Just found out that the entirety of the 1997 election coverage is on the BBC iPlayer, and given that we are very likely to see something very similar this year, it seems like a good time to reboost my piece about how culturally, we've yet to escape 1997...
I wrote an article for Unsustainable Magazine that is based around my dissertation research findings about what it means to wish for systems overhaul. The consequences of that desire are what I consider now in this article. It gets a bit personal; I am embedded within my own specific context and my observations come out of that situation.
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo#Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.
The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren#Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold#medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored#guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal#Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.
Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G#technology now being rolled out all over the world.
Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.
As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.
Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.
ERDAL ARIKAN WAS born in 1958 and grew up in Western Turkey, the son of a doctor and a homemaker.
He loved science.
When he was a teenager, his father remarked that, in his profession, two plus two did not always equal four.
This fuzziness disturbed young Erdal; he decided against a career in medicine. He found comfort in engineering and the certainty of its mathematical outcomes.
“I like things that have some precision,” he says. “You do calculations and things turn out as you calculate it.”
Arıkan entered the electrical engineering program at Middle East Technical University. But in 1977, partway through his first year, the country was gripped by political violence, and students boycotted the university.
Arıkan wanted to study, and because of his excellent test scores he managed to transfer to #CalTech, one of the world's top science-oriented institutions, in Pasadena, California.
He found the US to be a strange and wonderful country. Within his first few days, he was in an orientation session addressed by legendary physicist #Richard#Feynman. It was like being blessed by a saint.
The field was still young, launched in 1948 by #Claude#Shannon, who wrote its seminal paper while he was at Bell Labs;
he would later become a revered MIT professor.
Shannon's achievement was to understand how the hitherto fuzzy concept of information could be quantified, creating a discipline that expanded the view of communication and data storage.
By publishing a general mathematical theory of information
—almost as if Einstein had invented physics and come up with relativity in one swoop
—Shannon set a foundation for the internet, mobile communications, and everything else in the digital age.
The subject fascinated Arıkan, who chose #MIT for graduate studies.
There was one reason: “#Bob#Gallager was there,” he says.
Robert Gallager had written the textbook on information theory. He had also been mentored by Shannon's successor.
In the metrics of the field, that put him two steps from God.
“So I said, if I am going to do information theory,” Arıkan says, “MIT is the place to go.”
By the time Arıkan arrived at MIT, in 1981, Gallager had shifted his focus and was concentrating on how data networks operated.
Arıkan was trembling when he went to Gallager's office for the first time. The professor gave him a paper about packet radio networks.
“I was pushing him to move from strict information theory to looking at network problems,” Gallager says.
“It was becoming very obvious to everyone that sending data from one place to another was not the whole story
—you really had to have a system.”
So this is finally happening. It seems like “The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures Since 1832” will appear in #OpenAccess, too. There's still some way to go until this makes its appearance in November. Next: proofreading.
#TheMetalDogArticleList #phys.orgphys.org
Pythagoras was wrong: There are no universal musical harmonies, study finds
The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures.
I am creating a personal document called the Esoteric Catalog of Fascinations. It's, like, a private glossary of things I find interesting.
Here's the list so far:
Autonomous complex (Freud)
Charles Saunders Peirce
Cybernetics (Gregory Bateson)
Dixie Flatline (William Gibson / Neuromancer)
Dungeon Synth
Egregore
Floating city, Edo period in Japan
Gothic (genre/mood/mode)
Hard Problem of Consciousness
Henri Bergson
#amreading ”Yellowface” by R. F. Kuang, and it just throws my moral compass off the charts to see people underlining the worst parts of the protagonist’s mad ramblings.
Here’s a practically proto-fascist example: The white protagonist feels her asian ”friend” has taken something away from her by being so succesfull. 🥵
Of course, they may just be following her evil ways in intellectual curiosity, but I can’t help but feel shocked.
There are interesting explorations of how the laws apply mechanically, yet how the actual human process of making art tends to have some level of copying within it’s very core principles.
With the emergence of #generativeAI and the perhaps the need to rewrite some of copyright law, this book touches on several important topics!
▶️ VIDEO : Black Bloc - Introduction (2011) - ENG 📽
To the People who don`t Understand why Black Bloc activists use Militant Tactics to destroy Corporate Property : Black Bloc activists are NOT Protesters. They are not there to protest, they are there to take direct action against the machineries of oppression. Their actions are designed to cause material damage to oppressive institutions.
But much more importantly, they are intended as theatre. As a dramatized illustration that even in the face of an overwhelming police state, the people still have the power. That the cops and banks aren't as powerful as they try to convince us, and it really is within our power to strike back if they turn against us. And that defying authority and subverting "law and order" doesn't have to mean abandoning ethics, humanity, or care for your fellow man.
Physicist Arno Penzias, who co-discovered the cosmic microwave background, helping to confirm the Big Bang theory of the universe's beginning, died on Monday at age 90.
My name's Rob and I’m a Master of #Criminology postgrad from Melbourne. I love #movies, #books, occasionally camping, and obsessing over my dog. Pronouns are he/him.
** Apologies for the instance hopping and repeated intros but I'm still figuring this platform out. I don't want multiple accounts and my last one was kinda lifeless. There seems to be a really good mix of people here so hello again. **