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“So erscheint Asmodai” (Thus appears [the demon] Asmodeus) from Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros (1775)
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by Lothar Quinte, 1967
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Imagine a device that lets you move heat very quickly from one place to another, yet needs no power, no electricity, no pumps and no moving parts. You might think, "Sure, that's what metals like copper or crystals like diamond are for, with diamond being the best on Earth." But what if you could move heat much, much faster? A team of scientists in the College of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) has found this amazing capability exists inside a device called an oscillating heat pipe (OHP), in which ordinary liquids like water can move heat very effectively. Scientists have been building OHPs for years, but it has been difficult to measure exactly how much heat the liquid itself can carry. To address this issue, the team built an OHP with a glass mid-section and rigorous experimental controls, ensuring that all heat had to be carried across by the liquid alone. What surprised the researchers most was that the liquids didn't just move heat well, they moved it better than the best solids on Earth. And not just by a little bit—more than 150 times faster than copper, and even 20 times faster than diamond itself.
Source: techxplore.com
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Social media without socializing
I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.
From the earliest days of social media, social media bosses have been at war with sociability. To create a social media service is to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate forms of sociability. It's a monumental act of hubris, really.
It was ever thus. The founder of Friendster decreed that people could only form friendship bonds with each other, but could not declare themselves to be "friends" of everyone with a common interest. You and I could be friends, but you couldn't be "friends" with a group called "bloggers." Each member of that group would have to create a reciprocal friendship link to see one another's feeds.
Way back in 1999, Larry Lessig taught us that "code is law." By encoding these restrictions into the feed, Friendster's programmers were putting limits on the kinds of relationships that could be formed using the service. But Lessig's law (code?) is often overidden by an even older principle: William Gibson's 1982 maxim that "the street finds its own uses for things."
Friendster told its users how to be friends with one another, and Friendster's users treated Friendster's management as damage and routed around it. They created accounts with names like "New York City" and whenever anyone friended that account, it friended them back. Users hacked their own way to form "illegitimate" friendships based on affinity into the system:
As social media turned into a billion- (and then a trillion-) dollar business, the urgency of the struggle between how social media bosses demanded that we socialize and how we wanted to socialize only got sharper. Mark Zuckerberg doubtless thought he was covering all his bases when he tossed a casual "It's complicated" to the pulldown menu for defining your relationship status, but that's because he doesn't understand how complicated all our relationships are:
For Zuck, crisply defined relationships were things that he could do simple math on in order to target ads, make recommendations, and sort users into categories. When you need to treat relationships as elements in a series of discrete mathematical operations, the fact that relationships are intrinsically, irreducibly qualitative is a serious bug. So Zuck did what computer scientists usually do when they want to do math on qualitative variables: he incinerated all the qualitative elements by quantizing them, and then did math on the dubious residue that remained:
My Facebook feed is currently being overrun by bot-generated video Reels that quote Reddit posts about dysfunctional family and workplace drama. It probably doesn't surprise you that I didn't sign up for that, and it makes me very angry to have to endure it.
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Lydmur, Maia Urstad, 2005
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Louise Crossan - Flawed
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Sad Girl
Thirza Schaap
Acrylic on canvas, 2025
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Birdseye view of Manhattan in July, 1944, by Andreas Feininger. Looking west from the East River.
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