knowledge – Monocultured

Pasting is the new writing. DNA wants to be free!

astrid_martin_sara

In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it. This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery.

→ Locus online, Cory Doctorow: Cheap facts and plausible premise

“We make this look really simple,” Tobias said. “For us to get here is not so simple. But how long it takes us isn’t the issue because once you’ve figured out how to make something simple, a 15-year-old kid can replicate it… That’s why we’re being so careful about [the details].”

→ Threat Level, Kim Zetter: Electronic High-Security Locks Easily Defeated at DefCon [ Previously ]

Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world. Our philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Our position is that ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge.

→ SPTNK.org

kossor_med_flugor

One team of scientists is looking to modify the bacteria in our mouths, so that instead of developing plaque, they’re eating away at it and recalcifying our teeth. An inter-institutional collaboration called SynBERC is creating “tumor-killing bacteria” that hunt and destroy tumor cells based on biological markers. However, it’s tricky to work on these sorts of things right now, because there are so many societal hangups around introducing organisms into people.

→ SEED Magazine, Greg Boustead: The biohacking hobbyist

She’s got a DNA “thermocycler” bought on eBay for $59, and an incubator made by combining a styrofoam box with a heating device meant for an iguana cage. A few months ago, she talked about her hobby on DIY Bio, a Web site frequented by biohackers, and her work was noted in New Scientist magazine.

→ Wall Street Journal, Jeanne Whalen: In attics and closets, “biohackers” discover their inner Frankenstein

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→ MrGene.com

It is an overwhelming task. “The human genome,” Rienhoff says, “is still a wilderness.” Despite all the well-publicized advances of the past two decades, precious little is known about the genetic variants that cause even the most common maladies, to say nothing of the rare, sometimes one-of-a-kind diseases that afflict children like Beatrice. As a result, up to 40 percent of special-needs kids will never receive a precise diagnosis. “It’s agonizing to have a child with a degenerative disease and not even be able to figure out what it is or what’s causing it or what the course of it will be,”

→ WIRED, Brendan I. Koerner: DIY DNA: One Father’s Attempt to Hack His Daughter’s Genetic Code

iTard

The past five years I’ve had portable audio players with me much of the time. Filled with audiobooks, podcasts and lectures there is hardly a minute where I can’t be found with earplugs. I’ve grown so accustomed to having them in that I sometimes wear them without anything playing. It’s not as if I experience phantom pains if I don’t wear them, but I hardly register their presence anymore, and the second I’m not reading I’ll start listening to Science in the city or Arts and Ideas or any of the other 40 odd podcasts I’m subscribing to.

A couple of years ago I killed my mp3 player with excessive volts. Later the same day I walked to the store and heard birds for the first time in a good while. Their chirping reminded me of the time I was wasting. Every minute I walked without headphones on was a minute I wasn’t learning stuff. I remember walking faster only to get back to some sort of content. Too broke to pay I bought an iPod on credit from the store I was working at the next day.

Of course this has nothing to do with actual learning. It’s not even a pursuit of trivia or satiation of a particular interest. It’s the idea that time ought not to be wasted and by learning stuff you become better – whatever “better” means – and becoming better is better than not becoming better.

In the end I find that much of what I listen to doesn’t stick; I’ve become a good reference for references, but don’t retain much information, nor any big picture stuff aquired through osmosis. The articles below deal with this and they are worthy of your attention if you can manage reading for longer than three minutes.

hus_stewie

klippa

He sees our distraction as a full-blown epidemic—a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought. He compares it, in fact, to smoking. “People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes,” he says, “in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.”

→ New York, Sam Anderson: In defense of distraction

His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

→ The Atlantic Online, Nicholas Carr: Is Google making us stupid?

The Internet, paradoxically, empowers both the individual and the state. On the one hand, it allows people who had no way to express themselves before, whether for political or economic reasons, an outlet to do so. The Net also makes it much easier to find out what people in other countries are thinking. On the other hand, it gives governments a better view into their citizens’ activities. There’s a danger that some people might mistake the apparent anonymity of the Net for true anonymity.

→ The Sun, Arnie Cooper: Computing the cost; Nicholas Carr on how the Internet is rewiring our brains

You are a screw; A spirally inclined plane.

The Manual tells us that in the beginning the Builder decreed six fundamental Machines. These are his six aspects, and all we do we must do with the Six. We need no other machines. I believe this with all my heart. I do. And yet sometimes I seem to intuit the existence of a seventh Machine, hovering like a blasphemous ghost just beyond apprehension. There is something wrong with me, and I don’t know what it is.

→ William Shunn: Inclination.

Although we refer to the six simple machines there is really only three – the lever, the wheel & axle, and the inclined plane. The wedge, the pulley, and the screw are modifications of the first three.

→ Balmoral Science Department: Simple Machines.

A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force. In general, they can be defined as the simplest mechanisms that use mechanical advantage (also called leverage) to multiply force. A simple machine uses a single applied force to do work against a single load force

→ Wikipedia: Simple machine.

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