Tag: video

Wikileaks

What wikileaks means. By Bruce Sterling

Furthermore, and not as any accident, Assange has managed to alienate everyone who knew him best. All his friends think he’s nuts. I’m not too thrilled to see that happen. That’s not a great sign in a consciousness-raising, power-to-the-people, radical political-leader type. Most successful dissidents have serious people skills and are way into revolutionary camaraderie and a charismatic sense of righteousness. They’re into kissing babies, waving bloody shirts, and keeping hope alive. Not this chilly, eldritch guy.

2011-07-27: I guess with all the lulzsec of the world it was getting quiet around wikileaks.

2016-10-17: I had a lot of respect for Assange’s early work, but his climbing into bed with Putin is really in poor taste. Contrast that with Snowden, who on the surface seems even more in Putin’s pocket but hasn’t acted that way (yet?)

It turns out that this is what released the dead man’s switch: Ecuador cut off Julian Assange’s internet connection. I’m not even sure that American pressure was involved.

Were I Rafael Correa, I would be concerned that my long-term tenant was attempting to destabilize the regional hegemon in order to elect an anti-leftist, anti-Hispanic demagogue. He signed on for nonpartisan leaking which casts the US in the worst possible light internationally, freeing up space for Ecuador in international affairs. What he got was a specific campaign, directed by another foreign country entirely, dedicated to electing a leader whose interests are deeply, fundamentally opposed to his own.

This becomes even worse if (rather, when) Hillary wins: you then have an American president whom you appear to have attempted to keep out of office, and she is unlikely to look favorably on the fact that you were hosting a Russian-fronted attempt to sway the election.

And that doesn’t even get into Wikileaks’ response. In immediate response to having Ecuador cut his connection, Wikileaks tweeted out what appears to be an archive which threatens to blackmail his host. While it’s possible that the “Ecuador” file is about US-Ecuadoran relations, I substantially doubt that anyone in the US would be interested in that — just Ecuador.

Were I Assange, I would start looking for alternate accommodations now.

2018-06-17: Theodore Dalrymple

The actual effect of WikiLeaks is likely to be profound and precisely the opposite of what it supposedly sets out to achieve. Far from making for a more open world, it could make for a much more closed one. Secrecy, or rather the possibility of secrecy, is not the enemy but the precondition of frankness. WikiLeaks will sow distrust and fear, indeed paranoia; people will be increasingly unwilling to express themselves openly in case what they say is taken down by their interlocutor and used in evidence against them, not necessarily by the interlocutor himself. This could happen not in the official sphere alone, but also in the private sphere, which it works to destroy. An Iron Curtain could descend, not just on Eastern Europe, but over the whole world. A reign of assumed virtue would be imposed, in which people would say only what they do not think and think only what they do not say. The dissolution of the distinction between the private and public spheres was one of the great aims of totalitarianism. Opening and reading other people’s e-mails is not different in principle from opening and reading other people’s letters. In effect, WikiLeaks has assumed the role of censor to the world, a role that requires an astonishing moral grandiosity and arrogance to have assumed. Even if some evils are exposed by it, or some necessary truths aired, the end does not justify the means.

2019-01-06: Wikileaks also has a list of things you can’t say:

Either Julian Assange is the least self-aware person in the British Isles, or Wikileaks is playing some sort of weird joke on the press. The organization, whose entire reason for being is publishing documents whose authors don’t wish them to be published has bizarrely sent a list of 140 things reporters are not supposed to say about Assange (if this is a troll by Assange, you have to wonder if the 140 — Twitter’s original character limit — is somehow on purpose).

2022-11-23: The end has come

Although WikiLeaks long boasted that it released more than 10m documents in 10 years, at current, less than 3k documents remain accessible. The issues have become so apparent that supporters of the group are now voicing concerns across social media. Even organizations tied to WikiLeaks appear to be struggling. The website for Defend WikiLeaks, a group that raised funds for the legal defense of WikiLeaks’ imprisoned founder Julian Assange, has now been taken over by a Vietnamese sports blog. The website for the Courage Foundation, which similarly raised funds for whistleblowers and journalists including Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, was also taken over in the past week and transformed into a Japanese blog selling knockoff designer merchandise.

Concrete

bye bye potholes!

BacillaFilla is a gengineered bacterium based on Bacillus subtilis that has been modified to fill and bond cracks in cement caused by earthquakes and other violence. The bacteria burrow into the concrete until they have filled all its cracks, then they politely turn into calcium carbonate and die.

2012-06-24: Romans were better at concrete than we are. No modern concrete building will last 2000 years like the Roman Pantheon.

Modern concrete—used in everything from roads to buildings to bridges—can break down in as few as 50 years. But 1000s of years after the Roman Empire crumbled to dust, its concrete structures are still standing. Now, scientists have finally figured out why: a special ingredient that makes the cement grow stronger—not weaker—over time. Scientists began their search with an ancient recipe for mortar, laid down by Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius in 30 BCE It called for a concoction of volcanic ash, lime, and seawater, mixed together with volcanic rocks and spread into wooden molds that were then immersed in more sea water. History contains many references to the durability of Roman concrete, including this cryptic note written in 79 BCE, describing concrete exposed to seawater as: “a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and everyday stronger.” What did it mean? To find out, the researchers studied drilled cores of a Roman harbor from Pozzuoli Bay near Naples, Italy. When they analyzed it, they found that the seawater had dissolved components of the volcanic ash, allowing new binding minerals to grow. Within 10 years, a very rare hydrothermal mineral called aluminum tobermorite (Al-tobermorite) had formed in the concrete.

2013-10-28: 3D printed concrete will topple the slow, corrupt construction “industry”. a house can be printed in 20h, to much finer tolerances.

The process could accelerate the $1T (US only) construction industry 200x. Projections indicate costs will be around 20% of conventional construction.

3D-printing startup Apis Cor recently completed its latest claim to greatness: the “world’s largest” 3D-printed building to date. The 700m2, 10m-tall structure was built in Dubai

2015-09-30: Concrete is extremely CO2 heavy

The concrete industry is one of 2 largest producers of CO2, creating up to 5% of worldwide man-made emissions

2016-08-02: Mesh concrete. Another small step to turn construction from a super slow, error-prone process into a fast and accurate one.

Mesh Mould Metal “focuses on the translation of the structurally weak polymer-based extrusion process into a fully load-bearing construction system” by replicating the process in metal. Specifically, the current research delves into the development of “a fully automated bending and welding process for meshes fabricated from 3-millimeter steel wire.”

2021-07-26: Self-supporting concrete

By 3D printing concrete at specific angles, the collaborative team was able to produce blocks with layers “orthogonal to the flow of compressive forces,” allowing them to design differently-shaped blocks for different portions of the bridge. The blocks stick together through gravity, meaning no mortar is required. No steel reinforcements are necessary, either. And if needed, the entire bridge can simply be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere.

2021-08-09: Construction Physics describes how 3D printed concrete is at the bottom of an S curve:

For the most part, despite the hype, the current state of building 3D printing is fairly unimpressive. The resolution is poor, the process is sluggish (Icon’s printer can print a 3m x 3m in little over 8 hours – not terrible but not setting the world on fire), the material options are extremely limited, the equipment is expensive and finicky, and the results are generally worse on multiple axes than what you could get from conventional construction.

2022-02-03: The scale of concrete production

Human civilization is basically a machine for producing concrete and gravel.

Concrete will naturally absorb CO2, a process known as carbonation (even normal concrete will absorb roughly 30% of the CO2 emitted during the production process over the course of its life.) Companies like Carbicrete, Carboncure, Carbonbuilt and Solida all offer methods of concrete production that allow the concrete to absorb CO2 during the production process, substantially reducing embodied emissions. Interestingly, these producers mostly claim that their concrete is actually cheaper than conventional concretes, which would obviously be a massive tailwind for the technology’s adoption.

It’s not obvious what the best path forward is for addressing concrete CO2 emissions (like with most things, I suspect it’ll end up being a mix of different solutions), but understanding the parameters of the problem is necessary for solving it.

2022-03-25: Economics of concrete decarbonization

Full decarbonization with CCS is expected to double the cost of Portland cement, now about US$100 per tonne. Cement subsidies would need to match that. 0-emissions steel is expected to cost 20–40% more than standard steel, which is typically about $600 per tonne — so steel subsidies would need to reach $240 per tonne. For the EU, we estimate that could cost up to $200 billion over 10 years.

2023-01-12: The chemistry of roman concrete has been decoded

For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This specific kind of ash was even shipped all across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time.

Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features, which have been long recognized as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, often referred to as “lime clasts,” originate from lime, another key component of the ancient concrete mix. “Ever since I first began working with ancient Roman concrete, I’ve always been fascinated by these features. These are not found in modern concrete formulations, so why are they present in these ancient materials?”

Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability.


But this doesn’t mean that we can simply replace all concrete with this new formula

If we have the possibility of building more durable concrete buildings, why don’t we? Using unreinforced concrete dramatically limits the sort of construction you can do – even if the code allows it, you’re basically limited to only using concrete in compression. Without reinforcing, modern concrete buildings and bridges would be largely impossible.

Other methods of reducing reinforcement corrosion also have drawbacks, especially cost. Stainless steel rebar is 4-6x as expensive as normal rebar. Epoxy coated rebar (commonly used on bridge construction in the US) is also more expensive, and though it can slow down corrosion, it won’t stop it. Basalt rebar won’t corrode but can apparently decay in other ways.

2023-03-23: The 3D printing concrete dream won’t die. These savings are quite modest but a 24 / 7 operation should speed things up another factor of 4

This 100-house addition to the 2500 homes planned for Wolf Ranch is called “the Genesis Collection,” and as the world’s largest 3D-printed community, it is indeed sui generis. 3D-printed homes cost 10-30% less to build than conventional construction, while Coleman expects construction time to be cut 30% at Wolf Ranch. Concrete is carbon-intensive, but the material’s use at Wolf Ranch creates nearly airtight buildings that will reduce homeowners’ heating and cooling costs, while the solar panels installed on each residence will supply carbon-free electricity. Icon’s 3D-printed walls have exceeded building code strength requirements by 350% which allows them to better withstand hurricanes and wildfires. “We are trying to make the case that not only do our robots not need smoke breaks or anything like that, they also are very quiet and should be allowed to work around the clock.”

Reforestation

Reseeding forests from airplanes, at scale.

The process Alamaro advocates places trees in metal pods that rot on contact with the ground, instead of the low-tech and less sturdy plastic version. The process can be adapted to plant shrubs, and would work best in places with clear, loose soil, such as sub-desert parts of the Middle East, or newly habitable Arctic tundra opened up by global warming. “What is needed is government policy to use old military aircraft” adding that 1000s are in hangars across the globe. Although the original pitch failed, the growing CO2 market is creating new interest, and he hopes to find funding for a large-scale pilot project soon.

2023-07-31: Lots of progress on drones and ingenious ways to ensure the seedlings get into the soil.

Restoring forest worldwide will require a gigantic effort, a challenge made doubly hard by the fact that many sites are inaccessible by road, stopping manual replanting projects in their tracks.
Manual planting is labor-intensive and slow. Drone seeding uses the latest in robotic technology to deliver seeds directly to where they’re needed. Drones can drop seeds along a predefined route, working together in a “swarm” to complete the task with a single human supervisor overseeing the process.
Drone-dropped seed success rates are lower than for manually planted seedlings, but biotech solutions are helping. Specially designed pods encase the seeds in a tailored mix of nutrients to help them thrive. Drones are tech-intensive, and still available mostly in industrialized countries, but could one day help reseed forests worldwide.
Scientists are designing novel approaches to increase the germination rate of seeds dropped by drones. Yao and her team at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a self-burying seed carrier that after dispersal by a drone can gently drill each seed into the soil. Inspired by the structure of seeds from Erodium plants, the carrier requires no battery pack; the burying action is generated by the shape of the materials themselves.

“The coiled body will extend in rain, which creates a downward thrust force that allows the tip to self-bury into the soil”. Burying the seed, rather than leaving it atop the soil, can protect it from the wind, drought or birds.

Original Shakespeare

Quite a bit is known about how English was spoken back when Shakespeare wrote his plays but productions of his plays using the original pronunciation (OP) are quite rare. audiences will hear word play and rhymes that “haven’t worked for several 100 years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595.”