Despite being quite well suited by geography and economy to weather the pandemic, it seems the inevitable has happened and – part epidemiological entropy, part selfish human stupidity, part bad luck – COVID-19 has gained a foothold again here in Australia. Every morning and several times a day I check the news media online to […]
Tag: COVID-19
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COVID’s Metamorphosis, Revisited
A salient question to ask at this time is whether or not it is possible for rates of viral mutation to be self-modified. The rationale: if the information-replication and associated encoding mechanism that this viral family of entities represent is autonomously oriented towards maximal self-reproduction, and if accelerated mutation becomes a sustainable form of maximising […]
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COVID’S Metamorphosis, revisited
Context: A Language AI Is Accurately Predicting Covid-19 ‘Escape’ Mutations A fascinating method of discovery. An inference here is that the underlying information and energy-processing characteristics or adaptive, dynamical symmetries of viral RNA and linguistic structure possess a common logical antecedent. We might, indeed, perform such ontological archaeology through or as the indefinitely-extensible “languages” of […]
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Christmas Eve, 2020
Christmas Eve: a lonely walk around my neighbourhood where I captured these glorious sunflowers basking in the last rays of one of those long slow Summer’s afternoons that seem to sidestep evening and slide straight into night. It’s been a spectacularly difficult year for everyone and while I can’t see this changing at scale in […]
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Seismic Silence?
Recent studies reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic period has been the quietest period of human activity in the seismic record. It makes you wonder about the cumulative background noise that human activity generates as a constant vibrational hum of socioeconomic activity across the crust and into the subsurface body of the Earth. In what ways […]
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Pandemic Metamorphosis
Pandemic metamorphosis is upon us all and among all the darkness and tragedy there will be new life. Patterns of behaviour carry us, much as does language, in many ways much more than we could ever carry, possess or assert control over them and regardless of these fragile egos we are all compelled (as Subjects […]
Context: The Covid-19 Catastrophe; Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened – review An interesting article, skimmed, but honestly – we shouldn’t waste excess quantities of spilled ink or time on what is really quite a simple problem. That is: the grammars, games and mechanisms of political selection and government installation of and for […]
Context: The most common organism in the oceans harbors a virus in its DNA Meta-replicatory strategies (as explained in the article linked above) being those of diversifying and exploiting multiple channels of optimal and simultaneous self-replication. The referenced order of magnitude more viruses than bacteria in the ocean already suggests that the grey-zone between “living” […]
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Coronavirus Inquiry Stand-off
Context: Coronavirus inquiry tensions leave WA farmers fearing more China tariffs after barley hit Nothing quite invokes trust as does authentic accountability and undifferentiated transparency. Questions as to the Global or regional presence or absence of such transparency are as fractious as they are important. The international society of states (such as it is) currently finds itself […]
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Pandemic Murals
Context: Coronavirus murals: inside the world of pandemic-inspired street art Interesting to consider the ways in which popular culture embodies a communication medium for an inadvertent yet optimally-concise and autonomously self-propagating information pattern of ourselves, our minds and the hyper-extended cognition of (an ancient, symbolic language of) technological self-representation. The article could have done with a few more […]
Context: Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is Bogus I would usually just slide past this kind of topic without commenting. However, as an artefact in a vigorously-contested information environment – an observation to be made here is that even a document of dubious veracity serves a useful purpose above and […]
One thing humans do share with the machine intelligence we are so enthusiastically refining is a conspicuous (or at least institutionalised) absence of aptitude when it comes to smoothly and efficiently negotiating unexpected events and volatile environments. The benefits of integrated logistical automation are clear but when it comes to training the machine intelligence that […]
