[By far the most lucid thing I’ve read about the current Syria situation (although I’m not terribly knowledgeable about it). -egg]

The UK and France had a lot of experience of running colonial empires, and had devised a recipe for establishing puppet states. You carved up the blank areas on the map, deliberately cutting across tribal/national boundaries, to establish zones with a 70/25/5 percentage split. The 70% majority were to be ruled and policed by representatives drawn from the 25% minority, armed with clubs and possibly rifles, while the 5% of imperial merchants and administrators enforced colonial rule over the 25%ers with machine guns and gunboats.

via On Syria – Charlie’s Diary.

[Absolutely fascinating. -egg]

Researchers say this new breed of bots is being designed not just with greater sophistication but also with grander goals: to sway elections, to influence the stock market, to attack governments, even to flirt with people and one another.

via I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot. – NYTimes.com.

[Very interesting. -egg]

Why do children resemble their parents? It’s a question that has intrigued people for millennia, and surprisingly, in spite of our cutting-edge biotechnology, scientists still don’t have an answer. But when they find one, it will have big implications for how we use genetics to personalize medicine and understand human behavior.

via We Still Don’t Know Why We Look Like Our Parents.

[Neat! -egg]

Conventional scientific wisdom has it that plants and other creatures have only lived on land for about 500 million years, and that landscapes of the early Earth were as barren as Mars.

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old — at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.

via Greening of the Earth pushed way back in time | Communications.

[Here’s the part that really blows my mind:

‘“I explained to British authorities that there were other copies in America and Brazil so they wouldn’t be achieving anything,” Rusbridger said. “But once it was obvious that they would be going to law I preferred to destroy our copy rather than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze our reporting.”‘ ]

Guardian editors on Tuesday revealed why and how the newspaper destroyed computer hard drives containing copies of some of the secret files leaked by Edward Snowden.

The decision was taken after a threat of legal action by the government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American and British government surveillance revealed by the documents.

It resulted in one of the stranger episodes in the history of digital-age journalism. On Saturday 20 July, in a deserted basement of the Guardian’s King’s Cross offices, a senior editor and a Guardian computer expert used angle grinders and other tools to pulverise the hard drives and memory chips on which the encrypted files had been stored.

via NSA files: why the Guardian in London destroyed hard drives of leaked files | World news | The Guardian.

[Interesting article from The Guardian. -egg]

We live in the Age of the Algorithm, where computer models save time, money and lives. Gone are the days when labyrinthine formulae were the exclusive domain of finance and the sciences – nonprofit organisations, sports teams and the emergency services are now among their beneficiaries. Even romance is no longer a statistics-free zone.

But the very feature that makes algorithms so valuable – their ability to replicate human decision-making in a fraction of the time – can be a double-edged sword. If the observed human behaviours that dictate how an algorithm transforms input into output are flawed, we risk setting in motion a vicious circle when we hand over responsibility to The Machine.

via The problem with algorithms: magnifying misbehaviour | News | theguardian.com.

[Very interesting book review. -egg]

BETWEEN ROUGHLY 1995 AND 2007, mysterious emails pitching cheap Viagra and penny stocks were part of everyday life online. Over time, the messages grew stranger, incorporating passages of classic science fiction, ribald limericks, and the occasional incomprehensible JPEG. Although IT departments circulated enjoinders to “blacklist” these unsolicited messages, many of us were fascinated, producing blogs, fanzines, and poetry dedicated to the oddly evocative digital detritus. Meanwhile, spam continued to evolve, becoming increasingly intrusive. Often masquerading as urgent communication from a friend or family member, the absurd verse of anonymous “authors” like MegaDik gave way to desperate requests for money. Today, smart filters guard our inboxes, but the spammers are flanking us on blogs and social media. More cockroach than virus, spam adapts and stubbornly survives.

via The Tedium is the Message: Finn Brunton’s “Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet” |.

[Really like this stuff, and love the process. I’ve tried drawing using the same one-breath-per-line a bit in the last couple of days, and it’s really nice to do. -egg]

In his series of drawings titled Each Line One Breath, Netherlands-based artist John Franzen creates textured drawings remeniscent of wrinkled fabric or waves of water by drawing tediously placed rows of lines with black ink. The artist begins by drawing a single vertical line on the far side of a canvas but on subsequent lines allows for various imperfections to become amplified or suppressed as he continues, line after line. The process, which might look maddening, actually appears to be a sort of meditative effort for Franzen who works with almost robotic precision.

via Each Line One Breath: Morphogenetic Freehand Drawings By John Franzen | Colossal.

[Really interesting long article on MSG, umami, and fermentation. -egg]

Without fermentation, we would live in a sad world without beer, cheese, miso, kimchi, and hundreds of other delicious things humans have enjoyed for centuries. But in the carefully labeled containers stacked around the cramped confines of their lab, Chang and Felder have been fermenting new things. They’ve turned mashed pistachios, lentils, chickpeas, and other legumes into miso-like pastes Chang calls “hozon” (Korean for “preserved”). They’ve created variations on Japanese tamari — a by-product of miso production that’s similar to soy sauce — with fermented spelt and rye they call “bonji” (“essence”). They’ve even replicated the Japanese staple katsuobushi (a log of dried, smoked, and fermented bonito that’s shaved into bonito flakes) using fermented pork tenderloin instead of fish.

The flavor Chang and Felder are chasing in creating these new fermented products is umami — the savory “fifth taste” detectable by the human tongue along with salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. When bacteria and fungi break down the glucose in foods that are fermenting, they release waste products. And the waste valued in Momofuku’s lab above all others is glutamic acid, the amino acid that creates the taste of umami on our tongues.

Also on the shelf in Chang’s lab, underneath the jars containing foods in various states of controlled spoilage, is a giant tin of monosodium glutamate, more commonly known as MSG — perhaps the most infamously misunderstood and maligned three letters in the history of food. It just so happens that inside that tin of MSG is the exact molecule Chang and his chefs have worked so hard for the last three years to tease out of pots of fermenting beans and nuts. It’s pure glutamic acid, crystallized with a single sodium ion to stabilize it; five pounds of uncut, un-stepped-on umami, made from fermented corn in a factory in Iowa.

via The Notorious MSG’s Unlikely Formula For Success.

[Interestingly, the central premise of the article — that digital dualism is a fallacy — seems to be rapidly gaining acceptance in the field. I’ve got mixed feelings about it, myself. -egg]

The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.

And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.

via Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality » Cyborgology.