Quantifiable Information, Liquid Body Armour, Etc
In today's edition: fighting, stealing, machine learning for artists, neuroimmunology, and the mental health of farmers.
1. The future of war.
"The future of war is both fascinating and disheartening. It is made of mood hacking, cloned animals carrying missions as living bombs, false memories implanted in soldiers brains, quantum computing, helmets that turn thoughts into quantifiable information, liquid body armour, etc. Our weapons are many, they are in constant transformation and crucially, they have become ridiculously potent: a single jet bomber, Coker writes, has half a million times the killing capacity of a Roman legion."
"They are also evidence that the logic of the city of London is already a logic of secret connections and startling proximities. Putting this knowledge to work in order to access bank vaults or to plunder safe deposit boxes is thus, in some ways, just an everyday temptation encountered by living in England’s capital city—as if cutting holes through walls, or digging tunnels between buildings, is, perversely, one of the more efficient ways of moving through the city. The fabric of London, then, is one defined by perforation: serendipitous adjacencies that allow for movement out of sight and across property lines, through walls, from one building to another."
+ Manaugh has a new book out about all this stuff.
3. Machine learning for artists.
"The most recent, excerpted above, was 'A Book from the Sky', in which I fed a large database of handwritten Chinese characters to a neural network which learned a generative representation of them, enabling it to “fantasize” fake samples of real characters, and render smooth interpolations among groups of complimentary characters. In September, I made 'Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?', which applied the style transfer or 'stylenet' technique to a scene in Alice in Wonderland, as part of a series of animations."
"This particular discovery emphasizes at last the need to understand connections between the nervous and immune systems, and can only push forward the development of the still merely burgeoning field of neuroimmunology. Precisely because of the highly specialized nature of research and clinical care, brain facts tend to be understood apart from body facts, in a Cartesian fashion, as if one were really apart from the other. This piece of news reminds us that we can only understand one as an aspect of the other; and that we need to take seriously, in scientific terms, phenomena such as the placebo and nocebo effects, and the role of the psyche in the evolution of mental and physical disease generally."
5. The mental health of farmers in a climate changey world.
"Neville Ellis, of Murdoch University, conducted interviews with 22 Newdegate farmers over two years about their lives and, especially, their senses of well-being. His findings confirm what you might expect: This sort of climate change, in an area vulnerable to extreme changes, has had a nasty effect on the mental health of farmers. The biggest problem seems to be the uncertainty. Farmers don’t know whether their crops will survive or be hit by a sudden drought or heat wave. They don’t know whether the storms will blow their now-dry topsoil away, ruining any chance for crops to grow."
On Fusion: The first meteor shower of the year.
Hey, Bay Area, we're thinking about doing a screening of our Real Future television show, which debuts on TV this month. If you'd like to go, let me know.
1. we-make-money-not-art.com 2. thedailybeast.com 3. medium.com | @golan 4.edge.org 5. modernfarmer.com
Quantifiable Information, Liquid Body Armour, Etc