Yes-- the initial revolution, like in Russia, was plotted by Western powers-- but they lost control of them in time-- Stalin's purges & shift toward a Nationalist platform is similar to Mao's-- both rediscovered "national sovereignty" & represent Napoleonic counter-revolution.

This week, 33 years ago, Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was assassinated in a French-backed coup. He aspired to an egalitarian, feminist society, and an economy built on self-sufficiency, ecological regeneration, and independence from Western powers.

As debt crises mount across Africa, his ideas are more vital now than ever. I wrote about Sankara's legacy in these two pages from The Divide:

Today, Sankara's legacy is inspiring a new generation of revolutionary thinkers and activists across the continent and beyond. As Sankara himself put it, with uncanny prescience, “You can assassinate revolutionaries, but you cannot kill ideas”.

Sankara knew his assassination was coming. Speaking to African leaders at the OAU, he said "I would like this conference to clearly declare that we will not repay the debt; we must do it together, to avoid being assassinated individually..."

"...If Burkina Faso is the only one to refuse, I will not be here at the next conference."

Consider that Late Registration came out in 2005.

A 15 year old would only know Kanye as a maga hat embarrassment.

The Selfish Gene came out in 1976. Anyone under 44 only knows dawkins in his bigot form.

The milkshake duck time horizon

Dawkins, for instance, has now been a bigot for much longer than he was a respected scientist.

Kanye has been an embarrassment for much longer than he was a talented rapper.

It's like how a 120-year old has spent half their life as an elderly person.

At some point, the milkshake duck has been one so long that no one remembers the milkshake anymore.

It's just the racist duck, or the terf duck, or the virulently islamophobic duck. Or all three, and for brevity simply called the asshole duck

Would you like to live in a UFO? Well in 1968 you could, thanks to Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. He created the Futuro House and for a while it was a worldwide sensation!

Let's take a look around...

The Futuro was a round prefabricated house initially designed as a ski chalet. Quick to build and easy to heat it reflected the optimism of the times.

Inside the spacious Futuro were all the 1960s mod cons: a central cooker/heater, reclining chairs, funky furniture and cool, crisp lines. Did it have shagpile carpets? Of course it did!

The Futuro was made of fibreglass- reinforced polyester and was light enough to be towed to any location. You literally moved house.

But its futuristic design caused an immediate backlash: Futuro houses were banned from many municipalities by zoning regulations because they didn't 'blend in' with the environment. Production was halted in the mid 1970s.

In this thread, I will argue that the conventional wisdom that Shannon's information theory is all about syntax and not about semantics stems from superficial reading. On the contrary, even his 1948 BSTJ paper is already concerned with syntax, semantics, *and* pragmatics. 1/14

Of course, it does not help matters that Shannon himself states that "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem" of communication on the first page of his paper. But you have to read the entire paper, not just the first page. 2/14

Let's first pin down the notions of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the sense of Charles Morris: syntax is about relation of symbols to other symbols, semantics is about their relation to objects, and pragmatics is about their relation to subjects. 3/14

Let's start with pragmatics. The full formulation of Shannon's theory is concerned with the problem of reliable communication of some state of the world over a noisy medium, subject to a fidelity criterion. This is an operationalist, pragmatist concern. 4/14

We may envision the problem where we take an action U contingent on the state of the world X and incur the cost c(X,U). We cannot access the state of the world directly, but must mediate the act of selecting the action through transmission of symbols over a noisy channel. 5/14

Buckle up, everyone, this story is *wild*.

The 62-year-old Dyatlov Pass mystery, in which nine students died at the hands of an unknown force, has likely been solved thanks to the movie Frozen and gruesome car crash experiments.

Me, for @NatGeo + thread!

In what has become known as the Dyatlov Pass incident, ten members of the Urals Polytechnic Institute in Yekaterinburg—nine students and one sports instructor who fought in World War II—headed into the frigid wilderness on a skiing expedition on January 23, 1959. 1/x

One student turned back after experiencing joint pain.

He never saw his friends again.

2/x

The team made camp on February 1, pitching a large tent on the snowy slopes of Kholat Saykhl, whose name can be interpreted as “Dead Mountain” in the language of the region’s Indigenous Mansi people. Ominous, sure - but these were experienced mountain hikers. 3/x

The nine were never heard from again.

When a search team arrived at Kholat Saykhl a few weeks later, the tent was found just barely sticking out of the snow, and it appeared cut open from the inside. The next day, the first of the bodies was found near a cedar tree. 4/x