Dutch fashion designer Iris Van Herpen (previously) blends cutting-edge technology and classic motifs in her thought-provoking garments. Van Herpen’s most recent collection, Shift Souls, was showcased at Paris Fashion Week, and featured dresses that play with structure and color to blur the boundaries between fashion, technology, and art.

In a statement on the brand’s website about the collection, Van Herpen explains that she was inspired by the fluidity of identity change in myths, particularly from Japan. The stories “gave me the inspiration to explore the deeper meaning of identity and how immaterial and mutable it can become within the current coalescence of our digital bodies.”

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/01/dizzying-multi-layered-gowns-by-iris-van-herpen/

Praise Bob!

Poor is the person without Slack. Lack of Slack compounds and traps.

Slack means margin for error. You can relax.

Slack allows pursuing opportunities. You can explore. You can trade.

Slack prevents desperation. You can avoid bad trades and wait for better spots. You can be efficient.

Slack permits planning for the long term. You can invest.

Slack enables doing things for your own amusement. You can play games. You can have fun.

Slack enables doing the right thing. Stand by your friends. Reward the worthy. Punish the wicked. You can have a code.

Slack presents things as they are without concern for how things look or what others think. You can be honest.

You can do some of these things, and choose not to do others. Because you don’t have to.

Only with slack can one be a righteous dude.

Slack is life.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLLkWMDbC9ZNKbjDG/slack

There may be no reasonable max loss. Some things want too much.

A clean example is free to play mobile games. If allowed, they charge tens of thousands of dollars. Players called whales are so addicted they pay. The games destroy them.

The motivating example was Facebook. Facebook wants your entire life. Users not consciously limiting engagement lose hours a day. Every spare moment is spent scrolling, checking for updates, likes and comments. This reliably makes users miserable. Other social networks share this problem.

An important example is politics. Political causes want every spare minute and dollar. They want to choose your friends, words and thoughts. If given power, they seize the resources of state and nation for their purposes. Then they take those purposes further. One cannot simply give any political movement what it wants. That way lies ruin and madness.

Yes, that means your cause, too.

This generalizes into most sufficiently intense signaling and status competition. One must always signal harder or seek higher status. This takes over everything you are and eats your entire life. Part of sending sufficiently intense signals is showing that you have allowed this! Maya Millennial has fallen victim. Those keeping up with the Joneses fall victim. Many a child looking fitting in or applying to college falls victim.

Obsession with safety does this.

Television eats people’s lives. So do video games. So do drugs and alcohol. One must be careful and know your tenancies and limits.

Ethical arguments do this, ensnaring vulnerable people.

This property is a way to distinguish cults from religions. Cults want it all. Religion wants its cut.

You can only pay off those who charge a bounded price and stay bought. Before you pay the ransom, be sure it will free the hostages.

Would going along result in cooperation? Or put blood in the water?

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/

Via https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLLkWMDbC9ZNKbjDG/slack

Via https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/31/book-review-zero-to-one/

David Roberts

The Dutch don’t wear bike helmets. How safe is it to ride a bike in the Netherlands?

Chris Bruntlett

We — like you — live in a place where helmets have been mandated by law, because they’ve been accepted as a commonsense safety device, normal as a seatbelt. But the Dutch show that [for them], safety in infrastructure, safety in slowing cars, and safety in numbers are all far more important than safety in body armor.

David Roberts

Yeah, the US approach seems to be to up-armor the cyclist so that cars don’t have to change.

Chris Bruntlett

Exactly.

Less than 0.5 percent of Dutch cyclists wear helmets, which is one in 200 people on bikes. And that’s really just the sport cyclists. Virtually everybody else, from children to old people, doesn’t even think about helmets. It’s just not present in their culture, because they’ve ultimately decided that it’s far more important to build this culture of everyday cycling, and to build safe streets, instead of requiring people to protect themselves.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/28/17789510/bike-cycling-netherlands-dutch-infrastructure

Polyesters, industrially produced from petroleum, are widely used in plastic bottles and clothing.

Current recycling processes mean that polyester materials follow a downward quality spiral, losing some of their properties each time they go through the cycle. Bottles become fleeces, then carpets, after which they often end up in landfill.

PETase reverses the manufacturing process, reducing polyesters to their building blocks, ready to be used again.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43783631

(Denis Diderot, Conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot [Entretien entre d’Alembert et Diderot], 1769)

I too haz this feels

https://xkcd.com/2102/

There is increasing evidence that sugar, glucose specifically, can influence central nervous system activity. Although memory enhancement was not demonstrated in any of the challenge studies which measured memory in children, there is evidence that glucose levels influence memory functioning in rats and humans, locomotor activity and sleep patterns in rats, and the distress associated with painful procedures in human infants. The focus of research in this area has been to establish how glucose acts to mediate these effects.

Since the retention of memory is an important central nervous system function in the process of cognition, central nervous system mechanisms salient to this function such as noradrenergic and cholinergic systems have been investigated. To investigate the positive effects of epinephrine on memory processing, one study systematically examined the effects of glucose on both animal and human subjects. The study (206) employed a foot shock avoidance task on rats, and observed, similar to the epinephrine effects, significantly improved retention in animals who received 10 to 100 mg/kg injection of glucose immediately after training. No effect was observed if the injection was delayed by one hour or if higher or lower doses were used. In a subsequent study (207), glucose was shown to have similar effects to other memory modulators in that its administration with low foot shock training enhanced the rats’ memory storage while its administration with high foot shock training impaired retention possibly due to endogenous levels of epinephrine produced by the foot shock.

Extending the postulate that glucose improves memory functioning to a human population, one study (208) demonstrated significantly improved memory processing via a standardized measure in nine of eleven elderly human subjects after administration of oral glucose versus placebo. Further, a study found that enhancement of memory in elderly humans twenty-four hours after learning was significantly improved by glucose administration before or after the learning task (209). This may be similar to the finding in rats where memory potentiation in elderly rats was more marked than that demonstrated in a young adult rat population (210). None of the studies of sugar in children showed any effect on memory while those completed with elderly subjects did. However, it is important to note that most of the child studies used sucrose and only a few of them specifically tested memory.

In summary, there is evidence that glucose is discretely involved in neuroendocrine modulation of memory storage in both rats and humans. This influence is best demonstrated in elderly subjects. Further, one site of action of glucose is the medial septum which is rich with communications to the hippocampus. Although, the precise mechanism of the effects of glucose on memory are not yet established, these findings may have far reaching implications for pharmacologic treatment of memory impairments resulting from old age or head trauma. As of now the clinical implications of these findings have yet to be defined. Much more extensive research is required before any conclusions about clinically relevant implications can be drawn.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/w8079e/w8079e0o.htm

This is hilarious 🙂

In that moment, it became my mission. With the help of fake reviews, mystique, and nonsense, I was going to do it: turn my shed into London’s top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor?utm_source=reddit.com

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/configurations