Somehow, I missed this, and I thought I might not be the only one. Elements of Prince, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Lady Gaga, and others. The music didn’t grab me, but I do admire her vision. It’ll be interesting to see where her ambition takes her.
Category: media
100 Outstanding Podcasts of 2018 – Bello Collective
“For the third year, The Bello Collective is proud to share with you our list of 100 outstanding podcasts. The selections in this list were determined by The Bello Collective writers, editors, and friends, and appear in no particular order. For each show, we have highlighted either a favorite episode or series. If you want to dive right in, listen to our playlist version of this 100 list.”
—Bello Collective. “100 Outstanding Podcasts of 2018.” Medium.com. December 5, 2018.
My Name Is Larry — Wild Man Fischer
If you want to know more about Larry “Wild Man” Fischer, this Tedium article isn’t a bad place to start.
Maybe, Considering Consequences
The whole process of nature is a integrated process of immense complexity. You never know what the consequences will really be from apparent good or bad fortune.
Link Wray (Full Album)
Like this? Check out this year’s Music of North Carolina issue of Oxford American that has an extensive article on Link Wray.
Setting DNS Manually on Ubuntu Linux
Introduction: Domain name servers (DNS) provide the numerical addresses for sites on the Internet. When you type cafebedouin.org into your browser, your computer queries a DNS name server to get a numerical address. This numerical address is then used to contact the site. Normally, configuring DNS is handled behind the scenes by Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DCHP) automatically.
For some situations, you’ll want to set a different DNS server than the one set by DCHP. Maybe your Internet Service Provider (ISP) uses their own DNS server that is slower than Google’s DNS server. Maybe you use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and want to stop DNS leaks to your ISP.
In Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems in the past, you would change configuration files, such as /etc/resolv.conf or /etc/dchp/dhclient.conf, to set DNS manually.
The problem: Changing resolv.conf and dhclient.conf configuration files does not work in Ubuntu.
The solution: Starting with 17.10, Ubuntu uses netplan to set DNS. On my test machine, netplan’s configuration file looks like this:
version: 2
renderer: NetworkManager
It is possible to manually do the job of DCHP in netplan, but it’s complicated. If your objective is to just change the DNS servers, there is an easier way to do it. Use Network Manager.
There are files in the directory /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections that define how DCHP should work for each network connection. To the files listed in that directory, add the following with DNS server IP addresses under [ipv4]:
dns-search=
method=auto
dns=84.200.69.80;84.200.70.40;45.33.97.5;
ignore-auto-dns=true
The DNS servers in this example are from FreeDNS and DNS Watch.
After adding the DNS IP addresses, separated by a semi-colon, then from the command line, do: sudo service network-manager restart
Once completed, you should be on your DNS server of choice. It’s a little inconvenient to have to add these lines to each network-connection file, and there might be a better way. But, this will work.
Clinical Trial Society
“One implication is that 25, 50, 250 years from now, we become a kind of clinical-trial society in which empirically driven decisions are constantly popping up. But by clinical-trial society, I mean all sorts of questions, because the information net becomes so rich — and the capacity to understand or deconvolute that information, because of computational power and because of A.I.-dependent algorithms, becomes so rich — that we begin to subject aspects of human behavior, human selves, that were previously considered outside the realm of assessment to a kind of deeper clinical assessment.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee in roundtable discussion with Regina Barzilay, George Church, Jennifer Egan, and Catherine Mohr in “From Gene Editing to A.I., How Will Technology Transform Humanity?” New York Times Magazine. November 16, 2018.
This discussion strikes me as terribly naïve and would have benefited from the perspective of someone like James C. Scott. Legibility on the scale imagined here may benefit the average person, but it will primary serve the interests of capital. It will be an instrument of social control and a catalyst of inequality, as Egan points out.
Another issue? What kind of human beings will be created when we start becoming a manufactured product? And what of those born outside this process? Will people whose DNA hasn’t been scrubbed to acceptable norms be second-class citizens? Who decides what those norms will be?
Technological utopianism is just as bad as any other fundamentalism. Science and knowledge will always be serving someone’s agenda, and while the benefits may trickle down, it shows a series lack of historical perspective to imagine it will primarily benefit those on the receiving end.
