Which Biological Materials Are Collectively Owned
In today's edition: open-source sex hormones, the metastructure, brain reductionism, exploring segregation, simulating the sunset, and The Lonely Web.
1. A biotech project to create an "open source platform for the production of sex hormones."
"Open Source Gendercodes (OSG) is a project focused on developing an open source platform for the production of sex hormones. The development of a transgenic plant that could allow 'laypeople' to grow sex hormones would not only call into question the cultural and institutional frameworks that govern queer and trans bodies, it would also challenge the current system of pharmaceutical production. Can we imagine a communal system of pharmaceutical production in which biological materials are collectively owned?"
"What all these services and partnerships are building isn’t infrastructure. Let’s call it metastructure. It’s an evolving map of spacetime that robot cars and buses and trolleys and bikes live in, constantly updated, always available. London cabbies famously have to acquire the Knowledge, a preternatural understanding of not just the city’s streets but their ebbs and flows in time. Make that into something a robot can learn and a phone can access, and you have metastructure."
+ I think my preferred neologism for this class of stuff would be "interstructure," but still.
3. One reason it might not be so easy to model the brain.
"If power law distributions are so common in the brain, they must be telling us something about how it operates. Why does the brain transcend bell-curve averages? One possible explanation is that the brain lacks a privileged scale because its functioning cannot be reduced to component parts (i.e., neurons). Rather, it is the complex interactions between parts which give rise to phenomena at all spatial and temporal scales. If this hypothesis is true, it does not bode well for the Blue Brain Project. Like averages, reductionism is deeply ingrained in our scientific thinking. Water is explained in terms of molecules, molecules in terms of atoms, etc. If the brain is reducible to simpler parts, it should also exhibit a privileged scale of organization. And yet, it does not."
"The Green Book was a travel guide published between 1936 and 1966 that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, gas stations, etc. where black travelers would be welcome. NYPL Labs is in the process of extracting the data from the Green Books themselves and welcomes you to explore its contents in new ways."
5. Beautifully simulating the sunset live.
"In this performance/video/game I wrote a program and built custom hardware that let me mix the sunset live. I then projected with a video projector, from my computer onto a garage in a field behind my studio. As the sun set behind the building I attempted to match the color of the sunset with the projector. I did this for several days (you only get one attempt per evening of course). Each time I would go back to the studio and fined tune the software, and each time my skills got a little better."
On Fusion: A really remarkable story by Joe Veix about The Lonely Web, the barely-seen bits of YouTube and Facebook and Tumblr that form the raw material for the "viral" content industry. This one is so good.
1. opensourcegendercodes.com | @animistology 2. wired.com | @smc90 3. knowingneurons.com | @mindhacks 4. publicdomain.nypl.org 5. joemckaystudio.com | @tealtan
Which Biological Materials Are Collectively Owned