Rationalizing The Great Reset: Is There More At Work Than Absolute Capitalism?

thelocal.se |  Published every two years, the WWF Living Planet Report documents the state of the Earth, including its biodiversity, ecosystems, the demand on natural resources and what that means for humans and wildlife.

And the 2016 edition shows that Swedes are currently living lifestyles that would require the equivalent of four Earths to sustain – 4.2 to be precise.

Sweden ranks alongside the likes of the USA, UAE and Canada as one of the worst countries in the report when it comes to its consumption footprint, which the WWF defines as the area used to support a defined population's consumption.

The footprint, measured in global hectares, includes the area needed to produce the materials a country consumes, and the area needed to absorb its carbon dioxide emissions.

According to the study, Sweden consumes the equivalent of 7.3 global hectares per capita. For perspective, nearby Germany consumes 5.3, Tanzania consumes 1.3, and the USA consumes 8.2.

The WWF highlighted Sweden as being a big importer of consumer goods produced by fossil fuels, particularly from China. The Nordic nation has high indirect carbon dioxide emissions as a result.

“Sweden and Swedes are very good at many things and we have come far in our conversion of energy production even if there is still a lot left to do. We have advanced technology, knowledge and understanding of sustainability issues, but we don't speak a lot about the impact of consumption of items which are produced in an unsustainable way,” Swedish WWF CEO Håkan Wirtén told news agency TT.

In order to improve its sustainability, the WWF recommended that the Swedish government should bring in a target to reduce consumption-based emissions, work out a strategy to halve Sweden's meat consumption, and ban the sale of newly produced cars which run on fossil fuels by 2025 if possible.

“A big part of the Swedish footprint comes from transport. The government should set a target for consumption-based emissions so that we can actually start to measure the emissions we cause in other ways through our imports,” the WWF's Wirtén said.

According to the WWF, Sweden's consumption footprint can be broken down as 32 percent on food, 29 percent on travel, 18 percent on goods, 12 percent on accommodation and nine percent on services.

Knowledge Engineering: Human "Intelligence" Mirrors That of Eusocial Insects

Cambridge |  The World Wide Web has had a notable impact on a variety of epistemically-relevant activities, many of which lie at the heart of the discipline of knowledge engineering. Systems like Wikipedia, for example, have altered our views regarding the acquisition of knowledge, while citizen science systems such as Galaxy Zoo have arguably transformed our approach to knowledge discovery. Other Web-based systems have highlighted the ways in which the human social environment can be used to support the development of intelligent systems, either by contributing to the provision of epistemic resources or by helping to shape the profile of machine learning. In the present paper, such systems are referred to as ‘knowledge machines’. In addition to providing an overview of the knowledge machine concept, the present paper reviews a number of issues that are associated with the scientific and philosophical study of knowledge machines. These include the potential impact of knowledge machines on the theory and practice of knowledge engineering, the role of social participation in the realization of intelligent systems, and the role of standardized, semantically enriched data formats in supporting the ad hoc assembly of special-purpose knowledge systems and knowledge processing pipelines.

Knowledge machines are a specific form of social machine that is concerned with the sociotechnical
realization of a broad range of knowledge processes. These include processes that are thetraditional focus of the discipline of knowledge engineering, for example, knowledge acquisition, knowledge modeling and the development of knowledge-based systems.

In the present paper, I have sought to provide an initial overview of the knowledge machine concept, and I have highlighted some of the ways in which the knowledge machine concept can be applied to existing areas of research. In particular, the present paper has identified a number of examples of knowledge machines (see Section 3), discussed some of the mechanisms that underlie their operation (see Section 5), and highlighted the role of Web technologies in supporting the emergence of ever-larger knowledge processing organizations (see Section 8). The paper has also highlighted a number of opportunities for collaboration between a range of disciplines. These include the disciplines of knowledge engineering, WAIS, sociology, philosophy, cognitive science, data science, and machine learning.

Given that our success as a species is, at least to some extent, predicated on our ability to manufacture, represent, communicate and exploit knowledge (see Gaines 2013), there can be little doubt about the importance and relevance of knowledge machines as a focus area for future scientific and philosophical enquiry. In addition to their ability to harness the cognitive and epistemic capabilities of the human social environment, knowledge machines provide us with a potentially important opportunity to scaffold the development of new forms of machine intelligence. Just as much of our own human intelligence may be rooted in the fact that we are born into a superbly structured and deliberately engineered environment (see Sterelny 2003), so too the next generation of synthetic intelligent systems may benefit from a rich and structured informational environment that houses the sum total of human knowledge. In this sense, knowledge machines are important not just with respect to the potential transformation of our own (human) epistemic capabilities, they are also important with respect to the attempt to create the sort of environments that enable future forms of intelligent system to press maximal benefit from the knowledge that our species has managed to create and codify.

Knowledge Engineering Review 

The Magical Technosignatures of Truly Intelligent Species

space |  Space.com: So, intelligence can be considered on a planetary scale?

Grinspoon: The basic ability to not wipe oneself out, to endure, to use your technological interaction with the world in such a way that has the possibility of the likelihood of lasting and not being temporary — that seems like a pretty good definition of intelligence. I talk about true intelligence, planetary intelligence. It's part and parcel of this notion of thinking of us as an element of a planet. And when we think in that way, then you can discriminate between one type of interaction with the planet that we would have that would not be sustainable, that would mark us as a temporary kind of entity, and another type in which we use our knowledge to integrate into planetary systems [in]some kind of long-term graceful way. That distinction seems to me a worthwhile definition of a kind of intelligence

Especially then going back to the SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence] question, because longevity is so important in the logic and the math of SETI. There may be a bifurcation or subshell [of life] that don't make this leap to this type of intelligence. The ones that do make that leap have a very long lifetime. And they're the ones that in my view are intelligent. Using your knowledge of the universe to prolong your lifetime seems like an obviously reasonable criterion [of intelligence]. If you use that criteria, then it's not obvious that we have intelligence on Earth yet, but we can certainly glimpse it.

Space.com: You also wrote that sustainable alien populations could be harder to detect. What would that mean?

Grinspoon: One possible answer to the Fermi Paradox, which asks "Where are they?" is that they're all over the place, but they're not obviously detectable in ways that we imagine they would be. Truly intelligent life may not be wasteful and profligate and highly physical. Arthur C. Clarke said that the best technology would be indistinguishable from magic. What if really highly advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature? Or is hard to distinguish.

There's the set of assumptions embedded in [the search for extraterrestrial intelligence] that the more advanced a civilization is the more energy they'll use, the more they'll expand. It's funny to think about that and realize that we're talking about this while realizing things about our own future, that there is no future in this thoughtless, cancerous expansion of material energy use. That's a dead end. So why would an advanced civilization value that? You can understand why a primitive organization would value that — there's a biological imperative that makes sense for Darwinian purposes for us to multiply as much as possible, that's how you avoid becoming extinct. But in a finite container, that's a trap. I assume that truly intelligent species would not be bound by that primitive biological imperative. Maybe intelligent life actually questions its value and realizes that quality is more important than quantity. 

I'm not claiming to know that this is true about advanced aliens because I don't think anybody can know anything about advanced aliens, but I think it's an interesting possibility. That could be why the universe isn't full of obviously advanced civilizations: there's something in their nature that makes them not obvious.

Skull and Bones Phukkery Fakery FAIL

Let me tell you what the British intelligence told me this morning. [Christopher Steele] was also an FBI asset at one point in time so he has an intelligence background, but he was paid for people that were working for Jeb Bush in order to discredit him. The democrats took over the contract. He kept adding to the dossier and using information given to him by the FSB in Russia, most of it fabricated, the more he put into the dossier, the more he got paid. So e made a sensationalist dossier, as fat as possible just like your lawyer charges you more billable hours in order to get paid more.

The Darwinian Interlude - Metagenomics

TechnologyReview |  Carl Woese published a provocative and illuminating article, “A New Biology for a New Century,” in the June 2004 issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews. His main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years, and the need for a new biology based on communities and ecosystems rather than on genes and molecules. He also raises another profoundly important question: when did Darwinian evolution begin? By Darwinian evolution he means evolution as Darwin himself understood it, based on the intense competition for survival among noninterbreeding species. He presents evidence that Darwinian evolution did not go back to the beginning of life. In early times, the process that he calls “horizontal gene transfer,” the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time. Carl Woese is the world’s greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy. Whatever he writes, even in a speculative vein, is to be taken seriously.

Woese is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, during which horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species. With its superior efficiency, it continued to prosper and to evolve separately. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became another species. And so it went on, until all life was divided into species.

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization. And now, in the last 30 years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal.

In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners, who will use gene transfer to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also, biotech games for children, played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and diversity to our fauna and flora.

Does Culture Prevent or Drive Human Evolution?

nationalhumanitiescenter |  First, some terminology and background, especially for the nonspecialist.  “Evolution” has different meanings to different scientists;  a population geneticist, for example, views evolution simply as changes in allele frequencies (that is, the frequencies of the variant forms of a gene) over time.  Such changes are usually random, reflecting the fact that not everybody leaves offspring, so by chance some alleles increase in frequency and others decrease in frequency over time.  These random fluctuations, known as genetic drift, occur more rapidly in small populations than in large ones.  Genetic drift results in loss of genetic variation within populations and increases in genetic differences among populations over time, and is countered by migration among populations, which restores genetic variation within populations and decreases genetic differences among populations.  Thus, to a population geneticist, since allele frequencies are always changing because of drift and migration, by definition evolution is always happening, and it therefore makes no sense to say that humans are no longer evolving.

But to most people who are not population geneticists, biological evolution means natural selection, in the Darwinian sense:  increase in the frequency of an inherited trait which enhances the survival and/or reproductive success of individuals with that trait, also referred to as genetic adaptation.  Often, this is expressed as a response to a change in the environment, which in turn leads to a change in those traits that confer enhanced survival/reproduction. Familiar examples of genetic adaptations that resulted in human evolution include bipedality, increased brain size, loss of body hair, and variation in skin pigmentation. To say that humans have stopped evolving, then, is to say that such inherited traits no longer matter when it comes to how humans respond to their  environment.  This is the view that I often hear:  culture acts as a barrier or a buffer between us and the environment, thereby preventing human evolution.

However, if culture is a buffer, it is an imperfect one.  For example, humans are plagued by a variety of infectious diseases, and for every success story (e.g., eradication of smallpox and polio) there are diseases that resist our efforts at finding vaccinations or cures (e.g., malaria and AIDS).  And you can be sure that if our culture is unable (or unwilling) to do what it takes to prevent or cure a disease, then genetic resistance will indeed occur and will increase in frequency.  Some classic examples of natural selection in humans involve genetic variants that increase resistance to malaria, such as sickle-cell anemia.  Genetic variants that increase resistance to AIDS have been identified, and it is a safe bet that such variants will increase in frequency if there is no cure/vaccination for AIDS – but such increase comes at the expense of individuals who do not carry such genetic variants.  Evolution in response to infectious disease is thus an ongoing story in humans.

But there is an alternative view to that of culture as a (leaky) barrier to human evolution, which can be expressed as follows:  humans have been evolving and continue to evolve, not just in spite of culture, but because of culture.  That is, cultural practices have actually caused humans to evolve, and a classic example is lactose tolerance.  The story goes as follows: lactose is the major sugar present in mammalian milk, and most mammals stop making lactase, the enzyme that digests lactose, shortly after weaning because they are never again exposed to lactose in their diet.  This, incidentally, is a nice example of the evolutionary principle of  “use it or lose it”: there is no need to continue making lactase if there is no lactose in the diet.  Some humans are weird, however, in that they retain the ability to digest lactose into adulthood.  It turns out that the frequency of this trait, known as lactose tolerance (or lactase persistence), is highly correlated with milk-drinking populations in Europe and Africa, and was apparently driven to high frequency by natural selection in those populations.  Thus, a human cultural trait – domestication of cattle, thereby providing cow’s milk as a new source of nutrition – resulted in human evolution (namely, an increase in lactose tolerance).

Privatizing Nature, Outsourcing Governance: The Economics of Extinction

theecologist |  A few weeks ago the World Wide Fund for Nature released their latest Living Planet Report.

Its findings have reverberated around the world, with the bleak news that the 3,706 wildlife populations that are actively monitored by scientists have declined by an average of 58% since 1970.
To blame? Agriculture, fisheries, mining and other human activities. The report's authors predict that this figure will reach 67% by the end of the decade.

How on earth has this happened? The answer that's often put forward is that wildlife protection laws in the 'lawless' regions of the world (meaning large swathes of Africa and Asia) are woefully inadequate.

But the true root of the problem is that nature is being monetized in order to generate profits for investors and corporations in a process that's facilitated by changes in the structure of global governance - and it's about to get much worse.

Unless we get to grips with the real issues at stake, the destruction of nature is all-but guaranteed, except in those few parts of the world that are set aside as reserves for the enjoyment of wealthy visitors.

In 2011, for example, oil, gas and mineral exports from Africa were worth US$382 billion - more than eight times the value of development aid received by African countries in that year.

This money streams through mechanisms for cross-border accounting, tax evasion and the repatriation of profits that are designed and maintained by wealthy countries; facilitated by the institutional secrecy that is built into the global financial system; and controlled by corporate elites.

In a shadow economy that flows alongside the economy we see, commercial tax dodgers and criminals shift vast amounts of money across international borders quickly, easily and largely undetected. Hundreds of billions of dollars pour into western coffers each year, from both streams, leaving little behind for those whose lands and wildlife have been plundered.
 

Have You Deuterostems Blasphemed and Cast Down Deep Time...?

theatlantic |  Late one summer night in 1949, the British archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes went out into her small back garden in north London, and lay down. She sensed the bedrock covered by its thin layer of soil, and felt the hard ground pressing her flesh against her bones. Shimmering through the leaves and out beyond the black lines of her neighbors’ chimney pots were the stars, beacons “whose light left them long before there were eyes on this planet to receive it,” as she put it in A Land (1951), her classic book of imaginative nature writing.

We are accustomed to the idea of geology and astronomy speaking the secrets of ‘deep time,’ the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it. Hawkes’s lyrical meditation mingles the intimate and the eternal, the biological and the inanimate, the domestic with a sense of deep time that is very much of its time. The state of the topsoil was a matter of genuine concern in a country wearied by wartime rationing, while land itself rises into focus just as Britain is rethinking its place in the world. But in lying down in her garden, Hawkes also lies on the far side of a fundamental boundary. A Land was written at the cusp of the Holocene; we, on the other hand, read it in the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene, or era of the human, denotes how industrial civilization has changed the Earth in ways that are comparable with deep-time processes. The planet’s carbon and nitrogen cycles, ocean chemistry and biodiversity—each one the product of millions of years of slow evolution—have been radically and permanently disrupted by human activity. The development of agriculture 10,000 years ago, and the Industrial Revolution in the middle of the 19th century, have both been proposed as start dates for the Anthropocene. But a consensus has gathered around the Great Acceleration—the sudden and dramatic jump in consumption that began around 1950, followed by a huge rise in global population, an explosion in the use of plastics, and the collapse of agricultural diversity.

tards are the only ___________ still arguing about the cause of climate change...,

flassbeck-economics |  How climate change is rapidly taking the planet apart

‘There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all.’ Muhammad Ali 

1. Introduction

Writing up articles on climate change is difficult these days. Last week alone, 46 new papers and reports were published. I am certain that there are many more. The figure only refers to the sources I usually consult. I try to read all abstracts and all articles I find interesting, but sometimes I shy away from it: it is just too depressing. According to Naomi Oreskes, a great number of climate change scientists (she interviewed most of the top 200 climate change scientists in the US) suffer from some sort of mood imbalance or mild or serious depression. It is easy to understand why: we see the climate change taking the planet apart right in front of our eyes. We also clearly see, right in front of us, what urgently needs to done to stave off global disaster on an unprecedented scale. We need carbon taxes and the reconversion of industry and energy towards zero CO2 emissions systems. This route is without any doubt technically and economically feasible, but politically it seems to be permanently locked. If we do not unlock it, the future looks bleak, not to say hopeless, for humankind.

2. Data on warming, rain bombs, storms and water vapour feedbacks

NASA recently released data showing that the planet has just seen seven straight months of not just record-breaking, but record-shattering heat (see here). We are well on track to see what will likely be the largest increase in global temperature a single year has ever seen (see here and here). The NASA data show that May was the hottest May ever recorded, as well as the fact that it crushed the previous May record by the largest margin of increase ever recorded. The same is now true for June (see here). That makes it five months in a row that the monthly record has been broken and by the largest margin ever. When record-smashing months started in February, scientists began talking about a “climate emergency.” Since then the situation has only escalated.

The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that this is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be. Changes in extremes, such as higher temperatures and increases in heavy rains and droughts are not related to climate change, they are climate change (see here).

malheur county targetted for gold and uranium mines

oregonlive |  Sprawling Malheur County could soon be in the spotlight as a mining hub -- or a battleground of uranium and gold mining interests vs. environmentalists trying to protect its lonesome sagebrush landscape.

Australian-owned Oregon Energy LLC hopes to mine 18 million pounds of yellowcake uranium from the southeastern Oregon high desert 10 miles west of McDermitt near the Oregon-Nevada boundary. The go-ahead to mine the so-called Aurora uranium deposit could bring up to 250 construction jobs to the county, followed by 150 mining jobs.

Meanwhile, Calico Resources USA Corp., a subsidiary of a Vancouver, B.C., company, may seek permits this month to chemically extract microscopic gold from a high desert butte south of Vale called Grassy Mountain, a project likely to create another 100 jobs.

The proposals will be the first real test of the 1991 chemical processing mining law passed by the Legislature in response to a debate over mining's future in Oregon, said environmentalist Larry Tuttle. The law ushered in tough new bonding requirements to weed out marginal operators and guarantee environmental cleanup.

Approval of the Grassy Mountain project could trigger a deluge of new chemical mining in Malheur County. Up to a dozen gold deposits similar to Grassy Mountain dot the high desert between the Snake River town of Huntington and Jordan Valley.

The county, sparsely populated with only 31,313 people, could use new jobs, said County Commissioner Dan Joyce. Its unemployment rate in November was 10.3 percent, compared with 9.1 percent for Oregon and 8.6 percent for the nation.

Mining companies have passed up the county in the past because of Oregon's environmentally conscious reputation, Joyce said. But this time, the sluggish local and state economies, higher mineral prices and technological advances in mining and cleanup could open a door to mining, he said.

"I'm thinking people are a lot hungrier now than they were," Joyce said.

Uranium mine plan

Oregon Energy's proposal calls for extracting ore from a mile-long, 600-foot wide, 250-foot deep open pit 10 miles west of McDermitt and 3 miles north of the Oregon-Nevada border. The mine, adjoining the former Bretz Mercury Mine, a contaminated open-pit site from the 1960s, would cost $200 million to develop and uranium extraction could continue for up to 20 years, said Oregon Energy President Lachlan Reynolds.

Plans call for the ore to be crushed and mixed with an acid solution in enclosed vats to leach out the uranium, he said. The acid would bond with the uranium and when dry become a sand-like powder called uranium oxide concentrate, or yellowcake. Yellowcake would bring $52 per pound and could fuel nuclear reactors or be processed into weapons.

Tuttle, spokesman for the Portland-based Center for Environmental Equity, foresees environmental problems.

how's that climate change working out for alaska...

2015/07/30 at 12:56:17 PM

Climate Central | Monitor wildfires with our interactive wildfires map (above). The flame icons represent wildfires currently active in the lower 48 states and Alaska. Hover over a given fire to see its name, and if you zoom in you’ll be able to see the outline of the area that’s burning — the so-called fire perimeter. If you click within the perimeter, a window pops up showing the fire’s size in acres, the amount by which the perimeter has grown or shrunk over the past 24 hours, the fraction of the fire that has been contained and other data. There’s also a link to an even more detailed report.

[follow the link to see the up-to-date map]

compulsory community labour? non-negotiable doesn't end well

Before "Greening"

After "Greening"

BBC | In the pink-streaked twilight, a river of humanity is flowing across Tigray's dusty Hawzien plain. This cracked and desiccated landscape, in Ethiopia's far north, occupies a dark corner of the global collective memory. Thirty years ago, not far from here, the BBC's Michael Buerk first alerted us to a biblical famine he described as "the closest thing to hell on earth".

Then Bob Geldof wrote Do They Know It's Christmas? - a curious question to ask of perhaps the world's most devoutly Christian people - and thereafter the name Tigray became synonymous with refugees, Western aid and misery. The Tigrayan people were depicted as exemplars of passive suffering, dependent on the goodwill of the rest of the planet just to get through the day without dying.

But here, outside the village of Abr'ha Weatsbaha, I'm seeing a different version. From all directions, streams of people are trickling into that human river. You hear them before you see them - some chatting excitedly, others singing hymns - as they converge on a viciously steep valley at the edge of the plain. They were summoned before dawn by horns, an Old Testament echo calling every able-bodied man and woman over 18 years of age to report for the first of 20 days of compulsory community labour. Their job, quite simply, is to tame the desert.

"This is how the Axumite kings got stuff done 2,000 years ago," says my guide Zablon Beyene. "With the same tools, too."

By 10 in the morning, some 3,000 people have turned up. Using picks, shovels, iron bars and their bare hands, they will turn these treacherous slopes into neat staircases of rock-walled terraces that will trap the annual rains, forcing the water to percolate into the soil rather than running off in devastating, ground-ripping flash floods.

"Sisters are doing it for themselves," says Kidane, a pick-wielding Amazon whose arched eyebrow suggests I might want to put down my camera and do some actual work. Brothers, too: from strapping, sweat-shiny youths to Ephraim, a legless old man who clearly ignored the bit about being able-bodied and sits on his stumps, rolling rocks downhill to the terrace builders.

Overseeing this extraordinary effort is 58-year-old Aba Hawi, Abr'ha Weatsbaha's community leader. Short, pot-bellied and bearded, he darts from one side of the valley to the other, barking orders into his mobile phone, slapping backs and showing the youngsters the proper way to split half-ton boulders. Rumour has it that Aba Hawi once took up arms to fight for Tigrayan independence, but these days he prefers to describe himself as "just a farmer".

Technological progress in a market economy is therefore self-terminating, and ends in collapse

The Archdruid Report | Now of course there are plenty of arguments that could be deployed against this modest proposal. For example, it could be argued that progress doesn't have to generate a rising tide of externalities. The difficulty with this argument is that externalization of costs isn't an accidental side effect of technology but an essential aspect—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Every technology is a means of externalizing some cost that would otherwise be borne by a human body. Even something as simple as a hammer takes the wear and tear that would otherwise affect the heel of your hand, let’s say, and transfers it to something else: directly, to the hammer; indirectly, to the biosphere, by way of the trees that had to be cut down to make the charcoal to smelt the iron, the plants that were shoveled aside to get the ore, and so on.

For reasons that are ultimately thermodynamic in nature, the more complex a technology becomes, the more costs it generates. In order to outcompete a simpler technology, each more complex technology has to externalize a significant proportion of its additional costs, in order to compete against the simpler technology. In the case of such contemporary hypercomplex technosystems as the internet, the process of externalizing costs has gone so far, through so many tangled interrelationships, that it’s remarkably difficult to figure out exactly who’s paying for how much of the gargantuan inputs needed to keep the thing running. This lack of transparency feeds the illusion that large systems are cheaper than small ones, by making externalities of scale look like economies of scale.

It might be argued instead that a sufficiently stringent regulatory environment, forcing economic actors to absorb all the costs of their activities instead of externalizing them onto others, would be able to stop the degradation of whole systems while still allowing technological progress to continue. The difficulty here is that increased externalization of costs is what makes progress profitable. As just noted, all other things being equal, a complex technology will on average be more expensive in real terms than a simpler technology, for the simple fact that each additional increment of complexity has to be paid for by an investment of energy and other forms of real capital.

Strip complex technologies of the subsidies that transfer some of their costs to the government, the perverse regulations that transfer some of their costs to the rest of the economy, the bad habits of environmental abuse and neglect that transfer some of their costs to the biosphere, and so on, and pretty soon you’re looking at hard economic limits to technological complexity, as people forced to pay the full sticker price for complex technologies maximize their benefits by choosing simpler, more affordable options instead. A regulatory environment sufficiently strict to keep technology from accelerating to collapse would thus bring technological progress to a halt by making it unprofitable.

california drought as seen by kids from the edge of space

The Sierra mountain range as seen from the edge of space in January of 2014. The dry basin at the bottom of the photo is Owens Lake. (Earth to Sky Calculus /January 17, 2014)

LATimes | California's water problem is so bad you can see it from the edge of space.

In the images in the above gallery, some taken at an altitude of 100,000 feet, you can see just how little snow the Sierra Nevada have this year, even though we are halfway through the winter season.

On Friday, Gov. Jerry Brown officially declared a drought emergency in the state, and asked residents to reduce their water use by at least 20%.

The simultaneously gorgeous and disturbing images were captured by a group of high school students from Bishop, Calif., who have been launching large, helium-filled balloons up into the stratosphere on a regular basis for three years.

(If you click all the way through, you will get to see an image of a balloon at the moment it popped.)

The goal of these flights is to learn more about the top of the Earth's atmosphere -- how it is affected by solar activity, and what microbes live up there, for example. But on a flight earlier this month, video cameras attached to the balloon also caught images of the Sierra and Death Valley in the midst of one of the worst droughts in the state in decades.

"We had a flight almost exactly a year ago, and at that time the mountains were almost completely covered in snow," said Amelia Phillips, 17. "In the recent images very few mountains were covered with snow. We knew we were in a drought, but it wasn't clear to us before we saw the pictures how bad it is." 

Michael White, 17, another member of the balloon-flying club called Earth to Sky Calculus, said he found the images troubling. "Given that last year was also a low snow year, it is very disconcerting," he said.

The student group is lead by Tony Phillips, an astronomer who runs the website Spaceweather.com.

In one of the images above, you will see a picture of the balloons' launch pad -- a site about 15 miles southwest of Bishop. "For those of us who have been doing these balloon flight for years that is a really striking drought photograph for us," said Phillips. "Those mountains should be covered in snow by now."

from dust-to-dust...,

telegraph | American scientists have made an unsettling discovery. Crop farming across the Prairies since the late 19th Century has caused a collapse of the soil microbia that holds the ecosystem together. 

They do not know exactly what role is played by the bacteria. It is a new research field. Nor do they know where the tipping point lies, or how easily this can be reversed. Nobody yet knows whether this is happening in other parts of the world.

A team at the University of Colorado under Noah Fierer used DNA gene technology to test the 'verrucomicrobia' in Prairie soil, contrasting tilled land with the rare pockets of ancient tallgrass found in cemeteries and reservations. The paper published in the US journal Science found that crop agriculture has "drastically altered" the biology of the land. "The soils currently found throughout the region bear little resemblance to their pre-agricultural state," it concluded.

You might say we already knew this. In fact we did not. There has never before been a metagenomic analysis of this kind and on this scale. Professor Fierer said mankind needs to watch its step. "We really know very little about one of the most productive soils on the planet, but we do know that soil microbes play a key role and we can't just keep adding fertilizers," he said.

The Colorado study has caused a stir in the soil world. It was accompanied by a sobering analysis in Science by academics from South Africa's Witwatersrand University. They fear that we are repeating the mistakes of past civilisations, over-exploiting the land until it goes beyond the point of no return, and leads to a vicious circle of famine, and then social disintegration.

the doe has a "joint genome institute" exploring uncharted reaches of the microcosmos...,

thescientist | The tree of life is dominated by microbes, but many large branches remain uncharted because scientists have been historically restricted to studying the small fraction of species that will grow in a lab. An international team of scientists has now begun to redress this bias, sequencing full genomes from single cells to bring the “uncultured majority” into view.

In total, the team identified more than 200 new microbial species belonging to 29 underrepresented or unknown lineages. And the results, published today (July 14) in Nature, were full of new metabolic abilities and genetic surprises.

“[There has been a] strong imperative to fill in the microbial tree of life,” said Philip Hugenholtz from the University of Queensland, one of the study’s leaders. “If you have an incomplete view of evolution—vastly incomplete in the case of microorganisms—you have a vastly incomplete understanding of biology.”

By sequencing DNA directly from environmental samples, geneticists have suggested that the two microbial domains of life—bacteria and archaea—include at least 60 major lineages (phyla), but just four of these account for more than 88 percent of cultivated microbes. Of the others, around half are “candidate phyla,” whose members have never been grown in lab cultures.

To fill these gaps, the team collected samples from nine diverse habitats, including industrial reactors, hot springs, and a gold mine. The researchers gravitated towards places that were low in oxygen since these tend to harbor a greater and more interesting spread of microbes than familiar sites like our bodies. 

From these samples, Tanja Woyke from the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in California isolated 9,600 individual cells and amplified the genomes of around a third of these. If any of these genomes looked like they came from new lineages, the team sequenced them completely.

They ended up with 201 full genomes representing 21 bacterial lineages and 8 archaeal ones. Some of these were candidate phyla known only by abstract codes, but the team has now given them descriptive names based on the biology of their members. For example, EM19 is now Calescamantes (“heat lovers”) because they hail from an extremely hot environment, and OD1 is now Parcubacteria (“thrifty bacteria”) for its streamlined metabolism. 

working man's death

the root of the problem

The Scientist | New research suggests that the flow of carbon through plants to underground ecosystems may be crucial to how the environment responds to climate change. Human beings have inexorably altered the world’s ecosystems. We’ve plowed and seeded more than 40 percent of the Earth’s land surfaces, introduced alien species into new territories, poured carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, disrupted natural climate cycles, and polluted aquatic ecosystems with excessive nitrogen and other contaminants.

These far-reaching changes have spurred scores of researchers to examine the impacts of human activities on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and to devise management strategies that might lessen the damage. Scientists have scoured ecosystems from the ocean’s depths to the highest mountain peaks searching for signals of global change. But only recently has this attention extended under the Earth’s surface to the soil, and the linkages between plants and belowground microbial and animal communities. This realm of research is of paramount importance because the impact of human-induced disturbances on the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems is often indirect: they tend to operate via changes aboveground that cascade belowground to the hugely complex and diverse, soil-bound biological community, driving biogeochemical processes and feeding back to the whole Earth-system.

And these studies may be overturning a commonly held view of how plants help mitigate the impacts of global warming. Indeed, it is widely thought that vegetation, especially trees, will respond to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations by growing more vigorously, and thus help to moderate climate change by locking up more carbon in their leaves, branches, and trunks. But research into the intricate dynamics occurring just below the soil surface, where carbon, nitrogen, and other elements flow through plant roots into the soil and react with the microbial and animal communities living there—including bacteria, fungi and a host of fauna—is complicating this simplistic view. In fact, some work suggests that as plant growth increases because of elevated CO2, more carbon not only flows into the plants themselves, but also exits their roots to impact the growth and activity of soil microbes. This causes a net increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gases escaping from the soil and entering the atmosphere, thus adding to anthropogenic levels.

These insights indicate that a combined plant-microbial-soil approach can lead to a more holistic understanding of the consequences of global change—including climate change—for the health and functioning of both terrestrial ecosystems and the whole Earth-system. Most importantly, the role that plant-microbial-soil interactions, and specifically carbon transfer from roots to soil, play in governing climate change and its impact on ecosystem carbon cycling is coming to light.

wetikonomy

Reality Sandwich | In Part One of this article, I contemplated a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I call malignant egophrenia and indigenous people call wetiko which is undermining the evolutionary development of our species. Wetiko/malignant egophrenia (heretofore referred to as wetiko) is nonlocal, in that it is an inner disease of the spirit, soul and psyche that explicates itself through the canvas of the outside world. Certain people, groups of people, corporate bodies, or nation-states embody and act out this psychological malady in the world. Specific situations in the world, such as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by myriad multi-national corporations, or Monsanto instituting terminator seeds as it tries to gain control of the production of the food supply, are real-life enactments, both literally and symbolically, of this self-destructive, inner process. Certain potent symbols in our shared waking dream are literally showing us this inner, vampiric dynamic, a stupefying process in which we get bled dry of what really counts.

Seen as a symbolic entity, the global financial system, for example, is the revelation of wetiko disease displayed graphically and schematically in its architecture, operations and overall design, so that anyone with a trained eye can discern the telltale signs and spore prints of this maleficent psycho-pathology getting down to business. The global economy (which can appropriately be referred to as the ‘wetikonomy'), displays the fear-based, linear logic of wetiko disease as it reduces everything to the bottom line of dollars and cents. We are living inside of a horrifying, abstract economic structure that itself is a living symbol and re-presentation of the out-of-control insanity of the wetiko virus. The global financial system is one of the most rapid vectors and pathways through which the virus of wetiko is going pandemic in our world.

The economy as an entity is a projection of the collective human psyche, but particularly of the "Big Wetikos," who hold a disproportionate power in crafting its operating system and in running its day-to-day operations in the world. In the wetikonomy, money has become indispensable for our biological survival, as well as our psychological well being and need for social prestige. This results in the drive for acquiring money becoming hardwired into the most primal centers of our lower, animal nature. This can generate a dependency that can easily lead to a treadmill that spirals downwards towards degeneracy, a true ‘rat race' in which we become addicted to chasing after ‘the buck,' as we increasingly worship Mammon (the God of the love of money; Interestingly, the esteemed economist John Maynard Keynes considered the love of money a form of mental illness). Our need for money becomes the ‘hook' through which the Big Wetikos, who control the supply and value of money, can ‘yank our leash' and manipulate humanity. To say it differently, the economy is engineered by a few, the "Big Wetikos," who then utilize their creation to manipulate the collective human psyche and in so doing influence and warp it in a wetiko-like way.

Using the global financial and monetary system as our case study, we can see and understand how the wetiko virus operates in the psyche and in the world, which are both interactive and co-creative reflections of each other. The invention of money was a breakthrough in human affairs, an innovation in which real wealth is allowed to be symbolically re-presented by something else. Money is a construct, something made up, which adds convenience in the trading of goods and services that have value. The wetiko-created fiat money system, however, is the doorway through which a deviant distortion in this co-operative process of exchanging value amongst ourselves emerges. The wetikonomy's fiat-currency is not backed by real value, but rather, is a system in which, as if by magic, money is created out of thin air. Having fallen through the rabbit hole, we now live in a world where money materializes simply by decree (fiat) of an elite cabal of Big Wetikos, who can exchange the tokens of value they have conjured up for the time and natural resources of everyone else. The wetiko-economy is basically a legitimized counterfeiting operation. The Big Wetikos use their military and police state ‘enforcement' resources to ensure that others cannot accumulate and circulate capital outside of their system. As if that isn't bad enough, in a further diabolic sleight of hand, this virtual fiat currency, backed by nothing real and having no intrinsic value in and of itself, is then equated with debt, thus making it worse than nothing. This total inversion of our concept of value itself is a glaring symbol in our midst primal screaming that there is something terribly amiss with our financial system. There is indeed something wrong with a virtual, bubble economy that is decoupled from the real economy and is dictated and manipulated by the few at the expense of the many.

sapolsky on toxoplasmosis

Google Video - Robert Sapolsky on Toxoplasmosis

It's been a minute since I touched on the issue of behavior and parasitism, in this case, human behavior and parasitism. But I saw something on the programmer's stone list last night that gave me occasion to take a quick excursion back down this rabbit hole.

Edge | TOXO [ROBERT SAPOLSKY:] In the endless sort of struggle that neurobiologists have — in terms of free will, determinism — my feeling has always been that there's not a whole lot of free will out there, and if there is, it's in the least interesting places and getting more sparse all the time. But there's a whole new realm of neuroscience which I've been thinking about, which I'm starting to do research on, that throws in another element of things going on below the surface affecting our behavior. And it's got to do with this utterly bizarre world of parasites manipulating our behavior. It turns out that this is not all that surprising. There are all sorts of parasites out there that get into some organism, and what they need to do is parasitize the organism and increase the likelihood that they, the parasite, will be fruitful and multiply, and in some cases they can manipulate the behavior of the host.

Some of these are pretty astounding. There's this barnacle that rides on the back of some crab and is able to inject estrogenic hormones into the crab if the crab is male, and at that point, the male's behavior becomes feminized. The male crab digs a hole in the sand for his eggs, except he has no eggs, but the barnacle sure does, and has just gotten this guy to build a nest for him. There are other ones where wasps parasitize caterpillars and get them to defend the wasp's nests for them. These are extraordinary examples.

The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. If you're ever pregnant, if you're ever around anyone who's pregnant, you know you immediately get skittish about cat feces, cat bedding, cat everything, because it could carry Toxo. And you do not want to get Toxoplasma into a fetal nervous system. It's a disaster.