by Brooks Riley
Month: January 2017
Trudging
by Evan Edwards
So, walking when it is very cold always poses a dilemma for me. When it is very cold — and I live in Chicago, so very cold actually means very cold — something happens on my walks. If I am very attentive, as attentive as I normally am on walks, I feel as though the world appears with much more clarity. Surely you’ve experienced this as well. The sounds are clearer, crisper, maybe even louder. It sometimes seems as if a thin veil had just been lifted from around you, and noises were all of a sudden less muted. The same thing happens with vision. As if the subzero cold condenses all the matter in the air so that light travels more freely to the eye, making contours clearer, colors more vibrant. When the cold is accompanied by a heavy snow, it is of course more difficult to see, but the help that the ensuing silence lends to our hearing makes up for it. This clarity in the cold is a revelation of the previous inadequacy of your senses, and you feel that you’d been half-asleep up until this point.
On the other hand, when it is very cold—Chicago cold—you also tend to move much more quickly than if you were sauntering in the temperate weather of early fall or late spring. Just the other day it was so cold that my face began hurting after being outside for just a few minutes. If you have lived in a very cold place, this is no shock to you. If you have only visited, you probably weren’t visiting in the dead of winter, and this probably seems like an exaggeration to you. It is not. An animal part of you is kicked into action when it is that cold. You are overcome with one very simple desire: to not be this cold any more. There is a certain kind of embodiment that you experience when it is this cold, only it isn’t the pleasant kind of embodiment.
The Convergence of Things
by Sarah Firisen
President-elect Trump, along with so many other gaping holes in his knowledge, seems, for all his evident command of social media, to not really get the modern computer age. On the one hand, this is both astounding and terrifying. It’s one thing to have your 70 year old grandmother not understand or want to use The Email, it’s another thing for the incoming President of the world’s great industrial and economic powerhouse to be skeptical about the value of email and computers. On the other hand, in a rather Chauncey Gardner-like way, he may have inadvertently spoken a great truth, “I think the computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole, you know, age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on.”
We are clearly at the point of a huge paradigm shift in the relationship between humans and machines. While we’ve long depended on them in both our professional and personal lives, it has been a means to exercise our wills more quickly and efficiently, servants of our needs and desires. But artificial intelligence has now reached the point where the servant no longer needs the master; every day the news is full of yet another computer that has performed a task that was previously solely a human capability, and increasingly the computers are performing that task not only as well but better than a human could. Today we drive cars, tomorrow they will drive themselves.
While there are many technologies that will change our lives in the next 20 years in significant ways, there are a few that will have an impact beyond the imaginations of most people who aren’t Gene Roddenberry.
To boldly go to the Edge….science in everyday life
What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?
I’ve been through them, though only quickly, and selected three for comment: prediction error minimization, Bayes’s Theorem, and attractors.
Andy Clark: Philosopher and Cognitive Scientist; Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, University of Edinburgh, UK; Author: Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
Let’s ease into this one.
Once upon a time, back in my undergraduate days during the 1960s, I was invited to a party at an artist’s loft. This was a real honest-to-god un-renovated loft, large, bare walls, a wood stove for heat (it was mid-winter), raw. Someone remarked they were showing a film “over there.” Sure enough, there was a 16mm projector facing a wall, clicking and buzzing rapidly away, and there were blurry gray smudges dancing on the wall opposite (no sound).
I watched the moving mottled grays for some seconds, five, ten, twenty, who knows, I wasn’t counting, and then SHAZAM! It became clear. On the right, a naked woman standing, bent forward, outstretched arms touching a wall. On the left, a naked man behind her, thrusting away. SEX! First porn film I’d ever seen.
But why did it take me awhile to see what was very plainly there in the flickering lights on the wall? Because I didn’t know what I was seeing, that’s why, and that’s what Clark’s prediction error minimization is getting at. If someone had said “hey, dirty movies” or I’d seen a title (say, “Danny Does Debbie”) I’d have known what to look for in the lights. But I didn’t know and it took me awhile to figure it out.
Peter Singer on Free Speech and Fake News
Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:
Emails released by WikiLeaks showed that Podesta sometimes dined at a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong. Apparently for that reason the child-sex-ring accusations focused on the pizza restaurant and used the hashtag #pizzagate. The allegations were frequently retweeted by bots – programs designed to spread certain types of messages – contributing to the impression that many people were taking “Pizzagate” seriously. The story, amazingly, was also retweeted by General Michael Flynn, who is soon to be President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
Even after Trump’s election – and despite debunking by the New York Times and the Washington Post – the story continued to spread. Comet Ping Pong was harassed by constant, abusive, and often threatening phone calls. When the manager approached the DC police, he was told the rumors were constitutionally protected speech.
More here.
Teaching Math to People Who Think They Hate It
Jessica Lahey in The Atlantic:
I follow Steve Strogatz on Twitter, and while I don’t always understand his tweets (“Would you like Bayesian or frequentist statistics with that?”), I do find them fascinating. When Steve tweeted that he’d be teaching an introductory math course for non-math majors at Cornell University (#old_dog#new_tricks#excited), I emailed and asked him to tell me more. Why would a veteran professor of higher math choose to spend a semester in the company of undergraduates, many of whom would rather visit the dentist than spend two hours a week exploring mathematical concepts?
The short answer is that Strogatz has discovered a certain thrill in rectifying the crimes and misdemeanors of math education. Strogatz asks his students, more than half of them seniors, to provide a “mathematical biography.” Their stories reveal unpleasant experiences with math along the way. Rather than question the quality of the teaching they received, they blamed math itself—or worse, their own intelligence or lack of innate talent.
More here.
Partying with John Waters in 1970s Provincetown
This is the story of the 1970s summer photographer Nan Goldin and writer/actress Cookie Mueller spent in P-Town in the Cape, partying non-stop with eccentrics like Philippe Marcade, John Waters, and other brilliant weirdos.
Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain in Vice:
Now most of these sanctuaries have been wiped out by yuppies and gentrification, or in downtown NYC's case, fucking idiot students who've made the East Village their own private frat party. Gone are these special places to live out your life exactly as you wanted to, so we thought we'd provide a reminder to all those kids who have told us they were born too late and look fondly to the past—Quaaludes, 45 records, black beauties, 16 millimeter movies, and when "making art" was not just a hobby. You lived it.
Philippe Marcade is an old friend who lived a wild life as the lead singer of the Senders, and hung out with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, as well as Richard Hell, Dee Dee Ramone, Debbie Harry, and Chris Stein.
More here.
The Moral Dysfunction of Assadism
Abed Abu-Shehade in Pulse:
Syrian intellectuals have reached such a state of despair in the face of the crisis, that they have ironically proposed to the US Administration to allow the Syrian regime to use chemical weapons, as long as the latter stopped its bombings — because dying by chemical weapons is a lot ‘cleaner’, and at least no body parts would litter streets or children lie buried under rubble.
Sadik wonders how people can still dispute the legitimacy of the Syrian uprising. He compares the Syrian case to Hungary in 1956, when Hungarians rose up against the Soviet regime. But back then, no one (except for dogmatic supporters of the USSR) criticized the Hungarian people for what seems like a human act, a popular uprising against a violent regime.
By contrast, it is astonishing to see how, in the Syrian case, a significant part of the old political elites in Arab society regard Bashar Assad as the deus ex machina salvaging secularism and national liberation, while choosing to justify his crimes by de-humanizing those who oppose him.
More here.
Fizzy pop: Coca-Cola is a growing force in music around the world
Charlie McCann in The Economist:
…There is no public funding for the arts in Pakistan. The violence that beset the country in the mid-2000s destroyed the live-music scene and spooked many of the foreign record labels, which pulled out. Today, musicians interested in making a living need brand patronage. “It’s basically corporate culture which propels music everywhere,” says Ali Sethi, a Pakistani singer and occasional performer on the show. And the best gig in town is “Coke Studio”. Just don’t see red if you want to wear blue on Coke’s stage. Remember: you’re with the brand.
More here.
Two New Books Look at the Holocaust in Civic and Military Terms
Nicholas Stargardt in The New York Times:
…Why the Jews? Why murder? Why didn’t more Jews fight back more often?
Hayes’s answer to this last question is characteristically balanced and astute, as he sketches out the different courses set by four different ghetto leaderships. Whether it was Adam Czerniakow in Warsaw, Chaim Rumkowski kowtowing in Lodz or Jacob Gens in Vilna and Jewish leaders in Minsk who tried to assist Jewish partisan groups, it ultimately made no difference. As Hayes concludes, “whatever the Jewish leaders did — kill themselves, aid the resistance, appease the Nazis — the outcome was the same.” Theirs were truly choiceless choices. Contemporaries may have debated the right course of action, and Cesarani recounts the confrontation between Rabbi David Kahane and Henryk Landsberg, the respected lawyer and head of the Jewish Council in Lvov, in which Kahane declared that “it is better that all die and not one Jew be delivered to the enemy,” while Landsberg countered that the rabbis were not living in the prewar world. But neither Hayes nor Cesarani has any time for the old accusation leveled by Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt that without the collusion of the Jewish Councils, the Nazis could not have carried through the Final Solution to the same extent. Cesarani faults the Jewish leaders in Poland not for things over which they had no control, but for their venality and social conservatism when it came to allocating the scant resources they possessed. Cesarani’s central claim to originality is to reconnect the Final Solution with the military campaigns of World War II. As he argues, recent historiography has shown that “making war” was “the central mission of Hitler and the Third Reich,” but that their preparations for war were “erratic”; that the decisive victories over France, Britain and the Soviet Union in 1940-41 were achieved “mainly thanks to the mistakes of their opponents”; and that the regime’s response to the changing military tide thereafter was marked by “inadequacy.”
Picture: Children from Lodz on their way to the Chelmno extermination camp, 1942.
More here.
Sunday Poem
Ballad in A
A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshal
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan jackass scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.
Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s balls,
Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada
and thwart Law’s brawn,
slam Law a damn mass war path.
Marshal’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track,
calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,
Says: That dastard Kansan’s had
and gnaws lamb fatback.
At dawn, Marshal stalks that ranch,
packs a gat and blasts Kansan’s ass
and Kansan gasps, blasts back.
A flag flaps at half-mast.
.
.
by Cathy Park Hang
from Poetry, April 2010
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‘Choral Concerto’ (1984) by Alfred Schnittke
debbie reynolds (1932 – 2016)
john berger (1926 – 2017)
Remembering Derek Parfit
Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books:
Without a trace of annoyance, Parfit signed our books and offered to show us round the college. In the 15th-century chapel he pointed out the hammer-beam roof and gilded angels, the Gothic reredos and its 19th-century statues. We talked about moral philosophy. He said he couldn’t understand how Shelly Kagan, a philosopher at Yale whom he deeply admired, believed in moral retribution. ‘I just can’t believe that anyone deserves to suffer,’ he said, shaking his head. After the tour he gave us detailed instructions on how to get back to the railway station, anxious that we didn’t get lost, and wished us well.
More here.
Dark Matter: Did we just hear the most exciting phrase in science?
A new analysis shows a surprisingly simple relationship between the way galaxies move, and the distribution of ordinary matter within them. Unexpectedly this seems to hold however much mysterious dark matter they contain. That’s funny.
John Butterworth in The Guardian:
Galaxies are made up of three components. Stars, which we can see. Gas, which we can also see, although much of what we ‘see’ is infrared light with a wavelength too long for our eyes but which we can nevertheless measure. And most elusive of all, ‘Dark Matter’, which we can’t see at all. We deduce its presence from its gravitational influences – on the way galaxies move and the way light bends as it passes by them. We don’t know what Dark Matter is made of, a situation which especially annoys and intrigues particle physicists like me, who want to know what everything is made of.
Key to the analysis is the measurement of rotation curves of galaxies. This is the way the average speed of the stars orbiting in galaxies changes as they get further from the centre. To measure this you need a good spatial resolution (to distinguish the distance from the centre) and a measurement of the wavelength of the light, because the wavelength tells us the speed – from the ‘Doppler Shift’, similar to the way the pitch of a horn is higher for an approaching train and lower as it recedes. McGaugh, Lelli and Schmobery have analysed 2693 measurements in 153 galaxies studied by Spitzer.
More here.
It’s finally happening: Finland has just launched a world-first universal basic income experiment
Dom Galeon in Science Alert:
These Finns are the lucky recipients of a guaranteed income beginning this year, as the country’s government finally rolls out its universal basic income (UBI) trial run.
UBI is a potential source of income that could one day be available to all adult citizens, regardless of income, wealth, or employment status.
This pioneering UBI program was launched by the federal social security institution, Kela. It will give out €560 (US$587) a month, tax free, to 2,000 Finns that were randomly selected.
The only requirement was that they had to be already receiving unemployment benefits or an income subsidy.
The program allows unemployed Finns to not lose their benefits, even when they try out odd jobs.
"Incidental earnings do not reduce the basic income, so working and … self-employment are worthwhile no matter what," says Marjukka Turunen, legal unit head at Kela.
If successful, the program could be extended to include all adult Finns.
More here.
The history of Daesh (ISIS) in 6 minutes
Video length: 6:33
The American democracy and dream are the building of castles in air
Lewis Lapham in Lapham's Quarterly:
…Things haven’t worked out as well for the democratically endowed dreamers of the American dream floating on the rising tide of prosperity in the boom years subsequent to the Second World War. By the late 1970s, the boom was losing momentum, and so was the affordable credit. Which is to say, as did Henrik Ibsen in 1879, “Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.” Ceases to be free and beautiful for the occupant of the lived-in human space, not for the absentee owners of the price of the thing (corporation, insurance company, bank) who retain title to the property free and clear of its human flotsam and jetsam.
More here.
Can a Bombay Strongman Explain Trump?
Suketu Mehta in The New York Times:
He was a master of the art of the outrage, of politics as performance. He would castigate his opponents as “vampires,” “a sack of flour” and various untranslatable epithets like calling South Indians “yandu-gundus.” Periodically, he would express admiration for Hitler, immediately attracting thousands of news pages of free publicity. He regularly called for books and films that he felt were antithetical to Hindu values to be banned. Egged on by his invective, his legions would go out and beat up artists and journalists. Though Mr. Thackeray neither inherited nor ran businesses as Mr. Trump did, the two men’s support base was remarkably similar in its political contours. The people Mr. Thackeray represented were the native Maharashtrians, the “sons of the soil.” The list of his enemies varied with the seasons, from Communists to South Indian migrants to Gujaratis to Muslims and, eventually, North Indians. Working-class Maharashtrians felt excluded from booming Bombay, capital of Maharashtra State, as it made the transition from manufacturing to a postindustrial financial and services economy. They resented both the moneyed cosmopolitan elites as well as the North Indian migrants who competed with them for low-skill jobs.
More here.