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by Thomas Fernandes
One of my favorite thought experiments is the Library of Babel. Imagine an infinite library where the first book would contain only the letter A, the following book the letter B, and so on, with every character eventually moving to two-letter books, then three letters, on and on until all possible word combinations are represented in a book somewhere in the library. This library now contains all the available knowledge. All unavailable knowledge as well. Everything ever written is in there. Every paper that will ever be published, every conversation you have had, every YouTube comment under a given video, and your life story down to the actions you have not taken yet. In the thought experiment, all of it truly exists.
We already have trouble appreciating large numbers, infinity is so absurd that even some mathematicians would rather throw the concept out altogether. So a thought experiment helps us realize what infinity entails. It is also very conceptual. Revisiting the same library with a practical mind will point at a more practical truth. All knowledge is here, yes, but every meaningless combination of letters is there too, alongside multiple copies of every book differing by one typo. If you were to try to get something out of this library, your life’s achievement might be to decipher a “Hello World”, somewhere in the middle of a book of 873,618 characters.
This turns the thought experiment toward the power of curation. If generation of content is very large, you need to select at the same scale you generate, very relatable considering today’s entertainment landscape and algorithmic recommendation.
The only reliable way to ensure a similar rate of selection and production is to have them happen at the same time. If every book was filtered at production, the library would make sense and, to an outside visitor, the library would seem to be filled with human-made books (or at least purposefully written ones). Because, as mentioned above, if it were really random it would be filled with random, garbage books and the coherent ones would be the exception. The dual engines of generation and selection create the appearance of intelligent design. In the process, like in a social media algorithm, the algorithm is the content. Select for English books and your library will appear as if written by English people only. Select for success in spreading genes and you get natural selection.
Notice that in the Library of Babel the books are not randomly generated but are copies of the previous book with one modification. Inheritance is important as a log of explored space that you can deviate from, and it lets you avoid running in circles, printing the same book again and again. In natural selection, genes are selected at reproduction, having surviving children, which happens at the same time that we create small variations in the inherited genes.
Like the library, it historically left people convinced that there must be an intelligent design behind such non-random creation. In fact we now understand that the design is simply a three-part process of inheritance, variation and selection. Read more »
The inset photo shows a mountain hut (a big one) which you can just barely see at the center of the bigger photo. This is at the Aglsbodenalm in South Tyrol.
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by Scott Samuelson
During our disturbingly subdued celebration of the Declaration of Independence’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, one of the many things I’ve been thinking about is our natural right to “the pursuit of happiness.” As I’ve reconsidered the philosophical tradition that the Committee of Five was drawing on when they lit on that memorable phrase, seven great puzzles of happiness have stood out to me, which also emerge time and again in any halfway-thoughtful person’s life.
PUZZLE #1: WHAT’S IN OUR CONTROL?
In many languages, the word for happiness can also mean luck. Even in English, “happiness” derives from “hap,” which gives us words like “happenstance.” So, maybe happiness isn’t in our control at all. That’s one answer to the puzzle. Happiness is happenstance, sheer luck. Let’s just hope and pray for the best.
In many ways, the tradition of ancient Greek philosophy emerged to give an alternative answer. We can make an art of being human. We can shape our lives to be open to happiness. Fundamentally, the good life isn’t a matter of luck. It involves habits and virtues that we cultivate in ourselves. It’s more about what we do than what’s done to us.
Some philosophers—arguably Socrates himself, but certainly the Stoic philosophers he influenced—went so far as to say that happiness is totally in our control. If we cultivate the right mindset and practice the right virtues, we can be happy under all circumstances. Even when we’re wrongly imprisoned and face an unjust execution (to take the tragic example of Socrates—excuse me, I should say comic example, since all endings are happy endings for a virtuous person), we can be completely happy if we’re just at peace with our conscience. So, there’s another answer to our first puzzle. With the right moral character, we can be happy no matter what our fate holds.
Yet other philosophers, most famously Aristotle, argued that while our choices and virtues are the lion’s share of happiness, there’s still a little luck that we need. At minimum, a happy life involves dodging the worst of fates, a fate like that of Priam, who had to endure the rape and murder of his family, the destruction of his homeland, and the genocide of his people—a fate still being suffered in our current world. So, there’s another answer. Happiness is mostly in our control, but we need a little luck—or at least we need to be spared horrible luck.
Maybe we also need the basic equipment for being happy—for instance, a home and food. If so, that raises interesting political questions for anybody committed to a natural right to the pursuit of happiness. Read more »
by John Allen Paulos
Here is a very simple notion that is astonishingly powerful. It’s called the multiplication principle and states that if some action can be accomplished in M ways and another action can be accomplished in N ways, then these two actions can be performed in succession in MxN ways. Hence the word “multiplication.” This can obviously be extended to three or more actions or choices. An example: In how many ways can one choose and order 3 letters from among the letters a,b,c,d,e? There are 5 possibilities for the first choice, 4 for the second and 3 for the third, so the answer is 5 x 4 x 3, which equals 60. Similarly the number of ways of ordering all 5 letters is 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x1, which equals 120.
For a slightly more interesting example, assume that 10 world leaders at an international conference line up to get the commemorative group picture taken. In how many ways can the leaders be lined up? There are 10 choices for the left-most person in the photo, 9 choices for the next person in line, 8 for the next person in line, 7 for the next, and so on. So the number of possible orderings for the 10 leaders is 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1, which equals 3,628,800. A surprisingly large number! (Of course, we assume that all of the orderings are possible, and that there is no narcissistic blowhard who can commandeer the center of the ordering.) A bit of useful notation for the product 10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 is 10 factorial, written as 10!
Now rather than 10 world leaders, consider a deck of 52 cards (no jokers). In how many possible ways are there to order the cards in the deck. Note that there 52 possibilities for the first card in the ordering. After that choice, there remain 51 possible cards for the second card in the ordering, 50 possible choices for the third card in the ordering, 49 possible choices for fourth card, and so on for 48 possible choices, 47 choices, 46 choices until there is only one possible choice for the last card in the ordering.
Invoking the multiplication principle and factorial notation gives us 52x51x50x49x48 4x3x2x1 or 52! ways to order the 52 cards in a deck. So what does 52! equal? In this case the exclamation point might be taken to have two functions – to express the product succinctly and perhaps to express amazement at how big the number is. Read more »
by Dilip D’Souza
August 15 is India’s Independence Day – this year, it was our 80th (1947, our first). This year, we were reminded by various government channels that the previous day, August 14, is Vibhajan Vibhishika Smriti Diwas (“Partition Horrors Remembrance Day”).
This particular “Remembrance Day” is an annual memorial. Which may make you think this year was also the 80th such Day that we’ve observed. But no, it’s only the sixth. For it was first announced only in 2021, by Prime Minister Modi.
To be clear: Of course we should remember the horrors of August 1947. Partition was a bloodbath, a horrific blot on the birth of two countries. But you’ll forgive me if I am just a little sceptical of the motives of the regime we have in India, in announcing such a memorial. Hostility and hatred killed over a million in 1947. Today, there is great political capital in keeping that hostility alive.
Stuff like this, it gets me down. But then I remember how I once travelled across a large island, a country by itself, to meet a favourite and famous author. About how he wrote about murderous hostility. About how he made me feel.
Someone once asked for a list of my favourite books. It was a charm to compile. Just looking at the names brings memories floating in. The finely-detailed, beautifully-told slice of Roman history, the searching examination of pro basketball in the USA … and an exquisite novel set in Northern Ireland’s Troubles.
Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal is about Marcella, a young widow, and Cal, the awkward post-teen who falls in love with her. Simple? But there are complications. For this is Northern Ireland, which is nearly explanation enough. Marcella and Cal come from opposite sides of the bloody chasm there, so reminiscent of chasms in our parts. Cal helps in a murder, and that, without revealing more, draws him to Marcella, wrapping him in grieving, remorseful love. Eventually, a measure of redemption destroys him. Read more »
by Steve Szilagyi
I was cleaning my office the other day and came across some notes for a book I’d been commissioned to write many years ago. The topic was remarkable surgical cases. The book never got finished; the publisher went out of business. But there were a lot of notes for one chapter in particular, and I thought I might try and work them up. So here we go:
The story begins with a young head and neck surgeon named Marshall Strome removing a man’s voice box. It’s a common treatment for some advanced cancers of the larynx that removes the cancer along with the voice box. The downside is loss of the natural voice.
It was only Strome’s second total laryngectomy. He felt pretty good about it. Before the operation, the patient had been facing certain death from cancer. Now the man could look forward to years of life.
Three weeks later, the patient—who had no previous history of mental problems—jumped to his death from a bridge.
The surgeon was shaken.
“I realized then that people were willing to die because they could not speak,” Strome told me when I interviewed him 22 years ago.
The deeper Strome looked into the problem, the more troubling it became. Depression is a well-recognized consequence of total laryngectomy, and suicidal thinking has long been a concern among patients struggling with the loss of their natural voice. Strome believed women were particularly vulnerable. In his experience, some women even refused the operation, preferring the risk of death from cancer to life without a natural voice.
As a head and neck surgeon, Strome knew he would be facing this issue for the rest of his career. Was it possible to find a treatment for advanced larynx cancer that allowed patients to retain the power of speech?
It hadn’t been long since Christiaan Barnard had become a surgical superstar by performing the first heart transplant. Caught up in the excitement, Strome began contemplating something equally momentous.
A human larynx transplant. Read more »
Aimé Mpane. Kinoct, 2011.
Carved paintings.
“… His process is especially fascinating. . . he uses a small pick or awl to gouge into the different colored layers of an ordinary piece of plywood.”
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by Mark Harvey
Time gets compressed as you get older. When you’re a kid, a month waiting for summer break can seem like an eternity, whereas later in life, you marvel that just yesterday our forebears were crossing the mountains and steppes of the interior West in horse-drawn wagons. I long to know what it was really like trying to make it from, say, Ohio to California, or Iowa to Oregon in the 19th century. Most of the lore in fiction and the movies flattens the experience into hard men and bonneted women snarling at each other, fighting Indians, and eating grub around the campfire.
But there are a few surviving accounts from men and women who made the crossing and, despite long, long days on the trail, setting up camp, and tending to children and livestock, managed to jot down some of their thoughts and impressions along the way.
One of those women was Amelia Stewart Knight, who set off with her husband and seven children from Monroe County, Iowa, on April 9, 1853, for Oregon Territory. Her journal entries are terse and thus compress her interiority. But the hardships and disasters of the trip itself speak in themselves. And because they are so few, the entries when Amelia expresses hurt or despair are touching.
She begins her diary, “Started from home about 11 o’clock and traveled 8 miles and camped in an old house; night cold and frosty.”
I don’t know why Amelia, her husband, and her brood left Iowa, but Monroe County in 1853 had to have been almost impossible. Whites had barely settled it; malaria (known then as “the shakes”) and cholera were rampant, and massive storms and floods in 1851 had wiped out grain and lumber mills along the riverbanks. The floods and disease would have aggravated an already marginal existence.
And Oregon Fever was calling: thousands of people were on the move to realize the promise of free land and a temperate climate in the Pacific Northwest. Read more »
by Mary Hrovat
Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, by Robert Burnham, Jr., is a classic text. Its third and final volume was published in 1978. Written as a set of guidebooks for amateur astronomers, it’s a product of its time and circumstances. The abundant illustrations are in black-and-white, and the pages may look very plain to anyone accustomed to glossy large-format books about the universe, replete with color photographs. But to me it’s still immensely valuable, for the sheer amount of information it presents, for its attention to the history of astronomy, and for its astonishing breadth.
The full title of the set is Burnham’s Celestial Handbook: An Observer’s Guide to the Universe Beyond the Solar System. The books were written over a period of approximately 25 years. Burnham was an amateur astronomer when he decided he’d like to write a guidebook that describes the interesting astronomical objects accessible to amateur telescopes. His aim was to update existing guides to these objects, which were old enough to be out of date astronomically. In addition, the older guides covered the objects visible in the small amateur telescopes of their day, not the larger telescopes available to amateurs in the 1950s and 1960s. In his handbook, Burnham discusses around 7000 of these objects.
The first volume contains an introduction to amateur astronomical observing, including an overview of the types of objects outside of the solar system that you can see with binoculars or a telescope, their various naming conventions, and information about the coordinates used to describe their positions in the sky. He explains the abbreviations he uses to describe variable stars, double and multiple stars, and star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. Throughout the book, he uses these abbreviations to present compact tables of information about these objects.
Then, for each of the 88 constellation, he presents a set of these tables, followed by textual information on the constellation as a whole and on individual stars and other astronomical objects to be found in it. The length of the chapters varies. Those for some of the smaller constellations are quite short, and in several cases, only the tables are presented, without any text. The constellations with more lore or history associated with them are much longer. Read more »
Be alert among words, they’re shifty illusions
like 2-d boxes of joined walls on a flat page,
straight-forward and innocent as tots but,
they can turn inside-out in a blink,
spontaneously, now, as you listen.
Though once closed cells with steel wills
they may transform in instants, shape-shift,
morph like a high-speed chrysalis,
while you, gaslit, feel insane.
(Be careful among words warned
Lao Tzu)
or have you been, not in,
but out-of-sane all along,
distant from sanity, disconnected,
as removed from the Big Bang
as the Milky Way,
as far from sane as
out can be from in, but
now, by fate’s twist,
after a long life, despite
digging your heels in,
now, by fate’s mercy, you are
not out-of sane at all, but
finally, in —yes, into sane —all in,
Into sanity without the lonesome lunacy of
otherness that you once knew as
Me.
Jim Culleny
4/3/19
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by Bonnie McCune
“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
Over what is slowly becoming a lengthy session of being alive, I’ve found this statement to be absolutely true. I’m usually thrilled with the variety and my experiences so far. However, those things the world is full of aren’t necessarily always pleasant. Or desirable. We’re thrust, will we, nil we, into a stew of unknowns.
One of the mixed blessings of our contemporary way of life is the instantaneous nature of communications. We don’t have to search for the status of bad weather and storms near us; we get the news complete with visuals, sounds, quotes and opinions. Ditto for horrid happenings—from deadly crashes to wars to terrorists to epidemics.
On a more personal level, experiences of individuals. Yes, occurrences like falling in love or having a baby can make you euphoric. But the death of a loved one, the loss of a pet, getting fired from a good job does the opposite. We have a euphemism for these: we might call them challenges, not setbacks or evils. They shouldn’t plunge us into desperate thoughts. We should rise above them, learn from them.
This admonition doesn’t usually affect my inner status, which is easy to send into a panic. Several weeks ago, I spent the entire night nagged by the thought that I hadn’t paid my state property tax. Which I hadn’t. But throughout the night, I envisioned the tax man pounding on my door to levy penalty after penalty as the days passed because the state hadn’t deposited my delinquent check. Then I figured a whole line of checks would bounce because my bank account would be overdrawn. I’d have no way to appeal these decisions; it says so right on the tax website. My luck in getting a human to answer an official phone is zero, despite my customary plea to the automated responder to “I want a human, I want to talk to a human.” Read more »
by David Hoyt
Had the historian of California, Mike Davis, lived long enough to take in the spectacle of the AI boom, he very well may have seen a through line to earlier hybrids of unvarnished hype, greed, military research, science fiction, and techno-millenarianism, all perduring elements of a unique California ecosystem that has evolved some of the nation’s more distinctive cultural formations. If you think Peter Thiel’s itinerant, closed-door lectures on the Antichrist, Elon Musk’s high-volume procreation, or Sam Altman’s fascination with Napoleon and his notion of founding a company like you’re founding a religion were each a bit unusual, you have not read the history of California’s Church of Scientology.
Scientology – which has the same number of letters as “Singularity”- came into the world in the setting of a Pasadena club for Satan-worshipping libertines presided over by Caltech rocket scientist, sci-fi enthusiast and later founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, John Parsons. As Davis tells the tale in his classic City of Quartz,
“Aside from being a world-famous rocket pioneer and a secret wizard, Parsons was also a devoted science fiction fan who attended meetings of the Los Angeles Fantasy and Science Fiction Society …One day in August 1945, to Parsons’s delight, a LAFSFS acquaintance showed up at [his] mansion with a young naval officer, Lt. Commander L. Ron Hubbard, who had already established a reputation as a master of sci-fi pulp.”
A romantic imbroglio then ensued between Hubbard and Parsons’s mistress, the outcome of which was a “vast diabolical experiment…to call up a true “whore of Babylon” so that she and Parsons might procreate a literal Antichrist in Pasadena.” Sometime later, failing to get rich writing for pulp sci-fi mags, Hubbard decided it would be more lucrative to invent a religion, “a cosmology derived from the pages of Astounding Science Fiction” and grounded in the “occult dramaturgy” picked up from Parsons. Read more »
by Paweł Skała-Piękoś
Thomas R. Wells that nearly everyone hates neoliberalism, and that we will miss it all the same once it is gone. My own position is simpler and probably less elegant: I even like it. I am thirty-four, I am Polish, and my whole adult life has fallen in years when neoliberalism gave me more chances than it took away. I know its faults, I have felt a few of them personally, and I still think that, for all its sins, it treated us well. For the honest way to measure an order is by the cost of the alternatives. By that measure the defence writes itself. I also know that when someone runs the same measure and gets the opposite result, I have no right to point out an error in their arithmetic. So I want to defend neoliberalism, but differently from the way it is usually defended. The whole of that “differently” is this essay.
The argument about neoliberalism has been fought for years with the same ammunition: on one side, the more than a billion people who climbed out of extreme poverty in the age of globalisation (a large share of it credited to China’s market-plus-strong-state model); on the other, inequality and uprootedness. Both sides are counting the same things: money, percentages, degrees of interference. And the question I think matters most is rarely asked. Did people come out of all those solved problems as authors of their own lives, or as material for other people’s plans; treated as a someone, or processed as a something? It slips away most efficiently from liberals who have soaked up libertarianism and concluded that beyond freedom from interference there is nothing left to ask. I will come back to the libertarians. Something worse than blindness to one question is circling around them.
So much for the first trouble: the missing question. There is a second: the singular. Every doctrine gets flattened this way. What is peculiar is the price: if neoliberalism is less a single doctrine than a shared grammar, the singular erases precisely the thing that decided everything. What arrived in Stockholm was not what arrived in Santiago, nor in Warsaw what arrived in London. Before we decide whether to miss it, let us ask which one we lived with, and what it found when it moved in. Read more »
by Eric Schenck
I started reading the Bible after Easter of this year. Five months later, I’m about halfway through-
And still waiting for my spiritual epiphany.
There was no particular reason I set this reading goal. I had read chunks before, but never the entire thing in one go-around. Making my way through the Bible simply felt like something I ought to do.
I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting to get from it. What I thought I was going to find. But almost half a year after I started, I have (many) more questions than answers:
None of these things make sense to me. The deeper I get into it, the less the Bible feels like a spiritual authority on truth…
And more like a bunch of illiterate farmers creating a flimsy justification to pursue tribal warfare.
(Which I suppose, historically, it kind of is. At least a little.)
But it’s not just that the Bible is illogical. Plenty of stories are, and still end up being enjoyable.
My problem is also that the Bible is, far too often, dull. Read more »
by John Ambrosio
In The End of Reading is Here, an essay recently published in the Atlantic, Rose Horowitch argues that the U.S. has become a post-literate society, one in which people still read, but are increasingly unable to think logically, abstractly, and analytically. That is, while people are able to decode words, they lack the higher order thinking skills needed to comprehend and synthesize complex texts. She claims this is largely due to a growing reliance on digital technologies as primary sources of news and information.
In a partial rejoinder, David Wallace-Wells argues that despite the mass adoption of the smartphone around 2010, the amount of time U.S. adults spend reading has not changed significantly over the past few decades, except for older people, who read less, and that U.S. adults have never been avid readers. But the issue here is less a question of how much time U.S. adults spend reading, than of what and how they read: does their reading time consist mostly of scrolling social media on their smartphones or reading complex text?
According to the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2023, 28 percent of U.S. adults (16-65) scored below level two, and 57 percent scored below level three, on a five level typology of literacy proficiency.
The PIAAC measures reading competencies, what people can do, like fill out a job application. When the competencies are translated into grade level reading skills they indicate that 21 percent of U.S. adults, more than one in five, read below a fifth grade level and are classified as functionally illiterate, while 54 percent function below a sixth grade reading level. This is not primarily due to immigrants with low levels of literacy proficiency: two-thirds of functionally illiterate adults in the U.S. are native born.
The study also found that adult literacy scores in the U.S. dropped significantly between 2017 and 2023, which may be due, in part, to the effects of the pandemic. While literacy proficiency among U.S. adults is slightly below the average for all OECD countries that participated in the survey, the U.S. had the highest level of inequality in the distribution of scores, the biggest gap between the lowest and highest scores of any nation.
There are some ostensible paradoxes in the data. Read more »
Seen on a wall in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.
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by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad
In the first part of this series I described the data footprint that now surrounds a child before birth. It could take the form of an implantation score attached to an embryo, a polygenic risk estimate read from a few of its cells, a sequenced genome, growth curves etc. These may seem harmless or even mundane but the The technology is moving toward something much more ambitious i.e., towards a prediction of the life itself.
Consider the following cautionary tale: an AI model called life2vec was developed by researchers working with Danish national registry data. The data is a summary of recorded lives of roughly six million people. It includes things like Births, jobs, illnesses, relocations, incomes and diagnoses become events in a sequence. The model reads them much as a language model reads words in a sentence and learns what tends to come next. The analogy being that a human life can be represented as a sequence and, having read enough of that sequence, a machine can try to read forward. Once trained, life2vec could predict several kinds of outcomes, including personality characteristics and early mortality. In the tasks reported by its developers it outperformed specialized baselines. The researchers have also been careful about what this means. The model does not tell someone the date on which they will die. It was not released as a public “death calculator,” and its creators objected when it was described that way.
Now let’s get back to our main topic, the embryo grade and neonatal probability I discussed earlier were judgments made at one point in time. The systems now being developed can potentially go way beyond that. Foundation models trained on long stretches of electronic health records can absorb a person’s accumulating clinical history and repeatedly revise their estimates. A risk calculated in the neonatal unit could therefore become the first entry in a forecast that follows the patient for years. Genetic predictions are even easier to carry forward. Older forms of prophecy rarely had this institutional reach. A natal horoscope did not really set an insurance premium. A machine-readable risk score might do that if appropriate safeguards are not added to the system. Read more »
by Derek Neal
What if you took Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” concept and transposed it to the vast expanse of the African desert? You would get something like Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), which shows that the room a man locks himself in doesn’t need to be literal—a prison can be made anywhere. In Denis’ film, the man in a room is Galoup, a French Foreign Legion sergeant who commands a group of some 15 men in Djibouti. He is, he tells us in voiceover, “a perfect Legionnaire,” and like Schrader’s protagonists, he writes in a journal and narrates his memories, a storytelling technique stretching back to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. The story thus proceeds along two timelines: one, with Galoup in Marseille, writing in his notebook after he has been dismissed from the Foreign Legion; and the other, the memories of the desert and the Legion that the notebook engenders.
The drama of the narrative begins when a new recruit, Gilles Sentain, arrives in the desert and disrupts the orderly and structured existence that Galoup has fashioned for himself. Sentain and Galoup are foils: Galoup is older (played by Denis Lavant, 39 years old in 1999 but looking closer to 50) and his face is weathered, pockmarked, and to put it bluntly, ugly. Sentain, played by Grégoire Colin, is young and beautiful (24 years old in 1999). His skin is smooth, his features angular and chiseled, yet retaining an air of innocence. His nose is long and elegant compared to Galoup’s, which is squat and stumpy, and Sentain has a vaguely androgenous look, while Galoup is clearly an ageing man, and monstrously so. Sentain, at least in Galoup’s estimation, exhibits a “calm” and “openness” that attracts others, whereas Galoup must work for everything, his effort and straining visible, and he exists apart from the group, unable to take part in the Legion’s camaraderie and brotherhood. In one incredible scene, the rivalry between Galoup and Sentain is dramatized as they circle each another against the backdrop of the sea, holding eye contact the entire time, while the soundtrack to the Billy Budd opera plays in the background (the film itself is loosely adapted from the Melville novella). Read more »
