technology, entertainment, design

Via Super Punch, we are invited to consider the presentation that’s the buzz of this year’s TED Talk conference which was held last week in Vancouver. Computer scientist and virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier lamented the “free,” ad-based internet that we’ve created and suggested that these behaviour modification and commodification empires either adopt a subscription model, a utility that one pays for like any other service, or abandon this venture entirely.
“We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third party who wishes to manipulate them.” People of course encouraged to keep up their end of whatever topic of discussion might be circulating out there in the ether, as well. Charging a fee for their services (Marginal Revolution crunched the numbers earlier and determined that globally a membership fee of twenty dollars would cover the advertising revenue it earned per user per year) and it would drive improvement to make the site a service worth paying for. Would you rather have your outlook and opinions meddled with for free or pay a nominal fee and get your money’s worth? One pays for quality. If everyone roundly rejects paying anything for a service that once touted itself as complimentary and always would be, what are we to infer if such a business model fail to attract customers and reach critical, networked mass? Ideas worth spreading, indeed.

silurian hypothesis

Angling from the perspective of an astrobiologist and attempting to give one possible solution to Fermi’s paradox, Atlantic correspondent Adam Frank was about to put to the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies that perhaps alien civilisations advance to the point where they’re either consumed by a climatic catastrophe of their own creation with it being exceedingly rare for a race to muddle through but his proposal was derailed mid-sentence with the rather arresting question why ought one presume that humankind is the Earth’s first advanced civilization.

I’ve wondered about this before and of course it’s the subject of speculative fiction, considering that all of our vaunted history just barely reaches back four thousand years—though from an evolutionary standpoint, we’ve had the mental facilities that we possess today for about sixty-thousand years already and have been anatomically the same for about three hundred thousand years, which all seem to barely register as a blip on a geological timescale. The director, with deference to a Dr Who race of intelligent and industrial reptilians that inhabited the Earth millions of years ago, posits a hypothetical precursor quite off the scale of practitioners of archaeology and a challenge for paleontologists and geologists. The article goes on to explore what traces our civilization might be depositing in the layers of the Earth that might be detectable by scientists tens of millions of years in the future, once our buildings are ground to dust and even our most problematic pollution has finally degraded. Would future scientists even recognise the mark in the strata as telltale? More than the search for a long extinct race of intelligent dinosaurs that were perhaps too clever for their own good, this thought experiment—with actual inference—importantly demonstrates to us in there here and now how we leave an imprint on our planet and what we might do to soften that impact so humans (and the environment that we share with other residents) might be around a bit longer.

paleoartistry

I ran across this rather delightfully engrossing and illustrative (subjects not pictured) interview from Atlas Obscura’s archives recently that discussed what necessary liberties and license can confront and confound the anatomists and other researchers that—without context and living examples to look towards for inspiration—and cause inaccuracies that become ingrained in the way we envision dinosaurs and other long extinct beasts.
Until very recently, no one would have thought to embellish a stegosaurus with fancy feathers and plumage that might make the actual creature far fluffier than the lean and severe hunters that we picture. A classically problematic interpretation was thinking the skulls of elephants were actually the skulls of mythological cyclopes—or dinosaurs fossils evidence of dragons. Conversely, the padding, pouches, crests and wattles of extant species of today that aren’t necessarily preserved along with the skeletal frame that the artists have to work with—or otherwise over compensated for to achieve a sense of balance—could in for future paleontologist create some quite fantastic creatures—raptor like geese or deer that used their antlers (imagining them stretched taut with a sail of skin) like a paraglider. It would take quite an inspired leap (and probably a heretical one too) for a biologist of the far future, without the benefit of having experienced the life-cycles of the specimens studied, to realise that a toad and tadpole or butterfly and caterpillar are the same creatures.  What do you think? I suppose no matter how far off the mark we our with our rough sketches, it’s important to keep on using our imaginations.

昆虫学

Recognised as a pioneer for his introduction of entomology to the curriculum of higher-learning in Japan as both an academic and applied (on their roles in agriculture and forestry as well as in a broader ecological sense), Dr Shōnen Matsumura is probably best remembered for his exhaustive and ambitious four-volume catalogue first published in 1904 called Thousand Insects of Japan. Matsumura himself named and described (and has several named in his honour) over twelve hundred species in journals and contributing to other taxonomical endeavours that the professor saw as the natural extension of his original project.

vorgeschichtlicherwanderweg

 Though we’re yet to properly and fully explore it, there’s quite an extensive, marked prehistorical trail leading away from home. It climbs out of the valley and affords a good vantage point of the village from the fields and tree-line just beyond. There’s an ensemble of ancient Celtic burial mounds, though not as well defined as this other grouping we saw recently, but we are eager to discover what other artefacts the path has to offer.

of the people, by the people, for the people

In response to Trump’s offensive rubbishing of the character of the intelligence services, a former agency director erupted, “Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey. As the greatest nation history has known, we have the opportunity to emerge from this nightmare stronger and more committed to ensuring a better life for all Americans, including those that you have so tragically deceived,” addressing Trump with no intermediaries—through a Tweet. Surprisingly, this will be the fifth time that PfRC has used the Greek neologism and it has been invoked in many other editorials about this regime,  but the present surge in inquiries about its meaning—government by the worst—and how it echoed this earlier bit of testimony of he who bears the brunt of Trump’s attacks sent me on an errand mission to the original 1644 sermon preached by one Paul Gosnold (original orthography below and note the old-fashioned way plurals are formed) before the assembly of St Mary’s of Oxford, including some visiting parliamentarians:

Therefore we need not make any scruple of praying against such: against those Sanctimonious Incendiaries, who have fetched fire from heaven to set their Country in combustion, have pretended Religion to raise and maintaine a most wicked rebellion: against those Nero’s, who have ripped up the wombe of the mother that bare them, and wounded the breasts that gave them sucke: against those Cannibal’s who feed upon the flesh and are drunke with the bloud of their own brethren: against those Catiline’s who seeke their private ends in the publicke disturbance, and have set the Kingdome on fire to rost their owne egges: against those tempests of the State, those restlesse spirits who can no longer live, then be stickling and medling; who are stung with a perpetuall itch of changing and innovating, transforming our old Hierarchy into a new Presbytery, and this againe into a newer Independency; and our well-temperd Monarchy into a mad kinde of Kakistocracy. Good Lord!

Oh lordy, indeed! A derived term is khakistocracy, an ironic pun referring the habit of strongmen dictators of parading about in military fatigues or as poseurs in battledress.