Next Nature

McLuhan's ideas get written about so much, but nobody does it nearly as well as McLuhan himself. His 1969 interview with Playboy I think is the best primer: https://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mclu…

You are not wrong that polio spreads through feces of infected individuals, your intestines are where it usually replicates. I might add though that in the 20th century counterintuitively it was the improvements in bathroom hygiene in the western world that have caused the high ratios of polio induced paralysis. Mostly because with really bad bathroom hygiene, even babies get infected with the virus, who still receive antibodies through their mother's milk and are protected by them. The immune system can deal with an infection and gain immunity in a safer environment. Now, in places with improved bathroom hygiene more children get exposed at later ages, like e.g. the toddler age. At that point, polio is way more dangerous as the immune system is not helped by the mother's antibodies. https://nextnature.net/story/2014/how-modern-sanitation-gave-us-polio

The trend reminds me of McLuhans literate and tribal man https://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mclu…

Someday may be closer than you think -- https://www.nextnature.net/2008/12/scientists-extract-images-directly-…

I don't believe there was ever a "unique radiation signature." But there were some very interesting circles. Like this one, which appeared overnight next to the A303, which is one of the busiest roads in the area. https://www.science.org/content/article/jaw-dropper-crop-circle The Doug and Dave story is obviously ridiculous. IMO there's no way two fat old dudes could do something like this. It would be challenging to draw a design like this by hand on paper with drawing tools, never mind across nearly half a kilometre in a wheat field at night. At the very least it's clear it was planned, measured out, and laid with unusual competence. You'd need a team of a good few people and very possibly some surveying equipment - not impossible, but not at all a trivial project. Compare with a more recent attempt which shows what a crude circle looks like. https://nextnature.net/magazine/story/2007/crop-circles/065_crop.jpg

Custom software development is not an unexplored market. There are literally thousands of companies, many of them small & local, offering those services. It's just that we do so to other businesses, since it's way too expensive to develop custom stuff for single individuals. I've built a coin-operated electric candle stand[1] for a local theater group. I'm just an amateur at electronic circuits, and I'm sure a professional would have spent less time on it, but even at half my hourly price, I would have blown half their production budget. You could say some builders would be willing to take a pay cut to work within your community, but frankly, doing one-off toys to upper-middle-class people is not my idea of community service. I'd rather have a well paying job writing B2B software and then work for free for people in actual need. [1] a copy (with extra features) of something commonly found in catholic churches around here: https://www.nextnature.net/app/uploads/2010/05/led_candles.jpg

Yes, we've all heard this a thousand times... on random websites like the "Daily Dot" and from the dozens of writers who capitalize on internet backlash. Yes, we all suck at reading, the internet is destroying America, the good old days when everybody was reading Serious Novels and Coherent Arguments and the New Yorker is gone forever and youth culture killed my dog. Marshall McLuhan was way ahead of these guys. He was brought up with literary print culture, and he went through a phase of fear and loathing the emerging electronic culture, but then he realized he was ranting and raving to no good and adopted a different attitude. From the McLuhan Playboy interview: > You see, I am not a crusader; I imagine I would be most happy living in a secure preliterate environment; I would never attempt to change my world, for better or worse. Thus I derive no joy from observing the traumatic effects of media on man, although I do obtain satisfaction from grasping their modes of operation. Such comprehension is inherently cool, since it is simultaneously involvement and detachment. This posture is essential in studying media. One must begin by becoming extraenvironmental, putting oneself beyond the battle in order to study and understand the configuration of forces. It’s vital to adopt a posture of arrogant superiority; instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond…

Yes, it seems I overstated their dependence somewhat. Obviously water is important, so you want redundant systems so you have water in both rainy and dry times. Multiple systems on different scales (family, village, and island) is a possible explanation for the disparate accounts. Even today most human systems come in different scales. >Since the 1910 inhabitants didn't use this tree as a water source, I presume that cisterns and those small springs were enough for them, and so would have been enough for the Bimbache. That depends on how many inhabitants and what they're doing. I can't find historical population numbers, unfortunately. Today's population of ~10,000 uses industrial desalination. >But I don't see anything in those accounts about channels or pipes leading the water to people's homes. Check out pp 156: "It falls into a pond made of brick, floored with stones very tight, by pipes of lead conveyed from the tree to it, and thence divided into several ponds through all the island. They which dwell up-hill fetch it in barrels." All in all, a fascinating technology. It's amusing how the western accounts attribute everything to luck/God, but that's colonialism for ya. ;) (If you can't tell, I'm a fan of Clarke's [revised] Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature." It's even been proposed as a solution to the Fermi paradox:…