One letter to executives around the world has prioritized climate change on corporate agendas. But will this make a difference without government regulation?
"DANCE" (1910), Henri Matisse (Hermitage, St. Petersburg) "DANCE!" (2016), Pasha CAS (Temirtau, Kazakhstan)
One of the most significant paintings in Matisse's work is “Dance”, which he created between 1908-1913. impressed by ritual, mystical and probably even idolatrous dances. The energy of the picture is conveyed in 3 colors: blue, green and red. With them, the artist merges the state of nature, rhythm, actions and people that appear before us naked and liberated, completely merging and at the same time clearly standing out from the general background.
And now, a little more than a century passes, and there is a new artist who wants to peek at modern round dance of megalopolises - through the prism of a new reality. Looking at the modern “Dance” we find that the idol has ceased to be something deified, it is so tangible and real that it even has its own outlines and outlines in the form of corporations and the fact that they spew out of themselves, drugging and enslaving people in shirts and tie, as in shackles. The all-consuming illusion of satiety, demonstrating the power of those who sit "on the pipe" over those who dance around it. Monster corporations ready to suck and sell oil - paint new interiors. Desperately dancing around the pipe!
PS The city of Temirtau. Metallurgical plants etch everything living on the vine: not so long ago, environmentalists took a sample of the earth at five playgrounds and it was found that lead was exceeded 5 times higher than normal! Everyone is silent!
Author: street art artist Pasha CAS Curator: Rush X Text: Vita Pravda Photo: Olya Koto April 2016
In Australia, the conservative press has been denying that climate change is fueling the bushfires.
For years, climate change experts have said that hotter and drier summers would exacerbate the threat of bushfires in Australia. Fires have been raging since September and a prolonged drought and record-breaking temperatures mean the blazes won't stop for weeks — if not months.
But to read or watch or listen to the conservative press in Australia is to get an altogether different story: that it's arson, not climate change, that's mainly responsible for the deaths of nearly 30 humans and an estimated one billion animals. Damien Cave is the New York Times bureau chief in Sydney, and he recently wrote about "How Rupert Murdoch Is Influencing Australia's Bushfire Debate." He spoke to Bob about the media landscape of denial and deflection, and why critics say it's making it harder to hold the government accountable.
A new way of understanding climate change and other phenomena.
We are obliged to do something about them, because we can think them. ❧
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 08:56AM
It’s very difficult to talk about something you cannot see or touch, yet we are obliged to do so, since global warming affects us all. ❧
It’s also difficult to interact with those things when we’re missing the words and vocabulary to talk about them intelligently.
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 09:00AM
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University in Houston. He is the author of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End Of The World. ❧
want to read these
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:10AM
Or global warming. I can’t see or touch it. What I can see and touch are these raindrops, this snow, that sunburn patch on the back of my neck. I can touch the weather. But I can’t touch climate. So someone can declare: “See! It snowed in Boise, Idaho, this week. That means there’s no global warming!” We can’t directly see global warming, because it’s not only really widespread and really really long-lasting (100,000 years); it’s also super high-dimensional. It’s not just 3-D. It’s an incredibly complex entity that you have to map in what they call a high-dimensional- phase space: a space that plots all the states of a system. In so doing, we are only following the strictures of modern science, laid down by David Hume and underwritten by Immanuel Kant. Science can’t directly point to causes and effects: That would be metaphysical, equivalent to religious dogma. It can only see correlations in data. This is because, argues Kant, there is a gap between what a thing is and how it appears (its “phenomena”) that can’t be reduced, no matter how hard we try. We can’t locate this gap anywhere on or inside a thing. It’s a transcendental gap. Hyperobjects force us to confront this truth of modern science and philosophy. ❧
A short, and very cogent argument here.
Annotated on January 15, 2020 at 10:07AM
Last week, a long-awaited report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change showed that the worst consequences of global warming would occur even sooner than previously thought. Here’s the story behind the findings.
An auto emissions battle is brewing between the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of California. Separately, James Comey tore into the president on national TV.
Donald Trump plans to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change. That's bad news for anyone who happens to live on this planet.
I’ve been following a Google Alert for “information theory,” and so on an almost a daily basis for over 15 years I’ve seen thousands of notices and references to his excellent textbook Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, which he kindly chose to freely share with the world. It’s really a great little textbook, and I recommend that everyone download it or purchase it and give it a read. In addition he has a fabulous series of video lectures to go with it as well. (Someone had actually asked me for information theory lectures on Quora last week, and his are some of the best.)
An instant classic, covering everything from Shannon’s fundamental theorems to the postmodern theory of LDPC codes. You’ll want two copies of this astonishing book, one for the office and one for the fireside at home.
Bob McEliece, information theorist and professor, California Institute of Technology
Sir David J.C. MacKay was the Regius Professor of Engineering at Cambridge University and a former professor of natural philosophy in the Department of Physics at at Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He was also a leading figure in energy and climate change having written the accessible and highly praised book Sustainable Energy: Without all the Hot Air, which is also available for free on his site. In 2009 he was appointed to a five year term as Chief Scientific Advisor of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, United Kingdom.
His TED talk will give you an idea of some of his work in this area:
MacKay was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009. His nomination reads:
David MacKay introduced more efficient types of error-correcting code that are now used in satellite communications, digital broadcasting and magnetic recording. He advanced the field of Machine Learning by providing a sound Bayesian foundation for artificial neural networks. Using this foundation, he significantly improved their performance, allowing them to be used for designing new types of steel that are now used in power stations. He used his expertise in information theory to design a widely used interface called “dasher” that allows disabled people to write efficiently using a single finger or head-mounted pointer.
Sir David MacKay was knighted in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to scientific advice in government and to science outreach.
For those interested, he a great little blog. Here’s his last blogpost.
Below, from a variety of information theorists, mathematicians, and scientists is just the beginning of the outpouring of loss the world is experiencing today:
Deeply saddened to hear of the death today of David MacKay aged only 48—one of UK’s very best applied scientists: https://t.co/9QLq95BKzA
Pasha CAS (https://vk.com/pashacaskz)
Timothy Morton (High Country News)
Damian Carrington (the Guardian)
