Like Branding, Chaos Magic Is Mostly Concerned with Inception
"Chaos Magic is what happens after will. It’s the antidote to the tryhard problems that come with overthinking everything. If you really want change you have to go deeper. Like branding, Chaos Magic is mostly concerned with inception. But where branding is about implanting ideas in the brains of an audience, Chaos Magic is about implanting ideas into your own. Both practices depend heavily on the creation of sigils + mantras."
2. The mother robot.
"Researchers led by the University of Cambridge have built a mother robot that can independently build its own children and test which one does best; and then use the results to inform the design of the next generation, so that preferential traits are passed down from one generation to the next. Without any human intervention or computer simulation beyond the initial command to build a robot capable of movement, the mother created children constructed of between one and five plastic cubes with a small motor inside."
3. One reporter's voyage into the blast zone in Tianjin.
"I couldn’t get in from a guarded area, so I followed the overpass in (on the left). Underneath was a construction site parking lot. Everyone had already evacuated the area, so there was no one watching over it. I continued on towards the scene of the fire. I walked three or four hundred meters when suddenly a security officer yelled at me from the road off the overpass, 'Get out of here! What are you doing? This is the second time!' I think he mistook me for somebody else. I didn’t protest. I turned around and went back until the parked trucks gave me cover. Then I turned back around and went into the space by the police line, just by the parking lot. There was a meter-high railing, and beyond that a service road several meters wide. On the other side of the road was a shelterbelt, summer-lush and green. If I went into the grove, there would be no way anyone could see me. So I climbed over the railing and dashed across the road into the shelterbelt."
4. A historical perspective on our current techno-economic-anxiety.
"From our perspective, the more extreme of modern anxieties about long-term, ineradicable technological unemployment, or a widespread lack of meaning because of changes in work patterns seem highly unlikely to come to pass. As has been true now for more than two centuries, technological advance will continue to improve the standard of living in many dramatic and unforeseeable ways. However, fundamental economic principles will continue to operate. Scarcities will still be with us, most notably of time itself. The law of comparative advantage strongly suggests that most workers will still have useful tasks to perform even in an economy where the capacities of robots and automation have increased considerably."
5. Christopher Hawthorne is doing a series for the LA Times on reinventing the freeway.
"It’s fair to say that during the brief automotive golden age when the L.A. freeway was flowing swiftly and easily with traffic, it became in the dominant cultural narrative a kind of abstraction. It was a network and a symbol — of movement, ambition, metropolitan growth, modernity — as much as a thing. Now that our freeways are so often backed up, drivers have come to see them in a dramatically different way. We stare at them, at uncomfortably close range, while stuck in traffic. They've come back into focus for what they physically are: fixed behemoths that dominate much of the landscape in the region. This newly literal perspective on the freeways may, paradoxically enough, unlock newly creative ways of reimagining or even radically repurposing them: as elevated parks or as passageways for bikes, driverless cars or public transit."
On Fusion: Maybe the Ashley Madison hack will send people scurrying for privacy. Or not.
1. khole.net 2. cam.ac.uk 3. chinadigitaltimes.net 4. ingentaconnect.com | @pkedrosky 5. latimes.com
Like Branding, Chaos Magic Is Mostly Concerned with Inception