Incomes of the top .01%, 1915–2008
via @JWMason1
May 23, 2013
May 23, 2013
"All the illusions of the Monetary System arise from the failure to perceive that money, though a physical object with distinct properties, represents a social relation of production."
— Karl Marx - Critique of Political Economy 1859 (via dailymarx)
May 22, 2013
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
— Buckminster Fuller
I really needed to read this. —TO (via tobia)
(Source: ansil, via wildcat2030)
May 21, 2013
John Bonner’s slime mould movies (por princetonuniversity)
- some slimes altruistically sacrifice themselves,
- the individuals communicate based on micro rules to make a macro (emergent) decision “together”, yet without a central planning slime
- the slimes move around (like animals), yet also form a “stem” and grow upwards (like plants), yet also shoot spores out of the top (like fungi).
May 21, 2013
May 19, 2013
May 17, 2013
Beautiful ‘flowers’ self assemble in a beaker
These false-color SEM images reveal microscopic flower structures created by manipulating a chemical gradient to control crystalline self-assembly. Credit: Wim L. Noorduin, Harvard University
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-beautiful-self-assemble-beaker.html#jCp
May 16, 2013
Max Ernst: The Entire City (1935)
The heat death of the universe is a suggested ultimate fate of the universe, in which the universe has diminished to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and therefore can no longer sustain processes that consume energy (including computation and life). Heat death does not imply any particular absolute temperature; it only requires that temperature differences or other process may no longer be exploited to perform work. In the language of physics, this is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium (maximum entropy).
May 15, 2013
The Paradox of Gift Exchange
“When the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant. In the Scottish tale the girls who hoard their bread are fed only while they eat. The meal finishes in hunger though they took the larger piece. The girl who shares her bread is satisfied. What is given away feeds again and again, while what is kept feeds only once and leaves us hungry.”
—Hyde, “The Gift”
May 15, 2013
Game Theory and the Treatment of Cancer
Thinking about cancer as an ecosystem is giving biologists access to a new armoury of mathematical tools for tackling it, such as evolutionary game theory
Full Story: Technology Review
RSS feed: http://stochastastic.tumblr.com/rss
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Chris Fennell, Manitou, 2009, Acrylic, metallic glimmer, and paper collage mounted on canvas
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Behold The Hounds of Geevor. These whimsical dogs are the work of British artist David Kemp, who uses found objects to...
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“By exclusively doing commerce with government fiat currencies, we are letting politicians and bankers control money, which is the agreement on how we...”
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Biology can’t run on genes alone-
UC DAVIS (US) — Don’t lose the organism in the excitement over its genes, say biologists, who caution...
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“One of the greatest threats we face is, simply put, bullshit. We are drowning it. We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not...”
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Symmetrium by Niko Luoma
Luoma on his work:
My material is light. The work focuses on energy rather than matter. My work is...
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On the stupidification of IR. A must-read.
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“The great harm done by bourgeois society is not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each industrial and commercial...”
