ride the sainted rhythyms

arcfinity:

It doesn’t take a science fiction writer to realise that a few more decades of business-as-usual will leave no middle class left to save. This will leave us with either a global-corporate feudalist drone-boot stamping on a human face for ever, or a bunch of messy, doomed-to-fail populist-socialist uprisings that never work and no one wants. Lanier reckons that things should have sorted themselves out by the last third of the century, once the Boomers and most of the Xers have died off, and maybe the Millennials too.

Call me a pessimist, but I don’t think we have that long.

We probably don’t really have a choice about whether a $0.03 wireless sensor platform will exist. Technology marches on. But we do have a choice about how it will be employed.

[…]

There is another path: in this alternate world all the devices that are related to you will push their data into a place that you control.

[…]

In this alternate world you are in control. There’s not much question which of these worlds most of us would want to live in, and yet most companies aren’t doing anything that will get us any closer to that better place.

[…]

And people pursue short-term goals all the while hoping this better world will somehow magically emerge. It won’t. Not unless we build it. We have to build it.

If you work in tech, you have an ethical responsibility to build the world you want to live in. Simple as that.

But there is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it’s not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people’s ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable.

It was a mistake, you realize, to come out on a night this cold. You should turn back. Fishing into the front pocket of your shell parka, you fumble out the map. You consulted it to get here; it should be able to guide you back to the warm car. It doesn’t occur to you in your increasingly clouded and panicky mental state that you could simply follow your tracks down the way you came.

America’s spy community has taken a hard stare at the year 2030 and says we’re headed for an era of super-enhanced human cyborgs and giant megacities set to a backdrop of ominous climate disasters.

And this is where Honnold reigns: he is the world’s foremost free soloist, a style of climbing so pure and terrifying that only a miniscule fraction of climbers even dare to attempt it.

A fast-emerging body of scientific evidence points to a conclusion that’s unsettling, to say the least, for a lot of older athletes: Running can take a toll on the heart that essentially eliminates the benefits of exercise.

It looks like if we want optimal health, at least four factors should influence our daily activity:

• …do neither too much nor too little.
• Several hours per day of walking is probably beneficial.
• The rest of the day should be restful, but not completely inactive. We should not go more than 20 minutes without standing.
• [For circadian rhythm entrainment] …develop a routine that includes some activity every day…

My conversion to light boots came during a Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike in 1982. I started out from the Mexican border in heavy, traditional boots that soon gave me hot, sore feet. After a few days I ended up carrying them in my pack and wearing running shoes brought along for campwear most of the time. When my running shoes were worn out after 1500 miles I bought a new pair of light approach shoes and dumped the heavy boots. The staff in the store were horrified that I intended to backpack a thousand miles in them. But my feet rejoiced in being released from their stiff leather prisons and my daily mileages went up.

This study reviews historical and biomedical aspects of soldier load carriage. Before the 18th century, foot soldiers seldom carried more than 15 kg while on the march, but loads have progressively risen since then.

Here’s the fulltext, re-translated to English after translation to Swedish.