Month: September 2018

Liberal Radicalism

We were able to compute the optimum level of the public good because we knew each individual’s utility function. In the real world each individual’s utility function is private information. Thus, to reach the social optimum we must solve 2 problems. The information problem and the free rider problem. The information problem is that no one knows the optimal quantity of the public good. The free rider problem is that no one is willing to pay for the public good. The government used the contribution levels under the top-up mechanism as a signal to decide how much of the public good to produce and almost magically the top-up function is such that citizens will voluntarily contribute exactly the amount that correctly signals how much society as a whole values the public good. Amazing!

Food vendor cap

The city’s government isn’t interested in helping more workers become vendors. The city capped food-vendor permits in the early 1980s; there are currently just over 4000 available, often only on the black market, where they might cost $25K (the city, by comparison, charges $200 for 2-year permits, which can be renewed indefinitely). And yet a 2015 report found that New York’s vendors contributed an estimated $293M to the city’s economy and $71M in taxes. “Street vending is an inherently New York City thing. I don’t know why there needs to be a cap on permits.”

you can only get a nyc food vendor license if you sell burnt pretzels. it’s the law. see also how the mob controls these licenses.

AR Urbanism

What does the virtual space that “belongs to us” look like? Would could it look like? We might imagine a future as steeped in AR as Matsuda’s Hyperreality, but where instead of a hybrid landscape dominated by ads and obfuscating distractions, augmented overlays are used to highlight the hidden dimensions of place, or serve as a distinctly spatial platform for alternative forms of communication and culture. Inverting the vision of a commodified hybrid landscape, the seemingly inevitable barrage of immersive, interfacial capitalism could perhaps be transmuted into something democratic, artful, and even beautiful: a conduit to mobile urban discourse and learning; to collectively owned and managed hybrid spaces, and to community as a social body intersecting physical and digital worlds. But if this more hopeful image of an AR-saturated future is to come to fruition, it will require a deeply collaborative spirit between programmers and urbanists, artists and technologists, activists and educators — and most certainly architects as well.

KCBC Design

interview with the amazing designer of the kcbc labels.

WHY DON’T YOU TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO WHERE YOU’RE AT NOW? We can go way back on this question but to be brief I can say that for as far back as I can remember I liked drawing a lot. The desire to create images has stuck it out in me through ups and downs. Like a lot of other people it was a coping mechanism at first, a way to exercise control, a pretense to interact with people. For a person like me because that was all pretty important as I was a bit of an introverted kid. I’ve been friendly with the head brewer Peter Lengyel for 13 years. He was working in biology at the time and had started home brewing in earnest in, I believe, 2006 and shortly thereafter embarked on becoming a professional brewer. When he opened up KCBC with his partners he approached me to produce some labels and see what would come out. I can say safely that we gelled well and have gone on to make some interested work together.

Mars Crime

Consider the basic science of crime-scene analysis. In the dry, freezer-like air and extreme solar exposure of Mars, DNA will age differently than it does on Earth. Blood from blunt-trauma and stab wounds will produce dramatically new spatter patterns in the planet’s low gravity. Electrostatic charge will give a new kind of evidentiary value to dust found clinging to the exteriors of space suits and nearby surfaces. Even radiocarbon dating will be different on Mars due to the planet’s atmospheric chemistry, making it difficult to date older crime scenes.

Drosophila Titanus

This is very cool. In some sense, we have a moral imperative to spread life in the cosmos.

Your experiment involves creating flies that could survive on Titan. I understand that Titan is incredibly cold so the flies have to gradually get used to the very low temperatures but what would be the impact of Titan’s orange sky and the low frequency radio waves that emanate from Titan on their bodies? And how do you prepare them for that? The project involved adapting the flies for a range of environmental conditions that are very different to those found on Earth. The cold is the most obvious along with the different atmospheric composition. There is also increased atmospheric pressure, radiation, chromatic characteristics and so on. To reach what could be conceived as the end of the project I would need to condition the flies for all of the characteristics of Titan. The radio waves experiment has been earmarked for a future stage in the project so I haven’t got too much to say about that right now. However, the chromatic adjustment has been something I’ve been working on over the last couple of years. The natural phototaxis of Drosophila – its instinct to move towards a certain type of light – is geared towards the blue end of the electromagnetic spectrum. To overcome this I kept the flies for a year under a Titan analog orange light before testing for adaptation. The selection experiment was modelled on a Y-Trap apparatus, a simple way of offering an organism 2 choices. The flies crawl up a tube and are faced with a junction offering orange light in one direction and blue light in the other, each tube ending with another non-return trap. Any flies taking the orange option are considered adapted and kept for breeding. Repeated iterations of the project smooth out random events.

Brain Research Notes

We are generally poor at describing our mental state. Our friends generally do a better job on identifying if we are depressed. 25% of the world will develop a serious brain malfunction in their lifetime. If you spend 10-100 hours in an fMRI, we can read your thoughts. 40 Hz flickering LED light induces gamma oscillations in the brain. After 1 hour of exposure, she saw a 50% reduction in amyloid plaques in a Alzheimer’s rat model. Expansion microscopy is the opposite of normal microscopy. Instead of zooming in on the brain, you make the brain bigger with a polymer expansion similar to the gel found in super-absorbent diapers. Ed Boyden’s team can trigger brain activity at a targeted deep area with a pair of acoustic waves at close frequencies, like 2.00 and 2.01 Hz

Destroying psychology

interesting piece on the replication crisis in psychology, and what’s next.

Lindsay talks with psychologists all the time who aren’t eager to embrace the updated rules, and he understands why. “Our literature is packed with unreliable findings. And I can imagine if you hitched your whole wagon to a concept that doesn’t seem to be a real thing, that could be threatening.” Like Heathers, Nick Brown sometimes shakes his head at the reluctance among researchers to acknowledge what, to him, seems obvious. To continue to defend a system that’s churned out stacks upon stacks of hopelessly flawed papers, rather than to own up to the truth and try to fix it, seems pointless. “I don’t know whether they genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing or there’s a sort of doubt niggling at the back of their mind, but they don’t want to acknowledge it. Maybe the people who need to make those changes, in that deep, dark moment before they go to sleep, they think to themselves, ‘How are we going to get out of this?’”