Gobekli Tepe is MUCH Larger Than You Think It Is...,

dainst |  Since recently there has been renewed interest in the results of geophysical survey undertaken at Göbekli Tepe in the years 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2012 we put together this short overview on these works and their results – which helped to understand the extension of the Neolithic site and its monuments even in those parts of the tell not yet excavated.

Without a doubt, the most widely known features of the Göbekli Tepe archaeological site are the monumental buildings, which, due to their ‘outstanding universal value’, were recently inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Notably, since the very early years of excavations, one of the most pressing questions has been whether these structures, with their characteristic T-pillars, were restricted to certain parts of the mound (where revealed through excavation and suggesting a unique agglomeration of this particular building type) or whether they existed all over the tell.

Archaeological survey methods have changed significantly over the last years. One innovation which has dramatically changed the way field archaeologists work are ground-based physical sensing techniques (for a short introduction into this technology and its application see, e.g. here [external link]). This technology provides us with images of possible archaeological features beneath the surface without even taking a shovel to hand. In 2003, a geophysical survey was undertaken at Göbekli Tepe with the help of GGH – Solutions in Geoscience GmbH. In a first step, large parts of the tell were subjected to extensive magnetic prospection, and later selected areas were studied using georadar and geoelectric tomography.

As already noted by Klaus Schmidt in his 2003 field report which was published the same year (Schmidt 2003, 5), first results already provided a better understanding of the site and served to confirm earlier observations:

When Will the Sub-Two Hour Marathon Happen in Open Competition?

wired |  On Saturday morning in Vienna, Austria, Eliud Kipchoge, the world's finest marathoner, became the first person in history to run 26.2 miles in under two hours. His time of 1:59:40 required him to maintain an average pace of just under 4:35 per mile. That is, to put it mildly, soul-searing speed. Even a supremely fit person would struggle to run at so aggressive a clip for more than five or six minutes in a row. On Saturday, Kipchoge held it for just shy of 120.

But Kipchoge's performance will not be recognized as an official world record. The event was not an open competition; it was held for Kipchoge and Kipchoge alone. What's more, a rotating cast of pacers shielded him from wind throughout the run, and a bicycle-riding support team was on hand at all times to deliver him water and fuel. It was not so much a race, in other words, as an exhibition event designed for speed. A one-man, all-or-nothing time trial.

Viruses Modulate the Function and Evolution of All Living Things

NYTimes |  High in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, an international team of researchers set out four buckets to gather a shower of viruses falling from the sky.

Scientists have surmised there is a stream of viruses circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel. Very little is known about this realm, and that’s why the number of deposited viruses stunned the team in Spain. Each day, they calculated, some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet.

Most of the globe-trotting viruses are swept into the air by sea spray, and lesser numbers arrive in dust storms.

“Unimpeded by friction with the surface of the Earth, you can travel great distances, and so intercontinental travel is quite easy” for viruses, said Curtis Suttle, a marine virologist at the University of British Columbia. “It wouldn’t be unusual to find things swept up in Africa being deposited in North America.”

The study by Dr. Suttle and his colleagues, published earlier this year in the International Society of Microbial Ecology Journal, was the first to count the number of viruses falling onto the planet. The research, though, is not designed to study influenza or other illnesses, but to get a better sense of the “virosphere,” the world of viruses on the planet.

Generally it’s assumed these viruses originate on the planet and are swept upward, but some researchers theorize that viruses actually may originate in the atmosphere. (There is a small group of researchers who believe viruses may even have come here from outer space, an idea known as panspermia.)

Whatever the case, viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet by far. While Dr. Suttle’s team found hundreds of millions of viruses in a square meter, they counted tens of millions of bacteria in the same space.

Mostly thought of as infectious agents, viruses are much more than that. It’s hard to overstate the central role that viruses play in the world: They’re essential to everything from our immune system to our gut microbiome, to the ecosystems on land and sea, to climate regulation and the evolution of all species. Viruses contain a vast diverse array of unknown genes — and spread them to other species.

Last year, three experts called for a new initiative to better understand viral ecology, especially as the planet changes. “Viruses modulate the function and evolution of all living things,” wrote Matthew B. Sullivan of Ohio State, Joshua Weitz of Georgia Tech, and Steven W. Wilhelm of the University of Tennessee. “But to what extent remains a mystery.”

Feeling and Imagination Is No Match For Thinking and Working

WaPo |  The scenario in “Ready Player One” seems extreme, but it’s not so different from the fundamental dynamics at work between fans and corporations in the entertainment industry today. Wade and his friends, including Aech (Lena Waithe), Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Sho (Philip Zhao) and Daito (Win Morisaki), don’t love the Oasis not because it represents some ideal of independent artistry — in fact, it’s flooded with licensed versions of video game, superhero and anime characters. They love it because the game gives them the opportunity to live inside their fantasies, whether that means dressing in Buckaroo Banzai’s suit to go to a club or wandering around the Overlook Hotel from “The Shining.” And Sorrento and his fellow IOI honchos differ from contemporary entertainment executives mostly in that they aren’t very good at disguising their eagerness to monetize fans’ passions.

Though the conflict between Wade and Sorrento is meant to seem epic, there’s something strangely small-scale about the core of their disagreement. As BuzzFeed critic Alison Willmore put it on Twitter, “Ready Player One” is “a super dark story about how the world is a disaster but all its main character cares about is keeping ads out of his [massively multiplayer online role-playing game].” It’s as if “Ready Player One” were an epic movie about whether it’s okay for the streaming service Hulu to charge a few extra dollars a month to let viewers skip the 30-second spots that air a few times per episode.

While Cline’s novel and Spielberg’s adaptation both suggest that it’s probably good for people to spend some time outside of the Oasis developing their real-world relationships, neither is capable of grappling with the idea that, whoever owns it, preserving the Oasis means preserving the status quo.

If IOI wins control of the environment, spending time there may be more expensive and irritating, given the ad placements IOI hopes to sell. If Wade and his diverse group of friends win control of the Oasis, they intend to preserve it as a purer experience and run it without the abuses routinely practiced by IOI, including encouraging people to rack up debt they can’t pay off, purchasing those debts and moving the debtors into IOI labor camps.

But as bad as debt peonage is, the biggest problem with the world of “Ready Player One” isn’t that IOI is press-ganging people into spending their time in the Oasis. It’s that reality is such a hopeless mess that everyone would rather escape it. Closing the Oasis for a couple of days to force people to spend time with their actual friends and family doesn’t actually make a country defined by savage economic inequality, environmental degradation and social unrest a more appealing place to live. If Wade and his friends make the Oasis a more appealing place to spend time, saving it from becoming an ad-cluttered wasteland, they may make escape even more enticing, sapping energy from making the world habitable and enjoyable again. Tweaking the exact organic composition of a drug doesn’t make it something other than a narcotic.

(It’s also true that “Ready Player One” quietly rebukes the idea that giving women and people of color the opportunity to tell their own stories would automatically result in very different stories getting told. Aech’s race and gender don’t mean that she plays as a version of Audre Lorde; rather, her avatar is a formidable, orc-like brawler and engineer, and Wade spends much of the movie assuming she’s a man. Art3mis isn’t just a woman; her avatar is the Oasis’s version of a Cool Girl, an expert gamer who looks equally good in leather motorcycle gear or a ballgown, drives a motorcycle and is lethal with a gun.)

On a smaller scale, this dynamic is also at play in conversations about the contemporary American entertainment industry. None of this is to say that fighting to get power and opportunities in Hollywood for women, people of color, people with disabilities and members of other underrepresented communities is a worthless task. Money is valuable. Chances to decide who gets employed on a project are valuable. The ability to tell your story is valuable. But it’s possible to acknowledge all of this and to recognize that putting Kathleen Kennedy in charge of Lucasfilm or tapping Ava DuVernay to direct a $100 million adaptation of “A Wrinkle in Time” is proof that the corporate entertainment industry is very good at adapting just enough to endure in its present form. Developments such as these are preemptive reforms made by savvy companies aimed at heading off a revolt, not proof that some revolution is underway in Hollywood, much less the wider world.

Black Panther: Keeping Negroes Broke But Feeling Fabulous

CounterPunch |  Whereas the fictional rulers of Wakanda preserve their wealth by pretending to be poor, using advanced to technology to mask their vast fortune, the real Studio City tycoons behind the film have conjured their own bit of subterfuge in order to receive corporate handouts. Hence the main reason why the principal shooting for Black Panther took place in Atlanta, Georgia: tax breaks.  Over the last decade, in fact, Georgia has become known to producers as the Hollywood of the South thanks to the state government doling out more than $1 billion in tax credits to industry behemoths like Disney and Sony.  In return Georgia has become the leading runaway-production site for Hollywood films, despite few if any economic benefits.

Of course proponents say that hundreds of millions given to Hollywood studios will eventually trickle down to the population, but there’s no way of knowing since the state hasn’t developed a mechanism for evaluating its impact.  Furthermore, because these incentives typically go to productions that shoot on-location, they require little in the way of long-term investment and produce mostly temporary employment.  Even when they do beget jobs, they’re not great: after ten years of tax subsidies, for example, Georgia has added only 4,209 film jobs, just under 2 percent of the industry total, and those jobs don’t pay well: on average film-industry workers in Georgia are the lowest waged.

This is why Vicki Mayer and Tanya Goldman (following Thomas Guback) call such movie production incentives “welfare for the wealthy:” because they function “like every other bloated financial system in the U.S., moving capital between elites while workers live with exaggerated job insecurity, declining market value, and uncertain futures that make up the rest of the workforce.”

Of course revenue lost from tax credits means lower government spending in other areas like education.  And indeed since 2003, Georgia has ranked among the nation’s austerity leaders in cuts to public school funding.  As of the 2018 state budget plan, the state’s schools will have been slashed by a cumulative total of $9.2 billion.  Those cuts in turn play out in places like Atlanta, a city that currently ranks first in the US for income inequality, and where 80 percent of black school students live in areas of high poverty and 75 percent qualify for meal assistance.  Not coincidentally, it’s also a place where local rap stars like T.I.—“The King of the South”—have teamed up with corporate sponsors like Walmart to make sure those same kids who can’t eat still get to go see Black Panther.

Is it any wonder, then, why this city, located in the same state which has lost millions in tax revenues to one the most profitable industries in the US, is now obliged to its pop culture “royalty” for taking its kids to the movies?

Certainly this scenario is not out of step with a blockbuster about monarchical superheroes doing good under the specious cloak of poverty.  Nor is it out of step with a Hollywood system that delivers such high-priced spectacles on the basis of an overall political economy of regressive wealth redistribution, neoliberal governance and precarious labor.

That a billion dollar industry might capitalize on such conditions and still be considered a champion of black empowerment is telling.  Indeed it’s agreeable with a hegemonic model of identitarian wokeness that considers films about mega-rich superheroes to be progressive insofar as those superheroes (and the stars that play them) aren’t all white and male.  The fact that those same heroes emerge at a time when intensifying economic inequality is acutely affecting black communities is enough to recall Theodor Adorno’s dictum about the false promises of the Culture Industry: wherein “the idea of ‘exploiting’ the given technical possibilities, of fully utilizing the capacities for aesthetic mass consumption, is part of an economic system which refuses to utilize those same capacities when it is a question of abolishing hunger.”

Obviously, that’s not the way the film’s promoters would have it. For them, Black Panther affords “positive images” that take the form of African nobility—something most welcome at time of Trump and other noxious emitters of anti-black bigotry.  But to classify such images as racial uplift is to confuse the symbolic value of highborn black superheroes with the ostensible communities they represent.  Indeed it clouds the way we might think about the inequalities that prevent such communities from seeing the film in the first place.  As Joseph told the Wall Street Journal in the successful wake of #BlackPantherChallenge: “I understand that there are other struggles that these children have, whether housing, food or education. [But] it’s not just any movie. It’s a symbol that you can transcend in this turbulent era.”  By this logic, which assumes “representation and inclusion are essential to creating dreams for yourself,” the main thing poor black kids need is inspiration, not money.

When Feeling Fabulous Seems More Important Than Your Fixed Position...,

Guardian  |  RuPaul likes to speak in deeply heartfelt but somewhat opaque rhetorical flourishes, so I ask if he means that Drag Race has a political message about humanity.

“Yes! It doesn’t have a political agenda in terms of policies in Washington. But it has a position on identity, which is really the most political you can get. It has politics at its core, because it deals with: how do you see yourself on this planet? That’s highly political. It’s about recognising that you are God dressing up in humanity, and you could do whatever you want. That’s what us little boys who were maligned and who were ostracised figured out. It’s a totem, a constant touchstone to say, ‘Don’t take any of this shit seriously.’ It’s a big f-you. So the idea of sticking to one identity – it’s like I don’t care, I’m a shapeshifter, I’m going to fly around and use all the colours, and not brand myself with just one colour.”

Pinning him down on precisely what all of this means can be tricky, in part I think because he doesn’t want to offend anyone by explicitly acknowledging the contradiction between his playfully elastic sensibility and the militant earnestness of the transgender movement. The two couldn’t be further apart, I suggest.

“Ye-es, that’s always been the dichotomy of the trans movement versus the drag movement, you know,” he agrees carefully. “I liken it to having a currency of money, say English pounds as opposed to American dollars. I think identities are like value systems or currencies; there’s not just one. Understand the value of different currencies, and what you could do with them. That’s the place you want to be.” But to a transgender woman it’s critically important that the world recognises her fixed identity as a female. RuPaul nods uneasily. “That’s right, that’s right.”

What I can’t understand is how transgender women can enter a drag contest. Last year RuPaul’s Drag Race was widely acclaimed for featuring its first openly transgender contestant, called Peppermint – but if transgender women must be identified as female, how can they also be “men dressing up as women”?

“Well, I don’t like to call drag ‘wearing women’s clothes’. If you look around this room,” and he gestures around the hotel lobby, “she’s wearing a shirt with jeans, that one’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, right? So women don’t really dress like us. We are wearing clothes that are hyperfeminine, that represent our culture’s synthetic idea of femininity.”

In the subculture of drag you do occasionally find what are known as “bio queens” – biological women who mimic the exaggerated femininity of drag. Would RuPaul allow a biological woman to compete on the show? He hesitates. “Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture. So for men to do it, it’s really punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.”

So how can a transgender woman be a drag queen? “Mmmm. It’s an interesting area. Peppermint didn’t get breast implants until after she left our show; she was identifying as a woman, but she hadn’t really transitioned.” Would he accept a contestant who had? He hesitates again. “Probably not. You can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body. It takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing. We’ve had some girls who’ve had some injections in the face and maybe a little bit in the butt here and there, but they haven’t transitioned.”

There’s something very touching about RuPaul’s concern to stay abreast of subcultural developments and find a way to embrace even those he finds confronting. “There are certain words,” for example, “that the kids would use, that I’d be like, ‘Wait a minute, hold up now.’ But I’ve had to accept it because I understand where it comes from.” Such as? “Well, one of the things that the kids do now is they’ll say, referring to another drag queen, ‘Oh that bitch is cunt, she is pure cunt’, which means she is serving realness,” by which he means presenting herself as realistic or honest. “They say it knowing it’s shocking, knowing it’s taboo, and it’s the same way that black people use the N-word.”

Negroes in Drag...,

NewYorker |  The sixty-eight-year-old style legend Lana Turner doesn’t own a cell phone. If you wish to reach her at her home, in Hamilton Heights, you must call in the morning, when she is near her landline. For the rest of the day she is out and about, swanning around town in one of the five hundred vintage hats that she keeps in neatly stacked towers, filling her foyer and library.

It was when Turner was out, moving through the city, that the photographer Dario Calmese first saw her—they were both at church, on a Sunday. Calmese, whose father was a pastor, was immediately drawn to Turner’s radiant self-presentation, spotting her bright organza gown and jaunty felted chapeau across the pews of Abyssinian Baptist. At the time, Calmese was a graduate student at the School of Visual Arts and thought he might ask to photograph Turner’s hats for a class project. Instead, once the two met inside her brownstone, which is a living museum to her sartorial collection—she keeps her gowns and gloves encoffined in velvety tissue paper, alongside notes to herself about where she was, and who she was, when she procured each item—Calmese knew immediately that it was Turner who should be his main subject. It was only when she stepped into a strapless, pleated silk Mignon dress or a pastel-pink suit with black velvet buttons by Cosi Belle that the items in her wardrobe began to sing and reveal their stories.

Turner, who was born at Women’s Hospital, on West 110th Street, never formally worked in fashion, but said in one interview that she learned to dress by taking after her parents, who “worked as a chauffeur and a chambermaid, but by evening they would put on those formal clothes, gowns, and gloves, and, like so many other people in Harlem, would go out and socialize and define themselves by who they really were.” By day, Turner worked in real estate and in the art world, where she defined herself by her ornate attire, never leaving her apartment without a statement toque. People took notice—she was a favorite muse of the late street-fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, and the chef Marcus Samuelsson put several of Turner’s hats on display at his Harlem restaurant Red Rooster, in 2016.

As Calmese began to style Turner for these photographs, he realized that they were collaboratively creating a work about “Sunday presentation,” or about the ways in which churchgoers—particularly black women churchgoers—consistently infuse glamour and imagination into the realm of faith. As Andre Leon Talley, the editor-at-large for Vogue, writes in the catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of Calmese’s photos this month, at the Projects + Gallery, in St. Louis, Calmese’s photos capture how the black woman “who intersects her faith, her religion, and her personal style” is “reborn every single Sunday through the rituals and universal codes of deportment, carriage, and dress.”

South Africa and American Cities Have Much In Common

go-ogle |  Deindustrialization, disinvestment in urban public infrastructure, the expanding criminal justice system, and the privatization of correctional facilities create the nexus in which the school-to-prison pipeline is the logical outgrowth. The relationship between urban public schools and the criminal justice system was fostered by a variety of forces that systematically excluded black populations from participation in economic and social development. The economization of incarceration has further influenced a political environment where crime control is the reigning logic of governance of the urban poor. Residential and school segregation spatially and socially marked the urban poor and the black population was targeted and object of social ill.

De-industrialization of inner cities in the 1940's marked a new era in racial and social disparity. Facilitated and accelerated by government subsidies, the movement of resources out of urban centers was a precondition of poor urban isolation. As manufacturing jobs shifted out into the suburbs, and later abroad, employment opportunity for inner city folks dwindled. Federal subsidies such as FHA and VA facilitated suburbanization beginning in the late 1940's, creating a mass exodus of middle-income and white households. There is an established pattern of discretionary action on behalf of banks and public institutions that excluded black folks from partaking in these opportunities to move out into the suburbs. Access to superior living conditions, better funded schools, and higher-paying work was significantly limited. White flight signaled the beginning of a systemic disinvestment in public urban institutions. With homeowners now mobilized in America's suburbs, local politicians were advocating for resources that privileged their propertied constituents. Meanwhile, in cities, high unemployment rates compounded with low performing urban schools further ossified the color line. City schools as public institutions are thus situated within a larger political economy of post-industrial urban change. In Ghetto Schooling, Jean Anyon writes:

In the years between 1945 and 1960, a number of developments coincided to lay the foundation for the isolation and alienation of the urban poor that characterize our cities-and our city schools-today. the migration to cities of southern blacks fleeing poverty, segregation, inadequate education, federally subsidized suburbanization of white families and manufacturing firms leaving these same cities, federal and state policies that did not adequately address the problems festering in urban neighborhoods, corporate disinterest, and local political patronage and corruption.

Within two decades, major American cities had drastically transformed from predominantly manufacturing to white collar industry. In the early 1940's, New York's manufacturing industry employed a little over 40 percent of the total working population. By the 1960's, the vast majority of those jobs had been displaced by employment opportunities in the corporate, real estate, banking, financial, legal, and insurance industries, as well as civil service jobs in the growing bureaucracy of New York. Under the auspices of Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses, New York was transformed from an industrial working-class city to a corporate center with a booming middle-class. Investments shifted from the funding and supporting of urban infrastructure, including city schools, to financing middle-class housing and a growing service industry. Meanwhile, in 1950's New Jersey, the dispersal of manufacturing jobs from urban centers to the suburbs (and later abroad) accelerated the pace. The relocation of the manufacturing sector outside the reach of poor urban communities of color was aided by federal subsidies worth a little over 120 billion dollars. Resources for sustaining a viable community in poor areas, many of which were predominantly black or latino, were increasingly scarce. White flight and deindustrialization shifted good jobs away from them, creating a socially isolated superfluous population without the means to access white-collar jobs.

The effects of white flight and urban disinvestment would have generational reverberations, many youth of color were effectively shut out from jobs in the high-tech industry through the lack of educational preparedness available to them. Public schools in poor urban communities did little more than warehouse children in poor conditions. The institution funneled these youth into positions of subordination in the new economuy. Urban schools prepared youth for low-wage service sector jobs through a curriculum that emphasized discipline and conformity. They also pushed insubordinate youth into the juvenile justice system. City schools just did not have the adequate resources to provide a contemporary and quality education for its poor children.

Religion and Money

gurdjieffclub |  To reflect on the relationship of religion to money, there is no better starting-point than "to go beyond time." In returning to the origin of the question, we may find a grain of truth and thus turn towards the remedy for an otherwise intractable problem. Countless volumes have appeared about the Church's attitude to war and sex but very little has been written about money.

William Desmonde shows1 that in some ancient cultures money was used as a symbol to replace food in sacrificial communion rituals. Participation in the meal implied a bond of loyalty with other members of the group and signified also entering into a covenant with the deity. Each communicant received a particular portion of the sacrificial flesh corresponding to his standing in the community. When money of different denominations began to be used in place of the portions of food, the establishment of a contractual; relationship between two individuals at first retained traces of the original bond of religious loyalty among participants in the same communion, with impersonal bargaining replacing the patriarchal redistribution of foods among the brotherhood.

In any case, there is good reason to suppose that money was originally a sacred device created by religious authority to facilitate the exchange of necessities in an expanding society. It was intended to be a means of recognizing that human beings have individual property rights and at the same time that no human being or family is self- sufficient. In support of this theory, Rene Guenon states2 that coins of the ancient Celts are covered with symbols taken from Druid doctrine, implying direct intervention of the Druid priests in the monetary system.

Given the sacred origin of money, solutions to the problem of religion and money on this level can never be found. A solution is achievable only through reinstating the individual's relationship to money within the whole scale of his spiritual studies and strivings, that is, through re-educating him to regard money transactions as a measure of his individual human relationships. For, like everything existing, money is a vital part of life on the planet and is worthy of respect, of course at its proper level. True religion views everything, including money, in relation to universal laws. In showing us our dependence on each other, money acts to remind us of these laws. The only thing wrong with money is our present view of it. This is what needs to be studied and understood.

Where to begin? It stands to reason that such a program of re-education cannot begin with the masses, who, in the last analysis, are not concerned with human values except in terms of physical survival.

Nor can much be expected from the many studies of money that are being made on the psychological level, although these may serve as useful shocks to our customary unconscious attitudes towards accumulation and waste. For example, Freud noted that in the modern Western world, the language of people of different nationalities is a mirror of their typical attitude to money. Germans earn money, Italians find it, the French gain or win it, the English have it or possess it, Americans make it. Freud pointed out also a common tendency among the clergy of his time to look on money as dirty, you mustn't touch it. He detected here some similarity to their attitude to sexual relations and even hinted at a direct connection between the problems of money and sex.

MindSmash Pipes Up Into The Digital Catheter...,

endgadget |  The new replay tools offered in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds are so much more than standard video-capture technology. In fact, it isn't video capture at all -- it's data capture. The 3D replay tools allow players to zoom around the map after a match, tracking their own character, following enemies' movements, slowing down time and setting up cinematic shots of their favorite kills, all within a 1-kilometer radius of their avatar. It's filled with statistics, fresh perspectives and infinite data points to dissect. This isn't just a visual replay; it's a slice of the actual game, perfectly preserved, inviting combatants to play God.

PUBG is an ideal test case. It's a massively popular online game where up to 100 players parachute onto a map, scavenge for supplies, upgrade weapons and attempt to be the last person standing. Even though it technically came out in December, PUBG has been available in early access since March and it's picked up a considerable number of accolades -- and players -- in the process. Just last week, SteamDB reported PUBG hit 3 million concurrent players on PC, vastly outstripping its closest competitor, Dota 2, which has a record of 1.29 million simultaneous players.

Part of PUBG's success stems from developers' relentless focus on making the game fun to watch. Live streaming is now a major part of the video-game world, with sites like Twitch and YouTube Gaming growing in prominence and eSports bursting into the mainstream.

Kim says PUBG creator Brendan Greene and CEO Chang Han Kim built the idea of data-capture into the game from the beginning, and Minkonet's tech is a natural evolution of this focus. Minkonet and PUBG developers connected in late 2016 and started working together on the actual software earlier this year.

"One of their first visions was to have PUBG as not just a great game to play, but a great game to watch," Kim says. "So they were already from the very beginning focused on having PUBG as a great live streaming game; esports was also one of their sort of long-term visions."

Unintended Consequences of #MeToo Viral Weaponization

medium  |  Human civilization is made of rape. For millennia, all over the world, women have been commodified and kept as property for the purpose of receiving male reproductive fluids and raising their progeny, regardless of our will. During this time we were kept at home while men invented religion, money, economics, war, government, hierarchy, class, culture, rules, laws and traditions, including the laws of the marital bed. Civilization has been arranged so that each man receives a woman to own, with whom he may have sex whenever he wishes, between building, fighting, destroying and conquering in accordance with the will of whatever ruler happened to be running the show at the time.

This is only just now beginning to change. A woman’s will for her own sexuality is only just now becoming culturally relevant, a blink of an eye from a historical perspective.

Spousal rape was not considered a crime in all 50 states until 1993, and there are still seven states where there is a marital exception to certain sex crimes. The full anatomy of the clitoris wasn’t recognized by western science until 1998. The G-spot was given its name in the 1980s after a male gynecologist, Ernst Gräfenberg, who spent time in the 1940s studying the stimulation of the urethra. Birth control pills kill sexual desire. A third of women reported pain in their last sexual experience. There is a little-known, virtually unresearched and untreatable condition called vulvodynia that causes such intense nerve pain that some women consider suicide, and it is more common than breast cancer.

Just sit with that. A third of women reported pain in their last sexual experience. They didn’t just not enjoy it, they gritted their teeth through it. Why? Because for a myriad of reasons, we don’t feel like we have a choice. That’s rape culture.

Given that interest in a woman’s will for her own sexuality is just barely beginning to enter social consciousness on a large scale, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it is only just now in 2017 that sharing our experiences with rape culture is beginning to go mainstream.

Rape dynamics are woven into the fabric of society far more pervasively than anyone realizes, and by pulling this thread, the whole mad tapestry will necessarily unravel. This can only be a good thing.

Our species is at a crossroads. It’s become self-evident that we’re about to either collectively experience some kind of enormous transformation, or go the way of the dinosaur. Parallel to our unprecedented ability to network and share information and ideas with our fellow humans all around the globe is a death march toward either ecosystemic disaster or nuclear holocaust which so far shows no signs of slowing down, and one of these two factors will necessarily win out at some point in the near future. Thus far our attempts to shift trajectories have failed spectacularly. If something is going to save us, it’s going to come from way out of left field.

Women everywhere feel the significance of the #MeToo phenomenon. A lot of us are scared to say anything about it for fear of hurting the feelings of the men we love, fear of retribution, and fear of being eaten alive by the intimidating, debate-culture defenders of patriarchy, but there’s a widespread sense that this thing is much bigger than it seems. Some leaders of conventional feminist thought have been speculating about some kind of progressive political upheaval, but in my opinion this is infinitely more revolutionary than that. We are about to experience a plunge into completely unknown and uncharted territory.

Is Something Wrong With These Interwebs?

medium  |  Here are a few things which are disturbing me:

The first is the level of horror and violence on display. Some of the times it’s troll-y gross-out stuff; most of the time it seems deeper, and more unconscious than that. The internet has a way of amplifying and enabling many of our latent desires; in fact, it’s what it seems to do best. I spend a lot of time arguing for this tendency, with regards to human sexual freedom, individual identity, and other issues. Here, and overwhelmingly it sometimes feels, that tendency is itself a violent and destructive one.

The second is the levels of exploitation, not of children because they are children but of children because they are powerless. Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. 

Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.

Many of these latest examples confound any attempt to argue that nobody is actually watching these videos, that these are all bots. There are humans in the loop here, even if only on the production side, and I’m pretty worried about them too.

I’ve written enough, too much, but I feel like I actually need to justify all this raving about violence and abuse and automated systems with an example that sums it up. Maybe after everything I’ve said you won’t think it’s so bad. I don’t know what to think any more.

This video, BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video, contains all of the elements we’ve covered above, and takes them to another level. Familiar characters, nursery tropes, keyword salad, full automation, violence, and the very stuff of kids’ worst dreams. And of course there are vast, vast numbers of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, churned out at the rate of hundreds of new videos every week. Industrialised nightmare production.

For the final time: There is more violent and more sexual content like this available. I’m not going to link to it. I don’t believe in traumatising other people, but it’s necessary to keep stressing it, and not dismiss the psychological effect on children of things which aren’t overtly disturbing to adults, just incredibly dark and weird.

A friend who works in digital video described to me what it would take to make something like this: a small studio of people (half a dozen, maybe more) making high volumes of low quality content to reap ad revenue by tripping certain requirements of the system (length in particular seems to be a factor). According to my friend, online kids’ content is one of the few alternative ways of making money from 3D animation because the aesthetic standards are lower and independent production can profit through scale. It uses existing and easily available content (such as character models and motion-capture libraries) and it can be repeated and revised endlessly and mostly meaninglessly because the algorithms don’t discriminate — and neither do the kids.

These videos, wherever they are made, however they come to be made, and whatever their conscious intention (i.e. to accumulate ad revenue) are feeding upon a system which was consciously intended to show videos to children for profit. The unconsciously-generated, emergent outcomes of that are all over the place.

To expose children to this content is abuse. We’re not talking about the debatable but undoubtedly real effects of film or videogame violence on teenagers, or the effects of pornography or extreme images on young minds, which were alluded to in my opening description of my own teenage internet use. Those are important debates, but they’re not what is being discussed here. What we’re talking about is very young children, effectively from birth, being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal.  Fist tap Dale.

Trump Trains Elite Monkey Brains How to Perform and Mainstream Dominance

theintercept |  As the controversy over protests during the national anthem grew, President Donald Trump denounced NFL owners as being “afraid of the players,” a state of affairs that he called “disgraceful”. The lament fits a pattern in Trump’s war with the NFL, which has routinely been characterized as the president attacking African-American athletes, when, in fact, Trump’s immediate target is one much closer to him: the class and race traitors who make up the owners of the NFL.

One of the most haunting aspects of Trump’s battle with the players has been his consistent refusal to talk directly to or with them. His complaint, that they are refusing to stand during the national anthem, has been directed at the owners, a way to offer up an extra level of disrespect to the players. That refusal continued this week, as Trump spoke directly to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, reminding him of NFL rules he said applied to players around the anthem.

When Trump sparked the national debate, he did so by going right over the heads of the players. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Trump bellowed at a rally in Alabama in September.

Trump went on: “You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it, they’ll be the most popular person in this country.” 

For Trump, it comes back to being popular — with the right audience. But if that carrot isn’t enough, he has the stick of tax and antitrust policy to wield at the owners. 

Like everything else with Trump, his war with the NFL is layered with motivations ranging from the base to the financial to the personal. It hints at his own history with the NFL, his particular vision of rule, and ultimately, a sense of betrayal that has set the league on a collision course with not just Trump, but his supporters as well. 

Trump has commodified a vision of ownership that demands that bosses project complete dominance lest they become traitors to both their class and their nation — and, to the extent that Trump sees himself embodying the national spirit, they are at war with him personally. Through his so-called populist campaign and his TV show “The Apprentice,” he’s democratized that vision, transforming many of his supporters not into would-be apprentices hoping to learn from the great man, but mini-moguls with their own innate, incontrovertible knowledge about who should be “fired” and under what circumstances. Every viewer a king.

Trans-Turing Trains Silly Monkey Brains

hackernoon  |  At the heart of digesting online information is the evolutionary propensity to mine all input as social cues or signals. In the case of the “trending news,” Facebook was presenting a manufactured image of the social world which more closely resembles a world which the curators would approve of, than it does the actual world we live in. This manufactured world is then presented as social reality. No matter what side you come down on, this is no trivial thing.

We humans are built to use attention as a cue for status. We then use status as a signal of mastery for which we are constantly on the lookout to apprentice under. Joseph Henrich and Francisco J. Gil-White, while at the Universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania respectively, describe a theory of “information goods.” They show that humans, unlike chimpanzees, use “relative prestige” to assign status, and then use that status as a signal of what to believe and emulate.

The challenge is that this evolutionary mechanism was developed long before mass media. It developed through direct observation. The hunter getting the most attention is likely the fellow who most often comes back with the biggest kills. Thus, trusting the attention of others to point you in the right way was adaptively useful. The Internet is particularly adept at scrambling these signals. We are built to believe that seeing others give their attention to somebody, or something, signals the ability for that someone to teach you something useful. Therefore we implicitly connect attention with prestige and prestige with expertise.

Granny Goodness President Trump, who has an objectively terrible track record with the truth, provides one example of this. A giant swath of the nation, I assume mostly reasonable and well-adjusted people, describe her him as trustworthy, despite what the other half, which I assume are also mostly reasonable and well-adjusted people, feel is obvious and damning evidence to the contrary. Her His supporters are surrounded, physically or digitally, by others who are paying attention to her him. Therefore, some basic, even primordial, part of their brain signals to them that this is someone who deserves attention, emulation, and trust. They believe in him, at least in part, because of his ability to attract attention signals of trustworthiness. When each of President Trump’s tweets, to his 40 million followers, and now to the whole world, receives hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets, we shouldn’t be surprised that he didn’t need to actually do anything to earn that trust. He just needed to attract attention to himself, and then claim that he deserves the trust. The attention supports claim.

Western Elites Dominated By Filthy-Rich Moral Degenerates

bostonglobe |  While most of us were ignoring the long anti-elite crusade that began as a cynical attempt to paint opposing politicians as arrogant East Coast dilettantes, it morphed into a far more dangerous jihad against expertise at any level of government. To put it in Gilligan’s Island terms, they have taken the Professor and repackaged him as Thurston Howell III.

That helps explain Trump’s response to Vladimir Putin’s expulsion this summer of hundreds of American diplomats and embassy staff from Russia. Bizarrely, the American president thanked the Russian dictator, saying these professionals aren’t needed anyway and the expulsion will save the United States money. (Wrong on both counts. Career foreign-service officers are entitled by law to reassignment.) Yet somehow Trump faced absolutely no blowback from a Republican Party that historically viewed Russia as America’s most dangerous foe. Maybe the diplomats don’t like cheeseburgers.

Of course, the establishment elites are not blameless. Over the years, many of them made confident predictions, about everything from free trade agreements to Middle East strategy, that turned out to be disastrously wrong. After all, it wasn’t just Trump who brilliantly tapped into anti-elite sentiment in the 2016 campaign and turned it into electoral success. So did Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist who managed to win 23 primaries and caucuses and 13.2 million votes. 

Still, we have reached a dangerous point when an administration whose party controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and two-thirds of the state legislatures can scapegoat thousands of highly experienced government scientists, diplomats, and intelligence specialists, tossing them all into a basket of deplored elites.

It’s time to wage a new war in defense of expertise in government. And if it’s too late to prevent the word elite from being used as a weapon, it’s time to embrace it and redefine it as something good.

U.S. Justice System Ignores Elite Criminality

libertyblitzkrieg  |  Two very important articles published in recent days serve to once again highlight America’s metastasizing elite criminality problem. A problem which our justice system simply refuses to address.

This corrupt two-tier justice system is something I’ve been focused on from the very beginning of my writings, and I continue to see it as a civilization-level threat for this country if not aggressively addressed and confronted in the very near future.

The two articles in question focus on different aspects of untouchable elite culture in America.

The first relates to the continued fraud pervasive in America’s largest financial institution, while the second covers a thirty year history of predatory sexual behavior by one of Hollywood’s biggest moguls, Harvey Weinstein. 

In both cases, countless people have known and reported on repeated abuses perpetrated by both the institution and the man, yet the U.S. justice system and the vast majority of “elite” culture happily help shield them from justice. Predators are predators, and elite predators are far more dangerous to society that your average street crook, so why does our justice situation deal with it in the exact opposite way?

Let’s start with the blockbuster article published in The Nation by the always informative David Dayen. The article is titled, How America’s Biggest Bank Paid Its Fine for the 2008 Mortgage Crisis—With Phony Mortgages!

Here’s just brief excerpt:

Trans-Turing Machines

bigsmartdata |  From the Poised Realm, the embodiment of Trans-Turing Systems, as a real invention, doth flow. Of course you are familiar with the Turing Machine: the theoretical paper tape compute engine to which all modern processors are obliged to worship every Sunday…you are, of course, familiar with the Turing Machine.

The Turing Machine

The work of Alan Turing is the rock from which the quest for a congruent theoretical computer science was launched. Totally awesome quantum computing heavy Scott Aaronson has written that when it comes to AI, we can divide everything that’s been said about it into two categories: the 70% that was covered in Turing’s 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and the remaining 30% that has followed in the decades since then. 

Turing Machine = Foundation of Computer Science 




So whoa — a Trans-Turing System? What?? I must know more!

That was the third thing that drove me to Tucson. I had to ask Kauffman what he meant — what he Tsaw, what he imagined. I found a description in the patent that Kauffman, et al, filed in 2014:

 58

"Further disclosed herein is a Trans-Turing machine that includes a plurality of nodes, each node comprising at least one quantum degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one quantum degree of freedom in another node and at least one classical degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one classical degree of freedom in another node, wherein the nodes are configured such that the quantum degrees of freedom decohere to classicity and thereby alter the classical degrees of freedom, which then alter the decoherence rate of remaining quantum degrees of freedom; at least one input signal generator configured to produce an input signal that recoheres classical degrees of freedom to quantum degrees of freedom; and a detector configured to receive quantum or classical output signals from the nodes."

Sweet. I got it. Quantum computing nodes working in tandem with classical compute (Turing Machine) systems and what emerges is a Trans-Turing Machine, not constrained nor otherwise entailed by a bothersome set of NP-complete limits. Polynomial hierarchy collapse ensues, at long last P = NP, and we are full throttle to ride warp drive engines to the stars! Maybe? Maybe. Maybe not.

I had to ask Kauffman.

After I spotted him at the outdoor mixer on Thursday night, after I got over my fanboy flutters, after I introduced myself, chatted with him for a bit about his new book and how much I liked it, after I explained my own thoughts from my field in computer science, and how his book from a decade and a half earlier had so deeply influenced me, I did finally ask. 

“So how do we build the Trans-Turnig Machine?”

A wry smile crossed his face. His eyes lit. For a moment he stopped being the intellectual giant I had come to revere, and revealed the mischievous, inquisitive, childlike spirit that must have driven him his entire life.

“I have no idea,” he said replied with a grin.

I was all satisfied. I knew he did not mean that he could not conceive of one, nor he did mean that he could not describe one, nor not define the attributes it might require, nor not imagine how it might function. What he meant was we still don’t know enough about quantum computing to imbue an instrument of our own creation with something akin to consciousness — whatever that means.

Today we all harvest the ample fruits from the first baby steps into the Network Age. We are still painting a digital patina over the planet. More stuff soon will think. We are clearly well into the age of pervasive computing, but computing is not yet ubiquitous, though soon it will be. Soon — within a decade — everything will be engineered to connect with everything, and almost all those systems are and will be awesome Turing Machines, programmable systems all, that will link us all together in a transcendent fine-grained meshed digital fabric of increasing value. Yet on the fringes, there is quantum computing, playfully peeking through from behind the classical physics curtain. And therein lies the unpredictable. It could be that Here There Be Monsters. Or not. That’s the beauty and the bizarre of where we are. Both terror and elation are on the rise, though neither are as appropriate nor as compelling as is the raw, robust curiosity that drives us ever forward.

Is the ineffable thing to come a D-Wave progeny? Maybe. Will Scott Aaronson explain and extend the exploding adjacent possible? Probably. Did Kauffman and Hameroff lead us to the brink? Absolutely. And from the wily Trans-Turing Machine, will Machine Consciousness one day emerge … whatever that means? 

I have no idea.

Poised Realm Patent

google | CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

• [0001]
  This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Nos. 61/367,781, filed Jul. 26, 2010; 61/367,779, filed Jul. 26, 2010; 61/416,723, filed Nov. 23, 2010; 61/420,720, filed Dec. 7, 2010; and 61/431,420, filed Jan. 10, 2011, all of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
BACKGROUND
• [0002]
  1. Field of the Invention
• [0003]
  The present invention relates to systems and uses of systems operating between fully quantum coherent and fully classical states. Non-limiting applications include drug discovery, computers, and artificial intelligence.
• [0004]
  2. Background Description
• [0005]
  Many physical systems having quantum degrees of freedom quickly decohere to classicity for all practical purposes. Thus, many designed systems consider only classical behaviors. One example is in the field of drug discovery where traditional approaches to drug design considers the lock-and-key fitting of a molecule into an enzyme or receptor. Other designed systems are carefully setup to maintain full quantum coherence, for example, the qubits in a quantum computer. However, recent discoveries have indicated several systems in nature that have relatively slow decoherence. Birds are able to see magnetic field lines due to a quantum coherent chemical reaction in their retina. Light harvesting molecules are able to maintain quantum coherent electron transport for times much longer than the expected coherence time at room temperatures. The existence of such cases demonstrates that quantum coherence can exist at room temperature and at the presence of water bath and evolution can ‘design’ quantum coherent structures to play certain biological roles. Thus, there is a need for new systems that utilize the unique properties that exist between full quantum coherence and classicity
  SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
  • [0006]
    Disclosed herein are various methods of classifying the state of a system, such as a molecule interacting with its environment, in terms of its degree of order, its degree of coherence, and/or its rate of coherence decay. Some embodiments include classifying only a single one of these variables whereas other embodiments include classifying two or all three of the variables. These methods include classifying the system in the course of creating systems that exist and/or operate at a specific point or region of a classification space described the variables discussed above and all practical outcomes of such creation.
  • [0007]
    Disclosed herein is a quantum reservoir computer that includes a plurality of nodes, each node comprising at least one quantum degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one quantum degree of freedom in each other node; at least one input signal generator configured to produce at least one time-varying input signal that couples to the quantum degree of freedom; and a detector configured to receive a plurality of time-varying output signals that couple to the quantum degree of freedom.
  • [0008]
    Also disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the biological target; determining the energy level spacing distribution of a quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; comparing the energy level spacing distribution to at least one pre-determined reference function; and selecting a second subset of molecules from the first subset as drug candidates based on the comparison.

  • 0009]
    Further disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the biological target; determining the energy level spacing distribution of a quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; conducting an in vitro or in vivo assay for biological activity on each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; correlating the energy level spacing distribution with activity determined from the in vitro or in vivo assay; determining the energy level spacing distributions of a quantum degree of freedom in a new set of candidate molecules; comparing the energy level spacing distributions of the new set of candidate molecules with energy level spacing distributions that correlate with biological activity; and select as drug candidates from the new set of candidate molecules those molecules whose energy level spacing distributions exhibit a pre-determined level of similarity to the energy level spacing distributions that correlate with biological activity.
  • [0010]
    Further disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the biological target; measuring decoherence decay of a quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; comparing the decoherence decay to at least one pre-determined reference function; and selecting a second subset of molecules from the first subset as drug candidates based on the comparison.

Gabriel Kron: Negative Resistance

cheniere |  At the time of his death, Gabriel Kron was arguably the greatest electrical scientist ever produced by the United States.

It appears that the availability of this Heaviside energy component surrounding any portion of the circuit may be the long sought secret to Gabriel Kron's “open path” that enabled him to produce a true negative resistor in the 1930s, as the chief scientist for General Electric on the U.S. Navy contract for the Network Analyzer at Stanford University.  Kron was never permitted to release how he made his negative resistor, but did state that, when placed in the Network Analyzer, the generator could be disconnected because the negative resistor would power the circuit.  Since a negative resistor converges surrounding energy and diverges it into the circuit, it appears that Kron's negative resistor gathered energy from the Heaviside component of energy flow as an “open path” flow of energy — connecting together the local vicinities of any two separated circuit components — that had been discarded by previous electrodynamicists following Lorentz.  Hence Kron referred to it as the “open path.”  Particularly see Gabriel Kron, “The frustrating search for a geometrical model of electrodynamic networks,” circa 1962.  We quote:

“...the missing concept of "open-paths" (the dual of "closed-paths") was discovered, in which currents could be made to flow in branches that lie between any set of two nodes.  (Previously — following Maxwell — engineers tied all of their open-paths to a single datum point, the 'ground').  That discovery of open-paths established a second rectangular transformation matrix... which created 'lamellar' currents...” 
“A network with the simultaneous presence of both closed and open paths was the answer to the author's years-long search.”

A true negative resistor appears to have been developed by the renowned Gabriel Kron, who was never permitted to reveal its construction or specifically reveal its development.  For an oblique statement of his negative resistor success, see Gabriel Kron, “Numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations by means of equivalent circuits,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 16, Mar. 1945a, p. 173.  Quoting:

“When only positive and negative real numbers exist, it is customary to replace a positive resistance by an inductance and a negative resistance by a capacitor (since none or only a few negative resistances exist on practical network analyzers).” 

Apparently Kron was required to insert the words “none or” in that statement.  See also Gabriel Kron, “Electric circuit models of the Schrödinger equation,” Phys. Rev. 67(1-2), Jan. 1 and 15, 1945, p. 39.  We quote:

“Although negative resistances are available for use with a network analyzer,…”. 

Here the introductory clause states in rather certain terms that negative resistors were available for use on the network analyzer, and Kron slipped this one through the censors.  It may be of interest that Kron was a mentor of Sweet, who was his protégé.  Sweet worked for the same company, but not on the Network Analyzer project.  However, he almost certainly  knew the secret of Kron's “open path” discovery and his negative resistor.

---

Pooh-poohing the Kron negative resistor is just sheer naïveté.  Kron was one of the greatest electrical scientists of all time, and applied full general relativity to rotating machines, electrical circuits and generators, etc. 

Simply go check his papers in the literature.  Even today, there are few electrodynamicists really able to fully comprehend his advanced work.  And his direct quotations from his own published technical papers in the literature leave no doubt he had made a negative resistor.  Further, other scientists have commented on Kron's discovery of the “open path” connecting any two points in a circuit, and usable to provide energy transfer at will.

The mechanism by which he did this is what Kron was never allowed to reveal.