Tag: society

Camera culture


i noticed this cameraphone stuff in 2001 in hong kong, and started a moblog startup in 2003: kaywa.com as usual, a few years too early, so not much became of it. so what is next?

How quickly are we moving toward the world of Augmented Reality (AR)? Compare these 2 images of Rome during the election of the last pope in 2005 and more recently in 2013. Then contrast the images to my descriptions of “tru-vu goggles” in EARTH (1989) and the gel-lens stalks people wear in 2048, portrayed in EXISTENCE.

I don’t want kids

There is a script in my life that repeats itself over and over again: I tell someone, a friend, colleague, family member, that I don’t want to have kids and with rare exception, I hear the following, “Oh no, you have to have kids, you’d be a great father! You’re just saying that now, but you’ll change your mind.”

every childfree person gets the sort of proselytizing described in this article by countless assholes.

Anthropocene stats

  • We are the major form of erosion of rock.
  • We are using ~10% of the energy processed by the biosphere.
  • 83% of the earth’s land surface is influenced directly by human beings.
  • We are fixing 190 megatons of nitrogen per year, about the same amount that the entire biosphere fixes.
  • We appropriate 25% – 40% of the total net primary productivity of the planet for our use.
  • Humanity have 8x the mass of all wild land vertebrates (40 megatons), and the same biomass as all the fish and whales in the ocean. Domesticated animals have a biomass of ~100 megatons of carbon. The biomass of our animals is 20x the mass of all wild vertebrates on land, and 50% larger than the mass of all vertebrates in the ocean.
  • Only 10% of the land area is more than 48 hours from a large city.

LulzSec

Although large sections of the security community will deny it if you ask them, they’re secretly enjoying watching LulzSec’s campaign of mayhem unfold. LulzSec is running around pummelling some of the world’s most powerful organisations into the ground… for laughs! For lulz! For shits and giggles! Surely that tells you what you need to know about computer security: there isn’t any.

because it puts the media to work highlighting the cavalier attitude of business to security.

Molla Nasreddin

very courageous satire from central asia, a century ago.

Molla Nasreddin was revolutionary in many ways. In an era and a region where free speech wasn’t particularly encouraged, its authors boldly satirized politics, religion, colonialism, Westernization, and modernization, education (or lack thereof), and the oppression of women (Azerbaijan was surprisingly progressive on women’s issues at the time, granting women the right to vote in 1919—1 year before the United States). And with the majority of the population at the time illiterate, the magazine was a careful and clever blend of illustrations and text. And the text itself might be the most interesting of all: it was written in Azeri Turkish, rather than Russian, the language of their colonizers. The book’s editors had the unenviable task of sorting out the text: the Azeri alphabet, written with Arabic characters for nearly a millennium, was Latinized by Lenin in 1928, Cyrillicized by Stalin 10 years later, and returned to Latin following the fall of the Soviet Union.

End of work questions

Just 64.2% of adults were either in a job or actively looking for one, representing the lowest participation rate in 25 years.

At the same link you will see evidence that the number is likely to decline. Some women are less eager to work, some men are quitting the search for work, and there is a general aging of the population. Fewer students work while they are in school. Here are further links to future projections. That’s hardly the end of work but one thing dramatic recessions can do is to reveal new pieces of information. By overturning the table, we (sometimes) see which pieces of the puzzle did not fit in the first place. 1 result of this recession is that we will revise downwards our estimate of the labor force participation rate, both current and future. A few questions are:

  1. What is the political economy of a world where so few people work?
  2. What kind of low-rent areas will evolve to accommodate some of these people?
  3. Will we in fact move to some form of a guaranteed annual income?

Note that the answer to #2 will affect the feasibility of #3.

the comments are in denial. no suggestions of creating permanent disneylands to keep the unemployable happy.