Trans-Neptunian Objects

Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology inspired by permaculture. In a time where computing epitomizes industrial waste and exploitation, permacomputing encourages a more sustainable approach, maximizing hardware lifespans, minimizing energy use and focussing on the use of already available computational resources. Permacomputing asks the question whether it is possible to rethink computing in the same way as permaculture rethinks agriculture. Permaculture is the science and practice of creating semi-permanent ecosystems of nature. The resilience of any such ecosystem is equal to its diversity and interconnectedness. Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms. It seeks to provide a sustainable and secure place for living things on this earth. At first it may seems paradoxical to connect permaculture and computation. Indeed, an extractive technology that depends on a wasteful use of finite resources can hardly be permanent. Therefore, by making this connection, what we are truly asking is whether or not there can be a place for computer and network technology in a world where humans contribute to the well-being of the biosphere rather than destroy it? And if yes, how? Permacomputing wants to imagine such a place and take steps towards it. It is therefore both utopian and practical. We want to find out how we can practice good relations with the Earth by learning from ecological systems to leverage and re-center existing technologies and practices. A radical reduction of wastefulness is a fundamental aspect of it: maximize the hardware lifespans, minimize the energy use. And this is not just about a set of technical problems to be fixed­—the attitudes also need a radical turn. Understandability is aesthetics, virtual does not mean immaterial and doing things with less is not a return to the past. We want to investigate what a permacomputing way of life could be, and what sort of transformative computational culture and aesthetics it could bring forward. The principles of permacomputing are: Hope for the Best, Prepare for the Worst Care for All Hardware — Especially the Chips Observe First Not Doing Expose the Seams Consider Carefully the Interaction Between Simplicity, Complexity and Scale Keep It Flexible Build on Solid Ground (Almost) Everything has a place Integrate Biological and Renewable Resources Properties of permacomputing systems The principles concretely manifest themselves in various forms so as to highlight the following properties: accessible: well documented and adaptable to an individual's needs. compatible: works on a variety of architectures. efficient: uses as little resources (power, memory, etc) as possible (minimization). flexible: modular, portable, adapts to various use-cases. resilient: repairable, offline-first, low-maintenance, designed for disassembly, planned for longevity, maximized lifespan, descent-friendly or designed for descent

There are many scripts online you can follow, many ways to tweak your message to fit your senator (ESPECIALLY if they are up for reelection this year). Whether it's a recording you reach or a real person, be straightforward, don't argue, just let your rep know that you are a constituent and you oppose the KIDS act, etc.

Many of the common complaints made about audiobooks by people who dislike them, or try and fail to like them, seem to me to be failures of listening skill. "I just can't pay attention," "I don't retain anything," etc -- the ability to listen to a long piece of composed speech is just as complex and develop-able a skill as the ability to read a long text! this is not a fixed trait. I've listened to a reasonably wide variety of books solely as audio (academic works, pop nonfiction, different kinds of fiction) and have found that my ability to listen attentively fluctuates much like my ability to read attentively, varying with fatigue, familiarity with the material, interest, etc. There are certain things that help a lot -- in particular, there is a sweet spot of background activity that is "just right" for listening closely: doing a routine physical task or craft, or anything that involves some simple physical activity that involves no language. Less activity than that and my mind wanders, more and I tend to get distracted.

Listening to a complex text as audio is not imo "harder" than reading it on the page, but it is different in ways that aren't easily ranked. Lack of easy access to footnotes and indices and other textual apparatus obviously is a big downside. However, the fact that the audio transposes the static 2d matrix of text into a time-bound linear flow for you is a hugely helpful --this one step involves a lot of different skills that can pose problems for people. There's the ability to recognize characters and words (which is the main skill people tend to fixate on in this discussion), but also vision skills, the ability to physically handle the media the text is displayed on, and the concentration, attention, and emotional skills of managing your movement through the text. This last one is the one I personally find most helpful to delegate to audiobook: the more complicated a text is, the more likely I will bog down chasing a footnote or rereading a paragraph and stop moving forward.

But, this delegation of flow means that the listener has to manage an external source of stimulus that is less fully under their control than the static page. This is where some of those listening comprehension skills come in. The image in my mind is that listening to a complex argument is like having something paying out a line to you; you have to coil it and stow it in the same tempo (peach ... you can correct my nautical metaphor). Every sentence is a quicktime event. It really gives me an appreciation for the little I know about oral storytelling structures of repetition and reuse of set formulas, because they're so helpful for keeping your mental listening area tidy as you go.

How does this affect the reading experience? I'm convinced that it does, but in ways that are complicated and kind of hard to characterize. As a generalization, I feel like listening to nonfiction gives me a somewhat weaker sense of the individual details discussed, but can give me a stronger feeling for the discursive tempo, rhetorical style, and larger argument of the work. Fiction audio is so dependent on the narrator's style that I don't really have a unified way to explain how reading and listening differ, except that I think audio format can change the interplay between the main character's voice and the narration a lot.

Despite this account of differences, I do think that listening to a book is substantially more like reading a book than it is like listening to another audio genre. The other popular audio text genres I know of are like, podcasts and radio programs. Those tend to have either a lot of meandering, minimally-edited discussions (most podcasts!) or be very tightly edited with a lot of reminders of where you are and what you're listening to (some high-production value radio). Most books are structurally quite different from this in their prioritization of a long, linear, non-repetitive treatment of one subject, whether that's a fiction plot or a nonfiction topic, and the listening experience is therefore also very different.

I want to emphasize that it really is a skill you can develop. If you're struggling with comprehension at first, or you find your mind wandering, you can rewind just as easily as you'd re-read a few paragraphs, you're in control of your listening experience. As larger extension of that you can also re-listen to an audiobook the same way you might re-read a book, or revisit specific chapters, and in the case of non-fiction, it's often easier for me to listen to a book first so I can understand the "larger argument of the work", and then revisit specific parts later as text to better understand the details, it can be a very useful index.

You can also probably increase your listening speed faster than you think. It took me a little over a year to go from listening to everything at 1.0 to listening to most books at 1.75. I just started at 1.1 and slowly pushed my way up comfortably at my own pace. Even then I don't listen to everything at the same speed. Sometimes it's because the narrator or audio quality is kind of bad, but if I'm struggling to keep up with the argument in non-fiction, or I want to pay more attention to the prose in fiction I'll often push the speed back down. Even if you just get up to 1.25 that's still a lot of time saved in the long run and represents a real growth in your reading comprehension skills. Again, you're in control, there's no specific right way to read an audiobook!

As an added benefit of all this, keeping up a reading habit through audiobooks has helped me to build my book reading skills back up (which has been super helpful as someone with adhd). My reading comprehension and understanding of my own attention is just better, plus I'm also more motivated to read books generally.