New Extractivism





https://extractivism.online/

“A new form of extractivism defines life in the 21st Century. It is one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being: the stack that underpins contemporary technological systems goes well beyond the multi-layered ‘technical stack’ of data modeling, hardware, servers, and networks. Today’s full stack reaches into capital, labor, and nature, while demanding an enormous amount from each.This animation and accompanying diagram gather together different concepts and images of the new extractivism, proposing a semi coherent picture of the full stack. The concepts that it presents are mostly represented in the form of visual allegories. Dictionaries define allegory as a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. All of these allegories and concepts gathered here add up to a blueprint—for a machine-like superstructure; a super allegory that encompasses the whole world. What we have here is an almost fractal allegorical structure—an allegory within an allegory within an allegory…“

Essay, concept and maps - Vladan Joler
Animation - Živa Stanojević and Aleksandar Ilić
Music - Igor Lečić
2021

DALL-E 2

DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a text description in natural language. It can combine concepts, attributes, and styles.

DALL·E 2 has learned the relationship between images and the text used to describe them. It uses a process called “diffusion,” which starts with a pattern of random dots and gradually alters that pattern towards an image when it recognizes specific aspects of that image.


Fotini Markopoulou


Fotini G. Markopoulou-Kalamara is a Greek theoretical physicist interested in quantum gravity, foundational mathematics and quantum mechanics and a design engineer working on embodied cognition technologies. Markopoulou is co-founder and CEO of Empathic Technologies. She was a founding faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and was an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo.

Scientific American has called Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, currently a long-term researcher at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, “one of the world’s most promising young physicists.”

Dr. Markopoulou-Kalamara received her PhD from Imperial College London in 1998 and has held various postdoctoral positions at the Albert Einstein Institute, Imperial College London and Penn State University. She also recently shared First Prize in the Young Researchers competition at het Ultimate Reality Symposium in Princeton, New Jersey.

Her research interests include quantum gravity, quantum cosmology, discrete structure of space, causality, string theory, topological quantum field theory, quantum computing, category theory and logic.

Originally from Athens, Greece, Markopoulou-Kalamara’s love affair with physics began during her undergrad years in London. According to Scientific American, if her research proves correct, “…the causal spin networks theory that she’s helped to develop would mean that the universe functions like a giant quantum computer,” thus forever changing “…the way we think about the structure of space.”


The Human Energy Project




The Human Energy Project was founded to share a new scientific and cosmic story introducing the Noosphere as a source of meaning for future generations in our globalizing world.

Our vision

We envision a global human society that recognizes itself as a meaningful unity—a new kind of superorganism, or Noosphere. The noosphere began forming with early human culture and has accelerated with modern technologies of interconnection. It represents a vision of global integration for the immense variety of human beings and communities that continue to create it. The healthy Noosphere we envision will have respect for the biosphere from which it emerged and with which it continues to share the Earth.




Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience:
Information & the Origin of Qualia





This article argues that qualia are a likely outcome of the processing of information in local cortical networks. It uses an information-based approach and makes a distinction between information structures (the physical embodiment of information in the brain, primarily patterns of action potentials), and information messages (the meaning of those structures to the brain, and the basis of qualia). It develops formal relationships between these two kinds of information, showing how information structures can represent messages, and how information messages can be identified from structures.



The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener on Communication, Control, and the Morality of Our Machines



Half a century before the golden age of algorithms and two decades before the birth of the Internet, the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894–March 18, 1964) tried to protect us from that then-hypothetical scenario in his immensely insightful and prescient 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (public library) — a book Wiener described as concerned with “the limits of communication within and among individuals,” which went on to influence generations of thinkers, creators, and entrepreneurs as wide-ranging as beloved author Kurt Vonnegut, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier.



Simulations in a (connected) Clustered Population
 

Alexandre Galvão Patriota Professor of Statistics

University of São Paulo Institute of Mathematics and Statistics

In the simulations below, the parameters that lead to a strong change in the evolution of the curves seem to be the "minimum distance to avoid being infected" and the "probability of transmission if an infected trespasses the minimum distance to avoid infection". Nevertheless, the results are very sensible to the parameters.



Keep in mind that these are just simulations to understand how an epidemic evolves through the human net and they do not intend to represent reality.

Watch: Simulating an epidemic by Grant Sanderson.
Play: Plague Inc.

PS: The usual SIR model is not adequate to model the following cases. The parameters also vary with time. Run the code by yourself at Github. Forks with new scenarios would be very welcome. Let us share our knowledge!



Plague Inc.



Plague Inc. is a real-time strategy simulation video game, developed and published by UK-based independent video game studio Ndemic Creations. The player creates and evolves a pathogen in an effort to annihilate the human population with a deadly pandemic.




What Is It Like to Be A Bat?



"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by consciousness, including the possible insolubility of the mind-body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing.

If our idea of the physical ever expands to include mental phenomena, it will have to assign them an objective character-whether or not this is done by analyzing them in terms of other phenomena already regarded as physical. It seems to me more likely, however, that mental-physical relations will eventually be expressed in a theory whose fundamental terms cannot be placed clearly in either category. - Thomas Nagel

CriticismsDennett denies Nagel's claim that the bat's consciousness is inaccessible, contending that any "interesting or theoretically important" features of a bat's consciousness would be amenable to third-person observation.  For instance, it is clear that bats cannot detect objects more than a few meters away because echolocation has a limited range. He holds that any similar aspects of its experiences could be gleaned by further scientific experiments. Kathleen Akins argued that much about bat subjectivity, such as the function of cortical activity profiles of the bat's brain, remains to be fleshed out in neuroscientific detail, and Nagel is too quick in ruling these out as answers to his central question.

Peter Hacker analyzes Nagel's statement as not only "malconstructed" but philosophically "misconceived" as a definition of consciousness, and he asserts that Nagel's paper "laid the groundwork for…forty years of fresh confusion about consciousness."

Eric Schwitzgebel and Michael S. Gordon give detailed evidence that, contrary to Nagel, normal sighted humans do echolocate much like bats - it is just that generally it is done without awareness. They use this to argue that normal people in normal circumstances can be grossly and systematically mistaken about their conscious experience.


Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image



Memes are bastards, and we love them for it. But memes are bastards in the sense that they are born from two seemingly incompatible ontological registers: an unholy matrimony of semiosis and virality, sense and nonsense, signification and circulation. More on that later. First, let's acknowledge that the meme is also an infantile and laughable term, as are all words that repeat themselves. Yet—encountering its own stupidity, and making this into its generative principle—it is not ashamed; like any self-respecting idiot savant, it never ceases to persist in its own convoluted wisdoms. ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’, as Einstein’s scientific earworm had it. Call us crazy then, but last time we checked, isn’t there difference in repetition? Deleuzean mic-drop. Notoriously, the meme screws with time, and in this it is pompously and parodically postmodern. Take the memetic format of the animated reaction image. Einstein smoking a pipe, ad infinitum (fig. 1); the video timecode permanently skips from the seventh second to the eighth, to the seventh, to the eighth, tik tok, a historical figure evacuated from history. Has the viral image exorcized the Barthesian punctum? No: because even when it purifies time from melancholy, it leaves the purely formal mystery of time intact. And the subject, sucked into its vortex, and true to its sado-masochistic genealogy, experiences joy at the spectacle of its own decentering. Ha-Ha.

The meme also screws with narrative, or what could be called the gentrification of time. A truck about to run into a giant traffic pole, forever captured from multiple angles. The existential dread of infinite, contagious suspense: the antithesis of comic relief. Nervous laughter. Please let it end, a feeling intimately known by those suffering from an involuntary imperative to repeat: obsessive compulsive disorder. Wash your hands, turn off the gas, lock the door. Do it again. They demand from the object a solution, namely to rescue them from the abysmal tension that is ripping them apart time and time again. It’s a kind of magic. It’s a kind of magic. Repetition without end. The curtain never falls on everyday life as the substrate of the historical Event, which is singular and unrepeatable. In the meme, the Event becomes fractured and folded in a million little fragments scattered throughout asynchronous time. The world, as Walter Benjamin held, is only slightly, nearly imperceptibly changed after the arrival of the Messiah. Yet through it, everything becomes different, and therein lies its revolutionary thrust.


The Geometry of Grief: A Mathematician on How Fractals Can Help Us Fathom Loss and Reorient to the Ongoingness of Life



How the fractal nature of grief is both the key to understanding it and the doorway to moving through it is what mathematician Michael Frame explores in his unusual book Geometry of Grief: Reflections on Mathematics, Loss, and Life. After twenty years of working with the visionary father of fractals and another twenty years of teaching fractal geometry at Yale, Frame draws on a lifetime of loss and a lifetime of delicate attention to the details of aliveness we call beauty to interleave memoir and mathematics in an uncommon tapestry of thought, twining Borges and quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology and Islamic art, music and multiverse theory.


Queering Cognition: Extended Minds and Sociotechnologically Hybridized Gender

In the last forty years, significant developments in neuroscience, psychology, androbotic technology have been cause for major trend changes in the philosophy of mind. One such shift has been the reallocation of focus from entirely brain-centered theories of mind to more embodied, embedded, and even extended answers to the questions,what are cognitive processes and where do we find such phenomena? Given that hypotheses such as Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) Extended Mind  or Hutto’s (2006) Radical Enactivism, systematically undermine the organism-bound, internal, and static pictures of minds and allow instead for the distribution of cognitive processes among brains, bodies,and worlds, a worry that arises is that the very subject of cognitive science, the ‘cognizer’will be hopelessly opaque, its mind leaking out into the world all over the place, thereby making it impossible to rein in and properly study.

A seemingly unrelated and yet parallel trend has also taken place in feminist theorizing about the body over the last forty years. Whereas feminism of the 1970s andearly 1980s tended to view ‘the body’ as the site and matter of biological sex, while gender was a more fluid and socially constituted mode of existence, more recent feminist theory has questioned the givenness of bodies themselves. In other words, rather than seeing gender categories as manifestations of the already given sexed body, thinkers suchas Butler (2000) and Lorber (1992) argue that the very notion of a body is often a product of scientific inquiry, which is itself a product of the power structures aiming to maintain arigid binary between feminine and masculine gender roles. If the world at large plays such a constitutive role in determining who we are,then this implies that the tools we use,the language we speak, and the power relationships in which we are enmeshed are components of what it means to be embodied in any genuine sense. For thinkers like Haraway (1988) the image of the cyborg is most fitting for this new understanding of embodied subjects, as the cyborg is a coupling of machine and human. Gender and even biological sex will always be a technologically hybridized ‘monster’ consisting of matter, machine, and mind.



The Deleted City


The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a home-page. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built home-pages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free web-hosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighbourhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neighbourhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighbourhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few.

Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of "homesteaders" as the digital tenants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted. In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bit-torrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.


Emergent Information:
A Unified Theory of
Information Framework

At the dawn of the information age, a proper understanding of information and how it relates to matter and energy is of utmost importance for the survival of civilisation. Yet, attempts to reconcile information concepts underlying science and technology with those en vogue in social science, humanities, and arts are rather rare. This book offers a new approach, departing from fragmented information concepts.

Many academics refrain from undergoing unifications, as most undertakings are reductionistic. This book contends that it is the noble task of an as-yet-to-be-developed science of information to go one step in the direction of a unified theory of information without falling back into neither reduction nor anthropomorphisation.

To be able to succeed in an ambitious task like this, the book advocates the application of complex systems theory and its philosophical underpinnings. Information needs to be interpreted in terms of self-organisation to do justice to the richness of its manifestations. The way the book does so will provide the reader with a deep insight into a basic feature of our world.


The Young Never Sleep Studio Resource Library


As an extension of my ongoing archiving work, I’ve added a Resource Library page to the site. This section will showcase various kinds of printed media from my personal library, much of which directly influenced my individual and collaborative work thorugh The Young Never Sleep Studio. The archive will include links to download Hi-res files of content from the library.



Into the Metaverse: A Short History




Computational Theory of Mind




The computational theory of mind holds that the mind is a computational system that is realized (i.e. physically implemented) by neural activity in the brain.



The Museum of
Jurassic Technology


Like a coat of two colors, the Museum serves dual functions. On the one hand the Museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand the Museum serves the general public by providing the visitor a hands-on experience of "life in the Jurassic"



Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication & Information Theory

Communication is one of the most basic human needs. From smoke signals to carrier pigeons to the telephone to television, humans have always sought methods that would allow them to communicate farther, faster and more reliably. But the engineering of communication systems was always tied to the specific source and physical medium. Shannon instead asked, “Is there a grand unified theory for communication?” In a 1939 letter to his mentor, Vannevar Bush, Shannon outlined some of his initial ideas on “fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intelligence.” After working on the problem for a decade, Shannon finally published his masterpiece in 1948: “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”

Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of digital information. The field was fundamentally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s.


Constantinos Daskalakis



The theoretical computer scientist Constantinos Daskalakis has won the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for explicating core questions in game theory and machine learning.



The Eaton D.C.




Attention Deficit Disorder
Prosthetic Memory Program



Encyclopaedia on the cultural and cognitive flattening of human networked recollections by Ill-Studio and General_Index, in partnership with Slam Jam.

The A.D.D.P.M.P. Audio Guide tape is an 80-minute soundscape conceived with soundbytes, noises and music selected from the ADDPMP archives.



Time (Clock of the Heart)





Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality




Rebuild L.A.





Journal of Mathematics and the Arts



Finding a way to communicate an intuitive mathematical concept can be a very difficult problem, worthy of study in its own right. Illustration must rigorously contain the essential ideas of a mathematical abstract concept/process in necessarily concrete ways. This special issue seeks creative and innovative ways to reveal the beautiful ideas of mathematics. Of particular interest are papers that explore the inherent technical challenges. These may range from pure mathematics problems that arose in the process of translating the mathematics to the medium to the programming and engineering issues in creating the final piece.



Oculus Hand Physics Lab





Cyberfeminism Index





Poetry’s so common, hardly anyone can find it.


Catalyst


Discussion of capitalism is not off the table any longer. Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy launches with the aim of doing everything it can to promote and deepen this conversation. Our focus is, as our title suggests, to develop a theory and strategy with capitalism as its target — both in the North and in the Global South. It is an ambitious agenda, but this is a time for thinking big.







Opay Expansion



OPay started in 2018 in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and most populous country with 200 million people, and expanded into Egypt earlier this year. Its new fundraising talks come as Chinese investors, confronting a more hostile political climate in the U.S., are increasingly looking at other countries including in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.


RTFKT Studios




Cob on Wood Oakland




Outrage: The Prejudice Against
Queer Aesthetics



Electric Highway Coalition




Future Laboratory:
Retail Futures 2021




A Visual Introduction to
Machine Learning


Nike 3D Printed Footwear




Billion Seconds Institute



The Billion Seconds Institute is a lifelong learning initiative to organise a network of specialists, advisors and communities of practice to reimagine the ways we understand and shape the mental, social and environmental impacts of the digital economy.

Our aim is to help you expand and activate holistic ways of thinking for today, tomorrow and the next billion seconds.


Facebook Reality Labs


The first in a series exploring the future of human-computer interaction (HCI) — we’ll begin to unpack the 10-year vision of a contextually-aware, AI-powered interface for augmented reality (AR) glasses that can use the information you choose to share, to infer what you want to do, when you want to do it.


What’s Atheism Got to Do With It? Race, Gender and the 99%


Sikivu Hutchinson, Ph.D., is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars and Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels. She is the founder of Black Skeptics L.A. and the Women’s Leadership Project, a feminist humanist mentoring program. She was named Secular Women’s 2013 “Woman of the Year.”


The Banach-Tarsky Paradox



The Banach-Tarski paradox is a theorem in geometry and set theory which states that a 3-dimensional ball may be decomposed into finitely many pieces, which can then be reassembled in a way that yields two copies of the original ball.



Secrets of the Psychics



Magician James Randi investigates paranormal claims like knifeless surgery, faith healers and psychic services.


Snapchat



Snapchat is an American multimedia messaging app developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before they become inaccessible to their recipients.


Von Neuman Universal Constructor



John von Neumann's universal constructor is a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer. The fundamental details of the machine were published in von Neumann's book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, completed in 1966 by Arthur W. Burks after von Neumann's death. While typically not as well known as von Neumann's other work, it is regarded as foundational for automata theory, complex systems, and artificial life. Indeed, Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner considered Von Neumann's work on self-reproducing automata (together with Turing's work on computing machines) central to biological theory as well, allowing us to "discipline our thoughts about machines, both natural and artificial." Von Neumann's goal, as specified in his lectures at the University of Illinois in 1949, was to design a machine whose complexity could grow automatically akin to biological organisms under natural selection.


How To Make an Arizona Penny Can Alcohol Stove



How to make a penny can alcohol stove using Arizona tea cans.


Black to Techno



Black To Techno delves into the origins of the genre in Detroit, drawing parallels between the machine-like production lines of the city’s manufacturing heritage and the roots of black music in drum patterns and percussive variation. It features contributions from pioneering spoken-word and hip-hop group The Last Poets and Detroit DJs Stacey Hotwaxx, DJ Minx and DJ Holographic.
Exploring how the music found kindred spirit in the post-reunification Berlin of the early ’90s, the film weaves together a multi-layered narrative, structured with a nod to public access television.

WAP

The Philosophy of
Jaques Derrida



Jacques Derrida was a key philosopher of modern times who made pioneering explorations into the subtexts of our key concepts.

More Is More




Alice Walker



Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Alice Walker, describes a childhood experience and the thoughts it triggered about poverty, rage, oppression, sexism, and misogyny that has influenced her writing.


History of Land Grant Colleges



The legislative origins of today's land grant university system, including the federal mandates to provide instruction in agriculture and the mechanical arts, conduct agricultural research, and deliver knowledge and practical information to farmers and consumers. The chapter also describes the geographical dimension of the system's infrastructure by providing names and locations of land grant colleges of agriculture and of the related colleges and schools of forestry and veterinary medicine.


The Replicator: 3D Printing
with Light


Researchers have developed a new technique to 3D print entire objects in one go, by solidifying liquid resin with projected light.


Shakedown



SHAKEDOWN the film depicts a system, one that functions like a family put into motion for all of the reasons that people need a family, support financial and emotional, and a place of self-growth.  The cycle of money exchanged and passed through the world can also be a metaphor for energy and also as a vehicle to transport the viewer through the various voices in this world.


Open Controllers



This project suggests combining common industrial objects with several sensors that smartphones are equipped with, such as the gyroscope or the camera, in order to create controllers that are easy to reproduce: a sphere and a cube that transmit 3D movements, as well as a cone that can locate a source of light. These controllers work with a game specially developed for them.


Queer Theory

Queer Theory emerged from departments of literature, film, rhetoric, and critical studies in universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe during the early 1990s, exemplified and inspired by the publication of two paradigm-shifting books: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler 1990) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick 2008) (both cited under Theory). Drawing upon the social constructionist views prominent in the work of French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, Butler argued that gender is neither a natural nor a stable element of biological or social identity, but rather is constantly brought into existence through a series of performative activities: everyday gestures and actions that have the potential to reconstitute notions and practices of masculinity and femininity and thus resist normativity. Sedgwick similarly attacked foundational models of sexual identity, exploring the closet as more than merely a metaphor and revealing its omnipresence in American culture as a duplicitous social practice (the open secret) and juridical double bind (with a legal system that demands the simultaneous erasure and production of homosexuality). Sedgwick characterized two contradictory and pervasive views of homosexuality, “minoritizing” and “universalizing” discourses. Whereas the former defines homosexuals as a distinct minority, the universalizing view holds that queerness subtends all forms of sexual desire and practice, including heterosexuality.


Peer to Peer Foundation Wiki


The P2P Foundation is an international organization focused on studying, researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices in a very broad sense. This wiki is our knowledge commons. Our motto is "Together we know everything, together we have everything", i.e. pooling our resources through commons, creates prosperity for all. We document thousands of initiatives going in that direction on order to create "Hope with evidence".
The central question we address is the following:
* "How can we enable and encourage the formation of Global Cooperative Networks within the existing Global Adversarial Network? How could these bubbles form, grow, merge and eventually shift the whole civilisation towards a more cooperative generative process."


Memetics



A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.

A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model.


Lessons that Organizations and Institutions Can Learn From Nature


Complexity researcher Dr. Eric Berlow maps ecological systems to see how robust or fragile they may be, providing lessons about the mechanisms of long-term systemic success that can be applied to organizations and institutions.


Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production
& the Politics of Visibility



Essays, conversations, and archival investigations explore the paradoxes, limitations, and social ramifications of trans representation within contemporary culture. The increasing representation of trans identity throughout art and popular culture in recent years has been nothing if not paradoxical. Trans visibility is touted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with a political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people (especially trans women of color) and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law.



Foreignerrrr

DJ NIGGA FOX b2b FOREIGNER live on (the one and only) foreign hour on NTS RADIO August 22, 2019




Hush, Hush, Sweet Charolotte



Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a 1964 American psychological horror film directed and produced by Robert Aldrich. It stars Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead and Mary Astor in her final film role.



Selective Self-Presentation




The concept of selective self-presentation can be traced, in part, to Goffman (1959), who described interactions between individuals and their audience as a performance in which some traits are accentuated while others are concealed. In other words, individuals make a series of conscious decisions regarding how to self-present based on the people with whom they are interacting at a given time. Subsequent research by Schlenker (1985) suggested that context, audience, and environment are key factors driving a specific self-presentation, while Leary (1995) posited that individuals self-present in ways that conform to their audience’s values or evoke a desired response, and such self-presentations generally enhance their image.



Stripe



Stripe, Inc. provides payment software services and solutions. The Company designs and produces software to process online credit and debit card payments. Stripe serves customers worldwide.



Human Nature


From breakthrough science to the boundaries of morality, this documentary spotlights a revelation in genetic modification research known as CRISPR.


Aka Tribe



The Aka or Bayaka (also BiAka, Babenzele) are a nomadic Mbenga pygmy people.They live in southwestern Central African Republic and in northern Republic of the Congo. An ecologically diverse people, they occupy 11 different ecological zones of the Western Congo Basin. They are related to the Baka people of Cameroon, Gabon, northern Congo, and southwestern Central African Republic.


Joanie lemercier


Visual artist, climate activist




Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American author and journalist. Coates gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy.


Sarah Sitkin


Combining sculpture, photography, SFX, body art, and just plain unadorned oddity, the strange worlds suggested by her creations are as dreamlike as they are nightmarish.


AI, Ain’t I A Woman?


Poet of Code shares "AI, Ain't I A Woman " - a spoken word piece that highlights the ways in which artificial intelligence mininterprets the images of iconic black women: Oprah, Serena Williams, Michelle Obama, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Shirley Chisholm.


Evolution of the Eye



Many researchers have found the evolution of the eye attractive to study because the eye distinctively exemplifies an analogous organ found in many animal forms. Simple light detection is found in bacteria, single-celled organisms, plants and animals. Complex, image-forming eyes have evolved independently several times.


Universal Everything


Universal Everything is a global collective of digital artists, experience designers and future makers.


Depersonalization Disorder



Depersonalisation Disorder (DPD) – a condition that typically manifests as a profound and distressing feeling of estrangement from one’s own self and body, including one’s experiences, memories and thoughts. Often, depersonalisation is accompanied by derealisation, an alienation from one’s surroundings and environment. Sufferers report feeling like zombies, robots or machines, just going through the motions of their own lives.


Peppers Ghost


Pepper's ghost is an illusion technique used in the theatre, amusement parks, museums, television, and concerts. It is named after the English scientist John Henry Pepper who popularized the effect in a demonstration in 1862.


Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity



Raymond "Ray" Kurzweil (born 1948) is an American inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields as diverse as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.


Kearra Amaya Gopee: Tiger Balm



Artifact #1: Tiger Balm (detail), 2017⠀
Originally installed at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.⠀
⠀⠀
The work focus on the many facets of identity, nationality and immigration. Here we see their mother’s identity physical identity replaced with #whitenoise, reflecting the metaphorical state of visibility and invisibility often inhabited by immigrant people.


Without Sanctuary



“Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.” The book is filled only with postcards showing Black bodies being lynched — postcards found in basements and donated by white American families.


Arcologies: Visions of Earth Pt. 1



A look at possible futures for Earth that examines the concept of Arcologies: self-sufficient habitats, and under what circumstances such ideas can be practical.


Yvette’s Bridal Formal


Mirror of Yvette’s Bridal Formal, a personal favorite from the early era of online world-building.





LSD: Dream Emulator

First 30 minutes of gameplay from the exploration game LSD: Dream Emulator.



Pandrogeny
 
Pandrogeny, a term coined by the late Genesis P-Orridge, proposed this philosophy and practice as a fully integrated approach to recognize one’s own identity through art & expression in a way that expands beyond the omnipresent violence of conventional social norms.

One definition of pandrogeny as framed by Genesis P-Orridge:

“Pandrogyny is the conscious embracing of gender roles, sexual orientations, or cultural traditions so as to render the person’s original identity completely indecipherable. It is the ‘third gender’…a type of gender-neutral living being more akin to the OTHER…a pandrogyne is about making one’s life (a brief existence) into an art form. Is pandrogyny transvestism, transgendered behavior, or transsexuality? None of the above, as it turns out.”



Art & Copy

Art & Copy is a 2009 documentary film, directed by Doug Pray, about the advertising industry in the U.S. The film follows the careers of advertisers, including Hal Riney, George Lois, Mary Wells Lawrence, Dan Wieden, and Lee Clow.



How To Create A Mind

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is a non-fiction book about brains and minds, both human and artificial, by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil.  Kurzweil describes a series of thought experiments which suggest to him that the brain contains a hierarchy of pattern recognizers. Based on this he introduces his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind (PRTM).



ContraPoints

Natalie Wynn explores politics, gender, ethics, race, and philosophy on her channel ContraPoints. Wynn provides counterarguments to right-wing political argumentation, performed as various characters, often engaged in debate.





MSCHF MAG: VOL. 1 + VOL. 2

Fictions of subversion.




A Physics Theory of Life

The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics.



U.S. Patent No. 10,168,534 B2: Methods and Systems for Augmented Reality




The invention relates to methods and systems for augmented reality. The invention more particularly provides head mounted devices for the display and visualization of computer - generated information content by a wearer.




Smartphone as Lifeline: Designing Technology for a Changing World



This research study asks: How can we design data-driven technologies for the real world, not the ideal world? Source: Tactical Tech.



Dark Was The Night

A playlist of videos about the blues.




Antoine Choussat


Portfolio of Antoine Choussat, spans a decade of work and process as CD of Apple and Media Arts Lab in London and Los Angeles. I had the priviledge of working alongside Antoine during his tenure as CD at Snap.


BUFU

BUFU is By Us For Us. A project based collective interested in solidarity amongst us. Co-creating with you experimental models of organizing and making. Apractice of practicing liberation and love.



N55


N55 is a platform for  individuals and communities who want to work together, share places to live, economy, and means of production.

 


iFixit

iFixit is a wiki-based site that teaches people how to fix almost any device.




Arcosanti

The mission of the Cosanti Foundation is to explore the experiential and educational benefits of integrating Architecture and Ecology. It’s vision is to seek equitable and sustainable relationships between human activities and the Earth’s ecology.




Our House Plants


A complete guide to care for plants in the home. Includes care guides, helpful tips, problem sections, & readers personal experiences and comments.




The Venus Project

The Venus Project is a non-profit organization that presents a new socio-economic model utilizing science and technology toward social betterment to achieve a sustainable civilization of abundance for all, without exception.

  


Frekvens Hacks


3D printed components from IKEA.



Biosphere II

The Biosphere 2 facility serves as a laboratory for controlled scientific studies, an arena for scientific discovery and discussion, and a far-reaching provider of public education. Its mission is to serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching and life-long learning about Earth, its living systems, and its place in the universe.



Cal Earth Institute


Cal Earth, California Institute of Earth Art & Architecture, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to providing solutions to the human need for shelter through research, development, and education in earth architecture. Envisioning a world in which every person is empowerd to build a safe and sustainable home wiht their own hands, using the earth under their feet.



Earthship Biotecture

An Earthship is a brand of passive solar earth shelter that is made of both natural and upcycled materials such as earth-packed tires, pioneered by architect Michael Reynolds.



Atlas of Forms


Atlas of Forms is a large book of images collected by Éric Tabuchi that documents shapes found in architecture of
many kinds.



An Ambitious Project Collapsing

An incredibly well curated archive of human scale social projects.



Hakai Magazine

Hakai Magazine explores science, society,
and the environment from a coastal perspective.



Anoeses


Anoeses is a brand of premium quality leather accessories and lingerie inspired by images of desire, eroticism and fashion.




The Secret Museum of Mankind


A collection of photographs of various cultures from around the world. Taken from the 1890’s through the early 1900’s, the nearly 1,000 images document the diversity in dress, customs & lifestyle of human society.




Bibliodyssey


Thousands of pages of illustrations, books & manuscripts collected from various cultures around the world. The images range in subject from botany to religion, mythology, art, costume and more.




The Clearing

The Clearing was a vision of the future, built by Alex Hartley and Tom James, as a living, breathing encampment where people could learn how to live in the collapsing world that’s coming our way.

Collaborators in Creation





Aeon Essay: How social and physical technologies collaborate to create.

Rapid improvements in physical technologies, leading to computing and the internet, precipitated the transition of our society into the Information Age. These changes dramatically enhance our ability to communicate, coordinate and control, which are the underpinning drivers of both our physical and social technologies. The same innovations are now blurring the boundaries between social and physical technologies, what it means to be human and what it means to be machine.

Revolutions in physical technologies involve major changes in how we use matter, energy or information. The Stone, Iron and Bronze Ages were revolutions in our use of materials. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions were, in essence, energy revolutions. Each of these revolutions was transformative in its own way, but information technology revolutions arguably have a more direct impact on our social technologies than revolutions in matter or energy. This is because our social orders are ultimately products of human imagination; they are ‘imagined orders’ as the historian Noah Yuval Harari calls them in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011). Social orders are built on ideas, on knowledge and information, and depend on our abilities to store, process and transmit that information. The evolution of language itself, followed tens of thousands of years later by the development of writing, were transformative information revolutions that shaped social orders in profound and unpredictable ways. Who could have predicted that Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press would catalyse the Protestant Reformation, the invention of science, the Enlightenment, the creation of mass culture, and the development of democratic politics? Information revolutions change our cognition, our emotions and psychology, our moral values, our identities, how we interact with each other, and how we organise our societies.



3 Blue 1 Brown




3blue1brown, or 3b1b for short, is primarily a YouTube channel about discovery and creativity in math. On this site, you can find written versions of many of these lessons, often with more interactive elements sprinkled in.

Topics tend to fall into one of two categories:

• Those people might be seeking out, like linear algebra, neural networks, calculus, Fourier transforms, quantum mechanics, etc.
• Problems in math which many people may not have heard of, and which seem quite challenging at first, but where some shift in perspective makes it both doable and beautiful.

Loosely speaking, the first category motivates math by its usefulness, and the second motivates math as an art form. But of course, the line dividing these two is easily blurred.





Hello Play - The Future of Music
MAKING-OF A 360 FILM






Value-based Certification for Distributed Design





The Distributed Design Platform (DD) aims at promoting and improving the connection of makers and designers with the market through the development and recognition of the emerging field of Distributed Design. This is done by supporting creatives, their mobility and circulation of their work, providing them with international opportunities and highlighting the most outstanding talent. A recognised mechanism for highlighting creative talent is a label: a recognition that both certifies and promotes distributed design projects and their authors.

Within DD, one of the key goals is to develop a Europe-wide label that certifies and promotes talented makers and designers that represent Distributed Design principles in their work. In order to reach this goal, the DD project has dedicated a four-year study to explore potential criteria for selection, application, awarding and setting up a management structure sustainable over time. The label is intended to be an innovative approach to valorisation and recognition in response to the novelty of the field of Distributed Design.

Read the full report HERE.

WiD Bib: An Annotated Bibliography of Identity Theories



The Women in Design Bibliography, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

With sections on Feminist, Cyber-Feminist, Post-Humanist, Critical Indigenous, National Identity, Intersectionalist, Class, Critical Race, Postcolonial, Queer, Critical Disability, and Spirituality theories, an annotated bibliography of identity theories Harvard GSD believes must play a greater role in design education. The bibliography provides intentionally bite-sized excerpts rather than comprehensive texts. “It was an effort to make things accessible and digestible,” says 2019–20 cochair Fiona Kenney—“articles you could read on the bus in whatever spare time you have as a graduate student.”


Towards a Queer Futurity:
New Trans Television

Mandala


A mandala is a geometric configuration of symbols. In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of practitioners and adepts, as a spiritual guidance tool, for establishing a sacred space and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. In the Eastern religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Shintoism it is used as a map representing deities, or especially in the case of Shintoism, paradises, kami or actual shrines. A mandala generally represents the spiritual journey, starting from outside to the inner core, through layers.

In spiritual or religious process, a mandala is a period of approximately 40 days in which time the human system completes one physiological cycle.

The re-introduction of mandalas into modern Western thought is largely credited to psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. In his exploration of the unconscious through art, Jung observed the common appearance of a circle motif. He hypothesized that the circle drawings reflected the mind's inner state at the moment of creation. Familiarity with the philosophical writings of India prompted Jung to adopt the word "mandala" to describe these drawings created by himself and his patients.

Circular diagrams are often used in phylogenetics, especially for the graphical representation of phylogenetic relationships. Evolutionary trees often encompass numerous species that are conveniently shown on a circular tree, with images of the species shown on the periphery of a tree. Such diagrams have been called phylogenetic mandalas.


E8 Lattice & The “Theory of Everything”




"An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" is a physics preprint proposing a basis for a unified field theory, often referred to as "E8 Theory", which attempts to describe all known fundamental interactions in physics and to stand as a possible theory of everything. The paper was posted to the physics arXiv by Antony Garrett Lisi on November 6, 2007, and was not submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The title is a pun on the algebra used, the Lie algebra of the largest "simple", "exceptional" Lie group, E8. The paper's goal is to describe how the combined structure and dynamics of all gravitational and Standard Model particle fields are part of the E8 Lie algebra.

E8, a complex form of mathematical symmetry linked to string theory, was glimpsed in the real world for the first time, in laboratory experiments on exotic crystals.
Criticisms
The "exceptionally simple theory of everything," proposed by a surfing physicist in 2007, does not hold water, says Emory University mathematician Skip Garibaldi.

“This is an all-or-nothing kind of theory – it’s either going to be exactly right, or spectacularly wrong,” says Lisi. “I’m the first to admit this is a long shot. But it ain’t over till the LHC sings.”


Millenium Problems

In order to celebrate mathematics in the new millennium, The Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts (CMI) established seven Prize Problems. The Prizes were conceived to record some of the most difficult problems with which mathematicians were grappling at the turn of the second millennium; to elevate in the consciousness of the general public the fact that in mathematics, the frontier is still open and abounds in important unsolved problems; to emphasize the importance of working towards a solution of the deepest, most difficult problems; and to recognize achievement in mathematics of historical magnitude.

Following the decision of the Scientific Advisory Board, the Board of Directors of CMI designated a $7 million prize fund for the solutions to these problems, with $1 million allocated to the solution of each problem.


Potential Model for Physical Warp Drive



A pair of researchers at Applied Physics has created what they describe as the first general model for a warp drive, a model for a space craft that could travel faster than the speed of light, without actually breaking the laws of physics. Alexey Bobrick, and Gianni Martire have written a paper describing their ideas for a warp drive and have published it in IOP's Classical and Quantum Gravity.


Microsoft Mesh



A new mixed-reality platform powered by Azure that allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences on many kinds of devices. It will likely be a central area of devolpment as a part of the company’s planned expansion in Atlanta. Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberté appeared at Microsoft’s Ignite digital conference via holoportation, which uses 3D capture technology to beam a lifelike image of a person into a virtual scene. In the company’s first keynote experience designed entirely for mixed reality, people attending the conference from living rooms and home offices around the world could experience the show as avatars watching events unfold in a shared holographic world.


Calico Labs



Calico is a research and development company with a mission to harness advanced technologies to increase understanding of the biology that controls lifespan, with the end goal of enabling people to live longer and healthier lives.


Selvazama


Selvazama draws on essential,
human values to drive a radical
rethinking of the resort model.
In its deep commitment to inspiring
personal growth, stimulating
human connection and supporting
responsible economic development,
it is a vision rooted in place, and
grounded by a deep understanding the heritage and resources of Tulum.

The Opponent Process Theory of Color



The opponent process theory of color vision suggests that our ability to perceive color is controlled by three receptor complexes with opposing actions. These three receptor complexes are the red-green complex, the blue-yellow complex, and the black-white complex.


Black Encyclopedia of the Air



In 1968, a diverse group of historians, anthropologists, and musicians at Columbia University created the Black Identity Project. Based on the work of pioneering Africanist John Henrik Clarke, founder of the African Heritage Studies Association, and funded by the Ford Foundation, the project aimed to acquaint younger audiences, in classrooms and over the radio, with Black history and heritage. One of the outcomes of the project was the 1969 Black Encyclopedia of the Air. Designed for broadcast over Black radio networks to what contributor Alan Lomax called “the rock-and-roll audience,” it consisted of 31 “one-minute-plus” educational spots, researched by Clarke and narrated by WLIB-Harlem DJ and radio personality Jack Walker, “the Pear-Shaped Talker," who was also chairman of the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers, the Black broadcast-professional organization.


Rediscovering the Scientist


Rediscovering the Scientist (HD, 94 minutes) is an experimental animation documentary about repressed histories of science. Throughout these histories forms of oppression intersect to shed light on how and why the mainstream narrative has become what it is.

The reality is that the very foundations of “western” modern science do not belong to the west. If one only searches a little they will find that this reality has been declared and suppressed since the inception of “western” modern science. These facts may be accepted by science in passing but they are not institutionalized into its lesson plans, textbooks, and other structures of education.


Random Number Generator System



An international team of scientists has developed a system that can generate random numbers over a hundred times faster than current technologies, paving the way towards faster, cheaper, and more secure data encryption in today's digitally connected world.
Random numbers are used for a variety of purposes, such as generating data encryption keys and one-time passwords (OTPs) in everyday processes such online banking and e-commerce to shore up their security.
The system uses a laser with a special hourglass-shaped cavity to generate random patterns, which are formed by light rays reflecting and interacting with each other within the cavity. By reading the patterns, the system generates many series of random numbers at the same time.


Octavia Butler



Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction author. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, she became in 1995 the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.


Melanie Klien 



Melanie Klein was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory.


Yoshiko Jinzenji


 Textile artist Yoshiko Jinzenji bought a 400-square-meter plot of land up Mount Hiei in Kyoto to build a kitchen house. The house is an integrated suite with two kitchens, and no storage. All the materials in the house were collected by Yoshiko herself.

"This is my last gift to myself."


Cellular Automaton

A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessellation structures, and iterative arrays. Cellular automata have found application in various areas, including physics, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling.


Black Is, Black Ain’t



Marlon Riggs's final film debates Black identity, white critiques, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, colorism and cultural nationalism.


Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future


Elizabeth Kolbert opens Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future with a parable of humans’ hubristic attempts to control nature. “We’ve put our minds toward damming or diverting most of the planet’s rivers, replacing vast tracts of natural ecosystems with crops, and burning so much fossil fuel that 1 in 3 molecules of atmospheric carbon dioxide came from human action, she writes. We’ve warmed the atmosphere, raised sea levels, erased countless species and forged an uncertain future for humankind and the planet.
Our collective ingenuity got us into this mess, and Kolbert explores whether that same ingenuity can get us out. This is “a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”



Wearable Futures



In 2016, a range of commercially available mobile devices arrived on the market carrying integrated 3D Cameras capable of depth and object perception. If 3D vision technologies are as successfully adopted as their 2D predecessors, we should expect 70% of the world’s population to carry one in a decade. This project began with an interest in how this technology will not only change the way we record, but also interact with the world around us? The Sarotis Project looks beyond mobile phones and tablets, towards more intimate wearable technology futures. Where advanced vision systems and other sensor technologies are connected directly to the body through softer interfaces.


Feminist Theatre Theory & the
Three Act Structure

Dominant theatre narrative structures are inherently gendered. Feminist theatre theory maintains that the traditional ‘three-act’ structure centralises masculine subject arcs and marginalises the feminine. This single climax structure progresses the plot in a manner which validates masculine qualities, and concludes in a resolution which reifies masculine hegemony, and validates patriarchal gender division of labour, and structural misogyny.


NEON


Computationally created virtual beings, or “artificials” that look and behave like real humans, with the ability to learn new skills, form memories, and show emotions. NEON is the first venture of STAR Labs, an independent future factory of Samsung.


Andre Harrell Archive



Living digital archive to commemorate the life and work of Andre Harrell. Andre Harrell, know as the executive who bridged hip-hop and r&b, founded the influential label Uptown Records and gave breaks to some of the artists that have provided the soundtracks to the most important moments in our lives including the likes of Sean Combs, Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, Al B sure and many more.


Universal Computation


Universal computation, which rests on the principle of simulation, is one of the. foundational concepts in computer science. Thus, it is one of the main tenets of. the field that any computation that can be carried out by one general-purpose computer can also be carried out on any other general-purpose computer.


@africanceremonies




The Savage Ranch



The Savage Ranch is an international creative community located in the Southern California Desert of Temecula. Dedicated to giving visionaries, activists, and artists a chance to to create art, live, work and explore their creative fantasies in a place free from any gender & sexual discrimination.



Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review




T he Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review (‘the Review’) is a peer-reviewed publicationthat is available online through the Australian Psychological Society. Its remit is to encourage re-search that challenges the stereotypes and assumptions of pathology that have often inhered to re-search on lesbians, gay men, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) people. The aim of the Review isthus to facilitate discussion over the direction ofLGBTQ psychology both within Australia and abroad,and to provide a forum within which academics, practitioners and lay people may publish.



Country Foods


Country Foods is a Channel All About
Food,Traditional Cooking.



Neural Collapse




Neural collapse is an emergent phenomenon in deep learning that was recently discovered by Papyan, Han and Donoho.



Quibi

Quibi is an over-the-top American short-form streaming platform that generates content for viewing on mobile devices. It was founded in Los Angeles in August 2018 as NewTV by Jeffrey Katzenberg and is led by Meg Whitman, its CEO. It raised $1.75 billion from investors. It launched on April 6, 2020.


Engineering Life

Engineeringlife



When Whales and Humans Talk




Arctic people have been communicating with cetaceans for centuries—and scientists are finally taking note.


DNA Encoding

DNA digital data storage is the process of using synthesized strands of DNA to save binary data. It turns out that Deoxyribonucleic acid—the molecule that carries the genetic instructions of all known organisms—is an astoundingly good data storage device. DNA is so dense, it’s about 5 million times more efficient than existing storage devices.



American Queer


Filmmaker. Writer. Friend.



Auntie Fees Veggies:
Don’t Tell The Kids



Felicia A. O'Dell, popularly known as Auntie Fee-- was an American YouTube personality and online cooking show star, whose videos were recorded in her kitchen by her son, Tavis Hunter.


Dildo Generator

A bleeding edge HTML5/WebGL/THREE.js dildo generator for 3D printing.



Imprudence

A speculative design studio.



Kahawanu




A Sinhalese gold coinage known as the 'Kahavanu" had been in circulation in the island from about the 7th to 8th centuries AD. These coins were either gold or gold-plated. They were distinguishable in terms of value as ‘Kahawanu’, ‘Ada Kahawanu’, ‘De Aka’ and ‘Aka’. On the face of the coin there is a human figure standing on a lotus stem. The figure appears to be clad in something similar to a ‘Dhothi’. The figure’s upturned left hand is holding an object against his tilted face. Some believe that the figure is ‘Kuwera’ the God of Wealth. There is a conch and Lotus flower on the flipside of the coin.


Brainpickings: In Praise of Darkness



“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” wrote the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki in his glorious 1933 love letter to darkness, enveloped in a lament about the perils of excessive illumination. It seems like, having never quite grown out of our perennial childhood fear of the dark, at some point in the twentieth century we took Carl Jung’s poetic assertion that “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being” a little too literally and set out to illuminate darkness into nonexistence. But darkness — like silence, like solitude — belongs to that class of blessings increasingly endangered in modern life yet vitally necessary to the human spirit.


Chimp Fashion



The grass-in-ear behavior, as scientists have termed it, seems to be one of the “first times” that chimpanzees have created a tradition with no discernible purpose -- a primate fashion statement, in other words.


Don’t Waste the Reboot



 The Yak Collective is a loosely coordinated network of over 300 independent consultants, coaches, and freelancers with varied technical and creative skills. Make this “next normal” better than the last


The LevelerLeveler is a community platform that facilitates donations from people who have job security or funds to distribute to people who need it.


Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology



Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky gave the opening lecture of the course entitled Human Behavioral Biology and explains the basic premise of the course and how he aims to avoid categorical thinking.


Imvirgenmaria

Digital sex artist.


Toni Morrison: Beloved



Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War, it tells the story of a family of former slaves whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. Beloved is inspired by a true life incident involving Margaret Garner, an escaped slave from Kentucky who fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856, but was captured in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When U.S. Marshals burst into the cabin where Garner and her husband had barricaded themselves, they found that she had killed her two-year-old daughter and was attempting to kill her other children to spare them from being returned to slavery.


Alpha Go


Go, known as weiqi in China, igo in Japan, and baduk in Korea, is an abstract board game that dates back nearly 3,000 years. It’s a game of strategy played across a 19 x 19 grid; players take turns placing black and white stones to surround points on the grid and capture their opponent’s territory. Although the ruleset is very small, it creates a challenge of extraordinary depth and nuance.




The Mutualist Economy:
A New Deal for Ownership



Developed by the Berggruen Institute, this essay proposes a new model of personal and public wealth-building that can address the current crisis of inequality in the United States. Placing contemporary American wealth inequality into its historical context by tracing how federal government policies have worked to support personal and public wealth building across three periods: the First Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century, the Second Industrial Revolution of the early 20th century, and the Information and Communication Technology revolution of the late-20th century. Then suggesting a series of potential governmental policies that can help to ensure a more equitable wealth distribution in the future. This proposed “mutualist” model of political economy would allow for the large-scale diffusion of productivity gains that may follow the installation of deployment of the next wave of general-purpose technologies. This new social contract will move beyond the welfare state’s focus on insurance toward a more radical notion of shared ownership of returns on capital via universal individual capital endowments and new public investment channels that control shares in firms and intellectual property.

Maske

For over two decades, Phyllis Galembo has documented cultural and religious traditions in Africa and among the African Diaspora. Traveling widely throughout western and central Africa, and regularly to Haiti, her subjects are participants in masquerade events—traditional African ceremonies and contemporary costume parties and carnivals— who use costume, body paint, and masks to create mythic characters.

Masters of War

Odetta Sings Dylan

Lens Studio LiDAR Template

Lens Studio 3.2, which lets augmented reality creators and developers build LiDAR-powered Lenses for the new iPhone 12 Pro. 

I Want You

I Want You is the fourteenth studio album by American soul singer and songwriter Marvin Gaye. It was released on March 16, 1976, by the Motown Records-subsidiary label Tamla.

Resrouces for Godless Parents

List of freethinking, atheist parenting resources.Category: Education, Archive.

Dinotopia

Dinotopia is a series of illustrated fantasy books, created by author and illustrator James Gurney. It is set in the titular "Dinotopia", an isolated island inhabited by shipwrecked humans and sapient dinosaurs who have learned to coexist peacefully as a single symbiotic society.

Malcolm X

Archive of collected interviews, publications, speeches, documentary & news footage. 

Science Needs Fiction

Science journalist and novelist Annalee Newitz: techsploitation.com will discuss how scientists, innovators, and the rest of us benefit from the crucible of imaginative fictions.

Webinar #2: Astrobiology: Life on Earth and Beyond + Tardigrades & the Extremes of Life

An introduction to AstrobiologySpeakers : Anurup Mohanty & Jordan Fernandes

Intelexual Media

 Talks about history, sex, sociology, and pop culture. In addition to publishing three books on black history and America, Lexual promotes sexual positivity! She produces boudoir/pinup photoshoots and creates content on OnlyFans. With degrees in History from The Ohio State University, Lexual has spoken at NYU, Loyola University, and her Alma Mater on issues from black women in media to drug criminalization. 

Ecological Medicine

As the first title in the series, Ecological Medicine reflects the essence of the cultural DNA  encoded in Bioneers—biologicalpioneers. Ecological  medicine is a unifying field that embodies the recognition that human and environmental health are inseparable. Source: Bioneers

Seene

Seene enables mobile devices to locate themselves in space, map visual environments, and recreate in 3D what is seen through the camera, turning a standard smartphone into a 3D scanner without the use of additional hardware or off-device processing.

The Virtual Economy

Thorough breakdown of the virtual economy and it’s implications on the way we live and work. From L’atelier BNP Paribas, a foresight company.

The Young Never Sleep Blog

Archive of curated imagery, video and audio.

Hackteria Global Network

Hackteria is an international network of people practicing DIY (do-it-yourself) and DIWO (do-it-with-others) biology with an interest in the field of Open Source Biological Art. As a community platform hackteria tries to encourage the collaboration of scientists, hackers and artists to collaborate and test various biohacking and bioart techniques outside the official laboratories, medical and art institutions anywhere in the world.

Voyager Golden Record Full Audio

The Voyager 1 mission. The audio files "494-AAB" and "495-AAB" are parts one and two of the Golden Record, flown aboard the Voyager spacecraft. Launch date: 09/05/1977, 12:56:00 UTC Launch vehicle: Titan IIIE
Digitized, cataloged and archived by the Houston Audio Control Room, at the NASA Johnson Space Center. NASA

Singularity Hub

Singularity Hub chronicles technological progress by highlighting the breakthroughs, players, and issues shaping the future as well as supporting a global community of smart, passionate, action-oriented people who want to change the world.

Internet Archive

Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millionos of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America empowers people to learn, grow, and contribute to a diverse and better-functioning society by maximizing public access to our shared history, culture, and knowledge.

Association for Cultural Equity

The Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) was founded by Alan Lomax to explore and sustain the world's expressive traditions with humanistic commitment and scientific engagement. ACE repatriation projects are ongoing in the U.S., Spain, Italy, and the Caribbean with the goal to reconnect people with their musical roots and to revitalize musical communities.
     
  

The Global Jukebox

The Global Jukebox is an archive of sounds from around the world. A relational database with seven data sets and thousands of data points, it’s aim is marking traits of expressive culture in music, instrumentation, dance, conversing, phonating and phrasing.

Lost Kingdoms of Africa

Four-part series in which British art historian Dr Gus Casely-Hayford explores the pre-colonial history of some of Africa's most important kingdoms.

Everyday Feminism

Everyday Feminism seeks to support caring individuals and communities who see every person, including ourselves, as full human beings who deserve to be free to pursue our own happiness and meaning in life.

Black History Google Drive Library

Created and shared by Charles Preston, the Black History Month Library Google Drive Folder, provides a dense collection of resources documenting a vast breadth of events and prominent figures in Black History. 

Shop Spectrum Boutique

Spectrum Boutique is a sex-positive toy store that has a no-nonsense approach to sexuality and sexual education. 

O School

O.school is a non-judgmental resource for sexuality and dating. Helping people build sexual confidence through medically-accurate videos, articles and live streams.

Decolonizing Science Reading List

It’s the end of science as you know it.

Love Without Emergency

Writing on Trauma, Attachment, and Polyamory. 

Zooniverse

The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers — more than a million people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers.

The Kid Should See This

The Kid Should See This is an unprecedented collection of 4,500+ kid-friendly videos, curated for teachers and parents who want to share smarter, more meaningful media in the classroom and at home. In addition, TKSST includes a regular gift guide for curious minds of all ages.

Genderspectrum.org

Gender Spectrum works to create gender sensitive and inclusive environments for all children and teens.

Whores of Yore

Whores of Yore is a sex-positive, inter-disciplinary, research project and archive, dedicated to exploring the history of human sexuality and challenging shame and stigma.