Recent Readings, 9
Global Greening: Increased CO2 in the atmosphere is plant food. Wild plants of all kinds are growing faster around the world, sequestering CO2 into biomass. This is not the whole climate story, but it should not be ignored. Good summary by Matt Ridley here.
Once a modern heresy, non-Darwinian inheritance, aka Lamarkism, increasing can be shown to sometimes happen in nature. Case in point this recent paper. Question is: how common or important is it ordinarily.
One necessary aspect of the Mirrorworld is scanning the real world in full volumetric 3D. This demo of Matterport’s scanning ability is pretty impressive. They scan Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West.
TikTok, Chinese-owned video music platform, is creating a whole new genre of music video — the music meme, or memetic music, in 15 second clips that spread virally. This ear-opening article is a good introduction. Link.
There’s a yearly contest run by JPL for the best strategy to settle 100,000 star systems with human habitation 10,000 years from now. If you have a plan, you submit a simulation based on technology yet to be invented. Link.
The US is headed down a risky path toward 5G that is different from the rest of the world, while China is leading the rest along the other more doable path. Good explanation in @WIRED. This was a solid, essential, correct piece. I have not seen the argument made elsewhere. It was the article I hoped Wired would run. Link.
What color is the future? If you google “futuristic” you get images in blue and black. Why is that? Good thread on Twitter here.
