• slow science, preservation techniques in times of excess for times of little, systems, and systems analysis, using appropriate technologies, not just the ones that are being sold to us.
• To learn from other cultures
• gambiarra/makeshift/makedo/kludge techniques.
• this time of surplus where the dollar/pound/euro shops are selling us amazing technologies for a pittance. I buy the cool solar powered light for a £1, because, chances are, it will retain its use till I die or cannibalise it for parts
• personal fabrication: of personalised designs designed using open source toolchains and equipment.
• smart design (like the spork, or sofie the giraffe), that embody a lot of thoughtfulness in it design
• the pseudo-sciences of recipeology and workshopology where knowledge(such as how to etc) is packaged in a format for ‘consumption’  [also something I love to do]
• the promise of DIYbo and personalised SynthBio

In the paper “For a Comprehensive Citizen Appropriation of Information and its Technologies | Information Personnes / Persons Information”: http://pierrot-peladeau.net/en/archives/2196 the importance of choice is demonstrated. The concept in the paper that really made me think of Internet of Things was Social Appropriation.

social appropriation, which is the process by which people integrate innovations into their lives to empower themselves, adapting and even hijacking them from their initial control or purposes to fit their needs and interests.

The world is filled with technologies that went through a process of social appropriation, think telecommunications, the phones original purpose was to transmit concert performances into your house, sms was for diagnostic tests by engineers. These are the killer apps that are game changing. In the web world, flickr originally was set up for dating(anyone got a reference). Although the big appropriations are impressive, the smaller ones are more intrigueing

Take thimbl  http://www.thimbl.net/ This is a project based on an old computer service called finger, finger was used to check the details of a user on a computer. So you could read the .plan of  joeblogs@gamgee.uni.edu. The twist is that they want to take this decentralised service and knit it together into a web2 micro blogging application like twitter.

“The Future We Deserve is a new book project about collaboratively creating the future we deserve. We will be working together at internet scale on internet time to brainstorm and barnstorm our way towards an image of a world we all believe in, a world of fairness, collaboration and living within a harmonious balance with nature. The book is open to all contributions — essays about technology, politics, working examples of better ways and fantastic ideas which just need to get done.”

Re-envisioning our relationship with Micro-Organisms

(and a lot more questions to answer)

Humans are topologically donuts, bacteria live on the surface, human cells on the inside. We are dwarfed by the number of genes that are in these bacteria. At last estimation there are only 23000 genes encoded in our genome (doi:10.1186/1471-2105-7-327) and up to 9 million of bacterial origin (doi:/10.1371/journal.pone.0006074). From this we need to consider the fact that this bacterial population forms a chronically understudied extrahuman organ.

Are we going to discover that there is a deep bacterial culture basis to human culture, that some cultural norms actually support a specific community of bacteria? We already recognise that fermentation outside the body has had a profound effect on what we as humans can eat or metabolize(coffee, cheese, kim cha etc). Now we have to recognise that this fermentation dosen’t stop on the outside of our body, it continues, as bacteria provide essential nutrients to us. Might there be communal rituals that are about keeping the ‘good culture’ alive in the community? When explorers introduce pathogens into a ‘naïve population’ what is really being lost? If there is a move away from the traditional foodstuffs, are we losing more than a human culture?

The adage ‘you are what you eat’ makes more sense when changing a diet could change suceptibility to modern diseases such as diabetes(doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009085), Iritable Bowl Syndrome (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010507) by modifying our gut bacterial composition. The pectins in apple fruit skins has been shown to favour friendly bacteria within the gut (doi:10.1016/j.anaerobe.2010.03.005) and obesity (doi:10.1038/4441022a). As a last resort, colonic gut bacteria have been transplanted from a healthy person to cure a patient suffering from Clostridium difficile diarrhoea.

What will this mean for the Future We Deserve?

We hypothesis that there is a lot more going on in human culture that meets the eye. If we are carriers of ‘good’ as well as ‘bad’ bacteria, what does this add to human-human interactions, such as the rituals and customs of greeting? Are differences between cultures reflected in our microflora?

Can we have strategies that minimise the unintended evolution of bacterial pathogens by reducing the use of antibiotics? Can we investigate using other more specific technologies such as phage (a bacterial virus) therapy to knock out specific ‘bad’ bacteria such as C. difficile? In a wider context, does shared bacterial communities provide a method by which members are alike?

Can we ‘know our bacteria’ and gain guides on what foodstuffs we should be eating to maintain health? Can we envisage a Personalised Probiotics, that is not another mass produced commodity, or a ‘lite’ version of what actually works.

Lots of questions to answer, but that is part of the Future We Deserve, a culture that understands how it operates, where even the ‘lowly’ bacteria has a place, and not just as a causation of disease.

Image by loscuadernosdejulia via Flickr

This is my notes and everyones tweets refering to the GloNet Conference Stream at Futureeverything 2010
#futr Glonet

Aims: investigating the process of growing microorgansisms as a domestic performance.

Materials: glowing bacteria, fish, eggs, DNA, mushrooms, gelatin, agar, various fermented “live” drinks, vegetarian and milkbased bioplastics. Outputs: skinning models of domestic artifacts, such as chairs, teapots, straws.

Methodology: trying out things space,using open source recipes by others and i am still ruminating on the “live” ness.

Crossover: wordage on the application meshes with mine, as 25sg talks about being an incubator, and it will literally be that for the period I am there. Leave a comment  if you want to come and talk and learn a bit of biologyness.

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sparkfun trends to no 1 in google(US) searches

Originally uploaded by Dr Brian
Might get out with a camera, but this is indicative of the day.  

A day when an audatious sparkfun pledged to give away $100000 of stock $100 at a time to “people like me”.

Still trying to get my 0.1% slice of the pie but given the timesouts, thats not likely.

Amazing events

2200+ nicks on a single irc channel (admittedly only a percentage could talk)

a n1 in google trends

#Sparkfun not trending on twitter for an hour after getting to no1 on google. Does that indicate something about the world, or twitter or google or all of the above.

Monday, Stewart Brand(of the WELL, Whole Earth Catalogue, Long Now Foundation) talked at Life about his ideas on the future and humanity. How it might be time to rethink some of the popular stances against genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, urbanization and geoengineering. He intimated that the precautionary principal had gone too far, it wasn’t precaution in the ways of fixing acid rain and banning thalidomide, but anti-progress. Yes we can’t understand all the consequences of a technology, but we can be eternally vigilant.

• GM: mentioning how GM and organic food production should not be anathema, but that green peaces stance aginst GM has been more anti-science than reasoned.
• Nuclear Energy: comparing the effects of Chernobyl and Bhopal, Bhopal was definitely the more damaging to humanity. Chernobyl is now a de-humanised reserve full of plants and animals.  Nuclear is a base load energy producer, so can be controlled as opposed to solar and wind. It is not perfect, will have to be rethought, and he showed a number of smaller, cheaper safer reactors that might be used for local energy production (or even mobile ones). Of interest was Freeman Dyson’s buriable thorium reactor, that dosent need lots of reprocessing  tthat provides steam for energy production. If the US and India and China went down this route, most of the energy needs of the worlds populations would be satisfied. How to get this uptake? Make coal more expensive. On the nuclear waste problem, it is a smaller more controllable problem than the tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Each human would probably use the energy in a coke can or less to power their life. Some of the other reactors (such as fast breeders) can consume the waste of the other reactors.  An interesting aside was that the us nuclear plants are being powered by reprocessed USSR nukes. My idea was always that nuclear power stations werent viable, because they werent scalable. Each instalation took so much money and time, and ran over budget as they need to be made ensite. The smaller ones have the advantage that they can be fabricated in factories. More playeres than just the big ones (RR, Serco, Westinghouse, Mitsubishi). It might even provide a way out for companies heavily invested in the military uses of nuclear to find another revenue stream.
• Geoengineering : Talk starts with Mt Pinatubo which released 200million tonnes of sulphur dioxide and decreased the earths temperature by 0.6C. Can humans do the same? Should we do the same.  So strange contraptions that release sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere might give us a bit of breathing space til we get C)2 under control.
• urbanization: What happens as we reach the point where there is more people in cities than outside, reclamation of natural spaces, leaving areas for more intensive farming. Why are people streaming int the city? For jobs and oportunities Slums are strange places in this, an informal economy that works even though it is por and life is hard. However, it is probaly easer than it was on the land, otherwise they would be back there. So communities are being built in these areas, people are getting together to teach their children, and that is their objective, to never stop teaching.

A lot of this talk came from the idea that the greens have got it wrong, there is no unnature, they are being too romantic, and dramatic(see the book). There is more science needed, but we have been talking about global warming since I was in high schoolin  the early 90′s, and nothing much has been done. Ozone was stabilized, but that was relativly more simple, although the replacement for fluorocarbons are intense greenhouse gasses.

SO why is this post important to me?  If it isn’t already obvious, all of the topic by Steward Brand came with the caveat empor “More science needed” . But where will this science come from? The UK, USA, or China a society directed by engineers.  It also intersects at a strange angle with Fo.AMs “Luminous Green”, bricolabs, peer based learning, citizen science, synthetic biology, P2P production: Knowledge and learning, and making…..

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Are oceanic ecosystems heading for a refactoring?

One of the segments in the Blue Whale episode of “Last chance to See” was about the Humbolt Squid or Red Devil.

Had never heard of them before, but thay are wierd and scary

This squid hunts in packs and can grow to 7ft, and so poses a risk to divers. If you dive with these suckers you better be wearing a chain mail suit, because they are known to attack humans.

The reason they have invaded the straits of cortez, is that there are few sharks/ top level predators left.Noone knows how many are there, but estimates are in the millions.

Just up the coast, another ecosystem has been hit by the rise of slime, and a new dominant species, jellyfish.

There is more about  Humbolt Squid in  the Blue Planet  http://www.bbc.co.uk/oceans/locations/cortez/loreto.shtml.

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