Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals.
This is accomplished through what is known as WiFi sensing, or the use of WiFi signals to infer information about a physical environment. When radio signals like WiFi travel through a space, they interact with the objects and people around them. Those signals can be reflected, scattered, or absorbed. By analyzing how the signal is expected to behave compared with how it is actually received, researchers can infer details about the surrounding environment.
“By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present,” said Thorsten Strufe, a KIT professor and study co-author, in a press release. “This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition.”
In science fiction, everything can be rethought — including one of the most foundational aspects of human civilization, agriculture. T.K. Rex gives it a go in The Wildcraft Drones, with an exciting take on the future of food production… and how we all might live because of it.
T.K. REX:
The world of The Wildcraft Drones began on a train. I’d just finished my first ecology class, I was watching endless farms go by, and it was 2015, so drones were new and mostly in the news as war machines. I knew that industrial agriculture caused major problems for watersheds and biodiversity, and I knew that forests were being planted for carbon sequestration. All these ingredients simmered on that quiet, two-day ride, and over Amtrak coffee and hot dogs, I came up with an idea.
What if forests could replace farms?
Lots of trees make food. But I wasn’t thinking about orchards. I was thinking about biodiverse, multi-story forests where herbs grew in the underbrush and birds nested in ancient oaks. The kind of forests I grew up in, back in Northern California, but carefully managed with food plants, so they could be as bountiful as a field of corn, but also sequester carbon and restore wildlife populations. Was it possible?
Not with tractors, I realized. Industrial agriculture relies on big machines with big wheels, so every farm is half road. Even human harvesters need ground between rows. The harvesting itself requires wasted soil. What if we could harvest from the air? What if a forest was actually a better use of the same space, once drone technology became advanced enough to harvest hundreds of different species?
The ideas rapidly built on each other. The drones could have little lasers to zap pests — no chemicals needed. Encouraging biodiversity would generate natural fertilizer.
Humans would have to be kept out, of course. In this future, we would all live in walled cities, probably, while the drones managed the forest to supply us with food.
I wrote a vignette, and sent it to the only science fiction writer I knew back then: my mom, who had a couple stories published and edited an academic journal. She said something along the lines of, “I love the idea of forests replacing farms, but forcing people out breaks my heart. We loved living in the redwoods. And What about the Native people?”
This is why I love her so much.
Her words hit me hard — we both grew up next to reservations — but I couldn’t let the concept go. Industrial agriculture had to change if we were going to address the climate crisis, and the only tool I had to do anything bigger than recycling, I thought, was the craft of storytelling. So I made a point of learning everything I could about food forests, and how rewilding our farms might work in Northern California. If I was going to write a book, I’d have to get specific, so I researched native edible plants that were already adapted to the climate here, and that led me to one of the most profound mind-shifts of my life.
I was a huge technology enthusiast in my twenties, and I’d imagined this futuristic techno-super-forest would be better, somehow, than what nature could do. That changed when I read about the actual history of Northern California’s native edible plants.
The historical accounts from Spanish colonizers describe hillsides so dense with flowers (all, in fact, native food plants) they were like a sea of color, and flocks of tule geese that darkened the skies. The intricacy of indigenous ecosystem management is well documented by both anthropologists and Native people themselves, and I found details of precisely how they managed thousands of species, not just for food but for all of the materials that made their homes, tools, clothes, and devices used for trapping, childcare, strategic fire, textiles, and everything else they needed. Every inch of the forests I grew up in had been tended meticulously for fourteen thousand years, up until the century before I was born. “Hunter-gatherer” was a bullshit term, and the distinctions between nature, humanity and technology were specious.
(If you care to research indigenous land management in California yourself, I have to include a trigger warning: it wasn’t just the Spanish, it was the Spanish Inquisition. However bad you think colonialism might have been here, slather that with a nauseating amount of nightmare fuel. The tortures were so horrific even other Spanish missionaries were upset by it. I have to take a deep breath here before going back to my story.)
*deep breath*
Okay. So yeah. Researching this book taught me that pre-colonial California was actually already a highly-advanced, hyper-productive food forest, way beyond what I had imagined for my silly futuristic utopia. The scale of what racism, colonialism and greed have cost us is incalculable.
And that sparked the soul of this book. It became not so much a utopia, but a conversation. There will be technology and displacement in the climate crisis — there already is. But how can we be human about it? How can we move forward knowing just how bad it’s going to get, without throwing the most vulnerable under the bus? And if we do rewild everything outside the cities, there will be people who refuse to leave. Should anyone be forced to move? What about children who would grow up without roads, schools and hospitals? And what if there was an entity with no stake in human politics or property values, whose only allegiance was the health of the ecosystem? Would it truly want humans out, given the many-thousand-year history of humans who already did that work? Might it understand our potential better than governments and corporations do? Might it see how much we love the work, when we’re given the chance to do it ourselves?
Eleven years after that train ride, the popular perception of intelligent machines has changed so much more than I could possibly have imagined — they will likely be just as destructive in the hands of capitalists as in the hands of militaries. In The Wildcraft Drones, they answer to neither.
If there’s another way for them, maybe there’s another way for us.
The Alex Lifeson Interview by Alex Lifeson speaking with Rick Beato https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1CeYYEKXw4 i mean, i linked up Ged's interview last week, so this is kinda obligatory. a lot of gear talk in the first half, but good other stuff too via youtube recommends
Flag Design by Randall Munroe https://xkcd.com/3250/ just to get all the vexillologists twitching, yunno via rss
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Fandom: Heated Rivalry Characters/Pairings: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Scott Hunter/Kip Grady, Cliff Marleau, Eric Bennett, Carter Vaughn, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Greg Huff, JJ Boizeau, Hayden Pike, Jackie Pike, Gloria Grey, Svetlana Vetrova Rating: Teen Length: 6606 Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply Creator Links:Cricket_Writes on AO3 Themes: Journeys and Travel, Road Trips, Friendship, Teams, Families of choice, AU: Fork in the road, Pining
Summary: “Holy shit,” Carter says from the stall next to Scott, also staring at his phone. “Did you all see about Rozanov and Hollander?” The way Vaughan says it, it doesn’t sound like good news. Carter thrusts his phone in Scott’s face, and he takes it, pulls it back so the headline will focus. HOCKEY STARS CAUGHT IN STEAMY AFFAIR, the headline proclaims, and Scott skims through it quickly. Rozanov and Hollander, years—years?!—worth of videos and photos leaked. Scott is in an NHL locker room, watching his worst nightmare happen to someone else. Holy shit.
Reccer's Notes: This is a reversal of canon, as Shane and Ilya are outed much earlier and that kick-starts Scott into coming out and resolving things with Kip. After the public outing, Scott, Carter and Eric embark on a long (there and back) road trip from New York to Shane and Ilya's very suddenly organised wedding in Montreal. It's a lovely fic told from Scott's POV, in which Shane and Ilya are crucial but largely in the background, and are overwhelmed by the support of their friends, teams, and family, while Scott finally gathers the courage to love Kip openly.
Our cab was booked for 5:40 this morning; we set an alarm for 5:00 and were outside ready at 5:25, and he pulled up three minutes later! A smooth and quick ride to the port, a handing over of most of my British cash (which I had because I had not forgotten my wallet, yay again for Past Me), and we checked in for our ferry back to Jersey.
We had asked Ank, our host at our hotel who booked the taxi for us, if he would take payment by credit card, and she was like, "...if he has to." I had British £20 and £10 bills, and a Jersey £1; we hadn't done anything in cash on Guernsey to get Guernsey bills. The taxi fare came to £21 and a bit, and rather than try to fuss with change when we're about to leave the country anyway I just gave him both British bills, which he was happy about although he did jokingly grumble a bit at getting British currency. He also said that Guernsey currency isn't usable in the UK, which makes me assume that Jersey currency isn't either, which surprises me; certainly Scottish currency is, but then again Scotland is part of the UK, which Jersey and Guernsey aren't.
I took a pill because I am anxious, but the ocean was completely calm ("like a millpond," remarked our taxi driver) and in retrospect I'm sure I didn't need it. Never hurts to be sure, though! It probably did help me doze en route.
Once arrived back in St Helier, we trudged up the hill to our one-night hotel carrying everything; I am incredibly glad we are physically able to do that in our sixties, and not sure for how many more years that will be true. But we'll be booking a cab to the airport tomorrow morning instead of walking back down to the bus station, because that much of a load, at the temperature it had already reached even at that early hour, just leaves Geoff too overheated. The hotel obviously didn't have a room for us yet (I mean, it was eight-thirty in the morning!), but we were able to tuck our big bags safely away behind the front desk, and they were nice enough to let us have breakfast this morning since we won't be here to have it next morning. It was definitely a come-down from what we've been eating, but it included coffee, so yay. I gave Geoff all my beans in return for all his mushrooms. (We've been carrying the bag with the food our Guernsey hotel gave us; I think Geoff talked the front desk into putting it in a fridge while I was in the lobby ladies' room elsewhere.)
Since then we've just been sitting out in their pleasant (and pleasantly shaded) back garden, blogging and catching up on email. There were a lot of people here earlier, along with a woman enthusiastically and coaxingly booking city tours for them, but now everyone else has left except for one small group and one elderly man sitting alone in the sun; it's quiet except for the burbling of the hotel's fountain and one of the group occasionally murmuring. (Or coughing. We haven't seen a single other person masking the entire time we've been in the islands, and we haven't masked in our hotels and have eaten indoors in restaurants when necessary -- and have mainlined the antiviral nasal spray throughout the trip -- but our resolve to continue masking in public places, and not to eat indoors in restaurants at home, is unchanged.) Happily, the smokers have left. joya and partner will pick us up in about half an hour.
The merfolk here are bolder than those at home. But their colouration is decidedly more cryptic than I am used to, so they can be closer than one might think. I've quite often been observing groups at a distance only to become aware of individuals only metres away, observing me in turn. In this strange country, it is not lawful to harm or trap merfolk, or indeed any creature of language, so it is refreshing to see the merpeople sporting about the vessel I have chartered. No one I have spoken to yet speaks the language of the local mer, but a couple of villages west of here apparently do - and it is to these we will set sail tomorrow. Dated this 26th Day of MerMay in Good Tidings ink.
I read a lot of B7 fanfiction, but that's too big a field for me to pick one or even a few.
There are only three main computers, but there was a question about cliffhangers and there were only three (or four) of those.
My favourite is Zen, even though he was occasionally mysteriously obstructive and not as chatty as Orac and Slave, but he was otherwise helpful and reliable. Plus, any computer that can devastate me when he said sorry that he had failed them when he was dying has to be the one - I never trusted Orac, and Slave annoyed me.
I also have a soft spot for Gambit. I wish Vila had managed to rescue enough of her to have had a friend.
Title : On a knife's edge Author : Nelja Fandom : The Magnus Archives Characters/Ships : Michael/sasha Genre : Smut, mystery Summary : Sasha sure had thought about inviting the hot monster in her house. The thing is, she doesn't remember the previous one and isn't sure she didn't actually do it. Rating : NC-17 Disclaimer : This belongs to Rusty Quill. Word Count : ~3000 Warnings : Consent is dubiuos due to mindfuckk situations.
to the lily of the valley by Eat0crow (Mo dao zu shi, Wei Wuxian/Wen Ning, M) It’’s a little funny, that the first time Wei Wuxian kisses Wen Ning—kisses anyone— he’s elbows deep in his guts.
Small accomplishment this week: Mom's cat Gally has problems walking, and she's been quietly freaking out about the life of a cat she loves vs. her very small amount of discretionary income. So this week I got her talked around so she let me launch a crowdfunding campaign to take him to the vet.
If anyone can pitch in or signalboost it would be much appreciated 💕
On less frustrating note, I have a full timeline for a NCIS: Hawai'i vid draft! (and the fact that the seasons were on sale this weekend on Amazon means it exists in better than DVD quality - I remain annoyed that season 2 and 3 never got a Blu-Ray release)
I'm also trying my hand at an informal read-along for The Beauty's Blade over at baihe_media.
Sneak: *climbs out of a hole, holding records* o_o Guys... I got sucked into researching the various terms plurals have used over the years for singlets.
Okay, so there's like, a FLURRY of terms that all crop up in my records in 1992: single, single person (SP), singlet... the only terms that I could first find from other years were singleton (which I could prove appeared by 1991) and singletype (which seems to have come from a lost-to-the-sands-of-time argument on Dark Personalities in 2001 and never really broke containment).
I haven't dug super deeply into single and single person (just because they're such common words, you can't easily just search for them), but here are my quick and dirty notes on singleton and singletype! ( Singleton )( Singletype )
1. Well, so much for the three week pee-free streak. :-/ I woke up this morning to find Jasper had had an accident at some point in the night (or maybe early morning as it seemed pretty fresh). It was in a fairly easy to clean up spot and was on a small cat blanket that had been peed on a couple times years ago (during nervous vet visits) so that may have triggered it. It's a bummer that it happened at all, but three weeks is a better record than three days, which is what it was down to before, so fingers crossed it doesn't happen again any time soon.
2. We went to see The Mandalorian and Grogu this morning and it was really fun! I honestly don't remember much about where the show ended, but it's not necessary as the movie is pretty stand-alone.
3. We got our bbq tri tip sandwiches from the neighborhood market for lunch and they were so good! We got them a few times last summer, so I knew they would be, but I'd forgotten how good lol. Definitely will be getting those again soon.
4. I have been meaning to order baskets for our new bikes and finally got around to doing that today. If I'd been thinking, I would have just had the bike shop order them when we bought the bikes (they had the front basket in stock but not the back one), but I did not. The bikes do come with a back rack and I've used a bungee cord to strap stuff on there a couple times already, but a basket will definitely make it easier for times when a shoulder bag doesn't really work.
5. I really enjoyed my three day weekend. Wish I wasn't going back to work tomorrow, but so it goes. I did request some time off next month, the weekend of my birthday, but also the weekend before that. We're going to Pride Nite at Disneyland on the 18th, so I put in for the 19th off, which is a Friday, to give myself a three day weekend. Then I noticed that 4th of July falls on a weekend, so our company holiday will be on Friday the 3rd, which means with the time off I've requested I'll have a three day weekend, a four day weekend, and then another three day weekend. That will definitely help get me through the month lol.
6. Gemma loves to use this dresser to jump up on the high shelves in Carla's closet.
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