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What a marvelous installation piece 💚💚💚

A recent two-day installation in Commerce, California afforded visitors an opportunity to evaluate and deposit their secret wishes. Dandelions, which was organized by the anonymous artist group The Art Department, took place in an administrative building at the Laguna Bell electrical substation from May 11-12, 2019. The cavernous space was transformed into a secret wish processing facility, where visitors submitted their wishes for questioning and analysis before receiving a dandelion to send their wish in a whoosh down a chute of either slam dunks or long shots. Writer Renée Reizman, who had a chance to visit the fleeting facility, explains the guided performance art in depth on Hyperallergic. Explore more of The Art Department’s previous projects on their website and Instagram.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/05/dandelion-wish-facility/

…reports from major news organizations, including NBC and The Times, have focused on the “unknown energy source” theory. Most recently, “60 Minutes” aired a segment on March 17 titled “Targeting Americans.” The correspondent Scott Pelley said the diplomats had “suffered serious brain injuries” and noted that the F.B.I. is “investigating whether these Americans were attacked by a mysterious weapon that leaves no trace.” The attacks, Pelley intoned in his signature rumble, appear to be “a hostile foreign government’s plan to target Americans serving abroad.”

And yet, two and a half years after the first diplomats in Havana said they heard strange sounds and fell ill, and after at least six visits to Cuba by the F.B.I., the study by Penn researchers, another study led by the otolaryngologist at the University of Miami and a continuing investigation by a “health incidents response task force” organized by the State Department, the claims of an attack by an invisible weapon remain not only unproved but also highly contested by prominent physicists and engineers in the United States and abroad.

Dozens of leading neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists, meanwhile, have offered an alternative narrative: that the diplomats’ symptoms are primarily psychogenic — or “functional” — in nature. If true, it would mean that the symptoms were caused not by a secret high-tech weapon but by the same confluence of psychological and neurological processes — entirely subconscious yet remarkably powerful — underlying hypnosis and the placebo effect. They are disorders, in other words, not of the brain’s hardware but of its software; not of objective injuries to the brain’s structure but of chronic alterations to how the brain functions, typically following exposure to an illness, a physical injury or stress. And the fact that the State Department and doctors the government selected to treat the diplomats have dismissed this explanation out of hand does not surprise these experts. After all, they say, functional neurological disorders are among the most misunderstood, debilitating and denigrated ailments known to medicine.

I was rather startled that a neurologist would say the following, which seems rather philosophically confused:

“I wince when I hear the word ‘psychogenic,’ ” Stone told me during one of many Skype conversations. “It creates a false impression about what these disorders are. They’re like depression or migraine. They happen in that gray area where the mind and the brain intersect.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/15/magazine/diplomat-disorder.html

Gaaahhhhhhhh. Note to self: avoid ExxonMobil at all costs.

[Scientist and intern] Knisely projected [in 1979] that unless fossil fuel use was constrained, there would be “noticeable temperature changes” and 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the air by 2010, up from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. The summer intern’s predictions turned out to be very close to the mark.

[…]

The report, which circulated within the company through the early 1980s, reflected Exxon’s growing need to understand when the climate implications of increased CO₂ emissions would begin to spur policy changes.

So Exxon (now ExxonMobil) shelved an ambitious but costly program that sampled carbon dioxide in the oceans—the centerpiece of its climate research in the 1970s—as it created its own computerized climate models. The models aimed to simulate how the planet’s climate system would react to rising CO₂ levels, relying on a combination of mathematics, physics, and atmospheric science.

Through much of the 1980s, Exxon researchers worked alongside university and government scientists to generate objective climate models that yielded papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Their work confirmed the emerging scientific consensus on global warming’s risks.

Yet starting in 1989, Exxon leaders went down a different road. They repeatedly argued that the uncertainty inherent in computer models makes them useless for important policy decisions. Even as the models grew more powerful and reliable, Exxon publicly derided the type of work its own scientists had done. The company continued its involvement with climate research, but its reputation for objectivity began to erode as it campaigned internationally to cast doubt on the science.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18092015/exxon-confirmed-global-warming-consensus-in-1982-with-in-house-climate-models

These remind me a lot of some generative digital 3D modeling work I did as a senior project at UNCA….

Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan work as a husband and wife team primarily in the medium of cardboard. Their soaring installations fill gallery spaces, reaching from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The duo’s massive sculptural works are comprised of miniature homes that have been piled and stacked, creating dizzying towers of comingled landscapes. For many of their installations the artists work with students and community members to collaboratively build the cardboard structures, inviting participants to reflect on and channel their own migratory experiences. The Aquilizans moved from the Philippines to Australia in 2006, and much of their work centers around the migrant experience, and having a foot in two worlds.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/05/massive-cardboard-installations-by-isabel-and-alfredo-aquizilan/

An all-star lineup of economists, from Alan Greenspan to Paul Volcker, is endorsing a plan to combat climate change by slapping a tax on greenhouse gas emissions and then distributing the revenue to American households.

All living former Federal Reserve chairs, several Nobel Prize winners and previous leaders of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers have signed on to a statement asserting that a robust, gradually rising carbon tax is “the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary.”

“A carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future,” the 45 economists say in the opinion piece, published by the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/from-greenspan-to-yellen-economic-brain-trust-backs-carbon-tax

Like most Southern children, I accepted, almost as a matter of faith, that kudzu grew a mile a minute and that its spread was unstoppable. I had no reason to doubt declarations that kudzu covered millions of acres, or that its rampant growth could consume a large American city each year. I believed, as many still do, that kudzu had eaten much of the South and would soon sink its teeth into the rest of the nation.

I’m not sure when I first began to doubt. Perhaps it was while I watched horses and cows mowing fields of kudzu down to brown stubs. As a botanist and horticulturist, I couldn’t help but wonder why people thought kudzu was a unique threat when so many other vines grow just as fast in the warm, wet climate of the South. I found it odd that kudzu had become a global symbol for the dangers of invasive species, yet somehow rarely posed a serious threat to the rich Southern landscapes I was trying to protect as a conservationist.

Now that scientists at last are attaching real numbers to the threat of kudzu, it’s becoming clear that most of what people think about kudzu is wrong. Its growth is not “sinister,” as Willie Morris, the influential editor of Harper’s Magazine, described in his many stories and memoirs about life in Yazoo City, Mississippi. The more I investigate, the more I recognize that kudzu’s place in the popular imagination reveals as much about the power of American mythmaking, and the distorted way we see the natural world, as it does about the vine’s threat to the countryside.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudzu-vine-ate-south-180956325/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

You may remember Daryl Bem’s paper purporting to provide strong evidence for precognition, while hewing closely to the standard methodology at the time. The paper itself is a fascinating read, as are the many responses to it, and the entire crisis of confidence in peer-reviewed research that was partly triggered by the publication of Bem’s work.

But for most observers, at least the mainstream ones, the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directions—that ESP is real. If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you’d be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field—and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind—could be total bunk.

If one had to choose a single moment that set off the “replication crisis” in psychology—an event that nudged the discipline into its present and anarchic state, where even textbook findings have been cast in doubt—this might be it: the publication, in early 2011, of Daryl Bem’s experiments on second sight.

https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/06/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed-science-is-broken.html

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Situated in a clearing within an Italian forest, John Grade’s latest installation, Reservoir, appears like a chandelier glistening among the pine trees. Reservoir is featured in the Arte Sella Sculpture Park in Borgo Valsugana and is made up of five thousand clear droplets each of which is delicately attached to translucent nets, supported by tree trunks.

…

Reservoir is constructed from heat-formed plastic parts framed with steam-bent strips of Alaskan yellow cedar. Each droplet is attached to marine nets with fishing line which are then incorporated with stainless steel rings to maintain tensions and support the tree trunks above the structure. The shape of the translucent droplets are formed from casts of human hands cupped together. “We cast ten different people’s hands for variations in scale,” Grade explains.

When rain falls or snow lands the water accumulates within Reservoir’s clear pouches, giving them their droplet-like shape. In doing slow, the installation gets heavier and lowers, while in sunny, warm weather, it rises back into its original structure as the liquid evaporates. “The sculpture rises and falls with precipitation differently each time it rains or snows,” says Grade. Springs below the installation limit the vertical range of movement, so Reservoir always remains 10 feet above the forest floor.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/04/rainwater-collecting-installation/

As Brockell points out, nobody has ever asked for pregnancy and parenting ads to be turned on, yet we’re given so little control over turning them off. Once captured and stored by data brokers, the most personal details about our lives are sold with impunity and stalk you to every corner of the internet and beyond.

This lack of control, when you pause to think about it, is alarming. Short of throwing off the shackles of modern life and taking up a nomadic existence on the Great Steppe, keeping anything secret from the internet – or exercising any real control over how your personal data is used and abused – is nigh on impossible. For Brockell and the thousands of other people dealing with the loss of a child, that lack of control is hugely upsetting. For others, attempting to exert control over what happens to your data reveals the impossibility of our privacy predicament.

Opting out of tracking and targeting, it turns out, isn’t an option. There is no such thing as a purely transactional transaction. Every purchase I make and every website I visit is recorded, tracked and indelibly tagged to scores of profiles sold by data brokers I’ve never heard of to companies I’ve never heard of in an attempt to persuade me to spend £150 on a Chicco Next 2 Me Bedside Crib. Spoiler: I did.

None of this should come as a surprise, but being unable to keep a specific and emotionally charged life event away from online advertisers and data brokers is gut-wrenching. You have options, of course. Ditch Google for DuckDuckGo. Swap Chrome for Tor. Trade in your Android for an iPhone or an outdated feature phone. Make all purchases in physical stores using cash. Don’t send or receive a single email mentioning that you are expecting a child. Police the social media use of anyone who knows about the pregnancy and might inadvertently post about it.

It quickly becomes apparent that the cost of keeping a secret from the internet is too high.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-internet-hates-secrets