Category: Things I Read

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/27/disrupted-sleep-patterns-can-lead-to-deviant-behaviour-hay-festival-hears

http://theprofessionalspoint.blogspot.com/2019/05/tensorflow-tensors-computational-graphs.html?m=1

“Solid is an exciting new project led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.”

“What does Solid offer? Solid (derived from “social linked data”) is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols.”

 The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet – OneZero … :

“Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent. Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well. This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.”

(…)

“The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness — ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). This is the atmosphere of the mainstream web today: a relentless competition for power. As this competition has grown in size and ferocity, an increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests to avoid the fray.“

 BBC – Future – The ‘3.5% rule’: How a small minority can change the world … :

“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.“

 Capitalism used to promise a better future. Can it still do that? | Richard Reeves | Opinion | The Guardian … :

“Marx accused religion of being the opium of the masses, distracting them from capitalist exploitation. But capitalism has steadily undermined religion by reliably promising that the future will in fact be materially better, and not because of divine intervention but because of the manmade market. The greatest promise of capitalism is that each generation will rise, on the shoulders of the one before, as a result of the natural workings of a market economy. It should be no surprise that the greatest challenges to capitalism come when that promise begins to be questioned. If capitalism loses its lease on the future, it is in trouble.“

Another Reality update: What if we covered the climate crisis like we did the start of the second world war? | Bill Moyers | Opinion | The Guardian … :

“I have been asked to bring this gathering to a close by summing up how we can do better at covering the possible “collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world,” to quote the noted environmentalist David Attenborough, speaking at the recent United Nations climate summit in Poland.”

(…)

“But events educate, experience instructs, and so much destructive behavior has been caused by climate disruption that more Americans today than ever seem hungry to know what’s causing it, what’s coming and what can be done about it. We journalists have perhaps our last chance to help people grasp the magnitude of the threat. My friend and journalist-turned-citizen-activist Bill McKibben told me last week that because of the looming possibility of extinction, and in response to it from the emerging leadership among young people, we have reached a ‘climate moment’ with real momentum, and our challenge as we go forward is to dramatically change the zeitgeist—“to lock in and consolidate public opinion that’s finally beginning to come into focus.””

(…)

“I’ll begin with how I first heard of global warming—before many of you in this room were born. It was 54 years ago, early in 1965, at the White House. Before I became President Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary (“over my dead body,” I might add,) I was his special assistant coordinating domestic policy. One day, two members of the president’s science-advisory committee came by the office. One of them was the famous oceanographer, Roger Revelle. Famous because only a few years earlier he had shaken up the prevailing consensus that the oceans were massive enough to soak up any amount of excess of carbon released on earth. Not so, Revelle discovered; the peculiar chemistry of sea water actually prevents this from happening. Now, he said, humans have begun a “vast geophysical experiment.” We were about to burn, within a few generations, the fossil fuels that had slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. Burning so much oil, gas, and coal would release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it would trap heat that otherwise would escape into space. Earth’s temperature could rise, causing polar ice to melt and sea levels to rise, flooding the earth’s coastal regions.“

Reality update: Ein Freund der Erde – Wikipedia … :

“Heinrich Detering schreibt 2001 in seiner Rezension des Romans in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung: „Während hier die letzten amerikanischen Helden durch eine Welt waten, in der es nach ‚Endzeitschimmel‘ riecht, denken sie wehmütig zurück an die Zeiten, in denen noch über Wörter wie Global Warming oder El Niño debattiert wurde. […] Im Wechsel zwischen vorher und nachher, zwischen Innen- und Außenansicht des Helden entsteht dabei ein schauerlich-tragikomisches Kippbild. Und unversehens gerät Tys wüste Geschichte zur Parabel über Avantgarde und Demokratie, Moral und Macht. Dabei besteht an krassem Realismus sowenig Mangel wie an grotesken Szenerien.“[2]“

The Fox story anybody? 

Strache Caught on Camera in Ibiza – Secret Recordings – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The group mingling on the terrace on the evening of July 24, 2017, drinking champagne, eating tuna tartare and sushi, was discussing delicate topics: How could they make sure that a Russian investor was awarded contracts from Austrian businesses and the government? They were thinking big. Nothing seemed impossible. They discussed casino licenses, the sale of an old luxury hotel, contracts for highway construction — all of it for the Russian investor. They even discussed a takeover of the Kronen Zeitung, one of Austria’s most widely circulated newspapers.

Blow up: how half a tonne of cocaine transformed the life of an island | Society | The Guardian … :

“In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, it is still feeling the effects.“