Undulating Ungulate

the future of war

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.

Stiglitz continues to talk economic sense, in this case how to reduce deficits, and also explains why it will continue to be ignored…

There’s only one problem: it wouldn’t benefit those at the top, or the corporate and other special interests that have come to dominate America’s policymaking. Its compelling logic is precisely why there is little chance that such a reasonable proposal would ever be adopted.

Wifi hacking dangers: “Like it or not, we are now living in a cyberpunk novel,”

The Last Ring Bearer: apocryphal revisionist history of Lord of the Rings.

Somehow missed that they think they have found a gas giant 4 x bigger than Jupiter way out at the edge of the solar system… introducing Tyche

Psyops moving into social media

It’s recently been revealed that the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn’t like. It could then potentially have their “fake” people run smear campaigns against those “real” people. As disturbing as this is, it’s not really new for U.S. intelligence or private intelligence firms to do the dirty work behind closed doors

And hey, why not some total crazy:

DNA from William Burrough’s shit to be turned into bio art

In this project, a DNA sample from William S. Burroughs will be isolated, amplified and shot into the nuclei of some cells.

What is the process? –

1: Take a glob of William S. Burroughs’ preserved shit
2: Isolate the DNA with a kit
3: Make, many, many copies of the DNA we extract
4: Soak the DNA in gold dust
5: Load the DNA dust into a genegun (a modified air pistol)
6: Fire the DNA dust into a mix of fresh sperm, blood and shit
7: Call the genetically modified mix of blood, shit, and sperm a living bioart, a new media paint, a living cut-up literary device and/or a mutant sculpture.

Maybe he would approve.

Filed by billy at 11:34 am under culture,politics,sunday mutants,technology,the moose,the world
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Missed a week, since rewriting ate my brain.

First up, the Iraq War Logs wikileaks leak is staggering, and deserves probably multiple posts. You should be following this.

Reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 ‘civilians’; 23,984 ‘enemy’; 15,196 ‘host nation’ and 3,771 ‘friendly’

(One interesting question is whether this can sink the private contractor model of warfighting, as the leaks are particularly damning of blackwater/xe etc.)

This happens as government and legal attacks on wikileaks step up.

Two on visualising money in the world:

The difference more global equality could make

“Consumer democracy” is rendered meaningless by the fact that a few consumers have most of the votes, because they have most of the money…. The rich don’t just have more money than us as individuals, they have more than us collectively.

A map of GDP Density = GDP per capita * Number of people per square kilometer.

A map of GDP Density = GDP per capita * Number of people per square kilometer.

Two free ebooks:
Focus
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto

Old futurist predictions for 2010, compared with what we got

Oh yeah, and this excellent essay about magic by Alan Moore in two parts

…aaaand holy shit, twitter has capped how far back I can track my mutants list; it has grown and there has been a lot happening, but there are several days missing… hmm, may be time to tweak the lists

Filed by billy at 11:46 pm under consciousness,politics,sunday mutants,the world
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Less linky, more thinky this week.

A new Brainsturbator post:

Albert North Whitehead was fond of saying that the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century was not this or that invention, but the discovery of the technique of invention itself. It is very simple, and was loudly proclaimed by Poe, Baudelaire, and Valery, namely, begin with the solution to the problem, and then find out what steps lead to the solution. In other words, work backwards.

Such is Operations Research, in which metallurgic problems are tackled by psychologists and historians but not metallurgists. For the expert knows too much about a problem in advance. He sees why it is impossible. But teams of intelligent non-experts, not seeing the difficulties in advance, have time and again won through, and at high speed. The new pattern in management is small teams of men of varied competencies, not the pyramid of job hierarchies.”

Vinay Gupta, one of the most interesting and inspiring mutants I’ve come across lately, explains where he is coming from. As a ball park, he is fusing Buckminster Fuller and Ghandi. This is the conclusion from a really excellent inspiring piece.

I meditated until I realized the greatness of these masters, and then I attempted to follow. That’s what is unsaid.

I’m trying to build the tools we need, Free to All, to get us the lives we want, in full knowledge of the consequences of our actions. And the thing that drives me to do that is the thing which is sometimes called enlightenment, the thing that I saw at the top of the mountain, when I talked with god.

Can you create a cultural centre on an island off Abu Dhabi with $27 billion? They are going to try.

The biggest obstacle is still social evolution. Authentic culture is an intangible thing, and it cannot be bought wholesale. Abu Dhabi may want to follow the West’s model of individual creative freedom, but does it really have the stomach to let its people follow their creative visions, and to welcome all work in the name of freedom of expression. Will hopeful artists from around the world converge here in the way they do in NYC or London or Berlin? There are 200 nationalities living side by side, but they are strictly stratified and it is hard to imagine a ‘scene’ evolving out of the grass roots. Right now, Emirati artists are a small elite group; they need roughing up a bit, culturally speaking. But though a culturally forward society in the heart of the Gulf might suit the West, it is too early to get excited. This is still a place bound by rigid social and tribal traditions. The ruling family desire relevance on the global stage, but equally they will not want a rush of radical artists destabilising the social or political status quo.

Have a backlog of stuff to blog at the moment… hmm.

Filed by billy at 10:15 pm under consciousness,sunday mutants,the world
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(wow, next week will be 10/10/10)
(anyone have any idea why my computer only seems to want to give me decent speed interwebs late at night, and dialup equivalent during the day? no one else on this router is having problems.)

* Can We Make a Less Brain Damaging Internet?
Good sort of intro/linky to some of the interesting ideas going around at the moment about what the internet is doing to our attention, focus, and ability to think.

* Studies indicating brand loyalty activates same part of brain as religion. The more religious people are, the less they care about brands. Difficult to think of a clearer illustration of how and why we are culturally warped right now.

Similar to Duke’s report, brand expert Martin Lindstrom conducted a 3 year, 7 million dollar study comparing brain scans of the religious to those with high brand loyalty. Lindstrom discovered that the scans of people loyal to Apple matched the scans of devoted Christians.

If you haven’t already, go and watch century of the self now, as it explains how the shifting of our sense of values and identity was done to us by the application of billions of dollars of research in psychology and advertising over the past hundred years.

* Meanwhile, druids are now tax exempt in the UK.

Druidry is to become the first pagan practice to be given official recognition as a religion.

The Charity Commission has accepted that druids’ worship of spirits arising from the natural world could be seen as a religious activity

Awesome

* Power to the mutants: Guerilla webfare

While many videos posted online reinforce brand messages, others can prove damaging, especially if they’re made by angry customers or loose-cannon employees. One 2008 study estimated that spoofs and anti-marketing pieces accounted for 1 in 10 “advertisements” on YouTube. “Individuals now have more power and influence than at any time in history,” says Sage Lewis, founder of SageRock, a digital marketing agency in Akron, Ohio. “Anytime you allow the consumer to dictate your brand, you have a problem.”
…
Unwanted viral messages carry significant economic hazards. Last year, when Domino’s Pizza faced down a shaky amateur video showing employees tampering with food in disgusting ways, spokesman Tim McIntyre called it “the challenge of the Web world.” He lamented that “any two idiots with a video camera and a dumb idea can damage the reputation of a 50-year-old brand.”

* Some fun wikileaks posters.

* Finally, three tweets from @leashless

“I think we would all be a lot happier to work together on #climate if we didn’t feel like we were being screwed by capitalism

It’s the sense of unfairly shared hardship which makes us so unwilling to radically reduce our footprint to sustainable levels.

It’s the sense of cooperation and collaboration that will get us through this, much as I try to minimize reliance on them for survival.”

Filed by billy at 12:52 am under consciousness,culture,sunday mutants,technology,the world
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Not quite adjusted to daylight saving edition.

Cognitive Slaves – John Robb on social media and job/wealth creation now and in the future. (Or: why you are suckers working for free.)

A two minute whoa, wtf think piece: On networked buildings and architectural neurology.

In other words, why have a building somehow controlled by a human brain, when a human brain could instead be controlled by a building?

Three in a row, from @klintron, one of my favourite mutants.

Angelgate: price fixing and collusion among angel investors in silicon valley.

How Right-Wing Billionaires and Business Propaganda Got Us into the Economic Mess of the Century. Fairly peppy but interesting take on the issues; asks some interesting questions about mass psychology, of America in particular.

Fascinating if somewhat dated interview with Manuel Delanda about markets, anti-markets, self-organization, the internet age and information warfare, the importance of remembering the material basis of life in an information age, and the chauvinism of an organism based point of view.

On the other hand, another problem with original Adam Smith idea was not so much that it was too simple, but that it applied the term „markets, to things that were not self-organized. All the way back to Venice in the fourteenth century, Florence in the fifteenth, Amsterdam in the eighteenth, London in the nineteenth, in other words, throughout European history, beside these spontaneously coordinated markets, there have been large wholesalers, large banks or foreign trade companies or stock markets that are not self-regulated, these are organizations in which instead of prices self-regulating it, they had commands. Everything is planned from the top and more or less executed according to planned, everything is more or less intended. There is very little self-organization going on at all. And indeed, these large wholesalers, these large merchants, large bankers and so on, made the gigantic profits they made and they became capitalist thanks to the fact that they were not obeying obeying demand and supply, they were manipulating demand and supply. For example, instead of the peasant that shows up to the market to sell a certain amount of corn, here you have a wholesaler with a huge warehouse where he stores all the corn he can. If the prices are too low, he can always with drawn certain amounts from the market, put them in the warehouse, and artificially make the prices go up. When the prices go up, he then sells the rest of the corn at these high prices and he makes a lot of money. But, of course, he is manipulating demand and supply. He is not being governed by these anonymous forces. He is not being subject to self-organization; he is organizing everything in a planned cunning way. And so, because economists use the word „market” to describe both, that is one of the main confusions I see in contemporary thought.

We need another word to describe these organizations that are large enough to manipulate markets. A word has been suggested by historian Fernand Braudel and it is a very simple one: „anti-market.” Why? Because they manipulate markets. And so today, in the United States, there is a very strong political movement, mostly by the right wing, and Newt Gingrich is perhaps the most well known politician in this regards, who are trying, as they say, shrink the size of the government, let market forces have more room to operate. But, of course, translated into the terms we’ve just introduced, what they really want to do is let anti-market forces run wild. They don’t really want small producers and small manufacturers and bakers and printers and mom-and-pop shops to have more room to manoeuver and make money. They want national and international corporations to have more room to manoeuver. They want to shrink government so that there are less regulations to keep international and national corporations from doing what they want. But if you go and study one of these corporations, rather than looking like a market, they are like mini-Soviet Unions. I mean, everything is planned in these corporations. The managerial hierarchies are exactly like the hierarchies in the Soviet Union: they planned everything, prices play a very small role and most of the organization is done via command.

“I find Twitter to be the most powerful aggregator of shared novelty that humanity has yet possessed.” – William Gibson http://bit.ly/aQWZMO (Which is more or less what I said in the first of the Sunday Mutants posts.)

Could be more to come but home interweb is so slow right now it makes my eyes bleed.

Filed by billy at 1:02 am under consciousness,politics,sunday mutants,technology,the world
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Interesting mutant recently come across: Vinay Gupta. Basically seems to be doing really onto it risk assessment based analysis of the collapse of things as we know them, with a really interesting practical bent.

This is a PDF of a slideshow for a talk he gave recently, and is the must read of the week. (Lots of slides, not so many words.) About a third of the way in it gets really interesting, and stays that way.

In particular, his concepts of Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps (Slide 82 onward; examples from 134 onwards), and agro-industrial auto-catalysis (slide 113 onward), are really excellent.

Filed by billy at 1:23 pm under oblivion,sunday mutants,the world
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Grow your own algae – food source of the future? “Imagine that – you can have a personal algae tank that provides fresh, ultra-nutritious food on a year-round basis.” Link is to an interview with a guy at NASA who does this.

“It is my firm belief that the last seven decades of the twentieth will be characterized in history as the dark ages of theoretical physics.” Way to start a book, dude. One of the world’s ‘most successful practical scientists’, Carver Mead, seems bent on overturning quantum physics: interesting interview with him. Helps if you are a bit of a physics geek.

Global Consciousness Project. It seems like I should have already known about this.

The Global Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others. We collect data continuously from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites around the world. The archive contains more than 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second.

Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We predict structure in what should be random data, associated with major global events. When millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network data show meaningful departures from expectation. This is a powerful finding based in solid science.

Rethinking learning and study habits. Article about learning styles, teaching styles, and factors that influence learning. This bit struck me, as I have long abhorred the right/left brain distinction as anything other than a clumsy oversimplification.

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas.

Filed by billy at 10:08 pm under consciousness,research,sunday mutants,the moose,utopia
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General meta-question: does a link-dump work for people, or would you prefer the high-content-value pieces to get their own posts and more discussion/commentary from me?

The first couple are stuff I came across in the past day rather than culled from the mutants.

* Brief must read:
Juan Cole on the ways in which the 9-11 terror attacks were in violation of Islamic law, emphasising that they were the work of extremist nutjobs that don’t represent the majority of Muslims, the mainstream of whom widely slagged off the attacks.

* Somehow I missed a Kakapo being named an official spokesperson for the NZ government after shagging a BBC cameraman’s head.

* Must read – Kevin Kelly essay on humans as cyborgs, adaptation, biology, and accelerating evolution. No teaser quotes as this is basically all content. Looking forward to his new book.

* Editor of the New York Times acknowledging that they will someday stop printing the newspaper of record, but have no real idea how to switch to making money online,

* Shoulda posted this days back: brilliant analysis of what the world economy needs, and why, to get us out of recession. The key? More widely shared prosperity. As the gap between the ultra rich and everyone else grows, this needs to be known, understood, and acted on.

* Good summary of the paleo diet and philosophy. Worth knowing about, maybe experimenting with.

* And this is just cool: short video explaining how the opening shots of Blade Runner were done.

Filed by billy at 10:56 pm under consciousness,culture,politics,sunday mutants,the world
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* Unexpected short must read: William Gibson on Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

* Leaked German military report says

Peak oil has happened or will happen some time around this year, and its consequences could threaten the continued survival of democratic governments, says a secret Germany military report that was leaked online.

According to Der Spiegel, the report from a think-tank inside the German military warns that shrinking global oil supplies will threaten the world’s economic foundations and possibly lead to mass-scale upheaval within the next 15 to 30 years

* Exo-psychology revisited: what looks like a totally fascinating article about consciousness migrating off the planet, based off Leary’s notions and updating them.

* China’s lead negotiator on climate change, basically saying rich nations must go first; but definitely interesting perspective:

We cannot blindly accept that protecting the climate is humanity’s common interest – national interests should come first. Individual enthusiasm and willingness to make sacrifice for the sake of the climate is worthy of respect and praise. I myself usually walk or take the bus to work. The individual can choose not to drive, but China cannot choose not to have an automobile industry. The individual can save power, but there are 600 million people in India without electricity – the country has to develop and meet that need. And if that increases emissions, I say, “So what?” The people have a right to a better life.

* Crowdsourcing for environmental change. Interesting project. Got an idea? Tell them.

Filed by billy at 1:03 am under consciousness,politics,sunday mutants,technology,the moose
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Introducing what may well become a regular feature: Sunday Mutants.

Twitter makes most sense to me as a feed of what interesting people are thinking about, rather than a conversation/social thing (which I think only really makes sense for people working office jobs at the same time.) It is really quite amazing that you can sit on these people’s shoulders in this way and see what they are looking at, so to speak. Still, it is too much information, and most of it I don’t have time to engage with.

I have several twitter lists, making it functional. One for locals, one for thinkers, one for feeds. And one for mutants.

The mutants list is reserved for people who are way ahead of the curve in whatever field they are in. High grade information. Premium crack.

So the Sunday Mutants posts will probably be a linkfest from the far reaches, as, once a week or so, I read and curate the mutants tweets, tracking the bleeding edge of transformation underway in the world. (And throw in any extra stuff that otherwise will lag behind blogging.)

This is a couple of week’s worth.

*********

* For starters, this Foreign Policy article is one of the most interesting things I have read in ages: Beyond City Limits. Basically arguing that megacities evolving into relatively independent city-states is where we are heading.

* Increasing trend that the TV and the landline telephone are no longer perceived as necessities of life by the public. (More detail emerges in the demographics.)

* Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain. Pretty sharply pointed argument that transhumanist/downloading consciousness arguments are based on woeful understanding/abstractions of how the brain works.
[EDIT: Kurzweil's response. Cheers, Steve.]

* More on the conscious distortion of our social filters on reality: pro Israel groups offering courses in Zionist editing for wikipedia. (Interesting in the wake of a conservative cabal voting down stories it doesn’t like on Digg based on ideology that I blogged last week.)

* Wired interview with Steve Jobs from ten years ago.

Q: Then how will the Web impact our society?

We live in an information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly thinking less. So, I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.

Q: The problem is television?

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

There is actually tonnes of interesting stuff in this.

* Oh yeah. All this e-book, e-reader stuff? All that matters is what the kids learn to read on. Obvious when pointed out. The long game is over.

Filed by billy at 8:50 pm under consciousness,culture,meta,politics,sunday mutants,technology,the world
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