"We Be The Humans"
Older Retired White Guy. Buddhist.
"Non nobis solum"
Likes trees better than people. Books better than trees.
"We Be The Humans"
Joined Aug 2018
Cognition all the way down.
Biology’s next great horizon is to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas (even if unthinking ones).
By Michael Levin
"The other amazing thing that happens when cells connect their internal signalling networks is that the physiological setpoints that serve as primitive goals in cellular homeostatic loops, and the measurement processes that detect deviations from the correct range, are both scaled up."
https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas
To Watch:
Hole drummer Patty Schemel joins Zabrecky in an attempt to contact what may have been the second most famous performing feline in Las Vegas.
(I am not sure I agree with everything here, and none of this is new. But a good read anywho)
To Mend a Broken Internet, Create Online Parks.
We need public spaces, built in the spirit of Walt Whitman, that allow us to gather, communicate, and share in something bigger than ourselves.
By Eli Pariser
"Much of our communal life now unfolds in digital spaces that feel public but are not."
https://www.wired.com/story/to-mend-a-broken-internet-create-online-parks/
More:
Part two of this review:
Confabulation: good, bad, or inevitable?
Elly argues that, if confabulation is epistemically innocent, so is the narrative by the victim of domestic violence who excuses the perpetrator, and that is a problem for my account.
https://philosophyofbrains.com/2020/10/14/confabulation-good-or-bad.aspx
"We Be The Humans"
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For the Lakota there was no wilderness. Nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.
— Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Lakota
A review of:
Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.
by Nicholson Baker
The Blacked-Out Line
Nicholson Baker in the labyrinths of American secrecy.
By Charlie Savage
Baseless with a generally firm understanding that he has produced a very strange book. “I lay in bed some of today reading more of this book, hating it, excited by it, embarrassed by it,”
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/nicholson-baker-baseless-review/
Book:
Animations: Data Sonification: Sounds from Around the Milky Way.
Sonification is the process that translates data into sound, and a new project brings the center of the Milky Way to listeners for the first time. The translation begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right, with the sounds representing the position and brightness of the sources. The intensity of the light controls the volume.
Greece Is Buying French Rafale Fighters In Light Of Tensions With Turkey.
The Greek prime minister has outlined a major arms package for all three services, with new warships also being on the shopping list.
By Thomas Newdick
"A long-term observer of the Hellenic Air Force told The War Zone that they expect the older Mirage 2000s to be sold back to France or possibly to Cyprus."
Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time
Physicists have reached a long-sought goal. The catch is that their room-temperature superconductor requires crushing pressures to keep from falling apart.
By Charlie Wood
The hydrogen, carbon and sulfur compound operates as a superconductor at up to 59 degrees Fahrenheit, only while being crushed to pressures roughly 75% as found in the Earth’s core.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-discover-first-room-temperature-superconductor-20201014/
Paper:
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2801-z
(This new newsletter continues to impress. Check out all three of the posts, and sing up to have it delivered to you inbox.)
The Frontline
By Climate Editor Yessenia Funes
Well it looks like a large number of new users here in the last 24 hours.
Welcome Home All
https://dashboard.counter.social/dashboard/db/countersocial?refresh=1h&orgId=1
A Physicist’s Approach to Biology Brings Ecological Insights.
The physicist Jeff Gore tests theories about microbe communities experimentally and finds new rules governing ecological stability.
By Gabriel Popkin
"There’s a joke that physicists can describe systems of one, two or infinite individual elements, but nothing in between."
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-physicists-approach-to-biology-brings-ecological-insights-20201013/
(Are you a writer? Want to be a writer? These 21 posts will help a lot)
Never Say You Can’t Survive
Charlie Jane Anders
“You have the power to shape worlds, and the monsters are scared of you.”
From author Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can’t Survive is a how-to book about the storytelling craft, but it’s also full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish in the present emergency.
https://www.tor.com/series/never-say-you-cant-survive-by-charlie-jane-anders/
Foreign election interference:
A global response
Exploring the details of how each nation put these efforts into practice makes for fascinating reading and important lessons learned.
This is my message to the western world – your civilization is killing life on Earth
Nemonte Nenquimo
"It is the early morning in the Amazon, just before first light: a time that is meant for us to share our dreams, our most potent thoughts. And so I say to all of you: the Earth does not expect you to save her, she expects you to respect her. And we, as Indigenous peoples, expect the same."
(They are not even pretending anymore)
Supreme Court halts census in latest twist of 2020 count.
By Mike Schneider
After the Supreme Court’s decision, the Census Bureau said field operations would end on Thursday.
https://apnews.com/article/us-news-census-2020-c6cb554611d328b423ac508e5008f9cd
(Re-Post, as I just finished this. Very good stuff)
Science Fiction Short Stories:
Entanglements: Tomorrow's Lovers, Families, and Friends (Twelve Tomorrows)
by Sheila Williams (Editor)
The strange new worlds in these stories feature AI family therapy, floating fungitecture, and a futuristic love potion. A co-op of mothers attempts to raise a child together, lovers try to resolve their differences by employing a therapeutic sexbot.
Cultural Evolution and Oral Tradition: ‘Information transfer’ at the micro scale
My own position, is that the genetic elements of culture, which Dennett calls memes and which I’ve recently been calling coordinators, are properties of physical phenomena in the public sphere. In this case it’s the word forms, the physical sounds, that play the genetic role.
They are internal to the mechanism by which the story is held in the mind.
By Bill Benzon
https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2015/06/cultural-evolution-and-oral-tradition.html
Pro tip for web users:
Lots of people post links here, that might be behind a paywall.
If you use Firefox or Chrome, as a web browser, here is a great add on extension that gets you past those pesky paywalls.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
Also for Science Papers use Sci-Hub. Just copy and past the "DOI" here:
"We Be The Humans"
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Pro tip
find a hashtag you like
tap on the tag inside toots or search using the search function above the toot text input field
tap the top right of the new column that shows far right and pin the column
you can the add other tags you come across in that pinned column or repeat the pinning process to create another pinned column for tags
you can arrange columns as you please using < and > which shifts columns
use "Dark Reader" extension/add on you can change your CoSo theme
"We Be The Humans"
Older Retired White Guy. Buddhist.
"Non nobis solum"
Likes trees better than people. Books better than trees.
"We Be The Humans"
Joined Aug 2018