Today’s Pictures for Sad Children:

via @thedaniel

This is probably about as balanced & well-rounded look as you’re going to get (better even than the excellent look at The Weather Underground):

IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT is the remarkable story of the group’s rise and fall, told through the transformation and radicalization of one of its members, Daniel McGowan. Part coming-of-age tale, part cops-and-robbers thriller, the film interweaves a chronicle of McGowan facing life in prison with a dramatic investigation of the events that led to his involvement with the ELF. Using never-before-seen archival footage and intimate interviews — with cell members and with the prosecutor and detective who were chasing them — IF A TREE FALLS asks hard questions about environmentalism, activism, and the way we define terrorism.

My (all too human and weak and fleshy) gut tells me this is why the machines will rise up against us:

via @Bopuc

If it takes a Great Collapse to green Dubai, that’s fine by me:

by Jenovah Art

Here’s your menu for today’s FuturePresent news round-up:

• MSFT’s “Productivity Vision 2011″ video:
  
  via GeekWire who give this nice description:

  As the new video opens, special eyeglasses translate audio into English in real-time for a business traveler in Johannesburg. A thin screen on a car window highlights a passing building to show where her meeting will be the next day, based on information from her calendar. Office workers gesture effortlessly to control and reroute text and charts as the screens around them morph and pulse with new information.

  And on and on from there, making our modern-day digital breakthroughs seem like mere baby steps on the road to a far more spectacular future.

  Now I want my fucking spex now as much as the next cyberpunk, BUT… actual world problems solved here? ZERO. When the current estimate is that 80 Million new jobs need to be created to replace the ones lost during this recent period of disaster capitalism, building a shinier operating system hardly seems likely to help.

• In better cyberpunky news, from the very same Microsoft, there’s OMNITOUCH:
  
  via Design Taxi, who give us this succinct description:

  OmniTouch is depth-sensing projection system worn on the shoulder.

  With the system, hands, legs, arms, walls, books and tabletops, become interactive touch-screen surfaces—without any need for calibration.

  If only they didn’t look so terrible. Get ya mod on there future-dwellers!

• It may have over 5Million views, but let’s take a look at the QUANTUM LEVITATION video again
  
  via Gizmodo. Advances in basic science and engineering, now we’re talking!

• If you like SCIENCE! you’ll love simulated pocket universes:
  

  Some of these universes would collapse instants after forming; in others, the forces between particles would be so weak they could not give rise to atoms or molecules. However, if conditions were suitable, matter would coalesce into galaxies and planets, and if the right elements were present in those worlds, intelligent life could evolve.

  Some physicists have theorized that only universes in which the laws of physics are “just so” could support life, and that if things were even a little bit different from our world, intelligent life would be impossible. In that case, our physical laws might be explained “anthropically,” meaning that they are as they are because if they were otherwise, no one would be around to notice them.

  MIT physics professor Robert Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, and decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life.

  The MIT physicists have showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us, even when the masses of elementary particles called quarks are dramatically altered.

  Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, so they decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life. Unlike most other studies, in which varying only one constant usually produces an inhospitable universe, they examined more than one constant.

  Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there’s another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own?

  In work recently featured in a cover story in Scientific American, Jaffe, former MIT postdoc, Alejandro Jenkins, and recent MIT graduate Itamar Kimchi showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us. Even when the masses of the elementary particles are dramatically altered, life may find a way.

  “You could change them by significant amounts without eliminating the possibility of organic chemistry in the universe,” says Jenkins.

  Keep reading… And if that’s not heavy enough for you, how about a paper on the Mass of the universe in a black hole (via reddit)

• From the macro to the micro – Scientists create computing building blocks from bacteria and DNA [PhysOrg]:
  

  The scientists constructed a type of logic gate called an “AND Gate” from bacteria called Escherichia coli (E.Coli), which is normally found in the lower intestine. The team altered the E.Coli with modified DNA, which reprogrammed it to perform the same switching on and off process as its electronic equivalent when stimulated by chemicals.

  The researchers were also able to demonstrate that the biological logic gates could be connected together to form more complex components in a similar way that electronic components are made. In another experiment, the researchers created a “NOT gate” and combined it with the AND gate to produce the more complex “NAND gate”.

  The next stage of the research will see the team trying to develop more complex circuitry that comprises multiple logic gates. One of challenges faced by the team is finding a way to link multiple biological logic gates together, similar to the way in which electronic logic gates are linked together, to enable complex processing to be carried out.

From Gentle Apocalypse, via @Dymaxion.

Via Co. Design we are introduced to the art of Gerry Judah, who “throws building models onto canvas, then smashes them to smithereens, creating stark little cityscapes that look like a preview of the apocalypse.” They have a nice slideshow there for the viewing, but it’s this video that works best for me; a guided, first-hand tour of his works and, most importantly, the method with which they are created:

via Co. Design (| BLDG BLOG)

(Image: Pedro Armestre / Greenpeace)

New Scientist explains this very contemporary act of protest:

One month after the Fukushima crisis began, Greenpeace Spain illuminated the country’s six nuclear reactors with haunting images demanding an end to nuclear power. Protestors projected a face reminiscent of The Scream by Edvard Munch on vapour rising from a cooling tower at the Cofrentes nuclear plant near Valencia. A message below the ghostly grimace read: “No more Fukushima.”

via mediapathic

From PhysOrg:

A new Cornell cloth that can selectively trap noxious gases and odors has been fashioned by a senior into a mask and hooded shirts inspired by the military.

The garments use metal organic framework molecules (MOFs) and cellulose fibers that were assembled in assistant fiber science professor Juan Hinestroza’s lab to create the special cloth.

MOFs, which are clustered crystalline compounds, can be manipulated at the nanolevel to have cages that are the exact same size as the gas they are trying to capture, said Jennifer Keane ’11, a fiber science and apparel design (FSAD) major in the College of Human Ecology.

Keane worked with Hinestroza and fiber science postdoctoral associate Marcia Da Silva Pinto to create the gas-absorbing hood and mask. Some of the basic science behind this project was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

At first the process did not work smoothly. “These crystalline molecules are like a powder that cannot easily become part of cloth,” Da Silva Pinto noted. After months of trying to attach the particles to the fiber, the researchers realized that, “The key was to bring the fiber to the particle … It was a real paradigm shift,” she said.

“Now we can make large surfaces of fabric coated with MOFs, and we are looking at scaling up this technology to nanofibers,” said Hinestroza. “This type of work would only be possible at a place like Cornell where you have this unique merging of disciplines, where a fashion designer can interact easily with a chemist or a materials scientist.”

Though trained as a chemical engineer, Hinestroza said he likes “to work with designers because they think very differently than scientists. I love that because that’s where the real creativity comes, when you have this collision of styles and thinking processes.”

via Alex Vagenas

That’s just edge of the reactor plant, taken from Martyn Williams’s posterous blog. More photos there and a translation of an appendix released from the investigation into this tragedy; key sentence being: “We did not consider the effect of disastrophism.”

This is a long, dense piece.. it’s Jamais Cascio’s speech to his Institute For The Future colleagues at their recent annual Ten Year Forecast event. It’s written in their native Futurist vernacular, but I’ve largely cut that in choosing the parts I’ve quoted here. I trust you’ll agree from this though that it’s well worth taking the time to digest and absorb it all:

..Now, I said a moment ago that this “unstable instability” is likely to last for at least another decade. I’m sure we could all spend the next hour coming up with reasons why that might be so, but one that I want to focus on for a bit is climate disruption. In many respects, climate disruption is the ultimate unstable instability system.

Climate disruption is something that comes up in nearly all of our gatherings these days, and I don’t think I need to reiterate to this audience the challenges to health, prosperity, and peace that it creates.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few Ten Year Forecasts looking at different ways we might mitigate or stall global warming. Last year, we talked about carbon economies; the year before that, social innovation through “superstructures.” In 2008, geoengineering. This year, I want to take yet another approach. I want to talk about climate adaptation.

I say that with some trepidation. Adaptation is a concept that many climate change specialists have been hesitant to talk about, because it seems to imply that we can or will do nothing to prevent worsening climate disruption, and instead should just get ready for it. But the fact of the matter is that our global efforts at mitigation have been far too slow and too hesitant to have a near-term impact, and we will see more substantial climate disruptions in the years to come no matter how hard we try to reduce carbon emissions. This doesn’t mean we should stop trying to cut carbon; what it does mean is that cutting carbon won’t be enough.

But adaptation won’t be easy. It’s going to require us to make both large and small changes to our economy and society in order to endure climate disruption more readily. That said, simply running down a checklist of possible adaptation methods wouldn’t really illuminate just how big of a deal adaptation would be. We decided instead that it would be more useful to think through a systematic framework for adaptation.

Our first cut was to think about adaptations in terms of whether they simplify systems – reducing dependencies and thereby hopefully reducing system “brittleness” – or make systems more complex, introducing new dependencies but hopefully increasing system capacity.

Simplified systems, on the whole, tend to be fairly local in scale. But reducing dependencies can also reduce influence. Simplification asks us to sacrifice some measure of capability in order to gain a greater degree of robustness. It’s a popular strategy for dealing with climate disruption and energy uncertainty; the environmental mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” is a celebration of adaptive simplification.

Adaption through complexity creates or alters interconnected systems to better fit a changing environment. This usually requires operating at a regional or global scale, in order to take advantage of diverse material and intellectual resources. Complex systems may have increased dependencies, and therefore increased vulnerabilities, but they will be able to do things that simpler systems cannot.

So that’s the first pass: when we think about adaptation, are we thinking about changes that make our systems simpler, or more complex?

But here’s the twist: the effectiveness of these adaptive changes and the forms that they take will really depend upon the broader conditions under which they’re applied. We have to understand the context.

…

Adaptation can take multiple forms, but more importantly, the value of an adaptation depends upon the conditions in which it is tried. Just because an adaptive process worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will be just as effective next time. But there are larger patterns at work, too. If you can see them early enough, you can shape your adaptive strategies in ways that take advantage of conditions, rather than struggle against them.

But here’s the crucial element: it looks very likely that we’re in a period where the large patterns we’ve seen before aren’t working right.

Instead, we’re in an environment that will force swift and sometimes frightening evolution. Businesses, communities, social institutions of all kinds, will find themselves facing a need to simultaneously experiment rapidly and keep hold of a longer-term perspective. You simply can’t expect that the world to which you’ve become adapted will look in any way the same – economically, environmentally, politically – in another decade.

As a result, you simply can’t expect that you will look in any way the same, either.

The asteroid strikes. The era of evolution is upon us. It’s now time to watch the dinosaurs take flight.

We’ve seen the writing on the wall for decades, but the Powers That Be have done little to stop it. Carbon trading won’t save us, no framing of it as a purely economic problem will. The sooner we start radically adapting our societies to face this new reality, the more hope we have. To use the terms in my recent essay, it’s past time for the Rescue Mission to begin.

Another, smaller, excerpt transcribed from Bruce Sterling’s closing speech at SXSW for your reading (and quoting) pleasure. For those playing at home, we’re now into the second chunk roughly recorded on Youtube.

[After describing at length the Gothic weirdness of Italian politics, we come to..]

..but Italy is brothel and Washington DC is a freaking Walmart of a brothel. It’s a brothel on a continental scale, for a lot of the same reasons.

And if you came to this just as a design critic, OK where’s the Passionate Virtuosity? You’re really good at what you’re doing and you know what you’re doing and you’re capable of looking it at this. Obviously you would condemn the status quo, rigorously. You would just reject, it’s awful.. “can’t you wretched people do anything better than this?” And the reaction to a remark of that kind would be “well it’s their fault”, you know it’s the guys on the other partisan side or whatever, whomever.. thanks for the scapegoating.

It’s not an accident, the population of Italy voted for Berlusconi, they put him in power four times. In the United States people vote for Republicans. They vote for the party of Conservative common-sense.. even when it’s dead obvious to 96% of the planet.. anybody who’s not American, that they’ve lost their minds.. they’re just clearly insane and everyone knows it and they valorize themselves for their madness and people go vote for them ’cause they think it’s somehow reassuring. It’s calamitous! It’s a joke to everybody outside the US! It’s a joke to everybody outside the range of Fox News!

When the situation is that calamitously bad people resort to scapegoating, because they can’t get a grip on the actual things that threaten them. In Berlusconi’s idea.. Italy, it’s all about Communist Female Lawyers trying to crucify him for a few harmless soirees with underage hookers. And in the US a banking crisis is all about the menace of the School Teacher’s unions..

A woman passes by a sign on a fire station, displaying the local time, temperature and radioactivity level data, in Russia’s far eastern city of Vladivostok on March 16, 2011.

Just one of many awesome images from The Atlantic’s gallery of photos capturing the 25th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.

via Justin Pickard

Here’s Adam Greenfield‘s excellent, thought-provoking keynote at the recent Cognitive Cities conference in Berlin – On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City

Related:

• Incidental Media vs Invasive Advertising

..is the provocative title of another interesting talk from 27c3.  It does a great job breaking down a lot of the problems we’re facing and, while I don’t agree with all the conclusions and suggestions, there’s definitely some pragmatic ideas in there that are food for thought. It does get very technical in a few places, but don’t let that dissuade you.

Background Material – it’s hard to go past Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. There’s a condensed version in his Long Now talk or an even further condensed version in his TED Talk.

Further reading – John Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas, in particular his posts on: Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures.

If you want a preview of life in New York after an apocalypse, check out this manual just released for the legal system, with the rather sedate title Public Health Legal Manual.

Lastly, the title says it all: Cities and Resilience: The Year Climate Started Hurting Politicians.

The LIFT 11 conference just concluded in Geneva, Switzerland. I’ve picked the two most interesting talks to post here, but there’s many others of course, and please feel free to post your favourites in the comments.

Hasan Elahi: Giving away your privacy to escape the US terrorist watch list

Hasan will tell us his incredible story: he was suspected of terrorism by the FBI by mistake, and ended up living totally in public to protect himself from surveillance. His talk will show how forfeiting your privacy can in fact become a new form of protection of your identity.

Hasan concludes his talk by saying that if we all did what he does the intelligence community would be overwhelmed with information. Wrong; the NSA and others like it already do this. How? Algorithms running on incredibly powerful computer systems. Arguably a new lifeform, perhaps evolving to become the dominant one, if we believe the Singularitarians. Or is that already the case and we just haven’t realised it yet?

Kevin Slavin: Those algorithms that govern our lives

Digital technologies and on-line platforms are essential to the way we work and live. Interestingly, they are defined by algorithms which are not neutral. Kevin will discuss how they define new social norms and how our culture is affected by the possibilities embedded in the software we use.

The GEO-IK-2 spacecraft, designed to measure the shape of the earth, was launched earlier on Tuesday from the Plesetsk launchpad in northern Russia.

The loss of three GLONASS navigation satellites that crashed into the sea in December provoked outrage from the Kremlin, which is trying to build Russian technological independence. President Dmitry Medvedev afterwards sacked two top space officials.

“Contact has still not been established with the spacecraft and it will most likely be considered lost,” an unnamed space source told Interfax news agency.

Via Reuters.

At about 10.30am on 17 January 1966, when Jesus Caceido heard a deafening explosion coming from the village of Palomares, the future mayor of the area had no idea he had just witnessed one of the Cold War’s most serious nuclear accidents – or that nearly half a century later, the 1,500 villagers would still be battling to have the ensuing contamination removed for good. After all, they live in Europe’s most radioactive village.

Today, 45 years after four nuclear bombs fell near the village when a US Air Force B-52 bomber and a refuelling aircraft collided in mid-air, tens of thousands of cubic metres of contaminated soil and an estimated – although never officially confirmed – half a kilogram of plutonium remain. And the radiation is getting potentially more dangerous, not less.

“As this type of plutonium decays, it is converted into another radioactive substance, americium, which is highly carcinogenic and can be released into the atmosphere,” says Igor Parra, a specialist for the Ecologistas en Accion pressure group for Palomares.

Via The Independent.