Blue Moon 2024 aka The Sturgeon Moon

August 19 | 2024 First of 4 super moons :)

A cool guide to full moons of 2024

Complexfication ...

Photo-Illustration: Wired Staff; Getty Images

Complexification, you know, the ability to bamboozle and confuse the great unwashed, like me, is everywhere. From needlessly complex software interfaces hindering one to do something simple like saving a file to a specific location to encountering blister packs requiring the use of industrial strength scissors to gain access to some gizmo residing inside while avoiding the possibility of getting badly cut in the process makes one crazy to a fault. 

As a designer, yours truly knows, from experience, to never let a coder design a front end to anything.

With this notion in mind, the interesting Wired article , Should art be regulated by the SEC: NFT Artists' New Lawsuit Seeks Answers. brings complexification to a whole new level.

Note, Click here to see BRT's take on NFTs if you dare. :)

In 1946, a US Supreme Court ruling about the Howey Company, which sold citrus groves to buyers who shared in their profits, cemented the test for determining what a security is. The “Howey Test” defines securities as “an investment of money in a common enterprise with the expectation of profits from the efforts of others.”

In other words, Gottlieb says, it makes an investment contract a security. That can be tricky to apply to art, analog or NFT-affiliated. “When you sell a certificate, what you're really doing is essentially selling art collectors an interest in your art,” Frye says. That means buyers are investing in the expectation “that you're going to get more famous.” That fame, in turn, makes the art more valuable.

If you look at it that way and apply the Howey Test, Gottlieb says, it can look very much like art buyers are investing in a common enterprise and expecting to benefit from the artist’s efforts. The difference, Gottlieb says, is that “artists don’t owe you anything.” You may hope that your purchase of an autographed Brat album will go up in value as Charli XCX keeps selling out concert venues, but that wasn’t promised with the record’s sale. Same, the suit argues, goes for a digital cat cartoon tied to some blockchain-based code.

Sounds rather specious to me.

Complexification (Lie group) writ large. :)

Nothing is forever ...

Mike Mcquade

Memories depicting our view on reality, range from the internal residing in our minds to the external consisting of, in part, words, sounds, images and video, express, in no uncertain terms, what it means to be human. Said entities are fragile at best, something able to be lost forever at a moment's notice if we let it, is a most disconcerting circumstance thanks to the inevitablilty of entropy, something intrepid people are tying to prevent in ways most inspiring without question.

We shouldn’t try too hard to imagine what future historians would find interesting about us, says Niels Brügger, an internet researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark. “We cannot imagine what historians in 30 years’ time would like to study about today, because we don’t have a clue,” he says. “So we shouldn’t try to anticipate and sort of constrain the possible questions that future historians would ask.”

Instead, Brügger says, we should just save as much stuff as possible and let them figure it out later. “As a historian, I would definitely go for: Get it all, and then historians will find out what the hell they’re going to do with it,” he says.

Nothing is forever ...

We no longer have such space limitations. My iPhone takes thousands of photos a year. Our Instagram and TikTok feeds are constantly updated. We collectively send billions of WhatsApp messages and texts and emails and tweets.

But while all this data is plentiful, it’s also more ephemeral. One day in the maybe-not-so-distant future, YouTube won’t exist and its videos may be lost forever. Facebook—and your uncle’s holiday posts—will vanish. There is precedent for this. MySpace, the first largish-scale social network, deleted every photo, video, and audio file uploaded to it before 2016, seemingly inadvertently. Entire tranches of Usenet newsgroups, home to some of the internet’s earliest conversations, have gone offline forever and vanished from history. And in June this year, more than 20 years of music journalism disappeared when the MTV News archives were taken offline.

For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years. 

The endeavor raises complex questions. What is important to us? How and why do we decide what to keep—and what do we let go?

To be continued ...

The Fall of Phaeton

The Fall of Phaeton - Michelangelo Buonarroti 

(Caprese 1475 - Roma 1564)

The Fall of Phaeton depicts the mythological episode taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and particuarly the end of Phaeton’s life. Zeus, seen frontally and almost touching the cart with his foot, is launching a thunderbolt at proud Phaeton, who had dared ascend towards the heavens. 

One cannot control something when one doesn't know how it works. It matters not what kind of entity it is, the fact remains, if the inner workings of any given entity remains unknown, one cannot control it. 

AI is one such entity.

Throughout history many traditions have believed that some fatal flaw in human nature tempts us to pursue powers we don’t know how to handle. The Greek myth of Phaethon told of a boy who discovers that he is the son of Helios, the sun god. Wishing to prove his divine origin, Phaethon demands the privilege of driving the chariot of the sun. Helios warns Phaethon that no human can control the celestial horses that pull the solar chariot. But Phaethon insists, until the sun god relents. After rising proudly in the sky, Phaethon indeed loses control of the chariot. The sun veers off course, scorching all vegetation, killing numerous beings and threatening to burn the Earth itself. Zeus intervenes and strikes Phaethon with a thunderbolt. The conceited human drops from the sky like a falling star, himself on fire. The gods reassert control of the sky and save the world.

As often state in BRT, AI is an open-ended tech able to evolve, something different from anything man has ever done. The kicker is the fact AI's evolving in real time, millions of time faster than us, a most disconcerting fact without question.

AI is an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands. Nuclear bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill, nor can they improve themselves or invent even more powerful bombs. In contrast, autonomous drones can decide by themselves who to kill, and AIs can create novel bomb designs, unprecedented military strategies and better AIs. AI isn’t a tool – it’s an agent. The biggest threat of AI is that we are summoning to Earth countless new powerful agents that are potentially more intelligent and imaginative than us, and that we don’t fully understand or control.

Curvature

Being a good neighbor ... :)

A frog and a tarantula make good housemates. Credit: Francesco Tomasinelli and Emanuel Biggi

Tarantulas are cool. Big, hairy and pretty awesome without question but it seems they're good neigbors as well as seen by the pix above. I had numerous pets as a kid but never the big T. Now being a senior, I would love to have one but the upkeep would be steep and my wife would never allow it so this Physorg piece must suffice for now. :)

The research reported for the first time an association between tarantulas and snakes, whip spiders, and harvestmen, and also reported over 60 new cases of partnerships between tarantulas and amphibians from ten different countries.

According to the researchers, the interaction, or even cohabitation, between the tarantulas and other species is often mutually beneficial.

"Apparently, the frogs and toads that live within the retreats of tarantulas benefit from the shelter and protection against their predators. In turn, they feed on insects that could be harmful to the spider, its eggs, and its juveniles. It seems that tarantulas might not be as scary and threatening as their reputation suggests," says researcher and the first author of the study Alireza Zamani from the University of Turku, Finland.

I rest my case. :)

Night Sounds

The night is the best time to hear sounds, whether it be insects tying ther best to survive another night or intense winds issuing forth whenever a fast moving high pressure system makes its presence known. This, plus full moons to illuminate the environment at large, completes the picture as to why nature never disappoints. :)

The Demon-Haunted World

Carl Sagan is one of my heroes. Fearless, visionary, kind and wise, he embodies all that is good regarding critical thinking and why it matters. As a lay scientist and devout atheist, the mantra I try to adhere to is, as per Einstein, is ... Question everything because if you don't, the word assume applies, the most dangerous word in any language as it precludes questioning, the great possible leading to learning how the world operates at deep level.

Carl Sagan

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”

Any questions?

Acadian Driftwood

Listen closely to learn how The Band's Acadian Driftwood captures the tragedy
of the Acadian Diaspora.

The Band in 1969: (left to right) Manuel, Hudson, Helm, Robertson, Danko 

photo by ©Elliott Landy 1969

8" to 12" & counting ...

 

Debbie pepe 19 hours ago — Great quarter road Sandy hook

About a year ago, yours truly made a guesstimate as as to how much time we have left regarding relative normalcy vis a vis global warming. The guesstimate was 3 years before the gorilla's true impact finally begins to take off. Seems the gorilla's getting rather impatient as CT just got between 8 to 12 inches of rain on August 17 - 18, an amount equivalent to what Houston got, courtesy 2017's Hurricane Harvey but without the wind, thank god. 

With this being said, let's talk about how climate change will impact the making of stuff, you know, the material one endlessly buys in today's materialist world as the prognosis' not good by any stretch of the imagination. In 2024, we are producing the most stuff ever, something that will radically change because GW's just beginning, a most disconcerting fact without question.

Rob White 19 hours ago — Oxford House / Oxford CT / RT6

Photo by William Bossen on Unsplash

Fire and Ice | Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Seems fire and water will suffice but what do I know. I'm just a rube trying to cope in these uncertain times. 

Life ... finds a way

Summer is the best time to see just how persistent life truly is because nature's a tough place due to the fact competition for limited resources never ends, something readily seen with the intensity of bumble bees and Viceroys in their endless pursuit of nectar. Enjoy.