After 21 years, Berkeley’s SETI Research Center announced that it will shut down its distributed computing project SETI@home on March 31st, 2020. Launched in May 1999, the popular (screensaver) software allowed users to donate CPU time to analyzing data from the Arecibo radio telescope in search of alien life.
“Every human in the supply chain—from crane drivers up to the captain of the ship I was on—was constantly receiving instructions from unseen, distant, management algorithms.”
“He knew as little as I did about how to make the computer draw. But he trusted me, his student. Throughout my academic career, I tried to follow Prof. Knödel’s example—trusting students rather than mistrusting them. Isn’t this what teaching is all about?”
The New Normal
A recent paper by amateur astronomer and YouTuber Alberto Caballero identifies a possible source of the Wow! signal, the curious cosmic radio blitz recorded in 1977 that expedited the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and puzzles experts to this day. Looking for “sun-like stars that might host an exoplanet capable of supporting intelligent life” in the signal’s celestial region, Caballero scanned ESA’s 1.3 billion star-strong Gaia database and found a potential match: “This candidate source, which is named 2MASS 19281982-2640123, therefore becomes an ideal target to conduct observations in the search for potentially habitable exoplanets.”
“Like all technologies, light reflects larger expressions of power, carving up an architecture of visibility that shapes how lives are led at night, providing shelter for some and harmful exposure for others.”
“…as familiarity with coding increases, more people will use that skill to produce music or art. There are people who say ‘I spend all day behind a computer; the last thing I want to do after work is look at a computer again,’ but for me, the computer is not a burden but more like water. I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.”
“For me, personally, there’s no separation between my activities as a citizen and my activities as an artist.”
Hyperemployment
Ahead of the sunsetting of Adobe Flash on Dec 31, the Internet Archive announces the preservation of Flash content—SWF files—through emulation. First introduced by Macromedia in 1996, the software was vital for dynamizing the early Web. “From roughly 2000 to 2005, Flash was the top of the heap for a generation of artists, animators, and small studios,” writes archivist Jason Scott, warning that a big part of Internet history is now “in true danger of sinking beneath the sea.” To run Flash files without the discontinued player, the non-profit digital library incorporated Ruffle, an in-development emulator, into the site. Thus far, more than 1,000 Flash classics have been ‘resurrected.’
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announces the decommission of the Arecibo Observatory after another snapped cable had caused further damages to its iconic radio dish. The decision was made when several independent engineering companies assessed that the telescope structure is “in danger of a catastrophic failure” and recommended controlled demolition “as soon as pragmatically possible.” Gutted by the news, scientists around the world flood social media with #WhatAreciboMeansToMe posts.
“If the surface internet is like Art Basel, then the darknet would be your artist-run space in a dirty basement in Bushwick.”
In their latest investigation, London-based research agency Forensic Architecture reconstruct the Beirut port explosion that killed more than two hundred people, wounded over 6,500, and destroyed large parts of the city on the evening of Aug 4. Using open-source information including videos, photographs, and documents provided by the independent Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr, project lead Samaneh Moafi and team provide a meticulous, evidence-based picture of the events and “the multiple layers of state negligence” at play that day.
