This note used to say that the links below appear in the order I read them and was meant imply that they were more or less random in their subject matter, other than being of interest to me. Recently I started a few new sections at the bottom of the links on subjects that are of particular interest to me. But I can see that as time passes I am moving to a greater degree of "curation", which the dictionary tell me is about organizing and maintaining a collection. Applied to this collection of links and books I guess this will mean selecting links less randomly and trying to make them relevant in the context of this blog and whatever is going on in the world during the month.
Links
- Art Berman: Think Oil Is Getting Expensive? You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet., Art Berman interviewed by Chris Martenson,
A global supply crunch approaches... - How babies learn—and why robots can’t compete, by Alex Beard, The Guardian—The Long Read
"If we could understand how the infant mind develops, it might help every child reach their full potential. But seeing them as learning machines is not the answer."
This one could have gone under Intelligence or Artificial Intelligence, so I put it here instead. - Rotten results: Sainsbury's drops project to halve food waste, by Rebecca Smithers, The Guardian
"However, the year-long experiment fell far short of its 50% target, with households believed to have cut food waste by only 9% – and telling Sainsbury’s the issue was not a priority for them." - Do we need science and scientific discoveries to survive as a planet? Would we have been better off without science?
A Quora Question with some excellent answers. I do think all the answers are missing the distinction between science and technology, and the idea that much technology was developed before the existence of science as a formal discipline. - Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires, by Jerry Z Muller, Aeon
- You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to, by Daniel DeNicola, Aeon
"If some beliefs are false, or morally repugnant, or irresponsible, some beliefs are also dangerous. And to those, we have no right." - 10 Best GMO Memes, by Stephan Neidenbach, Medium
- A Half Dozen Reasons to Reject the “Dirty Dozen”, by Kevin Folta, Medium
"An activist marketing campaign harms food choice." - 100 million Americans have chronic pain. Very few use one of the best tools to treat it, by Brian Resnick, Vox
- Were you GMO fooled this year? Here are the biggest GMO jokes to watch out for, by Michael Stebbins, Medium—GMO Answer
- Beyond the Label: 3 Truths & No Lies About GMOs, by GMO answers, Medium
- The EmDrive, NASA’s ‘Impossible’ Space Engine, Really Is Impossible, by Ethan Siegel, Medium
- Bananas have died out once before—don’t let it happen again, by Jackie Turner, Aeon
Intelligence
- The unwelcome revival of "race science", by Gavin Evans, The Guardian
- Socioeconomic Status Modifies Heritability Of IQ In Young Children, by Eric Turkheimer et al, University of Virginia
"Results demonstrate that the proportions of IQ variance attributable to genes and environment vary nonlinearly with SES. The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse."
Poverty, Homelessness, Minimum Wage
- Old and on the Street: The Graying of America’s Homeless, by Adam Nagourney, New York Times
The emergence of an older homeless population is creating daunting challenges for social service agencies and governments already struggling to fight poverty.
Puerto Rico
- We Don’t Always Have Electricity, But We Accept Bitcoin, by Anne Mueller, Medium
"The strange dynamics of survival and growth in a post-catastrophic Puerto Rico."
Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Vehicles
- Frontier AI: How far are we from artificial “general” intelligence, really? by Mark Turck, Medium—Hackernoon
- Did Google Duplex just pass the Turing Test? by Lance Ulanoff , Medium
The answer is no, getting closer, but only in very specific, narrow domains. - No, Google Duplex Hasn’t Passed the Turing Test, by Junaid Mubeen, Medium
"We’ve just relaxed our human ambition." - Tesla Model S With Autopilot Slams Into Fire Truck At 60mph As Another Key Exec Departs, by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge
To be fair, we don't yet know (as of this moment) whether the car was on autopilot or not. - Witness recalls horror of Tesla crash that killed two teens, by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge
Again, we don't yet know if the car was on autopilot, but it is interesting to note that car caught fire, even without a tank of gasoline. Clearly an issue with the Tesla itself, not the autopilot. - Tesla’s Autopilot engaged during Utah crash, by Julian Hattem, Associated Press, The Detroit News
- Tesla in autopilot mode crashes into parked Laguna Beach police cruiser, by Brittny Mejia, LA Times
Books
Fiction
- Step to the Stars, by Lester del Rey
I originally read this when I was about 10 years old. Re-read it purely for nostalgic reasons. - Nemesis Games, by James S. A. Corey
Book five of the Expanse series. - On a Red Station Drifting, by Aliette de Bodard
- Into the Fire, by Elizabeth Moon
Another episode in the "Vatta's Peace" series - After the Last Day, by Don Hayward
The author is a fellow I actually know, who lives in Goderich, the next town south from Kincardine along Lake Huron. What mainly attracted me to the book, though, is that it is a story of life after the collapse of civilization in the area where I grew up. It starts in the town where I went to high school, and then the plot expands to include most of Southern Ontario and a small part of Northern Ontario. Don has done a pretty good job of sketching out the events following a major financial collapse.
Non-Fiction
I'm still wading slowly through The Bell Curve, in order to be able to criticize it with some degree of credibility. This has also lead to reading some scholarly articles about IQ on the web, further slowing down my other reading. So I didn't read any other non-fiction books this month, even those I have a growing pile that I'd like to get to. To make up for this lack, here is a short list of some gems from my bookshelf:
- Yes, We Have No Neurons, by A. K. Dewdney,
An Eye-Opening Tour through the Twists and Turns of Bad Science - The Quark and the Jaguar, by Murray Gell-Mann,
Adventures in the simple and the complex - Visions of Caliban, by Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall,
on chimpanzees and people. - The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, by Kevin A. Carson
A Low-Overhead Manifesto
Also available as a free ebook or pdf - A Matter of Scale, by Keith Farnish
A book, A Solution. A Future.
6 comments:
Great stuff, my Grandfather used to work at the nuclear plant there. Lot's of back roads to race cars on in the 70s.
https://wordpress.com/post/lokisrevengeblog.wordpress.com/33189
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/8d6847/why_we_must_reduce_emissions_100x_faster_than_now/
You might want to read something to balance the "Big 6" corporate propaganda that GMO Answer puts out.
@Robert Callaghan
I shudder to think of the stupid things I did in the 1970s involving cars and speed on the back roads of Southern Ontario. But marriage and fatherhood brought that to a stop.
"https://wordpress.com/post/lokisrevengeblog.wordpress.com/33189" took me nowhere, unfortunately. But Googling Loki's Revenge blog took me to a blog with lots of good posts. If it's yours,then kudos to you. Can you explain "100% private carbon dividends" further?
The list of links on Reddit is good too.
I think climate change is going to make collapse even harder than it needs to be. But I sure don't see us doing much to alleviate climate change. Here in Canada our prime minister, who was such a climate change cheerleader at the Paris talks, is now talking about spending billions of pipelines to get diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to market. Payback for those who funded his election campaign, I guess. Bad, bad news for the rest of us.
@ Micahel
And you might want to read something to balance the propaganda put out by the organic food industry, much of which is blatantly false. I would suggest having a close and open minded look at some of the links I post here.
The scientific consensus is the GMOs are not harmful. There are far more serious issues to worry about--climate change and peak oil among them.
Indeed that is one of the main ideas behind this blog--that both the "Business As Usual" people and the counter culture (crunchy) people have a lot of ideas that aren't reality based.
In particular the crunchies have bought into the BAU propaganda that science is on the side of BAU and as a result crunchies reject much that has been solidly established by science. And of course, the BAU folks would have us believe a lot of stuff that isn't supported by science, either.
I have; but thanks for assuming I hadn't. When conflicting "facts"are muddying the water I think back to what my departed father used to say: "When someone's trying to separate you from your cash take a large grain of salt with what they have to say". I enjoy your blog a lot, it seems to be well grounded while others of its type seem to have gone off the deep end; the Dimitry Orlov and James Kunstler blogs come to mind.
@Michael
nice of you to say. I do try to stay grounded in reality.
About being separated from one's cash, it's good to remember the organic food is a multi-billion dollar a year industry that relies on fear to sell its products. So I find it very hard to take them seriously.
The reality seems to be that safety wise, organic and conventionally grown foods are about the same. And, sadly, both organic and conventional farming are also pretty much equally unsustainable based on their dependence on fossil fuels.
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