by Jonathan Kujawa

A few years ago I decided I should learn a few card tricks. Like tying a necktie, eating with chopsticks, or building a fire, it seemed like the sort of thing everyone should have in their skill-set. As a person with mediocre dexterity I need tricks which don't depend on slight-of-hand. Fortunately for me the combinations, symmetries, and probabilities of playing cards means there is a rich tradition of card tricks which depend on math more than skill. That's the sort of trick even I can do.

My current favorite is Colm Mulcahy's Ice Cream Flavor Trick. Mulcahy is a mathematician and magician at Spellman College. He has written numerous articles and books on math and card tricks. You can find links to many of them on his homepage.

While idly shuffling cards I stopped and wondered: what is the chance that a deck of cards has ever occurred before in exactly the same order as the ones in my hand? [1]

On the one hand, I knew that there are many, many, many possible orderings of a 52 card deck. On the other hand, there are millions of decks of cards being shuffled all the time. Just imagine all the shuffling in Vegas alone!

The answer is truly startling! I was surprised and delighted by the how incredibly likely my deck of cards had never occurred before. Let's do the numbers together.

First, how many orderings are there for 52 card deck?

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by Jalees Rehman

On the evening of March 3 in 1514, Steven is sitting next to Friar Clay in a Nottingham pub, covering his face with his hands.

“I am losing the will to live”, Steven sobs, “Death may be sweeter than life in this world of poverty, injustice and war.”

“Do not despair, my friend”, Clay says, “for the printing press will change everything.”

Let us now fast-forward 500 years and re-enact this hypothetical scene with some tiny modifications.

On the evening of March 3 in 2014, Steven is sitting next to TED-Talker Clay in a Nottingham pub, covering his face with his hands.

“I am losing the will to live”, Steven sobs, “Death may be sweeter than life in this world of poverty, injustice and war.”

“Do not despair, my friend”, Clay says, “for the internet will change everything.”

Clay's advice in the first scene sounds ludicrous to us because we know that the printing press did not usher in an era of wealth, justice and peace. Being retrospectators, we realize that the printing press revolutionized how we disseminate information, but even the most efficient dissemination tool is just a means and not the ends.

It is more difficult for us to dismiss Clay's advice in the second scene because it echoes the familiar Silicon Valley slogans which inundate us with such persistence that some of us have begun to believe them. Clay's response is an example of what Evgeny Morozov refers to as “Internet-centrism”, the unwavering belief that the Internet is not just an information dissemination tool but that it constitutes the path to salvation for humankind. In his book “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism“, Morozov suggests that “Internet-centrism” is taking on religion-like qualities:

“If the public debate is any indication, the finality of “the Internet”— the belief that it's the ultimate technology and the ultimate network— has been widely accepted. It's Silicon Valley's own version of the end of history: just as capitalism-driven liberal democracy in Francis Fukuyama's controversial account remains the only game in town, so does the capitalism-driven “Internet.” It, the logic goes, is a precious gift from the gods that humanity should never abandon or tinker with. Thus, while “the Internet” might disrupt everything, it itself should never be disrupted. It's here to stay— and we'd better work around it, discover its real nature, accept its features as given, learn its lessons, and refurbish our world accordingly. If it sounds like a religion, it's because it is.”

Morozov does not equate mere internet usage with “Internet-centrism”. People routinely use the internet for work or leisure without ascribing mythical powers to it, but it is when the latter occurs that internet usage transforms into “Internet-centrism”.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

Men worldwide may have been startled to hear a ticking as their biological clocks sputtered into existence this week. A study of Swedish children born over a nearly 30 year period revealed there are negative health outcomes for those born to older fathers. In a paper published in JAMA Psychiatry this past Wednesday researchers found that in a sample size of over 2.6 million, advanced paternal age has a detrimental effect on the mental health of offspring, with a greater risk for autism and attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, as well as likelihood of suicide attempts and low educational attainment, even when controlling for multiple other factors. These findings have the potential to drive a cultural shift in the attitudes currently directed at mothers who postpone pregnancy until later in life.

For years research has shown that women put their unborn children and themselves at increased risk for a host of issues when they delay the onset of pregnancy— the most well-known example being that children born to mothers over 35 are significantly more likely to have down syndrome than children born to younger mothers. Despite these complications, and the reality that fertility peaks in the mid to late 20s, women in developed countries are delaying having children in ever higher numbers and at increasingly later ages. This demographic shift is attributed to women prioritizing education and career advancement before marriage and children— thus while women are making up a larger percentage of law, medical and MBA classes and achieving the kind of power in business and government that second-wave feminists dreamed of, they are also still committed to fulfilling roles as mothers, and consequently putting themselves and their children at risk.

In an powerful piece on her New Yorker blog page, Amy Davidson responded with provocative insight to the controversy created by the Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, earlier in February of this year. Armstrong explained his decision to make cuts to employee retirement benefits by offering the excuse, “two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost.” The ensuing firestorm of criticism directed at Armstrong was deserved and revealed a pattern of repugnant behavior when it comes to protecting quality of life for his employees and their families throughout his career. However, Davidson aptly connects this one example to a larger problem in American culture, where young adults are expected to delay the responsibilities of family in order to study and/or work round the clock. Davidson writes:

“We have an economy, culture, and workplace that push women and families in a certain direction, and then treat the higher risks they take on as theirs alone. Contempt replaces community. If Armstrong illustrates anything, it is the quickness with which a modern company can abandon those who reshaped their lives on its behalf, and made it rich.”

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by Madhu Kaza

There's a story I can't get out of my head. Except it's not a story, only the barest, stray thread. One winter morning a little over a year ago I turned on the radio to hear: “At least ten girls were killed yesterday as they were collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan. The girls, said to range in age from nine to eleven died in an apparent bomb blast . . . . In a separate incident in Kabul . . . ” And just like that the news ticked on. On that particular day the news cycle was consumed with the tragedy of the mass murder of twenty children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Reports patched together detailed timelines of what had happened at the school. As the names were released, stories of each of the victims began to take shape. And commentators launched into debates about gun control and school safety. I searched online for more information about the Afghan girls but the news became less and less clear. There were nine dead, not ten, and two girls were injured. There might have been one boy in the group. The youngest was possibly six, the oldest perhaps thirteen. The explosion was due to a land mine planted by the Taliban. Or it might have been a mine from the Soviet era.

It's a story I can't forget though there's so little to remember. Ten girls. Ages nine to eleven. Collecting firewood. Eastern Afghanistan. Died. When I think how strange it is that this particular incident, so meager in its narrative, should haunt me as it does, I am reminded of Alice Oswald's extraordinary book length poem Memorial.

Memorial is Oswald's version or “excavation” of Homer's Iliad. Only in a very loose sense can it be considered a translation. Oswald writes in her introduction that she has brushed away the narrative of The Iliad, and what remains is a “bipolar” poem that includes only the biographies of the dead soldiers and the similes of the original. The book according to Oswald is an “oral cemetery.”

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by Misha Lepetic

One fish says, “So, how's the water?”
The other fish replies, “What water?”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Richard Stallman, shuffling onto the stage at Cooper Union's Great Hall. Accompanying Stallman is the veritable Platonic Ideal of a potbelly; left behind are his shoes, which are almost immediately discarded and left by the podium. Padding around the same stage where, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave the speech that ignited his political career, Stallman proceeded to subject his New York audience to a rambling disquisition on freedom and computer code, consisting of oftentimes astonishingly petty invective, and peppered with various requests that veered from the absurd to the hopelessly idealistic, but which ultimately served to drive away a good portion of the audience, including myself, well before its conclusion, nearly three hours later.

Why is this recent encounter with a nerd's nerd at all worth recounting? (While entertaining, I will forego the petty bits, although you can view the whole talk here). Simply because, in computing circles, Stallman is an archetype: the avenging angel of free software. Over 30 years ago, he founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which has since that time been developing the GNU system, a free operating system that was completed by the addition of Linus Torvald's Linux kernel. It is no understatement to say that the smooth functioning and scalability of much of the Internet is thanks to the overall availability and robustness of the GNU/Linux operating system and its various derivative projects. These, in turn, are the result of probably millions of hours of volunteer labor.

So when Stallman says ‘free,' he really means it, and this is where the trouble begins. According to the FSF, free software allows anyone

(0) to run the program,

(1) to study and change the program in source code form,

(2) to redistribute exact copies, and

(3) to distribute modified versions.

This is a simple and powerful set of axioms. It also requires certain conditions to be met, the most challenging of which is access to the code in its source form. Any time the chain of modification and distribution is broken – say, if the person modifying the code chooses to make the source code unavailable, or chooses to charge a fee for the modification – the code is no longer considered free. Of course, ‘unfree' code can also be made free (this is in fact what Torvalds did with Linux).

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Jinn: a spirit capable of appearing in human and animal forms and influencing humankind for either good or evil.

A startling laugh, low as if muffled by a dupatta, an old net dupatta I imagine, makes me turn but there is no one there. The walls are the color of vanilla ice cream and the décor is simple and modern apart from a few objects like doilies with Baluchi embroidery, an heirloom paandaan, a tray from the copper bazaar. There are the usual consumer electronics and curtains in a thick, embossed fabric— good for darkening the room against the defeating heat. A whiff of chambeli oil hangs in the punishing late June air for a moment. I recall how the jinn are attracted to fragrances too sweet on the human olfactory scale. Like animals, the jinn have a different wavelength for sensory perception. That low laugh might have actually been much lower or higher for non-human ears, the scent not as sickly sweet. Both probably came from the realm of the jinn, though my rational mind would not allow that thought.

Rumor has it that the maid, a middle aged stocky woman, is either a jinn in human form or a medium for the jinn. She speaks only when spoken to but she speaks in two distinct timbres: one, an ordinary female voice, the other heavy like gravel, a wolf-like growl. It’s hard to predict how the next utterance will sound, whether it will come from the woman or the jinn she houses in her body. Her name is Ishrat, which means luxury. In Urdu Ishrat is a male name too. She is barely noticeable in my peripheral vision in her hand-me-down lawn suit in candy colors as she goes about her usual cooking and cleaning but then her eyes meet mine in the mirror she is dusting. I feel a chill when I glimpse her classic jinn face—eyebrows arching high over the most ancient eyes—eyes brimming with the intense heat of summer afternoons, quicksand eyes that one will descend into uncontrollably; nose—an alignment of broken things, forehead vertiginously high like the ceiling of old train stations.

I don’t want the jinn to detect my loss of composure. I reach for the tea tray she has placed next to my stack of books. The sound of china is comforting and when I go back to my reading, I tell myself never to look into those eyes again. Extracting myself won’t be easy the next time. I’m pulled by the weight of the long afternoon, its lull, and Urdu’s sonorous script, each looping “laam” and “noon” cradling me, but I cannot let myself fall asleep in Ishrat’s presence. The minute I close my eyes, I’m reminded of other jinns I’ve known in stories. There was one that possessed my aunt when she was six or seven— a docile and petit girl, she acquired superhuman strength for no apparent reason and became capable of knocking down several grown men at a time until she was exorcized. This was the India of my imagination and my grandmother’s memories where women who were careless about covering their hair when they were near aged trees were certain to attract the attention of the jinn. I recall long hair, coconut oil, the slow combing and the washing with scented amla, the advice to keep away from the sprawling Oak and Tamarind.

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