A meditation on things that from a distance look like helicopters
Contraptions | Venkatesh Rao | Substack
Janky, wobbly models of everything from philosophy to technology and everything in-between. Click to read Contraptions, by Venkatesh Rao, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Contraptions | Venkatesh Rao | Substack
Janky, wobbly models of everything from philosophy to technology and everything in-between. Click to read Contraptions, by Venkatesh Rao, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
About - Contraptions
Janky, wobbly models of everything from philosophy to technology and everything in-between. Click to read Contraptions, by Venkatesh Rao, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Drones in Visual Culture / Anna Jackman Converses with Elisa Serafinelli and Lauren Alex O’Hagan about Their Work - ASAP/Review
In recent years, the expansion of camera-laden drones has enabled and ushered in the production and consumption of new visual perspectives. Drone visuals are rapidly becoming part of our sociocultural imaginaries, at once generating distinct images that differ from traditional visual conventions and producing unexpected perspectives of the world that reveal hidden aspects of our surroundings.
Predictive processing frameworks for perception can explain recent drone sightings in the United States
We draw on the predictive processing theory of perception to explain why healthy, intelligent, honest, and psychologically normal people might easily misperceive lights in the sky as threatening or extraordinary objects, especially in the context of WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) societies. We argue that the uniquely sparse properties of skyborne and celestial stimuli make it difficult for an observer to update prior beliefs, which can be easily fit to observed lights. Moreover, we hypothesize that humans have likely evolved to perceive the sky and its perceived contents as deeply meaningful. Finally, we briefly discuss the possible role of generalized distrust in scientific institutions and ultimately argue for the importance of astronomy education for producing a society with prior beliefs that support veridical perception.
Modeling non-dual awareness via constraint closure: a reinterpretation of groundlessness
Abstract. Non-dual awareness (NDA) refers to a shift in consciousness in which the usual distinction between subject and object dissolves, and experience i
On Verticality
Explorations into the human need to escape the surface of the earth. A mashup of architecture, aeronautics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, anatomy and human pre-history
The sky is psychedelic: why so many people see strange lights in the sky
Your brain evolved to see deep meaning in the sky. And UFOs.
inFORM: dynamic physical affordances and constraints through shape and object actuation
We propose a new approach to Physical Telepresence, based on shared workspaces with the ability to capture and remotely render the shapes of people and objects. In this paper, we describe the concept of shape transmission, and propose interaction ...
The ungoverned sky: Drones and the domestic extremist threat
The combination of easy accessibility and payload potential, and the limitations of domestic counter-drone systems, presents a growing challenge.
Meditations on Machinic Desire
The philosopher and accelerationist Nick Land writes, in his 1993 essay Machinic Desire, three of the most insight-dense paragraphs I’ve ever encountered:
Home | Modos
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Drones could soon become more intrusive than ever
“Whole-body” biometrics are on their way
I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause. I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does. 🧵/ sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the_space/posture
Amplifiers of Epistemic Posture
sbgeoaiphd.github.io