Charlie Kurth at Aeon Magazine:

Immanuel Kant suggested an even graver problem with anxiety: it is incompatible with virtue. For Kant, the virtuous individual is someone who has brought ‘all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control’; therefore, he writes in The Metaphysics of Morals(1797), the ‘true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind’. But when we’re anxious, our minds are anything but tranquil. We lack the rational control that’s distinctive of virtue: it is emotion, not reason, that determines our behaviour. That’s bad.

This picture of anxiety as a dark and pernicious force certainly has illustrious supporters. Even so, I believe that it is mistaken. It goes against the grain to say this, but anxiety can be a good thing. Indeed, I hope to persuade you that it is central to our ability to successfully navigate moral and social life. I won’t go as far as to say that we needmore of it, but we should cultivate it. Worry is important; we should get it right.

more here.

Paula Byrne at the Times Literary Supplement:

Re-reading the youthful writings, one is struck again and again by the violence. A group of characters threaten murder by dagger, which shall be “steeped in your hearts blood”. A sister poisons another sister and is “speedily raised to the gallows” for her perfidy. A child bites off her mother’s fingers. There is also notable violence against the self. One young heroine inadvertently enters into an engagement with two gentlemen in the space of a single evening and kills herself by plunging into the river. Another is addicted “to the bottle”, and drinks herself half to death. In “Love and Freindship”, the two heroines, indulging in a bout of sensibility, are momentarily distracted by a road accident. They see “Two Gentlemen most elegantly attired but weltering in their blood”. When the heroines discover that the gentlemen are in fact their husbands, they respond like characters in a sentimental novel: “Sophia shrieked and fainted on the Ground – I ran instantly mad”. Sophia faints for so long that she catches cold, develops a fever and dies. Her final advice is not to faint but to run mad: “Beware of swoons, dear Laura . . . . A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequence”.

Critics have long seen “Love and Freindship” as an embryo version of Sense and Sensibility. Both works, of course, are attacks on the novel of sensibility. Austen’s first published novel establishes the type of novelist she is not.

more here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Longtime readers know that I’ve made a bit of an effort to help people understand, and perhaps even grow to respect, the Everett or Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (MWI) . I’ve even written papers about it. It’s a controversial idea and far from firmly established, but it’s a serious one, and deserves serious discussion.

Which is why I become sad when people continue to misunderstand it. And even sadder when they misunderstand it for what are — let’s face it — obviously wrong reasons. The particular objection I’m thinking of is:

MWI is not a good theory because it’s not testable.

It has appeared recently in this article by Philip Ball — an essay whose snidely aggressive tone is matched only by the consistency with which it is off-base. Worst of all, the piece actually quotes me, explaining why the objection is wrong. So clearly I am either being too obscure, or too polite.

I suspect that almost everyone who makes this objection doesn’t understand MWI at all. This is me trying to be generous, because that’s the only reason I can think of why one would make it. In particular, if you were under the impression that MWI postulated a huge number of unobservable worlds, then you would be perfectly in your rights to make that objection. So I have to think that the objectors actually are under that impression.

An impression that is completely incorrect.

More here.

Irvin D. Yalom in the New York Times:

Dr. Yalom, I would like a consultation. I’ve read your novel “When Nietzsche Wept,” and wonder if you’d be willing to see a fellow writer with a writing block.

No doubt Paul sought to pique my interest with his email. And he succeeded: I’d never turn away a fellow writer. As for the writing block, I felt blessed by not having been visited by one of those creatures and I was keen to help him tackle it.

Ten days later Paul arrived for his appointment. I was startled by his appearance. For some reason I had expected a frisky, tormented, middle-aged writer, yet entering my office was a wizened old man, so stooped over that he appeared to be scrutinizing the floor. Almost able to hear his joints creaking, I took his heavy battered briefcase, held his arm and guided him to his chair.

“All I know about you comes from your short email,” I said. “You wrote that you were a fellow writer, you’ve read my Nietzsche novel, and you have a writing block.”

“Yes,” he said. “And I’m requesting a single consultation. That’s all. I’m on a fixed income and can’t afford more.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “Tell me what I should know about the block.”

“I have to go back to my grad school days,” he began. “I was in philosophy at Princeton writing my doctorate on the incompatibility between Nietzsche’s ideas on determinism and his espousal of self-transformation. But I couldn’t finish. I kept getting distracted by such things as Nietzsche’s extraordinary correspondence, especially by his letters to his friends and fellow writers like Strindberg.”

More here. [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]

It’s Our Dance
—for Lorna

Every Sunday
I play Nina Simone’s
‘My baby just cares for me’
& with a different flower
in your hair every week
you spring out from the bar
& I leave the mixing desk
& we dance with our hangovers,
yes we dance around the bar
& last week we ended up
outside briefly on Lewes Road
in the petrol hazes
& we even waltzed
out to the beer garden
& everybody smiles
when we dance together
to ‘My baby just cares for me’
& for a few precious minutes
it’s as if we have all swallowed the moon
& everyone is lighter
& the world might not ever end.

by Brendan Cleary
from Face
publisher: Pighog, Brighton, 2013

Eoin O'Carroll in The Christian Science Monitor:

Are humans inherently happy, sad, or somewhere in between? A new study suggests that, at least when it comes to our vocabulary, we tend to look on the bright side of life. A team of mathematicians, computer scientists, and linguists at the University of Vermont and the MITRE Corporation combed through 10 languages' literature, movie subtitles, music lyrics, and, of course, Web pages and social media feeds, collecting an estimated 100 billion words from Twitter alone. The team used this data – from 24 types of sources in all – to draw up lists of the 10,000 most common words in each language. Then, the researchers had native speakers of each language rate their emotional response to each word on a 9-point scale, from saddest to happiest. For each of the 10,000 words of each language, the scientists collected 50 ratings, for a total of about 5 million scores.

The result? Every source averaged above 5. Our words, which the study's authors describe as “the atoms of human language,” reveal a “universal positivity bias.” “In every source we looked at,” said UVM mathematician Peter Dodds in a press release, “people use more positive words than negative ones.” All of the languages seemed to skew positive, but some did so more than others. In descending order of happiness, they are: Spanish, Portuguese, English, Indonesian, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean, and Chinese.

More here.

From Blackpast.org:

He was born to John C. and Sarah Peck in Carlisle, Pennsylvania around 1826. John Peck was a prominent abolitionist and minister who founded the local African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Carlisle. Peck was also a barber and wigmaker. John and Sarah Peck moved to Pittsburgh in the early 1830s where they established the first school for black children in the area. David was one of their first students. Between 1844 and 1846 David Peck studied medicine under Dr. Joseph P. Gaszzam, an anti-slavery white doctor in Pittsburgh. He then entered Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1846, three years after the institution opened. After he graduated in 1847, Peck toured the state of Ohio with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass promoting abolitionist ideals. His status as the first black graduate of a medical college was used by abolitionists to promote the idea of full black citizenship and was implicitly an attack on slavery. In 1849 Peck established his practice in Philadelphia. He lived in and worked from a red brick row house with his wife, Mary E. Peck, whom he married on July 24, 1849. Peck's medical practice, however, was not successful. Few doctors recognized his status, referred patients to him, or consulted with him.

Peck closed his medical practice in Philadelphia in 1851 and was preparing to travel to California when Martin Delany, an old friend and fellow Pittsburgh abolitionist, persuaded him instead to participate in an emigration project that would resettle U.S. free blacks in Central America. Delany, Peck, and other black emigrants moved to Nicaragua in 1852, settling on the east coast of the nation. The emigrants established San Juan Del Norte with Delaney as the mayor and commander of the militia. Peck practiced medicine and became the town physician. In 1854 he joined the Liberal side in the Nicaraguan Civil War and was killed by cannon fire in the town of Granada in January 1855. Dr. Peck was buried in the town square of the city of Granada.

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

Giulio Chiribella in Nautilus:

Let’s play a game. You get a box with two compartments and one ball. The ball could be in either compartment with equal probability, and my job is to guess which one. Ok, it’s not the most exciting game, but at least it’s fair. My odds are 50/50.

But suppose I know that your box was produced in a factory where a conveyor belt brought boxes to a cannon, which shot balls into one compartment or another depending on a coin toss. The coin toss was done once a day, and all the boxes produced on the same day have the ball in the same compartment. If I managed to get a box that was produced on the same day as yours, I would be able to win the game with certainty. So much for being fair.

The lesson is clear: Whether or not our game is fair depends on whether or not the ball in your box is correlated with some other system in my possession. In order to be sure that I don’t cheat, you need to collect all the systems that are correlated with your box and keep them safely in your control. But how can you be confident that you’ve collected all of them? The strongest guarantee is that your systems are in what physicists call a “pure state,” which means that nothing else can be correlated with it, and that you have maximal knowledge of your systems. A “mixed state,” on the other hand, gives you only partial knowledge, and some essential information can hide elsewhere.

And just like that, we have come to an idea at the heart of quantum mechanics, called the Purification Principle.

More here.

Before he entered politics, Yanis Varoufakis, the iconoclastic Greek finance minister at the centre of the latest eurozone standoff, wrote this searing account of European capitalism and and how the left can learn from Marx’s mistakes.

Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian:

In 2008, capitalism had its second global spasm. The financial crisis set off a chain reaction that pushed Europe into a downward spiral that continues to this day. Europe’s present situation is not merely a threat for workers, for the dispossessed, for the bankers, for social classes or, indeed, nations. No, Europe’s current posture poses a threat to civilisation as we know it.

If my prognosis is correct, and we are not facing just another cyclical slump soon to be overcome, the question that arises for radicals is this: should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising European capitalism?

To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath, while extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come.

For this view I have been accused, by well-meaning radical voices, of being “defeatist” and of trying to save an indefensible European socioeconomic system. This criticism, I confess, hurts. And it hurts because it contains more than a kernel of truth.

I share the view that this European Union is typified by a large democratic deficit that, in combination with the denial of the faulty architecture of its monetary union, has put Europe’s peoples on a path to permanent recession. And I also bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated. I confess I would much rather be promoting a radical agenda, the raison d’être of which is to replace European capitalism with a different system.

Yet my aim here is to offer a window into my view of a repugnant European capitalism whose implosion, despite its many ills, should be avoided at all costs. It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

You don’t need a field guide to recognise a luna moth. This large insect, found throughout the eastern half of North America, is unmistakeable. It has a fuzzy white body, red legs, feathery yellow antennae, and huge lime-green wings that can stretch up to 4.5 inches across. And at the end of its hindwings are a pair of long, streaming tails that can double the moth’s length.

In 1903, an entomologist named Archibald Weeks suggested that the tails direct predators away from the moth’s body. “Again and again may predator bat or bird, in an effort to capture a moth or butterfly, successively tear away sections of the tails, of which a sacrifice can be readily afforded, without disabling it or retarding its flight,” he wrote.

He was roughly right. More than a century on, Jesse Barber from Boise State University has shown that the luna moth’s tails are the equivalent of eyespotson fish and butterflies. These distinctive markings are typically found on dispensable body parts like tails and outer wings. They serve to draw a predator’s attention away from more vulnerable regions; better to lose a tail than a head.

Eyespots are visual defences, and bats—the main nemeses of moths—are not visual hunters. They find their prey with sonar—they make high-pitched squeaks and visualise the world using the rebounding echoes. To divert a bat, you need something that makes distracting echoes.

More here.

Oliver Sacks in the New York Times:

A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

More here.

From Blackpast.org:

Macon Bolling Allen is believed to be the first black man in the United States who was licensed to practice law. Born Allen Macon Bolling in 1816 in Indiana, he grew up a free man. Bolling learned to read and write on his on his own and eventually landed his first a job as a schoolteacher where he further refined his skills. In the early 1840s Bolling moved from Indiana to Portland, Maine. There he changed his name to Macon Bolling Allen and became friends with local anti-slavery leader General Samuel Fessenden, who had recently begun a law practice. Fessenden took on Allen as an apprentice/law clerk. By 1844 Allen had acquired enough proficiency that Fessenden introduced him to the Portland District court and stated that he thought Allen should be able to practice as a lawyer. He was refused on the grounds that he was not a citizen, though according to Maine law anyone “of good moral character” could be admitted to the bar. He then decided to apply for admission by examination. After passing the exam and earning his recommendation he was declared a citizen of Maine and given his license to practice law on July 3, 1844.

Finding work in Maine, however, was difficult. There were few blacks there willing and able to hire Allen and most whites were unwilling to have a black man represent them in court. In 1845 Allen moved to Boston, Massachusetts where he met his wife Hannah Allen. They had five sons together, most of whom became teachers. Allen passed the Massachusetts Bar Exam on May 5, 1845. Shortly afterwards he and Robert Morris, Jr., opened the first black law office in the United States. Allen soon set his sights even higher; in 1848 he passed another rigorous exam to become Justice of the Peace for Middlesex County, Massachusetts. In addition to his license to practice law he is believed to be the first black man to hold a judiciary position.

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

Tennis in the Snow

You looked up from your book, and apropos
of nothing, asked: Did I ever tell you
I played tennis once in the snow?

No, I said. You didn't. Where was this?

Tennis in the snow! you said again.
It was … in Colorado. No, in Kansas.
I was a young captain.

Did you win?

I don't know. I'd play this guy at the base.
Marty. I can see us laughing,
slipping and sliding all over the place.

Were tennis balls still white back then?

(A smile from you.) No, they were yellow
already. It was the early eighties.
It wasn't all that long ago.

*

Oh, I said. That's a shame.
I'm picturing the big white flakes
whirling around, and part of the game

is that you guys could hardly tell
the difference between falling snow
and the big white fuzzy tennis ball

or even the full moon that would seem
to lob over the net that night,
like a movie or in a dream.

Sorry, I said. I should leave it there.
I just wanted to be mixed up in it,
the place where your memories are.
.

by Mary Jo Salter
from The Antioch Review, Winter 2015

Claire Ainsworth in Nature:

As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex. A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine — but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male¹. “That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.

Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD². When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions.

…So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

More here.

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan in Gizmodo:

No one seemed to notice him: A dark figure who often came to stand at the edge of London's Hammersmith Bridge on nights in 1916. No one seemed to notice, either, that during his visits he was dropping something into the River Thames. Something heavy.

Over the course of more than a hundred illicit nightly trips, this man was committing a crime—against his partner, a man who owned half of what was being heaved into the Thames, and against himself, the force that had spurred its creation. This venerable figure, founder of the legendary Doves Press and the mastermind of its typeface, was a man named T.J. Cobden Sanderson. And he was taking the metal type that he had painstakingly overseen and dumping thousands of pounds of it into the river.

As a driving force in the Arts & Crafts movement in England, Cobden Sanderson championed traditional craftsmanship against the rising tides of industrialization. He was brilliant and creative, and in some ways, a luddite—because he was concerned that the typeface he had designed would be sold to a mechanized printing press after his death by his business partner, with whom he was feuding.

So, night after night, he was making it his business to “bequeath” it to the river, in his words, screwing his partner out of his half of their work and destroying a legendarily beautiful typeface forever. Or so it seemed.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Starts With A Bang:

This past week, the Powerball lottery jackpot went past $500,000,000, one of the largest sums in history, where the $564.1 million jackpot wound upbeing split by three winners. In order to win, you need to match five normallottery numbers — white balls numbered 1-through-59 — plus the Powerball: a red ball numbered 1-through-35. Each Powerball ticket costs $2, plus you have the option to pay an extra $1 to activate the power play, a multiplier that increases your payout for non-jackpot prizes.

Of course, if you win, you’ll conclude it will have been worth it, even if the payout was small, while if you lose, you’ll probably conclude that it wasn’tworth it. (Until the next drawing, of course, when you get another chance!)

But what does mathematics have to say about this? In particular:

• What are your odds of winning each individual combination?
• How much does each winning possibility pay out?
• Is it worth it to activate the power play option?
• And finally, how big does the jackpot have to be in order for playing the Powerball lottery to be “worth it”?

When you say worth it, by the way, it has a very specific meaning when it comes to mathematics. It means that the amount you can expect to win, on average, is greater than the amount you have to bet in order to play.

More here.

Roger Cohen in the New York Times:

After a Danish movie director at a seminar on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” and a Danish Jew guarding a synagogue were shot dead in Copenhagen, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the prime minister of Denmark, uttered a familiar trope:

“We are not in the middle of a battle between Islam and the West. It’s not a battle between Muslims and non-Muslims. It’s a battle between values based on the freedom of the individual and a dark ideology.”

This statement — with its echoes of President Obama’s vague references to “violent extremists” uncoupled from the fundamentalist Islam to which said throat-cutting extremists pledge allegiance — scarcely stands up to scrutiny. It is empty talk.

Across a wide swath of territory, in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, the West has been or is at war, or near-war, with the Muslim world, in a failed bid to eradicate a metastasizing Islamist movement of murderous hatred toward Western civilization.

To call this movement, whose most potent recent manifestation is the Islamic State, a “dark ideology” is like calling Nazism a reaction to German humiliation in World War I: true but wholly inadequate. There is little point in Western politicians rehearsing lines about there being no battle between Islam and the West, when in all the above-mentioned countries tens of millions of Muslims, with much carnage as evidence, believe the contrary.

More here.