I sometimes imagine wheeled creatures evolving in a location with a big flat hard surface like the Utah salt flats or the Nazca desert, but I guess there's not much reward for being able to roll around since those places are empty as well as flat. Tumbleweed found some success that way though, maybe?
The golden wheel spider lives in the sand dunes of the Namib Desert. When confronted by a spider-hunting wasp, it can perform a "cartwheeling" maneuver to escape. By tucking in its legs and turning onto its side, it can roll down a sand dune.
Is there any biological examples of freely rotating power systems? We have nice rotating joints with muscles to provide power, but I can't think of any joint that would allow the sort of free rotation while also producing torque, a wheeled animal would require.
Something internal to some shellfish, I believe, a kind of mixing rod that rotates. Hold on, I'll check if it's powered. (Also rotifers but they're tiny.)
Hmm, no, it sounds like it's externally powered:
> The style consists of a transparent glycoprotein rod which is continuously formed in a cilia-lined sac and extends into the stomach. The cilia rotate the rod, so that it becomes wrapped in strands of mucus.
Or maybe the cilia ( = wiggly hairs) could be seen as a kind of motor. Depends how you count it and exactly what the set-up is, I can't tell from this.
I think I would count internal power created by the rotating component itself. I hadn't though of that possibility, since human made machinery usually has the power producing component located in the main body and transferring that power to a freely rotating component is quite hard. Biological systems wouldn't necessarily look like that, and could feasibly be powered by the wheels themselves deforming as if the wheels were a separate, but connected, biological system.
On a tangent, what is astonishing to me as an outsider is the cultural stagnation. Even in times of economic decline Britain was a cultural powerhouse. Modern music, theater, cinema, tv, literature, sports, etc. were permanently shaped by post-war Britain (especially in Europe). Whatever the cultural norm dictated by the behemoth that is the USA, Britain always had something new, something fresh to give. There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.
What happened in the last 15 years is a mystery to me. I doubt it's economic stagnation (been there before) and I doubt it collapsed under the weight of US culture (which is still enamored with anything British). Maybe the modern internet and social media diluted everything. I don't know, but I miss it. (sorry for the off-topic)
Whenever you ask someone in the creative industries, they point to the aggressive tightening of the benefits system. People could write music and books while on the dole in the 80s, and become commercial successes. Now it's an area that's only accessible to people who can afford to have their parents "loss leader" their first few years in the industry, and as a result has lost all "realness".
I don't think it's entirely off-topic, though I only have a vague sense of the connection. I knew 1980s Japan, a society of supreme confidence, and contrast it with modern Japan, a society that has really lost its mojo. What I think happened is that the depression of the 1990s so thoroughly shook their confidence that they still haven't recovered.
I've only observed English culture from abroad, but my sense since the late 1990s is that the English have become somehow ashamed to be openly proud of their culture. I don't have a feeling for what brought this about.
must commend this briton for his unparalleled sense of humor, razor-sharp wit, subtle, effortlessly charming and perfectly timed quips. While American humor tends to be more direct and sometimes louder, this dry, understated delivery is a unique gift.
I'd expect the cultural stagnation to lead the economic. The article is clearly political but it is pointing out some really obvious long term trends. The fact that the UK elite haven't been able to grapple with them at any point in the last few decades showcases that, as a culture, they've lost the spark of competence.
The UK media and upper class have failed to identify energy, housing or infrastructure more generally as requiring serious responses too. Their entire system appears to be off the rails. Their failure relative to countries like China really is quite astonishing, although it doesn't set them far apart from the greater western bloc. It makes sense that we aren't seeing cultural leadership out of them; where would they lead us too? Nowhere good.
I'm not sure 15 years is enough to look back. I'm struggling to think of a time since the 80s that some formerly strong areas of British culture were vibrant and interesting.
See eg. BritPop, a vacuous derivate outpouring of jumped-up pub rock relying on waving the flag to justify it's existence.
Some areas have still produced decent stuff, eg comedy (The Office, Borat, Peep Show), etc. Our twists on black American music (eg grime, drill) seem ok.
But it's a real struggle to think of much that is vital and original as a culture from Britain in the last 30 years I'd say.
An excellent point. Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option (lets' be real, they'll find a way to circumvent your efforts anyway) and moving the burden of restriction from society to individuals is not fair.
So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.
I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.
Same feeling here, I loved the early internet, it played a huge part in who i am actually! This said, this is not the early internet anymore, where content was mechanically regulated by a sort of egalitarian rule. Social Media applies a power law to content, so that 80% of the viewers are aware of the 20% that's available and human nature being what it is, lowest common denominator content gets pushed to the forefront.
Hence all the attention seekers on FacebInstaTok...
This is further compounded by the pervert effects generated by these platforms one of them being the mimetism and the general wolfpack behaviour that can surge out of the madness of crowds. Online Bullying is real.
My kids (11 and 14) are stuck on feature phones for now and i'd like, as much as possible to keep them off smartphones and their constant Notifications for the foreseeable future, until they are not kids.
> Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option...
"Everybody else is doing it" has never been, and still is not, a valid reason for anything. If other parents choose to let their kids ingest mental poison, that does not mean that one should allow their children to do the same. Abstention is not only an option, it is something which absolutely should be enforced by any parent who cares about their child's well being.
I'm not talking about kids, I'm talking about adolescents (as is the quoted paragraph). I strongly believe that an adolescent's well being is tightly coupled with social interactions. If a restriction is not protecting them from life threatening situations, then alienating them from their peers is probably worse.
So the choice is between social-media-induced mental illness and alienation/isolation? No wonder kids are so screwed up today: there is no winning move!
It absolutely is a reason. Everyone else is doing it, meaning if you don't you feel isolated.
So, either you participate and feel isolated through your social connections by social media, or you don't participate and feel even more isolated because you don't have social connections.
30 years ago, you didn't live vicariously through the published perception of the world you friends held 24/7. Social interactions stopped when you put down the phone or went home for the day. If your friends went on a trip, while you couldn't, you'd only hear about their stories when they got back.
30 years ago, unrestrained access was still constrained to a desktop computer hooked to dial-up. Your access was constrained to a physical location.
Today, the big issue is the lure of having 24/7 mobile access to the Internet. At any moment, you can amend your own crafted online digital identity, meshing it with your real life, as you publish your location via Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp with your friends. Meanwhile, you can't but be confronted with notifications telling you where your friends are and what they are up to with who ("X has posted a photo, Y is currently at Z").
On a surface level, that lure has created a host of totally new social conventions and etiquette over the past 18 years, basically since the release of the iPhone. Social conventions to which one has to conform unless you don't want to lose out on social connections.
For instance, seeing whether a recipient of a PM has "read" a message and then "leaving you on read". Having that rather unrealistic expectation that one ought to respond instantly once a message has been read. At worst, friendships are put on tenterhooks as one ties value to the time between that "read" notice, and the moment a response follows.
In reality, the world 30 years ago wasn't more beautiful and people weren't more kind then they are today. In fact, if you weren't asked by your friends to hang out, or were left out when they went to a party and had all these in-group stories to tell, you felt socially isolated either way. That's not really new.
What's new is that this new lure of 24/7 connectivity creates a potential to be confronted with those feelings pretty much every waking hour. It must be anxiety inducing to scroll through your feed, not knowing if your friends did or didn't hang out last night without asking you.
To my mind, the answer isn't outright banning social media, or mobile devices. The answer is to keep having that difficult discussion about the value of the affordances - or lack thereof - the offer to foster healthy human relationships. It's about finding better ways to teach and empower young people on how to approach these tools, built by commercial enterprises, in healthy ways. And it's about being willing to properly publicly invest in aspects ranging from education to mental health support to enforcement and so on.
If they find a workaround, they will still be unable to sit there around the clock, which is decent reduction of consumption. Also there won't be many, just like smoking schoolkids, so no social pressure. You can ban it completely or you can have your lovely bookface 1 hour per day, why not, it's dangerous when they spend there 10 hours per day.
Overall, I think the internet has basically been weaponised (intentionally or not) by big tech. People of every generation are being manipulated at a scale that has never before been possible, and what’s more is that the algorithms for targeting and engagement make it trivial to do this, either through propaganda, disinformation, or advertising in a way that skirts regulations on traditional media.
Will it change? I doubt it - Google and Facebook are likely too big to fail now, Twitter is still around as a bona-fide hate platform, TikTok is unlikely to go anywhere until something else replaces it…
The term "Too Big To Fail" is probably inappropriate here (was it ever appropriate actually? banks should have been allowed to fail in 2008), indeed Facebook may well be replaced at some point (is Gen Z even on Facebook?), and AI might well replace Google's killer product: its search engine.
This said, I tend to agree with you, the power law exists and has to be maintained by big tech to control the content because a captive audience is soooo profitable.
Holy moley, that does explain those 4 skinny dudes on horses I saw the other night. This'll enable crazy large single-VI spaghetti monsters. There'll need to be a Guinness record for geometrically largest VI.
Next step is 3D VIs built using VR headsets. I'll buy an oculus and renew my labview cert when that day comes. Setting up communication with a lab instrument over a shoddy USB connection will feel like hacking the Gibson.
One can make parallels to other eras, sure, but the current convergence to an "average" is unprecedented in scale and speed. Various eras had a distinctive style that everything revolved around, but at least there was variety (cultural and corporate).
Nowadays I can't shake off this weird feeling of sameness emanating from every design. I can hardly distinguish brands any more, I can't tell cultures apart and that's a shame because there's never been an era with such abundance of products and expression mediums as the current one
Music is another example, which the article didn't go into, probably because it's not visual like his other examples. When I say [USA] '60s music, '70s music, '80s music and so on, you kind of know what I'm talking about. Sure, each decade had its outliers and variety, but you can probably immediately hear in your head the decade-stereotype sound I'm talking about. Each decade had that distinct fashion that the culture adopted and became known for. What is 2010's music? I have no idea. It's homogenized nothing. It's a shapeless average song, workshopped and focus-grouped to appeal to some nonexistent "Global ISO Standard Person." It's defining characteristic is its total absence of distinctiveness.
Completely disagree. Streaming has unlocked music listeners and artists to quickly iterate so that choice is boundless. Do you really think being stuck with the same sound for 10 years is a good thing? You don't know what 2010s music sounds like because it's completely individualized. Maybe that has its own problems involving increased siloization and could be linked to political tribalization but claiming its "homogenized nothing" is senseless.
I think the issue is you haven't actually found the sound you enjoy. If you just let pop radio take you on your way you're going to get lowest common denominator sound. And streaming has made this effect much worse. Now music radio is only for people who can't be assed to choose their own music, so it's even more lowest common denominator than before.
The best way I can explain it is as if we now live in a society that invented time travel and we use it to live the exact same month over and over again. We make small tweaks each loop but nothing substantive. We are comfortable in the control of this space and are now afraid of living in the future that is beyond this time window. Anyone who tries has an extremely hard go of it because they are entirely alone beyond the window. The rest of the society goes back to the beginning of the month to live it again.
I feel like a time prisoner /fugitive constantly trying to break out of this window-loop.
This next era may take 100s of years though, AI taking up physical labor is still science fiction (and I'm not fully sold on the utopia angle). She'll need to support herself much sooner than that, let's be realistic
