TL81.net

I cant make those sums work for any variant of the way we live in the West: either were going to fix it through as-yet-unknown technologies, or were going to be the caboose, the last part of the human race to live in a sustainable way. Were the last, not the first, and we have to face the fact that our lack of sustainability is a crime and a shame . . .

via Boing Boing.

I don’t really buy all that let’s-all-become-smallholders stuff, if I’m honest. And I don’t even know what a caboose is. I say we take off into space and let the hippies have their planet back.

But it’s worth adding to your cognitive-bias armoury that for every ‘first’ there may well be a more important ‘last’ we’re missing, obscured by the shortness of our lives, our lack of history or something else for which we’re less blameless.

And vice versa.

I don’t follow them. That would probably be weird.

They’re flippin’ brilliant. A lot of them have sections titled ‘My GIFs’. Supporting gay marriage is a thing.

They do this thing where they say stuff like, “Reblog if you’re up to no good!”. And they send round these little questionnaires where they answer 20 questions about their favourite music and their star sign and shit like that.

Today I saw one that asked the question, “What was your first URL?”

Filippo then issued a challenge, saying that the commission to build the dome should be given to the man who could make an egg stand on end, as that man would have the skills required for the job.  After the various architects tried in vain to accomplish it, Filippo took an egg, whacked it on its end and then placed it on the table where it stood upright and did not fall over.

The other architects protested that they could have done that, too, to which Filippo replied that they could have built the dome, too, had they seen his model.  Impressed, the judges awarded Filippo the commission to construct the dome.

From Duarte Blog, Great Moments in Presentation History, the Architect and the Egg

More on the dead chickens problem of price discovery and assigning value; I love stories like these.

The vast question, though is:

How do you reconcile this kind of truthy story – the genius leaps into the Adjacent Possible of the unknown sample space – with the idiocies of patent law and copyright?

Let me next define the “Adjacent Possible.” Take a liter flask with 1,000 types of chemicals. Call these “The Actual.” Let them react by a single reaction step. Perhaps new species of chemicals appear. Call these the “Adjacent Possible.”

Now I point to the Adjacent Possible of the evolving biosphere. Once there were lung fish, swim bladders were in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere. Two billion years ago, before there were multi-celled organisms, swim bladders were not in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere.

If we agree, then watch! We do not know what is in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere! We not only do not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen!

Then can we make probability statements about the evolution of the biosphere? No. Consider flipping a coin 10,000 times. It will come up heads about 5,000 times with a binomial distribution. But, critically, note that we knew beforehand all the possible outcomes, all heads, all tails, all 2 to the 10,000 possibilities. Thus we knew what statisticians call “the sample space” of the process, so could construct a probability measure.

Can we construct a probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible? No. We do not know the sample space!

Part of the issue with copyright and patents seems to be that we’re not sure if people have gone from A – Z (which is worthy of reward) or started off from N (which probably isn’t):

“Q: How can companies become more adaptive?

A: You need to be able to recognise your adjacent possibilities. A lot of people can’t. They are at A, they want to go to X. And X is maybe twenty steps away. And they can?t visualise what the next step is that gets them towards X. They can work their way backwards to like N. But they have no idea how to get from A to N. They do know if they can get to N, they can get to X. But they need to know what B and C are. I find that a lot of people at a lot of companies are so focused on being able to articulate X, and then they hire consultants who work them backwards to N, that they never figure out B and C.”

Interview with Michael Lissack, quoted on Purposive Drift

Is the story about Filippo great because he goes right back to the egg?

Credits/thanks/more:

The link to Duarte Blog comes from the ever-resource-full @timkastelle

Edge.org have a talk with Stuart Kauffman on his idea of the Adjacent Possible

Image: the Adjacent Possible from Rafe Furst at Emergent Fool

Image: Buckminster Fuller/Dome from Art Tattler

Found this cartoon summing up my view of living in the suburbs via agentnifty on The Twitter.

It’s from this Danish site and you’ll probably have to click it to see it properly.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like suburbs, even if they do make for some amazing pictures; there just isn’t enough space for wabi-sabi.

Luckily, Andrew Maynard has the answer – suburb eating robots. There’s a great slideshow here describing how – and why – they work (fuelled by liposuctioned fat from chubbies):

Perhaps more practically, the Build a Better Burb competition is looking at ways of improving the ‘burbs of Long Island. You can view all the entries and vote for your favourite.

My favourite is the idea of the Hub-urb, which is fairly self-explanatory (?) It reminds me of how things are organised in the suburbs of Tokyo, which works pretty well.

I’m also pretty keen on the idea of Clover-Stomping (which involves using all that dead space in and around clover-leaf intersections). Annoyingly, it’s all done in Flash, so I can’t link to the entries direct – but here’s some screengrabs below – as usual, click for embiggenisation:

Finally, Andrew Maynard doesn’t only dream of destroying suburbs with chubbie-powered robots, but of replacing them with dynamic, reconfigurable living spaces comprised of shipping containers that move according to the whims and needs of residents:

A good piece on Andrew Maynard and suburbs in general is here on the Landscape + Urbanism blog.

The Suburb-Eating Robot is also here on this PDF (with further elucidation on the chubbie-chasing ethos).

I found the links to Andrew Maynard via Treehugger.

All the images from above (and some more) are below in this gallery.

Sometimes things just take you by surprise. Haircuts by Children is one of those things. I’ve no idea why, it just grabbed me as one of those, “OMG, that’s so metaphorical and sums up the entire human condition!” things.

I think it’s a project by Mammalian Diving Reflex who create work that ‘is at once furious, riotous and rigorous’, ‘smashing ideas together at high speed to see what pops out, inadvertently producing ideal entertainment for the end of the world’.

And I found it via Agency of Coney, who are an ‘agency of adventure and play’. You can find their proper website here.

People have written about Haircuts by Children here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Pics come from there, there, there, there, there and there. And from The Flickr. As usual, clicking makes them bigger.