Tag: images

East of Edenworks

The Edenworks fish and greens ecosystem farm in Brooklyn uses broad-spectrum LED lighting for continuous production indoors, all year long. The microgreens are in floating aquaponic containers, fertilized by the microbially-digested fish waste from below, and they thrive on this nutrient stream. Results: the greens and fish are quite yummy and popular at the local Whole Foods.

  • 90% of American seafood is imported and 40% is mislabeled (!)
  • Fish are 40x more efficient than cows at converting feed to body mass
  • Over 50% of all fish meals come from aquaculture ($160B globally)
  • Edenworks’ aquaponic microbiome improves conversion of nitrogen to plant yield by 18x over indoor hydroponics

Mindless Consciousness

Speaking of actual geniuses, Noam Chomsky was there. It’s unclear why, because he doesn’t seem much interested in theories of consciousness, though obviously his mere presence classes up any would-be academic gathering — and he left MIT last year for the University of Arizona, so it’s not like he has to fly in for the gig. During his presentation to a packed ballroom, Chomsky compared the current state of neuroscience to a marionette: We can examine the puppet and its strings, but we know nothing of the puppeteer. When a fellow panelist challenged him, citing recent discoveries, Chomsky breezily dismissed the objection as beside the point. Chomsky’s rhetorical powers have been endlessly praised, but let’s give a shout-out to the brutality of his nonchalance. He eviscerates with a shrug.

4.5 hours silent staring

In 1969, United Nations Command negotiator and US Maj. Gen. James B. Kapp and North Korean Maj. Gen. Ri Choon-Sun sat across the table from one another for 11.5 hours without eating or using the restroom. The delegates were only permitted to leave the room if the person who called the meeting proposes a recess. Ri never did. In fact, the 2 men spent the last 4.5 hours of the meeting silently staring at one another. At 22:30, Ri stood up and walked out.

Art from Overfitting?

We argue that hand marks initially supplied the idea to archaic humans that a graphic mark could act as a representation, however basic it was. This was a beginning of sorts, but how could hand marks give rise to the more complex animal depictions? Hunters entering the caves with an overactive visual system will have regularly “mistaken” the natural cave features for animals. The cave walls also simulated the outdoor environment, where hunters regularly had to be able to spot their prey in camouflage. All the hunters needed to do to “complete” a depiction was to add 1 or 2 graphic marks to the suggestive natural features based on the visual imagery in their “mind’s eye.” When later humans entered the same caves and saw these, the Neanderthals may literally have “handed on” to our own species the notion that a graphic mark could act as a figurative representation. Thanks to the primed visual system of the later hunter-gatherers—and the suggestive environment of the caves—it was Homo sapiens who took the final step creating the first complex figurative representations, with all the ramifications that followed for art and culture.

Brooklyn Bridge Champagne Vaults

The cavernous vaults, which are located closer to the foot of the bridge, were rented out as storage space holding wine, champagne and liqueurs, as well as newspapers from the Evening World and produce from the Fulton Fish Market. Year round, the alcohol was kept in the stable temperatures afforded by the Brooklyn Bridge vaults and the rent collected helped offset the cost of constructing the bridge.

It is known that the vaults were constructed first in 1876, likely to appease distributors like Luyties and Racky’s whose storage facilities were demolished to build the bridge. A faded logo for Pol Rogers, the French champagne house favored by Winston Churchill, is still visible. The vaults were closed during World War I and repurposed for non-alcohol storage uses during Prohibition. In 1934, 6 months after the repeal of Prohibition, the city ceremoniously turned over the keys to a new tenant, Anthony Oechs & Co., an alcohol distributor, at a party inside the vaults attended by 100s of revelers.

Another curious find was uncovered in 2006 inside the Manhattan-side tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. A veritable time capsule was discovered by city workers which contained a stockpile of supplies in the event of nuclear attack. Put into reserve at the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this space, intended as both fallout shelter and storeroom, was forgotten for nearly 50 years.

As reported by The New York Times at the time of the discovery, the vault contained “water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers — an estimated 352K of them, sealed in 10s of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.” Boxes with blankets were labeled “For Use Only After Enemy Attack.”

Fentanyl at scale

What happens when chinese scale is applied to drugs. Narcos was child’s play:

Fentanyl is a smuggler’s dream. It’s compact. It’s valuable. It’s fantastic for the smugglers and it’s terrible for law enforcement. There’s no need to grow vast fields of opium poppies, which must be defended against weather, competitors and government eyes. Raw materials and equipment are cheap. Synthesis takes ~1 week and requires neither heat nor skills more sophisticated than following a recipe. And in recent years, rogue chemists have unearthed instructions for analogues that researchers discovered decades ago but never put into legitimate use. Sellers offer these variations before governments can outlaw them. Potency and purity vary: 1 dose may produce a euphoric high, while another kills immediately. Fentanyl’s astronomical profit margins have driven its rapid spread. 1 kilogram from China sells for $3800, which, when turned into tablet form, could fetch on the street up to $30m.

2021-11-06: Easily scalable synthetic drugs created a new type of drug lord:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that Sam Gor’s annual revenue could be as high as $21b, the same as Citibank’s. Practically every newspaper in the West has described Tse Chi Lop as Asia’s El Chapo. The comparison could hardly be less accurate. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, has claimed personal responsibility for 3000 murders in a drug war that took 300k lives. That is not Tse’s way. He achieved the size of Sam Gor not by murder and torture, but by industrializing his business, reducing the cost per unit, providing an excellent product at a fair price, and establishing well-maintained networks of key partnerships. There’s also the question of scale. El Chapo’s cartel was worth $3b—a fraction of Sam Gor’s value.

2023-06-19: China doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to crack down on fentanyl, arguably for geopolitical reasons.

From 2018 onwards, drug war cooperation with the United States declined in concert with the more general deterioration of US-China relations. In August 2022, cooperation ceased altogether. There have been no high-profile Chinese prosecutions since a trial in Hebei in 2019. While state media continues to boast of “an intensified fight against narcotics” and “the strictest drug control in the world,” this rigour does not apply to fentanyl. The opioid’s traffickers have come to enjoy a great sense of impunity. America’s crisis has intensified as a result, and the Party will certainly be enjoying the historical parallel.

2023-06-23: Deaths are through the roof and all this article manages to do is to paw ineffectually at prevention.

The shift to synthetics has put law enforcement at a distinct disadvantage by dramatically reducing drug prices — recent estimates suggest that fentanyl prices have fallen rapidly, by roughly 50% from 2016 to 2021. It has also made it much harder to detect and therefore interdict drugs. A great deal more law enforcement is therefore needed simply to return to the pre-synthetic level of efficacy.

Saildrones

Saildrone’s investors are taking a longer view, and that a global database of the oceans will benefit the company’s future more than chasing whatever business it can book today. “The most important asset is the data, and getting data that no one else can accumulate”. Still, Jenkins has been paired with Chief Operating Officer Sebastien de Halleux, who has a long track record of turning startups into big businesses. It’s de Halleux who convinced Jenkins that money could be made from understanding the weather. “Sebastien will keep it tethered, while Richard does his thing as a creative genius”. Saildrone plans to sell data to all comers, building a software platform that almost anyone can tap, and to go after commercial work, particularly with fisheries and logistics companies. Later this year, possibly by August, they plan to revive the goal of replicating Magellan’s voyage with a couple of saildrones. In order to make the circumnavigation official with the World Sailing Speed Record Council, the drones must start out in the Northern Hemisphere, cross every longitude line, and cross the equator twice. “We’ll fulfill all of our contracts first, and as soon as there is a boat available, we’ll set them off. It’s all about priorities, right?”

2023-03-11: Semi-autonomous ocean mapping

The Saildrone SD 1200 uncrewed surface vessel has successfully surveyed more than 45k km2 of previously unmapped ocean floor around the Aleutian Islands in Alaska and a region off the Californian coast. An Environmental Sample Processor went along for the trip too – gathering environmental DNA.

Paul Erdős Amphetamine

I began to wonder whether Paul Erdős (who I used as an example of a respected academic who used cognitive enhancers) could actually have been shown to have benefited from his amphetamine use, which began in 1971 according to Hill (2004). One way of investigating is his publication record: how many papers did he produce per year before or after 1971?