of silence and how it applies to being human.

There is an Arab saying that the donkey that bought you to the palace must be dismounted before you can enter.

If it’s windy, you still get it, the silence. But only at first. Then you notice the wind on clothes, or the rustling of a tarpaulin. If the wind is really high, it’ll be picking up sand and shooting it like mist over the ground — swirls, not cloudlike but dreamlike, silky, low-down patterns of the universe, all lit up. The desert is windy at certain times of the day, sometimes all day. You never go days without wind, but there are always periods of calm. Strangely, they often coincide with that moment of getting out of the car, with its big tough tyres and hot exhaust pipe and ticking, contracting bonnet.

You start listening to the silence. You start listening for imperfections, proofs against its existence. Maybe the ticking is reassuring, but it grows less frequent, fainter. People look for proof of their beliefs when they are young, when they are charged with hope. Many give up at what seems a very early age. They prefer the comfort of denial, of nothing with a small ‘n’, a rubbish nothing, easily shouldered aside by music, appetites, money, entertainment and controversy culture, stuff. Cars. The car that got you here, which you can now leave behind. 

I experienced this kind of profound silence in Death Valley, prior to becoming mostly deaf, and the impact on yours truly was amazing as it forces one to not think, to be in the present as the only thing one experiences in this kind of environment is one's self, a moment that has reamained with me to the present day. Interestingly enough, now that deafness is part of my equation, I experience silence when taking out my hearing aids in order to get away from the incessant noise of modern society. something that annoys my wife to no end. At the same time, I now understand, in small part, how the deaf remain  forever separate from the world, existing in a kind of silence the hearing will never experience unless they go to the desert and get away from it all, even if it's only for a short time. 

By 2100...

By 2100, coral reefs could join the dinosaurs as extinct entities but in this case, the extinction will be caused by us.

Ricke said: "Our results show that if we continue on our current emissions path, by the end of the century there will be no water left in the ocean with the chemical properties that have supported coral reef growth in the past. We can't say with 100% certainty that all shallow-water coral reefs will die, but it is a pretty good bet."

Deep cuts in emissions are necessary in order to save even a fraction of existing reefs, according to the team's results. Chemical conditions that can support coral reef growth can be sustained only with very aggressive cuts in carbon dioxide emissions.

The slippery slope looms.

Smarter Every Day

Just found a very cool YouTube site. Smarter Every Day, a science environment teaching us rubes some interesting factoids about science. The piece seen above explains the mystery of Prince Rubert's Drop. Check it out. Pretty cool without question.

The Foundation of a Very Oppressive State

In a terrific article in Slate,  Brian Jenkins,  a terrorism analysis par excellante, articulates the true danger of surveillance 24/7 in Fred Kaplin's piece titled, The Foundation of a Very Oppressive State.


And yet, Jenkins thinks that the U.S. government’s counterterrorism policies—which he’s helped influence over the decades—have gone too far. “What we have put in place,” he said, “is the foundation of a very oppressive state.”

The oppressive state doesn’t yet exist, he said, but if a president wanted to move in that direction, “the tools are in place now.” The choice to do so “could be made under circumstances that appear perfectly reasonable,” he went on, noting, “Democracy does not preclude voluntary submission to despotism. Given a frightened population, Congress can legislate away liberties just as easily as tyrants can seize power. That seems to be what has started to happen.”

The late Frank Church said it best.

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss," explained Church. "That is the abyss from which there is no return."

Any Questions?

The Art of War - Plant Style :)

PHD's terrific video on plant defenses explains, in large part, why Monsanto's GMO corn is being devoured by the ravenous Corn Borer beetle, something Monsanto is apoplectic about given just how protective of this "wonderful" crop Monsanto truly is. As often stated before, Nature always finds a way.

X Marks the Spot

 Sang Mun, an extremely talented designer, concerned with the 24/7 surveillance being conducted on us has come up with a set of fonts OCR and AI cannot decipher, something pretty impressive to say the least. What he has done is important, something I bet Thomas Jefferson would have approved of without question. As often stated, tech has no morality, it depends on who using it to see the impact it has on society. This is an example of a good way though it is so sad technology like this has to be created in the first place. The founding fathers must be rolling in their graves seeing what is happening to this once great nation.

Seen above are Sang's fonts, which work on Apple and Windows. 

According to Sang, the X example works best.