A 1971 television recording with Alan Watts walking in the mountains and talking about the limitations of technology and the problem of trying to keep track of an infinite universe with a single tracked mind.

Via Arthur Magazine (here)

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Via Abitare (here)

Pitchforkmedia recently interviewed Kode9. They discussed his label Hyperdub, the state of constant hype and the use of unsound. Read interview (here)

Excerpt below;

Pitchfork: You spend a lot of time deconstructing the virus metaphor as applied to the ways music spreads and shifts. How have technological advances in transmission, both digital sharing and pirate radio, changed the ways that music mutates and becomes over-exposed? How has it changed the ways that new music from urban areas around the world– the global ghettotech– operates and evolves?

K9: Audio virology is not a metaphor. It is to be taken literally. It maps real processes of mutation, transmission, contagion and memory within music culture. Both analog and digital developments have intensified the viral nature of sonic culture. Because we live in a condition of ubiquitous music and media, and near infinite technological memory, it is much easier for local cultures to find an audience that resonates with their music, whether local or globally. At the same time the acceleration and saturation leads to things becoming outmoded, or out of fashion before they’ve even happened. That’s a pretty complicated situation. Hype becomes autonomous from its object and runs away with itself.

Pitchfork: A quote you reference says, “Our discos are preparing our youth for a retaliatory strike,” and you deconstruct the different ways that sound is used to control– armies dispersing crowds, marketers implanting sales pitches, and DJs unifying the dance floor through bass vibrations. With the hyper-niche culture of music and the ability to be constantly plugged in and bombarded with information, has sonic warfare become more of a constant state of being?

K9: The book runs on the real fiction that sonic warfare is our ambient normality, purring away in the background so that you don’t even notice it– that is what I call the politics of frequency.

Earlier and related post on Hyperdub and Sonic Warfare book (here)

The NYT asks “Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism”?. Read (here)

Dig this image

Greenhouses being built at the Jittu Horticulture farm at Awassa in southern Ethiopia.

While some worry over a new colonization of land in African and the developing world others point to the enormous investment opportunities available. These investments moreover would have aggregate benefits.

“Africa is the final frontier,” Payne told me after the conference. “It’s the one continent that remains relatively unexploited.” Emergent’s African Agricultural Land Fund, started last year, is investing several hundred million dollars into commercial farms around the continent. Africa may be known for decrepit infrastructure and corrupt governments — problems that are being steadily alleviated, Payne argues — but land and labor come so cheaply there that she calculates the risks are worthwhile.

The payoffs could be immense. In a country like Ethiopia, farmers put in backbreaking effort, but they yield about a third as much wheat per acre as do Europe, China or Chile. Even modest interventions could start to close this gap. One small example: the black soil I saw throughout the Great Rift region. Known as vertisol, it’s a product of volcanic activity and possesses the nutrients to produce enormous harvests. Because of its high clay content, however, it becomes sticky and waterlogged during the rainy season, which makes it very difficult to plow by traditional methods. With the addition of advanced implements, improved seeds and fertilizer, you can double the amount of wheat it yields. Ethiopia, like all of Africa, is full of such opportunities, which is one reason the World Bank says that investing in agriculture is one of the most effective ways to speed economic development on the continent.

However, there are models others suggests which would be more socially beneficial while still increasing productivity and agricultural output.

But the argument against enormous land concessions needn’t be based solely on appeals to human rights, environmental warnings or romanticism. It’s possible to be a believer in development without endorsing Paul Collier’s view that the small landholders stand in its way. In fact, there’s a whole school of economic thought that says that Collier is wrong, that big is not necessarily better in agriculture — and that the land deals therefore might be unwise not because they’re wrong but because they’re unprofitable. A recent World Bank study found that large-scale export agriculture in Africa has succeeded only with plantation crops like sugar and tea or in ventures that were propped up by extreme government subsidies, during colonialism or during the apartheid era in South Africa.

For example.

 

On a bright Rift Valley afternoon, I went to see another option, a cooperative scheme under which a group of around 300 Ethiopians, working plots of 4 to 10 acres, were getting into export agriculture. During the European winter, they grew green beans for the Dutch market. The rest of the year, they cultivated corn and other crops for local consumption. The land had been irrigated with the help of a nonprofit organization and an Ethiopian commercial farmer named Tsegaye Abebe, who brought all the produce to market.

From this article “The Public Bath and the City” published in the Water issue of the Alphabet City series by MIT Press.

Excerpts;

The urban bath is basically viewed as a zone of non-city, wherein one can enter a place of de-densification and re-humanization.

The urban public bath attempts to capture the power of a wild landscape and its water, and to bring about a catharsis in the bather through its rituals. The rituals that rule the public bath are designed to encourage one to linger and ultimately lose one’s sense of purpose, allowing a peaceful space of silence to emerge.

And

In the West, the act of entering a discreet realm within the city and disrobing with others can symbolize a return to nature, to paradise, or to the amniotic bath from which we are born. The bath in the city may act as a kind of container for a socially constructed version of nature: once inside, we are paradoxically freed to act “naturally” through ritualized rules. Its accepted status as a space governed by ritual makes possible behaviors that the rest of public life rejects.

This part on how the culture of urban bathing is embeded in the “code” of Istanbul’s city plan I found particularly interesting.

The plan of Istanbul reveals cells of residences and businesses, each served by a central hammam and mosque

In the closing the author argues for the ritual of urban bathing an almost religious experience, allowing one to commune with their larger urban/human community.

However the public bath is framed, its cultivation allows us to continually renew its role as a free zone of peace and contemplation. Searching for meaning amidst the pleasures of the bath, we find instead our minds silently wandering on the peripheries of perception. Deep reflections are glimpsed through shifting mirror-mazes of light and water. Our private bathtub expands in the public bath, where we find ourselves in our broader home of human community.

I would quibble a bit with Bruce Sterling’s assertion that this is Pop music, and it’s definitely not American pop. More Euro-techno. Still, the sounds aren’t (thusly labeled) bad, and as an artisitic trifecta of music, design and art project mashing up electro, industrial/product design and a critical eye towards Italian Futurism They are pretty cool.

Beyond the Beyond (here)

Via this Pitchfork review of newly released by Rhino Records The Doors: Live in New York (here)

Via this Dusted Magazine review of 5: Five Years of Hyperdub the recent compilation released by Hyperdub I was alerted to the fact that Kode9 (Hyperdub label founder) is also a Lecturer in Music Culture at University of East London. In this capacity he (Steve Goodman) is releasing a book entitled Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (see MIT Press here) which will  “explore these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations”.

Sounds like a book to buy.

Related is this profile of Kode9 by Dan Hancox in the Guardian (here)

Particularly like this quote from the article

The new Hyperdub sound is all about synthesisers: sci-fi melodies as the host for this restlessly progressive London dance aesthetic. “It’s like hearing circuitry crying,” Goodman has said of this recent output

Additionally, I was alerted to this video of Linton Kwesi Johnson (aka LKJ, born 24 August 1952, Chapelton, Jamaica) who is a British-based dub poet, reciting his poem “Five Nights of Bleeding” lyrics for which can be read here.

Great power-point illustrating the challenges US and ISAF/NATO military faces in Afghanistan as well as progress made in understanding and applying population centered security, governance and economic improvements.

COIN_Helmand_Province_AAR_via_photos_23_Oct_(NXPowerLite)

Via Small Wars Journal (here)

Making use of light sensitive/reactive genes (originally found in a type of pond algae), scientists have controlled the firing of neurons in mice and rhesus monkeys. Currently research is underway into the clinical possibilities of using such neurological control for treating a range of neurological disorders including  Parkinson’s. The science could even be used to create more realistic prosthesis which rather than being a mono-directional prosthetic could function as a two way communications pathway between the brain and the prosthetic.

Treating Parkinson’s and other brain diseases could be just the beginning. Optogenetics has amazing potential, not just for sending information into the brain but also for extracting it. And it turns out that Tsien’s Nobel-winning work — the research he took up when he abandoned the hunt for channelrhodopsin — is the key to doing this. By injecting mice neurons with yet another gene, one that makes cells glow green when they fire, researchers are monitoring neural activity through the same fiber-optic cable that delivers the light. The cable becomes a lens. It makes it possible to “write” to an area of the brain and “read” from it at the same time: two-way traffic.

Via Wired (here)