Cyborg-Looking Welded Sculptures of Flowering Plants
In today's edition: the sports machine, blockchain art, the machines' cell network, a mummy, and a parable of post-industrial life.
***The Real Future Fair is coming to San Francisco, November 6-7. From now until the Fair, I'll be giving a couple tickets to the (spendy) Friday conference away each time I send a newsletter. All you have to do is reply to this email, and I'll pick people who hit my inbox randomly. (I don't always want to reward speed.)***
1. Crazy interesting story about live predictive analytics in sports.
"Somewhere in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, an astrophysicist and his son are working, with the backing of an outspoken billionaire, to bring us just such a glimpse. Armed only with a camera, a laptop and their custom code, they’re working on a system that calls a 3-pointer a swish or a brick, a volleyball serve in or out, a soccer shot over the bar or in the goal, all before the ball completes its flight. If the system works — and that’s a big “if” — it would be equivalent to a minor superpower: flash precognition. The sports fan would become, if only for a second or two, a superhero. And the system is almost done."
2. The art project that supports itself.
"Plantoid (2015) by Okhaos is a self-creating, self-propagating artwork system that uses blockchain technology to gather and manage the resources it needs to become real and to participate in the artworld. Structured as a Decentralised Autonomous Organization (DAO), once it is set in motion the code of the Plantoid system combines the functions of artwork, artist and art dealer in a single piece of software. As its name implies, the physical Plantoid artworks are cyborg-looking welded sculptures of flowering plants."
3. The machines get their own cell network.
"For the San Francisco rollout, Sigfox has around 20 of its briefcase-sized base stations on the top of buildings around the city. It partnered with the city of San Francisco to reserve space on these buildings. Sigfox’s network is able to handle tiny packets of data. These are small 12-byte messages — not enough for streaming video. Instead of phones, Sigfox’s wireless network is tailored for everything else you might want to hook up to the internet: parking meters, fire alarms, moisture sensors out in a farm field, or even wearables."
4. OK, fine, I bow to the season: this is what a mummy looks like inside.
"The individual pictured above, known as Henut-Wedjebu, is the oldest and least examined of the three. 'The challenge was scanning a patient that just happened to be from 1300 BC,' says Sanjeev Bhalla, the project’s lead radiologist, who usually tends to living patients. An x-ray taken almost 50 years ago showed a fracture in Henut-Wedjebu’s skull, but the radiologists knew little else about her physical state. Computed tomography probes deeper than conventional x-ray imaging, providing more detail and contrast and picking up on calcified structures filled with gas. 'You can see her optic nerve, you can see her spinal cord,' says Lisa Çakmak, assistant curator of ancient art at the St. Louis Art Museum. 'The level of anatomical detail you can see is stunning.'"
5. An intriguing parable of post-industrial life.
"What emerges in damaged landscapes, beyond the call of industrial promise and ruin? By 1989, something else had begun in Oregon’s cutover forests: the wild mushroom trade. From the first it was linked to worldwide ruination: The 1986 Chernobyl disaster had contaminated Europe’s mushrooms, and traders had come to the Pacific Northwest for supplies. When Japan began importing matsutake at high prices—just as jobless Indochinese refugees were settling in California—the trade went wild. Thousands rushed to Pacific Northwest forests for the new 'white gold.' This was in the middle of a 'jobs versus the environment' battle over the forests, yet neither side noticed the mushroomers. Job advocates imagined only wage contracts for healthy white men; the foragers—disabled white veterans, Asian refugees, Native Americans, and undocumented Latinos—were invisible interlopers. Conservationists were fighting to keep human disturbance out of the forests; the entry of thousands of people, had it been noticed, would hardly have been welcome. But the mushroom hunters were mainly not noticed. At most, the Asian presence sparked local fears of invasion: journalists worried about violence."
On Fusion: A profile of Nero, the troll.
1. fivethirtyeight.com | @jodyavirgnan 2. furtherfield.org | @erocdahs 3. forbes.com | @urbanhealthNP 4. sciencefriday.com 5. theamericanscholar.org
Cyborg-Looking Welded Sculptures of Flowering Plants