Dune: Part One

Despite my worries about the high numbers of coronavirus infections, I bit the bullet and reserved tickets to Dune’s opening night on IMAX last Friday, curious too see how this new adaptation by Denis Villeneuve looks on the big screen, and whether it can live up to the source material. As I wrote before on my blog, I had low expectations that he can deliver on the richness and subtlety of Dune – his previous movies that I watched, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, left me with the sense that Villeneuve is more adept at creating grand and stunning, yet impersonal and detached, imagery, less so at depicting raw, personal drama. And this impression has not changed after watching his latest Dune: Part One.

As I have read all six of Frank Herbert’s novels (twice) and rewatched the previous adaptations over the past year, I will not shy away from spoilers in this review, nor from comparisons with previous movies or the book.

Motherboard: “Zuckerberg announces Fantasy World where Facebook is Not a Horrible Company”

Moments before announcing Facebook is changing its name to “Meta” and detailing the company’s “metaverse” plans during a Facebook Connect presentation on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg said some people will say this isn’t a time to focus on the future, referring to the massive, ongoing scandal plaguing his company relating to the myriad ways Facebook has made the world worse. I believe technology can make our lives better. The future will be built by those willing to stand up and say this is the future we want.

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But Zuckerberg’s pitch of living, working, playing, and generally existing in a utopian, fake, Facebook-developed virtual world loaded with fun and friendly people, concerts where you can always be in the front row, seamless mixed-reality basketball games where you feel like you are actually playing basketball, and kicksass, uhh, NFTs you can use to modify your metaverse avatar, is a far cry from the disinformation, conspiracy theories, genocide-related, self-esteem destroying, spam, and general garbage content that exists on the platforms Facebook has already built.

There is no universe, meta-or-otherwise, in which people will not spread conspiracy theories, hate speech, and make threats online. In the metaverse, they will try to show each other their dicks, though it’s worth noting right now that Facebook’s current metaverse avatars do not have bodies that exist below their waists.

Jason Koebler

In the least surprising rebranding of the decade… Facebook now has a parent company called Meta, on a model similar to Google’s restructuring under the Alphabet umbrella a couple of years ago. Except this time Mark Zuckerberg continues to be firmly in charge of the new Meta, as he was before, so let’s not expect significant changes to its products and toxic effects.

The Guardian: “The dark side of wellness: the overlap between spiritual thinking and far-right conspiracies”

In 2011, sociologists Charlotte Ward and David Voas coined the term “conspirituality”. Ward defined it as a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fuelled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews. It describes the sticky intersection of two worlds: the world of yoga and juice cleanses with that of New Age thinking and online theories about secret groups, covertly controlling the universe. It’s a place where you might typically see a vegan influencer imploring their followers to stick to a water fast rather than getting vaccinated, or a meditation instructor reminding her clients of the dangers of 5G, or read an Instagram comment explaining that vaccines are hiding tracking devices. It’s a place where the word “scamdemic” might comfortably run up the side of a pair of yoga pants (88% polyester, £40, also available in “Defund the Media” print, “World Hellth Organisation” and “Masked Sheeple”, in millennial pink).

While the overlap of left-wing, magazine-friendly wellness and far-right conspiracy theories might initially sound surprising, the similarities in cultures, in ways of thinking – the questioning of authority, of alternative medicines, the distrust of institutions – are clear. But something is happening, accelerated by the pandemic – the former is becoming a mainstream entry point into the latter. An entry point that can be found everywhere from a community garden to the beauty aisle at a big Tesco. Part of what makes a successful influencer is the ability to compel their followers to trust them, and they do that by sharing their lives, their homes, their diets, their concerns. It’s become clear, both by the products they buy and the choices they make, that many people trust their influencers more than their own doctor.

Eva Wiseman

I know certain examples among acquaintances as well, specifically an old colleague from work. She was into wellness well before the pandemic, from natural plant oils to vegan food, and now she has become a staunch opposer of vaccines. She and her entire family got infected with coronavirus sometime last winter, but they all had mild illness, and she naturally interpreted this as confirmation that her alternative medicines are working. The latest I heard is that she had a massive fight with her (adult) son, because he got vaccinated behind her back…

The Washington Post: “Tesla is rolling back ‘Full Self-Driving’ for some users because of software issues”

The update had already proved troublesome earlier in the weekend, as Tesla delayed its initial release Saturday morning because of what Musk wrote was “regression in some left turns at traffic lights” found by internal quality inspectors. But he said Sunday that the company has proceeded with the rollout, noting that it leans on the public to gather more data on driving conditions and parameters.

Users reported sporadic issues including hard braking events, forward collision warnings and other system misfires that had not been present in previous versions.

It was the latest twist in a saga that has disrupted typical car industry practices and drawn the attention of safety advocates and regulators, who fear the consequences of Tesla foisting the largely untested software on the public. Full Self-Driving is an expanded iteration of the software that Tesla calls Autopilot, which can navigate highways, summon and park cars, and conduct other maneuvers with an attentive driver behind the wheel. Full Self-Driving brings those capabilities to city streets, allowing the software to navigate Tesla cars through local roads and residential areas. Users must pay attention at all times, and the software — despite its name — is not considered autonomous by industry or regulatory definitions.

Faiz Siddiqui

Considering Musk’s aversion to safety rules and regulations, this might be another reason behind the decision to relocate Tesla’s headquarters to Texas – aside from the obvious tax benefits for Musk: the Texas Attorney’s Office proved easily corruptible in the Boeing 737 Max case. If Tesla lands in legal trouble because of these rash decisions that might one day cause fatal crashes, Musk might be able to buy his way out of accountability…

Sky & Telescope: “New Horizons discovers Kuiper Belt ‘Twins’”

Both 2011 JY₃₁ and 2014 OS₃₉₃ appeared slightly elongated in the images compared to a nearby star. So the team fit the shapes with a two-body model: two asteroids in a tight orbit. Even though the individual rocks weren't resolved, the modeling showed that two bodies were better able to explain the elongation, as well as the brightness seen. The model for 2011 JY₃₁ had two 50-km-wide objects nearly 200 km apart, while for 2014 OS₃₉₃, the model had slightly smaller bodies (30 km across) that orbited each other 150 km apart.

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The tight-orbiting twins would have formed in situ, and — like twin-lobed Arrokoth seen up close by New Horizons in early 2019 — support a formation model in which gentle, low-velocity collisions among small objects, or “pebbles”, produce denser pebble-filled clouds that then collapse into larger planetesimals, as either contact binaries (like Arrokoth) or tight twins (like the other two asteroids).

David Dickinson

Impressive how data from the New Horizons missions is still delivering scientific insights. It also supports proposals for more probes in the outer solar system, orbiting the cold giants and surveying the Kuiper Belt. Maybe this would finally settle the question whether a large ‘Planet Nine’ is orbiting the Sun somewhere in the far reaches of the system.

Quanta Magazine: “Anil Seth finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy”

The free-energy principle is not itself a theory about consciousness, but I think it’s very relevant because it provides a way of understanding how and why brains work the way they do, and it links back to the idea that consciousness and life are very tightly related. Very briefly, the idea is that to regulate things like body temperature — and, more generally, to keep the body alive — the brain uses predictive models, because to control something it’s very useful to be able to predict how it will behave. The argument I develop in my book is that all our conscious experiences arise from these predictive models which have their origin in this fundamental biological imperative to keep living.

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This imperative for self-organization and self-preservation in living systems goes all the way down: Every cell within a body maintains its own existence just as the body as a whole does. What’s more, unlike in a computer where you have this sharp distinction between hardware and software — between substrate and what “runs on” that substrate — in life, there isn’t such a sharp divide. Where does the mind-ware stop and the wetware start? There isn’t a clear answer. These, for me, are positive reasons to think that the substrate matters; a system that instantiates conscious experiences might have to be a system that cares about its persistence all the way down into its mechanisms, without some arbitrary cutoff. No, I can’t demonstrate that for certain. But it’s one interesting way in which living systems are different from computers, and it’s a way which helps me understand consciousness as it’s expressed in living systems.

Dan Falk

Interesting concepts in this article about consciousness, especially this portion about it depending on a drive for self-preservation, which is absent in (current) software-based AI. I tend to agree with the view that consciousness is inextricably linked to its substrate – meaning that replicating consciousness with cleverly designed algorithms on a hardware substrate would either be impossible (or undesirable for practical purposes), or lead to a completely different form of consciousness that we may not even be able to recognize as such.

Euractiv: “How the US got the upper hand in the OECD tax reform proposals”

The first section of the proposals, Pillar One, establishes the principle that profits shall be taxed where economic activities take place and value is created. However, application of the principle will be limited. It will apply only to multinational enterprises (MNEs) with a global turnover of over €20 billion and profitability above 10%. This high threshold means that only around 100 of the world’s largest multinationals will be captured by the change. In these cases, between 20-30% of “residual profit” – profit in excess of 10% of revenue – will be allocated to countries where the companies do business.

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There is one final point, the issue of incentives in national taxation systems that drive base erosion and profit shifting has been largely ignored. As mentioned previously in EURACTIV over the last 70 years, US lawmakers have constructed a taxation system with avoidance baked into it, often in direct response to the corporate lobbies that fund US politics. For decades US corporations have been incentivised to delay paying US taxes by holding profits offshore, contributing to the global problems that the BEPS project was aimed to cure. There is nothing in the agreement to prevent this process from continuing.

Dick Roche

This proposed tax reform has certainly grabbed a lot of headlines, but the fine print reveals just as many exceptions and carveouts: for extractive industries, regulated financial services, and shipping. In the wake of numerous investigations about tax evasion, from the Panama to the Pandora Papers, you would be hopelessly naïve to think that rich people and corporations wound not find loopholes around these new measures.