Olga Khazan in The Atlantic:

In November, I came across a story that made absolutely no sense to me. A 33-year-old consultant named Niall Rice gave $718,000, little by little, to two Manhattan psychics who promised to reunite him with an old flame. How could someone be so gullible? Rice himself didn’t even seem to know: “I just got sucked in,” he told The New York Times later.

As it turns out, it’s much easier to fall for these types of cons than many people think. As Maria Konnikova, a psychologist and New Yorker contributor, explains in her new book, The Confidence Game, grifters manipulate human emotions in genius (and evil) ways, striking right when we feel lovelorn or otherwise emotionally vulnerable. I recently spoke with Konnikova about cons, why they happen, and if there’s any way to avoid becoming a fraudster’s next target. A lightly edited version of our conversation follows.

Khazan: You have so many great examples of cons in your book. Which one was the most remarkable to you?

Konnikova: I have too many favorites to choose. The one that really, I think, piqued my interest the most, which is why I explore it throughout the book, is the case I open the book with, of Ferdinand Waldo Demara. The fact that not only was he able to take on so many different guises, including as a surgeon—I mean that’s crazy, that he was able to fool the Navy into giving him an entire ship full of people. But, the fact that he was successful, that he actually performed surgery, so he was able to bluster his way through it, which is kind of remarkable if you think about it. That someone who didn't even graduate from high school was able to do this. And I also thought it was really interesting that so much of his life isn't known or at least, wasn't known to the public, because he has a really dark side and he's actually kind of a nasty person, but all of that got lost because his biographer was also conned by him, which is kind of incredible.

More here.

Melissa Davey in The Guardian:

Around the world, teams of engineers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers are using all kinds of exotic materials in the race to build the world’s first practical quantum computer, capable of processing amounts of data in a matter of hours that would take today’s computers millions of years.

Caesium, aluminium, niobium titanium nitride and diamond are among the substances being used by researchers trying to determine which will best allow particles to maintain a delicate quantum state of superposition, where particles exist across multiple, seemingly counterintuitive states at the same time.

But the decision by researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia to use cheap and widely available silicon, the building block of all modern electronic devices, has led to significant advances in their attempts to win the quantum race.

The team’s members believe that because silicon is already widely available and used in devices like laptops and mobile phones it will be easier to manufacture and upscale the world’s first functioning quantum computer. And their faith in it has paid dividends.

So groundbreaking have their discoveries been that in December, Telstra announced an in-principle commitment of $10m over the next five years to the team at the university’s centre of excellence for quantum computation and communication technology, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia also pledged $10m.

Prof Michelle Simmons is director of the centre and an internationally renowned quantum researcher.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

One day in grad school, a couple of friends and I were sitting at a table in a hallway in the astronomy building, working on a problem set. The professor who had assigned the problems walked by and noticed what we were doing — which was fine, working together was encouraged. But then he commented, “Hey, I’m confused — you’re all smart guys, so how come the girls have been scoring better than you on the problem sets?” Out loud we mumbled something noncommittal, but I remember thinking, “Maybe they are … also smart?”

This professor was a good-hearted guy, who would have been appalled and defensive at the suggestion that his wry remark perhaps reflected a degree of unconscious bias. Multiply this example by a million, and you get an idea of what it’s like to be a woman trying to succeed in science in a modern university. Not necessarily blatant abuse or discrimination, of the sort faced by Marie Curie or Emmy Noether, but a constant stream of reminders that many of your colleagues think you might not be good enough, that what counts as “confident” for someone else qualifies as “aggressive” or “bitchy” when it comes from you, that your successes are unexpected surprises rather than natural consequences of your talent.

But even today, as we’ve recently been reminded, the obstacles faced by women scientists can still be of the old-fashioned, blatant, every-sensible-person-agrees-it’s-terrible variety.

More here.

Simon Critchley at The New York Times:

On the title track of “Blackstar,” the David Bowie record released just a couple of days before his death on Jan. 10, Bowie sings, “I’m not a pop star.” True, he was an attractive celebrity with hit records, great hair and a vaguely gender-bending past. But for me, and for his millions of fans, he was someone who simply made life less ordinary. Indeed, Bowie’s music made me feel alive for the first time. And if that sounds like overstatement, then perhaps you don’t get what music is about and what it can do.

For the hundreds of thousands of ordinary working-class boys and girls in England in the early 1970s, including me, Bowie incarnated something glamorous, enticing, exciting and mysterious: a world of unknown pleasures and sparkling intelligence. He offered an escape route from the suburban hellholes that we inhabited. Bowie spoke most eloquently to the disaffected, to those who didn’t feel right in their skin, the socially awkward, the alienated. He spoke to the weirdos, the freaks, the outsiders and drew us in to an extraordinary intimacy, although we knew this was total fantasy. But make no mistake, this was a love story. A love story that, in my case, has lasted about 44 years.

more here.

Rudolph Herzog at Lapham's Quarterly:

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, there were only a handful of aerial drones in its invasion force. By 2010 the Pentagon had nearly 7,500 drones in its arsenal. Today almost one in three U.S. military aircraft does not have a pilot. This technological revolution has been driven by the use of weaponized American drones, especially the Predator and Reaper. To illustrate the impact of these new weapons: drone campaigns in Pakistan, a country not at war with the U.S., have killed more people than died in the entire NATO-led war on Yugoslavia in 1999.

Despite the futuristic concept of robotic air warfare, drone technology goes back a hundred years. The technological groundwork was first established by genius inventor Nikola Tesla, who introduced radio-control technology at Madison Square Garden in 1898. Tesla immediately realized his invention’s military potential, noting that the technology would allow man to build devastating remote weapons that would be a deterrent so inhuman and destructive that, in his imagination, they would “lead to permanent peace between the nations.”

Driven by the same fin-de-siècle enthusiasm, Archibald Montgomery Low, a British engineer, recognized the potential of marrying airplanes with wireless transmission. At the beginning of World War I, he won a commission to build a remotely piloted weapon to destroy German Zeppelins.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

It wasn’t the concept of the blockbuster that I had found troubling 20 years ago, but the idea of making Vermeer the subject of such a show. Few artists seem more unsuited to a hurried and harried viewing experience. One must shut out the noise of the wider world to enter the mysterious worlds portrayed in his small canvases. Consisting of no more than a few figures, but typically showing just a solitary woman engaged in some domestic activity, these pictures are as tranquil as still lifes. A young woman pouring milk from a jug, reading a letter, holding a pitcher of water, making lace, or gazing into a mirror—Vermeer imbues these everyday rituals, by virtue of his mastery of color and the expressive possibilities of light, with great feeling and poetry. They are intimate, quiet scenes, and almost all of them are enigmatic in some way—to puzzle out their mysteries requires time and attention. InWoman in Blue Reading a Letter, for example, the questions come almost at once. Why are the woman’s pearls laid out on the table, partially covered by a sheet of paper? What does her letter say? What causes her to adopt that curious pose, lips parted, head tilted ever so slightly? Has the letter been sent by a lover, someone at sea perhaps, as suggested by the map of the Dutch states of Holland and West Friesland hanging behind her? Most compelling of all: Is the woman pregnant, as Vincent van Gogh had suggested in 1888? Or is her bulbous blue jacket simply typical of the oversized clothing worn by Dutch women in the 17th century, a time when pregnancy would not have been depicted in art? Nothing about this canvas—or Vermeer’s other paintings, for that matter—is easy or clear.

more here.

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like
his.
.

By Ted Kooser
from Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985 by Ted Kooser
University of Pittsburgh Press.
.
.

Peter Wehner in The New York Times:

Beginning with Ronald Reagan, I have voted Republican in every presidential election since I first became eligible to vote in 1980. I worked in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and in the White House for George W. Bush as a speechwriter and adviser. I have also worked for Republican presidential campaigns, although not this time around. Despite this history, and in important ways because of it, I will not vote for Donald Trump if he wins the Republican nomination.

…Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it. I understand that it often happens that those of us in politics don’t get the nominee we want, yet we nevertheless unify behind the candidate who wins our party’s nomination. If those who don’t get their way pick up their marbles and go home, party politics doesn’t work. That has always been my view, until now. Donald Trump has altered the political equation because he has altered the moral equation. For this lifelong Republican, at least, he is beyond the pale. Party loyalty has limits. No votes have yet been cast, primary elections are fluid, and sobriety often prevails, so Mr. Trump is hardly the inevitable Republican nominee. But, stunningly, that is now something that is quite conceivable. If this scenario comes to pass, many Republicans will find themselves in a situation they once thought unimaginable: refusing to support the nominee of their party because it is the best thing that they can do for their party and their country.

More here.

From Delanceyplace:

Today's selection — from The Horse by Wendy Williams. Climate change has varied widely through time. The temperature increase during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) of 56 million years ago, in which global temperatures rose at least 5°C for 200,000 years, may have helped lead to the rise of mammals: “[During the PETM] it was hot. … In fact, it was as though there was a sudden explosion of heat, as remarkable in its own way as the fall of the asteroid had been 10 million years earlier. Curiously, this explosion of heat also marks the appearance of Polecat Bench, [Wyoming's] horses and primates. This was a time when temperatures in some places shot up by 6 or 8 degrees Celsius in a very short time period, lingered at those heights, then, almost as sud­denly, dropped back down. The cause of this heat spike remains elusive, but it may have been due to large bursts of methane that bubbled up from the deep ocean.

…”It's hard for us to imagine in our twenty-first-century world, where we accept the cruel reality of sweltering summers and freezing winters, but for a good deal of Earth's history, including most of the Eocene, the planet enjoyed fairly uniform temperatures. For example, during the Eocene, the world north of the Arctic Circle was so warm that crocodiles flourished there. There were no ice caps, of course, and so much freshwater flowed into the Arctic Ocean that a layer of fresh­water sat like a lens over the salt water. The freshwater Azolla fern was plentiful. Forests of redwoods and walnut trees grew there. Pale­ontologists have found the remains of giant ants usually associated with the tropics.”

More here.

Katherine Q. Stone in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In the summer of 2014, three years after I read Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence for the first time, I flew to Istanbul. It was one year after the anti-government protests in Gezi Park that brought international attention to Turkey’s widespread political corruption, media censorship, and police brutality. Though I had obsessively followed the protests and attended rallies of support in New York, my reasons for coming to Istanbul weren’t political. Instead, I came for Pamuk. I wanted to see if the way he described the city in his novels would match my experiences; or if, as a yabancı, a foreigner, the city’s best secrets would always remain out of my reach.

I arrived in Istanbul two days after the Soma Mining Disaster, when the entire city was collectively mourning the 301 men who had died in the explosion. A resulting conflagration had just been extinguished. The country came to a standstill as, one by one, survivors, and then bodies, were lifted from the mine. Talk of dangerous working conditions began to spread, with miners saying they had been too frightened to speak up for fear of losing their jobs. Thousands of protesters gathered in Istanbul, Izmir, and several other major cities, including Ankara and Bursa. Photographs surfaced of Yusuf Yerkel, an aide to then-Prime Minister (and now President) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, kicking a protester in the face, which led to further protests. The government issued a ban on public protests, sending water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas onto the streets. Lawyers on their way to assist the victims’ families were detained. YouTube had been banned.

More here.

Michael Graziano in The Atlantic:

When Isaac Newton was 17 years old, he performed a series of experiments with prisms and light beams. Within weeks he discovered the scientific explanation for color, invented the reflecting telescope, proposed the particle theory of light, and deduced that the human eye contained three receptor types corresponding to the three primary colors. Not bad for a teen.

Newton’s insights were not easily accepted. At the time, the prevailing theory of color was metaphysical. White light was thought to be pure, heavenly, and scrubbed of all contaminants, whereas colored light was contaminated by the worldly surfaces it touched. To scholars, the exact process by which white light became dirtied was a philosophical hard problem worthy of debate.

We now know why that hard problem was so darn hard. The brain processes the world in a simplified and inaccurate manner, and those inaccuracies gave people the wrong idea about color. Deep in the visual system, the brain reconstructs information about light. In that simplified code, white corresponds to the color channels registering zero and the brightness channel cranked up high. Pure luminance without color is a physical impossibility, because white light is a mixture of all colors. The pre-Newtonian problem of color was hard because it had no possible solution.

Why would the brain evolve such an inaccurate, simplified model of the world? The reason is efficiency. The brain didn’t evolve to get all the scientific details right. That would be a waste of energy and computing time. Instead, it evolved to process information about the world just well enough, and quickly enough, to guide behavior. All the brain’s internal models are simplified caricatures of the world it models. Arguably, science is the gradual process by which the cognitive parts of our brains discover the profound inaccuracies in our deeper, evolutionarily built-in models of the world.

More here.

Mark Hay in Good:

Peter Singer is arguably one of the world’s best-known modern philosophers. Singer has been based out of Princeton University since 1999 and has a host of awards and honors to his name. He’s perhaps best known for his seminal 1975 tomeAnimal Liberation, which all but coined that term (he’d used it earlier in 1973) and helped to launch the movement around it. Arguing that there was no real value or significance in the distinction between species and rejecting the need for reciprocal social contracts for ethics to exist, he asserted that we ought to do the greatest good for the most living beings in the world by instituting animal rights (via non-violent activism), combating factory farming, and pursuing vegetarianism. But Singer’s interests and philosophical works go far beyond these best-of conceptual touchstones.

A classical utilitarian, Singer concerns himself with sorting out hierarchies of need and interest to allocate resources, attention, and effectively provide the greatest good to the most beings. His interests have drawn him into debates on everything from population control to the right to death and every other hot-button political issue of every era since he became a public intellectual. Recently he’s become an outspoken commentator on effective altruism and corporate ethics.

Singer’s general preoccupation with determining the best and most rational courses for human behavior towards the wider world dovetail nicely with (and have led him to previously address) issues related to climate change.

More here.

John Nichols at The Nation:

David Bowie declared himself “apolitical.” Yet he taught us how to rebel.

Bowie abhorred the corruptions of empire (he famously rejected designation as a commander of the Order of the British Empire, along with a knighthood), and he had no taste for rigid partisanship, saying in the fall of 1977 (even as his song “‘Heroes’” was heard as an anthem of global liberation), “The more I travel and the less sure I am about exactly which political philosophies are commendable.”

Melody Maker’s cover story in that season when punk rock was ripping it all up had Bowie rejecting his own outrageous statements of the past (“I am not a fascist”) and offering the sober explanation that “The more government systems I see, the less enticed I am to give my allegiance to any set of people, so it would be disastrous for me to adopt a definitive point of view, or to adopt a party of people and say ‘these are my people.’”

On the occasions when Bowie did adopt a definitive point of view—as when he expressed opposition to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence—his stances could be frustrating for those who came to recognize that the man whose music so frequently celebrated insurrection did not always rush to the barricades. Bowie played benefits for Tibet House. His songs called outmilitarism and nuclear madness, wars of whim, and surveillance states.

more here.

George Musser at Nautilus:

Our world is crisscrossed by a web of these seemingly mystical relationships. And in the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed a remarkable evolution in attitudes among physicists toward locality. In my career as a science writer and editor, I have had the privilege of talking to scientists from a wide range of communities—people who study everything from subatomic particles to black holes to the grand structure of the cosmos. Over and over, I heard some variant of: “Well, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen if for myself, but it looks like the world has just got to be nonlocal.”

To make sense of nonlocality, the first step is to invert our usual understanding of space. Physicists and philosophers can define space as the fact that the natural world has a very specific structure to it. Instead of saying that space brings order to the world, you can say that the world is ordered and space is a convenient notion for describing that order. We perceive that things affect one another in a certain way and, from that, we assign them locations in space. This structure has two important aspects. First, the influences that act on us are hierarchical. Some things affect us more than other things do, and from this variation we infer their distance. A weak effect means far apart; a strong effect implies proximity. The philosopher David Albert calls this definition of distance “interactive distance.” “What it means that the lion is close to me is that it might hurt me,” he says. This is the opposite of our usual mode of thinking. Rather than cry, “Watch out, the lion is close, it might pounce!” we exclaim, “Uh-oh, the lion might pounce on me; I guess it must be close.”

more here.

Frederic Raphael at The Times Literary Supplement:

Joseph Roth has emerged as one of the greatest, certainly the most prescient, of the German writers of the entre-deux-guerres. If Thomas Mann achieved wider renown, it was due in good part to his performance as the aloof man of letters. Writing to Stefan Zweig in 1933, Roth was typically irreverent: “I have never cared for Thomas Mann’s way of walking on water. He isn’t Goethe . . . . [He] has somehow usurped ‘objectivity’. Between you and me, he is perfectly capable of coming to an accommodation with Hitler . . . . He is one of those people who will countenance everything, under the pretext of understanding everything”.

By contrast, The Hotel Years – an anthology of Roth’s shorter journalism, collected and translated by Michael Hofmann – includes a gentle pen portrait, from 1937, of Franz Grillparzer. Composed in Parisian destitution, it demonstrates how Roth came to treasure the irretrievable civilities of the old Europe. Of the Austrian playwright’s single meeting with Goethe, he observed, “It was like a Friday going out to see what a Sunday is like and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday”. In Roth’s case, exile and penury bestowed sorry radiance on the lost world of the shtetl in which the impoverished Ost- Juden had no occasion for alien affectations; unashamed thieves, smugglers, tricksters and whores nurtured no illusions, as Western Europe’s haute Juiverie did, of exemption from malice. Whether their obituarist in Weights and Measures (1937) would ever have been happy actually living among them is another matter.

more here.

Richard Scorerin New Humanist:

‘‘We know we have a problem, but we do not know the full extent of the problem . . . We will commission an independent investigation of sharia law in England and Wales.” In a speech in March 2015 the Home Secretary Theresa May promised a review of the role of sharia courts. In an apparent toughening of political rhetoric, May appeared to situate the issue squarely within wider concerns about Islamist extremism following the “Trojan horse” and teenage jihadi scandals. The growth of sharia courts, May implied, is evidence “that a small but significant number of people living in Britain – almost all of whom are British citizens – reject our values”.

The sharia debate has been rumbling for several years. In 2007 the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, provoked a furore when he claimed that it was “unavoidable” that English law would need to incorporate sharia. At one extreme, far right groups have portrayed sharia courts as a threat to British “cultural integrity”, conflating sharia with unrelated but emotive issues like the grooming scandals in Rotherham. At the other end of the spectrum, some prominent legal figures like Lord Phillips, a former President of the Supreme Court, have argued that there “is no reason why sharia law should not be the basis for alternative dispute resolution”. The lawyer Sadakat Kadri, author of Heaven and Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law, maintains that much press coverage of this subject is “hysterical”. Concerns about the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT), one of the leading UK networks of sharia councils, “bore no relation to the risks it posed”, Kadri suggested, particularly as the MAT had no jurisdiction over criminal matters or cases involving children. The most detailed and evidence-based critique of sharia has come from secularist campaigners who, whilst rejecting caricatures of Islam, have highlighted concerns about the treatment of women and children in sharia courts, especially in cases where women have been forced to return to abusive relationships, or custody decisions have ignored child welfare.

More here.

Before you could ever know
what would happen,
you happened.

After you've known you happened,
there’ll come a day you will not know
you had happened.
…………………….—Shiloh Reed

When I was Conceived

It was 1945, and it was May.
White crocus bloomed in St. Louis.
The Germans gave in but the war shoved on,
and my father came home from work that evening
tired and washed his hands
not picturing the black-goggled men
with code names fashioning an atomic bomb.
Maybe he loved his wife that evening.
Maybe after eating she smoothed his jawline
with her palm as he stretched out
on the couch with his head in her lap
while Bob Hope spoofed Hirohito on the radio
and they both laughed. My father sold used cars
at the time, and didn’t like it,
so if he complained maybe she held him
an extra moment in her arms,
the heat in the air pressing between them,
so they turned upstairs early that evening,
arm in arm, without saying anything.
.

by Michael Ryan
from New and Selected Poems
Hougton Mifflin, 2005

From KurzweilAI:

Diclofenac, a common painkiller, has significant anti-cancer properties, researchers from the Repurposing Drugs in Oncology (ReDO) project have found. ReDO, an international collaboration between the Belgium-based Anticancer Fund and the U.S.- based GlobalCures, has published their investigation into diclofenac in the open-access journal ecancermedicalscience. Diclofenac is a well-known non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) widely used to treat pain in conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, migraine, fever, acute gout, and post-operative pain. Like other drugs examined by the ReDO project, diclofenac is cheap and readily accessible — and it’s already present in many medicine cabinets, so it has been carefully tested, according to ReDO researchers.

NSAIDs for cancer treatment?

NSAIDs have shown promise in cancer prevention, but there is now emerging evidence that such drugs may be useful in actually treating cancer. The ReDO researchers have examined the literature and believe that there is enough evidence to start clinical trials on the use of diclofenac in cancer treatment. For example, diclofenac taken in combination with other treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, may improve their effectiveness, the researchers say. They suggest that cutting down on the risk of post-surgical distant metastases through the use of drugs like diclofenac may represent a huge win in the fight against cancer. Developed by Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the drug is available globally as a generic medication. In some countries, low-dose formulations of oral and gel DCF are available over-the-counter (OTC) as a general purpose analgesic or anti-pyretic. Common trade names include Voltaren, Voltarol, Cataflam, Cambia, Zipsor and Zorvolex. As with all NSAIDs, long-term use of diclofenac is associated with a small increase in the risk of cardiovascular events, particularly myocardial infarction and stroke, the authors note, but “many of the agents currently being trialled (examples include sorafenib, imatinib and crizotinib) have greater toxicity and costs associated with them.”

More here.