down runter

An interesting featured article ostensibly on an army recruitment campaign imploring Australian colonists to fight for metropolitan Britain during World War I re-introduces us to the broader, meticulous and vast curation of unusual maps by Big Think contributor Frank Jacobs.
Like many in the collection, the propaganda illustrated on this broadsheet evokes the it could happen here trope with the continent rebranded as New Germany—with Kaisermania just off the southern coast. Ironically, as this sort of panic was not firmly ensconced in the realm of possibilities with the Great War being one of attrition, the outposts that Imperial Germany had in the vicinity of Australia were immediately taken by New Zealand and Australian forces as soon as war was declared, rebranding Neu-Mecklenburg and Neu-Pommern as New Ireland and New England respectively. The Treaty of Versailles formally stripped Germany of its colonial holdings and with Africa and Asia already unduly apportioned among the other European powers, the only land left up for grabs for a resurgent Nazi Germany was Antarctica.

brick and mortar

Via the Daily Dot, we discover that Lego- compatible adhesive tape is on offer for pre-order and will be ready to ship sometime this summer, having far surpassed their original fund-raising goal multiple times over. Brilliantly any surface can be made Lego-friendly, enhancing building possibilities and seems to us a far better alternative to modifying and replacing components than some boring old 3D printer. Founded in 1934 in Denmark, the company’s name is a play on the Danish phrase leg godt—“play well.”

peripheral

Thinker and inventor of predictive texting, the auto-complete feature (that’s quite different from psychography or automatic writing) Ben Medlock, writing for Æon magazine, poses the question of whether the singularity can transpire so long as artificial intelligence is something disembodied. I wonder if we need physical extensions and limitations to achieve self-awareness.
I guess this is another way to approach the floating man conjecture of Avicenna that suggests that without being able to confirm the fact that we have a body, sensibly, we might not naturally assume that there’s any distinction between internal and external.  Our living and mortal structures are of course a veritable Ship of Theseus, dynamic and continuously in need of upkeep and refurbishment and that to me suggests that intelligence also needs a way to sense time—through aging, with some going so far as theorising that the spark of consciousness arises out of awareness that the intellect and its support-systems is liable to being drug down by the same rules of entropy that causes everything’s consummation. I wonder if the immortal and the incorruptible have, experience intelligence in the same way. Is it a question of kind or degrees? Maybe the gap is always growing narrower but will always be there. Of course we can give a robot any sort of body that we chose but that casing, input/output device is something different than a feeling, corporeal form.

pleistocene park

Having seen the full documentary on German television over the weekend with H, I was pleased to see the coverage of enormous and complex conservation project reproduced by The Atlantic. Reaching back to the dawn of human civilisation and the retreat of the glaciers that spawned the shared myths and memories of the great deluge and Atlantis (we’ve no tales of advancing sheets of ice and winters that span æons) the Pleistocene Age ushers in human society, perhaps developed as a way to cope with the cold and privation.
The success of humans upset the balance of that Nature had cultivated for far longer than the fifty thousand years since the Age of Man, hunting most of the megafauna of the plains to extinction. The grazing of huge beasts adapted to the climate, corralled by predators, ensured that the tundra maintained its character and did not give up its permafrost in an uncontrolled catastrophic fashion. Some determined residents of Siberia have begun a massive land-management project that aims to restore the grasslands and the integrity of their local biome by reintroducing elk, bison, and maybe even mammoths in the near future. Similar conservation efforts are beating back the advance of the desert on the plains of Africa and have even allowed cattle ranchers and elephants to coexist. It seems a bit counter-intuitive at first but if committed and managed correctly could save heath and prairie and keep sequestered carbon out of the atmosphere.