I am on a journey. I am in pursuit of an idea, a story, a chimera, perhaps a folly. I am chasing ghosts. Starting in humanity’s birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the ancestors who first discovered the Earth at least 60,000 years ago. This remains by far our greatest voyage. Not because it delivered us the planet. No. But because the early Homo sapiens who first roamed beyond the mother continent—these pioneer nomads numbered, in total, as few as a couple of hundred people—also bequeathed us the subtlest qualities we now associate with being fully human: complex language, abstract thinking, a compulsion to make art, a genius for technological innovation, and the continuum of today’s many races. We know so little about them. They straddled the strait called Bab el Mandeb—the “gate of grief” that cleaves Africa from Arabia—and then exploded, in just 2,500 generations, a geological heartbeat, to the remotest habitable fringe of the globe.

Millennia behind, I follow.

Using fossil evidence and the burgeoning science of “genography”—a field that sifts the DNA of living populations for mutations useful in tracking ancient diasporas—I will walk north from Africa into the Middle East. From there my antique route leads eastward across the vast gravel plains of Asia to China, then north again into the mint blue shadows of Siberia. From Russia I will hop a ship to Alaska and inch down the western coast of the New World to wind-smeared Tierra del Fuego, our species’ last new continental horizon. I will walk 21,000 miles.

via To Walk the World.

22 Dreamy Art Installations You Want To Live In.

I first noticed the Render Ghosts on the hoardings surrounding a new development near Finsbury Square. On the balconies of some vast, virtual tower, two pixelated figures looked out over a darkened London, a perfect red-pink gradient sunset behind them. He had short dark hair and stubble, wore a black jacket and blue jeans. She had a cropped red bob, white jacket, and a purple knee-length skirt. I didn’t know who they were, but I started seeing them everywhere.

The Render Ghosts are the people who live inside our imaginations, in the liminal space between the present and the future, the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital. A world of architecture, urbanism and the city before it is completed – which is also never. They inhabit a space which exists only in the virtual spaces of 3D computer rendering software, projected onto billboards, left to rot and torn down when the actual future arrives; never quite as glossy or as perfect as our renderings of it would like it to be, or have prepared us for.

There are thousands of them, millions. I have seen them walking down the imagined high streets of Glasgow and West London, shopping at Lara, Cap, and M&H. They sit out and dine, or wander through the European-style piazzas of new commercial developments, which we know will turn out to be empty and wind-swept squares, patrolled by private security guards. They flit through new subway stations and airports, stroll in leafy parks; their children play among physically-impossible fountains and bright, toxic plants. Most of all, they like to stand on balconies, those too-narrow balconies which real urban-dwellers fill with bikes and rusted BBQs, but where the Render Ghosts dance and chatter, sip from tall flutes of champagne, admire sunsets and city views, live, love, and wait. They are waiting for their own end.

via Electronic Voice Phenomena | The Render Ghosts – James Bridle.

[Oooh, no shortage of ethical difficulties down this road…-egg]

Realistic animated 10-year-old girls are being used to catch sexual predators in the act, and creating moral, legal, and human rights quandaries in the process.

via Why Are We Building Jailbait Sexbots? ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community.

[Really important look at what the consequences of climate change are likely to be. It’s huge, but just the executive summary alone will explain a lot. -Egg]

“This report focuses on the risks of climate change to development in Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia and South Asia. Building on the 2012 report, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided, this new scientific analysis examines the likely impacts of present day, 2°C and 4°C warming on agricultural production, water resources, and coastal vulnerability for affected populations. It finds many significant climate and development impacts are already being felt in some regions, and in some cases multiple threats of increasing extreme heat waves, sea level rise, more severe storms, droughts and floods are expected to have further severe negative implications for the poorest. Climate related extreme events could push households below the poverty trap threshold. High temperature extremes appear likely to affect yields of rice, wheat, maize and other important crops, adversely affecting food security. Promoting economic growth and the eradication of poverty and inequality will thus be an increasingly challenging task under future climate change. Immediate steps are needed to help countries adapt to the risks already locked in at current levels of 0.8°C warming, but with ambitious global action to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, many of the worst projected climate impacts could still be avoided by holding warming below 2°C. “

Turn down the heat : climate extremes, regional impacts, and the case for resilience – full report (English) | The World Bank.

Science and Its Skeptics : The New Yorker.

 
Is It Too Late to Prepare for Climate Change? : The New Yorker.
 

Elizabeth Kolbert: The Clash over Population Growth : The New Yorker.

The Life and Times of an Aging Superhero Captured in Oil Paintings by Andreas Englund | Colossal.

[Useful info. -egg]

These rigs are built to handle the incredible demands modern games put on them, rendering state-of-the-art graphics quickly and smoothly to create a realistic gaming experience. At least, that’s the theory. The conventional wisdom is that a cheap PC will produce a jerky, low-resolution image that ruins the immersive effect of modern games.

However, we found that a $700 computer was more than capable of running one of the most demanding games out there at high resolution, and that most gamers don’t need to spend more than this.

via You’re Spending Too Much on Your Gaming PC | Product Reviews | Wired.com.

[Solid review from The Wirecutter]

After sifting through literally hundreds of options, seriously considering nearly 150 models, testing the top 40, and calling in audio experts to blindly evaluate the top 20, we’re pleased to report that if you want to buy an inexpensive pair of in-ears, you should get the Panasonic RP-TCM125 “Ergo Fit”. They sound good, they have a one-button remote and mic, they fit well, they come in a variety of colors, and they’re less than $15.

via Best In-Ear Headphones Under $30 | The Wirecutter.

Huh? is not trivial. It might seem frivolous or even trivial to carry out scientific research on a word like Huh? But in fact this little word, along with others that function in similar ways (e.g., ‘Sorry?’ ‘What?’) is an indispensible tool in human communication. Without such words we would be unable to signal when we have problems with hearing or understanding what was said. Because conversation moves along so quickly, if we did not have reliable ways of signaling trouble, we would constantly fail to stay ‘on the same page’ in social interaction. While Huh? may seem an unlikely topic of scientific research, in fact human communication, and thus common understanding in social life, relies heavily on the use of such linguistic devices.

Huh? is universal. We sampled languages from around the world in this study, and we found that all of them have a word with a near-identical sound and function as English Huh? This is an exception to the normal situation, namely that when words in different languages mean the same thing, they will usually sound completely different: compare, for example, these very different-sounding words for ‘dog’: inu in Japanese, chien in French, dog in English. Why do these differences between the sounds of words across languages occur? Because language does not impose any necessary connection between sound and meaning in words (a principle that linguists call ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’). This study shows that ‘Huh?’ is a rare exception to this otherwise strong rule.

via Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?.