Immune Systems
Quite a multi-layeredness of the artificially strengthened immune systems they have in place at the Thai border. Microbes and terrorist: hand in your passport. Peculiar image of the week.
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Posts Tagged ‘Technorhetoric’
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Pimp My Planet
“We live in a time where everything or everyone can be upgraded or ‘pimped’. After the worldwide acceptance of plastic surgery, it was time to subject our worldly possessions (Pimp my Ride) and digital identities (Facebook) to an esthetical and/or functional upgrade. So it’s likely that eventually everything will be pimp-able. Even our own planet.”
The PIMP MY PLANET video, created the good people of Studio Smack, explores the possibilities of redesigning our planet according to ideals or aesthetic values. It is the wet dream of every modernist – I bet Mondriaan would have liked this – and then you wake up and realize that maakbaarheid is never finished and with every attempt to cultivate nature, a next nature arises that is wild and unpredictable as ever.
Related: If the implications of Global Warming were fair, Fight climate change, hack the planet, Ancient Man impacted environment already, Doggerland – mapping a lost world, Unfolding the Earth.
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The Modernist agenda uncovered
Peculiar image of the week. Created by Merijn Bolink.
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OOMouse versus Magic Mouse
Recently were introduced, the OOMouse…
…and the Magic Mouse. Both tools are developed to browse the ones and zeros more easily.
It almost seems unfair to compare them, so I won’t. But what I would like to compare instead is both companies’ mission statements:
Open Office: Our mission statement is to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.
Apple: Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.
The first reads in one word: “community” (building and sharing together). The second reads: “ego” (look how good I am). Now look again at their mices.
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The World without Technology
I remember the smoke the most. That pungent smell permeating the camps of tribal people. Everything they touch is infused with the lingering perfume of smoke — their food, shelter, tools, and art. Everything. Even the skin of the youngest tribal child emits smokiness when they pass by. I can hold a memento from my visits decades later and still get a whiff of that primeval scent. Anywhere in the world, no matter the tribe, steady wafts of smoke drift in from the central fire. If things are done properly, the flame never goes out. It smolders to roast bits of meat, and its embers warm bodies at night. The fire’s ever-billowing clouds of smoke dry out sleeping mats overhead, preserve hanging strips of meat, and drive away bugs at night. Fire is a universal tool, good for so many things, and it leaves an indelible mark of smoke on a society with scant other technology.
Besides the smoke I remember the immediacy of experience that opens up when the mediation of technology is removed in a rough camp. Living close to the land as hunter-gatherers do, I got colder often, hotter more frequently, soaking wet a lot, bitten by insects faster, more synchronized to rhythm of the day and seasons. Time seemed abundant. I was shocked at how quickly I could dump the cloud of technology in my modern life for a cloud of smoke.
But I was only visiting. Living in a world without technology was a refreshing vacation, but the idea of spending my whole life there was, and is, unappealing. Like you, or almost anyone else with a job today, I could sell my car this morning and with the sale proceeds instantly buy a plane ticket to a remote point on earth in the afternoon. A string of very bumpy bus rides from the airport would take me to a drop-off where within a day or two of hiking I could settle in with a technologically simple tribe. I could choose a hundred sanctuaries of hunter-gatherer tribes that still quietly thrive all around the world. At first a visitor would be completely useless, but within three months even a novice could at least pull their own weight and survive. No electricity, no woven clothes, no money, no farm crops, no media of any type — only a handful of hand-made tools. Every adult living on earth today has the resources to relocate to such a world in less than 48 hours. But no one does.
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Craig Venter – Catalyst of evolution
If the six hour crash course on synthetic genomics is a bit too much for you, there is always a more snappy TED lecture in which Craig Venter ponders on whether we can create new life out of our digital universe. Needles to ask what his answer is.
Dr. Venter now has a database now with about 20 million genes and thinks of them as the design components of the future. In little over half an hour the audience is walked through the latest endevours in synthetic genomics.
His talk covers topics like: How to boot up a chromosome. How he plans to replace the petrochemical energy with bacteria that turn CO2 into energy. How to take security measures. Why people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at the time have missed much of biology. And why it is a mistake to think they are trying to create life from scratch, as they are merely playin on one of the key principles of nature: all life derives from other life.
Nature changes along with us and it is changing fast. Buckle up for a catalyst of evolution.
Related: Build a better being, DNA Synthesizer, Top 10 new organisms, Mapping the DNA world, Google DNA, Poetry of Genetics, Crash course on synthetic genomics, How biotech will drive our evolution, Human genetic DNA sequencing soon child play?.
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Economy, as seen from Space
Reliable data on economic growth is hard to come by in many parts of the world, especially in developing countries. Yet according to scientists, outer space offers a new perspective for measuring economic growth.
Using satellite images of nighttime lights, J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil from Brown University have created a new framework for estimating a country or region’s gross domestic product, or GDP by observing the changes in a country’s “night lights” as seen from outer space.
“Consumption of nearly all goods in the evening requires lights,” they write in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. “As income rises, so does light usage per person, in both consumption activities and many investment activities.”
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Autimacy
Autimacy [aw-tih-muh-see] – noun, plural – cies. The term was coined by Simona Kicurovska.
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LHC – How physics becomes metaphysics
Little over a week after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) became operational it broke down. As the world’s largest particle accelerator isn’t working, computer simulations are the only option for a whole generation of researchers. With entire PhD’s being based on simulated data, you wonder whether physics is still an empirical science.
Today’s most ambitious scientific instruments are modern-day cathedrals in their size and complexity. Situated as much as 175 meters (570 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to accelerate protons to near the speed of light and smash them together in four giant detectors spread around its 27-kilometre circumference. Built at a cost of $4.3 billion, making it not only the grandest but also the most expensive scientific instrument ever created by man.
The main argument for the creation of the LHC is to discover the Higgs bosons, an elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics, but yet to be observed experimentally – a Nobel price is awaiting the one who makes the discovery.
SIMULATIONS REPLACE EMPIRICAL EXPERIMENTS
Physicists once hoped that the LHC would start its collisions in late 2006, but on 19 September 2008, shortly after the machine was finally switched on, an electrical short caused extensive damage along a sector of the machine. Repairs have taken longer than expected, and the LHC is not scheduled to restart before mid-November 2009.
The long delays have scattered the dreams of LHC Students who had hoped to use fresh data from the machine to use in their studies. According to the renowned Nature journal, LHC Students face data drought: “European graduate students face strict time constraints for completing their PhDs. Most universities require a thesis to be submitted within three to four years, and that means that students cannot wait for their data. Instead, their analyses are being done with data from ‘Monte Carlo’ simulations — computer programs that replicate what might come out of real collisions..”
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Bacteria that turn CO2 into energy
We’ve written earlier about man–made bacteria that eat waste & shit petrol. How about a genetically modified bacteria that can eat CO2 and excrete methane that could power our cars and homes? Abundant carbon dioxide, which is considered a pollutant, could be a nearly unlimited source of fuel. Will you one day be driving your car to fight global warming?
At first you think it sounds too good be true and quickly categorize the idea in the hoax section along with the cheap solar panels made from human hairs. But once you hear Craig Venter – yes, that researcher that sequenced the human genome – is involved, you know you have to take things more seriously.
Dr. Venter with his new firm, Synthetic Genomics, has turned his attentions to creating synthetic biological organisms for environmental change. What is particularly interesting about the company’s approach is the digitizing of existing organisms, which are then remodeled to new ones that do things that serve us well, such as eating pollution and excreting fuel. It’s high science today, but could be a genetic Photoshop within our lifetime.
A leading candidate to be the desired ‘CO2 eating, energy excreting bacteria’ that changes the game of climate change is Methanococcus jannaschii – depicted at the top of this post –, an ancient, single-cell organism that is found in the seafloor in the vicinity of hydrothermal vents. The organism produces methane by combining carbon dioxide with hydrogen rising through the vents. Incorporated into the air pollution control systems of power plants, the organism could turn CO2 into methane.
Although it will be difficult to apply the technique on a large scale anytime soon, president Obama already decided to honor Craig Venter with the National Medal of Science for his life time achievements.
Sources: Lab News, Popular Mechanics. Related: Crash course on synthetic genomics, Bacteria that eat waste & shit petrol, Driving on Algue, Arnolds hybrid hummer, Green Blues. -
Placebo Buttons
Buttons are everywhere: throughout your day you press them on phones, alarm clocks, keyboards, elevators, dishwashers and of course on the computer screen. Although buttons did not exist in old nature – taken that nipples do not count as buttons – the little symbols of control have been ubiquitous throughout most of our lives. But for how long?
As technology advances, buttons are replaced by sensors, gesture technology and autonomous systems. In fact, it may well be that our grand-grand-children won’t be pushing buttons like we do, as for them the entire environment has become an interface (again).
Although buttons may one day be grand-grand-parents technology, the current generation of people is still so used to pushing buttons, they are increasingly applied as skeuomorphs, meaning that they have no effect or function and are merely providing the user with a decorative feedback. Such buttons are called placebo buttons.
Examples of placebo buttons are unwired walk buttons at pedestrian crossings in New York City and door-close buttons in elevators, which functioning has been replaced by sensors. In some cases the button may have been functional, but may have failed or been disabled during installation or maintenance. Sometimes the button have been deliberately designed to do nothing besides establishing a illusion of control in the mind of the user.
Now one wonders about that big red button in the White House… could that one be a placebo too? Well allright, better not to try if that one just now.
Related: The buttons, Switch Critters – can you make them switch?, The powerbutton button, Magical interaction, Simulating old nature on next nature, Your grand-grand-parents new media, A society of simulations. Thanks Selby.
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Google ‘Opt Out’ parody
The Google Opt Out Feature Lets User protect their privacy by moving to a desolate village where the are guaranteed an environment free from Google products. Participants will expected to know how to grow their own food, heal their wounds and bury corpses by hand.
While this video is a parody, created by the Onion News Network, Google has been facing a lot of privacy concerns both from the US Government and its users. As Google continues to grow, and invade our lives, situations similar to the ones parody might not seem so far fetched and funny?
Related: Google 2084, Google DNA, Google manhole, Googling in physical space, Google pigeons, Behind the Search Engine, Google Kills Bambi.
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Artificial ‘Trees’ to Stop Climate Change
The British researchers conclude that the climate is changing so quickly, without geo-engineering we will be impossible to stop it. The use of artificial trees is number one on their list of recommendations.
The technology behind the artificial trees, which should filter CO2 from the air, is currently being developed. The present-day prototypes are able to retrieve a thousand times more CO2 from the air than a regular tree.
The ‘trees’ are about the size of a sea container (!) – should be an interesting addition to the landscape, here is a picture of an actual prototype. Researchers believe they will be able to mass-produce them soon and expect they will be part of our landscape within ten to twenty years.
Via BBC, NY Times. Related: Windmill trees, Cellphone Treemasts, Fight climate change, hack the planet, Let the Dutch bury the carbon, Humans to blame for global warming, Doggerland – Mapping a lost world, If the implications of global warming were fair, Global Warming Ready Campaign.
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The anatomy of fun
This guy put his work as an x-ray technician and his gaming hobby together and put his (old) gaming devices under the scanner. I was surprised how some of them actually look like nature, maybe there is a clue in that? (Probably not).
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Inbox Victory
Have you ever been in the situation where you spend days trying answer all of your email only to accomplish your goal and have no one to share in your victory? All you want is a high five, a pat on the back, and job well done soldier, and yet most likely all you are left with is an empty room and a cold cup of coffee. Inbox Victory is an initiative that you deserve that high five!” And here is how you get it:
1) Get your email inbox down to zero. People have various methods for dealing with their email inbox is going to mean different things to different people. A basic rule of thumb, however, is getting it to a point where no further action can be taken.
2) Open up your webcam software and take a screenshot of yourself profiling in front of your defeated foe
3) Shoot an email with your screenshot (fi5e at ni9e dot com) -
Recycling robot takes the streets of Italy
Let the robots do the dirty work! This real-life Wall-E Recycling robot, part of the $3.9 million DustBot research program that is trying to improve urban hygiene, collects trash and measures atmospheric pollutants. He – or is it a she? – can also identify residents, and sort their trash into organic, recyclable, or waste.
The robot is nimble enough to navigate where conventional gas-guzzling garbage trucks cannot. The one on the picture is still in the prototype phase and robots aren’t legally allowed to roam around without human guidance in Peccioli, Italy. But who knows — some day soon you may see a friendly green robot zipping garbage down your street.
Via The Guardian. See also: Ladybug cleans the toilet, Killer Robots, the order Electrus.
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The next hacking frontier: your Brain?
In the past year, researchers have developed technology that makes it possible to use thoughts to operate a computer, maneuver a wheelchair or even use Twitter — all without lifting a finger. But as neural devices become more complicated — and go wireless — some scientists say the risks of “brain hacking” should be taken seriously.
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iReligion
Graphic designer Roel Boonen takes the Apple cult to the extreme with this iReligion triptych. His piece is illustrative on how central corporations and digital technology have become in our everyday lives. Will technological corporations replace religion and the holy church in the long run? Read more »
