This is commentary. And this is really good.
Blueseed is or was a "company working on launching a ship near Silicon Valley which was to serve as a visa-free startup community and entrepreneurial incubator. The shipstead planned to offer living and office space, high-speed Internet connectivity, and regular ferry service to the mainland. The project aims included overcoming the difficulty organizations face obtaining US work visas, intending to use the easier B-1/B-2 visas to travel to the mainland, while work will be done on the ship."
Full disclosure, I accidentally typed "sheep" instead of "ship" the first time around.
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Tektites are "gravel-size bodies that are composed of black, green, brown, or gray, natural glass that are formed from terrestrial debris ejected during extraterrestrial impacts... Tektites generally range in size from centimers to millimeters."
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In India, especially in "the overcrowded regions of Uttar Pradesh... many have resorted to bribing officials to have the owner of a plot declared deceased and the land transferred to their ownership. The process to undo this is long, arduous, as well as often hopelessly inefficient and corrupt-- not to mention that those least able to fight back make excellent victims." The Uttar Pradesh Association of Dead People "seeks to reverse the declarations, call attention to the problem and prevent others from being exploited in similar fashion."
It is led by "Lal Bihari, who was 'dead' from 1976 to 1994 and used the word Mritak (Dead) in his name during the period."
Is the character of my next book going to be legally deceased? Maybe.
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Some quotes and other things on the aestheticization of violence:
"[If] any human act evokes the aesthetic experience of the sublime, certainly it is the act of murder... if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist-- a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction." Joel Black
"In the film Man on Fire, which tells the story of a burnt-out former Black Ops agent who seeks to avenge the killers of a young girl he was bodyguarding, a character states that the agent is an 'artist' in killing, and he is about to 'paint his masterpiece' as he seeks out and kills all of the members of the criminal organization who were connected with the death of the child."
"Tarantino manages to do precisely what Alex de Large was trying to do in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange: he presents violence as a form of expressive art... Tarantino is able to transform an object of moral outrage into one of aesthetic beauty... [,in which,] like all art forms, the violence serves a communicate purpose apart from its aesthetic value... [When the Bride] skillfully slices and dices her way through... we get a sense that she is using them as a kind of canvas for her expression of revenge... like an artist who expresses herself through brush and paint... [she] expresses herself through sword and blood." Xavier Morales
Hieronymous Bosch "used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man."
"[Whereas modern societies were] organized around the production and consumption of commodities... postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs... In the postmodern media and consumer society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle.. [The] commercialization of the whole world... will turn out rather to have been the aestheticization of the whole world-- its cosmopolitan spectacularization, its transformation into images, its semiological organization." Jean Baudrillard
Dead Man might also qualify, or at least Nobody thinks that it applies to William Blake, as he says that the latter's poetry will now be in the blood of white men (that he kills). (This is not William Blake the poet, by the way, but another person coincidentally named William Blake)
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"Georgism is an economic philosophy holding that the economic value derived from natural resources and natural opportunities should belong equally to all residents of a community, but that people should own the value they create themselves."
"A land value tax would also be a progressive tax, since it would be paid primarily by the wealthy, and reduce economic inequality."
"Early followers of [Henry] George's philosophy called themselves Single Taxers, associated with the idea of a single tax on the value of land. The term Georgism was coined later, and some prefer the term geoism instead."
"George held that people own what they create, but that natural resources, most importantly land, belong equally to all."
"George believed that although scientific experiments could not be carried out in political economy, theories could be tested by comparing different societies with different conditions and through thought experiments about the effects of various factors... George concluded that many of the problems that beset society, such as poverty, inequality, and economic booms and busts, could be attributed to the private ownership of the necessary resource, land."
"When a single tax on land value is implemented... socially created wealth is taxed and used by the community, while privately created wealth remains private as no other taxes are levied." I have to confess at this point that I like the logic of Georgism. But also... I can't say that I really support the idea of a tax fundamentally, so this is more a "lesser of two evils" thing.
"In Georgism, a land value tax is seen as fitting the definition of a user fee instead of a tax, since it is tied to the market value of socially created locational advantage, the privilege to exclude others from locations."
"It was Adam Smith who first noted the efficiency and distributional properties of a land value tax in his book, The Wealth of Nations."
"Some geoists prefer voluntary value capture systems that rely on methods such as non-compulsory or self-assessed location value fees, community land trusts, and purchasing land value covenants."
It has been proposed that the goblins of Harry Potter are Georgists.
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"Sandboarding is a board sport similar to snowboarding. It is a recreational activity that takes place on sand dunes rather than snow-covered mountains. The boardsport has adherents throughout the world, most prevalently in desert areas or coastal areas with beach dunes."
"It is less popular than snowboarding, partly because it is very difficult to build a mechanized ski lift on a sand dune, and so participants generally must walk back up to the top... On the other hand, dunes are normally available year-round as opposed to ski resorts, which are usually seasonal."
"Sand Master Park, located in Florence, Oregon USA is the world's first sandboard park with 40 acres of private sculpted sand dunes and a full-time pro shop."
"Peru is known for having large sand dunes in Ica, some reaching up to 2km."
"A rather small sand mountain is the Monte Kaolino in Hirschau, Germany. Being equipped with a lift to the 120m top it is also the host of the annual Sandboarding World Championships."
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If all oxygen were to disappear for five seconds, then:
- There would be no ozone blocking any UV light
- "With fewer particulars in the atmosphere to scatter blue light, the sky would get a bit less blue and a bit more black."
- "Every internal combustion engine would stall... Every airplane taking off from a runway would likely crash to the ground, while planes in flight could glide for some time."
- "All pieces of untreated metal would instantly spot-weld to each other... The reason metals don't weld on contact is they are coated in a layer of oxidation. In vacuum conditions, metal welds without any intermediate liquid phase (cold welding)."
- "Everyone's inner ear would explode... We would lose about 21 percent of the air pressure in an instant, equivalent to being teleported to the top of the high Andes."
- "Every building made out of concrete would turn to dust... Oxygen is an important binder in concrete structures."
- "Every living cell would explode in a haze of hydrogen gas."
- "The oceans would evaporate and bleed into space."
- "Everything above ground would immediately go into free fall. As oxygen makes up about 45 percent of the Earth's crust and mantle, there is suddenly a lot less 'stuff beneath your feet."
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Precocial species are those "in which the young are relatively mature and mobile from the moment of birth or hatching... Precocial species are normally nidifugous, meaning that they leave the next shortly after birth or hatching."
"Precocial birds are born with their eyes open. They are covered with downy feathers that soon grow to adult feathers after hatching. Birds of this kind can also swim and run much sooner after their birth than other birds, such as songbirds... Many precocial chicks are not independent in thermoregulation... and they depend on the attending parent(s) to brood them with body heat for a short period of time. Precocial birds find their own food, sometimes with help or instruction from the parents... The most extreme, superprecocial birds are certain species of the megapodes, where the newly hatched chicks dig themselves out of the nest mound without parental assistance, and are capable of flight on the same day they hatch."
"Precociality is not a particularly conservative characteristic, in the evolutionary sense."
"Precocial species typically have a longer gestation or incubation period than related altricial species, and in smaller litters or clutches, since each offspring has to be brought to a relatively advanced (and large) state before birth or hatching."
"Precociality is thought to be ancestral in birds. Thus, altricial birds tend to be found in the most derived groups. There is some evidence for precociality in Protobirds and Troodontids."
Altricial species are those "which are incapable of moving around on their own soon after hatching or being born." They "are relatively immobile, lack hair or down, are not able to obtain food on their own, and must be cared for by adults; closed eyes are common, though not ubiquitous. Altricial young are born helpless and require care for a specific amount of time."
"The ability of the parents to obtain nutrition and contribute to the pre-natal and post-natal development of their young appears to be associated [with precocial vs altricial strategies]."
"Precocial birds are able to provide protein-rich eggs... Altricial birds are less able to contribute nutrients in the pre-natal stage... In the case of mammals it has been suggested that large adult body sizes favor production of large, precocious young, which develop with a large gestation period... It has been suggested that altricial strategies in mammals may be favored if there is a selective advantage to mothers that are capable of reabsorbing embryos in early stages of development."
"Precocial animals' brains are large at birth relative to their body size, hence their ability to fend for themselves. However, as adults, their brains are not much bigger or more able. Altricial animals' brains are relatively small at birth, thus their need for care and protection, but their brains continue to grow... Thus the altricial species have a wider skill set at maturity."
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