Bind the Citizens Together in Bricks and Mortar
In today's edition: the magnet in my finger, small AI, Beijing's urban plan, bringing down the highways, the history of seeds, and making your DIY brain experiments work for science.
"When we look around today at what people are calling ‘The Internet of Things’ we see a world of silos, where things can’t talk to each other, let alone talk to the people who use them. And we see lots of tech people trying to make devices work together at the level of protocols and silicon. We think these these devices should talk to each other in a place that people can see and maybe even join in. By bringing them all together in a common place, we can find loads of new ways that they can work together to make your life better. We think this place is Thington. And we see a future in which Thington does for the physical world what Twitter and Facebook did for our social world."
2. Consider Los Angeles or Seattle in 2000 years.
"The effect is no accident: Beijing was conceived as a diagram of an organised, harmonious society, designed to bind the citizens together in bricks and mortar under the supreme rule of the emperor. It was to be an expression of absolute power like no other city in the world. Founded more than 3,000 years ago as the city of Ji, Beijing’s present urban form was established in the early Ming dynasty (1368-1644), when the Yongle emperor moved the imperial capital here from Nanjing."
3. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is going after the (highway) infrastructure of injustice.
"Foxx will launch his crusade in a speech Tuesday to the Rotary Club in Charlotte — 'It’s probably not the speech they’re expecting to hear,' he said — and repeat it Wednesday in Washington before the Center for American Progress. 'It became clear to me only later on that those freeways were there to carry people through my neighborhood, but never to my neighborhood,' said Foxx, who grew up in Lincoln Heights, a neighborhood walled in by three highways. 'Businesses didn’t invest there. Grocery stores and pharmacies didn’t take the risk. I could not even get a pizza delivered to my house.'"
4. Hell, even actual farmers can be sold on the Brooklyn-chic-farmer-mystique vibe.
"He's started a small but growing seed company, using the original name that his great-grandfather used: Rob-See-Co. Robinson says the company tries to operate in a way that takes farmers back to a less complicated time. 'We're kind of a throwback. We're from a simpler world,' he says. He's also able to work with his two sons. But he couldn't go back completely to the old times. He's not breeding his own new varieties and corn hybrids. The seeds he sells are supplied by Syngenta."
5. How to make the people doing tDCS (applying current to their brains) more useful for science.
"At present online sharing of tDCS experiences is haphazard, and is restricted to the more anarchic fringes of the internet. However, those communities are generating potentially valuable information, which could be of great interest to researchers and to manufacturers. At-home and DIY users frequently stretch the limits of protocols, delivering higher current for greater amounts of time. Bringing at-home users into the fold will provide useful information about safe and unsafe protocols, and will generate important information about the milder side-effects of tDCS that are thought to be under-reported by researchers. In this way, at-home users will be following in the tradition of the scientific self-experimenters, by contributing their knowledge willingly and openly to the community."
1. medium.com | @cshirky 2. theguardian.com | @fordm 3. washingtonpost.com 4. npr.org | @centgg 5. jlb.oxfordjournals.org | @n_j_davis
Bind the Citizens Together in Bricks and Mortar