Winter

When the new room was built my mother showed me What To Do In Case Of Fire. There were
four metal rungs embedded in the balcony wall: this was the escape route. She did not show me
(then) the other one.

What happened was, my mother was very very sad. She was so sad she could not hold up her
head, she could not sit down, she could not lie down, she could not see out of the dark, my very
sad mum.

In the course of my research I learned a new kind of love. This lesson taught me to pray. I made
a prayer for my mother. By ‘prayer’ I mean a meditation on a want that can never be answered.
A prayer for the dead alive inside the living. That’s what it is to burn a flame. We were in the
darkest days of winter, approaching the celebration of light.

I watched the white men in their pastel coats / Roll you up and put you away / They put you
inside their white box / With its clicks and locks / And carried you far away
.

by Emily Berry
from The Poetry Review
Vol. 105, No.4, Winter 2015
.

From Kurzweil AI:

The results of two Yale University psychology experiments suggest that what we believe to be a conscious choice may actually be constructed, or confabulated, unconsciously after we act — to rationalize our decisions. A trick of the mind. “Our minds may be rewriting history,” said Adam Bear, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of a paper published April 28 in the journal Psychological Science. Bear and Paul Bloom performed two simple experiments to test how we experience choices. In one experiment, participants were told that five white circles would appear on the computer screen in front of them and, in rapid-fire sequence, one would turn red. They were asked to predict which one would turn red and mentally note this. After a circle turned red, participants then recorded by keystroke whether they had chosen correctly, had chosen incorrectly, or had not had time to complete their choice. The circle that turned red was always selected by the system randomly, so probability dictates that participants should predict the correct circle 20% of the time. But when they only had a fraction of a second to make a prediction, these participants were likely to report that they correctly predicted which circle would change color more than 20% of the time. In contrast, when participants had more time to make their guess — approaching a full second — the reported number of accurate predictions dropped back to expected levels of 20% success, suggesting that participants were not simply lying about their accuracy to impress the experimenters. (In a second experiment to eliminate artifacts, participants chose one of two different-colored circles, with similar results.)

Confabulating reality

What happened, Bear suggests, is that events were rearranged in subjects’ minds: People unconsciously perceived the color red from the screen image before they predicted it would appear, but then right after that, consciously experienced these two things in the opposite order. Bear said it is unknown whether this “postdictive” illusion is caused by a quirk in perceptual processing that can only be reproduced in the lab, or whether it might have “far more pervasive effects on our everyday lives and sense of free will.”

More here.

Jamieson Cox in The Verge:

Peter Gabriel, St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark), Jon Hopkins, and Esa-Pekka Salonen are going to help The Sync Project — the initiative headed up by former Nokia design head Marko Ahtisaari — explore the future of musical medicine. The four musicians are joining the collaborative venture as advisors, roles that'll necessitate working with the scientists researching music's therapeutic properties and helping to raise the project's awareness. While they represent a wide range of musical styles and experiences — Gabriel and Clark are art-rock veterans, Hopkins is an accomplished electronic producer, and Salonen conducts the London Philharmonia Orchestra — Ahtisaari is more interested in their value as thinkers than their musical bona fides.

“We're very much looking for musicians and creators who have an active relationship with technology,” says Ahtisaari. “I felt that was a common denominator for everyone, in slightly different ways… It wasn't so much about the contents of the music, or to commission any work. These are creative thinkers — let's involve them.” Ahtisaari had preexisting relationship with Gabriel and Salonen that facilitated their involvement, and he reached out to Hopkins and Clark after consulting with Gabriel, Salonen, and others. “We meet regularly to discuss the product, we show prototypes, we design together. We're engaging them as creative product thinkers.”

The product in question is wildly ambitious: musical treatment programs for medical conditions that match the efficacy of drug-based treatment without subjecting patients to the dangers and side effects of pharmacological programs. Ahtisaari cites treatment for Parkinson's disease as an example.

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

I read Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity in the early nineties; it was a major influence on my life. There were equations in that book to stop a nerdy 13-year-old’s pulse, like

A thousand pages of exposition about Ramanujan’s mysterious self-taught mathematical style, the effect his work had on Hardy and Littlewood, his impact on the later development of analysis, etc., could never replace the experience of just staring at these things! Popularizers are constantly trying to “explain” mathematical beauty by comparing it to art, music, or poetry, but I can best understand art, music, and poetry if I assume other people experience them like the above identities. Across all the years and cultures and continents, can’t you feel Ramanujan himself leaping off your screen, still trying to make you see this bizarre aspect of the architecture of reality that the goddess Namagiri showed him in a dream?

More here.

Peter Coates at The Times Literary Supplement:

The original and unsurpassed cowboy president – though the quartet’s only Easterner, and a New Yorker to boot – was not only an ardent hunter and all-round outdoorsman. The “damned cowboy” (as the Republican Party boss Mark Hanna derided the vice president elevated to the top job when an anarchist assassin killed William McKinley) was also a skilled naturalist and fervent conservationist, as well as a peerless presidential creator of wildlife refuges, national forests, national monuments and national parks. Small wonder that the cover of Otis Graham’s Presidents and the American Environment (2015) shows him at Glacier Point during his 1903 trip to Yosemite.

The pervasive campfire aroma of Roose­velt’s larger-than-life persona is reflected in book titles such as David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback (1981), Sarah Watts’sRough Rider in the White House (2003) or Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt(2005) – the latter about the near-fatal, post-presidency voyage up Brazil’s Rio da Duvida that proved to be the last major ad­venture before 1919, when the man who’d ­survived countless scrapes met a rather unmemorable end, from a blood clot in his sleep. Roosevelt was the sort of person of whom it was easy to imagine that he, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Revenant, would have survived a mama grizzly’s mauling, a roller-coaster ride down a raging, frigid river, and a night inside a dead horse. After all, as Michael R. Canfield recounts in this new account of Roosevelt’s relationship with the outdoors, in 1912, in Milwaukee, he pressed on with a scheduled campaign speech despite having just taken an assassin’s bullet in the chest, proceeding to speak for over an hour, as the bloodstain gradually spread across most of his shirt (the bullet was never removed).

more here.

J. Kates at The Harvard Review:

When curmudgeons want to argue the intractability of poetry to translation, one of the first names they pull out of the hat is that of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. It is generally acknowledged that his poetry is about as untranslatable as you can get. Therefore, in the perversity of human endeavor, Horace is probably the most translated poet in the Western world, honored even by the attentions of at least one prime minister of the British Empire, William Ewart Gladstone. “'We love Horace,'” William Peterfield Trent wrote,

“and hence we must try to set him forth in a way to make others love him,” is what all translators, it would seem, say to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, when they decide to publish their respective renditions. And who shall blame them? Where is the critic competent to judge their work, who has not himself listened to the Siren’s song, if but for a moment in his youth, who has not a version of some ode of Horace hid away among his papers, the memory of which will doubtless forever prevent him from flinging a stone at any fellow-offender? [1]

One of Horace's most thoroughly worked-over poems is the fifth ode in his first book ofcarmina. [2] It begins with the speaker of the poem putting a question to a blonde bombshell. Pyrrha—her name actually means “redhead,” but the adjective (flavam) used within the poem to describe her hair means golden yellow—is asked rhetorically who her latest victim might be.

more here.

Matthew Buckley in the Boston Review:

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is located in a vast tunnel along the France-Switzerland border, 27 kilometers around and 300 feet underground. It was planned, designed, and constructed through a remarkable international effort, extending over a period of nearly twenty-five years at a cost of billions of dollars. Building it required great technical innovations and incredible collaboration by thousands of people. All with the promise of finding one thing: the particle known as the Higgs boson.

After 2000, the Higgs was the only missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics—the theory that physicists developed in the 1970s to describe the properties of the most fundamental particles of the Universe and how they interact to make up the world as we experience it. As the structure of the Standard Model came into focus, physicists knew there had to be a new kind of quantum field, but less powerful particle accelerators, such as the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois and CERN’s own Large Electron-Positron Collider, had failed to detect it.

Even before the LHC was built, we physicists had very high confidence the new accelerator would be able to find it. But if the LHC had not found the Higgs boson, we still would have been incredibly excited. We would have understood that our grasp of nature’s basic components and their interactions was flawed. Contrary to some depictions in popular culture, scientists love to learn that our expectations are wrong.

More here.

Deirdre Serjeantson at The Dublin Review of Books:

When modern readers reach for a great Florentine poet, their hands tend to light on a volume of Dante. Dante had been enormously popular in the late middle ages, and if his overtly Catholic subject matter made him less visible during the English Renaissance, his great revival in the nineteenth century assures his fame in modern times. There is even a computer game based on the Inferno. Petrarch is less accessible: a considerable number of his works, including his Penitential Psalms and many of his letters, have never been translated into English. He survives most prominently as an adjective attached to sonnets by the great writers of the sixteenth century, but the term “Petrarchan” only acknowledges the tradition which built up around the love poetry and ignores the bulk of Petrarch’s achievement. And yet, he is ubiquitous in early-modern literature – a knowledge of Petrarch has the power of bringing a host of more familiar works suddenly into focus. From throwaway jokes about young lovers to political iconography in paintings of Elizabeth I, his writing is one of the keys to reading the Renaissance.

All of this is not to say that Petrarch is neglected. The tradition of scholarship around his works, which began even before his death, continues today. The seven-hundredth anniversary of his death in 2004 saw a number of important international conferences, and their proceedings join other recent books in re-evaluating and celebrating his legacy. These publications, however, constitute a professional literature: the British Academy’s excellent collection of essays, Petrarch in Britain, sells for around €95, which is quite an obstacle in the way of the general reader, no matter how interested he or she might be. This is where the new Cambridge Companion to Petrarch, edited by AR Ascoli and Unn Falkeid, and retailing at closer to €20, comes in.

more here.

Santiago Zabala in the Columbia University Press Blog:

In order to respond to this important question, it is first necessary to emphasize that there isn’t much difference among philosophers, theologians, scientists, or artists when it comes to intellectual freedom. Whatever the training, traditions, or debates the intellectually free are those who know how their disciplines are framed. For example, when the scientist Laurent Ségalat, in his bookLa Science à bout de souffle?, criticized how the management of funds has become more important than search for truth in his field, he was both pointing out what frames his discipline and also exercising intellectual freedom. Only those who thrust us into the“absence of emergency” are intellectually free today.

When Martin Heidegger said in the 1940s that the “only emergency is the absence of emergency,” he was referring to a “frame” (“Ge-stell”), a technological power that had grown beyond our ability to control it. Today this framing power is globalization, where emergencies, as Heidegger specified, do not arise when something doesn’t function correctly but rather when “everything functions . . . and propels everything more and more toward further functioning.” This is why he was so concerned with the specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge that would inevitably limit and frame independent and critical thought. So to be intellectually free today means disclosing the emergency at the core of the absence of emergency, thrusting us into knowledge of those political, technological, and cultural impositions that frame our lives.

The recent passing of the philosopher Umberto Eco, the musician Prince, and the filmmaker Ettore Scola ought to remind us how important intellectual freedom is. Their works have all resisted orthodox interpretations of artistic creation, social stereotypes, and fascistic discrimination.

More here.

Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker:

Hanif got the idea of writing about a nurse in a decrepit hospital. Alice Bhatti (named for his old editor) is a ferociously strong young woman: smart, independent, and rebellious to the point of recklessness. She works as a nurse in the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments, a shambling Catholic institution in Karachi that is corrupt, underfunded, and horrifyingly filthy: rats make nests of human hair; gunnysacks filled with body parts sit in a corner. Alice is Christian, the daughter of a faith healer, from a Christian slum called the French Colony, where Jesus is known as “Lord Yassoo.” She comes from a family of “sweepers,” or janitors, a job performed overwhelmingly by Christians. At the hospital, Alice sees the most vicious tendencies of Karachi—murders and molestations that go unreported, bodies that go unclaimed. She freely mocks the Islamic faith, in concert with her father, who warns her, “These Muslas will make you clean their shit and then complain that you stink.” More than anything, Alice is determined to defend herself from an endless wave of insults and assaults:

There was not a single day—not a single day—when she didn’t see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband, brother protecting his honour, father protecting his honour, son protecting his honour, jilted lover avenging his honour, feuding farmers settling their water disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body.

When a wealthy patient’s relative tries to force Alice to perform oral sex, she slashes his genitals with a razor and dispatches him to the emergency room. “Go to Accidents. And no need to be shy, they get lots of this sort of thing during their night shift,” she says. “And stop screaming.”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The directions, which came via cell phone, were a little garbled, but as you understood them: “Turn left at the 3rd light and go straight; the restaurant will be on your right side.” Ten minutes ago you made the turn. Still no restaurant in sight. How far will you be willing to drive in the same direction? Research suggests that it depends on your initial level of confidence after getting the directions. Did you hear them right? Did you turn at the 3rd light? Could you have driven past the restaurant? Is it possible the directions are incorrect? Human brains are constantly processing data to make statistical assessments that translate into the feeling we call confidence, according to a study published today in Neuron. This feeling of confidence is central to decision making, and, despite ample evidence of human fallibility, the subjective feeling relies on objective calculations. “The feeling ultimately relies on the same statistical computations a computer would make,” says Professor Adam Kepecs, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and lead author of the new study. “People often focus on the situations where confidence is divorced from reality,” he says. “But if confidence were always error-prone, what would be its function? If we didn't have the ability to optimally assess confidence, we'd routinely find ourselves driving around for hours in this scenario.” Calculating confidence for a statistician involves looking at a set of data—perhaps a sampling of marbles pulled from a bag—and making a conclusion about the entire bag based on that sample. “The feeling of confidence and the objective calculation are related intuitively,” says Kepecs. “But how much so?”

In experiments with human subjects, Kepecs and colleagues therefore tried to control for different factors that can vary from person to person. The aim was to establish what evidence contributed to each decision. In this way they could compare people's reports of confidence with the optimal statistical answer. “If we can quantify the evidence that informs a person's decision, then we can ask how well a statistical algorithm performs on the same evidence,” says Kepecs. He and graduate student Joshua Sanders created video games to compare human and computer performance. They had human volunteers listen to streams of clicking sounds and determine which clicks were faster. Participants rated confidence in each choice on a scale of one (a random guess) to five (high confidence). What Kepecs and his colleagues found was that human responses were similar to statistical calculations. The brain produces feelings of confidence that inform decisions the same way statistics pulls patterns out of noisy data.

More here.

Sally Goerner in Evonomics:

The media has made a cottage industry out of analyzing the relationship between America’s crumbling infrastructure, outsourced jobs, stagnant wages, and evaporating middle class and the rise of anti-establishment presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Commentators are also tripping all over one another to expound daily on the ineffectual response of America’s political elite – characterized by either bewilderment or a dismissal of these anti-establishment candidates as minor hiccups in the otherwise smooth sailing of status-quo power arrangements. But the pundits are all missing the point: the Trump-Sanders phenomenon signals an American oligarchy on the brink of a civilization-threatening collapse.

The tragedy is that, despite what you hear on TV or read in the paper or online, this collapse was completely predictable. Scientifically speaking, oligarchies always collapse because they are designed to extract wealth from the lower levels of society, concentrate it at the top, and block adaptation by concentrating oligarchic power as well. Though it may take some time, extraction eventually eviscerates the productive levels of society, and the system becomes increasingly brittle. Internal pressures and the sense of betrayal grow as desperation and despair multiply everywhere except at the top, but effective reform seems impossible because the system seems thoroughly rigged. In the final stages, a raft of upstart leaders emerge, some honest and some fascistic, all seeking to channel pent-up frustration towards their chosen ends.

More here.

Petra Bonfert-Taylor in the Washington Post:

Why do smart people enjoy saying that they are bad at math? Few people would consider proudly announcing that they are bad at writing or reading. Our country’s communal math hatred may seem rather innocuous, but a more critical factor is at stake: we are passing on from generation to generation the phobia for mathematics and with that are priming our children for mathematical anxiety. As a result, too many of us have lost the ability to examine a real-world problem, translate it into numbers, solve the problem and interpret the solution.

Mathematics surrounds us, yet we have become accustomed to avoiding numerical thinking at all costs. There is no doubt that bad high school teaching and confusing textbooks are partly to blame. But a more pernicious habit does the most damage. We are perpetuating damaging myths by telling ourselves a few untruths: math is inherently hard, only geniuses understand it, we never liked math in the first place and nobody needs math anyway.

Often adults are well-meaning when telling children about their own math phobia: after all, won’t it make the children feel better if they know that others feel that way as well? Research shows the answer is a resounding “no.”

More here.

Dominic Frisby in Aeon:

The impact of record-keeping on the course of history cannot be overstated. For example, the act of preserving Judaism and Christianity in written form enabled both to outlive the plethora of other contemporary religions, which were preserved only orally. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, was still being used to settle land disputes as late as the 1960s. Today there is a new system of digital record-keeping. Its impact could be equally large. It is called the blockchain.

Imagine an enormous digital record. Anyone with internet access can look at the information within: it is open for all to see. Nobody is in charge of this record. It is not maintained by a person, a company or a government department, but by 8,000-9,000 computers at different locations around the world in a distributed network. Participation is quite voluntary. The computers’ owners choose to add their machines to the network because, in exchange for their computer’s services, they sometimes receive payment. You can add your computer to the network, if you so wish.

All the information in the record is permanent – it cannot be changed – and each of the computers keeps a copy of the record to ensure this. If you wanted to hack the system, you would have to hack every computer on the network – and this has so far proved impossible, despite many trying, including the US National Security Agency’s finest.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Guardian:

She writes of places where many Beyoncé fans rarely go, the portions of London where the faces are black and brown, where men huddle outside shop-front mosques and veiled women are trailed by long chains of children. Warsan Shire, the Somali-British poet whose words are featured in Beyoncé’s new globe-shaking Lemonade album, is a bard of these marginalised areas – she was even named the first Young Poet Laureate for London at 25.

Beyoncé reads parts of Shire’s poems, including For Women Who Are Difficult To Love, The Unbearable Weight of Staying (the End of the Relationship) and Nail Technician as Palm Reader in interludes between songs in her 12-track, hour-long video album that premiered this week. Truly, Shire was a brilliant choice for Beyoncé’s unapologetically black and female album: like the people and places from which they are woven, Shire’s poems – published in a volume titled Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth – are laden with longing for other lands and complicated by the contradictions of belonging in new ones. In Conversations about Home, she writes: “I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget”, and: “They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the city of Rome with no jacket.”

Finally, here is the migrant talking back, trolling the absurdities of documentation that have such unquestioned legitimacy in the Western architecture of border and boundary, admission and exclusion.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

‘Can Europe be the same with different people in it?’ So asked the American writer Christopher Caldwell in his book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, published a few years ago. It is a question that has been asked with increasing urgency in recent years as the question of immigration, and in particular of Islamic immigration, has taken centre stage.

At the heart of this question lies the dilemma of how Western societies should respond to the influx of peoples with different traditions, backgrounds and beliefs. What should be the boundaries of tolerance in such societies? Should immigrants be made to assimilate to Western customs and norms or is integration a two-way street? Such questions have bedeviled politicians and policy-makers for the past half-century. They have also tied liberals in knots.

The conundrums about diversity have been exacerbated by the two issues that now dominate contemporary European political discourse – the migration crisis and the problem of terrorism. How we discuss these issues, and how we relate the one to the other, will shape the character of European societies over the net period.

More here.

Jason Goldman for Conservation Magazine:

When the story of Cecil the lion’s death at the hands of an American hunter hit the media, the global response was “the largest reaction in the history of wildlife conservation,” according to a new paper. Researchers from Oxford’s Wildlife Research Conservation Unit (or WildCRU, the same organization that had tracked the lion since 2009) analyzed the traditional and social media response to the hunting incident. They found that a combination of elements in the story may have made it go viral in a different way than the average Internet sensation. And conservationists may subsequently have a golden opportunity to transform the “Cecil Moment” into a “Cecil Movement.”

To recap the sequence of events around Cecil’s death: Around 10:00 pm on July 1, 2015, a hunter from Minnesota named Walter Palmer sent an arrow into the side of a 13-year-old male African lion nicknamed ‘Cecil’ on privately owned property outside of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. This arrow failed to kill the beast, but the second one, shot some 11 hours later, did. Several weeks later, the news hit both mainstream news and social media. On July 27, Palmer was publicly named as the hunter. The next day, Jimmy Kimmel denounced the hunt—and trophy hunting in general—during the monologue portion of his nightly talk show on the ABC network. While tearing up, he encouraged folks to donate to WildCRU and displayed the unit’s website on the screen. The site received some 4.4 million visitors following Kimmel’s monologue before it went down due to server overload.

More here.