photo credit: lrargerich

((An incomplete idea))

Begin with the idea of seeds as dense packets of shippable information. Seeds contain (self)assembly instructions. Just add water.

Think about memes vs. genes. Memes allow an evolution that is faster than the rate of gene evolution. There is the rapid transmission, sure. But there is also the internal workings, self-reflection and modification of memes. A meme can undergo a great deal of evolution within a single entity before it gets spit back out into the world.

What would it look like if plants had access to memes? What if plants had rapid learning? They’d still need to be plants, so no moving and talking like people. Otherwise, we’ve just recreated Treebeard.

Think about machines. In some crude sense, RepRaps are plants. They build other RepRaps but they themselves don’t change or learn. The learning is instantiated in the next generation of machine that the RepRap builds. Generations can be radically (instead of gradually) different – an advantage afforded by all of the information processing that happens between generations of RepRaps.

Give plants memes and let them instantiate their learning in the (plant)conscious design of the next generation of seeds. Give them access to the ability to modify their behaviour almost as quickly as humans modify ours. Let them adapt rapidly to our rapid cultural shifts. Why should Monsanto have all the fun?

Scenarios

A weed appears in the Middle East with seed pods that are as satisfying to smash as a florescent tube. When smashed near the right kind of soil, chemical triggers set off a fiery light show. Youthful Tehran is overrun with the stuff.

In Paris, a species of flower predicts next season’s colours and changes its children accordingly. A bizarre symbiosis occurs as fashion designers derive inspiration from plant and plant derives inspiration from the runway. All the big houses guard their greenhouses jealously. Chanel’s radical “Agent Orange” spring line causes a scandal.

On the rootops of Detroit, a species we call shiftspice changes flavours from generation to generation. Chefs prize them, trading and collecting them the way that we trade vintages of wine. “Is that a Brightmoor late 2012?” Collector-prospector-burglars creep along the eaves with highly portable harvesting gear. Their discoveries are sold to restaurants all around the world.

In Tokyo, a kind of balcony fruit that seemed incredibly successful is learning about fads and backlash. While in Abbotswood, truce is declared as gardeners learn that updating your landscaping to the latest fashion can be something of an impossibility if the current plants don’t want to be removed.

Rumours circulate of a grass in L.A. with hallucinogenic properties and pollen spores that are activated by fire. If you hotbox with male and female angiosperm in the same bowl, the trip is said to be twice as intense.

Authorities in São Paulo engage in a futile attempt to crack down on the practice of “body pollenating” at festivals, after revellers discover a flowering vine that, in the right conditions and quantities, produces an indescribable contact-high.

From a plant’s-eye view

Steve Brill, entrepreneur, law writer, founder of Court TV and recently defunct CLEAR is trying to save journalism by reversing the trend of free news online. He gave a briefing today and while I did not hear it, @NeimanLab posted the slides here.

Let me say that I LOVE the idea of a kind of iTunes for news. It is my fondest wish that I not have a separate login and password for every friggin’ site. I’d also love to be able to pay some reasonable rate to support good journalism. Like the App Store, a unified easy payment system might free up news sites to experiment with more granular payment models. I hope they do, and I hope that they understand that the results need to be consumer-friendly and mindful of the information-firehose context of content online.

I’m not a producer of news, but as a heavy consumer, the future of journalism in the face collapse is of great interest to me. As a periodic entrepreneur, I like playing with numbers. Let’s take a look at Steve’s.

Slide 4

I had NO IDEA that my time and attention was so valuable. And all this time I’ve been GIVING it away to newspapers and magazines. Heck, I’ve been PAYING some of them for the privilege. (Hey advertisers, call me! Let’s work out something where you give me the $500 directly.) But hey, look at those online numbers. Pretty grim, huh?

Taking these figures from the Boston Globe, there are only about 20 times as many online readers as as print readers, where one needs 100 unique visitors for every lost print subscriber.

Slide 5

This is where Steve comes to the rescue. There’s an untapped demand for paying for the news! 92% of us would be willing to pay $300/yr (on average)! That sounds pretty good.

Pay close attention to the chart on the right. Steve is confusing us by playing around with medians and means. The chart tells us that 21% of us are ready to pay pay up to $600, 24% would pay that “average” $300, and 45% of us will pay NO MORE than $120. (There’s an unlabelled 10%. Presumably, they are ready to pay INFINITY dollars.)

Using a mean here is disingenuous. If we charge $25/mo. for online news, we will not see 92% of visitors subscribing. We’ll see 55%. The ones willing to pay more? We’ll have to work out some kind of premium scheme, I suppose. So let’s word it another way. 55% of consumers are willing to pay $25/mo or more. 45% are willing to pay $10/mo or less. That begins to look like a lot less money.

Why this matters comes into sharp focus when we look at…

Slide 12 & Slide 13

You’re going to want to click on those and look at the fine print. The subscription models Steve has up here assume $7-8/month per subscriber, along with some per-article users who are reading only 6 stories every month. Let me be the first to say that if you are a newspaper publisher and you imagine a world where people only want to read 6 of your articles per month, YOU ARE A BAD NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER. I recognize that the idea is that these will be longtail micropayments intended to capture revenue from drive-by readership or whatever, so let’s retreat back to the monthly subscriptions (presumably, all-you-can-eat).

Steve’s numbers in Slide 5 don’t specify whether the amount people were willing to pay was intended to be per-site-they-love or overall. Given that most households only subscribe to a single newspaper and a few magazines, I think we can assume that it’s a monthly budget for online news in general.

At $7.50 a month, we’ve wiped out the budget of 45% of our online readership. They can’t afford a second subscription. Even our 24% ‘average’ readers are subscribing to only three things. Heaven help them if they want to sample from a lot of sites. At $0.25 a story, they get to read 100 stories per month across the entire Internet.

According to Google’s RSS reader, I receive 300-400 items, scan through about 30-100 of them, and read some subset of those PER DAY, not counting links from friends/Facebook/Twitter. The Globe and Mail RSS feed alone sends me 180 stories daily (note to Globe and Mail: Guys! That’s too many!). The flood is so bad that I don’t even subscribe to other newspaper feeds. It’s easier and better to click on curated links to the best articles, as picked out by friends and trusted blogs. Steve wants me to rely on a few trusted all-I-can-eat subscriptions or limit myself to 3 articles a day (assuming I’m ‘average’).

Moving from numbers to a boring annecdote: Last week a friend sent me a link to a Financial Times article. I’d gone over my article limit for the month. I went and read something else. (the end) The brutal reality of online news and opinion is that we are inundated with ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more things to read and watch than we have time to read and watch them.

I’m sympathetic with the need to fund excellent journalism and writing, but schemes that are tone deaf to the state of online news are doomed to fail. Hoping that consumers will be willing to limit themselves to a few subscriptions per month while asking them to pay (for magazines at least) 10 times as much as they used to just isn’t reasonable.

Unless the briefing contained a lot of context and nuance that were not captured by the slides, this does not look like the solution. If Brill &co. are going to convince consumers that their new service is a good value proposition, they’ve go an uphill battle.

((Below emphasis is mine))

2007: Developer ensures islands will be safe from rising sea levels

Nakheel, which is the developer of The Palm islands and The World, says it followed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) estimation of a rise of 30cm to 50cm by 2100 when it prepared its plans for the islands. “It goes without saying that both short and long-term [sea level] rises are always considered in the design of Nakheel coastal projects,” said Dr Louay A Mohammad, a scientist with Nakheel.

“The upper end of the range is adopted by Nakheel, which is in line with International Marine and Coastal Structures Design Practices. We are therefore confident that the sustainability of our waterfront projects is ensured in the long term.” The developer, however, did not comment on the recent report from international ocean expert Stefan Rahmstorf, published in the journal Science, which said the increase was more likely to be 1.4 metres by 2100 – nearly triple the IPCC estimation.

2009: Oceans Rising Faster Than UN Forecast, Scientists Say

Ocean levels have been rising by 3.1 millimeters a year since 2000, a rate that’s predicted to grow, according to the study. The projections of sea levels rising by a meter this century compare with the 18 to 59 centimeters (7 to 23 inches) forecast by the IPCC.

((Oops))

photo credit: saharsh

This is a review of a documentary.

When I first heard about the Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre, I thought about Neale Stephenson’s Snow Crash. There’s this refugee raft city, cobbled together around a dead tanker that is slowly drifting counter-clockwise from Asia to the States. It’s been at sea for years, turning into this kind of Darwinian pool of only the most vicious and desperate survivors and the whole thing’s going to come ashore in California…

The second time I heard about the Gyre, I was in Montreal. A young woman had just been accepted into a graduate program and she was telling me about this continent of trash that was out there.

“It’s a whole floating island,” she said.

She wanted to do something with plastic-eating fungii for her thesis. She was going to do some research and see if she could seed the floating islands with mushrooms. See if the continent could support life, a kind of enormous artificial island. A sixth Olympic ring the size of one or more Texases.

I haven’t been in touch with her, so I don’t know what happened to her thesis project when her research inevitably discovered that her garbage island is just as fictional as Stephenson’s raft city. What’s actually out there is much, much worse.

Toxic Garbage Island

The documentary, by Vice’s VBS.tv follows a group of filmmakers who take a ride out to the Gyre on the Agalita, one of the few vessels doing research into the Gyre. It’s divided into 3 parts and at some point during the second part, I began to get impatient. When were we going to see the garbage continent?

Getting to the Gyre takes seven days by boat. For the first hour of the documentary, you are given a glimpse into each day. The crew get more and more bored and frustrated. Toward the end of part 2, the Captain explains to the filmmakers that they aren’t going get their money shot.

“Everybody says show me a picture of the Garbage. Well, it’s spread out, it’s diffuse. This is an enormous ocean. You’re not gonna find a dump, there is no trash dump down here.”

Plastic breaks down in the sun. The pieces get smaller and smaller but not nothing eats the polymers. So you end up increasingly tiny bits of plastic suspended in the water. The area the size of one or more Texases is filled with plastic garbage at various stages of breaking down. It’s plastic soup. Chunky plastic soup. Inhospitable to life, chunky, plastic soup.

Water in the Gyre is relatively stable. Before the plastic started to accumulate, biological stuff did. The micro-organisms that feed on that stuff thrived and the creatures that ate them thrived all the way up to large mammals and sea birds. A lot of creatures came to expect that the Gyre would be a buffet. They still go up there, looking for food. So you end up with this (warning: that image is disturbing as hell).

True to the captain’s word, the filmmakers never do get their money shot. But after sitting through an hour of movie voyage, when they come across a construction helmet and then a floating jar and then a tangle of net you begin to get a sense. There are bits of garbage everywhere. They are seven days out to sea, just about as far from humans and land as they can possibly be and they are picking up stuff that you’d expect to see in a poorly maintained marina. There’s a lot of it.

The Sublime

In University, talking about the sublime, we looked at Kant’s interpretation; the feeling you can get of utter smallness and powerlessness in the face of a vast universe. To experience this feeling, you need to come across events or things that reveal your weakness without threatening your existence. A safe enough distance from you that you can contemplate it but immediate enough that that you know for certain that you are powerless in the face of it.

When we used examples, we’d normally talk about stuff like watching a roaring thunderstorm from a cave. We’d compare being chased by a bear (terror, not sublime) to observing the pounding majesty of a massive waterfall (sublime). Sitting in class, ‘lo those many years ago, it never occurred to me that I’d have this feeling in the face of a floating sea of suffocating garbage.

Watching The Documentary

You can see the whole thing for free on VBS.tv.
Toxic Garbage Island Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The Monsanto House of the Future

Check out this article on Ars Technica about law prof. Patricia Akester’s study examining the effects of DRM on the legal use of copyrighted works. As you’re reading it, bear in mind that due to laws similar to the DMCA all over the world, it is often illegal to bypass DRM encryption, even if copyright law allows you to make a copy.

Why is this important?

In a storage locker in Halifax, there is a small box which theoretically contains copies of every essay I wrote in high school. These essays are stored on a stack of floppy disks. I’ll probably never read them again. For this to be otherwise, a lot of things would need to come true.

1. I figure out which Mac OS I was running (System 6?).
2. I find a copy of the OS and get it running either on old hardware (which I also find) or virtualized.
3. I find a compatible floppy drive.
4. I find a compatible copy of the word processor (WriteNow).
5. The disks have dramatically exceeded their estimated 2-year lifespan.

In contrast, consider my University essays, all of which I can still open and read. This is possible because I have been transferring the files from computer to computer over the past 12 years. There is an unbroken chain of digital pack-ratting from the MacBook I’m using now to the Pentium 166 I built in 1997.

The loss of my essays (grades 10-12) are not a big loss to society. But it serves to illustrate a problem that plagues archivists. Digital content is very easy to copy in the short term but degrades very quickly in the medium and long term. To keep digital content alive, you have to keep it moving. Kevin Kelly calls this Movage.

Anything you want moved to the future has to be given attention to keep it moving forward.

In order to preserve content against the decay of laughably short-lived media and compatibilty, archivists need to make copies – early and often. We’re not used to thinking of it that way. We’re used to thinking of preservation as a kind of stasis. We think of climate controlled rooms and white gloves and sealed vaults.

In digital, stasis is death. Stasis is the BBC’s endangered Domesday Project, trapped on laserdiscs, needing hardware that had nearly disappeared in 2002 (interestingly, they knew this was coming but the archivists failed to keep the data alive).

It is bad enough for librarians, what with the fires, earthquakes, moisture, theft, time, and other disasters eating away at the content they seek to preserve. Copyright holders have made it all the worse, by preventing the one thing going for digital – easy, short-term, perfect copies – from happening in a legal setting.

DRM schemes make it illegal for archivists to do their jobs.