If X can release a new album after 35 years, I guess I can do a new blog post about it. It’s pretty good. I especially liked Angel On The Road. Listen to and get it at Bandcamp (click on the player below).
Category Archives: Uncategorized
New Model Protest • Buttondown
Decentralized, leaderless revolution.
https://buttondown.email/ayjay/archive/new-model-protest/
What’s uncanny about this, to me, is how much it echoes a model of distributed action imagined a few years ago by Adam Roberts in a novel called New Model Army — a novel I wrote about here. Roberts imagines a near-future world in which New Model Armies (NMAs) — collectivized and non-hierarchical organizations of mercenaries — have become major players on the European political scene. The novel’s protagonist associates himself with one of those NMAs, called Pantagral.
Squid skin inspires creation of next-generation space blanket: Engineers develop material with heat regulation properties — ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190429095053.htm
Drawing design inspiration from the skin of stealthy sea creatures, engineers at the University of California, Irvine have developed a next-generation, adaptive space blanket that gives users the ability to control their temperature. The innovation is detailed in a study published today in Nature Communications.
High-fructose corn syrup boosts intestinal tumor growth in mice — ScienceDaily
Summary:
Consuming a daily modest amount of high-fructose corn syrup — the equivalent of people drinking about 12 ounces of a sugar-sweetened beverage daily — accelerates the growth of intestinal tumors in mouse models of the disease, independently of obesity, according to new research.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190321141924.htm
Happy October
Did you know Instagram has a #spidersofinstagram hashtag. They do se it here: spidersofinstagram
10 Libertarian Thoughts on the Civil War | RealClearHistory
10 Libertarian Thoughts on the Civil War
An interesting article on mid 19th century world history and the civil war. The section on Brazil makes me wonder if that may be why Nazis moved there after WWII.
By Brandon Christensen
August 23, 2018
…
2. Brazil and Dom Pedro II. Brazil shares many similarities with the United States, including a long history of slavery. In fact, Brazil was last country to abolish the slave trade (1853) and abolish slavery (1888), and while the country remained neutral during the Civil War, its impact could be felt. Most notably, after the confederacy surrendered to the north, 20,000 slave owners fled the United States and moved to Brazil, where they established new plantations and became known as “Confederados.” Brazil was a monarchy at the time, and its emperor, Dom Pedro II, had sent recruiters to the American south in order to bring skilled tradesmen and farmers to his country. While the emperor himself worked to abolish slavery in his country, he could not pass up the opportunity to invite tens of thousands of skilled migrants into his realm to help spur economic, political, and cultural development. The last monarch of Brazil, Pedro II’s Brazil fought two wars during the American Civil War, one against Paraguay and one in Uruguay as an intervening neighbor. The Paraguayan War, which lasted from 1864-70, was the deadliest interstate war in Latin American history and was fought between Paraguay and an alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Brazil’s role in the Uruguayan War (1864-65) was to bolster the support of the governing party (“Blanco party”) and help it fight a rebellious party (“Colorado party”) that was supported financially and ideologically (but not militarily) by Argentina, Brazil’s ally in the Paraguayan War. Brazil emerged from these series of wars as a regional hegemon and Pedro II is admired domestically for his statesmanship involving these wars….
Joel Simon — Evolving Floor Plans
Evolving Floor Plans is an experimental research project exploring speculative, optimized floor plan layouts. The rooms and expected flow of people are given to a genetic algorithm which attempts to optimize the layout to minimize walking time, the use of hallways, etc. The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the perspective of optimization and without regard for convention, constructability, etc. The research goal is to see how a combination of explicit, implicit and emergent methods allow floor plans of high complexity to evolve. The floorplan is ‘grown’ from its genetic encoding using indirect methods such as graph contraction and emergent ones such as growing hallways using an ant-colony inspired algorithm….
The results were biological in appearance, intriguing in character and wildly irrational in practice.
Money and Work Unchained by Charles Hugh Smith
Great book. I was a little slow getting into it, but it panned out well. You can read from the blurb below what it’s about, so if you’re into economics, interested in the why nots of Universal Basic Income, want to know how we can change our relationship to money and work, this is a good book for that.
[showbookcover isbn=”B077S8PJ5Y” action=”amazon”]
How to Do What You Love
Paul Graham writes about doing what you love.
Some quotes from it, and how hard it actually can be, even if you don’t have to work at something else. (Which is a flaw with Universal Basic Income, which I’ll get into sometime.)
Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don’t take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.
….
Most people would say, I’d take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I’ll figure out what to do. But it’s harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.
Dex Day
So today is Saturday, and I had my Dexamethazone yesterday. I was awake at 3AM, up at 4, and have been wanting to bite people’s heads off all day. Hate it. Worst day in a while, I think the Revlimid might tone it down, but I’m off that for a week.