ohrwurm oder kleiner hai

Though there is not a definitive pedigree for the children’s tune that has gone viral and memetic for all its various tributes and celebrity renditions and it is believed to have been a traditional campfire song, but it’s strange that we’ve been here before—a decade ago—and have conveniently put the experience out of our heads, and was first popularised in 2007 as Little Shark by German artist alemuel. The beat in this slightly darker version (see bottom video, try playing both at the same time) of the earworm of a song is closer to the theme from Jaws and involves a baby shark devouring a swimmer but it’s essentially the same piece (although the reinforcement of gender stereotypes within the pleurotrematic extended family are also kind of disturbing) that reached a critical mass just within the past few months.

field notes

Though the verdict is still out on whether plants can vocalise, it seems that a research team has demonstrated that flowers act as ears and can distinguish the buzz of an approaching pollinator over the general din and sweeten its nectar. The less conclusive part of the study looked into whether plants communicated distress or well-being at ranges above what humans can hear and how this might be interpreted by arboreal creatures and insects.
Humans are being humbled all the time and we have far more empathy for the natural world and our place in than we did in the past—even a decade ago, most regarded animals as having no interior lives or feelings, but as the latter smacks a bit of the pseudoscientific methods that probably set back our collective willingness to examine and consider plant communications, it’s probably a bit of a treacherous claim that we are not quite ready for. For better or worse, regardless of the veracity and rigour, sometimes we are just not receptive to ideas that can change our world view, like the parable of Clever Hans, a stunt that set back the cause of animal rights significantly but no we not only know that bees can do simple arithmetic but that plants do communicate to and socialise with their neighbours through chemical signals and via a complex and poorly understood network that connects whole forests through their roots.

™

Grifter-in-Chief and accomplished beneficiary of the rentier economic model is poised to reform regulation at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO, which accrues more funding the more patents it grants) to be more favourable for fellow parasitic copyright trolls.
Article One, Section Eight of the US constitution vests in congress the power “to promote the progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Reanimating the sort of legal framework that allowed such ransoming and trouncing on creativity, playing very loose with the concepts of invention and originality—which obviously hurts all of us—is a disturbing change of course and bears more public scrutiny and intervention.

404: page not found

The always engrossing Things Magazine refers us to a quite excellent essay composed by the consummate Kate Wagner (previously) on the manner in which the old grifter nostalgia is cannibalising and repackaging the old, aspirational internet and selling it back to us at a premium.
For the sake of sleekness and convenience, we’ve relinquished a lot of our agency for something that was not inevitable yet a natural consequence of the capitalist model made virtual perfect and instantaneous by ghettoization and other forms of corralling. The interregnal period between the transition from the scientific, professional internet to the interwebs of throttling and objectification is characterised as the age of Vaporware, Vaporwave—referring to items that are prototyped and test-marketed but never released—references Karl Marx’ (the thinker being the original arbiter of the free exchange of ideas—advocating that when “society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”) other pronouncement “All that is solid melts into air.”

global hawk

Via Slashdot, we learn that a company specialising in wireless power transmission has announced it has developed an electromagnetic field generator that could permit drones to remain aloft indefinitely—never needing to idle for a recharge. Our cargo cult-like obsession with automation and seamless delivery makes me think of how the pre-Enlightenment natural scientists supposed birds of paradise had no feet and lived their entire lives in the skies.