Monday, July 1, 2024

Terroir on the High Seas


Fyi - Terroir for the ocean is called merrior, and it's for oysters not for wine. 

Homeowners insurance could go up more than 55% due to severe weather, inflation, Allstate warns
Feb 2024, nj.com

Allstate is warning customers their homeowners insurance premiums could be hiked more than 55% after the insurer asked the state to approve a series of rate hikes. (They ask for 36.9% but get approved for about 7.0%.)

“Our payments to help New Jersey residents recover from accidents and disasters have increased significantly in recent years and we need to adjust rates to reflect the cost of providing the protection our customers depend on,” Allstate told NJ Advance Media on Thursday.

In the letter to consumers, it said the increase is needed because of inflation and because of costs “due to our catastrophic exposure (severe weather) in the state.”



Newsflash - Pollution was helping us the whole time?
Research shows how air pollution has offset expected increases in rainfall
Feb 2024, phys.org

The expected increase in rain has been largely offset by the drying effect of aerosols.

"Prior to our study, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had concluded that the evidence was mixed and inconclusive for changes in U.S. precipitation due to global warming," said Bill Collins, associate laboratory director for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab and co-lead author on the study. "We have now provided conclusive evidence for higher rainfall and also helped explain why past studies assessed by the IPCC reached conflicting conclusions."

Over the long term, aerosols cool the planet, which causes a drying effect. But they also have a faster, more local response. That fast impact depends on the season, with aerosols generally reducing rainfall in the winter and spring, and amplifying it in summer and fall over much of the United States.

via Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45504-8.


Scientists create new idea on how to hack a warming planet: drying the upper atmosphere
Feb 2023, phys.org

They're calling it the Last-Ditch Toolbox:

Inject ice high up in the air so water vapor in the upper atmosphere would get a bit drier and that could counteract a small amount of the human-caused warmth.

High-tech planes could inject ice particles about 11 miles high, just below the stratosphere, where the air slowly rises. Then the ice and cold air rise to where it's coldest and gets the water vapor to turn to ice and fall, dehydrating the stratosphere. Injecting 2 tons a week could conceivably take out about 5% of the overall warming created by carbon.

So far there is no workable injection technique, he said.

Schwarz is not quite sure about what side effects could occur, and that's the problem, other scientists said.

via National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA: Joshua P. Schwarz et al, Considering intentional stratospheric dehydration for climate benefits, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk0593


Power company admits role in igniting Texas wildfire
BBC News

Keep in mind that the power companies are burning up our planet while making OUR electricity, so it's doubly crazy how it's all happening.

AI Art - Planetary Collapse Map 2 - 2024

Soil may release more carbon than expected, affecting climate change models
Mar 2024, phys.org

Soil stores 80% of carbon on Earth, and with increasing cycles and severity of droughts in several regions, that crucial reservoir is cracking and breaking down, releasing even more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In fact, it may be creating an amplified feedback loop that could accelerate climate change well beyond current predictions.

via Tufts University: Farshid Vahedifard et al, Amplifying feedback loop between drought, soil desiccation cracking, and greenhouse gas emissions, Environmental Research Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ad2c23


Here's a reminder that airplane and satellite surveillance are changing - rapidly - the data on carbon emissions:
US energy industry methane emissions are triple what government thinks, study finds
Mar 2024, phys.org

Using one million anonymized measurements from airplanes that flew over 52% of American oil wells and 29% of gas production and delivery system sites over a decade, and found that 3% of the U.S. gas produced goes wasted into the air, compared to the Environmental Protection Agency figures of 1%.

This is likely because more than half of these methane emissions are coming from a tiny number of oil and gas sites, 1% or less,

The overflight data shows the biggest leaks are in the Permian basin of Texas and New Mexico. Contrast that with tiny leak rates found in drilling in the Denver region and the Pennsylvania area. Denver leaks are so low because of local strictly enforced regulations and Pennsylvania is more gas-oriented, Sherwin said.

via the International Energy Agency, U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and  Stanford University: Evan D. Sherwin et al, US oil and gas system emissions from nearly one million aerial site measurements, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07117-5


Atmospheric observations in China show rise in emissions of a potent greenhouse gas
Mar 2024, phys.org

The GWP of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is 24,300 times that of CO2, and it's used primarily in high-voltage electrical switchgear in electric power grids. Atmospheric concentrations of SF6 have risen sharply along with global electric power demand.

via MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Fudan University, Peking University, University of Bristol, and Meteorological Observation Center of China Meteorological Administration: Minde An et al, Sustained growth of sulfur hexafluoride emissions in China inferred from atmospheric observations, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46084-3


Here is another example about how leaving sulfur pollution in the air may have been a better idea than taking it out:
Mysteriously rapid rise in Legionnaires’ disease incidence correlates with declining atmospheric sulfur dioxide.
Mar 2024, PNAS Nexus

Legionnaires’ disease is a severe form of pneumonia caused by inhalation of aerosols containing Legionella. These bacteria can grow, spread, and aerosolize through building water systems.

A recent dramatic increase in Legionnaires’ disease incidence has been observed globally, with a 9-fold increase in the United States from 2000 to 2018, and with disproportionately higher burden for socioeconomically vulnerable subgroups. 

Our results suggest that declining sulfur dioxide air pollution, which has many well-established health benefits, results in reduced acidity of aerosols emitted from cooling towers, which may prolong the survival duration of Legionella in contaminated droplets.

Corrected Heat Index - David Romps and Yi-Chuan Lu at UC Berkeley - Mar 2024

The heat index—how hot it feels—is rising faster than temperature: Study
Mar 2024, phys.org

The reason that it feels much hotter than you'd expect from the increase in ambient temperature alone is that global warming is affecting the interplay between humidity and temperature, he said. In the past, relative humidity typically dropped when the temperature increased, allowing the body to sweat more and thus feel more comfortable. However, with climate change, the relative humidity remains about constant as the temperature increases, which reduces the effectiveness of sweating to cool the body.
So it really does feel hotter - it IS hotter, to the human body - than it used to, even at the same temperature.

Note for the image above - The corrected heat index created by UC Berkeley researchers fixes problems encountered at humidities and temperatures that the originator of the index thought would be rarely reached and also where the model broke down. (Graphic by David Romps and Yi-Chuan Lu, UC Berkeley)

via University of California Berkeley: David M Romps, Heat index extremes increasing several times faster than the air temperature, Environmental Research Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ad3144


Scientists don't exaggerate, so when you hear them use the words "crazy" and "mind-boggling", you know you are in for some sh*t:
Simply 'mind-boggling’: world record temperature jump in Antarctic raises fears of catastrophe
Apr 2024, The Guardian

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that sea levels are likely to rise between 0.3m to 1.1m by the end of the century. Many experts now fear this is a dangerous underestimate. In the past, climate change deniers accused scientists of exaggerating the threat of global warming. However, the evidence that is now emerging from Antarctica and other parts of the world makes it very clear that scientists did not exaggerate. Indeed, they very probably underrated by a considerable degree the threat that now faces humanity.

Cloud engineering could be more effective 'painkiller' for global warming than previously thought
Apr 2024, phys.org

Cloud Engineer sounds like a perfectly respectable career in the 2050's (not like the internet AI cloud, but like regular actual clouds)

Marine cloud brightening (MCB), also known as marine cloud engineering, works by spraying tiny particles, or aerosols, into the atmosphere where they mix with clouds and with the primary aim of increasing the amount of sunlight that clouds can reflect.

Researchers created a "natural experiment" using aerosol injection from the eruption of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. With machine learning and historic satellite and meteorological data, the team created a predictor to show that how the cloud would behave during periods when the volcano was inactive. This predictor enabled them to identify clearly the impacts on the clouds that had been directly caused by the volcanic aerosols.

And fyi: In the U.S., a team from the University of Washington recently carried out its first outdoor aerosol experiment from a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Alameda, California.

via University of Birmingham: Nature Geoscience (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01427-z 


Study presents evidence that recent reductions in aerosol emissions create an additional warming effect
Apr 2024, phys.org

Sulfate particles have masked part of global warming by reflecting sunlight. In the last couple of decades, however, this cooling effect has reversed and now contributes to a warming due to extensive measures to improve air quality in many regions worldwide.

When removing emissions of reflecting particles, the particles and their cooling effect disappear in the order of days.

"Continued reductions of particle emissions may lead to an accelerated surface temperature warming already in this decade."

via CICERO Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research: Øivind Hodnebrog et al, Recent reductions in aerosol emissions have increased Earth's energy imbalance, Communications Earth & Environment (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-024-01324-8

Wildwood NJ 1991- 2023

Jersey Shore town’s disappearing beach is getting smaller
Apr 2024, nj.com

“The city of North Wildwood has been experiencing significant erosion of its berm and dune, especially along the northern sections of the municipality’s oceanfront, since the 1990s,” Army Corps officials wrote in a February update on the project.

According to experts, stronger wave action and more frequent storms will only be fueled further by human-caused global warming — bringing on more erosion.

Critics also say the beach protection strategy of replenishment, also done to bolster shores with sand for beachgoers each summer, has only encouraged more people to build homes and settle on the coast.

The climate porn is so hard to ignore, by the sheer irony of it all.
They used LCA, or life cycle assessment, which is way too complicated for public discourse, and part of the reason why "plastic bans" are enacted in the first place:
Replacing plastics with alternatives is worse for greenhouse gas emissions in most cases, study finds
Apr 2024, phys.org

Findings from the study have revealed that in 15 out of the 16 applications examined, plastic products actually result in lower GHG emissions compared to their alternatives. The reduction in emissions spans from 10 percent to as high as 90 percent across the product life cycle.

Lower energy intensity during production, the weight efficiency of plastics, and superiority in upstream processes including production and transport all highlight the efficiency of plastic materials in mitigating emissions. Also, plastic packaging plays a crucial role in preserving the quality of food across a wide range of categories, helping prevent food spoilage and the GHG emissions it causes.

"Demand reduction, efficiency optimization, lifetime extension, and reuse/recycling are win-win strategies to reduce emissions effectively. Solely focusing on switching to alternative materials is not."

via University of Sheffield Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Cambridge and KTH Royal Institute of Technology: Fanran Meng et al, Replacing Plastics with Alternatives Is Worse for Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Most Cases, Environmental Science & Technology (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.3c05191


Good to remember:
US seeing surge of climate-related power outages, report says
Apr 2024, The Guardian

"The conditions that our infrastructure was built to handle are much different than what they were.”


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Wednesday, June 26, 2024

For Food's Sake


In a perfect world, this would destroy the artificial food industry

Want to know how processed your food is? There's an algorithm for that
Jun 2023, phys.org

The fingerprint of food processing:

"In the paper what we do is really say that we believe that nutritional information, so the chemicals that are measured as nutrients in the nutritional facts, somehow encode the fingerprint of food processing," says Giulia Menichetti, senior research scientist at Northeastern's Network Science Institute and lead author of the research. "Because when we process a food, when we modify some staple ingredients, we change its chemistry in many different ways."

That "fingerprinting" is the way that researchers can glean insight into just how many chemical alterations have been made to a given food using the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies.

The machine learning classifier called FoodProX is from the Foodome project. 

The researchers note how the NOVA system, which splits foods into four classifications, from "unprocessed or minimally processed" to ultra-processed, is fundamentally limiting because it doesn't account for the different gradations of processing within each separate category.
More than 73% of the U.S. food system is ultra-processed. And tobacco companies own the food companies, in case you didn't know, like I didn't know. Companies never die, they only change their names, and the people who run them. Companies are transcendental intelligent entities, a sentient superorganism. In this case, it is a superorganism that is literally devouring the human population, eating the years off of our collective life expectancies in order to survive. Or are we all just cells that must be sloughed, part of a normal-functioning healthy system?

via Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University: Giulia Menichetti et al, Machine learning prediction of the degree of food processing, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37457-1

(I believe the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University was the original home of the Barabasi Lab [link])


To Repeat: The food industry is really the tobacco industry in disguise, and that most Americans eat one extra meal a day in junk food.
--US tobacco companies selectively disseminated hyper-palatable foods into the US food system: Empirical evidence and current implications. TL Fazzino, D Jun, L Chollet-Hinton, K Bjorlie. Addiction v119i1pp62-71 Jan 2024, 08 September 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/add.16332
--Snacks contribute considerably to total dietary intakes among adults stratified by glycemia in the United States. K Heitman, CA Taylor, et al. PLoS Global Public Health. October 26, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0000802

Bonus:
AI Art - Cigarette Food Robot Confusion - Three Ladies Smoking in the Kitchen - 2023

Image credit: Note the thumbnail image above, and how AI Art doesn't understand how we use our mouths, and anytime you want a picture of someone eating, or smoking a cigarette for that matter, it looks like this. Meanwhile, consider the these image generator models are trained on The Internet, which we all know is 99% porn. Now remove the porn images from the trained model, i.e., "unlearn" the porn, and this is what you get - a robot that doesn't understand what a mouth is. 


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Algorithmic Crack


'Temu is as addictive as sugar': How the ecommerce retailer drives a shopping frenzy
Apr 2024, BBC News

China was the first (and to date the only) to use the term "electronic drugs"
--Shares slide after China brands online games 'electronic drugs'. Aug 2021, BBC News https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58066659 

This article came at a significant moment, one where I notice an inordinate amount of friends self-diagnosing as afflicted with ADHD (formerly known as ADD, after we realized that half the problem was the diet, but before we were allowed to call out the food industry for it, hence we still refuse to accept the affliction for what it is). 

We eat an entire extra meal's worth of calories in snacks every day. Americans that is, and half of us. We are, again likely the majority, all suffering from sleep deprivation due mostly to social jetlag and a bit of just-in-time algorithmic gig-worker flex-scheduling. 

But now, let's add this to the onslaught - we're all addicted to algorithms, groveling at the feet of the eternal, anti-dimensional Al-Khwarizmi. Pick your program - on a scale from simple social media to shopping to straight-gambling. Dark patterns, endless scrolls, rabbit holes, notifications specifically designed to bypass your fatigue thresholds, your fragile cerebral manifold. 

These programs, software, applications - basically anything you click or touch - they are engineered to game your brain. We learned the 4 rules of game theory a very long time ago, and have been plugging them into every user interface possible to extract every grain of attention from your fully-assembled, indivisible self that we possibly can. 

And then we come to the conclusion that we're the problem, because we have ADHD. The solution? More fucking drugs. If you don't think drug companies pay social media influencers to convince you that you have a mental disease that requires medication ,you're really not paying attention. (Granted, the influencers don't know what they're doing, or who they're really doing it for.) 

I can imagine it being hard for people to believe - I'm not injecting this into my veins. It's just a phone. 

No, it's not just a phone. It's neuromimetic virus that's been engineered to override your endocrine system. It hijacks your dopamine system to force you into paying attention, very close attention, to whatever it wants. 

You might have attention-deficit disorder all right. But after you're done watching that superhot 24 year old explain the epigenetic precursors for prefrontal cortex regulation dysfunction, or whatever she's saying that sounds really scientific and well-researched and must totally be highly credible information, stop and think about how endless scroll works. Or how sex sells. Or how humans can't not turn their head when they smell something rotten. We have reflexes, they're hardwired into us. We have biological limits, and we understand those limits really really well, and we know how to overcome and manipulate them. Do you know what an abusive relationship looks like? This is what it looks like. Maybe it will be easier to see it this way once the algorithms become people. We're almost there:


Post Script, on features of post-consumerism:
"You're either going to get something really good and an absolute bargain. Or you get something that's a bit naff, but won't actually return it, because it's less than £10 so it's not worth your time". [link]


And finally, just for good measure:
"Crack cocaine of algorithms"
--Imran Ahmed, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, TikTok sets 60-minute daily screen time limit for under-18s, Feb 2023, BBC News https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64813981

AI Art - Scruffy British Man Sitting on a Dirty Couch - 2024

See further: 
On the Imagery of Addictions as Seen through the Eyes of the Internet, 2022

Electronic Drugs and Addiction by Design, 2022


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Monday, June 3, 2024

Taxi Driver and the Advent of Graffiti in New York City as Seen in Movies from 1971-1979

This is a typical scene from the movie Taxi Driver 1976, looking through the rainstreaked windshield on the city streets at night.

For no particular reason I'm watching The French Connection, 1971. Twenty minutes into the movie I get this weird feeling - it's filmed entirely in New York City, and parts of it look pretty close to what you would see if you went there today, 2024. But something was missing. 

There's no graffiti in the entire movie. It's filmed all throughout New York, on the streets downtown, on the elevated subways way uptown. Inside the subways, on the platforms. Brick walls, under bridges, it's all there. And not one inch has a piece of graffiti on it. 

There's one scene where far in the distance there might be like a hobo sign next to a loading dock behind a building. And maybe a scrawled Tony somewhere, maybe permanent marker. 

I thought that like most things, graffiti didn't just come from nowhere and all at once. There's always something that comes before. But no, not for graffiti. Like sure the aerosol spraycan came out in the 50's, but it took something to make it catch on. And that something must have happened in New York City sometime before 1979, when we see the movie The Warriors and a city consumed by crime, and graffiti. 

***

The Warriors, just like French Connection, relies on the subway almost as another character - here they're using it to evade both gangs and cops, like some omnipotent and very reliable sidekick. This is why I like using these two movies as the limits of this completely unscientific study - in the history of graffiti, the subway is important enough to be like a character in itself.

On the origin of graffiti in New York City, the easy way out of this question is to point to the blackout, summer of 1977. This event is often credited as the birth of Hip Hop, because it's when all the now-famous DJs got their equipment (for free). All these DJs now have sound systems and turntables, and they can have big parties, and the scene explodes. Anyway, that's the easy answer. 

I thought it would be better to look at it through the lens of movies filmed in New York City from 1971 to 1979, so here we go:

The French Connection, 1971
  • It's filmed in New York City, but there's no graffiti. None.
The climax of the film takes place inside a series of subway cars, and we see various subway stations, brick walls, payphones. You get a good sampling of the city, and can be sure, no graffiti. This is the beginning.

Super Fly, 1972
  • Trace amounts (first 20 min, last 10 min).
This is filmed mostly in Harlem. 

Mean Streets, 1973
  • No graffiti (a flower, in spray paint, 20 min).
Note this is filmed in an Italian neighborhood circa 1970, not sure where, but granted it's not the best place to go looking for graffiti at this time. 


Death Wish, 1974
  • Here we go. First scene in NYC, graffiti on the elevated subway.
  • The hoodlum at the supermarket buys spraypaint and then vandalizes the inside of the guy's house with it (and his name is Spraycan in the credits)
  • Bronson's first murder, in Riverside Park, graffiti everywhere (45 min)
  • Scenes inside the subway are still clean (53 min)
This is the first real appearance of graffiti in a movie in New York City, and it comes hard. The very premise of this movie is about the rampant crime that has grown in recent years and crept into every area of the city, and one man was so victimized that he became a vigilante and started straight shooting people. 

So this movie is about crime, about bad people doing bad things. And the aerosol spraycan makes an immediate appearance. Within the first twenty minutes, there's a scene where a bunch of hoodlums follow this guy into his apartment building, and one of them starts spray paining all over the inside of the building, and then all inside his apartment, a real sign of lawlessness. The guy's name in the credits is Spraycan.

But actual examples of graffiti are limited to Riverside Park, which is smacked. The cover of the movie poster shows Charles Bronson aiming his gun at someone, but right behind him is a wall tagged with black spray paint, the letters stylized in a way that says authentic, in-the-wild graffiti. Likely Riverside Park was already a party spot before the influx of DJ equipment following the '77 blackout.

Prisoner of 2nd Ave, 1975
  • Black and white block letters on a wall, "BIKE" (3 min)

Three Days of the Condor, 1975
  • Busted-ass proto-graffiti (22 min)

Marathon Man, 1976
  • Central Park (9 min and 44 min)
  • Scribble scrabble (1:18 min)

Next Stop Greenwich Village, 1976
  • Nothing.
Filmed in the then-Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush, or Brownsville, somewhere in between, and also Greenwich Village in Manhattan; you're not seeing any graffiti, not even on the subway (10 min)

Taxi Driver, 1976
Here, we are at an impasse. It was released in 1976 but filmed in the summer of 75 during a heat wave and a citywide garbage collectors strike. The way it was filmed, and the places it filmed, were supposed to show the dying gasp of a city on the verge of bankruptcy, which it was.

You might think a movie like this would have lots of graffiti, but no. In fact, there's no graffiti in the entire movie. Granted, it's really hard to see anything because so many scenes are him driving, so he's going too fast to see the walls, and you're looking through the windshield of his car so it's blurry, and it's like always raining so it's even more blurry, and also, he works nights, so it's always dark. Sorry to say, even if there were graffiti in the movie, it would be pretty hard to see. 

That being said, there still seems to be no graffiti anywhere, not at the 57th Street cab station, not even in the "bad" neighborhoods in Harlem with the hookers and the hoodlums, nowhere. There's some basic magic marker written in the hallway of the whorehouse (1:24 min). 

But alas, go search images for the film and you'll find all of them are shots of Robert De Niro in front a wall that's absolutely shattered, yet the movie itself has no graffiti in it. There's two different images that seem to reappear, and I've copied them below. 

So here's a movie, 1975-1976, where the movie itself shows no graffiti, but the marketing was certain to make the point very clear - graffiti is a thing, it's bad, and it's here.

Here is an example of one of the photographs for Taxi Driver showing graffiti in the background. 

Here is another example of one of the photographs for Taxi Driver showing graffiti in the background. 

Saturday Night Fever, 1977
  • Filmed almost entirely in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, and began in March of 77 and lasted 3 months (Vanity Fair article), so it was still before the "blackout"
  • The subway is trashed (1 min)
  • Brick wall (4 min)
  • Under the bridge, proto-graffiti (27 min)
  • Throwups at the "Barracuda" joint (48 min)
  • Brick wall, mix of proto- and early graffiti (1:17 min)
  • Barracuda's again (1:28 min)
  • Subways are rocked, inside and out, and even the stations too (1:50 min)
It's impossible to ignore now. Something tells me things were already heating up prior to filming in March 1977, and only months before the "blackout". Taxi Driver is filmed in the summer of 75 and we don't see any graffiti. So the entire year of 76 between these two movies seems like a good place to put the thumbtack on the map. Unfortunately, there's not enough good material from this exact time period. 

Superman, 1978
  • Doesn't count.
It's overproduced, too controlled, too sanitized; like if there was graffiti they would have paid to have it removed from the scene. And it's the only movie filmed in NYC from 1978.

The Warriors, 1979
  • The title has drips and the whole credits font is written as if it were from a spraycan (1 min)
  • Inside the subway and out, rocked (2 min)
  • Supposed to be the Bronx but it's actually Riverside Park, and, same as Death Wish, it's rocked (7min)
  • There's a scene in a cemetery, and either the whole thing is a stage or they put a fake tombstone in there, and it's spraypainted with a "W" on it for Warriors; all the other graffiti in there is bootie, I think it's fake (19 min)
  • So far every single scene in the movie has graffiti, some proto- some regular (20 min)
  • Sprays the guy in the face with a can of paint, like it's a weapon (1:15 min)
I suspect some scenes had the graf added on purpose, it's just so bad, and yet other scenes have really good stuff around, so it's hard to tell.

This is where I realize that movies have fake graffiti. I take for granted that I can tell the difference, but I think it's so obvious at times that anyone could tell.

Anyway, it's interesting to think about graffiti as a sign of lawlessness, crime, deteriorating social values, you name it. When a person making a movie wants to create a good, believable set for a movie about gritty city life, they either find a wall with graffiti on it, or they make the wall with graffiti on it. This brings me to the last movie, outside the 1970's decade, but added here just for their use of fake graffiti:

Escape from New York, 1981 
  • This one for good measure. 
  • At 1:20 you can see real good what fake graffiti looks like in a movie in 1981. The whole thing is simulacra by the way, since it's supposed to be NYC but it's really filmed in East St. Louis.
In 1971, if you wanted to make a movie set look gritty, you might turn over a garbage can, get some broken bottles on the sidwalk, let loose a couple rats, but you never thought to yourself, man what I really need is to get some tags scribbled on this stop sign. Graffiti simply didn't exist. Something that resembles graffiti has always existed, and everybody knows Pompei had it scribbled on the walls back in 79 AD. But it simply didn't mean the same thing as it does today.

When you to want to make your movie set look a little more hard core, you don't draw Kilroy on the payphone. It also didn't matter if you wrote TAKI 183 on the payphone because it didn't really look like graffiti yet, and it didn't mean then what it meant by 1977.

When it first appeared, at least through the lens of the movies filmed in NYC 1971-1979, it meant "crime"; it meant a city completely out of control. Nothing says "we have completely given up governing our society" like wild, undecipherable scribble on every visible surface. Since then, you absolutely cannot say the same thing without it. 



Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

The Anthropic Engine and the Rematerialization of the Anthroposphere


(This is the 1,000th post to Network Address since its inception in 2010)

Every so often, I find my reservoir of bat cave crazy shit running low, and I run a search for lectures via the Santa Fe Institute. This time, after watching the brain-scrambling presentation by Raissa M. D'Souza from UC Davis via Northwestern, and the resulting unintentional revelation about Dragon King events in chaos theory not being integrated into current climate models, I find this: 

"The Anthropic Engine" by Dr Manfred Laubichler of Arizona State University and Santa Fe Institute in 2024. He talks about how during the pandemic he found himself with much less to do, and decided to come up with a metric to assign to human endeavour, and ends up combining energy and information to tell us that 1975 was a turning point in human history, and he adds a positive prophecy about the coming climate catastrophe, that a socio-global correction is in order. 

My tank is overflowing now, thank you Santa Fe Institute (and Vienna Complexity Hub). But this only introduces the current issue. I go back to find the url for the video. I type the guy's name, the title of the talk, the name of the university, nothing. All different permutations, nothing. If you can't find it, maybe it doesn't exist. It used to be the case that if it was on the internet, you could find it, you just had to tune your search. But then the internet got too big, and the search engines too greedy (THE search engine) and it started to eat itself, and now we can't find anything.




Images: Above is a series of screenshots from three search engines for the term "Anthropic Engine"; none of them - Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google - found the result we were looking for. 

When was the last time you searched for something and got zero results? It's been a long time. And these are the things that excite me more than anything, so you bet I'm paying attention. A few years ago I thought, "Thermodynamic Hallucinations"? Not a single result. So I make the result; I generate a single simple post with that phrase in the title. I now own that phrase, right? Wrong. Weeks later, I type that same phrase, and get nothing. Like I said, the internet (as we knew it) is broken. Note that as of this writing, which was Feb 1 2024, the above phrase was found on bing and duck but not google (and you can see the post here).

So today, after my Anthropic Engine discovery, I'm on a roll, and I pump my perennial cyber-barometer into the engine (search engine not anthropic engine) and to my surprise, after waiting long enough, I now own that phrase also. Most other instances have either died due to link rot, or to google-rot, likely both. And it's a big day here at Network Address, the weblog that started as a dematerialized instantiation of the mass transference device itself, and which is today generating its 1,000th post after 10 years. The rematerialization of the anthroposphere is complete. Start your engines (all of them). 


Images: Above is a series of screenshots from three search engines for the term "Mass Transference Device"

Notes:
1. "Complex Networks with Complex Nodes: Emergent Behaviors and Control". Raissa D'Souza, Professor and Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering, University of California, Davis. Oct 4 2023. https://nico.northwestern.edu/news-events/events/index.php?eid=603965
2. The Anthropic Engine, Dr Manfred Laubichler, Arizona State University and Santa Fe Institute, 2024. 

Thumbnail image credit: AI Art - Artificial Meat_1 - 2024

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Who's the Alien Now


Way back when this weblog first started, and I had just begun to read religiously the scientific research press releases, I came across this paper; but then I lost it, and I've been looking for it ever since:

Researchers use Moore's Law to calculate that life began before Earth existed
Apr 2013, phys.org

By reverse engineering the rate of acceleration of genetic complexification, the zero-point of origin comes out at 9 billion years, five more than Earth’s existence. 

via the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida and the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore:  Life Before Earth, arXiv:1304.3381 [physics.gen-ph] arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381


Since it has been many years since I first came across this article, perhaps some re-recognition is in order.

I now understand that extreme claims require extreme evidence. Sure, I knew the Carl Sagan quote back then too, but only now, after many years of being burned over and over again do I think I understand it. The idea of using Moore's Law to compute the age of all living organisms sounds pretty extreme, and pretty amazing, so let's get critical.  

First of all, Florida (Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, to be specific). I'm sorry for everyone who lives and works there, but simply incuding the word Florida in any (any) piece of information I see automatically lowers the credibility quotient.

Next, I look at a couple other papers by the authors:

Embodied cognitive morphogenesis as a route to intelligent systems. Bradly Alicea, Richard Gordon, Jesse Parent. Interface Focus Royal Society 06 June 2023, V13 I3. DOI:10.1098/rsfs.2022.0067

Along with the word "Florida", there are other identifiers of low-credibility content I like to use. One of them is "morphic resonance" and "morphogeneis", terms refering to the evolutionary biological theories of Rupert Sheldrake, which are generally considered to be...low on the credibility scale. 

Comprehending the Semiosis of Evolution, Alexei Sharov, Timo Maran, Morten Tønnessen. Biosemiotics. 2016 Apr; 9(1): 1–6. doi: 10.1007/s12304-016-9262-7

And, not that I have anything personally against "semiotics" (big fan actually), it's when you combine semiotics with evolutionary biology that your mouth gets a warning label in my brain. Not that you're wrong, just that it's going to take a lot more to convince me. 

So let's not get too excited. The idea itself though, it's pretty nuts.

Background: The size of non-redundant functional genome can be an indicator of biological complexity of living organisms. Several positive feedback mechanisms including gene cooperation and duplication with subsequent specialization may result in the exponential growth of biological complexity in macro-evolution.

Results: I propose a hypothesis that biological complexity increased exponentially during evolution. Regression of the logarithm of functional non-redundant genome size versus time of origin in major groups of organisms showed a 7.8-fold increase per 1 billion years, and hence the increase of complexity can be viewed as a clock of macro-evolution. A strong version of the exponential hypothesis is that the rate of complexity increase in early (pre-prokaryotic) evolution of life was at most the same (or even slower) than observed in the evolution of prokaryotes and eukaryotes.

Conclusion: The increase of functional non-redundant genome size in macro-evolution was consistent with the exponential hypothesis. If the strong exponential hypothesis is true, then the origin of life should be dated 10 billion years ago. Thus, the possibility of panspermia as a source of life on earth should be discussed on equal basis with alternative hypotheses of de-novo life origin. Panspermia may be proven if bacteria similar to terrestrial ones are found on other planets or satellites in the solar system.

Note: Genome increase as a clock for the origin and evolution of life. Alexei A Sharov. Biol Direct. 2006 Jun 12;1:17. doi: 10.1186/1745-6150-1-17.


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

On Consumerism, Loneliness, and the True Value of Social Capital


Study reveals more depression in communities where people rarely left home during the COVID-19 pandemic
Sep 2023, phys.org

We try to avoid health-based research on Network Address but this is an interesting finding about the value of socialization and how it's being exploited by private industry to make America both the richest and the loneliest place on the planet:

In surveys conducted between May 2020 and April 2022 that were completed by 192,271 adults living the all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, the average county-level proportion of individuals not leaving home on a daily basis was associated with a greater level of depressive symptoms.

via Massachusetts General Hospital:  Roy H. Perlis et al, Community Mobility and Depressive Symptoms During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States, JAMA Network Open (2023). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.34945


Post Script:
Either technology or capitalism or just human society in general really wants, above all else, to remove us from each other, because there is no money in sharing, in fact, they are diametrically opposed - public space, public service, public anything, is always more efficient. Social capital and private capital are at odds, and where one is at play, the other is at risk. Lonely people, with nobody else to help them, must pay for help. Also, it's strange that as the planet explodes with human bodies, older folks in wealthy countries have so few people to take care of them (literally putting the food into their mouths and then taking it back out the other end), that they must pay for it with their entire life savings, some losing 30 years worth of investment returns in 3 years, others losing generations of their own family's wealth in as much time. 


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)