Read moreFlusty had identified a range of “characteristics…introduced into urban spaces to make them repellent to the public,” and he gave each of the five situations he listed particularly evocative names:
– stealthy spaces “cannot be found”
– slippery spaces “cannot be reached”
– crusty spaces “cannot be accessed”
– prickly spaces “cannot be occupied comfortably”
– jittery spaces “cannot be utilized unobserved”
Author: m1k3y
Read moreSaturn’s moon Prometheus by the F Ring, photographed by Cassini, 26 December 2009. See also the first few frames of this sequence inverted by AgeOfDestruction.
Control, Halt, Delete: Gulf States Crack Down on Online Critics
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus warned of the dangers of casually bad-mouthing the ruler in ancient Rome: “A soldier, dressed like a civilian, sits down by your side, and begins to speak ill of Caesar, and then you too, just as though you had received from him some guarantee of good faith in the fact he began the abuse, tell likewise everything you think, and the next thing is you are led off to prison in chains.”
History has a knack of repeating itself. The Internet and the social media it spawned initially offered safe spaces for citizens in closed societies to express their views. Yet authoritarian rulers unaccustomed to criticism were quick to monitor and infiltrate those virtual spaces and whisk critics and malcontents off to the physical confines of a jail cell.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the hereditary monarchies of the six Gulf states, where rulers are struggling to come to terms with the concurrent rise of social media and increasing desire of emboldened citizens to speak their minds. A recent spate of convictions for bloggers, tweeters and Facebook users across the region is part of an emerging trend that reflects the Gulf rulers’ fear of free speech and open debate.
Control, Halt, Delete: Gulf States Crack Down on Online Critics
Read more "Control, Halt, Delete: Gulf States Crack Down on Online Critics"http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/size=medium/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/notracklist=true/transparent=true/track=1650178709/ theaudacityofswope: dogmanfilms: I haven’t reblogged anything for awhile. Here I invent “Ellising”. Defined as playing whatever weird, droney, and trancelike music Warren Ellis posts and then scrolling through your entire dash letting your subconcious absorb the the sound and sights. fyi : The lesson here is human is a strange beast. ffyi: You will mostly […]
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Read moreI am proposing an alternative view that states that our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities, ala The Matrix, but instead live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits. And our selves are not separated across these two spheres as some dualistic “first” and “second” self, but is instead an augmented self. A Haraway-like cyborg self comprised of a physical body as well as our digital Profile, acting in constant dialogue. Our Facebook profiles reflect who we know and what we do offline, and our offline lives are impacted by what happens on Facebook (e.g., how we might change our behaviors in order to create a more ideal documentation).
Read moreTwitter lips and Instagram eyes: Social media is part of ourselves; the Facebook source code becomes our own code.
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In great part, the reason is that we have been taught to mistakenly view online as meaning not offline. The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online. If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected. That is, disconnection from the smartphone and social media isn’t really disconnection at all: The logic of social media follows us long after we log out. There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.
Digital information has long been portrayed as an elsewhere, a new and different cyberspace, a tendency I have coined the term “digital dualism” to describe: the habit of viewing the online and offline as largely distinct. The common (mis)understanding is experience is zero-sum: time spent online means less spent offline. We are either jacked into the Matrix or not; we are either looking at our devices or not. When camping, I have service or not, and when out to eat, my friend is either texting or not. The smartphone has come to be “the perfect symbol” of leaving the here and now for something digital, some other, cyber, space.
But this idea that we are trading the offline for the online, though it dominates how we think of the digital and the physical, is myopic. It fails to capture the plain fact that our lived reality is the result of the constant interpenetration of the online and offline. That is, we live in an augmented reality that exists at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online. It is wrong to say “IRL” to mean offline: Facebook is real life.
Read moreHindle contrasted the government’s response to fracking – setting up a new agency, the Office of Unconventional Gas and Oil, to support the industry – with the lack of political interest in biogas, which is rarely mentioned by ministers.
One reason biogas has received less attention is that it falls between three government departments – energy, environment and communities and local government.
At present, according to estimates from the government’s Waste Resource and Action Programme, the UK throws away 15m tonnes of food waste a year, from homes, industry and retail. Only about 1m tonnes of the waste is used to generate biogas, or methane, using anaerobic digestion techniques that are well-established in other parts of the world.
This diverts resources to landfill and gives rise to greenhouse gas emissions, because the rotting food produces methane that is not captured and adds to the concentration of carbon in the air.
About 90m tonnes of animal waste is also produced in the UK each year, only a tiny portion of which is used for energy production. Sewage treatment plants are also overlooked. Biogas can be poured into the national gas grid and used for heating homes, burned to generate electricity, or used in specially adapted vehicles.
Read moreLin Erda, a member of the national expert committee on climate change and a professor at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said:
“The chances of high temperature and precipitation are continuously increasing in China, [but] it is hard for climate experts to predict how or in what degree.”
He said he believed artificial precipitation would be effective in some areas, but noted that it worked only under certain conditions.
“In the long run, we can only prepare to deal with climate change, and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases to slow down global warm.”
Li Weijing, another climate expert, told the state news agency, Xinhua, that extreme weather events were becoming more frequent and that climate change would cause China’s rain belt to move north in the summer.
Jiang Tong, a research fellow with the China Meteorological Administration’s national climate centre, told the Global Times that many cities were not prepared for such severe weather at present. He said development plans should include details of how to manage such conditions.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 