five horsemen or executive-decision

Slate magazine has a pretty provoking essay on the nature of our executive faculties of decision making, also known as free-will, and how technologies emerging a-pace is altering the landscape of choosing and prerogative.
In some ways, buffeted by legislated morality disguised as cautious health and safety regulations, our feelings of being in control, having a choice translated into a statement and stance, individual will seems strengthened. There is some hint of distaste, however, that that confidence is illusory, and that seed of doubt is sown in a very fecund field. Maybe when faced with a paucity of alternatives, we’d like to imagine that we’re still being deliberative in a narrow framework—where the technology has already decided for us. The article speaks of five horsemen, those galloping fields of bio-engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanites and the manipulation of judgment, perception and reason (also said to embrace free-will itself), that are canting leagues—some say, of the institutions, laws and even our own ability to cognitively cope, which while not heralds of assured destruction do seem to announce an era of difficult choices and direct dialogue.

five-by-five

lunchables: 3-D printer creates living, growing food

double-jeopardy: venture aims to promote an on-line trivia competitive community as a way to pay down student loan debt

promenade: bouncing, dancing continental gifs

ants go marching two by two: a study of the social insects reveals the dangers of isolation

corporate raider: The Guardian presents an historical overview of the East India Company

quantum triviality

Via Neat-o-Rama, comes the story that the mathematically literate and long-running television series The Simpsons had Homer at the blackboard (in the episode The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace, wherein he tries to outdo the prolificacy of inventor Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park) parsing a formula that’s eerily similar to the solution that particle physicists derived over a decade later to describe the mass of a Higgs-Boson particle, whose existence at the time of first airing was only theoretical. Given the naming controversy over this nano-particle, sometimes called the “God Particle,” maybe it should be called the Homer Boson. Even if only coincidental—to show the audience something incongruent, something they’d expect more from Professor Frick, and inscrutable, I hope that the story is true—although the debunking can also attract a lot of interest and hopefully in the sciences as well as the cartoon.

gazetteer

Vox complies an interesting and sometimes rather chilling glimpse of alternative histories and outcomes mapped-out graphically in twenty unrealized battle plans, contingency operations, secessionists’ aspirations, and massive infrastructure projects.

 I especially found engrossing the portrayal of Africa without colonialism, the secret US invasion plans for Canada, or the proposal for the terra-forming of the Mediterranean Sea. A gazetteer or a gazette has sometimes been used as name for a newspaper but originally referred to a directory, an index to be used in conjunction with a map or an atlas—like the underlying battle plans or agendas that plotted out these charts.

five-by-five

great tribulation: Collectors’ Weekly features a gallery of apocalyptic images from the 17th century Augsburg Book of Miracles

cinderella dressed in yellow: a fancy jump rope prototype uses one’s persistence of vision as a display medium

hologram: actor Hugh Jackman promotes latest film with a virtual interview junket

engineered obsolesce: France is combatting throw-away consumerism by mandating expiration dates for electronic goods

pasteurised interface: writing for Æon magazine, Samuel Arbesman, mourns the why sleek and magical operating systems has alienated tinkering and understanding of how computers and programs work

posh frock or privileged witness

I don’t really know the context behind this upwelling of interest and controversy over that dress, but it’s really becoming a fascinating and unexpected vulnerability in the armour of perceptions. Firstly, it is pretty remarkable that a precedent hastag, as sort of an apotheosis to an asterisk or a dagger signaling a footnote, has come to indicate a whole on going and evolving conversation, whereas what’s denoted with a marginalia is just a postscript at best, though mostly just a sort of disclaimer. That single symbol can embrace worlds, it seems.
Secondly, and a lot of very clever people have been forthcoming with expert testimony on this phenomenon, it illustrates that although we intuit the tasteless and tawdry and wrong-headed and artless in others readily and have advanced aesthetics a great deal, we are woefully unsophisticated and take for granted that others might perceive the fundamental elements of reality in a different manner than we. Though we can imagine a fly perspective on things or remark on the Japanese distinction of colouration or laugh at the misheard renditions of others, we cannot really experience the world as it is through the eyes of others nor have the vocabulary to articulate how markedly or subtly different things are. I say it’s tangy and blorange, that dress.

it’s a fact: potato is an imaginary number

The internet cannot be extolled enough for inciting curiosity and bringing the obscure and sometimes abstruse into the light, but sometimes that highly specialised knowledge and semantics twisting in the wind prove a bit too contagious, as if there’s some cameo by an Evil Genius ready to pounce on any given string of conventional wisdom. For instance, sauntering down the produce-aisle of the information-superhighway, lately I have been schooled several times in the classification and naming-conventions of my fruits and vegetables. Today I found out that while carrots and cantaloupes are Tories, the casaba is in fact uncountable and the banana is, rather than a mineral as some of you were no doubt led to believe, actually an Eisenstein-Bose condensate.

five-by-five

zootopia: rediscovered studies on rodent paradises suggest that we can’t have nice things

neep: the first of its kind tidal lagoon power plant comes to Swansea

secret knock: bars and lounges with hidden entrances

LLAP: Canadians are “spocking” their banknotes to honour the passing of Leonard Nimoy

photon-finish: scientists capture the dual nature of light in a single photographic exposure