Once an IoT device is shipped, its manufacturer typically has very little information about what is going on with it in the field. This creates a black hole. A huge one, if you consider that there are
Q&A August 8, 2022 The biochemist Nick Lane thinks life first evolved in hydrothermal vents where precursors of metabolism appeared before genetic information. His ideas could lead us to think differe
astrophysics May 12, 2022 In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope released a historic image of a supermassive black hole in another galaxy. The follow-up — an image of Sagittarius A* — shows it shimmerin
The Covid 19 pandemic has underscored the perils with efficiency maximisation at all costs and the importance of resilience. The excessive concentration of manufacturing, especially of critical Pharma
Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and cap
The following is a short course to prepare us to become holograms, which is to say to develop and practice The Hologram as a method of organized social care and collective liberation. In a world where
This Introduction gives an overview of the main questions and concerns voiced by the expression ‘pirate care’, which also the gathering principle for bringing together the different knowledges, techni
This is a bloggified version of the talk that I gave at GUADEC 2017. In converting it into print, it has been elaborated and refined. When I first got involved in GNOME, one of the things that struck
by Thomas Swann 20th April 2021 Viable Systems for Mutual Aid Almost a year ago, writing for this blog, I argued that the mutual aid networks that emerged around the world in response to Covid-19 coul
The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quant
A hundred years ago, the Japanese scientist Y. Shirai published a mysterious finding: When Shirai transplanted tumor tissue into a mouse’s body, the tissue was destroyed by its immune system. But when
Share Comment K Allado-McDowell had been working with artificial intelligence for years—they established the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google AI—when the pandemic prompted a new, mor
Bran Castle, Romania This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself drifting through soc
James C Scott is arguably the most perceptive of social science scholars, belonging to the highest standards of cross-disciplinary enquiry. He's been a trenchant critique of the modern state for over
Understanding White Privilege as Process I borrowed the title for this 2012 blog-post on whiteness from Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse via Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Global Transformations : Tro
nonlinear