After These Messages...

This adorable little robot is designed to make sure its photosynthesising passenger is well taken care of. It moves towards brighter light if it needs, or hides in the shade to keep cool. When in the light, it rotates to make sure the plant gets plenty of light. It even likes to play with humans.

Oh, and apparently, it gets antsy when it’s thirsty.

The robot is actually an art project called “Sharing Human Technology with Plants” by a roboticist named Sun Tianqi. It’s made from a modified version of a Vincross HEXA robot, and in his own words, it’s purpose is “to explore the relationship between living beings and robots.”

Finished up some food commissions this past week! They’re for a family-run restaurant in Burbank, California—check them out here! 

In a brilliant Twitter thread, UCSB political scientist Matto Mildenberger recounts the sordid history of Garrett Hardin’s classic, widely cited 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” whose ideas are taught to millions of undergrads, and whose precepts are used to justify the privatization of public goods as the only efficient way to manage them.

Hardin’s paper starts with a history of the English Commons – publicly held lands that were collectively owned and managed – and the claim that commons routinely fell prey to the selfish human impulse to overgraze your livestock on public land (and that even non-selfish people would overgraze their animals because they knew that their more-selfish neighbors would do so even if they didn’t).

But this isn’t what actually happened to the Commons: they were stable and well-managed until other factors (e.g. rich people trying to acquire even more land) destabilized them.

Hardin wasn’t just inventing false histories out of a vacuum. He was, personally, a nasty piece of work: a white supremacist and eugenicist, and the Tragedy of the Commons paper is shot through with this vile ideology, arguing that poor people should not be given charity lest they breed beyond their means (Hardin also campaigned against food aid). Hardin was a director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the white nationalist Social Contract Press, and co-founded anti-immigrant groups like Californians for Population Stabilization and The Environmental Fund.

Mildenberger argues that Hardin was a trumpist before Trump: He served on the board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), whose talking points often emerge from Trump’s mouth.

(Hardin quotes that didn’t make it into his seminal paper: “Diversity is the opposite of unity, and unity is a prime requirement for national survival” and “My position is that this idea of a multiethnic society is a disaster…we should restrict immigration for that reason.”)

As Mildenberger points out, this isn’t a case where a terrible person had some great ideas that outlived them: Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons was a piece of intellectual fraud committed in service to his racist, eugenicist ideology.

What’s worse: the environmental movement elevates Hardin to sainthood, whitewashing his racism and celebrating “The Tragedy of the Commons” as a seminal work of environmental literature. But Hardin is no friend of the environment: his noxious cocktail of racism and false history are used to move public lands into private ownership or stewardship, (literally) paving the way for devastating exploitation of those lands.

By contrast, consider Nobelist Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, whose groundbreaking insights on the management of common resources are a prescription for a better, more prosperous, more egalitarian future.

Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet

Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet is a spiral-shaped building rising up out of the landscape of Vallée de Joux in Switzerland designed by BIG for the watchmaker to house its collection of timepieces.

The curved glass walls and the green roof of the BIG-designed pavilion sit next to the original Audemars Piguet workshop, which was set up in 1875.

This historic building has been restored by Swiss architecture office CCHE and connected to the new museum, which was also realised by the studio.

JURASSIC PARK vs JURASSIC WORLD trilogies 

why the original trilogy feels more mature and real than the new one, more cartoonish instead. 

Which style do you prefer?

And then cue dramatic melancholy music while he sits and thinks about how his job is actually meaningless in the face of the fact that it’s prevented him from learning more about the woman he married all those years ago.

There’s a bunch of scenes where they look pensively at each other from the doorway. They start off quarantine sitting on chairs on opposite sides of the living room. As the days progress they move closer and closer. By the end of the movie they’re next to each other on a love seat.

It’s about two upper middle class white heterosexuals. He works at a bank and she runs an etsy shop making tiny idly jewelry. Their neighbor is an Eldery Likable Black Man who offers them sage advice talking over the fence of their backyards. He of course eventually dies of the virus, leaving his two neighbors to learn and grow from the experience- and to treasure what really matters in life.

“nothing to see here.” - The Field Museum of Natural History