Read moreWhat happens in a world, or at least a nation, where most of the population lives semi-comfortably (by historical standards) off a basic income, supplemented by occasional temporary gigs, thanks to the economic output of tomorrow’s technology; a small middle class works at the diminishing number of jobs which can’t be handled by technology; and a smaller-yet minority of the ultra-rich actually design the tech, and/or live off their inheritances a la Piketty? Call it a “low-scarcity” future, as opposed to the full-on Singularitarian “post-scarcity” future.
It seems to me that such a world would be extremely fertile ground for the rise of — you guessed it — a reputation economy. The key is that it wouldn’t outright replace a traditional monetary economy, at least not for some quite considerable time; rather, it would begin to thrive parallel to, and independent of, its capitalistic counterpart. Eventually, though, as I’ve argued before, since we are fundamentally social creatures, in the long run, “at some point it will be better to be awesome than to be rich.”
* this feeds nicely into that Star Trek as LARP idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395). The Star Fleet ranks as a reputation economy. Social capital etc.
I like to think on a good day that’s what we’re doing in these spaces. Bootstrappin’ the internet into a Type 1 Civ communication system. Negotiating a new culture, a new societal operating system. Eating the old world. Folding in the machines. Neotany on a global scale. Cyborg Gaia.
We definitely need new mythologies, patched out of whatever is at hand.
LLAP.
Author: m1k3y
The results support the idea that primitive life might have possibly arisen on the icy moon. Scientists say that places where water and rock interact are important for the development of life; for example, it’s possible life began on Earth in bubbling vents on our sea floor.
Prior to the new study, Ganymede’s rocky sea bottom was thought to be coated with ice, not liquid – a problem for the emergence of life. The “club sandwich” findings suggest otherwise: the first layer on top of the rocky core might be salty water.
“This is good news for Ganymede,” said Vance. “Its ocean is huge, with enormous pressures, so it was thought that dense ice had to form at the bottom of the ocean. When we added salts to our models, we came up with liquids dense enough to sink to the sea floor.”
…
The results can be applied to exoplanets too, planets that circle stars beyond our sun. Some super-Earths, rocky planets more massive than Earth, have been proposed as “water worlds” covered in oceans. Could they have life? Vance and his team think laboratory experiments and more detailed modeling of exotic oceans might help find answers.
Ganymede is one of five moons in our solar system thought to support vast oceans beneath icy crusts. The other moons are Jupiter’s Europa and Callisto and Saturn’s Titan and Enceladus.
Read more
A Dumbo Octopus (Grimpoteuthis sp.) seen by a NOAA Ocean Explorer team from a deep sea submersible near the Many Mounds Area of the West Florida Escarpment in the Gulf of Mexico.
(via: NOAA Ocean Explorer)
It’s like it’s got a floofy skirt. :3
Friend
Read more
Beautiful photo of the BICEP2 telescope, used to detect cosmic inflation, at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station.
(via The Echo of Creation – Astronomers Hear the B of the Big Bang | Inside the Science Museum)
Station Ident.
Read more
A wall painting in the tomb of Djehutihotep clearly shows a person standing on the front of the pulled sledge and pouring water over the sand just in front of it.
Besides revealing something about the ancient Egyptians, the results are also interesting for modern-day applications. We still do not fully understand the behaviour of granular material like sand. Granular materials are, however, very common. Other examples are asphalt, concrete and coal. The research results could therefore be useful for examining how to optimise the transport and processing of granular material, which at present accounts for about ten percent of the worldwide energy consumption.
Ancient Egyptians transported pyramid stones over wet sand
Read moreRead moreBut based on evidence from ancient bones, spears, and porridge, Speth believes our Stone Age cousins likely boiled their food. He suggests that Neanderthals boiled using only a skin bag or a birch bark tray by relying on a trick of chemistry: Water will boil at a temperature below the ignition point of almost any container, even flammable bark or hides…
Speth suggests that Neanderthals boiled foods in birch bark twisted into trays, a technology that prehistoric people used to boil maple syrup from tree sap.
Archaeologists have demonstrated that Neanderthals relied on birch tar as an adhesive for hafting spear points as long as 200,000 years ago. Making birch tar requires clever cooking in an oxygen-free container, says paleontologist Michael Bisson of Canada’s McGill University.
“I’ve burned myself trying to do it,” Bisson says, adding that Neanderthals were plenty clever when it came to manipulating birch. They likely ignited rolled-up birch bark “cigars” and plunged them into holes to cook the tar in an oxygen-free environment.
If the tar is exposed to oxygen in the air as it cooks, “it explodes,” Bisson adds.
Supporting the boiling idea, Speth said that animal bones found in Neanderthal settings are 98 percent free of scavenger’s gnawing marks, which he says suggests the fat had been cooked off.
And some grains found in the teeth of a Neanderthal buried in Iraq’s Shanidar Cave site appear to have been cooked, according to a 2011 Proceedings of the National Academies of Science report.
“It is speculative, but I think it is pretty likely that they knew how to boil,” Speth says.
In a separate talk at the meeting, University of Michigan paleontologist Andrew White noted recent evidence that Neanderthal mothers weaned their children at an earlier age than human mothers typically do. He said the early transition from milk to food supports the theory that Neanderthals boiled their youngsters’ food to make it more digestible.
With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When It’s Milking Time – NYTimes.com:
“It just clicked,” said Susan Borden, Tom Borden’s 24-year-old daughter. “One day we came in and they had started milking themselves.”
Sure enough, on a recent Friday, the Bordens stood watch as cows lined up in front of the closet-size devices; each quietly allowed the machine to wash and scan its underbelly with lasers before attaching mechanical milk cups.
The cows ate the whole time, then moved along when the machine was finished. Nearby, another new device, a Roomba-style robot, pushed feed toward cows who lounged in a pen or lay on straw mats.
“We’re the most disruptive thing in here,” Mr. Borden said.
How do you fund deextinction and the rewilding of ecosystems forward to their next-natural state? What if you can make it pay for itself?
What if you can farm the rewilding with robots???
Why choose between domestication and the wild, that is so twentieth century binary thinking man. Embrace the xor!
Ride that paleo diet wave, and that suburban quest for authenticity via cable tv gurus: sell Auroch milk for $20 a litre in Williamsburg and to the greater citizens of Portlandia!
The first Boskarin cattle have now been released in the Velebit mountains. Part of the Taurus program to resurrect Europe’s only recently extinct ancient cattle:
The aurochs stands at the very roots of the whole idea of our continent but was sadly driven to its extinction by man. Luckily, it can also be brought back by man. In 2008, the Taurus Foundation decided to give the re-breeding of the aurochs a serious try. It has since grown into a joint effort together with Rewilding Europe and the Dutch organization ARK Nature. The end result will look like an aurochs, live like an aurochs, behave, eat, mate, defecate and eventually die like an aurochs. For the time being, this animal will be called the Tauros, the Greek word for the bull.
It’s 2017, and Oprah is saying: forget Quinoa, forget the ancient grains and antioxidant berries from the Amazon, try the milk of recently resurrected pre-domesticated cattle. The real, true superfoods harness the power of the palaeolithic, that Ice Age hardiness imbued unto you!
“Rumour has it this is what Cleopatra really bathed in,” the signs on the spas say.
Flown in by drones direct from the biomemetic milking stations built by anthropology majoring makers trained in augmented reality set design and custom blinds.
Untouched by a single human hand. Unseen by a single human eye. Reveal in the Authenticity consumers! Drink it in.
For an extra $99.99 you can have it tweaked with custom gut biota to cure all your ails.
And for 9,000 Euro you can have your own personal herd, visible to all your “friends” on Facebook via our special Farmville plugin.
It’s 2022 and the herds are now big enough to offer safaris for corporate retreats, buck’s nights and any other manner of escape.
Armed only flint knives chipped with the very finest rocks. Wearing only hare-skin loincloths. Juiced up with Neanderthal DNA temporarily spliced in by harmless virii. They hunt their food for the year on foot and gather tales enough to entertain the crowds at their neighbourhood barbecues. Watched over by fleets of robot medics, ready to resurrect them or repair any injury.
We get a restored ecosystem, a better gardened planet, and they get… fed body, soul and hyperego.
— don’t you just love it when a future path into a better gardened Earth practically writes itself?
Read moreFrom Athletes to Couch Potatoes: Humans Through 6,000 Years of Farming
“Work published by biological anthropologist Dr Colin Shaw (also Cambridge University) has enabled Macintosh to interpret this male decline in relation to Cambridge University students. Using Shaw’s study of bone rigidity among modern Cambridge University undergraduates, Macintosh suggests that male mobility among earliest farmers (around 7,300 years ago) was, on average, at a level near that of today’s student cross-country runners. Within just over 3,000 years, average mobility had dropped to the level of those students rated as sedentary, after which the decline slowed.”
* weird sample group, amirite?
From Athletes to Couch Potatoes: Humans Through 6,000 Years of Farming
Read more "From Athletes to Couch Potatoes: Humans Through 6,000 Years of Farming"Move over exoplanets, exomoons may harbour life too
if a Jupiter-like exoplanet orbits within a star’s habitable zone, it begs the question: might that exoplanet host habitable moons? Jupiter has Europa, which is suspected to have liquid water buried under an ice crust, and Saturn has Enceladus, which definitely has water hidden underneath its coat of hydrocarbon ices. So Earth-like exomoons are certainly not out of the question.
Recent research by Duncan Forgan and Vergil Yotov at the University of Edinburgh highlights the various factors that may make an exomoon more or less habitable. They investigate how the climate of an exomoon will be affected by tidal stresses which provide a source of internal heating for the exomoon as it is stretched and deformed by the gravitational pull of its planet. They also investigated how light reflected from the exoplanet, and eclipses by the exoplanet, can also subtly alter the exomoon’s climate.
The researchers lump theoretical exomoons into a number of classifications: “habitable”, “hot”, “snowball” or “transient”. Those in the first class have more than 10% of their surface at a temperature between the freezing and boiling points of water, with only a small fluctuation around the average temperature value.
Those in the second class have average temperatures above 100°C at all times, whereas those in the third class are permanently frozen – in both cases less than 10% of the surface is habitable. Exomoons in the fourth, transient class are on average habitable, but the amount of habitable surface area varies widely with time. Overall, this research shows that exomoon climates are rather more complex than previous research has supposed.
As yet, no exomoons have been discovered, but there are various techniques proposed for finding them. One way is by studying the effects that an exomoon will have on the exoplanet it is orbiting – their gravitational connection means there will be a to-and-fro tugging between them. This will cause variations in the times at which the planet transits in front of its star and in the durations of these transits, which we are able to measure.
Move over exoplanets, exomoons may harbour life too
Read more "Move over exoplanets, exomoons may harbour life too"
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 