In the world of diplomacy, India may be remembered for its last-minute push to downgrade coal language at this year’s climate talks. Scientific American, November 16, 2021 More children are in hospital with breathing problems as pollution levels remain dangerously high in New Delhi, doctors warned on Wednesday, and the government shut five power stations […]
Observing the President of COP26 stifling emotion as he apologised for the shortfalls of the limited agreement obtained at this critically important conference, I find myself reflecting on the words being variously wielded and warped on such a Global stage. There are two primary games of symbolic communication (i.e. language) at work in these large […]
The conspicuous absence of Global unity on climate change is horrifying and, notwithstanding that if human beings do anything particularly well in gestalt it is to perpetuate an endemic disagreement and adversarial dissonance that optimally and endlessly reproduces itself through and as us, you would think that the one thing we might at least all […]
Sunday morning brought this little documentary gem of existential anxiety to my digital doorstep: The future of modern warfare: How technology is transforming conflict. Long gone are the days when a newspaper delivery, thrown from a footpath and having missed its mark might shatter our living room window, allowing us the superficially satisfying retort of […]
The twilight of my own aspirations to a peaceful and purposefully useful life on Earth appears to be the dawn of a new Global stupidity. It would be somewhat less distressing to witness a general dissolution and devolution into the flailing, lumbering madness of political and ideological conflict were it not that the buffoons who […]
Context: The Speed of Ocean Currents Is Changing in a Major Way, Scientists Warn Increasing the median internal energy gradients in any such vastly distributed information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) system is bound to have consequences. Complexity and self-referential combinatorial structure of sufficient sophistication is likely to acquire new and perhaps relatively stable phases. If […]
Notice that the love of family is the love that humanity really needs; we are, for all our shared problems, just One vast and dysfunctional (planetary) family.
On discovering that the Government of my country is putting policy (and thus ideology) before environment and refusing to sign a leader’s pledge on biodiversity: Australia joins US, China and Russia in refusing to sign leaders’ pledge on biodiversity The sophistication required here is at a level of complexity that almost entirely invalidates existing (institutional) […]
You would think that any self-respecting species possessing intellectual and technological aptitude sufficient to fathom the deepest mysteries of the Cosmos might also be able to avoid its own imminent catastrophic dissolution and descent into conflict, environmental disassembly, geopolitical dissonance and self-destruction. Not, as it turns out, this distributed material and symbolic human being within […]
Context: Sixth mass extinction of wildlife accelerating, scientists warn …and all the while, humanity stumbles and lumbers around from one profoundly tragic self-inflicted catastrophe to another, all but blind to this darkening existential threat and profane insult to life itself that emanates like dusty, choking smoke and tar from the ill-purposed machines of civilisation. What […]
What is the aggregate consequence of so (very) many people spending most of their lives in concrete and glass labyrinths, bound. Where (almost) all stimulus and perception is normalised, by regularity, uniformity, aspiration to control through linear precedent, by axiomatic illumination of certainty (such as it is) and knowledge, there is little room for the […]
Don’t be fooled into a false sense of security by the fact that a worst-case climate apocalypse is intimately terrifying on a scale exceeding any story that humanity ever told itself and is so far beyond our limited experience that we more readily characterise it as myth or fiction. At the scale of disaster we […]
Daedelus Kite 