Marching Toward the Singularity – kcstudio.org

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Art and Technology Exhibitions Present an Unsettling Take on Contemporary Reality

Artists have engaged technology to aid and enhance their creations at least since the Renaissance and possibly as early as prehistoric times. Consider, for example, David Hockneys book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters or Penn & Tellers documentary Tims Vermeer. Both make a compelling case that the camera obscura, a comparatively simple optical device, was a revolutionary technological breakthrough for artists capacity to render images with great accuracy and linear perspective.

Now that we are marching with reckless abandon toward the high-tech crisis point known as The Singularity, contemporary artists appear to comfortably employ all manner of technology as both artistic tool and subject of contemplation. A cross section of current exhibitions in our region shows an inventive array of art-meets-tech explorations laced with unsettling consequences.

The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas, hosts Charles Lindsay: Field Station 4, a spaced-out immersive installation that repurposes government surplus equipment into five funky multi-media sculptures.

Lindsay, a formerexploration geologist and photojournalist who lived for a while with a shaman in Tibet and did research at NASA Ames, brings a broad range of experience and knowledge to his Field Station, including his current work at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountainview, California.

One can hear the eerie soundtrack gurgling from the Field Station as it draws the visitor into a cluttered, darkened space. Enclosed by dozens of white stacked equipment cases marked with unsettling stencils like ALL FLUID DRAINED, and thick bundles of colored cables snaking through the space, it feels like entering an abandoned space station in which the scientific research has taken on a strange sentient twist.

One of the cases is splayed open to reveal a small bronze sculpture of a fierce Buddhistic deity wired up to a circuit board with an emergency off button. A small video screen shows two metallic balloons anchored to a large rock in a mountainous landscape. Is this science fiction or just weird science? Both would apply, and the visitor, as the only human presence in the space, is left to ponder just what scientific paradigm has been discovered here.

Lindsay provides a clue in two adjacent works that feature the ancient and medically important horseshoe crab, one of the oldest species to continuously inhabit our planet.

In a case resembling a fish tank, several gilded crabs with their distinctive helmet shapes are illuminated from below with erratic flashes of bluish light suggesting a communicative capacity. An underwater soundtrack clicks and pops like a pod of intelligent cetaceans from a small speaker. Buddhist iconography appears again in the form of a painted wooden panel inside the case. Can marine organisms be Buddhist too?

Clad in aluminum tape, the horseshoe crabs become slithering cyborgs in another large storage case in which they are halved to reveal their hybrid technological undercarriage. They are tethered to an emergency shut off button and a whizzing 12-digit LED countdown clock with a mysterious ravioli-like form bursting its carbonaceous guts.

At the back of the installation, one discovers the source of the sci-fi sound effects. A transparent canister, connected by hoses rising to the rafters, holds chunks of fluorescent minerals that sound like theyve come from deep Earth or deep space. Towers of stacked equipment cases add to the claustrophobic atmosphere and the mystery of the seemingly abandoned Field Station.

Outside the main exhibition space, another bizarre object defuses the tension with a bit of levity. Early Tibetan Computer, a clunky old desktop computer outfitted with yak horns, provides another clue to the artists interdisciplinary intent. Charles Lindsays Field Station 4 points to an expanded consciousness where science and shamanism, inquiry and imagination, intersect in the fluid boundaries of contemporary art.

A Tech Trio at the Ulrich

A trio of solo exhibitions at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, addresses parallel artistic responses to the increasingly insidious relationship between humans and our technological creations.

New York based Scottish artist/filmmaker Zoe Beloffs carnivalesque installation Emotions Go to Work disarms the visitor with large cartoon cutouts linking early 20th-century anthropomorphic animation to the current proliferation of smart devices endowed with artificial intelligence, surveillance and data harvesting capabilities that effectively quantify and commodify our very existence.

Things that seemed outlandish almost a century ago, such as Betty Boops wacky, lifelike machines, have now come to pass in the form of Internet-connected doorbells, drones and dolls. Beloffs related film, The Cognitive Era, mimics a slick corporate animation and lays bare the frightening economic motive behind the so-called Internet of Things: nothing short of complete domination of the biological sphere from cradle to grave. Surely thats a fair price to pay for consumer convenience. Right, Alexa?

On a somewhat lighter note, Beloff plays with the now ubiquitous emojis that standardize our emotional responses into reductive digital icons. In a triptych of large panels, she presents uniform grids of expressive facial drawings. One panel calls to mind Charles Darwins pioneering scientific investigations into human and animal emotions as registered by minute variations in facial musculature. In another, she plays with the origins of several familiar emojis by exaggerating the features and restoring the nuances inherent in the human face.

Beloff extends this study in the projected video Future Emoji with real human faces masked into the circular format of the emoji with their corresponding color tints. Her rehumanization of the form reminds us that much emotional experience is lost in translation to digital platforms. However, the larger implication in the work is that through our voluntary interaction with the AI behemoth, we are teaching it how to emotionally manipulate us into predictable behavior monetized for life and beyond.

Curated from the Ulrichs permanent collection, Lee Adler: A Mad Man Amid the Machines brings to light a little known painter and printmaker active in the 1960s and 70s. Lee Adler (1926-2003), a native of Brooklyn, worked on Madison Avenue in the advertising industry before honing his skills as a graphic artist preoccupied with a society in technological ascent. His flat, hard-edged machine forms, rendered in the bright color schemes of Pop art, coincided with the development of cybernetics and systems art. Adlers work retains a surprising conceptual relevance 50 years later the convergent evolution of technological humans a.k.a. cyborgs interacting with ever more humanistic robots. How long before we can no longer recognize the difference?

One of the many consequences of the Digital Revolution has been the irreversible transformation of the photographic medium from a chemical process of image making to an electronic one. In the process, our relationship to the photographic image has destabilized from one of reliable representation to unprecedented manipulation. Photoshop and Instagram filters are commonplace, but now we face deepfake videos and de-aging movie actors that point to a breakdown of trust in the image itself.

That crisis in the medium becomes an opening for artists like A.P. Vague who exploit the tools of manipulation to discover the layered potentials of digital image making. Vagues exhibition of Digital Palimpsests comprises gicle prints and moving image works that range from painterly to geometric abstraction with ghostly traces of representation. Sometimes referred to as glitch art, Vagues work celebrates the open-ended process of liberating images from their original matrix.

Charles Lindsay: Field Station 4 continues through Oct. 17 at Kansas State Universitys Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas. For more information, 785.532.7718 or http://www.beach.k-state.edu.

Zoe Beloff: Emotions Go to Work, Lee Adler: A Mad Man Amid the Machines, and A.P. Vague: Digital Palimpsests continue through March 29 at Wichita State Universitys Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas. For more information, 316.978.3456 or http://www.wichita.edu/museums/ulrich.

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Scientists Just Proved These Two Brain Networks Are Key to Consciousness – Singularity Hub

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Consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of the human species. Where and how does it originate? Why do we have it? Is it even real, or just an illusion?

These questions arent just hard to answereven looking for answers is difficult. But scientists are slowly chipping away at them, with teams all over the world carrying out studies on the brain aimed at cracking the consciousness code.

One of the most recent studies showed a clear relationship between two brain networks critical to consciousness. In a paper published this week in Science Advances, a team from the University of Michigan described their finding that the default mode network (DMN) and the dorsal attention network (DAT) are anti-correlated, meaning that when one is active, the other is suppressed. The team also found that neither network was highly active in people who were unconscious.

These findings suggest that the interplay of the DMN and the DAT support consciousness by allowing us to interact with our surroundings then to quickly internalize those interactions, essentially turning our experiences into thoughts and memories.

Say youre walking through your neighborhood on a sunny afternoon. Youre thinking about the party you went to over the weekend, remembering people you met and conversations you had. Then theres a crashing noise and a car horn starts honkinga biker has run into a car and fallen over not ten steps from you. No one appears to be hurt, but you rush to the bikers side to see if she needs help.

In a few seconds, youve switched from using one brain network to another. The default mode network (DMN) is active when were internally focused, thinking about ourselves and using our memory and imagination. The dorsal attention network (DAT), on the other hand, is activated when were aware of and paying attention to the environment around us.

Of course, switching between different brain networks happens constantly, as does simultaneous use of multiple networks; wed use both the frontoparietal network (active in higher-level processing) and the visual network (used for sight) to analyze and react to images we see or words we read, for example.

But when it comes to the default mode and dorsal attention networks, the situation is a little different; the two are rarely, if ever, active at the same timein fact, neuroscientists had long suspected the two networks werent simultaneously active. The relationship between the two has been studied before, but the Michigan teams research yielded the first definitive proof that the DMN and DAT are, in fact, anti-correlated.

If you think about it, it makes sense; its hard to be fully engaged with your surroundings and be deep in thought about yourself at the same time.

People meditate to try to get out of their heads and focus on the present moment, that is, to quiet the DMN and activate the DAT. Psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD have the same effect: the default mode network is quieted, often resulting in intense feelings of connection to the natural world, other people, or ones surroundings. Since the DMN is where our egos live and where negative thought loops about ourselves take place, the use of psychedelics to quiet this brain region is increasingly being studied as a treatment for depression, PTSD, addiction, and other neurological disorders.

Indeed, were trying pretty hard these days to get out of our own headsand its not easy. This study showed that not only can we not be in our own heads and out of them at the same time, but this mutually exclusive relationship between the DMN and the DAT and the consistent switching between them is what enables us to interact with our environment then internalize and process our experiencesin other words, to be conscious.

The results provide novel scientific insight into the neuronal mechanisms of consciousness, said Zirui Huang, the lead author on the study, and these insights could eventually be used to develop an indicator of the state of consciousness in patients with brain disorders.

The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, to study the brains of 98 participants. Some of the participants were awake, while others were mildly sedated or generally anesthetized, and some suffered from brain disorders of consciousness.

The team built a machine learning model to analyze when different parts of participants brains were in use at the same time. Many previous studies of these patterns used fMRI data averaged over several minutes, but the Michigan team took second-to-second images of brain activity.

We know the brain is changing second to second with different networks engaged in collaboration, said Anthony Hudetz, Professor of Anesthesiology and Director of the Center for Consciousness Science, and a senior author of the paper. Temporal averaging can miss the actual dynamics of the brain and what underlies everything the brain does, from our thinking to our imagination.

They observed eight primary brain networksfrom higher-level processing to visual processing and the activity of the whole brainin addition to the aforementioned DAT and DMN. Using the first 98 participants, the team created a model of the activity patterns of these networks, including which ones were activated simultaneously, for how long, and which network activated subsequently.

Once they had a reliable model, the team further evaluated their results in an additional group of 248 participants, all of whom were conscious but some of whom had psychiatric disorders that could alter the functioning of their brain networks.

The researchers saw that the brain quickly transitions from one network to another in regular patterns, and the conscious brain cycles through a structured pattern of states over time, including frequent transitions to the default mode and dorsal attention networks.

But in patients who were unconsciouswhether theyd been sedated or they suffered from brain disorderstransitions to the DMN and DAT were much less frequent.

This is key: though the experiences of unresponsive patients would have differed depending on how they became unconscioustheir brain networks would have been impacted and reorganized in different waysthey all shared the same isolation of the DMN and DAT networks.

In people who are conscious, turning off the DMN (which is what happens when you take psychedelics) results in an inability to deeply self-reflect. Turning off the DAT, on the other hand, would result in an inability to be aware of and respond to ones surroundings. Its the switching between these two networks that allows us to be engaged, aware, self-reflective humansconscious beings, you could say.

We wanted to pinpoint which networks are related to consciousness, said Huang. By suppressing consciousness, we developed a better sense of which networks are important for consciousness by process of elimination.

We already knew that youre in a conscious state whether youre daydreaming and caught up in memories or out of your head and engaged with the world around you.

But now we have further proof that, one, you dont use the brain networks required for self-reflection and external engagement at the same time, and two, you dont use much of either when youre unconscious.

Huang hopes to next identify how the brain regulates these moment-to-moment changes from one network to another. These structured patterns of brain changes are important for consciousness, he said.

Cracking the codeor, rather, the many codesof the human brain will likely take decades, and thats taking into account the decades scientists have already devoted to studying, probing, imaging, and analyzing the three-pound ball of neurons and fatty acids inside our heads.

But after all, the brain is the seat of consciousness, as well as that of every thought, memory, emotion, and sensation we have; we couldnt have expected its inner workings to be straightforward.

Image Credit: Greyson Joralemon on Unsplash

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Scientists Just Proved These Two Brain Networks Are Key to Consciousness - Singularity Hub

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 14) – Singularity Hub

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MEDICINE

Flattening the Coronavirus CurveSiobhan Roberts | The New York TimesThe ideal goal in fighting an epidemic or pandemic is to completely halt the spread. But merely slowing itmitigationis critical. This reduces the number of cases that are active at any given time, which in turn gives doctors, hospitals, police, schools and vaccine-manufacturers time to prepare and respond, without becoming overwhelmed.

Autonomous Robots Are Helping Kill Coronavirus in HospitalsEvan Ackerman | IEEE SpectrumTo prevent the spread of coronavirus (and everything else) through hospitals, keeping surfaces disinfected is incredibly important, but its also dirty, dull, and (considering what you can get infected with) dangerous. And thats why its an ideal task for autonomous robots.

Quarantined Italians Are Singing Their Hearts Out. Its Beautiful.Emily Todd VanDerWerff | VoxTheCovid-19 coronavirusand the associatedsocial distancing that nearly everyone on the planet is being encouraged to practicewill presumably hinder people from making and listening to music together, but tweets from all over Italy (which is under heavy lockdown) reveal a country where citizens are taking to their balconies and windows to enjoy music together.

These Industrial Robots Get More Adept With Every TaskTom Simonite | Wired Were paying people trillions of dollars a year to do stuff that robots have been physically capable of doing for the last 30 or 40 years, Phoenix says. Anyone who can make industrial robots more adeptand Vicarious is not the only one tryingcould transform the economy by shifting the balance of labor between people and machines.

How Wikipedias Volunteers Became the Webs Best Weapon Against MisinformationAlex Pasternack | Fast Companywhile places like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter struggle to fend off a barrage of false content, with their scattershot mix of policies, fact-checkers, and algorithms, one of the webs most robust weapons against misinformation is an archaic-looking website written by anyone with an internet connection, and moderated by a largely anonymous crew of volunteers.

Cosmos: Possible Worlds Review Gorgeous Scientific Escapism Advocates for Rebels and OptimismSteve Greene| IndieWireThe most valuable part of Cosmos: Possible Worlds is its merging of boundless optimism and the necessity of urgency. Not merely content with being restricted to doomsaying or cheerleading, theres a healthy blend of both that sticks to a central thesis: Were capable of understanding what mystifies us now, but only if were willing to display some humility and cooperation in the process.

Dont Go Down a Coronavirus Anxiety SpiralLouise Matsakis | WiredThe stock market had its biggest decline in decades, Sarah Palin rapped to Baby Got Back dressed in a bear suitit feels like the world is unraveling. There is so much going on, and so much uncertainty, it is all too easy to get trapped watching cable news or scrolling through Twitter all day. If all this news is making you feel stressed, youre far from alone.

Image Credit:Ari He /Unsplash

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Biden, Sanders and a Debate for This Moment of Panic – The New York Times

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This is an unprecedented moment in American history, Bernie Sanders said on Sunday night. It certainly produced an unprecedented debate, the singularity of which was captured in a superficially odd but profound bit of business near the start.

Both Sanders and Joe Biden volunteered proudly that they hadnt shaken hands. Both sang the praises of soap. And both spoke of hand sanitizer as if it were holy water.

The pandemic caused by the coronavirus changed and governed everything about the evening, in ways overt and oblique. It determined the first question that the two candidates were asked. It informed the last. It was the focus of many of their remarks in between.

Above all, it was the terrifying context in which their inevitable policy disagreements, aspersions on each others characters and exhumations of each others records took on a wholly different cast. All that stuff was unquestionably important and yet.

There was a life-threatening, nation-shuttering, wealth-decimating crisis at hand. Did Bidens decades-old comments about Social Security or onetime support of the Hyde Amendment matter even an eighth as much? Did Sanderss long-ago votes on gun control or kind words about Fidel Castro?

And wasnt the most important takeaway that neither of the candidates dwells in the truth-free, information-barren, delusion-rich bubble surrounding our current president, whose irresponsibility is having epic consequences? The two Democrats criticisms of each other, which grew heated at times, seemed almost immaterial next to what needed to be said and sometimes was about the denier in chief, Donald Trump.

That dynamic favored Biden, for several reasons. Hes now the far-and-away front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, with a lead in delegates that Sanders probably cant overcome, so any sense of urgency for the party to unite in common cause against Trump becomes a summons to send Biden into the general election in the strongest shape imaginable. I suspect many Democrats tuned into this debate, almost certainly the last of the Democratic primaries, not to see Biden tested but to will him onward unscathed.

Bidens position in the race, coupled with his message of national healing, meant that he more than Sanders had an interest in floating above the details of issues and painting a larger, gauzier picture. That approach suited this moment of utterly warranted panic.

So practiced riffs that were somewhat pat before the pandemic were wholly pertinent, such as Bidens recognition that while he and Sanders differ on how to improve health care or tackle other problems in America, We dont disagree on the principle. We fundamentally disagree with this president on everything.

So, he added, this is much bigger than whether or not Im the nominee or Bernies the nominee. We must defeat Donald Trump.

And Biden was able to portray Sanderss grander plans for transforming the American economy as luxuries unaffordable in the face of a scourge, as distractions from the emergency upon us. People are looking for results, not a revolution, Biden said.

Barring some remarkable, unforeseeable development, Sunday night was likely the valediction to Sanderss bid for the Democratic nomination. Thats not because there was any particular, glaring deficiency in Sanderss performance, a thorough and sometimes fierce grilling of Biden that correctly identified his evasions, inconsistencies and episodes of flawed judgment.

Sanders projected passion and self-assurance. He defended himself well against Bidens attacks. And he raised fair, even necessary questions about whether, on issues like climate change, Bidens proposals were more timid than the stakes demanded.

But there was something strained and strange about Sanderss repeated pivots from the pandemic to income inequality, from the pandemic to corrupt pharmaceutical executives, from the pandemic to how many millionaires and billionaires have contributed to Bidens campaign. The world has been transformed; the script remains the same.

And he couldnt claim the kind of experience that Biden repeatedly did, the intimate knowledge of what its like to be at the center of crucial national decisions.

Biden smartly understood that his eight years beside the last Democratic president and his foreign-policy seasoning are probably more reassuring to voters now than they were a month or even a week ago. So he marinated in them.

And to guarantee further that the media wouldnt fixate on who had got the better of whom, he threw in some major news, promising outright that he would pick a woman as his running mate. Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg: You can officially stand down.

There were also bad moments for Biden: selective retellings and lavish sugarcoating of votes and comments hed made in the past. But they werent nearly enough to alter the current trajectory of the Democratic contest.

And Biden provided a mostly reassuring answer to perhaps the biggest question coming into this debate: With only one opponent sharing two full hours and a whole lot of talking to do, could he communicate his thoughts sharply enough, make his points with sufficient force and keep his sentences from running out of gas on a road to nowhere?

Squaring off against Sanders was a preview of squaring off against Trump, not because Sanders and Trump are anything alike, but because the initially crowded nature of the Democratic contest meant that Bidens debates until now were populous affairs, when he was on the hook for maybe 20 minutes total and not the only or even the main candidate under fire.

But Sunday nights debate was a two-person face-off, of the kind bound to occur in a general election. Did the extra time mean added peril? Biden was plenty repetitive and occasionally misspoke, but it was nothing to bolster team Trumps gross caricature of him as a barely animated corpse.

Biden mostly came across as calm and resolute in the face of dire circumstances that had forced a relocation of the debate to Washington from Phoenix, the elimination of an audience and the addition of an extra few feet between his lectern and Sanderss.

The two candidates may have stood at a greater distance from each other than they normally would, but somehow they were closer together. Even during the debates bitterest exchanges, I never got the sense that either of them was really and truly intent on savaging the other.

You cant tell Americans to pull together at this frightful juncture if youre pushing them apart. The Democrats seem to get that. If only the president did, too.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Biden, Sanders and a Debate for This Moment of Panic - The New York Times

Coronavirus: Seven Ways Collective Intelligence Is Tackling the Pandemic – Singularity Hub

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Tackling the emergence of a new global pandemic is a complex task. But collective intelligence is now being used around the world by communities and governments to respond.

At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity created when distributed groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilize more information, ideas, and insights to solve a problem.

Advances in digital technologies have transformed what can be achieved through collective intelligence in recent yearsconnecting more of us, augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence, and helping us to generate new insights from novel sources of data. It is particularly suited to addressing fast-evolving, complex global problems such as disease outbreaks.

Here are seven ways it is tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

On December 31, 2019, health monitoring platform Blue Dot alerted its clients to the outbreak of a flu-like virus in Wuhan, Chinanine days before the World Health Organization (WHO) released a statement about it. It then correctly predicted that the virus would jump from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo.

Blue Dot combines existing data sets to create new insights. Natural language processing, the AI methods that understand and translate human-generated text, and machine learning techniques that learn from large volumes of data, sift through reports of disease outbreaks in animals, news reports in 65 languages, and airline passenger information. It supplements the machine-generated model with human intelligence, drawing on diverse expertise from epidemiologists to veterinarians and ecologists to ensure that its conclusions are valid.

The BBC carried out a citizen science project in 2018, which involved members of the public in generating new scientific data about how infections spread. People downloaded an app that monitored their GPS position every hour and asked them to report who they had encountered or had contact with that day.

This collective intelligence initiative created a huge wealth of data that helped researchers understand who the super-spreaders are, as well the impact of control measures on slowing an outbreak. Although the full data set is still being analyzed, researchers have released data to help with modeling the UKs response to Covid-19.

Created by a coding academy based on official government data, Covid-19 SG allows Singapore residents to see every known infection case, the street where the person lives and works, which hospital they got admitted to, the average recovery time and the network connections between infections. Despite concerns about potential privacy infringements, the Singapore government has taken the approach that openness about infections is the best way to help people make decisions and manage anxiety about what is happening.

For dashboard enthusiasts, MIT Technology Review has a good round-up of the many coronavirus-related dashboards tracking the pandemic.

In early February, Wired reported how researchers at Harvards medical school were using citizen-generated data to monitor the progress of the disease. To do this, they mined social media posts and used natural language processing to look for mentions of respiratory problems and fever in locations where doctors had reported potential cases.

This builds on evidence published in a January article in the journal Epidemiology that found that hot spots of tweets could be good indicators of how a disease spreads. It remains to be seen how effective these initiatives are or whether they will succumb to the problems that beset Google Flu Trends.

The reality of peoples experience of the virus is largely absent from media reporting so far, but the importance of social sciences in pandemic preparedness and response is becoming increasingly recognized. We should therefore all tip our hats to the citizens of Wuhan who have been archiving and translating social media data from inside China, creating chronicles of testimonies of those affected before they get censored by the government.

To speed up the development of drugs to combat coronavirus, researchers at the University of Washington are calling on scientists and the public to play an online game.

The challenge is to build a protein that could block the virus from infiltrating human cells. The game is on Foldit, a 12-year-old website which has crowdsourced contributions to important protein research from more than 200,000 registered players worldwide.

Responding to concerns about lack of access to testing for Covid-19, Nesta Collective Intelligence grantee Just One Giant Lab is behind an effort to develop a cheap, quick coronavirus test that can be used anywhere in the world. The initiative is crowdsourcing ideas from do-it-yourself biology communities, with the ambition to open source and share designs so that certified labs can easily produce test kits for their communities.

In a global crisis, sharing collective intelligence about the virus will be a significant factor in our ability to respond and find new treatments. NextStrain pulls in all the data from labs around the world that are sequencing SARS-CoV-2s genome and centralizes it in one place for people to see in a genomic tree. This open repository, which is built on GitHub, is helping scientists studying coronavirus genomic evolution and enabling tracking of how the virus is passed between people.

Researchers have also been sharing new findings about the virus genomic profile through open source publications and preprint sites such as BioRxiv and Chinaxiv. Paywalls are being temporarily lifted on content related to coronavirus in scientific publications such as BMJ, and the public is demanding that major news outlets follow suit.

Activists on Reddit have gone one step further and bypassed paywalls to create an open archive of 5,312 research articles mentioning coronaviruses, citing a moral imperative for the research to be openly accessible. Newspeak House is crowdsourcing a handbook of tools, tech, and data for technologists building things to respond to the coronavirus outbreak.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is also compiling all published research into a global databaseand making learning resources about managing Covid-19 for health professionals, and decision makers have been made available on the WHO online learning platform. But they have also been criticized for not replying to comments left on their channels, leaving a vacuum instead of a response to rumors and falsehoods.

At Nestas Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, well keep tracking how collective intelligence is being used during the current crisis and updating our public online noticeboard of collective intelligence projects as often as we can. Please share any examples you come across in the comments.

By working together and sharing knowledge, we have a better chance of beating the pandemic.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Kill It and Leave This Town: Film Review – Variety

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An utterly bizarre, frequently grotesque, occasionally obscene singularity, Polish artist Mariusz Wilczynskis abrasive animation Kill It and Leave This Town exists so far outside the realm of the expected, the acceptable and the neatly comprehensible that it acts as a striking reminder of just how narrow that realm can be. Occupying a conceptual space several universes away from (or perhaps, given its intensely personal nature, deeply nested inside whatever it is we recognize as) reality, the scratchy, hand-drawn interior epic is alarmingly niche in appeal, but if you can slip into that tiny schism, it certainly rewards with one of the most nightmarishly original dystopian visions you are likely to encounter this year.

Willfully lo-fi, rendered in often crude black and white lines and smudges occasionally accented with tiny spots of color a pilot light, a row of cigarette packs, a fizzing neon sign in the shape of a ram the film is noted animator Wilczyskis first feature, but has been in the works for 11 years, which maybe accounts for why its 88 minutes play out like a decade-long anxiety attack. Within it, memory abuts dream, which in turn jostles against long tracts of defiantly self-indulgent navel-gazing that play as a kind of therapeutic exercise for an author experiencing an ontological crisis. So if a linear narrative is impossible to discern among such densely surreal imagery, the mood of circular despair, self-recrimination and intense melancholy is just as impossible to miss.

Loosely speaking, it is set in Wilczynskis childhood home of Lodz, in the 1970s, when a browbeaten Poland was still firmly in the clutches of the communist regime. The city backdrops are rendered in unusual detail, with plumes of smoke puffing from the industrial skyline, which has the eloquent effect of oppressing the more crudely-drawn human characters that populate it. These people officious shopkeepers, unhelpful station-masters, truant schoolboys all seem alienated from one another even as we swim in and out of their nervily chattering, nonsensical monologues.

Bobbing fish in a tank turn into decapitated heads that roll across trainyards and rasp incomprehensible, vaguely satanic-sounding messages to the living. An ancient sailor with a medal and a beak for a mouth bickers with his wife on a train ride. A man and his son go to the beach for the day and forget to telephone home where mother becomes increasingly frantic. And Wilczynski himself appears, a lumbering Brobdingnagian giant in this Lilliputian world (its as unflattering a self-portrait as you can imagine) while he waits at his dying mothers bedside later, we will watch in ghastly close-up as the mortician chats offhandedly while sewing up the genitalia on her shriveled corpse.

The film does not feel directly political, yet the style still recalls the politicized caricatures of George Grosz or the ghouls of Otto Dix meeting the surreal grotesqueries of Jan Svankmajer or Jiri Barta, minus the aesthetic intricacy. The transitions between disparate scenes are haphazard, sometimes simply fading in and out of black, sometimes eliding into each other as in a dream, and sometimes cutting on a sound element (old Polish pop music dots the soundtrack) or the wail of an electric guitar riff from Tadeusz Nalepas twanging score. The varying strokes and weights of the individual animators styles further challenge the films flow, with characters rendered so differently from one scene to the next its surprising that we can still ascribe them any object permanence at all. But despite the jarring form, Kill It and Leave This Town is still oddly immersive: a peculiarly vivid, monochromatically psychotropic bad trip.

These are Wilczynskis memories but also his nightmares, fears and neuroses made manifest in ink on paper backgrounds. Sometimes that paper is lined and ragged, stuck together with visibly yellowing tape that testifies to both the spontaneous, even hasty, nature of the images, but also to their ancientness, like marginalia doodles discovered in an old school copybook. And the naivet of the presentation is clamorously dissonant with the artistic ambition, which is little less than the tortured representation of an already unruly psyche gathering together fragmentary impressions churned up in the wake of the specific type of existential grief that occurs when orphanhood happens to an adult.

I simply dont believe in death, says Wilczynskis bloated, scraggly avatar at one point. Everyone who is gone is just gone. They didnt die, they are alive in my imagination. That might well be the kind of cozy blandishment wed expect of a much easier, more lighthearted film about death, one designed to comfort rather than provoke. But here it is anything but a consolation. The imagination that Kill It and Leave This Town illustrates may indeed be a sort of afterlife for people of Wilczynskis past, but if so, it is Purgatory.

'Kill It and Leave This Town': Film Review

Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival, Feb. 22, 2020. Running time: 88 MIN.

Production:(Poland, Animation) A Bombonierka production, in co-production with the National Film Archive, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Ec1 Lodz - City Of Culture, Letko, NoLabel, DI Factory, Gigant Films and the Polish Film Institute. (International Sales: Outsider Pictures, LA.) Producers: Ewa Puszczynska, Agnieszka Scibior. Co-producers: Piotr Szczepanowicz, Jakub Karwowski, Grzegorz Waclawek, Krzysztof Hrycak, Lukasz Czyczylo, Jedrzej Sablinski, Rafal Golis, Julia Skorupska, Michal Herman, Radoslaw Drabik, Teresa Siwicka, Jacek Siwicki, Michal Chacinski. Executive producer: Lucja Kedzior-Samodulska.

Crew:Director, screenplay: Mariusz Wilczynski. Lead animators: Wilczynski, Agata Gorzadek, Jakub Wronski. Animation supervisor: Piotr Szczepanowicz. Editor: Jaroslaw Barzan. Music: Tadeusz Nalepa.

With:Krystyna Janda, Andrzej Chyra, Maja Ostaszewska, Malgorzata Kozuchowska, Barbara Krafftowna. (Polish dialogue)

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Kill It and Leave This Town: Film Review - Variety

Here’s what to do in Houston this week – KPRC Click2Houston

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There's a little something for everyone coming up on the events calendar this week. From a card tournament to an improv show, here's a rundown of options to help you get out and about in the days ahead.

Hoodline offers data-driven analysis of local happenings and trends across cities. Links included in this article may earn Hoodline a commission on clicks and transactions.

From the event description:

We're playing spades, and you're invited. CReed Global Media is hosting game night. Calling all spades players. Bring your partner.

When: Friday, March 13, 7-11 p.m.Where: CReed Global Media Studios, 6363 Richmond Ave., Suite 350Admission: Free

Click here for more details, and to get your tickets

From the event description:

It's official! Crawling for charity is more fun. This is the official charity pub crawl, which supports the parade. Drink specials at participating bars for crawlers only.

When: Saturday, March 14, 3-9 p.m.Where: Downtown HoustonAdmission: $5 (Super Pre Sale (83% off); $7.50 (Pre Sale (75% OFF)). More ticket options available.

Click here for more details, and to get your tickets

From the event description:

Learn to make beautiful holiday icicle ornaments from molten glass in this introductory flameworking class.

When: Saturday, March 14, 4-5 p.m.Where: Verlocal, 214 E. 27th St.Admission: $75

Click here for more details, and to get your tickets

From the event description:

Insane salsa night party at Capitol Bar. It's off the hook. You get three dance lessons in salsa merengue and bachata. Then dance inside and outside to salsa, bachata, cumbia reggaeton and more till 2 a.m. with two DJs!

When: Saturday, March 14, 8 p.m.- Sunday, March 15 2 a.m.Where: Capitol Bar Midtown, 2415 Main St.Admission: $10

Click here for more details, and to get your tickets

From the event description:

Saturday Singularity at Station Theater welcomes the best in live independent improv and sketch comedy from Houston and beyond!

When: Saturday, March 14, 8-9:15 p.m.Where: Station Theater, 1230 Houston Ave.Admission: $8

Click here for more details, and to get your tickets

This story was created automatically using local event data, then reviewed by an editor. Click here for more about what we're doing. Got thoughts? Go here to share your feedback.

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Here's what to do in Houston this week - KPRC Click2Houston

Huge $161 Million Investment Means Meat Without the Animal Is Here – Singularity Hub

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In 1931, Winston Churchill made a bold prediction: We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. It must have sounded like pure science fiction back thenbut not anymore.

Today, thanks to scientific innovations in tissue engineering for human medicine, were very close to fulfilling Churchills vision for food.Researchers and the media have variously called this new kind of food cell-based, cultured, or lab-grown meat, but I prefer the more palatable cultivated meat. Unlike plant-based alternatives, cultivated meat islike its conventional counterpartmade up of animal muscle and fat cells. But because these cells can be cultivated at the cellular level, we dont have to grow a whole animal to make meat from only some of its cells.

Since early cultivated meat company Memphis Meats launched in 2015, more and more startups have focused on producing animal meat without the animal. By removing the animal, these companies aim to produce meat with a fraction of the environmental footprint, needing as little as 45 percent less energy, 96 percent less water, and 99 percent less land than conventional meat.

As we race to find sustainable ways to feed the worlds insatiable appetite for meat, the field of cultivated meat has exceeded annual exponential growthmore than doubling every year in terms of the number of startup companies and investment dollars. In late 2015, one startup raised a few hundred thousand dollars. In 2020, there are dozens of cultivated meat companies around the world pursuing everything from shrimp and bluefin tuna to steak and kangaroo.

This year, the sector took another significant step forward when cultivated meat first-mover Memphis Meats closed a $161 million Series B funding round from lead investors Softbank, Norwest, and Temasek. This amount is greater than all other publicly disclosed investments in cultivated meat companies combined and brings total investment in the startup to $181 million.

What does an investment like this mean for cultivated meat companies and the field as a whole? Having tracked the sector since its inception, I think there are three key takeaways.

Funding at this level enables a cultivated meat company to move beyond the proof-of-concept phase. It allows them to dive into the juicy engineering challenges associated with scale-up and enables the construction of a pilot facility representative of true commercial-scale production.

This funding milestone serves to validate the technological soundness of the concept of cultivated meat and Memphis Meats approach to it. With a Series B funding round, scrupulous investors evaluate not just a research plan and a teams credentials but also actual progress toward technical and business milestones. They see a path toward commercial viability and profitability tooall within the time horizon of a typical venture capital fund.

The fact that Memphis Meats has been able to secure follow-on investments from their previous funders and also bring in noteworthy new investors shows theyve made impressive progress to date de-risking their technology.

While this is a win for Memphis Meats, the investment is also a validation for the entire field and the concept of cultivated meat as a solution to some of the problems inherent in conventional meat production.

But theres no time for a victory lap.

Momentum for meat alternatives is building. Plant-based meats from Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat made a splash in fast food restaurants like Burger King and KFC last year. And Beyond Meats initial public offering had a historic post-IPO pop (though its since retreated).

Cultivated meats may capture a further slice of the market if they can offer something even closer to a true replacement for conventional meat. But it will take more investment. And cultivated meat companies still need to pass regulatory scrutiny and convince the public that their products are not only healthy and safe, but also desirable and delicious.

Financial support will come from the private sectoras the Memphis Meats Series B seems to showbut the public sector can help keep things moving too.

Governments, which are heavily invested in renewable energy, should become heavily invested in renewable meat as well. The sector is still nascent. Continued resources are needed to address challenges, drive innovation, and enhance efficiencies to rapidly scale animal-free meat production. Given the vast promise of better meat production, governments are overdue for writing some of the critical checks to broaden the foundation of fundamental research.

As the climate crisis unfolds, we need to invest in the science that can save us, including methods that can produce truly sustainable meat. If the US is to maintain its lead in feeding the world safely and sustainably, we need public support for better forms of meat production.

Image Credit: Wolfgang Hasselmann /Unsplash

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PS4-exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn is coming to PC – The Tech Report

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Were approaching the video game singularity, where platform and hardware no longer matter. Sony and developer Guerrilla games took us one step closer to that singularity this week with the official announcement that Horizon Zero Dawn is coming to PC.

The announcement comes straight from the most official source possible. Head of Sonys Worldwide Studios Helman Hunst, who ran Guerrilla Games before stepping into the Sony position last year, announced the release via Sonys official PlayStation blog.

I can confirm that Horizon Zero Dawnis coming to PC this summer, Hunst said. There will be more information coming from Guerrilla, from the new studio directors pretty soon.

The announcement was rumored earlier this year, and its not completely without precedent. Also releasing this summer is Hideo KojimasDeath Stranding,which Kojima built using Guerilla Games Decima Engine. In that light,Horizon Zero Dawnmakes more sense than any other Sony game for this move. Its also one of the biggest Sony properties to appear on PC; its not hard to start fantasizing about games like God of War or The Last of Us joiningHorizon Zero Dawn. Word from Sony suggests that this might be just the start.

If you havent come acrossHorizon Zero Dawn yet, the game follows a woman named Aloy, outcast from her tribe. She searches for clues to her origins in a world overrun by imposing and dangerous mechanized creatures, modeled in the shapes of dinosaurs, predators, and other wildlife. Signs of an old world are out there, and call to Aloy as she unravels the mystery of her own life and that of the dinosaurs roaming the planet. As a PlayStation exclusive, the game has held a steady 89 on Metacritic.

Horizon Zero Dawn isnt available for pre-order just yet, but it does have a page on the Steam store for theHorizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition.The package includes the game, the Frozen Wilds expansion, and some special weapons and item packs. Theres no word on price just yet.

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PS4-exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn is coming to PC - The Tech Report

AQ Arif accentuates brave nature of defending warriors in Epic Mughals – The News International

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AQ Arif accentuates brave nature of defending warriors in Epic Mughals

The genesis of war is as old as history. Human beings have been fighting for power and supremacy from the moment they began to run out of resources and starve, leading to ruthless greed, writes art critic Saeed Kureshi (Sitara-e-Imtiaz).

The ArtCiti Gallery, which is hosting AQ Arifs solo art exhibition titled Epic Mughals until March 17, quotes Kureshi as saying: Today history is replete with conflicts, battles and wars that were fought for a variety of reasons, such as forcing ideological change, settling border disputes and capturing mineral resources among others.

Accentuating the brave nature of defending warriors, AQ Arif has put together a unique set of aesthetically modelled artworks. Additionally, being a highly acknowledged painter of cityscapes and Islamic buildings, the artist in the current exhibit introduces a new wave of captivating structures draped in Muslim architecture.

The set of paintings depicting the grand era of the Mughals reflects the artists vivid vision, eye for detail and a keen urge to define the atmosphere of combat. The visually complex subject of armed conflicts comprising armour, weapons and dynamic articulation is a daunting theme that Arif confronts head-on. The historical nature of painted episodes is crucial to the preservation of past history of the Subcontinent; some of it grand and some humiliating.

The artist indeed has manifested his command over this exclusive subject, narrating some of the significant junctures of battle, which now stand preserved. The remarkable demeanour of courage, gracefully composed for movement and posture, these paintings exude inspiration and induce a winning spirit to struggle.

The artist through his extraordinary arrangements on the canvas has revived the powerful imagery of the regions ancestors, which oozes with inspiration to fortify the defences of the motherland.

Retrospectively, ever since the Indus Valley Civilisation (3300-1300 BC), successive kingdoms and empires invaded and ruled the region and enriched its culture: from the Persian Achaemenid Empire to Alexander the Great.

Muslim rule in the Subcontinent began in 712 AD, when Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh and Multan, setting off several successive invasions leading to the forming of Muslim empires of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.

It was the Mughal rulers who introduced Middle-Eastern art and architecture to India. The emerging Mughal army developed a superior cavalry branch. The cavalrys horsemen possessed horses and used a wide variety of weapons like swords, shields, lances and, more rarely, guns.

Their armour was made of steel or leather, and they wore the traditional dress of their tribes. Arif portrays the aforesaid with masterful imagination deploying painterly realism, especially the Mughal cavalry with elephants bearing richly ornamented sturdy armour.

Among the Mughal military, the artist portrays warships and boats which were used for defending coastlines, controlling piracy and for transportation of men and goods.

The inclusion of maritime activity amid the subject of warriors strengthens the artists archival aspiration, capturing the essence of the 16th century Akbarnama paintings of Mughal court painters that depict battles on the Ganges river.

Arif underpins the soft aspect of the Mughal lifestyle through artistic representation of royal attire of men and women. Portraits of graceful women dressed in glorious apparel of that era convey an insight into feminine grandeur and beauty.

Imparting a majestic textural persona to the paintings, the artist handles paints in a variety of application techniques, ranging from scumbling and stippling to bold impasto strokes.

Culminating into an enhanced and a more gratifying style, Arif has achieved a distinguished disposition among leading painters. The singularity of the artists concepts and perception emerging from history emphasises the significance of learning from the past, specifically when the homeland is threatened by conniving adversaries.

Pictures courtesy: ArtCiti Gallery

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10 Forgotten First Person Shooters You Need To Play | Game Rant – GameRant

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If someone was to ask most gamers to name a first-person shooter they most likely answer would either be Call of Duty, Battlefield, or even Halo. Which is unsurprising considering how popular these games are with fans of multiplayer shooters.

RELATED:5 Multiplayer Games Best Played Solo (& 5 With Friends)

One only has to look at the Call of Duty franchise topping the number one selling game every Christmas for the last few years to see its dominance on the market. Unfortunately, this has meant that many great first-person shooters that perhaps focused more on its single-player than the multiplayer have gone under the radar. Lets take a look at ten great but forgotten single-player shooters that gamers should check out if they want something different from the CoD series.

Released in 2005 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the PC, F.E.A.R. is an atmospheric survival horror first-person shooter developed by Monolith Productions. The game offers players a well rounded single-player campaign with an interesting story taking inspiration from Japanese horror films like Ju-On: The Grudge and Ring.

RELATED:10 Horror Games That Take The Longest To Beat

F.E.A.R. also uses its own version of the bullet-time mechanic called Reflex Time which comes in handy against the games advanced artificial intelligence. The long-haired little girl Alma may be pretty scary but the true star of the show is the unpredictable A.I. The enemy soldiers coordinate with teammates, use suppressive fire, blind fire, and really seem to make an effort in taking down the player by not repeating the same mistakes.

Released on the Nintendo Wii in 2010, Red Steel 2 is a first-person action shooter that combined themes from samurai and Wild West movies. It also implemented cell-shaded visuals which still look great giving it an anime-style appearance.

Red Steel 2 also made excellent use of the Nintendo Wiis motion controls delivering some of the best swordfight mechanics in any game and it transitions fluidly into gunplay very nicely. Unfortunately, a planned sequel was canceled by its developers by Ubisoft due to its low sales, but Red Steel 2definitely deserves another chanceand could be the perfect candidate for the PSVR.

Released in 2006 for the Xbox 360 and PC formats in 2006, Prey is a science fiction horror first-person shooter developed by the now-defunct Human Head Studios. It was created using the Doom 3 engine also known as id Tech 4 and unsurprisingly the graphics still hold up well. Level design is top-notch, and monster design is gruesome in all the right ways.

Its a completely different game to the very good 2017 reboot of the same name developed by Arkane Studios. The gameplay implements the use of portals that are there to interconnect the levels and create new methods of attack. In addition, the Spirit Force mechanics allows the protagonist Danny to enter the spirit realm to solve puzzles and surprise enemies.

First released in 2011, Bulletstorm was released on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the PC. Despite being well received by critics, the game was a commercial failure. Bulletstorm was released again on the Xbox One and the PS4 in 2017, and the Nintendo Switch in 2019.

In spite of the remasters, Bulletstorm is still not a game that is considered to be a mainstream hit. For lack of a better term, Bulletstorm is an absolute blast to play and has a great sense of humor. The Skillshot mechanic is what will keep players hooked from beginning to the end, however, letting players pull off some amazing feats with the games unique weapons.

Developed by Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay creators Starbreeze, The Darkness is another fantastic first-person shooter based on thecomic book series if the same name. The gunplay is solid but the games most unique mechanic is the Darkness powers such as Creeping Dark allowing stealth attacks and Dark for more violent tentacle attacks that can impale enemies in lots of creative ways.

In addition to the excellent gameplay, The Darkness world is a joy to explore with lots of characters and items to interact to help bring the game to life, and the storyhas lots of twists rig.

Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter was released on the Xbox, PC and PlayStation 2 in 2003. It is a futuristic science fiction game with inspirations from classic Wild West movies. Mace Griffin allows players to switch between space ship fights and first-person viewpoints and was way ahead of its time in terms of loading speeds and transitional gameplay.

The game features solid voice work from Henry Rollins as the titular character, and the interesting and involved sci-fi story builds and develops at a great pace in relation to the mission design.

Released in 2012, Syndicate was a first-person shooter reboot of the cyberpunk real-time strategy series. It was developed by Starbreeze Studios. Just like The Darkness, theres a lot more to this game than simply running and gunning. However, it must be said that running down a corridor John Woo-style taking out enemies with ease is very satisfying.

Syndicate gives its players an incredible amount of tools to use in battle from the DART chip that can tag enemies through walls, hacking techniques and lots of weapons that feel great to use. Despite being on the PS3 and Xbox 360, Syndicate still holds up well visually with great art design and excellent animations.

The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is another great action title from Starbreeze Studios and arguably their best effort to date. First released in 2004 on the original Xbox it was best looking and performing game on the machine. However, the remastered edition included with Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is the best version giving gamers two great games in one.

RELATED:The 10 Best Stealth Games Ever Made (According To Metacritic)

The lighting and shadows look realistic and really add to the games stealth mechanics which are among some of the best in the genre. Furthermore, in terms of hand-to-hand combat in the first person, there are very few games that can match the fluidity of the Riddick games.

Released in 2010 on the PS3 and Xbox 360, Singularity is a first-person science fiction horror shooter developed by Raven Software. Even though Raven is perhaps now better known for developing Call of Duty games Singularity is a narratively driven FPS that has more in common with the Bioshock series.

RELATED:Call of Duty: 5 Reasons Why Its WW2 Era Was The Best (& 5 Why It's The Modern Warfare Era)

In addition to its very good storyline, Singularity implements an innovative time manipulation mechanic that can be used as a weapon and solve several puzzles as the game progresses. Theres an alternate timeline storyline thats inspired by classic science fiction TV shows and was far more imaginative than it was given credit for at the time of its release.

Released as a launch title for the Xbox 360 in 2005, Condemned: Criminal Origins is a survival horror FPS developed by Monolith Productions the same team behind the F.E.A.R. series. Unlike F.E.A.R. however, theres a stronger emphasis on horror and successfully making the player jump out of their skins - gamers will never look at a store mannequin in the same way again.

The shooting mechanics areweighty and satisfyingbut its brutal melee combat that stands out among the best in the genre. Despite its age, Condemned is still one of the more visually striking games on the system and quite possibly one of the most underrated horror games of the last two generations.

NEXT:10 Great RPGs That Flew Under The Radar (And Their Metacritic Scores)

Next10 Ridiculously Long PC Games (& How Long They Take To Beat)

Writer for GameRant, The Gamer, The Sportser, and ScreenRant. Gaming, wrestling and film fan for over 35 years. He's a Schwarzenegger and Stallone fanatic that considers himself something of an expert in all things RPGs and cheesy action films from the 80s and 90s.

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10 Forgotten First Person Shooters You Need To Play | Game Rant - GameRant

A Theory of Quantum Mechanics That Suggests Everyone is Immortal – Interesting Engineering

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According to one theory in quantum mechanics, you are immortal.

One interpretation of a theory called quantum suicide ironically leads down a train of thought that makes your immortality completely absolute.

Now, we're going to be discussing quantum mechanics here, so try to keep your eyes from glazing over and stay with me, because at the end of this, you're going to be immortal.

Theorized and published by Hans Moravec in 1987 and Bruno Marchal in 1988, the quantum suicide thought experiment proposes the same setup as the famous Schrodinger's Cat experiment with one minor change that you are the observer as well as the test subject inside the box.

Stepping back a little, and stay with me here, the Schrodinger's Cat experiment places a theoretical cat in a box. As we observe the box with a cat inside, the state of the cat is both alive and dead due to the readily accepted view of quantum mechanics. The theoretical cat's life is tied to a quantum event that may or may not occur, so until we open the box, the cat exists in a state of being alive and dead, called superposition.

In the quantum suicide experiment, as you sit awaiting possible death inside the box being both the observer and test subject, your odds of survival are 50% per the probability of a given quantum event occurring per run of each experiment. The experiment repeats onward to infinity. The theory of quantum suicide essentially suggests that by the second attempt, you would be decisively dead.

But let's focus on the other interpretation of the quantum thought experiment that gives you immortality because that's much more fun.

First, we have to assume that there are infinite worlds. Stay with me here again, this is actually a common belief in quantum mechanics. It essentially states that every possible world and every possible past and future has and will exist on a quantum level. Under this theory, there could be an identical version of you reading this article exactly where you are, with the only difference being that they're eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Trippy.

So, un-mush your mind for a second and let's keep digging down this quantum rabbit hole... Like I said, you'll be immortal at the end of this.

RELATED: MAX BORN AND THE FORMULATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS

If we re-run the quantum suicide experiment assuming that the many-worlds theory is true, then in every test instance, in one or more worlds, our consciousness survives, no matter what. Since you being the observer and the test subject are in a state of superposition, you must live by a matter of quantum necessity, otherwise, you fall out of superposition which is a contradiction to the original experiment.

So, no matter the number of iterations of the experiment, it is physically necessary that you survive, suggesting that you have quantum immortality.

But what does this actually mean? Could you go run off a bridge and survive? Sure, if there are actually infinite worlds and you follow the strict parameters of the quantum suicide experiment. But let's see what this really means.

Max Tegmark, a famous cosmologist made the most famous response to this immortality thought experiment. He acknowledged that if the logical parameters of the experiment follow correctly, then everyone should be immortal. However, the flaw, he believed, was that death is rarely a binary event.

RELATED: QUANTUM MECHANICS HELPS EXPLAIN WHY HUMANS SOMETIMES MAKE FOOLISH DECISIONS

In the experiment, each test is a binary event, either you live or die. Tegmark suggests that dying is more of a progressive process, which relies on the results of previous events. When this is the case, the theory of quantum immortality breaks down.

So, if there are in fact endless worlds and you place yourself in a quantum box being both an observer of quantum experiments and a test subject of them, then you will live forever. That, is how you become truly immortal.

If you could, would you hop in the quantum box and live forever?

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A Theory of Quantum Mechanics That Suggests Everyone is Immortal - Interesting Engineering

How Altered Carbon, The Good Place, and Black Mirror explore eternal pleasure – Polygon

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[Ed. note: This article contains major spoilers for The Good Place season 4, Altered Carbon season 1, and the Black Mirror episode San Junipero.]

Fiction is filled with depictions of hell. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Event Horizon, writers and directors have imagined the horrors of endless torture, and graphically demonstrated the way that experience could break victims body and mind.

Visions of heaven are far rarer. Thats understandable, since fiction is typically built on conflict, and theres a lot less of that in places traditionally defined by peace and goodness. The Buffy spinoff Angel and Amazon Prime Videos adaptation of Good Omens imagine heaven as boring compared to life on Earth, but other works take a much darker view of eternal bliss. The Matrix posited that human minds would reject any paradise that didnt have some form of suffering. And several recent TV shows have delved deeper into the idea, exploring the philosophical and cosmic ramifications of immortality, and how living forever would affect our sense of pleasure.

Pleasure in eternal life was one of the dominant themes of season 1 of Netflixs Altered Carbon, a cyberpunk show set in a future where the ultra-rich use a mix of cloning and alien technology to avoid death. The conceit is primarily used to explore the illusion of upward mobility, as power and wealth stay permanently consolidated in a few peoples hands, while everyone else is condemned to age and die as humanity always has. Yet the writers also posit that even having everything cant save people from their own natures.

After living for hundreds of years, the Meths (named for the long-lived biblical figure Methuselah) have become jaded with typical pleasures. As with Frank Cotton in Hellraiser, their boredom leads them to dark places. Season 1 depicts a party hosted by Laurens Bancroft, one of the oldest and most influential Meths. Its a display of decadence and cruelty, including guests eating a white tiger, and cheering as a married couple fights until one of their bodies is destroyed. During a party game where each guest shows off something unique they brought to the event, one attendee reveals that she put the mind of a death-row inmate in the body of her pet snake, just to see what would happen. She laughs as she explains it broke his mind.

The Meths push the boundaries of morality even further when it comes to finding sexual pleasure. Laurens daughter apparently gets a thrill from having sex in the body of one of her mothers clones. Miriam Bancroft offers a man shes trying to seduce the chance to have sex with several of her clones at once. Laurens himself enjoys sexual sadism, beating and sometimes killing prostitutes, then making it up to them by replacing their bodies with enhanced versions. Its another way the writers get across the shows main theme of the terrible power imbalances caused by wealth. The women consider this a fair transaction, even though being killed is deeply traumatic..

Psychologists have observed a phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill, where something new and exciting might make someone happier for a short period of time, but eventually, theyll revert back to their baseline. The Meths experience the same phenomenon, seeking more dramatic and illicit thrills as they age. Season 1s biggest twist reveals that a high-end brothel is giving the Meths a chance to permanently kill people, and that Laurens was drugged and persuaded to partake of this forbidden pleasure. Confronted by what hes done, he realizes hes lived too long, and that any future pleasure he would achieve would come at too high a cost for others. The only solution was to kill himself.

Altered Carbons writers posit that physical pleasure cant be reasonably sustained over eternity. But what if the pleasure response was removed from the body? Season 2 briefly reveals that some people have renounced physical form to upload their minds into a virtual paradise. This concept is only explored as a subplot of a single episode, so its unclear whether it really is a better solution within the shows world. But another show has explored the concept in more detail: Charlie Brookers Black Mirror, in the episode San Junipero.

In the episode, terminally ill, totally disabled, and physically dead people have uploaded their minds into a virtual realm. San Junipero is a party town where people can live in young, beautiful bodies, have casual sex, drink, dance, play games, and go to the beach. As the episodes ending song makes clear, its meant to be heaven created on Earth.

And yet, as is always the case in episodes of Black Mirror, the technology has darker aspects. Doctors ration how long living patients can spend in the simulation, saying they would go crazy if they spent too much time there. While Altered Carbon just gets into sadism, San Junipero explores the search for pleasure in sadomasochism through the Quagmire, a club that features bondage and people suffocating or assaulting each other.

The episode centers on two women, Yorkie and Kelly, who meet and fall in love in San Junipero and debate whether they should stay together there after they die. Neither believe in a real afterlife, but Yorkie thinks the simulations pleasures are real and worth enjoying. Kelly disagrees, and she has some evidence on her side. She points out that smoking there doesnt taste like anything, and people who have been in San Junipero for a particularly long time tend to pursue more extreme sensations. She tells Yorkie, You want to spend eternity somewhere nothing matters? You want to wind up like all those lost fucks at the Quagmire trying anything just to feel something? Go ahead.

One of the ways Yorkie persuades Kelly to change her mind is by pointing out that she can disconnect whenever she gets bored of their heavenly life together. That solution is also at the core of the representation of a functioning heaven in The Good Place. That show launched by focusing on Eleanor Shellstrop, a selfish woman who winds up in the titular heavenly realm by mistake, then tries to become a better person to avoid being kicked out. But by the end of season 1, viewers learn that she and the other main characters are actually in the Bad Place, being subjected to a new form of psychological torture.

The hedonic treadmill works both ways: people will also become miserable when something bad happens to them, but will eventually adapt to most downturns, and return to their previous state of happiness. The demons in The Good Place have an arsenal of bizarre and terrible tortures, like butthole-spiders and penis-flattening, but those tools have become less effective over time, leaving even the torturers feeling bored and unsatisfied with their jobs. In an inversion of the idea that heaven is dull compared to Earth, they decide that their methods cant compare to the hell that is other people, so they devise a way to let humans eternally torture each other.

Michael Schur gave his series a decidedly humanist and uplifting tone, so his characters actually wind up banding together and becoming better people. Eventually, they earn their spots in the actual Good Place, which turns out to have just as many problems at the Bad Place. After spending centuries or millennia being given everything they could want, the humans there have become pleasure zombies who have lost all the intelligence, curiosity, and desires they had in life. They barely react to the new arrivals. The architects of the Good Place try to fix things by offering up even more impossible pleasures, but their charges dont even know what to ask for.

Thats a more wholesome version of the problem depicted in Altered Carbon and San Junipero, and the solution also remains the same. The Good Place denizens are offered the chance to leave whenever theyre ready. They have eternity to enjoy time with their loved ones, learn new skills, or just read trashy novels. When all those joys lose their luster, they can simply move on to something else a peaceful state fundamentally detached from human consciousness. In the tear-jerking series finale, the shows main characters find all the pleasure they could want, and then seek the ultimate fulfillment by taking one last step into the unknown.

Theres a traditional Jewish folk tale about a king who asks for a ring that will make him happy when he is sad, and sad when he is happy. His trusted advisor realizes that no magic can accomplish this, but he solves the problem by bringing the king an ordinary ring inscribed with the message, This too shall pass. It is a reminder that all pain and pleasure is finite, as is human life itself. That truth can be comforting and terrifying, and its what makes imagining the possibility of eternity so appealing and challenging. The shows currently pondering immortal, eternal joys all conclude that the human mind cant really handle endless pain or endless pleasure, so we should just try to make the most of the time we actually have.

Originally posted here:

How Altered Carbon, The Good Place, and Black Mirror explore eternal pleasure - Polygon

When Central Fell 1 Shot Short Of Winning The State Basketball Championship (Part 2) – The Chattanoogan

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After the disappointing loss to Lenoir City in the 1958 finals in the Sweet Sixteen State Tournament at Vanderbilt University in Nashville some might have asked if the defeat might adversely affect the players who had come so close to immortality in the history of Central High athletics.However, every player on the team either graduated from college or served honorably in the military.

Eddie Test played both basketball and baseball at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Freshmen were not eligible to play in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) at that time, but as a Sophomore he was elected on the All Sophomore team.After obtaining a Business Degree with a minor degree in Finance, he initially taught and assisted Coach Smith at Central. In 1986, Test went into business for himself and established Test Medical Equipment in Ringgold, Georgia, which is an ongoing and successful medical supply business with his wife and other members of the family.

The only other senior on the 1957-1958 squad was Bill Culpepper who was an important contributor to the success of the team on several occasions.Bill was the star of the Pounders upset victory over the top-seeded Kingsport Dobyns Bennett Indians in the third round of the State Tournament on March 14.He graduated in the Class of 1958 and did not go to college but he did play on the semi-pro Peerless Woolen Mill squad in the Southern Textile League prior to the plant closing down in the 1960s.

He served three years in the United States Army, was honorable discharged and married his high school sweetheart, Susie Hartman, and they had three children, William, Jr. , Joella and Nathan.After returning from his Army service, Bill worked at Singer-Cobble Manufacturing Plan and National Life Insurance Company before starting a 40-year career at Colonial Baking Company.He died in 2003.

After the Kingsport victory, Coach Gordon Smith was very specific about Bills performance to the press.Bill Culpepper made the difference for us tonight.

Diminutive 57 junior guard Ken Connelly was a solid and consistent player for three years, including the 1959 season where he was co-captain with forward Ron Cole after the exciting 1958 season.He also was an outstanding baseball pitcher for the Pounders and was selected to be on the All City Team along with several other Pounders. After graduating from Central in 1959 he attended Austin Peay University on a baseball scholarship and was chosen Most Valuable Player both his junior and senior years and was an all Ohio Valley Conference (OVC) selection his senior year.

Following his graduation from Austin Peay in 1963 with a Bachelor of Science degree, Ken worked for 42 years with the Boy Scouts of America, rising through the ranks from District Executive through various positions in the United States and elsewhere in Europe and the Carribbean to Assistant Chief Executive Officer for the national organization headquarters in Dallas, Texas.He was recognized as one of the top fundraisers for the Boy Scouts of America and was primarily responsible for raising $45 million in Capital and Major Gifts for various programs of the organization.

James Ron Cole was a 61 forward under the backboards along with Bill Culpepper and Webb Cate.Ron was selected to be co-captain along with Ken of the 1959 team and would be selected as an All City and second team All-State player from Central. Following graduation in 1959 he was awarded a basketball scholarship at the University of Chattanooga where he played for four years. Ron graduated with a degree in Fine Arts and subsequently served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War in that combat theater.He later obtained a Master of Arts Degree from the University of Georgia. He relocated to Lumberton, North Carolina where he served as an Adjunct art professor at Pembroke College and Southeast Community College and also established his own business in the field of art.He died in November, 2009.

Webb Cate was the third of the 61 forwards who contributed much to the success of the team.Not as muscular as Cole and Culpepper, he nevertheless played an important role in the success of the Pounders under the goal and on the backboard. Following graduation from Central he attended Austin Peay University in Clarksville, Tennessee and played basketball for the Governors during the 1961-1963 seasons.

Webb graduated in 1963 with a degree in Accounting and a minor in Economics.He subsequently enlisted as a naval lieutenant and served in the United States Navy for four years. After leaving the Navy he and his family relocated to the Escondido, California, area where he became involved in the investment field for 34 years and subsequently retired in 2005.He also served on the City Council and as the Mayor for a total term of public service of 15 years. During that time he was employed as a manager with several investment firms in California and retired as an Executive with A.G. Edwards.His upward advances clearly indicated that he was extraordinarily talented and successful in the financial world.

Junior Blaine Allen at 64 was the tallest player on the 1958 squad and primarily was a substitute, but on occasion Coach Gorgon Smith would start him against the taller teams to try and offset the Pounders lack of height. Blaine attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.After graduating from UT, the Allens moved to Greeneville, Tennessee where Blaine became the operator of Allen Petroleum in Greeneville and Dogwood Oil in Johnson City, Tennessee. He prematurely died at the age of 41 allegedly caused by a latent gene that was present from his childhood.

Sophomore Paul Smith would be the third guard that would occasionally relieve the two starting guards. Paul did not go to college but served in the United States Army for 20 years and eventually settled in the Dallas, Texas area after serving in Vietnam.

Sophomore William Millsaps 62 played on the record team and got playing time when he relieved one of the starting forwards.William entered the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) and was a walk-on-player on the freshman basketball team for the Volunteers. He also got a job that ultimately led to his newspaper career at the Knoxville Journal as a sports writer. He later joined the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the sports department in 1966 and in 1973 he was the newspaper's sports editor until 1991 when he became the managing editor.

As a sports writer he has acquired remarkable success, being an 11-time Virginia Sports Writer of the Year Award winner.In 2011 he was the recipient of the Red Smith Award from Associated Press Sports Editors, for career contributions to sports journalism. Bill has also been elected to the Virginia Communication Hall of Fame, the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame, and the United States Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, in addition to being a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism for 2001-2002.

The 10thplayer on the 58 team was 56 junior Jerry Cox.Jerry was unique in that in spite of getting limited playing time he was a loyal and dedicated member of the team.After graduating from Central in 1959, Jerry attended Georgia Tech.An Honor Society member while at Central, he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the Atlanta school in 1963.After serving in the Army for two years, he attended the Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania and obtained a Masters in Business Administration advanced degree. After starting and selling several companies, he went to work around 2009 for Coastal States Insurance Company in the investment division in Atlanta and became a successful financier.

In spite of the 34-33 loss to Lenoir City the 1957-1958 squads demonstrated that they were all successes in their life after March 15, 1958.

(The other starting guard who missed the last shot has probably survived!)

* * *

Jerry Summers

jsummers@summersfirm.com

Link:

When Central Fell 1 Shot Short Of Winning The State Basketball Championship (Part 2) - The Chattanoogan

A Very Quick Recap of Westworld Season Two – Vulture

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Okay, first of all, this is Dolores. Shes a robot. Photo: HBO

Its been almost two years since the second season of Westworld ended, so if you barely remember what the heck has happened in this show, then youre not alone. It certainly doesnt help that Westworld season three looks distinctly different than what weve come to expect from HBOs sci-fi epic: Gone is the theme park with robots concept of the first season and most of the second, replaced by something that looks closer to A.I. or Blade Runner than the original source material by Michael Crichton. But many of the characters are the same. Sorta?

How did we get here? Let us guide the way.

The second season of Westworld revealed the true purpose of the park: Its not just a place for rich people to get their rocks off in fake saloons, but the home of a massive data collection site called The Forge, which gathers and stores personal information about every single guest. (Yes, the dopey cowboy hats were secretly scanning every guests brain.) Delos, the company that created Westworld, essentially wanted to use all that data as a means to unlock immortality imagine a world where a humans consciousness could be uploaded into a host but the original hosts, led by Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), revolted against their puppet masters. In the season finale, after a ton of carnage erupts in the park, Dolores escapes after seemingly uploading the Forges data to a location that only she can find.

Once a victim of her creators and anyone else willing to pay the price to visit Westworld, Dolores is now the leader of the robo-revolution. Before leading her team to the Forge, it seemed like she wanted to destroy Westworld by wiping out all of the data stolen from the guests, but she had much grander plans in mind. After helping a handful of hosts escape to the Valley Beyond a virtual nirvana stored in the Forge where hosts can live free from their human persecutors she changed the coordinates of the upload, sending the Valley Beyond and all that data to a different location that couldnt be found. She then transplanted her own consciousness into a host body built as an exact replica of Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), and after gunning down the real Charlotte, she left the park with five hosts brain balls in her possession. (Theyre called pearls or control units in the world of the show, but lets be honest, theyre brain balls.) Which hosts did she take with her? Where is she taking them? And what does she plan to do with them in season three? We dont know yet.

The arc of Old William (Ed Harris), a.k.a. The Man in Black, was arguably the most divisive of season two, and it didnt even end until after the finale credits. We learned in season two that the Williams wife committed suicide, possibly because of what a monster William became at the park. His daughter Emily came after him and he killed her, thinking it was still just a part of Fords game for his best contestant. Then things got even weirder: William tried to kill Dolores and then was rescued by Delos before everything went haywire. However, the post-credits scene featured William alive in a flooded Forge where he sees a host version of his daughter, and hes ushered into a room much like the one that was used to train the host version of company founder James Delos. Emily assures him that this is the real world, but how do we know for sure? When does this scene even take place? William appears in the previews for season three out in the real world, so its possible that Delos got William out of Westworld after all. But is he the real thing or a host?

If you saw Maeve (Thandie Newton) in the season three trailer and thought, Hey, didnt she die in the finale? dont worry, youre not misremembering. A lot of characters died. Season two revealed that Maeve had a glitch that basically allowed her to control nearby hosts. She escaped captivity and torture, traveling with Hectors gang and Westworlds pompous narrative writer Lee Sizemore to the showdown in the season finale. But she was then gunned down after watching her daughter escape to the Valley Beyond. However, her body remained. And we saw Felix and Sylvester, the two dopey park technicians who joined Maeves revolution earlier in the season, being told to retrieve important bodies from the scene. They shared a look that makes it clear theyre going for Maeve, and Newton is prominent in the season three trailers, so you can connect the dots. But will she start the season under Delos control, or finally free?

Much of season two was aboutBernards struggle, as he was torn between being a puppet master and a puppet. After all, he was modeled after one of the creators of Westworld and worked for years alongside Ford to control it, never knowing he was actually a host. In season two, despite a tense relationship with Dolores, he helped her spark a revolution and she chose to save him in the finale. The last image before the post-credits tag is of Bernard, no longer in the park and opening a door to the real world. (He also joins Dolores in a safe house left to them by Ford, where he creates a copy of her original host body in case you were wondering how Evan Rachel Wood is still on this show.) We also learned in the finale that Bernards flashback conversations with Dolores were meant to test his fidelity. What role he will play in season three is really up in the air, but Wrights presence is an essential one to Westworld, so were sure Dolores will find something for him to do.

Its remarkably easy for dead characters to return on Westworld, so dont be surprised if some old faces of the deceased show up. The Ghost Nation leader Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon) traveled with Maeves daughter to the Valley Beyond at the end of season two, abandoning the physical world for life in the cloud, but his voice can be heard in the season three trailer. How will he come back? Teddy (James Marsden) shot himself in the head after learning Dolores true endgame, but could his data have been offloaded or even smuggled out of Westworld in Dolores/Charlottes purse? Clementine became a tool of Delos in season two, forcing the hosts to kill each other, but even her body may have been recovered from the scene, so she might returntoo. Dont forget: After Dolores escaped Westworld, she got a new version of her old host body, which means theres an unused sleeve of Charlotte Hale that could be used by one of the hosts that Dolores smuggled out of the park. Its anybodys guess who itll be.

Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), the guy who ran Westworld security, didnt have too major of a role in season two. But he got a key scene in the finale: Hes the one who allows Dolores to leave the park in Charlottes host body, although hes tasked with specifically stopping any hosts who attempt to sneak out, and even implies that he has been a host all along too. Will he return as a Dolores ally in the war against the humans? Theres only one way to find out.

Continue reading here:

A Very Quick Recap of Westworld Season Two - Vulture

Andy Warhol’s ‘fright wigs’ go on display in UK for first time – The Guardian

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Andy Warhol

Tate Modern show features the late pop artists hairpieces along with 100 works

Tue 10 Mar 2020 11.22 EDT

Three precisely coiffured wigs Andy Warhol probably glued to his head because he feared they would fly off are to go on display in the UK for the first time.

Tate Modern will this week open its first big Warhol show for almost 20 years, featuring more than 100 works from his career.

Gregor Muir, the co-curator, said the London gallery wanted to display the wigs because they shone a unique light on the artist.

They are incredible objects, which he would have had a say in, in terms of their design the way they are dark at the back and blonde at the front, he said. The wigs are part of Warhols persona, and Warhol himself was an artwork.

Muir recalled seeing the wigs for the first time at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and thinking they had to be part of the Tate show. It was a little eerie, it has to be said but at the same time it is him.

Warhol was bald from his 20s and his early wigs were quite conservative. They are a man who wants to blend in, Muir said. As Warhol got older they became wilder, more silvery and, in some ways, scarier.

He used strong glues and lots of product, Muir said. He was so fearful of the idea it would fly off.

Next to the wigs is one of Warhols instantly recognisable fright wig self portrait, created in 1986.

Muir said: You have to ask yourself, what has given him the fright? It is as if he has seen a ghost. I get very poetic here but perhaps he is his own ghost.

The show includes a number of artworks that will go on display in the UK for the first time. They include Sixty Last Suppers, a 10-metre wide canvas created months before Warhol died.

The work is a meditation on death, immortality and the afterlife and has been hung in the exhibitions final room, which is dark and feels more like a chapel.

Another is a large screen print of dozens of Marilyn Monroes lips from his Marilyn series, made months after she was found dead after a drugs overdose in 1962.

Warhol will be all over Tate Modern for the duration of the show, including a homage to his sweet tooth with a Death by Cheesecake pale ale available on draft and in cans. In the kitchen and bar there will be frozen hot chocolate, a nod to New Yorks Serendipity Cafe, where it was the signature dessert.

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Andy Warhol's 'fright wigs' go on display in UK for first time - The Guardian

Adelaide Festival laid on a feast, but where was the Indigenous work? – Sydney Morning Herald

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Death stalked many shows at the festival this year. In darkened auditoriums, this art offered catharsis for my own recent, complicated loss of a parent. Fortunately, this Requiem gave us joyous folk dancing too.

The images were indelible; a spectacular distraction from the texts absurd damnations. Performers in all-white posed against a car wreck like crash victims granted immortality by paparazzi. Chorus members poured bright paint upon the head of a girl, then sacrificially hoisted her face first against the wall. A boy soprano kicked a skull across the stage.

The closing opera, Breaking the Waves, fresh from the 2019 Edinburgh Festival, had US soprano Sydney Mancasola breathe fresh life into Bess, an outsider subject to religious and misogynistic judgment on the Scottish isle of Skye, although the operas long arc meant the work could not quite sustain the tension of Lars von Triers original 1996 film upon which the opera was based.

Sydney Mancasola as Bess in Breaking the Waves.Credit:James Glossop

Mancasola rose vocally to Royce Vavreks engaging text, which posed Bess body as a map of goodness and faith, while Missy Mazzolis dramatic score brought to the fore Bess rich inner life, underscoring her agency and a personal musical schema as epic as the islands landscape.

The Belgians at Adelaide Festival, meanwhile, served two dark comedies on death. The first, Dimanche, blending marionettes and human performance, was a family show, though the laughing children in the audience went quiet as global warming scythed through life forms: a polar bear separated from her cub; a cameraman drowning under ice; an elderly woman puppet electrocuted. Grim with hilarious timing.

Dimanche at the Adelaide Festival.Credit:Alice Piemme

The second Belgian work, Cold Blood, had performers create a live film using tiny sets, their hands as actors. On screen we saw seven suggested scenarios in which we might die, portrayed through flips in scale, angle and point of view, the manner of our demise ranging from romantic to sleazy to absurd. We never know when its coming, deadpanned our narrator, but its coming for us all. Doom aside, this was gorgeous work.

Cold Blood at the Adelaide Festival.Credit:Julien Lambert

Lucinda Childs opening Grand Fugue for 12 dancers in Lyon Opera Ballets Trois Grandes Fugues proved safe and unmemorable, although Anne Teresa de Keersmaekers post-interval Die Grosse Fugue for eight dancers was exhilarating. EnterAchilles, by Lloyd Newsons DV8 Physical Theatre, was both a hilarious and poignant satire of pack-male mentality, while Nick Powers pairing of Darwin and Cambodian street dancers in Between Tiny Cities was fierce. But I wondered why Adelaide Festival was not presenting more Asia-Pacific performing arts.

There was also Bugul, the emotionally affecting symphonic and dance tribute to the late Dr G Yunupingu which I had seen at its Sydney Festival premiere but otherwise there was a broad lack of Australian Indigenous performing arts. Compared with the Sydney and Perth festivals emphasis on Indigenous performance, Adelaide fell short, notwithstanding strong Indigenous visual artists installations at the separately curated Adelaide Biennial.

Adelaide Festival should consider collaborating with their local Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute. During the overlapping Adelaide Fringe Festival, Tandanya presented many Indigenous works as a First Nations hub. I caught Tessa Roses gorgeous one-woman play The Daly River Girl, which premiered in Darwin, a work that grappled with this countrys colonial history through the personal.

Meanwhile, my favourite work of the 2020 Adelaide Festival season was The Doctor, from Britains Almeida Theatre. Starring Juliet Stevenson as a Jewish doctor who refuses to allow a Catholic priest to administer last rites to a teenage girl who is dying from septicaemia from a botched self-abortion, Robert Ickes radical rewrite of a century-old play about anti-Semitism became a televised, Kafkaesque debate that simultaneously examined the pitfalls of tribalism while interrogating the power of language to oppress minorities. Stevenson was commanding.

Juliet Stevenson in The Doctor at the Adelaide Festival. Credit:Tony Lewis

Traverse Theatre Company of Scotlands Mouthpiece, a two-hander in which an impoverished teenage artist saves a 41-year-old playwright who is contemplating suicide, was terrific too. The female playwright in the story plunders the teens life story to revitalise her career, and takes sexual advantage of him. Kieran Hurleys witty work is pungent about power, working-class access to culture and the self-delusions of storytellers about personal responsibility for their source material.

Angus Taylor in Mouthpiece.Credit:Lara Cappelli

I hope more Australians might eventually see some of Adelaide Festivals enriching premieres, but broader commissioning from Indigenous Australian storytellers and our geographical neighbours would have presented a more inclusive picture.

Steve Dow is an arts writer for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Adelaide Festival laid on a feast, but where was the Indigenous work? - Sydney Morning Herald

Danny Heitman’s ‘At Random’: Standing beneath dinosaurs, I was reminded how small I was – The Advocate

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I hadnt thought about Ross Perot for many years, but he came back to mind a few weeks ago when my wife and I drove to Texas.

While in Dallas on family business, we spent a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, which is named for the five Perot children who endowed it. That got me thinking again of the funny little man with the crew cut and cowboy twang who ran for president in 1992 and 1996.

Perot pioneered the tradition, still in fashion, of billionaires campaigning for the nations highest office, though, of course, he didnt make it to the White House. His most memorable legacy might be the natural history museum his children supported.

Men of wealth often think of politics as the path to immortality. But its Americas grand museums, funded by the barons of industry, that might best sustain the profile of successful capitalists for generations.

Theres the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Boston, to name but a few. The Perot Museum can proudly stand with the rest, and we welcomed the chance to wander its exhibits on a wet, gray day that seemed not much good for anything else.

Shaking off the citys chill as I entered the Perots ticket line, I thought about a column called Astronomy Without Pain that the late Brooks Atkinson wrote for The New York Times long ago. Atkinson loved nature, but he also celebrated the paradoxical joy of appreciating the outdoors while snugly indoors. Referring to a popular landmark in Manhattan, Atkinson wisely observed that it is pleasanter to gaze at the winter sky in the Hayden Planetarium than on the wind-bitten roof of an apartment house. The Planetarium is warm and the chairs comfortable.

I felt the same way as we settled into the museum theater and donned cardboard glasses for a 3-D documentary called Tornado Alley. For 40 minutes or so, we cheerfully endured the illusion of twisters rolling into the audience a threat that felt immeasurably better than the real weather outside.

Such three-dimensional wonders aside, the most startling dimension at a natural history museum is time, its breadth unfolding in the dinosaur bones in the main exhibit hall. Like anything in Texas, the Perot prides itself on lavish scale, as evidenced by the Alamosaurus skeleton, about 100 feet long, that reaches to the ceiling, as if the long-necked herbivore were still grazing a treetop for dinner.

The children visiting a dinosaur exhibit are accustomed to being the smallest creatures in the room and dont look so shocked by the huge beasts. That kind of humility is in scarce supply these days, but its not a bad thing.

For an afternoon at the Perot, I was usefully reminded how small I was, too.

Originally posted here:

Danny Heitman's 'At Random': Standing beneath dinosaurs, I was reminded how small I was - The Advocate

Why the belief that some men have advanced stages of being still persists – The Hindu

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In the ruins of the Kotla lived a Mast Qalandar. Every day he would walk down to the tomb of Bhure Shah in the vicinity of the Red Fort and pray to the saint with the fiery temper. A big-built man with a barrel of a chest and a shaggy beard, his prayers were not the silent outpourings of a heart, but the mutterings of one who had lost contact with his surroundings. He would walk up to the shrine of Hare-Bhare and beat his chimta (iron tongs) to announce his arrival. Like Zanoni, from the 1842 book of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who had the gift of immortality, he was likened to an order of mystics who thrive for centuries.

Sufi Rafiq Khan had this tale to tell about the Mast Qalandar. When Firoze Shah Tughlak took the reins of government into his hands after the sudden death of Mohammad bin Tughkal in Sindh, he was reminded by a young fakir that the emperor had died not because of the after-effects of a dish of bad fish, but because of cruelty to his subjects. So it was Firozes lot to undo the harm done by his cousin. The new Sultan was impressed by the words of the fakir and brought him along to Delhi. And when he built his Kotla, a special place was marked in it as the fakirs abode.

Firoze Shah died after a very long reign. Taimur came and devastated Delhi. The Tughlaks were ousted by the Sayyids, who in turn lost their kingdom to the Lodhis. Next came the Moghuls and the British, but the fakir was still around. In 1857, during the revolt, he was at Kashmiri Gate, encouraging the bhistis (water carriers) to carry water to the sick and wounded.

The Qalandar was seen right up to 1947, but after the riots, he just disappeared. Some said that he had migrated to Pakistan and others that he had decided to make himself scare because of the disgusting events. Nobody could imagine that he might have been killed such was the aura that surrounded him.

Abdul Hai, a man who kept track of goings on in Delhi, and whose religious and other beliefs were tinged more by logic and reason than blind faith, had a more plausible story to offer. The Mast Qalandar was a member of an order of dervishes who lived in secluded areas, and what was better than the ruins of the Kotla? Even if one came and another passed on, wed never know the difference.

You can still find them visiting the Jama Masjid area, especially during the Ajmer Urs, when some of them strike strident poses at the grave of Hare-Bhare, shouting Maula Bhej, Bhej meaning, Send money to visit Ajmer or Ill break this shrine. To supplement their threat they either lift up their chimta or pick up a huge stone. But somebody or the other always fulfils their wish and so the threat is warded off.

It is generally assumed that the order of Mast Qalandars originated in Iran, where before the advent of Islam it was almost unknown. It came to India with the Arab invasion of Sind and its adherents spread as far as Bengal. Mast Qalandars entered South India too sometime in the 13th century, but in Delhi they have existed since the time of the Slave dynasty. Some, however, claim that the order was mostly of Afghan origin.

One remembers a Mast Qalandar who used to stand in front of the sweets shop of Haji Kalan in Jama Masjid and beat his back with a chimta from time to time. He wore a huge black shirt and was quite wild in his habits, but people were somehow attracted to him though he hardly seemed to care, and the more alms he got the wilder he became. He used to come all the way from Basti Nizamuddin on foot and lived in one of the ruined dargahs. But he is long dead.

The writer is a veteran chronicler of Delhi

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Why the belief that some men have advanced stages of being still persists - The Hindu

UL ‘likely’ to play host to field hospital if hospitals become overwhelmed by Covid-19 – BreakingNews.ie

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University of Limerick (UL) is likely to become a location for a Covid-19 field hospital in the event that hospitals in the region become overwhelmed by cases of the virus, announced the Universitys President, Dr Des Fitzgerald.

It is likely that UL will play host to a field hospital as our frontline health services are potentially overwhelmed, Dr Fitzgerald said this morning.

We are currently working with the HSE to develop more sophisticated systems of contact tracing, with the inclusion of testing.

"This is further to the change in testing criteria in recent days, he explained.

We are also working on a process of using mobile phone geolocation data to map individuals who may have come into contact with an individual with a positive diagnosis.

Dr Fitzgerald added the University do not take these decisions lightly.

None of us has ever faced anything like this in our lifetimes but we do have it within our power to influence how dire this does or does not become.

Social gatherings are still taking place, and at a level where there is disregard for everyones public safety.

Dr Fitzgerald, who is a cardiologist and former Professor of Molecular Medicine at UCD and Chief Academic Officer of the Ireland East Hospital Group, made a passioned plea for people to take personal responsibility to try and slow down this virus and save lives.

He has mounted a campaign over social and traditional media to alert people to the severity of the COVID-19 crisis, and to reinforce the absolute necessity for immediate social distancing.

The announcement of the change in recent days in the testing criteria means there will be more testing and that will absolutely mean a lot more diagnoses that are positive the virus is far more widespread than the number of positive tests would indicate now, he explained.

We have to do anything and everything to stop this awful virus spreading. The professionals will do their part, so you must do your part, he urged.

Stop this virus spreading - stay apart. People in Limerick must stop meeting, stop this disease - party when it is over, not now.

What you do now will have an impact long into the future. We owe it to the sisters, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers and sons, mothers and fathers placing themselves in the way of this virus that is already spreading through our community.

We must take action and by remaining apart, we stand together.

Dr Fitzgerald has sought support from TDs, senior business people, media and civic leaders, to amplify his message.

These are extraordinary times. We are facing the single biggest health crisis in living memory, Dr Fitzgerald declared.

However, he said he was deeply concerned that people are not fully realising the severity of the situation and so are not changing their behaviour quickly enough.

The government and health authorities are doing everything they can and those at the front line facing COVID-19 Coronavirus are performing incredible work, he said, praising doctors and nurses.

Those that are dealing directly with this crisis dont have the luxury to self-isolate and reduce their personal contact - we owe it to those at the coalface to do everything we can to buy them enough time to deal with this crisis.

We have a small window of time right now where we can really have an influence over how bad this gets.

"We still have a chance to flatten out the curve of this deadly virus and help to interrupt its march, but we need to act now today this morning, he added.

Dr Fitzgerald said he expected that, UL, which closed its doors to tackle the spread of the virus would remain closed until at least mid-June, and after this pandemic hopefully peaks.

He suggested that people consider keeping a daily diary of their contact with other people, this is a good way to make people more conscious of their personal contact with others.

Stay active and keep going for walks and connect with people remotely via phone, or social media, he said.

I have already heard a lot of incredible stories of communities coming together through social messaging platforms to stay connected and support each other.

This is the only kind of community gathering we need right now.

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UL 'likely' to play host to field hospital if hospitals become overwhelmed by Covid-19 - BreakingNews.ie