Rusty Swarf @rustyswarf@refactorcamp.org
Industrialist, philanthropist, bicyclist.
Joined Jul 2018
Rusty Swarf
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"Odceixe, Portugal" [Oct 19, 2015] by Hanna Fasching
Just watched a squirrel bury a walnut. He really took his time covering it back up with dirt, tamping it down, and arranging the grass so it was invisible afterwards.
Are there any published Amish tech journalists?
The only MTV cribs episode I really want to see is Werner Herzog.
Rusty Swarf
boosted
Finnish "Tiira 1", home built from farm equipment and flown without aviation experience in 1973
Going through old Bruce Sterling talks, found this:
"The easiest way to predict the future is to predict the present — just tell people stuff they should know already. Stuff you know to be actually true — for them that’s the future. If they haven’t heard about it yet it doesn’t matter that it’s objectively factual — that it’s happening somewhere. As long as they heard it from you and they never heard it from anybody else you have in fact told them the future."
Young sciences are so much more fun. Trying to identify a mushroom, I come across this:
"At the time of this writing (April, 2015) the genus "Polyporus" is headed for major changes; DNA studies (for example Sotome et al., 2008) have made it clear that the genus we thought we had a handle on is actually fairly incoherent, requiring a number of taxonomic changes."
Just learned that Archilllect is a bot. I'd assumed it was just a prolific hipster. Spooky.
Rusty Swarf
boosted
Sailing Boats in the Morning (Inland Sea), Yoshida Hiroshi, 1926 [2335 × 3200]
Hilarious story on the college admissions scandal. Reading it I feel something like second-order schadenfreude: gleeful vicarious appreciation of another's enjoyment of a third party's suffering.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/what-college-admissions-scandal-reveals/586468/
"Not reforming capitalism would be an existential threat to the US."
This feels like the beginning of a sea change in thinking from the economic elites:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-reformed-ray-dalio/
After orchard pruning all day my bellybutton lint is mostly sawdust.
Bruce Sterling SXSW 2019 talk:
Who is the most cyberpunk person in the world?
Puzzling that there's no climate optimism on either side.
Liberal Climate Chaos Optimism: Once there's no "normal," we have freedom to invent crazy microclimate ecosystem designs.
Conservative Climate Chaos Optimism: Same, but with no fear of using nukes and similar scale tech to influence weather.
Pondering ways to characterize environmental politics:
Liberal Ideal: We should freeze ecosystems as they are, prevent further contamination.
Conservative Ideal: We should freeze rate-of-industrialization at its recent state.
Both sides feel rooted in fear of change.
Does this make sense?
Really appreciating woodstoves during this cold snap.
I feel like they're the closest thing we have to "Mr. Fusion" from back to the future: you just take trash lying around on the ground in the woods, chuck it in the box, and get energy out!
Rusty Swarf
boosted
Is our search turned off? I can't seem to search anything cc @zacharius
I already have too many toots to search for my own without a search function. Looking for something I tooted about how some science fiction approaches closer to reality instead of escaping from it...
I get the super blood part, but what does wolf mean?
Is there any particular university that's pre-eminent in Environment / Climate / Ecology / Meteorology stuff?
Seems like there's no obvious choice the way there is for engineering, medicine, finance, etc.
I'm being nudged into a marketing role where I work, and it's forcing me to re-examine a long-held belief: Advertising Is Evil.
Anyone care to play devil's advocate?
Industrialist, philanthropist, bicyclist.
Joined Jul 2018
