The Case for Blunders

Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books:

15802325Science consists of facts and theories. Facts and theories are born in different ways and are judged by different standards. Facts are supposed to be true or false. They are discovered by observers or experimenters. A scientist who claims to have discovered a fact that turns out to be wrong is judged harshly. One wrong fact is enough to ruin a career.

Theories have an entirely different status. They are free creations of the human mind, intended to describe our understanding of nature. Since our understanding is incomplete, theories are provisional. Theories are tools of understanding, and a tool does not need to be precisely true in order to be useful. Theories are supposed to be more-or-less true, with plenty of room for disagreement. A scientist who invents a theory that turns out to be wrong is judged leniently. Mistakes are tolerated, so long as the culprit is willing to correct them when nature proves them wrong.

Brilliant Blunders, by Mario Livio, is a lively account of five wrong theories proposed by five great scientists during the last two centuries. These examples give for nonexpert readers a good picture of the way science works. The inventor of a brilliant idea cannot tell whether it is right or wrong. Livio quotes the psychologist Daniel Kahneman describing how theories are born: “We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true.” A theory that began as a wild guess ends as a firm belief. Humans need beliefs in order to live, and great scientists are no exception. Great scientists produce right theories and wrong theories, and believe in them with equal conviction.

More here.

Abandoning Ukraine

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

ScreenHunter_531 Feb. 22 22.35Over the last few days, a disheartening consensus has emerged among self-styled Western progressives that there is little or nothing in the current Ukrainian revolution that merits solidarity. This mixture of wariness and indifference was already evident in the build-up to the bloody crackdown in Kyiv on February 18, but it has been stoked and heightened considerably since then by the clear and central role played in unfolding events by the Ukrainian extreme right, particularly by members of the so-called Right Sector and by the somewhat less extremist group Svoboda.

It is undeniable that the far right has taken a leading role in the shaping of post-Yanukovych Ukraine. But what international observers have entirely failed to grasp is that the choice between either supporting fascism or disowning the revolution is an entirely false dichotomy. Progressives worthy of the name could instead have taken the role of the far right as yet another challenge within a political situation that presented a complex cluster of challenges, including, most importantly, the removal of an utterly corrupt lackey of a neighboring dictator. The far right has come to own this revolution in part because of the prissiness of the left, the inability to accept that the situation might be intrinsically complex, and might impose common interests on groups that are otherwise entirely at odds.

The one place where the left seems to get this basic fact is in Russia. Now by 'Russian left' I don't mean people who watch Alex Jones or whomever on RT and who meet every criticism of Putin with the subject-changing remark, 'Well, it's no worse than what the US does'. By 'Russian left' I mean the Russians who want to see Putin go the same way as Yanukovych, so that they can really start building a free and egalitarian society.

More here.

WHY IS ACADEMIC WRITING SO ACADEMIC?

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

ScreenHunter_530 Feb. 22 22.31A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to publish this in an academic journal,” someone said. He thought it was more like something you’d read in a magazine.

Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work—practically and spiritually—is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing—the kind you read for fun—seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.

More here.

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

23COLE-master180Teju Cole at The New York Times:

“Writing poetry is an unnatural act,” Elizabeth Bishop once wrote. “It takes skill to make it seem natural.” The thought is kin to the one John Keats expressed in an 1818 letter to his friend John Taylor: “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Bishop and Keats both evoked a double sense of “natural”: that which is concerned with nature, with landscape, flora and fauna, and that which is unforced and fluent. In both senses, Derek Walcott is a natural poet.

Walcott, who turned 84 this year, began writing young. His first poem appeared in a local paper when he was 14, and his first volume, “25 Poems,” was self-published when he was 18. “Everyone wants a prodigy to fail,” Rita Dove wrote. “It makes our mediocrity more bearable.” Walcott did not fail. His early poems were expert, and even though they bore traces of his apprenticeship to the English tradition (in particular W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas), they were to prove thematically characteristic. Right from the beginning, he was keen to use European poetic form to testify to the Caribbean experience. This commitment made him a part of the boom in 20th-century Caribbean literature, a gathering of talents that included Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé on the French-­speaking side; and Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and C. L. R. James from the English-speaking islands, as well as the Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul, with whom Walcott was one of the Caribbean’s two Nobel Prize winners for literature.

more here.

Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake

Whistler-Nocturne_in_black_and_goldAN Wilson at the Finanacial Times:

An astonishing 20 years have passed since Richard Dorment and Margaret MacDonald’s exhibition of James McNeill Whistler at London’s Tate Gallery, and yet the thrill of the work – the remarkable “Nocturnes” of the Thames, the portraits, the nude drawings, the lithographs and etchings – is as fresh in my mind as if it had been yesterday.

It is more than time for a new biography of this great artist, American by birth but for most of his life a European, who left behind such a range of beautiful artworks and who was also, in the judgment of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, “a little viper”. Daniel Sutherland, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, has given us a warts-and-all portrait of Whistler, the man, the work and his times.

The father was an engineer, who was hired by the tsar of Russia to build the Moscow to St Petersburg railway. He died young and his widow Anna, destined to be the most famous artist’s model since the Mona Lisa, took the family back to America for a short spell. Anna’s tiny firstborn son James, after education at private school in England, was placed at the West Point military academy.

more here.

Letters home to India during the first world war

Daljit Nagra in The Guardian:

Soldiers-009Our people have many lice in their clothes, and they bite terribly. They are worse than a rifle bullet. But there are no mosquitoes or other creatures which bite mankind, and no snakes or scorpions at all.” This extract is from a letter by an Indian soldier in 1915. He is in France and writing home to a friend. The letter comes from a collection of correspondence copied by British military censors, revealing the experiences of the many Indian soldiers who fought in the first world war, that has just been digitised by the British Library. The collection also contains the censors' summaries of the letters, revealing their concerns.

By the time of the Armistice, India had provided more than 1.27 million men. The Indian army at this time was drawn mainly from the middle peasantry, recruited from the north and north-west of India partly on account of the “martial races” theory of the British which suggested that some races or castes were inherently more warlike than others. Most Indian soldiers in France were Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs. My family are Sikhs from Punjab, and my maternal grandfather served in the Indian army in the 1930s. I don't know if my family had any further involvement in the first world war, but, for me, these letters provide a valuable link to the history of my ancestors and their positive involvement with the empire.

More here. [Thanks to Sujatha Sundar.]

Saturday Poem

Syrinx Escape

The swan will waddle in
from its easy shadow
Leave its tear-shape imprinted
on the crushed rushes.

The butterfly will souse
its bridal-price of colour
It will fold its wings
on a weighed-down stalk.

A crisp froth will break
from the face of the water
only wisps will be left
snagged on its border.

———

And your body will finish
its graceful dance
vigour will pass
from your satin limbs.

You’ll have no defence
except the warrior reeds
dark grey spear heads
a living shield.
.

by Aifric Mac Aodha
from Gabháil Syrinx
publisher: An Sagart, Dublin, 2010
translation by author

An Unnecessary Woman: A world transformed by words

Aminatta Forna in The Independent:

BookOne morning in December, Aaliyah Sobhi, a 72-year-old resident of Beirut, misreads the label on a shampoo bottle and dyes her hair bright blue. With this accidental act, so begins Rabih Alameddine’s gorgeous fourth novel, An Unnecessary Woman, the story of a life lived in a city at war. The story’s conceit is simple and unusual. Aaliyah, who has spent her life working in a moderately unsuccessful bookstore in Beirut, passes her retirement translating works of fiction into classical Arabic. On the first of January each year she chooses her book. Last year it was WG Sebald’s Austerlitz; this year she ponders tackling Chilean Roberto Bolano’s mammoth 2666. For reasons of her own she never translates from English or French. When the translation is complete she does not send it to a publisher but stores it in the unused maid’s room at the back of her apartment, along with the translations of the books that went before. So far there are 57. Aaliyah is alone. There is an impotent ex-husband, who did not love her and whom she declined to love in turn. There is a father who died. There is an avaricious and ailing mother, who favoured the sons of her second marriage. Aaliyah’s step-brothers, equally avaricious, all want to get their hands on Aaliyah’s apartment. There are neighbours: husbandless women too, who meet for coffee each morning. From her flat below Aaliyah listens to their conversations and assiduously avoids the possibility of an encounter.

…An Unnecessary Woman is a story of innumerable things. It is a tale of blue hair and the war of attrition that comes with age, of loneliness and grief, most of all of resilience, of the courage it takes to survive, stay sane and continue to see beauty. Read it once, read it twice, read other books for a decade or so, and then pick it up and read it anew. This one’s a keeper.

More here.

Expanding civil rights: Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

From PBS.org:

BrownBrown v. Board of Education (1954), now acknowledged as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, unanimously held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the decision did not succeed in fully desegregating public education in the United States, it put the Constitution on the side of racial equality and galvanized the nascent civil rights movement into a full revolution. In 1954, large portions of the United States had racially segregated schools, made legal by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that segregated public facilities were constitutional so long as the black and white facilities were equal to each other. However, by the mid-twentieth century, civil rights groups set up legal and political, challenges to racial segregation. In the early 1950s, NAACP lawyers brought class action lawsuits on behalf of black schoolchildren and their families in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, seeking court orders to compel school districts to let black students attend white public schools.

One of these class actions, Brown v. Board of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by representative-plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children denied access to Topeka's white schools. Brown claimed that Topeka's racial segregation violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because the city's black and white schools were not equal to each other and never could be. The federal district court dismissed his claim, ruling that the segregated public schools were “substantially” equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine. Brown appealed to the Supreme Court, which consolidated and then reviewed all the school segregation actions together. Thurgood Marshall, who would in 1967 be appointed the first black justice of the Court, was chief counsel for the plaintiffs. Thanks to the astute leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court spoke in a unanimous decision written by Warren himself. The decision held that racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Court noted that Congress, when drafting the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s, did not expressly intend to require integration of public schools. On the other hand, that Amendment did not prohibit integration. In any case, the Court asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal education today. Public education in the 20th century, said the Court, had become an essential component of a citizen's public life, forming the basis of democratic citizenship, normal socialization, and professional training. In this context, any child denied a good education would be unlikely to succeed in life. Where a state, therefore, has undertaken to provide universal education, such education becomes a right that must be afforded equally to both blacks and whites.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Why the one appealing part of creationism is wrong

Lawrence Krauss in The New Yorker:

Ken-ham-creationism

Ken Ham

Earlier this month, Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Kentucky, held a debate with Bill Nye at the museum. Within the creationist crowd, Ham represents the young-Earth wing, which believes that the planet is around six thousand years old. He also has other extreme interpretations of biblical claims: for example, he believes that the Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs were actually vegetarians that lived in the Garden of Eden before the fall of Adam and Eve.

Ham often stresses a line of argument made within the broader creationist community, which resonates, at least somewhat, with the public at large. “There’s experimental or observational science, as we call it. That’s using the scientific method, observation, measurement, experiment, testing,” he said during the debate. “When we’re talking about origins, we’re talking about the past. We’re talking about our origins. You weren’t there, you can’t observe that…. When you’re talking about the past, we like to call that origins or historical science.” In other words, Ham was saying that there is a fundamental difference between what creationists call the “historical sciences”—areas of study, like astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology, that give us information about the early Earth and the evolution of life—and other sciences, like physics and chemistry, which appear to be based on experiments done in the laboratory today.

On the surface, this does not seem completely unreasonable. There is, after all, a difference between an observation and an experiment. In the laboratory, one can have much better control when attempting to establish cause-and-effect relationships. However, to suggest that somehow this qualitative difference between observation and experiment translates into any sort of deep qualitative difference between the different sciences mentioned above is to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science itself.

More here.

Should Writing Try to Humanize Particular Groups of People?

Anis Shivani in the Huffington Post:

ScreenHunter_529 Feb. 21 19.18I have no audience of actual contemporary readers in mind when I write anything, fiction, poetry, or criticism. I suppose if there is an abstract audience in mind it is an audience of the future, distant in time but not too distant, perhaps a hundred years away, when there might still be enough similarity with the present that they would be able to understand what I'm saying but not so distant that they can't comprehend what it's all about.

I'm not saying that this specific audience is what I always have in mind, but if pressed for an answer about audience, perhaps something like this would be my guess. I write inspired by writers I hold in high regard, primarily the high modernists, so you could say that they are my demanding audience: Am I keeping faith with the tradition? Can I hold my head high against the effort they've already made? I think if I wrote with any actual present audience in mind, whether one person or a larger number, I would be instantly lost, my writing would lose all value.

Writing for an audience really means writing for approval, and that is fine, everyone has that need, except the sources one is seeking approval from better be the highest authorities, who can also be contemporary writers. What if, say, Franz Wright, a poet I much admire, were reading my poetry, would he think it legitimate? Or if I write fiction, would it pass muster with Orhan Pamuk or J. M. Coetzee? If not, it's probably false.

More here.

The Strange, Deadly Effects Mars Would Have on Your Body

Kevin Fong in Wired:

ScreenHunter_528 Feb. 21 19.10Take gravity away, and our bodies become virtual strangers to us.

In our daily lives, gravity is that pedestrian physical force that keeps us glued to the ground. You have to go out of your way — climb a cliff face or jump out of a plane — before it starts demanding your attention.

But we are constantly sensing the effects of gravity and working against them, largely unconsciously.

Without the quadriceps, buttocks, calves, and erector spinae that surround the spinal column and keep it standing tall, the pull of gravity would collapse the human body into a fetal ball and leave it curled close to the floor. These muscle groups are sculpted by the force of gravity, in a state of constant exercise, perpetually loaded and unloaded as we go about our daily lives. That’s why the mass of flesh that constitutes the bulk of our thighs and works to extend and straighten the knee are the fastest-wasting group in the body.

In experiments that charted the changes in the quadriceps of rats flown in space, more than a third of the total muscle bulk was lost within nine days.

Our bones, too, are shaped by the force of gravity. We tend to think of our skeleton as pretty inert — little more than a scaffold on which to hang the flesh or a system of biological armor. But at the microscopic level, it is far more dynamic: constantly altering its structure to contend with the gravitational forces it experiences, weaving itself an architecture that best protects the bone from strain. Deprived of gravitational load, bones fall prey to a kind of space-flight-induced osteoporosis. And because 99 percent of our body’s calcium is stored in the skeleton, as it wastes away, that calcium finds its way into the bloodstream, causing yet more problems from constipation to renal stones to psychotic depression.

Medical students remember this list as: “bones, stones, abdominal groans, and psychic moans”.

More here.

Combating climate change with ammonia-fueled vehicles

Doo Won Kang in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

ScreenHunter_527 Feb. 21 19.01Why ammonia? An ammonia molecule is composed of one nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. Ammonia can be burned in internal combustion engines with minor modifications — emitting only nitrogen and water vapor from the tailpipe, even when only low-cost emissions controls are used. Unburned ammonia and nitrogen oxides in the engine’s exhaust would be removed by a selective catalyst reduction system. Ammonia can be produced, at an affordable cost, by a catalytic reaction between nitrogen (obtained from air, which is 78 percent nitrogen) and hydrogen (obtained by splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen).

Ammonia-fueled vehicles operate in much the same way as gasoline-fueled vehicles: Liquid ammonia is burned with oxygen, producing energy that is harnessed to drive the vehicle’s wheels. This familiar technology means that ammonia-fueled vehicles can generally be built and maintained in the same way as the current vehicle fleet. But unlike conventionally fueled vehicles, ammonia-powered cars would not emit carbon dioxide.

Most cars on the road can run on a mixture of 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent liquid ammonia, and could be modified to run on a mixture of up to 80 percent ammonia—at a cost of $1,000 to $5,000 per vehicle. An engine that could run entirely on ammonia is currently under development.

More here.

letting the beatles go

BeatlesBook390James Marcus at Harper's Magazine:

Because I’m a skeptical person, I tend to grow suspicious of the things I love. Which is why I’m wondering whether a half-century after the Beatles landed at JFK, it might be time to give them a rest. The demographic cohorts following my own will never attain our heights of Fab Four worship. And indeed, their impatience with Boomer culture strikes me as completely reasonable. The giants of that era keep sucking the air out of the room, don’t they? Imagine being told that guys in their seventies are still better than anything your own generation can produce. Imagine being peddled, year in and year out, a rosy View-Master panorama of that departed age, like Periclean Athens plus paisley and blotter acid.

No wonder a kind of Beatles fatigue has set in. Let the contemporary idols — Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Radiohead, Taylor Swift — have their turn. Whether their music will still sound as fresh fifty years hence is anybody’s guess. But you could make the same argument about, say, Monteverdi, whose operatic masterpiece L’incoronazione di Poppea went into a three-century-long hibernation after his death, only to find popular success right around the time the Beatles were recording “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Meanwhile, I’ll admit that my hoard of memorabilia functions quite literally as a fetish object: a magical means of accomplishing an impossible end, which is stopping time.

more here.

what makes poets great?

Kirby1largeDavid Mason at The Hudson Review:

The more I read, the more it seems a complete investment of one’s entire being is a necessity for greatness in the arts. Even to speak of greatness in our time invites derision. Who needs greatness when you can have tenure? Yet we’ve all seen it, haven’t we? Not in our contemporaries, the blur of smaller talents, but in the dead. Generalizations never stand up to scrutiny, but I will risk a few. Most contemporary poets I read seem too concerned with avoiding ridicule, trying to be the smartest kid in the workshop, rather than plumbing what Eliot called “the inexplicable mystery of sound”—bodying forth a whole charged expression of living. Much of our poetry seems denatured, flat. Intelligence abounds, cleverness is everywhere, but vitality is hard to find.

One experiment I frequently conduct is to open a contemporary journal and read only the first lines of poems. Usually the exercise proves soporific in the extreme. No novelist worth his salt would assume he deserved to be read without grabbing the reader by the throat, yet our poets are so often complacent, too comfortable in the expectation that someone will read them, even if only assigned to do so in a classroom.

more here.

skating the old-fashioned way

Screen-shot-2014-02-20-at-6.44.49-PMDan Piepenbring at The Paris Review:

If you’re like me, the Olympics have borne in you one mighty, overriding desire: to become a strapping world-class professional figure-skater. Well, we’re in luck, every one of us. Thanks to the glut of teaching materials available in the public domain, dazzling one’s peers in the rink and taking home the gold has never been easier.

As a starting point, consult an invaluable volume from 1897: T. Maxwell Witham’s A System of Figure-Skating: Being the Theory and Practice of the Art as Developed in England, with a Glance at its Origin and History. In sporting matters, Witham was no slouch—the title page notes that he was a “Member of The Skating Club.” Which skating club, you ask? Well, let me answer your question with a question: How many skating clubs do you belong to?

With verve and good humor, A System of Figure-Skating will teach you such cherished and essential maneuvers as “the Jagendorf dance,” “the Mercury scud,” “the spread-eagle grape vine,” “the sideways attitude of edges,” and—of course—the “United Shamrock.” Confused? You needn’t be. The System offers detailed instructions every step of the way.

more here.