warrenellis:

“…by 2113 we’ll have gone through a dozen or so technosocial-fashion generations. Smartphones give way to tablets to phablets to wearables to implantables to swallowables to replaceable eyeballs to neo-sinus body-nanofab systems (using mucous as a raw material) to brainwebs to body-rentals… and those are increasingly considered “so 2110.” And with all of these (or whatever really emerges), there are shifting behavioral norms. Don’t look at your phone at the dinner table. Don’t replace your eyeball in public. Don’t reboot your neo-sinus in church.”

Open the Future: Futures of Human Cultures

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tedxsummerisle:

TEDxSummerisle is pleased to announce our final speaking schedule.

The event will run from 5pm GMT (10am PT / 1pm ET) to about 7:30pm GMT (12:30pm PT / 3:30pm ET) GMT on March 20. While we are disappointed that Michael Pollan had to withdraw, we couldn’t be happier with the list

• …

TEDxSummerisle: Updated Final Schedule

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vruba:

Via Anne Galloway on Twitter, I just saw Living With Less. A Lot Less, an opinion piece in the New York Times.

I run into some version of this essay by some moneybags twig-bishop about once a year, and it bugs me every time.

Here’s the thing. Wealth is not a number of…

Lost Arcana: Wealth, risk, and stuff

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wildcat2030:

A fierce dispute has erupted between Pulitzer prize-winning author Jared Diamond and campaign group Survival International over Diamond’s recently published and highly acclaimed comparison of western and tribal societies, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? The controversy threatens to expose a deep rift in modern anthropology, with each claiming the other has fallen into a delusion that threatens to undermine the chances for survival of the world’s remaining tribal societies. On a book tour of the UK last week, Diamond, 75, was drawn into a dispute with the campaign group after its director, Stephen Corry, condemned Diamond’s book as “completely wrong – both factually and morally – and extremely dangerous” for portraying tribal societies as more violent than western ones. Survival accuses Diamond of applying studies of 39 societies, of which 10 are in his realm of direct experience in New Guinea and neighbouring islands, to advance a thesis that tribal peoples across the world live in a state of near-constant warfare. “It’s a profoundly damaging argument that tribal peoples are more violent than us,” said Survival’s Jonathan Mazower. “It simply isn’t true. If allowed to go unchallenged … it would do tremendous damage to the movement for tribal people’s rights. Diamond has constructed his argument using a small minority of anthropologists and using statistics in a way that is misleading and manipulative.”

Jared Diamondin row over claim tribal peoples live in ‘state of constant war’ | Books | The Observer

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technoccult:

Klint Finley

A while back someone put every issue of OMNI Magazine online for free download in PDF and other formats. Over at the William Gibson forums, Memetic Engineer rounded up all the issues of OMNI that are available for download and have stories by William…

THE FIRST CHURCH OF CYBERPUNK: William Gibson Stories in OMNI Available For Download

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technoccult:

Klint Finley

A couple years ago Inhuman Experiment did a run down of cases of humans hibernation, from Russian peasants to trapped skiers:

During the same TED Talk, he mentions experiments showing that if you reduce the oxygen content in the air slightly, roundworms die, and if you reduce it a…

Technoccult: The Curious Case of Human Hibernation

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hautepop:

by nocaesura:

dear capital:
while you were out colonizing institutional space, unethically accumulating resources on blind cybernetic autopilot and profiting at the expense of humanity, i have been levelling up my mage. i am now an advanced practitioner in the spheres of skepticism, invasion, critical irony and hauntology. i have maxed out my skill level in all four of these spells to ‘sisyphean ad nauseam’… ne plus ultra much, bitch? see u in hell.

p.s. my identity is an emerging micro-niche market which i have chosen to claim ownership to despite previously owning it in an informal-communal sense defined by untranslatable semiotic which i have betrayed by increasing the visibility of and making translatable to the commodity form in order to profit from and secure my personal transmutation into celebrity, please buy my chapbook grimoire e-book for $5 via paypal. thanks.

net/art people seem big on personal branding – in the ruins of its desecration (can you desecrate something that was always ghastly?) by digital marketers and bloggers-on-blogging about 2-3 years ago. not quite sure what this means, now – but it’s interesting.

dear capital: while you were out colonizing institutional space…

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climateadaptation:

The folks at Skeptical Science wrote an epic take down / open letter to London Mayor Boris Johnson. Johnson embarrassed himself in an opinion-editorial published the UK’s The Telegraph. In it, the Mayor of one of the most powerful cities in the world claimed he doesn’t know a thing about science, yet his ignorance and lack of curiosity somehow allows him to understand how the entire earth’s climatic system works.

Epic take down is epic.

Higher temperatures cause increased water evaporation. Evaporated water forms more cloud cover. Add those clouds to winter, and you get more snow. The end. So, either the Mayor is a genuine ignoramus, or he’s chosen the drunken route of power, wishing to stay elected rather than take action and  lead.

The letter is a great read. Here’s the beginning:

Open Letter to London Mayor Boris Johnson – Weather is not Climate

Mayor Johnson, I was rather puzzled to read your recent opinion-editorial in the Telegraph, suggesting that the sun is to blame for global warming because it has been snowing in London in the winter.  Quite simply, weather is not climate.  The main necessary ingredients for snow are cold temperatures (which tend to occur in winter) and moisture in the atmosphere, which has increased as a result of global warming.  In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that winter precipitation in the United Kingdom will increase in a warming world.

In your editorial, you acknowledge your lack of expertise on the subject, but defer to weather forecaster Piers Corbyn due to his alleged accuracy in predicting British weather (that accuracy being generally exaggerated, with manycounter–examples).  However, irrespective of his accuracy in making weather predictions, Corbyn is not a climate scientist; weather forecasting and climatology are very different scientific fields.  If your cardiologist informed you that you need open heart surgery, would you ask your dentist for a second opinion?

If Corbyn would like his climate opinions to be taken seriously, he should subject them to the peer-review process like climate scientists do.  However, it is very easy to see why he is wrong.  Were the sun the main driver of global temperatures, the planet would have cooled slightly over the past 50 years.  Instead it has warmed rapidly, and the United Kingdom has warmed nearly 1.3°C during the period of downward solar activity.  Additionally, right now we are approaching the peak of the current 11-year solar cycle, which is difficult to reconcile with efforts to blame your wintery weather on low solar activity.

Read the rest, with more resources at Skeptical Science.

Weather is not climate.

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