SpaceCollective: meganmay

SpaceCollective: meganmay http://spacecollective.org/meganmay Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:56:26 +0000 http://spacecollective.org/meganmay en Growing up at the Singularity Summit http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/8012/Growing-up-at-the-Singularity-Summit http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/8012/Growing-up-at-the-Singularity-Summit Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:56:26 +0000 meganmay 8012 Coming of age with a familial strain of futurism, I have been carrying on the tradition quite naturally. Cobbling together bits and pieces of breakthroughs and speculation I've formed my own personalized worldview, and I've undoubtedly taken some bits and pieces of Singularity theory with me. In spite of the close proximity between Space Collective and many of the ideas being discussed at the Singularity Institute, no one from the "staff" has ever ventured out to a formal conference. So I paid a visit to the Singularity Summit in early October to see what I'd been missing all these years. Given that the future is a multifaceted frontier, and that my background is in "the future of everything," I was expecting to meet a very diverse crowd, and I did. But as I continued asking questions, I realized that in this community two subjects really floated to the top - greater than human intelligence and immortality. Some people wore cryonics tags tucked in shirts, and occasionally exposed them to make a point, others allowed them to glisten in the sun. There was an amazing talk by a 17 year old <a href="http://www.thielfellowship.org" target="_blank">Thiel fellow</a> that made me feel more convinced than ever before that immortality would become a matter of choice. But I followed the scent of superhuman intelligence for the most part, perhaps because it opened up discussion to the most existential predicaments. There are two generally accepted ways of discussing the emergence of greater than human intelligence. "Soft takeoff" describes a gradual development that may allow us to adapt as we incorporate more and more intelligence into our world. "Hard takeoff" would imply the rapid creation of a runaway artificial intelligence that at its most volatile could lead to our extinction. For better or worse, the authorities on the subject seemed to expect "hard takeoff." One of these authorities is Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the extremely popular "Less Wrong" community and a current research fellow at the Singularity Institute. According to the website, Less Wrong is a forum where <blockquote>"users aim to develop accurate predictive models of the world, and change their mind when they find evidence disconfirming those models, instead of being able to explain anything."</blockquote> In other words, the Less Wrong community strives to help you realize that you are biased about a lot of things, including the common misconception that AI will not pose a serious threat to humanity. Luke Muehlhauser, the executive director of the Singularity Institute explains that this misconception is due largely to "the availability heuristic" which explains how we usually assume probabilities based on what is most available to our memory. In "<a href="http://facingthesingularity.com/2011/not-built-to-think-about-ai/" target="_blank">Not Built to Think about AI</a>" he writes: <blockquote>"The availability heuristic also explains why people think flying is more dangerous than driving when the opposite is true: a plane crash is more vivid and is reported widely when it happens, so it’s more available to one’s memory, and the brain tricks itself into thinking the event’s availability indicates its probability."</blockquote> And during his talk at the Summit, Muehlhauser explained that we have optimized the world to serve our very narrow field of interests, and that the chances of AI serving a purpose outside of these narrow interests is far greater than vice versa. As a result, "Almost all the mind designs would steer AI where we don't want to go." He called upon the most intelligent mathematical minds in the crowd to join him in solving the difficult math problems required to build a "friendly AI." But with all the attention concentrated on artificial super intelligence, it was only logical that someone in the crowd would ask how biology might fit into this paradigm. The answer was: <blockquote>"biological cognitive enhancement is a growing trend and an important one, but I think in the end anything that's tied to the biological system of the brain is going to fall behind the purely artificial mind architectures because somewhere in the loop there is still all this slow neuronal firing spaghetti code nonsense that evolution created, that sort of works but is totally non-optimal. So I think that biological cognitive enhancement won't be able to keep up at a some point with purely artificial systems."</blockquote> Further still, if you ask his colleague Eliezer how biological systems fit into this equation he might answer: <blockquote>”the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, but you are made of atoms it can use for something else"</blockquote> I'm willing to consider all possible futures, just because it's more fun than limiting your imagination, but like any human, I can't help and throw a little wrench in this scenario. In any discussion of "greater than human" entities there is an inherently subjective impasse, this is why anthropology doesn't work without incorporating the anthropologist's bias. No matter how much we attempt to overcome our bias, the final evaluation of whether we've created "greater than human intelligence" will be up to us, simply because human intelligence is myriad and arranging it on a hierarchy is a subjective task. As a catch-22, in my subjective opinion, nothing can have "greater than human intelligence" if it doesn't also have a greater than human tolerance for the lifeforms that gave rise to it. Disrespect for our biological ancestors and degradation of our life-supporting habitat has not necessarily served human beings well, and a greater than human intelligence should be able to overcome that error in judgement. Unfortunately, my forgiving parameter was thwarted somewhat by Robin Hanson's claim that future lifeforms, whole brain emulations specifically, just wouldn't care about nature once they migrated entirely to non-biological substrates. "We care about nature not just because we like it but because we're afraid we will die without it." To whole brain emulations, the biological world would be obsolete, full stop. He acknowledged though that his thought experiment inevitably excluded some variables and remarked that "a future world is a vast place with lots of things going on and if you really want to evaluate it on the whole you have to look at a lot of different elements of it." Overall, The Singularity Summit brought together a fine selection of minds dedicated to thinking through the good, the bad, the ugly and the less wrong futures. On the last day of the summit I was lucky enough to find someone capable of summing up the sentiments that I'm sure at least a few human beings in the audience were feeling. I will leave him with the final word. <object width="500" height="281"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=53666434&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=53666434&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="500" height="281"></embed></object> http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/8012/Growing-up-at-the-Singularity-Summit Novelty in the modified body http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/7428/Novelty-in-the-modified-body http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/7428/Novelty-in-the-modified-body Mon, 15 Oct 2012 14:44:56 +0000 meganmay 7428 How do we come to understand actions that are beyond our experience? What happens when we watch an agent, human or otherwise, performs seemingly impossible tasks? <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1332967754/in_alter_omnia_.gif" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> This isn't the uncanny valley, it's the unwalked path, the unfamiliar and ideally we can expect to see more and more of it in the future. The neurological correlates of understanding difference and novelty is, broadly speaking, the subject of my friend Lei Liew's research at the USC Center for Brain and Creativity. In one study, Lei used fMRI to observe the brain activity of participants watching an actor performing familier and unfamilier gestures, respectively a thumbs up and the sign language for "the Netherlands." Among her findings, she discovered that the novel gesture activated more motor regions in the brain, suggesting that unfamiliar actions are first and foremost represented physically, and when people tried to explain the gesture afterwards, they tended to re-perform the action. <cap><blockquote>"Just like birds, humans have to amplify their locomotion to get control and get familiar with their new body expansion—the Wings. In my conception this is something which is independent of any hardware or software problem." - Genius Dutch Filmmaker Florian Kayak </blockquote></cap> Next she asked, what happens when you see an action that you can't perform at all. In this study, she had participants watch as someone performed actions with their hands, cutting with scissors, grabbing goldfish (the crackers), et cetera. Then participants were asked to watch these same actions performed by someone with congenital amputations. After only two minutes of watching the amuptee, Lei observed increased activity in the mirroror system in the the four limbed participants. The visual stimulation highly effective in helping create a motor map to correspond with the amputees. This work on how we acclimate to difference seems particularly relevant now, if as Joel Garreau suggests in his book Radical Evolution, humans begin speciating into differently modified creatures through the continuous integration of biotechnology, prosthetic implants, and stem cell technologies into the primordial soup. Assuming, for interest's sake, that such technological modifications do become increasingly commonplace and desirable, how we will manage to keep track of what a human is amongst the resulting behaviors, mannerisms, and visual landscape? Perhaps, it's the duty of visual artists to take the initiative to help acclimate the public to what our future companions, or maybe even our selves could look like. ET was a hallmark example of building this kind of tolerance. Maybe the next study in this line of research should test whether people who watch sci-fi frequently learn to identify with radically different physical traits than those who don't. http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/7428/Novelty-in-the-modified-body The End of the Terminator Era? http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/6700/The-End-of-the-Terminator-Era http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/6700/The-End-of-the-Terminator-Era Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:25:28 +0000 meganmay 6700 In the span of 12 hours I met a young French man playing gypsy music on a saxophone in the park, filmed a rehearsal for an anti-play by 1960s Austrian playwright Peter Handke, being restaged for children by my friend Emily Mast, and attended <a href="http://blog.scienceandentertainmentexchange.org/2011/02/science-of-cyborgs-contest-rules.html" target="_blank">an event</a> about the current trends in science, specifically related to transhumanism, for an audience of Hollywood screenwriters. Needless to say, you can live in as many different centuries in a day as you can access multiple dimensions (which according to current estimates is up to 12, or infinitely many according to Gleb*). In the strangest way this clash of generations within generations seems be a defining characteristic of this day and age. (And it seems like an age when more effort is being put towards characterizing the passing days than ever before.) Transhumanism itself is a hodge-podge of scenarios and strategies for enhancing humanity through technology; at least, this is how the hosts of the “Science of Cyborgs” framed the movement at the Directors Guild on Sunset Blvd. I listened as they reminisced about the days when “the heart of cyborgian transhumanism” was the forearm, (more often than not a male forearm), and presented the fairly well accepted refrain The Future Is Now, on the basis of Oscar Pistorius’ Artificial legs. <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1299110533/terminator crap 3.jpeg" border="0" width="" height="" align="left" class="padRight"> <cap><a href="t" target="_blank">Wearable Terminator Salvation Toys</a>, basically sums up this entire post.</cap> Next, they introduced one screenwriter and three scientists, whose research was meant to inspire the next round of Hollywood blockbusters. Jonathan Mostow was the first to present, and set the tone by explaining that perhaps one of the reasons the prevailing depiction of evil machines in motion pictures results largely from a deep-seated anxiety about humans losing contact with one another. An interesting theory. Then up walked a PHD! an accreditation that, given the context, inspired a certain amount of reverence. It may have been just me, but in this context, it seemed like the scientists were 21st century prophets come to deliver an eager audience of culture-makers news from the future. <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1299115072/storypotential_small2.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <cap>Epic question from MacIver's PPT</cap> The first presenter Malcolm MacIver, was developing robotic systems based on the movement and sensory systems of a weakly electric fish called the “black ghost weakly electric fish.” This same presenter was a consultant on the sci-fi series Caprika, and concluded with the a clip from his favorite show, Battlestar Galactica, where one character says to another “You said that humanity never asked itself why it deserved to survive...maybe you don’t.” Again, the human audience was asked to question its relevance, but more because of its arrogance than its anxieties. The next presenter, Michel Maharbiz worked on inserting microcontrollers into larvae in order to wii-mote control beetles (seriously), while the fourth and final PhD, Mark Humayun, discussed his work on recovering sight for the blind. Humayun proved to be the only one of three working directly with human systems, and it was his singularity that proved to be one of the most striking aspects of the evening. While the discussion began by defining cyborgs as machine modified humans, it concluded with how photosynthesis could be inhibited in isolated spinach coroplasts. And it was the final statement from Maharbiz during the Q&A that really defined the evening for me: “If there’s one thing you should all do when you get home tonight, it’s wikipedia opto-genetics… What you think now is technology is organic.” This statement seamed to debunk the classical notion of our future as cyborgs altogether in favor of the increasingly seamless integration between artificial and organic systems on a whole. The kind of invisibility predicted by Kevin Kelly in his first book, and a seamlessness that ultimately poses the greatest challenge to Hollywood screenwriters: when biology becomes technological, how will the difference between “us and them” be visualized? In any case, it’s this integrative perspective of the entire organic system that I find most exciting when considering our future forms. It’s the re-contextualization of our sapience in a larger pool of sentient life that explodes far beyond the singular human frame and, perhaps, marks a closure of the conventionally imagined cyborg era. Here are <a href="http://hypem.com/#!/item/18sye/Xynn+-+Computed+Man" target="_blank">a few resounding notes</a> compliments of <a href="http://www.glebden.com/" target="_blank">Glebden</a>. http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/6700/The-End-of-the-Terminator-Era Our Primordial Future http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/6535/Our-Primordial-Future http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/6535/Our-Primordial-Future Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:56:12 +0000 meganmay 6535 <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1297810516/communication,couple,drawing-5012b0cd7771af5756ce53d631bec8ae_h.jpeg" border="0" width="" height="" align="left" class="padRight"> <cap>M.C. Escher Peeled Faces </cap> <blockquote>"We are flesh—-self-aware, questing, problem-solving flesh." — Octavia Butler</blockquote> I had a really exciting conversation with Adam Stieg scientific Director of the Nano and Pico Characterization Lab at the California Nanosystems Institute this evening about his current projects. There was always something about his research that really rung a bell with me, and as he continued to describe his work with artificial brains and stem cells, I had an epiphany. Whether he's attempting to create a "physical brain" using top secret chemical etching techniques, or experimenting with <a href="http://www.stembook.org/node/516" target="_blank">mechanically induced stem cell differentiation</a>, Adam consistently relies on basic physical processes to "artificially" modify (or create) living systems. Rather than a building an artificial intelligence system out of software or reverse engineering the brain one neuron at a time, he attempts to catalyze a "physical brain" using special etching techniques, basic chemistry and chaotic processes that may or may not yield functional brain-like structures (more info shall be revealed after publication). Similarly, rather than injecting DNA from another animal to induce stem cell differentiation, why not expose the pluripotent gems to the physical environments that they're destined to serve in through machine-driven stimulation? I suppose these very elegant solutions could only come from a forward-thinking chemist, who compared biology to art in its nebulousness. (It should be noted he is also the Scientific Director of the Art|Sci summer program at UCLA). I suppose it's only natural then that I was immediately compelled to extrapolate this bottom up cell differentiation theory to the highly complex process of human development, recalling a wise Japanese inventor named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiro_Nakamatsu" target="_blank">Dr. Nakamatz</a> who recently introduced me to the idea that our environment and actions allow us to access <a href="http://www.nextnature.net/2010/10/goodbye-nature-vs-nurture/" target="_blank">genetic potential</a>, IE nature and nurture are not opposed, but complimentary. The more experience you subject your human apparatus to, the more access you have to potentialities as yet unknown to you.* And from Adam's perspective, this makes sense because a person is a system subject to the same natural laws as say, the pluripotent stem cell. Then he held up a book on Cybernetics — " the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves." (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics" target="_blank">Wiki</a>). Which leads us back to, THE BODY. <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1297889340/tumblr_lgl6mi3BtN1qa3q7lo1_1280.jpeg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <cap>Yang Zhichao, Planting Grass, 2002 via <a href="http://olena.tumblr.com/post/3284967359/yang-zhichao-planting-grass-2002-location" target="_blank">The Operating System</a> </cap> In spite of being a severed head wishing on occasion to disregard the body completely, I can't help but be seduced by the thrilling re-cognition that the material world is as manipulatable as it is concrete. Under the right conditions it can be elastic, re-programmed, and re-imagined. The work Adam is doing is definitely on par with some of the best conceptual art in how concisely it opens up the possibility that life, even Artificial Intelligence life, may actually be catalyzed by interactions in the physical world. Clearly the integration of the internet/computational intelligence (a most harmonious coupling, from which the most user-friendly form AI will most likely be birthed — see Google* and NELL — ) to the total system is crucial. However, when it comes to the future form of everything, technology not only offers add-ons and implants, but also a means of further unraveling and transforming intelligence from the most primordial levels. Now performing another leap in scale, I would compare this re-conception of the physical world to the discovery of 10 thousand galaxies inside a tiny black patch of sky. Seems to me like the 90% of the JUNK in our genome is another black patch that will hopefully reveal some equally massive new insights. We are continuously looping back on ourselves with fresh information gleaned, "producing ourselves from ourselves." Will runaway AI be catalyzed physically? Will it look more like us or will we look more like it? The present seems like a breeding ground for the primordial and the high-tech to meet, mesh, and manipulate each other in mutually mind/body/environment altering ways. As such, it may be apt to conclude by saying that the newest high tech airport security may, in fact, have <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/8300223/Mice-trained-for-airport-security.html" target="_blank">fur</a>. http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/6535/Our-Primordial-Future Leaving the Garden of Earthly Delights http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/6168/Leaving-the-Garden-of-Earthly-Delights http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/6168/Leaving-the-Garden-of-Earthly-Delights Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:54:38 +0000 meganmay 6168 <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1280904873/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights.gif" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/6168/Leaving-the-Garden-of-Earthly-Delights Revenge of the Elders http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5965/Revenge-of-the-Elders- http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5965/Revenge-of-the-Elders- Sat, 29 May 2010 00:40:58 +0000 meganmay 5965 As the aging populations of <a href="http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2006/EuropesPopulationAgingWillAccelerateSaysDataSheet.aspx" target="_blank">Europe</a> and <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news190003386.html" target="_blank">Japan</a> come to represent the local majority, it would seem the elderly are posed to reclaim some of the cultural territory they lost to the decades long bias towards youth. And as the search for immortality continues, the extremely old, reverently referred to as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian" target="_blank">supercentenarians</a>, are in the position to become icons as celebrated and admired as the most flawless of pop stars. Edna Parker (pictured below) is one out of 100 people in the <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24204526" target="_blank">Supercentenarian database</a>, whose DNA is being used to study genetic links to long lives. So, while the ambition of most longevity enthusiasts is to reverse or eliminate the aging process, what if instead, as lifespans increase, there is a renaissance of beauty at age 200+? <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1275117311/Ann_Pouder.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <cap>Ann Pouder 110 YO England</cap> <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1275117367/maria-capovilla.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <cap>Maria Capovilla 116 Eucador</cap> <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1275118807/080418-edna-parker-vmed-2p.widec.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <cap>Edna Parker 115 YO US</cap> <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1275118817/xinsrc_372010430132412553594.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <cap>Yone Minagawa 115 Japan</cap> <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1275120168/133785-haftanin-olaylari.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <cap>Jauna Bautista 125 YO Cuba</cap> Interestingly, longevity is increasing in Cuba (home to Juana Bautista, the oldest woman in the world) in part due to the winning combination of <a href="http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/11-02-2010/112176-oldest_person_lives_in_Cuba-0" target="_blank">social programs</a>, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5407636.stm" target="_blank">cigars, and a healthy sex life</a>. http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5965/Revenge-of-the-Elders- What comes after the Internet? http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5535/What-comes-after-the-Internet- http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5535/What-comes-after-the-Internet- Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:28:42 +0000 meganmay 5535 Last night I asked google, "is the internet over?" <a href="http://internetno.ytmnd.com/" target="_blank">This</a> was the response (be warned if you have little tolerance for internet gore do not click). The result was both ironic and nostalgic, like a last stand for the unkempt wilderness the internet has been. As I mentioned on <a href="http://spacecollective.org/Olena/5561/This-is-the-Internet-you-type-in-what-you-want-and-hit-enter" target="_blank">Olena's</a> post, it occurred to me the other night that lawlessness can be extremely beneficial to intelligence and the rapid growth of culture, particularly when it comes to the vast databases of music and movies we've stolen for our edification and enjoyment. It also struck me that those who've directly benefited from this lawlessness are simultaneously the most marketed to generation in history and a generation that's probably stolen more merchandise on a whole than any other group of people living in a semi-functional society. But I've had a distinct sense for the past few months that the internet is no longer the frontier, that it's well on the way to becoming as practical and depoliticized as the telephone. While cyberwarfare may be making appearances in the newspaper for months or even years to come, it'll more likely be evidence of governmental meddling than radical uprising. While I don't get off on illuminati flavored conspiracy theories, the use of Facebook friend photos to generate advertisements, in combination with the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-campaign-finance22-2010jan22,0,850920.story" target="_blank">Supreme court decision</a>, and Google <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/11/google-deletes-music-blogs" target="_blank">deleting music blogs without warning</a> has made me extremely aware how easily we can sleep through what promises to be (or already is) a corporate chokehold. While this all seems a little bleak, it's actually rather refreshing to realize. I've been feeling a little coddled by the neverending stream of utopian rhetoric surrounding the internet, which I myself am guilty of propagating, and with good reason! But it seems about time we set our sites on a new frontier. So...what comes after the Internet? <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1268027743/tumblr_kyw5221LeF1qznlfio1_500.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" align="left" class="padRight"> <cap>[ note, this post was written and published as private for a while so the news is old now...but still relevant ]</cap> http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5535/What-comes-after-the-Internet- The State of Utopia http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5630/The-State-of-Utopia- http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5630/The-State-of-Utopia- Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:39:37 +0000 meganmay 5630 <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1266896361/utopia2.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> I just found an excellent (5 year old) article to follow up an older post about Utopian thinking. This collection of excerpts would make a great companion to the State of the Union :) <blockquote>Utopias tended to be written at times when the imagination overstretched the available means. They were about people feeling their way ahead, before there were yet any route markers. Thomas More came at the dawning of modernity, when the Middle Ages was receding and a new society stretching its limbs. Charles Fourier and the utopian socialists came at the dawn of the working-class movement, when some realised that bourgeois promises of freedom were inadequate but hadn't yet worked out what to propose in their place.... ...Set-ups that people take as natural - 'the way things are' - are shown to be foolish, temporary arrangements that will soon be overturned. This educates the imagination, the sense of what could be.... ....It's telling that the authors of utopias often lived unromantic and frustrated lives. Their heads were reaching into the future, but their feet remained stuck in times that they were powerless to change.... ...Sometimes the dreams of one generation became the practical reality for the next.... ...Over time, utopias tended to become less hazy daydreams and more something that people would fight to be realised. For a start, there was a shift from utopias being set on a remote island to being set in the future. Then the visions became grander.... ...And while More and Bacon imagined their utopian societies created by God or a benevolent legislator, later utopias imagined that they were created by people themselves. The vision of the future was a practical problem to solve.... ...Today the old political landmarks are gone, and people have little idea about how to go forward. Past utopians' brave leaps into the future could act as inspiration. However, there are limitations with today's approach towards utopias. There are broadly speaking two different types of modern utopian project: escapist utopias, and mystical utopias. Both seek a dreamy happy ending, while sidestepping the problems of political life today.... ...The question isn't whether the utopian impulse exists, for it will so long as human beings are alive: the question is whether this impulse takes us forward or just tightens our chains... ...Jacoby's conclusion: 'To connect a utopian passion with practical politics is an art and a necessity.'... </blockquote> The <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAEE7.htm" target="_blank">whole article</a> is worth a read. http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5630/The-State-of-Utopia- squirrels + global warming = evolution http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/1602/squirrels-global-warming-evolution http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/1602/squirrels-global-warming-evolution Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:34:21 +0000 meganmay 1602 <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1183058395/squirrils!.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <a href="http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn3382" target="_blank">FROM NEW SCIENTIST</a>: <blockquote>Red squirrels are rapidly evolving in response to global warming - they are the first mammals in which such genetic changes have been seen. The discovery could bode well for other species struggling to adapt to new conditions, say researchers. Andrew McAdam, at the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues monitored four generations of squirrels in the Yukon, Canada, over 10 years. They found that female squirrels now give birth on average 18 days earlier in the year than their great-grandmothers. The driving force behind the evolutionary changes is that the warmer climate means that females with a genetic propensity to give birth earlier are more likely to have offspring that prosper. These early-borns have a head start on their younger peers. They are bigger and more independent when autumn comes and it is time to store food, says Stan Boutin, another member of the team. The work joins a growing body of evidence that many living things are changing their abundance, distribution and behaviour in response to increasing global temperatures. Genetic changes have been shown in American mosquitoes but this is the first study that demonstrates a genetic shift in a mammal. </blockquote> I was talking to one of the guy who helped us move this year about global warming...he thought human babies were gonna be born with heat resistent skin soon enough....i don't know about that, but we might <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200606/s1666892.htm" target="_blank">invent some</a> <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1183057691/Redsquirrel.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/1602/squirrels-global-warming-evolution My Life as a Severed Head http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5429/My-Life-as-a-Severed-Head http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5429/My-Life-as-a-Severed-Head Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:58:18 +0000 meganmay 5429 At this moment in the Internet's history I am one of many, I would suspect, who often prefers to receive the world on demand, to leave touch with my immediate surroundings in order to surf the information of my choosing. This is a very particular and unique kind of information acquisition, it's accelerated and intentional. I've asked several friends in the cognitive sciences what to call this variety of mental processing, it's not intellectual perse, not rational necessarily, cerebral? These synonyms all have connotations that disqualify them as adequate terminology, so instead I'll call it "severed head." This particular state of being is characterized by the feeling that your body is trailing behind your head at all times, only to be felt when some mentally stimulating idea triggers a release of adrenaline. A fine feeling indeed. <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1264477923/*soul_flipper_crop.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <cap>Coop Himmelblau's Soul Flipper</cap> This way of absorbing the world is very different from the world experienced by the body as a whole. And being a severed head myself, I often prefer Google search results to more physical sources of information. Recent experiences, however, have re-covered my appreciation for the latter. Hana Van Der Kolk and I are like a lesson in fate. The strangeness of her recognizing me from the internet, unwittingly becoming my neighbor, finding out that not only are we both daughters of Dutch psychologists, but in the most remarkable twist of fate, it turns out an uncle of mine helped Hana's parents immigrate to America. So when Hana asked me to be in her next performance the answer of course had to be yes (and my solo would be nothing less than an incessant repetition of this positive affirmation). It was notoriously hard to describe Hana's choreographic style to inquisitive friends. A blend of minimalist dance and performance art? With long pauses and pop songs? I think she said it best by calling it a mix tape, and I called it a collage, a blend of performance techniques. At it's core though, it was the performance of an altered state, and getting there required a perception of "the whole body at once," a task comparable to listening for the sound of one hand clapping. After assigning us mental scores, Hana began to choreograph clichéd group activities, painfully simple solos, and duets that begged to be narrativized. The whole process was particularly interesting because Hana was in the position to direct us while reminding us not to plan or think. This was a bit of a struggle, every clarification was like dancing around the mind's tendency to take information and smother it with intellectual constructions. It began to seem like the whole thing was an empirical study of how this strange clump of matter and chemistry that we identify as the human body might communicate complex sentiments without interference from "higher" brain functioning. By the time the performance rolled around, I was eager to check this hypothesis with an audience. It was nerve racking, and slightly ironic, to present the work to a group of people harboring the very analytical agenda we were trying to debunk. It should also probably be noted that in addition to being told throughout my life that I "think too much," I'm not a seasoned performer, so the whole experience was like being in a foreign country with a bare minimum of vocab words at my disposal. It demanded complete dedication to those few words to facilitate this still unfamiliar relationship between body and mind. The performance ended, and the only thing I knew for sure was that the audience had been audibly shifty in their chairs. I soon learned though, that without any kind of character motivation or explicit direction, the performance not only hit certain narrative cues, but exceeded them. People were raving about transference, friends who I would never have expected to enjoy such a performance were trailing behind Hana to congratulate her, and on the third night I shed the most perfectly timed, completely uncalculated tear. It appeared that the intimacy Hana set out to cultivate was oozing from our unconditioned bodies with supernatural clarity. I've often vouched for the internet as a unique channel for achieving intimacy, and a superior instrument for streaming thoughts without physical interference. But Hana's method was a reminder of the body's refined capacity to transmit and receive hi-fidelity information. I have never experienced a performance so devoid of intellectual burdens, so painfully simple and yet gut-wrenchingly complex. Getting back to my life as usual has been like filing back into an anatomical hierarchy whereby my body is once again second in command. And as I sit here, a collection of limbs obediently stationed in front of a computer monitor, I'm imagining a sc-fi future in which the body is obsolete. In my mind, however, it's a mere perception that's been left behind, making way for a popular view of the body as an instrument of communication well worth being tuned. <img src="http://spacecollective.org/userdata/Ui5Kc9gr/1264478179/36_omao007.jpg" border="0" width="" height="" class="padTopBot"> <cap>pre-performance rehearsal, more photos of the performance <a href="http://www.fivethirtythree.org/index.php?/2009/once-more-again-one/" target="_blank">here</a> </cap> http://spacecollective.org/meganmay/5429/My-Life-as-a-Severed-Head