In an edited excerpt from his new book, Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explains how the massive amounts of data necessary to deal with complex phenomena exceed any single brain's ability to grasp, yet networked science rolls on. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recorded daily weather observations, but they didn't record them hourly or by the minute.
Phi Beta Iota: Absent a public uprising and a change in the electoral integrity of the US Government, it will take another 20 years for the truth to be pushed back into big pharma, big sugar, and big oil. The truth, however, is making a comeback as a public good. “The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.” Once a government gets back into the business of serving the public interest instead of special interests, transparency, truth, and trust will again become the signal attributes of a democracy.
Obama is urged to declare emergency so Army Corps can take steps to keep 200-mile stretch open.
8:27PM EST November 28. 2012 – A key stretch of the drought-ravaged Mississippi River may fall to a record low by mid-December, halting barge traffic and disrupting billions in commerce on the nation's busiest inland waterway.
President Obama on Tuesday was urged to declare an emergency so the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers can take steps to boost the river's flow and deepen the channel along the 200-mile segment between St. Louis and Cairo, Ill.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., plans to meet Thursday with the Pentagon official who oversees the corps to ask that it quickly dynamite exposed rock pinnacles and increase Missouri River reservoir flows to keep the river open, the St. Louis Beacon reported Wednesday.
Phi Beta Iota: We have not done the math, but we are beginning to see some convergence among various challenges (mostly not enough fresh water) and various solutions (mostly solar and wind power, but decentralizes). We connect dots. So connect the above dot with the below dot. Anyone who has the math, please share it. We strongly suspect that if a viable solution can be found for desalinating ocean water to stop the drught shallows now and fill the aquifers later, that those who stand to lose close to $4 billion a month from use of this public waterway just might find a way to earmark $100 million and up for a novel persistent solutioin.
After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .”
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In fact there is just one scientist who has been culturing Turritopsis polyps in his lab consistently. He works alone, without major financing or a staff, in a cramped office in Shirahama, a sleepy beach town in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, four hours south of Kyoto. The scientist’s name is Shin Kubota, and he is, for the time being, our best chance for understanding this unique strand of biological immortality.
Philipp Saumweber is creating a miracle in the barren Australian outback, growing tonnes of fresh food. So why has he fallen out with the pioneering environmentalist who invented the revolutionary system?
Jonathan Margolis
The Observer, Saturday 24 November 2012
Desert blooms: Philipp Saumweber, the founder and CEO of Sundrop, with a tray of his “perfect” produce. Photograph: Jonathan Margolis for the Observer
The scrubby desert outside Port Augusta, three hours from Adelaide, is not the kind of countryside you see in Australian tourist brochures. The backdrop to an area of coal-fired power stations, lead smelting and mining, the coastal landscape is spiked with saltbush that can live on a trickle of brackish seawater seeping up through the arid soil. Poisonous king brown snakes, redback spiders, the odd kangaroo and emu are seen occasionally, flies constantly. When the local landowners who graze a few sheep here get a chance to sell some of this crummy real estate they jump at it, even for bottom dollar, because the only real natural resource in these parts is sunshine.
Google's ambitious book-scanning program is foundering in the courts. Now a Harvard-led group is launching its own sweeping effort to put our literary heritage online. Will the Ivy League succeed where Silicon Valley failed?
In his 1938 book World Brain, H.G. Wells imagined a time—not very distant, he believed—when every person on the planet would have easy access to “all that is thought or known.”
The 1930s were a decade of rapid advances in microphotography, and Wells assumed that microfilm would be the technology to make the corpus of human knowledge universally available. “The time is close at hand,” he wrote, “when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica.”
