This plugin allows you to publish the contents of an OPML file in any WordPress post or page. Just put the URL of the file (it must be public on the internet) in between the quotes using this shortcode: [opml url=""]
Category: Bookmark
🔖 A relatively comprehensive list of Indieweb sites
Indie Map is a complete crawl of 2300 of the most active IndieWeb sites, sliced and diced and rolled up in a few useful ways: Social graph API and interactive map. SQL queryable dataset and GUI analytics. Raw crawl data in WARC format: 2300 sites, 5.7M pages, 380GB HTML + mf2. Indie Map is free, open source, and placed into the public domain via the CC0 public domain dedication. Crawled content remains the property of each site's owner and author, and subject to their existing copyrights.
So you’re looking to start an Indieweb blogroll? This is a reasonably large place to start…
cc: Richard MacManus
Apparently there’s a beta Bioinformatics group on Stack Exchange now. It’s just come out of alpha in the last few days and it appears anyone can join now.
🔖 A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman
The life and times of one of the foremost intellects of the twentieth century: Claude Shannon—the neglected architect of the Information Age, whose insights stand behind every computer built, email sent, video streamed, and webpage loaded. Claude Shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. He constructed a fleet of customized unicycles and a flamethrowing trumpet, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called “the Magna Carta of the Information Age.” His discoveries would lead contemporaries to compare him to Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. His work anticipated by decades the world we’d be living in today—and gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass. In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. It’s the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It’s the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the “idea factory” of Bell Labs, in the “scientists’ war” with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon’s collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener. And it’s the story of Shannon’s life as an often reclusive, always playful genius. With access to Shannon’s family and friends, A Mind at Play brings this singular innovator and creative genius to life.
I can’t wait to read this new biography about Claude Shannon! The bio/summer read I’ve been waiting for.
With any luck an advanced reader copy is speeding it way to me! (Sorry you can’t surprise me with a belated copy for my birthday.) A review is forthcoming.
You have to love the cover art by Lauren Peters-Collaer.
Resources from Domains 2017
Indie EdTech and Other Curiosities, June 5-6, 2017 at University of Oklahoma
Twitter Stream for #Domains17
Keynote: Neither Locked out nor locked in by Martha Burtis
Live-streamed videos from Virtually Connecting
DoOO Curriculum on Github
JBJ blogpost: Looking back at #Domains17
🔖 Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media
By supporting Micropub, indie-config, and/or action URLs, current feed readers can make it far easier for people on the open web to not only read content the way they currently do on siloed social media services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. Increased ease-of-use to allow these functionalities with beautiful user interface will help to move users out of walled-gardens where they’re trapped into the larger universe of the free and open internet. Individuals with their own websites can support the acceptance of these posts to save their interactions with what they’ve read, be they comments, likes, bookmarks, or other interactions. They can also close the loop by supporting Webmentions so that their comments can be sent to (and potentially displayed) on others’ websites. All of these pieces combined make for a more open and democratic web.
The article about feed readers that I wrote for the new AltPlatform tech blog is out now. I hope everyone will take a look.
When this publication from Richard MacManus (the founder of ReadWriteWeb.com, one of my old favorite standbys) popped up a few weeks ago with the tagline “A non-profit tech blog about the open web”, I immediately bookmarked it and knew it would be at the top of my subscription list. When I read his founding manifesto for the blog, I was hooked and bumped it to the top of my list and tipped off others:
This looks like a must-read blog for #Indieweb proponents.https://t.co/pVvG1h34nb
— ChrisAldrich (@ChrisAldrich) May 31, 2017
There’s also some great articles up by Emre Sokullu, Brian Hendrickson, and Richard MacManus on a variety of other great topics. I hope you’ll take a look at what they’re doing and subscribe.
I’m pleased that they’ve taken something I was planning on posting here on my site and are giving it some wider exposure.
If you’re a journalist, blogger, or writer in the space, do feel free to connect with them to pitch ideas.
🔖 dokieli
dokieli is a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions.
dokieli envisions research results, analysis and data all being produced interactively on the Web and seamlessly linked to and from articles. Through annotations and notifications, the academic process of peer-review can be open, transparent and decentralised for researchers.
🔖 Can entropy be defined for and the Second Law applied to the entire universe? by Arieh Ben-Naim | Arxiv
This article provides answers to the two questions posed in the title. It is argued that, contrary to many statements made in the literature, neither entropy, nor the Second Law may be used for the entire universe. The origin of this misuse of entropy and the second law may be traced back to Clausius himself. More resent (erroneous) justification is also discussed.
🔖 The hidden simplicity of biology by Paul C W Davies and Sara Imari Walker | Reports on Progress in Physics
Life is so remarkable, and so unlike any other physical system, that it is tempting to attribute special factors to it. Physics is founded on the assumption that universal laws and principles underlie all natural phenomena, but is it far from clear that there are 'laws of life' with serious descriptive or predictive power analogous to the laws of physics. Nor is there (yet) a 'theoretical biology' in the same sense as theoretical physics. Part of the obstacle in developing a universal theory of biological organization concerns the daunting complexity of living organisms. However, many attempts have been made to glimpse simplicity lurking within this complexity, and to capture this simplicity mathematically. In this paper we review a promising new line of inquiry to bring coherence and order to the realm of biology by focusing on 'information' as a unifying concept.
Downloadable free copy available on ResearchGate.
🔖 The “Hard Problem” of Life by Sara Imari Walker & Paul C.W. Davies
Chalmer's famously identified pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the "hard problem of consciousness". He argued that subjective experience constitutes a "hard problem" in the sense that its explanation will ultimately require new physical laws or principles. Here, we propose a corresponding "hard problem of life" as the problem of how `information' can affect the world. In this essay we motivate both why the problem of information as a causal agent is central to explaining life, and why it is hard - that is, why we suspect that a full resolution of the hard problem of life will, similar to as has been proposed for the hard problem of consciousness, ultimately not be reducible to known physical principles. Comments: To appear in "From Matter to Life: Information and Causality". S.I. Walker, P.C.W. Davies and G.F.R. Ellis (eds). Cambridge University Press
🔖 The Algorithmic Origins of Life – Sara Walker (SETI Talks)
The origin of life is arguably one of the greatest unanswered questions in science. A primary challenge is that without a proper definition for life -- a notoriously challenging problem in its own right -- the problem of how life began is not well posed. Here we propose that the transition from non-life to life may correspond to a fundamental shift in causal structure, where information gains direct, and context-dependent, causal efficacy over matter, a transition that may be mapped to a nontrivial distinction in how living systems process information. Dr. Walker will discuss potential measures of such a transition, which may be amenable to laboratory study, and how the proposed mechanism corresponds to the onset of the unique mode of (algorithmic) information processing characteristic of living systems.
https://youtu.be/dPiI4nYD0Vg
🔖 Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that are anywhere near that of even the simplest living systems. A key challenge is identifying the properties of living matter that might distinguish living and non-living physical systems such that we might build new life in the lab. This review is geared towards covering major viewpoints on the origin of life for those new to the origin of life field, with a forward look towards considering what it might take for a physical theory that universally explains the phenomenon of life to arise from the seemingly disconnected array of ideas proposed thus far. The hope is that a theory akin to our other theories in fundamental physics might one day emerge to explain the phenomenon of life, and in turn finally permit solving its origins.
🔖 Statistical Mechanics, Spring 2016 (Caltech, Physics 12c with videos) by John Preskill
An introductory course in statistical mechanics.
Recommended textbook Thermal Physics by Charles Kittel and Herbert Kroemer
There’s also a corresponding video lecture series available on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0ojjrEqIyPzgJUUW76koGcSCy6OGtDRI
🔖 Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2016
The ALife conferences are the major meeting of the artificial life research community since 1987. For its 15th edition in 2016, it was held in Latin America for the first time, in the Mayan Riviera, Mexico, from July 4 -8. The special them of the conference: How can the synthetic study of living systems contribute to societies: scientifically, technically, and culturally? The goal of the conference theme is to better understand societies with the purpose of using this understanding for a more efficient management and development of social systems.
🔖 Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security
The narrowing of diversity in crop species contributing to the world’s food supplies has been considered a potential threat to food security. However, changes in this diversity have not been quantified globally. We assess trends over the past 50 y in the richness, abundance, and composition of crop species in national food supplies worldwide. Over this period, national per capita food supplies expanded in total quantities of food calories, protein, fat, and weight, with increased proportions of those quantities sourcing from energy-dense foods. At the same time the number of measured crop commodities contributing to national food supplies increased, the relative contribution of these commodities within these supplies became more even, and the dominance of the most significant commodities decreased. As a consequence, national food supplies worldwide became more similar in composition, correlated particularly with an increased supply of a number of globally important cereal and oil crops, and a decline of other cereal, oil, and starchy root species. The increase in homogeneity worldwide portends the establishment of a global standard food supply, which is relatively species-rich in regard to measured crops at the national level, but species-poor globally. These changes in food supplies heighten interdependence among countries in regard to availability and access to these food sources and the genetic resources supporting their production, and give further urgency to nutrition development priorities aimed at bolstering food security.
h/t Eat This Podcast