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Apple TV+ has taken down the paywall on their anthology series Extrapolations until Monday 25 September. Important but harrowing viewing about how the next few decades might unfold, with some great actors involved. Worth checking out this weekend.
Thanks to Oreo Speedwagon II for the heads-up.
A language is a dialogue with the environment… it captures the essence of that place where it developed better than imported languages. Being able to know these couple dozen words for different types of rain that Hawaiian has, that English doesn’t…that’s something that’s just, I think, really meaningful to be able to experience. It always gives you more. You see more colors in the spectrum. It’s a richer experience.
Hawaii’s Native language nearly vanished—this is the fight to bring it back
Chile's experiment with cybernetic management
In a February 1973 lecture, he explained how his cybernetic approach to management would empower the Chilean people and put the power of science at their disposal. “I know that I am making the maximum effort towards the devolution of power,” Beer told the audience. “The government made their revolution about it; I find it good cybernetics.” Beer stressed that the tools he was developing in Chile were the “people’s tools” and that his systems were designed for and in consultation with Chilean workers. Critics from the Chilean opposition pushed back and equated the system to a new form of government surveillance that would lead to increased government control and abuse.
Project Cybersyn: Chile’s Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism
This article is a few years old, but provides a good overview of Cybersyn.
Wildfires and xenophobia
Twitter/X really is the new Gab:
“Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. “We’re at war,” Papadakis has been filmed saying. “Where there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.”
On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed “hunting” and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.”
While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants
The last of the fungus
“Before sunset, we found more than 30 caterpillar carcasses. We arrived back at his village after nightfall, and Tenzin sold them all to a middleman for $300. Two weeks of unusually good days like this would bring in roughly the average income for a Tibetan household for an entire year.”
An excellent article about the fascinating, valuable and doomed prcatice of collecting catepillar fungus. I saw some of this in the highlands of Bhutan when I was there for work in 2016, where its also prized for traditonal medicine.
The Last of the Fungus - A young scientist’s quest to transform a dying way of life
