The NO TECH MAGAZINE reader shared some intriguing links worth checking out:
The documentary “The secrets of civilization” gave fascinating insights into how Romans changed their environment. First, there is an artificial mound in Rome known as Monte Testaccio, a big ancient waste heap which is nearly entirely made of broken pieces from discarded containers (amphora) used for, for example, storing olive oil. Here are two videos about the site:
Second, the documentary mentioned how a landscape in Spain, Las Médulas is the result of a Roman gold-mining technique called Ruina Montium (“wrecking of mountains”). Here is a video describing the process from IMAGEEN.
Finally, it’s interesting to know that it seems that a period of unusually warm weather, called the Roman Climactic Optimum, may have benefitted the Romans.
This article from the Financial Times provides some funny criticisms on the “invention” of Italian food traditions based on the work of Alberto Grandi. The article also points out a link with food and nationalistic politics:
Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era. As part of her election campaign in 2022, prime minister Giorgia Meloni posted a TikTok video in which an old lady taught her how to seal tortellini parcels by hand. This month, Meloni’s minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, suggested establishing a task force to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants around the world. He fears that chefs may get recipes wrong, or use ingredients that aren’t Italian. (Officially listed “traditional food products” now number a staggering 4,820.)
Article on ChatGTP that is worth reading, but is likely flawed. The fact that Noam Chomsky contributed and included his own theory of language is noteworthy.
In short, ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.
The following video provides a fascinating look into the gradual demise and transformation of the electronics giant Philips. Since I’ve seen the brand so much throughout my entire life, the video had a different impact on me even though the story is probably similar to that of many other older tech companies:
Interestingly, recent events have sparked attention in global politics to ASML, a major player in the microchip industry and one of the companies connected to Philips. See this article on policito.eu for information on the government’s announcement to impose new export restrictions on AML’s products to China.
After the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk the whole platform seems to be in disarray and to have an uncertain future. Ian Bogost writing at The Atlantic provides some perspectives on the rise of Twitter and change from social networking to social media:
The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.
Twitter, which launched in 2006, was probably the first true social-media site, even if nobody called it that at the time. Instead of focusing on connecting people, the site amounted to a giant, asynchronous chat room for the world.
Read the full article here.
This article from The New York Times discusses a controversy about the restitution of prehistoric objects by Indonesian government against a Dutch Naturalis museum.
While art museums have been grappling since the 1990s with claims that they hold or display looted Nazi art, and ethnographic museums have faced repatriation claims from African nations and Indigenous people worldwide, the Java Man case pushes restitution into the realm of the natural history museum — where it hasn’t been much of an issue until now.
In a review of William MacAskill’s book “Doing good better,” Amia Srinivasan writes about the conservative aspects of effective altruism as a social movement:
The subtitle of Doing Good Better promises ‘a radical new way to make a difference’; one of the organisers of the Googleplex conference declared that ‘effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need.’ But effective altruism, so far at least, has been a conservative movement, calling us back to where we already are: the world as it is, our institutions as they are. MacAskill does not address the deep sources of global misery – international trade and finance, debt, nationalism, imperialism, racial and gender-based subordination, war, environmental degradation, corruption, exploitation of labour – or the forces that ensure its reproduction. Effective altruism doesn’t try to understand how power works, except to better align itself with it. In this sense it leaves everything just as it is. This is no doubt comforting to those who enjoy the status quo – and may in part account for the movement’s success.
This article from an Italian newspaper gives a good analysis of the dilemmas presented by the idealized and romanticized images of Italy that foreigners post on social media.
A positive spin on thinking about our own collapse, from an article by Thomas Moynihan who wrote a book an how humanity only recently started to think about its own extinction/collapse:
Only very recently in human history did people realize that Homo sapiens, and everything it finds meaningful, might permanently disappear. Only recently did people realize the physical universe could continue — aimlessly — without us. However, this was one of the most important discoveries humans have ever made. It is perhaps one of our crowning achievements. Why? Because we can only become truly responsible for ourselves when we fully realize what is at stake. And, in realizing that the entire fate of human value within the physical universe may rest upon us, we could finally begin to face up to what is at stake in our actions and decisions upon this planet. This is a discovery that humanity is still learning the lessons of — no matter how fallibly and falteringly.
In this article I also learned about the 1755 Lisbon earthquake which apparently which apparently lead scientists to study the phenomena, leading to modern seismology and earthquake engineering.