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So, Canada Geese aka cobra chickens are well known for their aggressive territoriality.
Wild turkeys are larger and relentlessly persistent however. Most of us would not want to be on the wrong side of one. Come spring, we give turkey hens wandering about with their chicken-sized fluffy grey chicks a wide berth.
While they are native to Ontario originally, wild turkeys were extirpated from the Canada by 1909. Mid twentieth century efforts to restore wild turkeys in the United States were picked up in Canada.
Reintroduction for Ontario efforts of the mid 1980s were successful and current efforts focus on distributing the population and maintaining a population for hunting.
Ottawa, with its extensive greenbelt, has many natural corridors for wild turkeys.
A major intersection with high traffic volume in Ottawa unfortunately seems to have become a regular hangout for some turkeys to the misfortune of pedestrians, especially if a pedestrian appears to be trying to walk away from them.
A pair of them decided that they needed to follow a someone this weekend and someone caught it on video.
Enjoy.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-man-turkey-chase-video-story-9.7103190
#Canada #Turkey #WildTurkeys #Birds #Ottawa #Ontario #Wildlife #SuburbanWildlife #Rewilding
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New article: Intrusive Thoughts and Spiritual Warfare
Exploring the intersection of intrusive thoughts, psychology, and the biblical command to take every thought captive.
https://walljm.com/writing/2026-03-01-intrusive-thoughts-and-spiritual-warfare.html
#theology #mentalhealth #psychology #spiritualwarfare #identity
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New article: Intrusive Thoughts and Spiritual Warfare
Exploring the intersection of intrusive thoughts, psychology, and the biblical command to take every thought captive.
https://walljm.com/writing/2026-03-01-intrusive-thoughts-and-spiritual-warfare.html
#theology #mentalhealth #psychology #spiritualwarfare #identity
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#Introduction Hello all, I'm a DeafBlind Australian. I'm a classical vocalist, pianist, and master's student in neuroscience, sharing insights on music, mental health, and personal growth. As a choral scholar with deep Christian faith, I explore music's transformative power and holistic practices in daily life.
Follow for candid discussions on mental wellness, the intersections of neuroscience and music, and reflections on faith, resilience, and healing. #ClassicalMusic #MentalHealth #Neuroscience #BlindMusician #HolisticHealing #Faith #WellnessJourney
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#Denton friends, if you want to see how local #wrestling and therapeutic #horseback riding intersect (hint: community and fun), check out this event on Saturday
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#Denton friends, if you want to see how local #wrestling and therapeutic #horseback riding intersect (hint: community and fun), check out this event on Saturday
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#Denton friends, if you want to see how local #wrestling and therapeutic #horseback riding intersect (hint: community and fun), check out this event on Saturday
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#Denton friends, if you want to see how local #wrestling and therapeutic #horseback riding intersect (hint: community and fun), check out this event on Saturday
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#Denton friends, if you want to see how local #wrestling and therapeutic #horseback riding intersect (hint: community and fun), check out this event on Saturday
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Colonial Palm Oil Threatens Ancient Noken Weaving in West Papua
A powerful new indigenous art exhibition has highlighted the tragic loss of #WestPapua’s cultural identity due to #deforestation for #palmoil and #sugarcane monoculture plantations. A situation perpetuated by the illegal Indonesian colonisation of Melanesia. The ancient Melanesian tradition of noken weaving is under threat, as military-backed land grabs force Indigenous Muyu communities from their forests. Protect people and culture, when you shop make sure you #BoycottPalmOil #HumanRights #IndigenousRights
#News: Exhibition highlights vanishing of West Papua’s UNESCO recognised #noken weaving for #palmoil and #sugarcane in #WestPapua. Reject corporate #landgrabbing for palm oil in when you shop! #BoycottPalmOil #HumanRights #IndigenousRights @palmoildetect https://wp.me/pcFhgU-bmj
Share to BlueSky Share to TwitterAsia Pacific Report. (2025, March 28). Researcher warns over West Papuan deforestation impact on traditional noken weaving. Evening Report. https://eveningreport.nz/2025/03/28/researcher-warns-over-west-papuan-deforestation-impact-on-traditional-noken-weaving
West Papuan doctoral candidate Veronika T. Kanem has issued a stark warning about the cultural and ecological destruction unfolding in Indonesia-occupied West Papua. As the region faces what may be the world’s largest deforestation project—two million hectares for palm oil and sugarcane—centuries-old Indigenous traditions are being pushed to the edge of existence.
Veronika T. Kanem, whose exhibition “Noken/Men: String Bags of the Muyu Tribe of Southern West Papua” opened at Auckland University, says the forced removal of her people from their forests has endangered not only biodiversity but the sacred art of noken weaving—a practice deeply embedded in the identity and social fabric of her father’s tribe, the Muyu.
Known locally as “men,” the noken is more than a string bag. Made from inner fibres of the genemo tree and other natural materials, noken symbolises a woman’s womb, a vessel of life used in ceremonies, food gathering, child-rearing, and cultural gift-giving. It holds economic, spiritual, and ancestral significance across Melanesia.
Now, industrial agriculture and military occupation threaten the entire cultural landscape. These new plantations are not only destroying forests; they are severing communities from their knowledge systems, their land, and each other.
Kanem’s research applies Indigenous Melanesian methodologies, using the act of noken weaving as a metaphor for knowledge, kinship, and resistance. Her work captures the lived experience of displacement and climate injustice at the intersection of colonial occupation, corporate extraction, and Indigenous resilience.
The Auckland exhibition also screened a documentary showcasing noken weaving traditions from across West Papua, including Asmat, Nabire, and Wamena. Speakers at the event, including Pacific scholars and artists, praised the project as a vital act of cultural preservation and defiance.
As Indonesia accelerates its colonial development schemes, the voices of West Papuans like Kanem are essential. Indigenous peoples must lead solutions to environmental destruction. Without indigenous justice, there can be no climate repair.
Defend West Papua’s forests and ancient indigenous cultures. Reject palm oil-driven genocide. #BoycottPalmOil #Boycott4Wildlife #HumanRights #IndigenousRights
Asia Pacific Report. (2025, March 28). Researcher warns over West Papuan deforestation impact on traditional noken weaving. Evening Report. https://eveningreport.nz/2025/03/28/researcher-warns-over-west-papuan-deforestation-impact-on-traditional-noken-weaving
ENDS
Read more about human rights abuses and child slavery in the palm oil industry
Family Ties Expose Deforestation and Rights Violations in Indonesian Palm Oil
An explosive report by the Environment Investigation Agency (EIA) details how Indonesia’s Fangiono family, through a wide corporate web, is linked to ongoing #deforestation, #corruption, and #indigenousrights abuses for #palmoil. Calls mount for…
Papuan women will not be silenced while palm oil behemoths consume their land
In the colonised region of #WestPapua, Indigenous Melanesian women’s rights are being forgotten as companies and the Indonesian government seizes ancestral land for palm oil and sugar cane plantations — without owners’ consent.…
Greasing the Wheels of Colonialism: Palm Oil Industry in West Papua
A landmark study published in Global Studies Quarterly in April 2025 has revealed that the rapid expansion of the #palmoil industry in #WestPapua is not only fuelling #deforestation, #ecocide and environmental destruction but…
Palm Oil Workers Expose Industry Practices Resembling Colonialism
Palm Oil Workers Expose Industry Practices Resembling Colonialism | A coalition of palm oil workers in Indonesia has unveiled industry practices that mirror colonial exploitation, including land grabbing, poor working conditions, and environmental…
Papua’s ‘Empty Lands’: A Dangerous Myth Displacing Indigenous Peoples
In #WestPapua, on illegally colonised and disputed land taken by violence from Melanesian Indigenous peoples last century by Indonesian forces, authorities label indigenous lands as “empty”. This is done in order to justify…
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The World’s Most Loved Cup: A Social, Ethical & Environmental History of Coffee by Aviary Doert
How do we stop the world’s ecosystems from going into a death spiral? A #SteadyState Economy
3. Supermarket sleuthing: Next time you’re in the supermarket, take photos of products containing palm oil. Share these to social media along with the hashtags to call out the greenwashing and ecocide of the brands who use palm oil. You can also take photos of palm oil free products and congratulate brands when they go palm oil free.
https://twitter.com/CuriousApe4/status/1526136783557529600?s=20
https://twitter.com/PhillDixon1/status/1749010345555788144?s=20
https://twitter.com/mugabe139/status/1678027567977078784?s=20
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Pledge your support#art #BoycottPalmOil #Boycott4wildlife #BoycottPalmOil #childLabour #childSlavery #deforestation #humanRights #HumanRights #indigenousRights #indigenousrights #landRights #landgrabbing #News #noken #PalmOil #palmoil #slavery #sugarcane #WestPapua
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La chorale Les luttes enchantées vous donne RDV ce soir ( et tous les mardi) à 19h au planning familial d'Orléans pour préparer les chants du 1er Mai !
Les luttes enchantées sont une chorale féministe, intersectionnelle et queerfriendly qui porte haut ses valeurs à travers le chant choral
RDV le Mardi à 19h
au 2 Rue Saint Paul à Orléans -
Is It From the Birds? Stephen Sondheim Asked the Right Question About Music and Then Preferred Not to Hear the Answer
In November of 1997, Stephen Sondheim sat in his Manhattan townhouse with Mark Eden Horowitz, a senior music specialist from the Library of Congress, and said something extraordinary. Not extraordinary in the way that most Sondheim quotes are extraordinary, which is to say technically precise and laced with a craftsman’s impatience for imprecision. Extraordinary because it was none of those things. It was, instead, the sound of a man who had spent his entire adult life inside music admitting that the existence of music itself was something he could not explain.
A Concordance for Future Scholars
The moment circulates now as a sixty-second clip on social media, stripped of its original context, which was a three-day filmed interview session in which Horowitz, with Sondheim’s manuscripts spread before them, asked the composer to walk through his compositional process show by show. The interviews were intended as a concordance for future scholars. They were the opposite of a talk-show appearance. No audience. No applause. No performance. Just Sondheim, seated alone, head slightly bowed, speaking to the table as much as to Horowitz, working something out in real time.
View this post on Instagram
A transcript of the interview clip follows.
Music is a magical art. I don’t know how the human mind ever got to it, because everything else is somehow representational and literal, including painting, but not music. How did that happen? Is it from the birds? What is that from? How do we make music? I can understand vaguely how man learned to speak, because he had to communicate things, but what is this? How did man learn to whistle?
I mean, you know, how do we, and where does the 12-tone scale come from? And blah, blah, blah. And I’m ill-educated this way, so you could probably answer, but it seems to me miraculous. To me, it’s as mysterious as astrology, but unlike astrology, completely believable.
That final line is perfectly constructed. The setup is slow, exploratory, uncharacteristically loose in its syntax, and the payoff lands with the timing of a man who has spent fifty years placing stress on the right syllable. He knows where the laugh is, even in a room with one other person and a camera crew. The performance of the punchline does not cancel the sincerity of the question, though. Both things are happening at once: Sondheim is bewildered, and he is shaping his bewilderment into a deliverable thought. That is what writers do. It does not make the bewilderment false.
Auditory Cheesecake
The question Sondheim is asking is real. It is also old. Darwin raised it in The Descent of Man in 1871, speculating that music might have preceded language as a mechanism for sexual selection, the way birdsong functions in mate attraction. That hypothesis has never been conclusively confirmed or refuted. In the century and a half since, the evolutionary origins of music have generated an extraordinary volume of competing theories and almost no consensus.
Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist, famously dismissed music in 1997 (the same year Sondheim was speaking to Horowitz) as “auditory cheesecake,” a byproduct of neural systems that evolved for language processing, spatial reasoning, and emotional regulation. Music, in Pinker’s account, is a pleasure technology that exploits pre-existing cognitive architecture without having been selected for independently. It is, in his framing, an accident of evolution that happens to feel important.
That position was immediately and rightly challenged. The ethnomusicologist John Blacking had argued decades earlier that music-making is a universal human competence, not a specialized talent, and that its presence in every known human culture suggests something more than parasitic exploitation of other cognitive systems. Aniruddh Patel, working at the intersection of neuroscience and music cognition, demonstrated that music and language share neural resources but are not identical processes, and that musical training reshapes the brain in ways that pure language exposure does not. If music were merely cheesecake, it would not leave structural traces in neural architecture.
More recent work has proposed that music is adaptive in its own right: it facilitates infant bonding (lullabies are cross-culturally universal), it coordinates group movement (work songs, military cadence, ritual drumming), it signals coalition membership, and it regulates emotion in ways that have direct survival implications. The anthropologist Joseph Jordania has argued that early hominid group singing and rhythmic movement served a defensive function, producing a coordinated display that deterred predators. Whether or not one accepts that specific mechanism, the broader point stands: music does things in human social life that are not easily explained as side effects of language processing.
So when Sondheim asks “How did that happen? Is it from the birds?” he is asking a question to which the honest scientific answer, even now, is: we do not know for certain. The question is legitimate. What is less legitimate is the framework he wraps around it.
The Option of Representation
“Everything else is somehow representational and literal, including painting, but not music.”
This is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that a man of Sondheim’s cultural literacy should have caught. Painting is not inherently representational. The entire history of abstraction in visual art, stretching from Kandinsky’s first non-objective watercolors in 1910 through Mondrian’s grids, Rothko’s color fields, Agnes Martin’s trembling pencil lines, and the whole of Abstract Expressionism, demonstrates that painting can operate on precisely the same non-referential plane that Sondheim claims is unique to music. When you stand in front of a Rothko and feel something move in your chest, you are not decoding a representation. You are responding to organized color, proportion, and scale in a way that is structurally identical to responding to organized sound. Neither the painting nor the chord “means” anything in the propositional sense. Both produce experience without reference.
Sondheim, who loved puzzles and who approached problems with a logician’s temperament, is drawing a boundary here that does not hold. His category error is instructive, though, because it reveals what he actually means. He does not really mean that painting is always literal. He means that painting can be literal, that it has the option of representation, and that this option gives it an explicable origin story: early humans needed to record what they saw, so they drew on cave walls. Language has a similar origin story: early humans needed to coordinate hunting and warn each other of danger, so they developed vocalizations that referred to things in the shared environment. Music, in Sondheim’s framing, has no such origin story. It does not point at anything. It does not carry survival-critical information. It simply exists, and everyone responds to it, and nobody knows why.
This version of the argument has problems, too. Language is not purely functional. If language existed only to communicate propositional content, poetry would not exist. Lullabies would not exist. Glossolalia would not exist. The musical qualities of speech itself (prosody, rhythm, pitch contour, the rise at the end of a question, the drop at the end of a declaration) are not informational features. They are expressive features, and they sit on a continuum with music rather than on the opposite side of a clean divide. The boundary between speech and song is blurry in practice, and several researchers (including the musicologist Steven Brown) have proposed that music and language descended from a common proto-expressive system that only later differentiated into separate streams. If that model is correct, then Sondheim’s framing of language-as-communication versus music-as-mystery is not a real opposition. It is a retrospective illusion created by looking at two branches of the same tree and asking why one of them has leaves.
You Cannot Fact-Check a Melody
Strip away the sloppy premises, though, and something solid remains. Music’s relationship to meaning is unlike language’s relationship to meaning, and this asymmetry is a structural feature of the two systems, not a romantic invention of composers protecting their guild secrets.
A sentence can be true or false. “The cat is on the mat” is either an accurate description of a state of affairs or it is not. A chord cannot be true or false. A C minor triad is not making a claim about the world. It is not referring to anything outside itself. You cannot fact-check a melody. Music operates in a domain where the very concept of reference, which is foundational to how language generates meaning, does not apply.
Music produces meaning anyway. Not propositional meaning, not the kind that can be paraphrased or translated into another form without loss, but experiential meaning: the sense that something has been communicated, that you have understood something that was not said. When the bassoon opens Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in that strained high register, you feel physical unease. When Sondheim’s own score for Sweeney Todd drops that Bernard Herrmann chord into the orchestration, the audience’s bodies register dread before their minds process the harmonic information. These are real effects with real neurological substrates. The amygdala responds to certain dissonant intervals. Rhythmic entrainment synchronizes motor cortex activity across listeners. The dopaminergic system fires in anticipation of harmonic resolution. The mechanisms are increasingly describable. The description does not dissolve the mystery, because knowing that dopamine is released when a suspended chord resolves does not explain why organized sound produces subjective experience in the first place. It only pushes the question back one level.
Sondheim’s question, the one underneath his stated question, was not really “where does the 12-tone scale come from?” That question has a technical answer. The equal temperament system is a mathematical compromise that divides the octave into twelve logarithmically equal intervals to permit modulation between keys, and it became standard in Western music through a series of practical and aesthetic decisions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. His actual question was: why does organized sound produce emotion in the absence of reference? Why do human beings, across every culture and every period of recorded history, take vibrations in the air and arrange them into patterns that make other human beings feel things?
That question remains open. The evolutionary accounts explain why music might be useful, but they do not explain why it feels the way it feels. The neuroscientific accounts map the brain activity that corresponds to musical experience, but they do not explain why that brain activity is accompanied by subjective experience at all, which is the hard problem of consciousness wearing a musical costume. The acoustic accounts describe the physics of the overtone series and the mathematical relationships between frequencies, but they do not explain why a minor third sounds sad to Western ears, or whether it sounds sad to ears trained in other tonal systems, or what “sounding sad” even means at the level of physical vibration.
The Puzzle Without a Solution
Sondheim was not, I think, being coy when he asked these questions. He was not performing the standard artist-as-mystic routine, in which the creator claims special access to forces that ordinary mortals cannot comprehend. He spent his entire career attacking that posture. He told interviewers that his college professor Robert Barrow had cured him of the belief that inspiration descended from above, that the revelation of understanding what a leading tone does and what a diatonic scale is had shown him that composition was “something worked out,” not something received. He called art “an attempt to bring order out of chaos” and compared songwriting to solving crossword puzzles. No one in the history of American musical theater was more committed to demystifying the process of making music.
That history is what makes this moment so unusual. Here is a man who demystified everything about how music is made, admitting that the bare fact of music’s existence remains mysterious to him. He cracked every local puzzle. He understood voice leading, harmonic substitution, the precise relationship between syllabic stress and melodic contour, the dramaturgical function of a vamp, the architecture of a twelve-bar modulation. He knew how to build the thing. He did not know why the thing existed to be built.
And he had been asking, in one form or another, for over thirty years. “How did man learn to whistle?” is not an idle example. In 1964, Sondheim opened Anyone Can Whistle with a song built on the same question, given to a character named Fay Apple who cannot do the thing everyone else finds natural. “Anyone can whistle, that’s what they say, easy,” the lyric begins, and then turns: “So someone tell me why can’t I?” The song is not about whistling. It is about the gap between capacities that appear universal and the lived experience of finding them impossible. Fay cannot let go, cannot be spontaneous, cannot perform the act that “anyone” supposedly can. In 1964, Sondheim wrote that question as dramatic psychology, embedded in a character’s specific anguish. In 1997, sitting with Horowitz, the character is gone, the dramatic frame is gone, and the question has become his own. He is no longer writing through someone else. He is asking it as himself, without the protective apparatus of fiction. The altitude has changed: Fay Apple’s question was why she, individually, could not access something innate; Sondheim’s 1997 question is why the innate thing exists at all. But it is the same bewilderment, carried forward three decades, stripped of costume and orchestration.
The “blah, blah, blah” is the tell. That is not Sondheim’s diction. He was a man who chose every word with a jeweler’s attention to weight and setting. Here, the precision abandons him. He is gesturing toward a set of questions he knows he cannot pursue with the rigor he would demand of himself. He is waving off his own inquiry, not out of boredom, but because he recognizes that he lacks the equipment to follow it. “I’m ill-educated this way, so you could probably answer” is simultaneously self-deprecating and self-protective: it acknowledges the gap in his knowledge while declining to fill it. He does not want the answer. He wants the question to remain a question. The inexplicability of music flatters the art form he gave his life to, and the alternative, a fully mechanistic explanation of music as an emergent property of neural computation and evolutionary pressure, would feel reductive to him even if it were true.
That preference for mystery over explanation is recognizable in many brilliant practitioners. A carpenter who builds flawless joints does not need to understand the molecular structure of wood. A poet who writes devastating lines does not need a theory of phonaesthetics. Sondheim composed at the highest level for more than half a century, and his inability to explain why music exists did not impair his ability to make it. The question was, for him, an object of wonder rather than a research problem. He held it up to the light, turned it over, admired its opacity, and set it back down.
The rest of us are allowed to pick it up again.
#aesthetic #art #birds #blah #lyrics #meaning #music #musicals #painting #performance #rothko #scales #sondheim #theatre #whistle #writing -
Excited to share that I’ll be speaking about how the game mechanics of Oceania 2084 reinforce the political themes of the game at Serious Play Europe 2026 in Mainz, Germany, June 18 to 19 at KUZ Kulturzentrum. The program features a packed lineup of talks, workshops, panels, and walk-and-talk sessions, plus an expo and arcade zone, bringing together an international community working at the intersection of games, learning, health, and social impact. If you’ll be in Mainz, I’d love to connect, and I hope to see you there. Registration details are at https://eu.seriousplayconf.com/registration/
#seriousplay26 #seriousgames #gamebasedlearning #gbl #gamification #training #simulations #games #play #educationalgames #innovation #gamesforrevolution
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Kick the Bot, Fear the Dog: Street Psychology and the Coming Age of Mechanical Animals
The first time you see a sidewalk delivery bot, you smile. It is impossible not to. The thing is knee-high, usually white or pastel, rolling along on six stubby wheels like a cooler that gained sentience and decided to take itself for a walk. It carries burritos, or prescription medication, or someone’s iced latte, and it navigates curbs and crosswalks with the earnest determination of a toddler heading for a puddle. You watch it pause at an intersection, calculate its moment, and trundle forward with a confidence that borders on optimism. Your first instinct is to root for it.
Your second instinct, if you stand on any busy sidewalk long enough, is to watch someone else try to destroy it.
The kicked delivery bot has become a minor genre of urban video. A man in business casual plants his wingtip into the side panel of a Starship Technologies unit and sends it spinning into the gutter. A teenager shoves one off the curb. A woman screams obscenities at a bot that committed the sin of occupying the same stretch of concrete she wanted to walk on. The reactions are disproportionate, performative, and strangely emotional for encounters with a machine that weighs forty pounds and is carrying pad thai. These are not people responding to a real threat. These are people responding to a real anxiety, and the distinction matters more than it appears to, because the thing they are anxious about has not arrived yet.
What rolls down the sidewalk today is a cooler with a flag. What rolls down the sidewalk in five years is something with legs, teeth, cameras, and a mandate from someone you did not elect.
The Psychology of Kicking Down
Reactance theory, first articulated by Jack Brehm in 1966, describes the motivational state that arises when a person perceives a threat to their behavioral freedoms. The mechanism is direct: when people feel their autonomy is being constrained or their environment altered without their consent, they experience a psychological tension that demands resolution, and that resolution almost always takes the form of reasserting dominance over the perceived intrusion. The delivery bot is a perfect trigger for reactance. Nobody asked the pedestrian whether autonomous machines should share the sidewalk. Nobody held a public hearing. The bot simply appeared one morning, and now it is there, every day, navigating the same path the pedestrian considers sovereign territory. The kick is not about the bot. The kick is about the feeling that someone, somewhere, made a decision about your daily environment and did not consult you, and the only available target for that resentment is a rolling plastic box that cannot kick back.
This is the critical detail. The bot cannot retaliate. It has no voice, no legal standing in the moment of confrontation, and no capacity to shame its attacker. It occupies a psychological category that has no precedent in public life: an autonomous agent with no social power. Humans have always directed aggression toward entities that cannot respond. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments demonstrated how easily cruelty flows downward through a hierarchy. Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford work, for all its methodological controversy, illustrated the speed at which people adopt aggressive postures toward those they perceive as beneath them in a power structure. The delivery bot sits at the absolute bottom of every conceivable hierarchy. It is not alive. It is not a person. It is not even a convincing imitation of a person. It is a thing, and the social cost of striking a thing is, at this moment, zero.
But there is a second psychological layer that makes the bot-kicking phenomenon more revealing than simple displaced aggression. The delivery bot introduces something into public space that has not existed before in this form: ambient autonomy. A parked car is a machine in public space, but it does not move of its own volition while you walk past it. A traffic light governs your behavior, but it is fixed infrastructure, part of the architecture, as invisible as the curb. The delivery bot moves. It makes decisions. It reacts to your presence. It occupies a perceptual category somewhere between tool and creature, and that liminal status provokes a discomfort that most people cannot articulate but many people feel. The uncanny valley, as Masahiro Mori described it in 1970, typically applies to humanoid forms that are almost but not quite convincingly human. The delivery bot is not humanoid at all, yet it triggers an adjacent discomfort: something that is not alive is behaving as though it has intention, and it is doing so in your space, on your sidewalk, during your commute. The kick is a way of resolving that discomfort. It is a way of saying, to no one in particular, “I am still the one who decides what happens here.”
They are wrong, of course. They decided nothing. And they will decide even less in the years to come.
The Normalization Engine
Every new technology that enters public space follows a predictable emotional arc. Novelty produces delight. Delight produces familiarity. Familiarity produces invisibility. The automobile was a spectacle in 1905 and a background hum by 1955. The security camera was an outrage in the 1970s and wallpaper by the 2000s. The smartphone was a marvel in 2007 and an extension of the hand by 2012. The delivery bot is currently somewhere between delight and familiarity, which is precisely why people still react to it at all. In three years, most pedestrians will not notice it. In five years, they will step around it without conscious thought, the way they step around fire hydrants and newspaper boxes. The bot will become infrastructure.
And that is the function, not the side effect, of the delivery bot in public space. Not conspiratorially, not by secret design, but by the simple mechanics of habituation. Repeated exposure to a stimulus reduces the emotional response to that stimulus. Psychologists have confirmed this in every setting they have tested it, from animal behavior labs to advertising research to clinical desensitization therapy. The cute delivery bot habituates you to the presence of autonomous machines on your street. It teaches your nervous system that a moving, deciding, reacting machine in your pedestrian space is normal, expected, unremarkable. By the time the machines change shape, you will have already accepted the premise.
And the machines will change shape.
From Wheels to Legs
Boston Dynamics has been refining quadruped robots for over a decade. Their Spot model, a yellow mechanical dog weighing roughly seventy pounds, can climb stairs, open doors, navigate rough terrain, carry payloads, and operate camera and sensor arrays. It has been deployed by police departments, military units, construction companies, and energy firms. The New York Police Department tested Spot in 2021, deploying it to a hostage situation in the Bronx, and the public reaction was immediate and visceral. The robot was nicknamed “Digidog,” mocked, protested, and ultimately pulled from service after political pressure mounted. But the withdrawal was temporary and strategic, not principled. Police departments across the country continued to acquire robotic platforms. The technology did not retreat. It paused, waited for the news cycle to turn, and resumed.
The trajectory is not speculative. It is budgetary. The United States Department of Defense allocated significant funding for autonomous systems research in its most recent budget cycles, and much of that funding is directed at quadruped platforms capable of patrol, surveillance, and logistics in urban environments. Ghost Robotics, a Philadelphia-based competitor to Boston Dynamics, has already mounted weapon systems on its quadruped platform, the Vision 60, and demonstrated the configuration at military trade shows. The combination of legs, cameras, and weapons is not a thought experiment. It is a product line.
Now extend the timeline. If military and police agencies are deploying quadruped robots with sensor arrays and weapon mounts, the civilian market will follow, because it always does. Night-vision technology moved from the battlefield to the hunting catalog to the home security aisle within two decades. Drones followed the same path, from Predator to DJI Phantom to your neighbor filming his roof. GPS, the internet itself, and even the microwave oven all migrated from military application to consumer product. Mechanical dogs will be no different. Within a decade, perhaps less, quadruped robots will be commercially available to anyone with sufficient capital.
Drug dealers will have them. They will use them as sentries, as couriers, as intimidation platforms. A mechanical dog sitting outside a stash house does not sleep, does not get bored, does not cooperate with police, and does not require the loyalty management that a human lookout demands. It simply watches, records, and, if equipped to do so, acts.
People who currently own dogs bred for aggression and display, who walk their pit bulls without leashes as a projection of personal menace, will upgrade. The mechanical dog does not need to be fed, does not generate liability in the same legal framework as a biological animal, and can be programmed to perform intimidation behaviors on command without the unpredictability of an actual animal. It is the logical extension of the impulse that drives a person to acquire a dog not for companionship but for theater.
Police departments will integrate quadruped robots into routine patrol, traffic enforcement, and crowd control. The arguments for doing so are bureaucratically irresistible: the robot does not require a pension, cannot be accused of racial bias in the same legal framework as a human officer, does not experience fear or fatigue, and can be deployed to dangerous situations without risking an officer’s life. Every one of these arguments has already been made in budget meetings. Every one of them will prevail, because the institution of policing optimizes for risk reduction and cost efficiency, and the robot satisfies both criteria.
The military applications are already in motion and require no projection at all.
The Street in 2032
Imagine a sidewalk six years from now. You walk to work. A delivery bot rolls past carrying someone’s groceries, and you do not notice it, because you stopped noticing delivery bots years ago. Half a block ahead, a quadruped robot in police livery stands at an intersection, its camera array tracking pedestrian flow, its posture low and stable, its presence reassuring if you trust the police and menacing if you do not. Across the street, a private security dog patrols the entrance to a luxury residential building, scanning faces, logging foot traffic, and emitting a low audible tone when someone lingers too long. On the next block, something that looks almost identical to the police model but carries no visible insignia sits on a stoop outside a building you know better than to look at too closely.
You do not kick any of them. You do not curse at them. You do not react at all, because by 2032 you will have spent years learning not to react to autonomous machines in your space. The delivery bot taught you that. It preconditioned you that machines belong on the sidewalk. It softened you that machines can make decisions in your presence. It warmed you that machines occupy public space as a matter of course, and your role is to accommodate them. The delivery bot was the primer. The dog is the payload.
This is not a conspiracy. No one sat in a boardroom and designed the delivery bot as a psychological conditioning tool for the eventual acceptance of armed robotic quadrupeds. The delivery bot exists because venture capital funded last-mile logistics solutions, and the robotic dog exists because defense contracts funded autonomous patrol platforms, and the two developments are converging on the same sidewalk by separate but parallel logics. The effect, however, is identical to what a conspiracy would produce: a population gradually habituated to the presence of autonomous machines in public space, such that each successive escalation in capability, autonomy, and lethality meets diminishing resistance.
The Bite That Isn’t a Bite
The people who kick delivery bots are responding to something real, even if their response is misdirected and futile. They sense, at some preverbal level, that something is being taken from them. The sidewalk was theirs. It was human space, governed by human norms, navigated by human bodies. The introduction of an autonomous machine into that space changes the social contract of the street, and it does so without negotiation. The kicker is not wrong to feel displaced. The kicker is wrong to think that kicking will change anything.
When the machines have legs and cameras and the backing of institutions with the legal authority to use force, no one will kick. The asymmetry of power that currently makes bot-kicking cost-free will invert completely. The police dog will record your face. The private security dog will flag your presence to a property management algorithm. The military dog, in the contexts where it appears, will carry capabilities that make the question of kicking purely theoretical. The window in which a human being can express physical dominance over an autonomous machine in public space is closing, and it is closing fast.
What replaces that window is a new psychology of public life, one in which the street is shared with entities that watch you without caring about you and respond to you without understanding you. The philosopher of technology Langdon Winner wrote in 1980 that artifacts have politics, that the design of a technical system encodes and enforces particular arrangements of power. The delivery bot’s politics are mild: it encodes the priorities of a logistics company and the laziness of a customer who does not want to walk to the restaurant. The robotic dog’s politics are not mild at all. It encodes the priorities of whoever purchased it, programmed it, and deployed it, and in a society where purchasing power correlates directly with institutional power, the dog will serve the interests of the already powerful far more often than it will serve yours.
The Question Nobody Is Asking
The public conversation about autonomous machines in urban space remains fixated on the delivery bot phase of the problem. Cities debate sidewalk access, right-of-way rules, and whether a delivery robot should be classified as a pedestrian or a vehicle. These are legitimate regulatory questions, but they are also the equivalent of debating the font on the eviction notice. The substantive question is not how delivery bots should navigate the sidewalk. The substantive question is what kind of public space we are willing to live in, what degree of autonomous mechanical presence we will accept as normal, and what mechanisms of accountability will exist when the machines on the street carry capabilities that extend well beyond delivering your lunch.
That question is not being asked, because it is not yet urgent, and democratic societies have a durable habit of ignoring structural questions until the structure is already built. By the time the robotic dog is a fixture of the American sidewalk, the normative framework that might have governed its deployment will not exist, because the moment for building that framework is now, and no one with the authority to build it considers the matter pressing.
So the delivery bot rolls on. It carries your tacos. It navigates the curb. Someone kicks it, and someone else films the kicking, and someone else watches the film and laughs, and the bot rights itself and continues on its route, because it does not care about any of this. It is not designed to care. It is designed to arrive.
What arrives after it is designed to do something else entirely. And by the time it gets here, you will have already learned not to flinch.
#ai #autonomousMachines #bostonDynamics #bot #digidog #dog #dogBot #drugDealer #ghostRobotics #military #normalization #police #psychology #quadrupedRobot #reactanceTheory #tech #uncannyValley #violence -
Gamefinds: words.zip
words.zip is a fun word search kind of game. It's an infinite field of random letters. You try to find words snaking through the array. Words can twist and turn, and can also go backwards, but can't go diagonally, cross themselves, or intersect with any other word that someone else has ever found.Here I've found the word RO
https://setsideb.com/gamefinds-words-zip/
#gamefinds #indies #niche #collaborative #gamefinds #indie #niche #puzzle #webgame #words #wordszip -
Hi there. I want to share with you one avant-garde/musique concreté piece -
Atrium Omnis.At the core of its concept lies an informational crossroads within the hyperreality of post-digital culture, where decontextualized radio transmissions, news, discussion fragments, and social media content intersect in one place - endlessly arriving from and departing in all vectorial directions.
Here is the link to the track:
https://nickbalmer.bandcamp.com/album/atrium-omnis -
Hi there. I want to share with you one avant-garde/musique concreté piece -
Atrium Omnis.At the core of its concept lies an informational crossroads within the hyperreality of post-digital culture, where decontextualized radio transmissions, news, discussion fragments, and social media content intersect in one place - endlessly arriving from and departing in all vectorial directions.
Here is the link to the track:
https://nickbalmer.bandcamp.com/album/atrium-omnis -
How do we make ITER work? ⚡
Fusion energy could reshape the global energy system — but delivering it requires extraordinary physics, engineering, and international collaboration. ITER sits at that intersection of ambition and precision.
The scale of the challenge is matched by the opportunity. 🌍
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How do we make ITER work? ⚡
Fusion energy could reshape the global energy system — but delivering it requires extraordinary physics, engineering, and international collaboration. ITER sits at that intersection of ambition and precision.
The scale of the challenge is matched by the opportunity. 🌍
-
How do we make ITER work? ⚡
Fusion energy could reshape the global energy system — but delivering it requires extraordinary physics, engineering, and international collaboration. ITER sits at that intersection of ambition and precision.
The scale of the challenge is matched by the opportunity. 🌍
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A woman was fatally stabbed in Magdeburg on Sunday afternoon, according to police reports. The incident occurred around 12:15 PM at an intersection in the Neue... https://news.osna.fm/?p=14471 | #news #death #germany #magdeburg #stabbed
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A woman was fatally stabbed in Magdeburg on Sunday afternoon, according to police reports. The incident occurred around 12:15 PM at an intersection in the Neue... https://news.osna.fm/?p=14471 | #news #death #germany #magdeburg #stabbed
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A woman was fatally stabbed in Magdeburg on Sunday afternoon, according to police reports. The incident occurred around 12:15 PM at an intersection in the Neue... https://news.osna.fm/?p=14471 | #news #death #germany #magdeburg #stabbed
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Fontane di Roma: Sculpted aquatic marvels of the Eternal City
Close up view of the Fountain of Neptune in Piazza Navona – the blog author’s personal favoriteUsually the first attractions one hears about regarding Roma, Italy are the Vatican and the Colosseum. The Trevi Fountain (Fontane) is usually high on the list too, but you may not hear of the hundreds of other fountains that dot the city. For us, these aquatic marvels, often sculpted in marble, were a particular highlight of the Eternal City.
We were particularly fond of the three fountains in Piazza Navona as well as the Quattro Fontane at the intersection of Via del Quirinale and Via XX Settembre where each corner of the intersection is graced with a unique fountain.
Trevi Fountain, while quite beautiful, is literally overwhelmed with tourists, making the experience much less than satisfying. Who knows if the recently enacted new two euro fee for those seeking close access to the fountain will make a difference.
Most endearing to this retired urban planner was the way these sculpted fountains served as a gathering place…a place of relaxation and contemplation…a third place to meet friends and family or to just people watch. The fountains also serve as a sanctuary…a place of respite from the hustle and bustle of the city surrounding you through the soothing “white noise” of the fountain’s gurgling waters.
American cities could learn a lot about placemaking from Roma and other Italian cities. From piazzas to fountains to gardens to monuments, many Italian cities radiate people-friendly attributes. One cannot help but become enamored with their endearing charm.
Provided below is but a small sampling of these wonderful works of sculpting art mixed with water — some are as much as 500 years old. Pax!
p.s. All photos are by the blog author.
_______
Fontana del Nettuno “Fountain of Neptune” (1574/1878) in Piazza del Navona Trevi Fountain (1762) Close up off Trevi Fountain Fontana delle Naiadi “Fountain of the Naiads” (1888/1912)_______
Quarttro Fontane
Diana (1593) The Arno (1593) The Tiber (1593) Juno (1593)_______
Teatro del Fontanone on Palatine Hill Bernini Fountain (1677) in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City Fountain of St. Peter’s Square (1614) in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City Fontana del Moro (1654) in Piazza del Navona Fontana dell’Adriatico “Adriatic Fountain” (1911) Fontana del Tyrennian “Tyrennian Fountain” (1911) Fountain in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi “Fountain of the Four Rivers” (1651) by Bernini in Piazza del Navona Close up of the Fountain of the Four Rivers Fontana del Tritone (1643) by Bernini in Piazza Barberini Fontana del Nettuno “Fountain of Neptune” (1823) at the Piazza del Popolo Fontana dell’ Obelisco: “Fountain of the Obelisk” (1823) in Piazza del Popolo#cities #fontana #fontane #fountains #fun #geography #history #Italia #Italy #landUse #peopleFriendly #placemaking #planning #Roma #Rome #sightseeing #tourism #travel
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Fontane di Roma: Sculpted aquatic marvels of the Eternal City
Close up view of the Fountain of Neptune in Piazza Navona – the blog author’s personal favoriteUsually the first attractions one hears about regarding Roma, Italy are the Vatican and the Colosseum. The Trevi Fountain (Fontane) is usually high on the list too, but you may not hear of the hundreds of other fountains that dot the city. For us, these aquatic marvels, often sculpted in marble, were a particular highlight of the Eternal City.
We were particularly fond of the three fountains in Piazza Navona as well as the Quattro Fontane at the intersection of Via del Quirinale and Via XX Settembre where each corner of the intersection is graced with a unique fountain.
Trevi Fountain, while quite beautiful, is literally overwhelmed with tourists, making the experience much less than satisfying. Who knows if the recently enacted new two euro fee for those seeking close access to the fountain will make a difference.
Most endearing to this retired urban planner was the way these sculpted fountains served as a gathering place…a place of relaxation and contemplation…a third place to meet friends and family or to just people watch. The fountains also serve as a sanctuary…a place of respite from the hustle and bustle of the city surrounding you through the soothing “white noise” of the fountain’s gurgling waters.
American cities could learn a lot about placemaking from Roma and other Italian cities. From piazzas to fountains to gardens to monuments, many Italian cities radiate people-friendly attributes. One cannot help but become enamored with their endearing charm.
Provided below is but a small sampling of these wonderful works of sculpting art mixed with water — some are as much as 500 years old. Pax!
p.s. All photos are by the blog author.
_______
Fontana del Nettuno “Fountain of Neptune” (1574/1878) in Piazza del Navona Trevi Fountain (1762) Close up off Trevi Fountain Fontana delle Naiadi “Fountain of the Naiads” (1888/1912)_______
Quarttro Fontane
Diana (1593) The Arno (1593) The Tiber (1593) Juno (1593)_______
Teatro del Fontanone on Palatine Hill Bernini Fountain (1677) in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City Fountain of St. Peter’s Square (1614) in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City Fontana del Moro (1654) in Piazza del Navona Fontana dell’Adriatico “Adriatic Fountain” (1911) Fontana del Tyrennian “Tyrennian Fountain” (1911) Fountain in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi “Fountain of the Four Rivers” (1651) by Bernini in Piazza del Navona Close up of the Fountain of the Four Rivers Fontana del Tritone (1643) by Bernini in Piazza Barberini Fontana del Nettuno “Fountain of Neptune” (1823) at the Piazza del Popolo Fontana dell’ Obelisco: “Fountain of the Obelisk” (1823) in Piazza del Popolo#cities #fontana #fontane #fountains #fun #geography #history #Italia #Italy #landUse #peopleFriendly #placemaking #planning #Roma #Rome #sightseeing #tourism #travel
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https://transitionmagazine.fas.harvard.edu/the-politics-of-hunger-in-sudan/
Sara, key character in "A New Faith", grew up in a #refugee #camp in #Sudan . Then she gets an opportunity to #migrate to Sequoia, a #fictional #city, for #climate #refugees .
The plot is animated by her actions when her life intersects with someone from her past. But actions have consequences and the implications for Sequoia are existential.
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Like Levy, Milius is in the funny position of being at the intersection of many of these crosscurrents,
having worked in mainstream politics but appearing on so-called dissident podcasts
and being on the periphery of a cultural scene where right-wing politics have taken on a sheen approximating cool.
She said she was too “black-pilled”
—a very online term used to describe people who think that our world is so messed up that nothing can save it now
—to think much about what it would look like for her side to win.“I could fucking trip over the curb,” Milius said, “and that’s going to be considered white supremacism.
Like, there’s nothing you can do. What the fuck isn’t white supremacism?”
“They’re going to come for everything,” she said.
“And I think it’s sinister
—not that I think that people who want to pay attention to race issues are sinister.But I think that the globalization movement is using these divisive arguments in order to make people think that it’s a good thing.”
This is the Cathedral at work.
#Dasha #Nekrasova #Thiel #Balaji #Srinivasan #Coinbase #Koch #Milo #Yiannopoulis #Steve #Bannon #NRx #RAGE #authoritarianism #monarchy #Yarvin #crypto #decentralized #internet #Lydia #Laurenson #BDSM #Mencius #Moldbug #Anton #Yarvin #Yarvin #Thielverse #Cruz #Josh #Hawley #Masters #Vance #Rod #Dreher #Walter #Kirn #worldview #dystopian #hell #Peter #Thiel #NatCon #Thielbucks #Vance #Blake #Masters #Thiel #Foundation #New #Right #Curtis #Yarvin #incels #Josh #Hammer #Michael #Anton #Chris #Arnade #Sohrab #Ahmari #Compact #libertine #left #libertarian #right #kook
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TOMORROW FRIDAY JAN 30 4pm FOLEY SQUARE NYC ICE OUT!
4/ 5/ 6 train to Bklyn Bridge/ City Hall, or N/ R/ W train to City Hall/ Broadway.
Foley Square is at the intersection of Worth St/ Centre St/ & Lafayette St.
See you there around four - time to make a new sign!
#IceOut #ForGood #BeGood #BePretti #Ice #melts #NYC #protest #FoleySquare #NewYorkCity #fascist #USA #terrorist #WhiteSupremacist #radicalized #assassins #GOP #DHS #immigration #OurPutin #AnotherOrban #policing #slave #patrols -
Etniko Bandido Infoshop Europe Tour
KØPI 137, Monday, May 18 at 09:00 PM GMT+2
INFO TALK - DRINKS - FOOD
" The Experiences of an Autonomous/ Anti-authoritarian space in the so-called Philippines"
In Kopi137, the info talk will start at 21uhr. free entrance
Etniko Bandido Infoshop Europe Tour
Germany/Czech Republic
May 6-19, 2026
"The intersection of language, culture, and identity, particularly within the context of the so-called Philippines.
The influence of Western powers on various aspects of life in the Philippines is undeniable, and the way this has impacted music, lifestyle, and the overall sense of community is profound. Yet, there's an opportunity to reshape how we embrace this reality.
The so-called Philippines are heavily bombarded by Western rhetoric and ideas that are forced onto us through our educational systems, the Constitution, Religion/Spiritual belief, the western kind of development, the style of government
Sub-topics to be presented:
*Against War on Drugs during the Duterte regime
* Anti-mining campaign
* Presentation of Decolonization in the context of so-called Philippines
* Decentralised/self-managed renewable energy
* Culture of sharing and Mutual Aid during Pandemic days
* Insights from the recent September 2025 riots against Corruption
https://berlin.askapunk.de/event/etniko-bandido-infoshop-europe-tour
