Quentin Hardy in the New York Times:

Jeff Hawkins has been a pioneer of mobile devices, a distinguished lecturer in neuroscience, and a published author of a revolutionary theory of how the brain works. If he’s right about Big Data, a lot of people are going to wish he’d never gone into that field.

Mr. Hawkins, who helped develop the technology in Palm, an early and successful mobile device, is a co-founder of Numenta, a predictive software company. Numenta’s technology is based on Mr. Hawkins’s theories of how the brain works, a subject he has studied and published on intensively. Perhaps most important for the technology industry, the product works off streams of real-time information from sensors, not the trillions of bytes of data that companies are amassing.

“It only makes sense to look at old data if you think the world doesn’t change,” said Mr. Hawkins. “You don’t remember the specific muscles you just used to pick up a coffee cup, or all the words you heard this morning; you might remember some of the ideas.”

If no data needs to be saved over a long term and real-time data can stream in all the information that is needed, a big part of the tech industry has a problem.

More here.

Some writers leave only traces, contrails across the literary firmament. They expire with few or no publications to their names, their legacies left as much to chance as to the efforts of the occasional passionate admirer. Contemporaries offer testimonies of superlative talent unfulfilled, of death robbing posterity of a name that, given time and circumstance, surely would have been added to the rolls of the great. And while some work might survive, appearing in the occasional anthology, it is shrouded in the pall of its author’s biography. Samuel Greenberg belongs in the pantheon of literary manqués. He’s not totally forgotten—a few hundred poems survive; some were published in posthumous editions. In the 95 years since his death at the age of 23, he has endured as the prototypical “cult writer,” his works passed around like samizdat and occasionally earning an ardent, powerful admirer.

more from Jacob Silverman at Poetry here.

How the male gets into the female is only one of the many mysteries faced by the boy child. In his naive cosmology, God the Father is at best a remote presence. Presiding over his destiny instead is a figure he calls the Patroness, a composite of the Virgin Mary and his own mother in her youth. “The very purpose of her existence was to remain aloof from me and so to provide me with a task worthy of a lifetime of effort: the simple but baffling task of gaining admission to her presence.” A need to offer up to the female principle some strenuous act of penance becomes one of the deeper motives in Murnane’s writing, animating his novel Inland in particular. As a writer, Murnane is anything but a naive, straightforward realist. Putting down on paper what an Irish Catholic upbringing was like in Australia circa 1950 is not the limit of his ambition.

more from J.M. Coetzee at the NYRB here.

Antarctica, as it turned out, was more emptiness than facts. And a particularly empty emptiness, in the form of a deep crevasse, awaited Mawson and his comrades. After the saga that followed, from which a ruined Mawson would emerge as the sole survivor, he noted that, in the midst of his deprivation, “cocoa was almost intoxicating and even plain beef suet, such as we had in fragments in our hoosh mixture, had acquired a sweet and aromatic taste scarcely to be described… as different as chalk is from the richest chocolate cream.” Are we Mawson’s descendants or his antithesis? Either way, our lunchtime banter is trapped within an inescapable vanity: We take pride in occupying this rare and hallowed ground, but we do it by reveling in a cozy existence on a continent that could sponsor raptures over the benefits of starvation.

more from Jason Anthony at The Smart Set here.

From The Guardian:

There are certain novels that can shape a teenage boy's life. For some, it's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; for others it's Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. As a widely quoted internet meme says, the unrealistic fantasy world portrayed in one of those books can warp a young man's character forever; the other book is about orcs. But for me, of course, it was neither. My Book – the one that has stayed with me for four-and-a-half decades – is Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, written when Asimov was barely out of his teens himself. I didn't grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation. OK, economics is a pretty poor substitute; I don't expect to be making recorded appearances in the Time Vault a century or two from now. But I tried. So how do the Foundation novels look to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever. The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece; there has never been anything quite like it. By the way, spoilers follow, so stop reading if you want to encounter the whole thing fresh.

Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it's not exactly science fiction – not really.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Data from new research, published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, was analysed by Dr Richard Emes, a bioinformatics expert from the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science at The University of Nottingham. The results showed that disease-causing mutations occur in the genes that evolved to make us smarter than our fellow animals. Dr Emes, Director of The University of Nottingham's Advanced Data Analysis Centre, conducted an analysis of the evolutionary history of the Discs Large homolog (Dlg) family of genes which make some of the essential building blocks of the synapse—the connection between nerve cells in the brain. He said: “This study highlights the importance of the synapse proteome—the proteins involved in the brains signalling processes—in the understanding of cognition and the power of comparative studies to investigate human disease.”

The study involved scientists from The University of Edinburgh, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the University of Aberdeen, The University of Nottingham and the University of Cambridge. This cross-disciplinary team of experts carried out what they believe to be the first genetic dissection of the vertebrate's ability to perform complex forms of learning, attention and function. They focussed on Dlg—a family of genes that humans shared with the ancestor of all backboned animals some 550 million years ago. Gene families like the Dlgs arose by duplication of DNA, changed by mutation over millions of years and now contribute to the complex cognitive processes we have today. However, this redundancy and subsequent accumulation of changes in the DNA may have led to increased susceptibility to some diseases.

More here.

Richard Beck in n+1:

American liberals spent the last decade complaining about the “paranoid” style of their conservative opponents. With each new dire warning, each shift in the Department of Homeland Security’s now defunct color-coded “threat level” indicator (which never once dropped below yellow in nine years of operation), liberal commentators took the stage as level-headed counterparts to the prevailing Republican psychosis. George W. Bush, everyone knew, governed by fear. Liberals wanted something better, or believed they did.

Homeland, now in its second season on premium cable, suggests that liberals may have been fooling themselves. What they really wanted was not to eradicate Republican paranoia, but to overcome what made Republican paranoia so potent: the widespread impression that Democrats were too weak and too plagued by self-loathing to defend us from our enemies. Under Obama, our shared fears have been inflected with the rhetoric of tolerance, and torture has been repudiated (at least in its most egregious forms). But the terrorists, on Homeland and in real life, are still supposedly out there, still capable of anything, still ready to strike at a moment’s notice. Homeland works by acclimating its Democratic fans to a permanent political mood of suspicion and imminent catastrophe. President Obama, whose drone strikes have killed scores more than Bush’s torturers—and have done so with much less fuss from the left—has called it his favorite show.

Homeland is produced by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, former writers for the network hit 24, a war-on-terror action thriller in which patriot-hero Jack Bauer rushed around the world, dodging bazooka rounds and shooting or smashing or stabbing kneecaps, always in a desperate attempt to stop a terrorist attack. In interviews, Gordon and Gansa like to describe their new project as confessing the sins of its fascistic pro-torture predecessor (their New York Times interview was headlined “The Creators of ‘Homeland’ Exorcise the Ghost of ‘24’”). In practice, however, Homeland indulges many of the same fantasies. It promotes the old myths about al Qaeda’s omnipresence, wags its finger at Arab societies and the things they do to “their” women, and generates the same charge from scenes of mayhem and destruction. In the show’s fifth episode, a CIA agent asks a Marine sergeant to assist in interrogating an al Qaeda operative. “One question,” the Marine asks, hesitating. “Will he be tortured?” “We don’t do that here,” the agent replies, and the Marine breathes a sigh of relief. In Homeland‘s moral universe, strong opposition to torture provides cover for the very fears and myths that made torture possible in the first place.

Mathias Schreiber in Spiegel:

The expression “infernally haunting reality” neatly sums up the cultural environment in the German capital in the 1920s. One of Grosz's drawings depicts a disillusioned soldier in a steel helmet who wants to relax by the riverside in a large city, only to find a bloated corpse there, apparently a former comrade who had lost his desire to live.

The sarcastic title “Feierabend” or, quitting time, is a reference to both the death of the drowned suicide victim and the end-of-day feeling of the man looking at the corpse. The title — perverted into a negative take on the original meaning of the expression, which actually refers to the pleasant feeling of reaching the end of the workday — is sharp-edged, shocking and direct, exhibiting a keen view of real contradictions.

From this time on, this cold view of what writer Bertolt Brecht called the “asphalt city,” and its sinister agents, became established in the most important branches of art and hastened by the new mediums of photography, radio, poster advertising, records, the daily press, cabaret and film. Raw truth replaced expressively blissful beauty. “Art is boring; one wants facts,” author Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) wrote in defining this wave of reality-based art.

The memory of the second world war hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous. The threat of economic collapse now is not the same as the threat of Nazism and war. But the current crisis still poses a threat to parliamentary democracy in Europe. It may awaken the nationalist monsters which the European ideal had tried to consign to history. Today it is very hard to appreciate the huge historical forces that killed some 60m to 70m people, or even more. Chinese historians now claim that more than 40m of their countrymen died, double the number that had been assumed earlier. And when counting the war dead, we could add to these figures all the victims of famine and illness brought on by malnutrition. It is almost impossible to distinguish between categories of suffering. When we dwell on the enormity of the second world war and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors’ lives in ways impossible to predict.

more from Antony Beevor at Prospect Magazine here.

Still, one greets this larger-than-life study of the modern revolutionary’s vocation with a certain puzzlement—a kind of variation on the age-old radical quandary “What is to be done?” While reading Avrich’s excellent chronicle of Berkman and Goldman’s lives and times, I was once again moved by the depth of their idealism and commitment—but I was also repeatedly struck by how different our current situation is from theirs. Their experience of injustice and inequality was tangible. It meant something to speak, as Goldman and Berkman did, of “parasitic capitalists,” “capitalistic thieves and idlers,” in a world where labor truly was “the creator of all the wealth in the world,” where “everything in this city was created by our hands or the hands of our brothers and sisters.” Amid the present-day polarization of wealth, however, such evocations of a shared historical plight among the dispossessed, rare as they are, have little resonance. Thanks to the steady financialization of the economy and the export of manufacturing jobs to the impoverished developing world, fewer and fewer of us make anything—and certainly not under the exploitative conditions of the nineteenth-century factory. And this radical change in our everyday lives appears to have sharply weakened, if not altogether severed, our direct relationship to the rich.

more from Rochelle Gurstein at Bookforum here.

How many people think like this? Probably as many as think like Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Ramsay or one of David Foster Wallace’s characters. Petterson is remarkably gifted at capturing not so much randomness or irrelevance (habitual catchments of the stream of consciousness) as the staggered distances of memory: one detail seems near at hand, while another can be seen only cloudily; one mental picture seems small, while another seems portentous. Yet everything is jumbled in the recollection, because the most proximate memory may be the least important, the portentous detail relatively trivial. Petterson’s interest is pictorial and spatial rather than logical and interrogative. His sentences yearn to fly away into poetry; it is rare to find prose at once so exact and so vague. Yet Petterson is novelistically acute about human motive and self-deception. In both passages, our needy, self-involved narrator hovers over his memories, and finally pokes his way back into the narrative with local assertions of self: “and sometimes I, too, was in that taxi”; “which in fact I did at a funeral not long ago.”

more from James Wood at The New Yorker here.

Bilal Tanweer in Poetry, etc.:

How to describe the poetry of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, who Seamus Heaney described as “a poet of exemplary ethical and artistic integrity in world literature in the 20^th and 21^st century… a poet whose work fulfills the classical expectation that great literature will delight and instruct,” and who Robert Hass referred to as “one of the most influential European poets of the last half-century, and perhaps—even more than his [Nobel Prize winning] contemporaries Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska—the defining Polish poet of the post-war years,” and about whom Stephen Dobyns wrote in the New York Times claiming: “In a just world Mr. Herbert would have received the Nobel Prize long ago”?

I first encountered Zbigniew Herbert in a volume called Mr. Cogito and I experienced that rare exhilaration of encountering something wise, beautiful and unlike I had read before. It was a detached poetic voice that was also contemplative and humorous and deeply serious and yet playful all at the same time, and its sparse and precise language moved delightfully between thought and image. By the time I went through the collection, the marginalia of my copy were all exclamatory points and Wow’s of varying lengths and slants. Many of these poems have since become my ports of refuge, and one The Envoy of Mr. Cogito has grown into an anthem. However, on that first reading I dwelled longest on a much simpler poem where Herbert leads a kind of existential meditation stamped with his trademark humor:

Mr. Cogito Meditates on Suffering

All attempts to remove
the so-called cup of bitterness—
by reflection
frenzied actions on behalf of homeless cats
deep breathing
religion—
failed

one must consent
gently bend the head
not wring the hands
make use of the suffering gently moderately
like an artificial limb
without false shame
but also without unnecessary pride

do not brandish the stump
over the heads of others
don’t knock with the white cane
against the windows of the well-fed

drink the essence of bitter herbs
but not to the dregs
leave carefully
a few sips for the future

accept
but simultaneously
isolate within yourself
and if it is possible
create from the matter of suffering
a thing or a person

play
with it
of course
play
entertain it
very cautiously
like a sick child
forcing at last
with silly tricks
a faint
smile

More here.

Vijay Prasad in CounterPunch:

In October 1998, Said wrote in al-Ahram against Yasser Arafat’s promise to declare a Palestinian state in May 1999. The demographic and geographic realities of a “Palestinian state,” eaten into by Israeli settlements and hemmed in by the security barriers of Israeli paranoia, would not allow anything close to a state with actual sovereignty to become reality. What Arafat’s declaration would do, Said argued, is to accept the social conditions of apartheid – to invalidate the tradition of liberation and self-determination and to accept the crumbs of Bantustan. Those who believed that this was a first step to true self-determination, Said cautioned, were thinking illogically. “If by declaring that what, in effect, is a theoretical abridgment of true statehood is the first step towards the realization of actual statehood, then one might as well hope to extract sunlight from a cucumber on the basis of the sun having entered the cucumber in the first place.”

After the current vote, Joseph Massad weighed in at The Guardian. Massad correctly points out that the UN vote offers the Palestinians at most 18% of historic Palestine. “The vote is essentially an update of the partition plan of 1947,” Massad argues, “whereby the UN now grants Jewish colonists and their descendants 80-90% of Palestine, leaving the rest to the native inhabitants, and it risks abrogating the refugees’ right of return.” In other words, the Palestinian political project has been reduced to possession of a statelet.

Both Said and Massad drive their analysis away from the two-state solution toward binationalism – better to create one secular state where Palestinians and Israelis can live together. Such a state would abrogate Zionism, which is a form of supremacy, and end the apartheid social conditions that would otherwise be institutionalized in the two-state arrangement.

More here.

Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman in Wired:

Engineers working for the Assad regime in Syria have begun combining the two chemical precursors needed to weaponize sarin gas, an American official with knowledge of the situation tells Danger Room. International observers are now more worried than they’ve even been that the Damascus government could use its nerve agent stockpile to slaughter its own people.

The U.S. doesn’t know why the Syrian military made the move, which began in the middle of last week and is taking place in central Syria. Nor are they sure why the Assad government is transferring some weapons to different locations within the country, as the New York Times reported on Monday.

All that’s certain is that the arms have now been prepped to be used, should Assad order it.

“Physically, they’ve gotten to the point where the can load it up on a plane and drop it,” the official adds.

Sarin gas has two main chemical components — isopropanol, popularly known as rubbing alcohol, and methylphosphonyl difluoride. The Assad government has more than 500 metric tons of these precursors, which it ordinarily stores separately, in so-called “binary” form, in order to prevent an accidental release of nerve gas.

Last week, that changed. The Syrian military began combining some of the binaries. “They didn’t do it on the whole arsenal, just a modest quantity,” the official says. “We’re not sure what’s the intent.”

More here. And Obama has issued a warning:

From Nature:

Spaun sees a series of digits: 1 2 3; 5 6 7; 3 4 ?. Its neurons fire, and it calculates the next logical number in the sequence. It scrawls out a 5, in legible if messy writing. This is an unremarkable feat for a human, but Spaun is actually a simulated brain. It contains 2.5 million virtual neurons — many fewer than the 86 billion in the average human head, but enough to recognize lists of numbers, do simple arithmetic and solve reasoning problems.

Described for the first time in Science¹, Spaun — the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network — is the brainchild of Chris Eliasmith, a theoretical neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and his colleagues. It stands apart from other attempts to simulate a brain, such as the ambitious Blue Brain Project (see 'Brain in a box'), because it produces complex behaviours with fewer neurons. “Throwing a lot of neurons together and hoping something interesting emerges doesn’t seem like a plausible way of understanding something as sophisticated as the brain,” says Eliasmith. “Until now, the race was who could get a human-sized brain simulation running, regardless of what behaviours and functions such simulation exhibits,” says Eugene Izhikevich, chairman of the Brain Corporation in San Diego, California, who helped to develop some of the first large-scale neuronal models — including one with 100 billion neurons. “From now on, the race is more [about] who can get the most biological functions and animal-like behaviours. So far, Spaun is the winner.”

More here.

Releasing the Sherpas

The last two sherpas were the strongest,
faithful companions, their faces wind-peeled,
streaked with soot and glacier-light on the snowfield
below the summit where we stopped to rest.

The first was my body, snug in its cap of lynx-
fur, smelling of yak butter and fine mineral dirt,
agile, impetuous, broad-shouldered,
alive to the frozen bite of oxygen in the larynx.

The second was my intellect, dour and thirsty,
furrowing its fox-like brow, my calculating brain
searching for some cairn or chasm to explain
my decision to send them back without me.

Looking down from the next, ax-cleft serac
I saw them turn and dwindle and felt unafraid.
Blind as a diamond, sun-pure and rarefied,
whatever I was then, there was no turning back.

by Campbell McGrath
from Poetry, Vol. 201, No. 1, October, 2012

From The New York Times:

In Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, “Flight Behavior,” a central character is an entomologist tracking the effects of global climate change on monarch butterflies. The scientist, Ovid Byron, shows up at the Appalachian farm of Dellarobia Turnbow after she discovers a vast immigration of monarchs, displaced from their Mexican wintering spot by floods caused by global warming. There’s a love story, of course, and a coming-of-age story (Dellarobia finally gets to go to college), and an intergenerational buddy story — her precocious 6-year-old, Preston, bonds with Dr. Byron. But the take-away of this novel is that nature is off kilter, spinning out of control, changing before our very eyes.

As she did in “Prodigal Summer” (2000), Ms. Kingsolver uses fiction to advocate for environmental awareness. But this advocacy is embedded in a compelling narrative of love and loss, opportunities taken or missed, characters who behave in complex and sometimes perplexing ways. Dellarobia Turnbow and her family are dirt-poor, and a summer of incessant rain has left them desperate. The timberland where she discovers the butterflies has already been promised to a lumber company. Save the butterflies or save the Turnbows? Along with a suspenseful and sweetly told story, the science-nerd reader gets some basic ecology: “The temperature at which a wet monarch will freeze to death,” Dr. Byron tells Dellarobia, “is minus four degrees centigrade” (25 above zero Fahrenheit), meaning the monarchs are threatened by more than the proposed logging. That temperature range, Dr. Byron goes on, is “an inevitable event, for this latitude.”

“Flight Behavior” fits neatly into a genre of serious fiction with a snappy new name: lab lit.

More here.