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link roundup 9

Published:

to begin with this week – two links that should be read sequentially, but if you only read one, i recommend the first. (but read both!)

the guardian piece about accelerationism is also surprisingly good.

reading

Anyone in the art world who has gained the privilege of speech is someone for whom the system is working, and who is working for this system. In formal terms, the discourse which they generate reflects their status and their aims. The “content” is inconsequential. What is required is a form of speech which can supply opinions on a range of subjects (valuable for arts professionals, competing in an industry in which meaning constitutes a form of value) which is theoretically directed against massive global forces (glamorous, since it aligns the spokesman with the rebels, as well as flexible, since it can be applied with minimum variation in almost any country) but doesn’t implicate anyone personally (it is acceptable to run an anti-neoliberal program, which is sponsored by a bank, or arrange a biennial about freedom in a country employing slaves). This is a discourse which fulfills the need to speak, but has no fundamental connection to a concrete object.

The reality is that international contemporary art promotes multicultural left-wing sentiments, for obvious reasons: it is a State-supported, global capitalist industry. Capitalism isn’t itself racist, sexist, or right-wing: it’s beyond ideology because it sells ideology, and the more manufactured it is, the more capitalist. Capital liquidates patriarchy because it it liquidates tradition and nature in insatiable hunger for profit — that is Marx’s argument. It’s anti-racist — it annihilates all human differences into quantitative units; on the same basis, if feminism lowers wages, and creates consumer markets, it’s pro-feminism.

[…]

The power of the networked media — this machinery of viral replication — was something to behold. But it wasn’t inexplicable. The speed through which the campaign [to shut down the LD50 gallery] escalated was possible only because of a shared interest of elite cultural institutions, and the radical Left in presenting the specter of a “fascist” enemy as their opposition. The Hackney Gazette, e-flux, the Guardian, and The New York Times all recirculated propaganda legitimating the campaign. The Mayor of Hackney supported it. Art Monthly, funded by the Arts Council, carried a piece by Larne Abse Gogarty describing “a delusion of free speech only permissible to those who never have to feel vulnerable on the street.” (I wondered how facing a mob screaming Nazi at you ranks in the vulnerability sweepstakes.)

I asked Land what he thought of left accelerationism. “The notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism,” he said, “is a deep theoretical error.”

The visit, along with group discussions, they said, had pushed the jihadist contingent to be more communicative. They had kept to themselves before the debate, their lives and rap sheets a mystery. “Now we begin to understand a bit more,” the North African told me. One of the jihadis “had a breakup, others had family problems.” Some of them, he added, had begun to talk a bit differently about their prospects after swapping stories with other inmates doing longer sentences. “They had this idea that we’re fiche S” — the designation used for monitoring potential terrorists — so “there’s no future. Now they seem to understand there is a future. They talk about having jobs, marriage, kids. There’s a positive evolution.”

But when the two inmates talked about life outside prison, their own optimism faded. France, they said, seemed to be building toward a confrontation with Islam. It was the same in all of Europe, they said, and even in the United States (they made clear that they spent much of their time watching TV news). For young men from the French banlieues, assimilation and radicalization appeared to be two sides of a coin that never fell in their favor. “All the profiling, the discrimination, it adds up,” the North African said. He continued, referring to the numeric code for France’s most notorious banlieue: “Ninety-three — if that’s on your C.V., it’s hard to get a job. There’s frustration among the young. That becomes hate, and hate becomes radicalism.”

Usually, an article like this, abstract and argumentatively complex as it is, wouldn’t attract all that much attention outside of its own academic subculture. But that isn’t what happened here — instead, Tuvel is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt, abetted in part by Hypatia’s refusal to stand up for her. The journal has already apologized for the article, despite the fact that it was approved through its normal editorial process, and Tuvel’s peers are busily wrecking her reputation by sharing all sorts of false claims about the article that don’t bear the scrutiny of even a single close read.

Despite a century of research on complex traits in humans, the relative importance and specific nature of the influences of genes and environment on human traits remain controversial. We report a meta-analysis of twin correlations and reported variance components for 17,804 traits from 2,748 publications including 14,558,903 partly dependent twin pairs, virtually all published twin studies of complex traits. Estimates of heritability cluster strongly within functional domains, and across all traits the reported heritability is 49%. For a majority (69%) of traits, the observed twin correlations are consistent with a simple and parsimonious model where twin resemblance is solely due to additive genetic variation. The data are inconsistent with substantial influences from shared environment or non-additive genetic variation. This study provides the most comprehensive analysis of the causes of individual differences in human traits thus far and will guide future gene-mapping efforts.

Now, along comes the demographic transition—the recent shift to lower death rates and then lower birth rates. Malthusian catastrophe was averted, but the price of relaxing selection has been moving the mutation-selection balance toward an unsustainable increase in genetic diseases. Various naturalistic experiments suggest this meltdown can proceed rapidly. (Salmon raised in captivity for only a few generations were strongly outcompeted by wild salmon subject to selection.) Indeed, it is possible that the drop in death rates over the demographic transition caused—by increasing the genetic load—the subsequent drop in birth rates below replacement: If humans are equipped with physiological assessment systems to detect when they are in good enough condition to conceive and raise a child, and if each successive generation bears a greater number of micro-impairments that aggregate into, say, stressed exhaustion, then the paradoxical outcome of improving public health for several generations would be ever lower birth rates. One or two children are far too few to shed incoming mutations.

We use the most up to date Milky Way model and solar orbit data in order to test the hypothesis that the Sun’s galactic spiral arm crossings cause mass extinction events on Earth. To do this, we created a new model of the Milky Way’s spiral arms by combining a large quantity of data from several surveys. We then combined this model with a recently derived solution for the solar orbit to determine the timing of the Sun’s historical passages through the Galaxy’s spiral arms. Our new model was designed with a symmetrical appearance, with the major alteration being the addition of a spur at the far side of the Galaxy. A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events. Furthermore, we identify five additional historical mass extinction events that might be explained by the motion of the Sun around our Galaxy. These five additional significant drops in marine genera that we find include significant reductions in diversity at 415, 322, 300, 145 and 33 Myr ago. Our simulations indicate that the Sun has spent ~60% of its time passing through our Galaxy’s various spiral arms. Also, we briefly discuss and combine previous work on the Galactic Habitable Zone with the new Milky Way model.

misc

huge list of resources for learning russian that i posted earlier this week

this game is really really fucking cool – think minecraft plus starcraft, autism-fuel resource extraction simulator with guns; pirate downloads, wiki, and (mostly russian) community attached to this unofficial site

”I want to expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet.”