The idea that there’s a set of consistent first principles behind the existence and operations of the universe is undermined by evidence of a multiverse – many universes with potentially different properties – and the existence of “dark matter.” In this universe and on this planet, we’ve had just the right conditions for life – is this an accident? What other conditions may exist, what other forms of life? Question’s raised by Alan Lightman in his Harper’s piece, “The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith.” Thinking about the expansion and dissolution of the universe is a great way to feel smaller, less like a dominant life form and more like a gnat buzzing in the dark. Smaller still when thinking how all must be infinite, yet infinity seems impossible to grasp. Our place in all this is uncertain. Do we have within us manifestations of the universal, are we all pieces of some expansive and infinite intelligent hologram? Or are we bits of dust in an infinite chaotic meaningless haboob?
Blog
Adriana Lukas: how to avoid hierarchies
Adriana discusses her thinking about heterarchy, including initial thoughts about five laws of heterarchy.
“Hierarchies seem to be like oxygen: they’re all around us, pervasive, visible only to those who study them. Hierarchies are the most efficient system for management and distribution of scarce resources… given that the physical world is defined by scarcity of all sorts, it goes a long way toward explaining hierarchy as our default organizational structure….There is potential to come up with alternatives to our hierarchical organizational defaults, and I think that would be good news for all those trapped in stifling and disempowering organizations.”
The “Internet of Things” gets real
The Internet of Things, predicted by Bruce Sterling around 2006, is happening. Steve Lohr in the NY Times explores the mainstreaming of the idea: “… the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies.”
Across many industries, products and practices are being transformed by communicating sensors and computing intelligence. The smart industrial gear includes jet engines, bridges and oil rigs that alert their human minders when they need repairs, before equipment failures occur. Computers track sensor data on operating performance of a jet engine, or slight structural changes in an oil rig, looking for telltale patterns that signal coming trouble.
Here’s Bruce at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2006:
Light in slowmo
Extreme slow motion video of a pulse of laser light passing through a Coke bottle.
“We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light at an effective rate of one trillion frames per second. Direct recording of light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that combines millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints.” [Link] Via MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group, in collaboration with the Bawendi Lab in MIT’s Chemistry department.
Voyager changed our understanding of the solar system
The Voyager program’s data transmissions, including images of the most distant planets in the solar system and data about galaxies beyond, offer “an unprecedented view of our own galaxy.” [Link]
The Abolition of War, suggested by Krzysztof Wodiczko
We recently watched all episodes of HBO’s intense, realistic miniseries about the brutal and devastating war in The Pacific; it was a jaw-dropping experience – watching human beings blow each other apart, a real nightmare of violence. I was realizing how transformative that experience would be – you can’t go home again after that kind of experience.
Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has an exhibit in London currently that is dedicated to war veterans who “might have a roof over their head but it doesn’t feel like home anymore. They are traumatized to various degrees and feel like they’ve become strangers to the place where they used to live. They don’t function like they used to. They have been conditioned to be constantly on alert, to react on the spot to any unexpected light, move, noise, etc. It is difficult for them to turn off that aggressive instinct once they are back to civilian life.” This resonates with the thoughts I was having as I watched the miniseries. We should wonder about the role of post-traumatic stress disorder in shaping postwar culture.
Shown above: “His War Veteran Vehicle is a ex-military vehicle complete with missile launcher converted into a mobile video projector with loudspeakers. Words, coming from interviews with homeless veterans were magnified and projected from the vehicle in buildings and monuments in Liverpool two years ago (a year before, a military Humvee had screened the words of American veterans on the facade of a homeless shelter and of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts during the Democratic National Convention.)”
The truth about OWS
Naomi Wolf in The Guardian: we hear that Occupy Wall Street has no clear message, but is it precisely because the dis-organization has a clear message, set of goals, and growing force that we’re seeing efforts to shut the 24/7 demonstrations down?
The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.
Update: Joshua Holland at AlterNet says Naomi Wolf’s piece “takes an enormous leap away from any known facts to suggest that Congress is ordering cities to smash the Occupy Movement in order to preserve their own economic privilege.”
On blogging
ActionCamp San Antonio invited me to give this talk about blogging October 28:
Pete Cochrane on singularity and evolution
Pete Cochrane at TedX Brussels, speaking on the requirements for intelligence, entropy, singularity, the Internet and evolution. “Are we going to be smart enough to recognize new intelligences and new life forms when they spontaneously erupt on the Internet?”
Holy orbit
Aleksandra Mir collage via The Daily Beast. Blake Gopnik says “…when you think about it, a satellite and Jesus really do fit together in interesting ways. The cosmos has always had some place in our religious thought – we think of God as superlunary.”
U.S. journalist Mona Eltahawy detained, beaten, sexually assaulted in Egypt
The whole story is at boingboing.net
This is the quote I wanted to blog: “The whole time I was thinking about article I would write. Just you fuckers wait.”
Detail Moon
NASA’s created a topographic view of the moon. Sez Mark Robinson, Principal Investigator of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) from Arizona State University in Tempe. “We can now determine slopes of all major geologic terrains on the moon at 100 meter scale. Determine how the crust has deformed, better understand impact crater mechanics, investigate the nature of volcanic features, and better plan future robotic and human missions to the moon.”