arkkahn

[arkkahn]

Last night we hosted our first of three virtual letter writing parties for https://votefwd.org/, a non-partisan group whose mission is to help register voters from under-represented demographics and encourage them to vote.

If you’d like to participate, message me, or visit Vote Forward’s site to learn more.

[arkkahn]

The biggest problem with solar and wind is storage: how to bank excess electricity on sunny/windy days in order to use it on cloudy/windless days. But instead of trying to invent a better battery, what if we used that excess electricity to split water molecules into hydrogen, which can then be stored and used as fuel for planes, trains, and automobiles. That would be neat!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/green-hydrogen-could-fill-big-gaps-in-renewable-energy/

[arkkahn]

The everyday items that have led to the deaths of people of color at the hands of law enforcement officers

http://www.ambernford.com/personal-projects#/mistaken-identity/

“In Mistaken Identity, Amber N. Ford focuses on the everyday items that have led to the deaths of people of color at the hands of law enforcement officers. Much like how the absence of the orange safety tip on Tamir Rice’s toy gun became  part of Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann’s justification for shooting within 2 seconds of arriving on the scene, here we are reminded that sets of keys,  wallets, and mobile phones have all been mistaken for weapons across the United States. The extension cord, taken from the artist’s studio, is her personal contribution to the monochromatic orange display in A Color Removed.”

[arkkahn]

The Stages of Gentrification, as Told by Restaurant Openings

https://www.eater.com/21194965/gentrification-signs-restaurants-cafes-bars-nyc-chicago-san-francisco-portland

[arkkahn]

Big democracy fit

https://store.usps.com/store/product/stamp-gifts/express-mail-t-shirt-P_843249

[arkkahn]

The fonts behind famous logos

https://emanueleabrate.com/ via https://uxdesign.cc/these-are-the-fonts-behind-30-famous-logos-40c83cd05d16

[arkkahn]

My cousin Greg accomplished his goal a few years early.

If you’re interested in Mobile Robot Learning, you can hear him give his PhD dissertation talk on Friday, October 2 from 3-4pm PST at http://berkeley.zoom.us/j/94359402639

[arkkahn]

Longboarding in South Korea

[arkkahn]

"We Have A World To Win": New Yorkers On Not Leaving NYC

Meet the New Yorkers who stayed.

[arkkahn]

Larry Amponsah, The Thinker In Pursuit, 2020

Link via: Kimberly Rose Drew

[modelsof-color]

Skarla Ali by Eva Wang for Fräulein Magazine - July 2020

[arkkahn]

My favorite quotes from Jarrod Dicker’s latest piece, “Media 2020: Rise of the Renaissance Creator”:

If you can write, build an audience & manage distribution, you are now a media company. 

As larger media companies become labels, their value to the creator needs to supplement the value the creator can attain on their own. 

The fuel of the information ecosystem is “breaking news” which is usually released by a larger publication and then runs through the creator lifecycle of syndication, curation, aggregation and then resuscitation. That information is most valuable when it “breaks”, then when there’s commentary on the curation and then it’s worth is dictated by programmatic level CPMs until it fizzles. This has encouraged consumers to believe that content should be free, or at least at some time, available for consumption at no cost.

Prior to this newsletter boom, readers have been doing anything possible to circumvent the payment experience. Again, this isn’t about paying for content but more so about needing control, needing a better experience and thus the casualty of that desire is media companies losing revenue (ad blockers and circumventing paywalls). But what’s incredible with newsletters is, people aren’t looking for ways to steal content. In fact, content is more portable than ever (I forward this email to you) but it’s not being done because the experience and control is finally made available to that particular reader. So much so, that they’re even starting to pay for it.

The holy shit! moment of creator’s realizing that their value *could* be larger than it’s getting credit for started with platforms and the ability to accumulate and engage followers directly on platforms. But the emergence of platforms like Substack, OnlyFans, Cameo & Patreon have accelerated that and are creating a new market indicator for individuals similar to what free agency does to athletes.

Before Substack, if an individual writer wrote for a publication, they had no idea what their ‘value per individual’ was. They knew their traffic, or their following on platforms outside of that publication, but internally their value was diluted amongst others.

What platforms in the passion economy bring is a direct value attribution by the fans to creators that’s dictated by all market factors (competition, content, platform, budget). As I argued in my last piece, these are benefits that larger media companies need to adopt as the attraction of brand reputation is now second to their ability to be excellent distributors, developers and managers of talent and talent’s product.

We’re seeing independent creators rebundle the unbundled newsroom and developing their own micro-labels anchored on platforms such as Substack. We’re seeing creators teaming up and organizing themselves to build collaboration groups to naturally support one another. We’ll start to see more products and companies focused on creator comfort (how can I be better at creating?) and confidence (how can I financially do this?) explode and surpass the value of the creative tools these individuals are building on.

[arkkahn]

There’s an organization called The Ocean Memory Project which has a fascinating take on the definition of “memory”:

If human cognitive memory can be defined as the faculty of the mind by which information is ​encoded, stored, and retrieved, and that its role is to use that information to predict future outcomes, then the ocean’s capacity for telling its many stories is boundless.

Think of how environmental changes, whether on short or long time scales, may be recorded in ocean “memories” via genetic and epigenetic mechanisms within organisms or their larger networks or “pangenomes”, or in physical and chemical traits within the dynamic structure of the ocean itself.

https://oceanmemoryproject.com/

[arkkahn]

#GreenPowerHour --- this “kinetic power plant” fills buckets full of water, which then sink to the bottom of a pool, and then get filled with air to float back to the top. This infinite continuous motion produces electricity, with zero fossil fuels. Link and a few quotes below:

Kinetic power plants are pneumatic systems that use Archimedes’ principle of buoyancy to produce continuous 24/365 total green, emission-free electricity without adding fossil fuels.

Save the Planet, a subsidiary of Swiss-based company Rosch Innovations, has launched a kinetic power plant at the research and development (R&D) laboratory of Rosch in Serbia's capital Belgrade. The pilot plant requires an electric input power of 1.6 kW and generates an electric output of 11.8 kW. 

https://renewablesnow.com/news/montenegros-wvc-to-build-100-mw-kinetic-power-plant-with-chinese-support-report-675837/

[arkkahn]

Great article on the current state of AI filmmaking experiments. My favorite quotes:

“Machine learning is a very useful metaphor for human thinking,” he said. If you’re a creative person, that doesn’t mean you’re truly original. “We put a load of stuff that humans made in you, and now you make stuff.”

In 2015, the A.I. nightmare known as DeepDream, one of the first popular examples of generative A.I., was released online...Since then, A.I.s have churned out disturbed cultural products like accidental horror stories and bizarre Frank Sinatra songs about spending Christmas in a hot tub.

“Unless you specifically tell it that there has to be logical consistency between scenes, it’s very conceivable that you have your first scene where you have a set of people, and then you just switch angles and it’s a completely different set of people talking about the same thing,” Carlson said. The trick is to “represent the internal consistencies in math.”

https://onezero.medium.com/an-a-i-movie-service-could-one-day-serve-you-a-new-custom-film-every-time-241395352821

[arkkahn]

New haptic technology from tacticalhaptics.com --- in contrast to standard vibration, the controller can deliver solid feedback, opening up lots of new possibilities for VR/AR

[arkkahn]

Aerial photography by bradscanvas.com