Marcus du Sautoy in Literary Hub:

Although I’ve successfully learned the language of mathematics, it has always frustrated me that I couldn’t master those more unpredictable languages like French or Russian that I’d tried to learn in hopes of becoming a spy. Although Gauss too left his love of languages behind to pursue a career in mathematics, he did actually return to the challenge of learning new languages in later life, such as Sanskrit and Russian. At the age of 64, after two years of study, he had mastered Russian well enough to read Pushkin in the original. Inspired by Gauss’s example, I’ve decided to revisit my attempts at learning Russian.

One of the problems I have is simply remembering strange new words. Spotting patterns is my shortcut to memory. But what if there are no patterns? I wanted to know if there might be alternative shortcuts I could try. Who better to ask than Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory and founder of a new venture for learning languages called Memrise?

More here.

Madeline Lane-McKinley in the Boston Review:

If there is a utopian kernel to be found in this pandemic, so replete with dystopian terror, it is most certainly that each day more and more people have grown to hate the world of work. Some of us, certainly a lucky few, might even enjoy our jobs, or certain aspects of them, but all the same, work under capitalism has become increasingly legible as a system of false promises—deferred freedom, self-actualization, leisure, joy, safety, or whatever else we might value that cannot be reduced to the accumulation of capital.

At the center of this network of false promises is the myth of the labor of love, currently “cracking under its own weight,” as labor journalist Sarah Jaffe argues in her recent book Work Won’t Love You Back, “because work itself no longer works.” Historically this myth applied to the work of caretaking as a way to naturalize the unwaged or low-waged labor of women, from childcare, eldercare, and housework to teaching and nursing. Today, “the conditions under which ‘essential’ workers had to report to the job,” Jaffe notes, “revealed the coercion at the heart of the labor relation.”

More here.

Enda O’Doherty at The Dublin Review of Books:

Colm Tóibín presents us with one account of Mann’s gradual progress away from German nationalism. It might not be the last word on what seems to have been a complex and tortured journey, but it functions well in the context of the demands of a novel, where the shifts in perspective must be presented dramatically and are often portrayed through Thomas’s interactions with others, principally members of his large and turbulent family. First and most important of these is his wife, Katia Pringsheim, who is deeply suspicious of his friendship with the nationalist (and later Nazi) writer Ernst Bertram. On the outbreak of the First World War Katia asks her husband to consider how they would feel if their two boys, Klaus and Golo, were old enough to be conscripted, “and we were waiting here each day for news of them”: “And all because of some idea.”

The doings of the Mann family provide much of the necessary human interest of The Magician. Highly gifted and highly-strung, they are a problem for Thomas from the start, but all of them, and in particular the eldest pair, Erika and Klaus, have the function, along with his brother/rival Heinrich, of slowly pulling him towards a braver, more radical opposition to Nazism.

more here.

Richard Vinen at The Literary Review:

In many ways, the age of coal was terrible. Thousands died in mining accidents and thousands more of diseases that they had contracted in pits. When a slag heap at Aberfan collapsed on top of the village primary school in 1966, at the inquest the coroner talked of ‘asphyxia and multiple injuries’, but one miner shouted that the words that he wanted on his child’s death certificate were ‘buried alive by the NCB’. And yet the British remember this age with a curious nostalgia. What could be more reassuringly familiar than the dense, smoky fogs of Sherlock Holmes’s London or the fact that the detective keeps his cigars in the coal scuttle? In Mike Leigh’s film High Hopes, the disappearance of coal is used as a metaphor for the rise of the rootless, yuppie society of the 1980s. ‘Mum, look what they’ve done to your coal hole,’ says one character when she sees how the new owners of a former council house have adapted the cellar. A Hovis television advertisement of 2008, celebrating the last hundred years of British history, featured miners, along with V-E Day parties and a Churchill speech, though, revealingly, it depicted a scene of a picket line in 1984 rather than of an actual working mine.

more here.

Nicole Karlis in Salon:

What if dark matter didn’t exist? Sure, scientists have never observed it, but they believe it exists because of apparent gravitational effects. But what if our current understanding of gravity was just plain wrong?

The question has been raised over the last several decades, but typically when a proposed modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) theory is put forth it has too big a blindspot to be taken seriously in the scientific community. In this case, the theory arguing against the existence of dark matter can’t account for observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the leftover glow of the Big Bang or explain what happens at a larger scale with galaxies. Certainly such a discovery would be a significant change in the world of physics and have a remarkable impact on science.

This month however, researchers Constantinos Skordis and Tom Zlosnik from the Czech Academy of Sciences published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters suggesting that a new modification to the parameters of Newton’s theory of gravity could provide an answer as to why dark matter has yet to be detected. And unlike previously proposed MOND theories, this one just might stick because the new proposal can match observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is a key detail that has lacked in the previous MOND-like theories.

…Dark matter is estimated to make up 27% of the universe’s total mass and energy, which is nearly five times more than the “normal” matter that comprises planets and stars. True to its name, dark matter is hard to directly observe. So far, none of the efforts to figure out the nature of the dark matter have gone very far. Yet astronomers are quite convinced it exists because of the huge gravitational effect it has on galaxies and the stars that live within them. As far as anyone can tell, dark matter is extremely non-interacting: just as humans walk through a still room barely noticing the atmosphere that surrounds us, dark matter seems to barely ever touch, even faintly, the normal matter that it hovers around. It is bound to our world by gravity only, and only tugs on other things that also possess gravity.

More here.

Grigori Guitchounts in Nautilus:

On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s campus. As a purplish-red sun set, I sat brooding over my dataset on rat brains. I thought of the cold windowless rooms in downtown Boston, home to Harvard’s high-performance computing center, where computer servers were holding on to a precious 48 terabytes of my data. I have recorded the 13 trillion numbers in this dataset as part of my Ph.D. experiments, asking how the visual parts of the rat brain respond to movement.

Printed on paper, the dataset would fill 116 billion pages, double-spaced. When I recently finished writing the story of my data, the magnum opus fit on fewer than two dozen printed pages. Performing the experiments turned out to be the easy part. I had spent the last year agonizing over the data, observing and asking questions. The answers left out large chunks that did not pertain to the questions, like a map leaves out irrelevant details of a territory. But, as massive as my dataset sounds, it represents just a tiny chunk of a dataset taken from the whole brain. And the questions it asks—Do neurons in the visual cortex do anything when an animal can’t see? What happens when inputs to the visual cortex from other brain regions are shut off?—are small compared to the ultimate question in neuroscience: How does the brain work?

The nature of the scientific process is such that researchers have to pick small, pointed questions. Scientists are like diners at a restaurant: We’d love to try everything on the menu, but choices have to be made. And so we pick our field, and subfield, read up on the hundreds of previous experiments done on the subject, design and perform our own experiments, and hope the answers advance our understanding. But if we have to ask small questions, then how do we begin to understand the whole? Neuroscientists have made considerable progress toward understanding brain architecture and aspects of brain function. We can identify brain regions that respond to the environment, activate our senses, generate movements and emotions. But we don’t know how different parts of the brain interact with and depend on each other. We don’t understand how their interactions contribute to behavior, perception, or memory. Technology has made it easy for us to gather behemoth datasets, but I’m not sure understanding the brain has kept pace with the size of the datasets.

More here.

Greetings to the People of Europe!

Over land and sea, your fathers came to Africa
and unpacked bibles by the thousand,
filling our ancestors with words of love:

if someone slaps your right cheek,
let him slap your left cheek too!
if someone takes your coat,
let him have your trousers too!

now we, their children’s children,
inheriting the words your fathers left behind,
our bodies slapped and stripped
by our lifetime presidents,

are braving seas and leaky boats,
cold waves of fear – let salt winds punch
our faces and your coast-guards
pluck us from the water like oily birds!

but here we are at last to knock
at your front door,
hoping against hope that you remember
all the lovely words your fathers preached at ours.

by Alemu Tebeje, © 2020,
from: Songs We Learn From Trees
publisher: Carcanet Classics, Manchester, 2020
Translation: Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje, 2020

Matthew Stewart in Literary Hub:

The story of rising economic inequality is by now so familiar that it fits easily onto a T-shirt. But the way the story is told is often imprecise enough to leave out much of the plot. “We are the 99 percent” sounds righteous enough, but it’s a slogan, not an analysis. It suggests that the whole issue is about “them,” a tiny group of crazy rich people, who are nothing at all like “us.” But that’s not how inequality has ever worked. You can glimpse the outlines of the problem if you take a closer look at the math of inequality.

Supposing we stick for the moment with the questionable suggestion that “we” are merely a collection of percentiles in the wealth distribution tables—and I will question that suggestion in a moment—the first thing to note is that “99 percent” is not the right number. Contrary to popular wisdom, it is not the “top 1 percent” but the top 0.1 percent of households that have captured essentially all of the increase in the relative concentration of wealth over the past fifty years.

More here.

John McQuaid in Undark:

The problems originate in the mundane practices of computer coding. Machine learning reveals patterns in data — such algorithms learn, for example, how to identify common features of “cupness” from processing many, many pictures of cups. The approach is increasingly used by businesses and government agencies; in addition to facial recognition systems, it’s behind Facebook’s news feed and targeting of advertisements, digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa, guidance systems for autonomous vehicles, some medical diagnoses, and more.

To learn, algorithms need massive datasets. But as the applications grow more varied and complex, the rising demand for data is exacting growing social costs. Some of those problems are well known, such as the demographic skew in many facial recognition datasets toward White, male subjects — a bias passed on to the algorithms.

But there is a broader data crisis in machine learning. As machine learning datasets expand, they increasingly infringe on privacy by using images, text, or other material scraped without user consent; recycle toxic content; and are the source of other, more unpredictable biases and misjudgments.

More here.

E. Tammy Kim in The Nation:

Squid Game is not a subtle show, either in its politics or plot. Capitalism is bloody and mean and relentless; it yells. Each episode moves from one game to the next, in a series that, by the end, combined with some awkward English-language dialogue, feels hopelessly strained. But the show redeems itself with its memorable characters (all archetypal strugglers) and its bright, video-game-inspired design. The art director, Choi Kyoung-sun, said that she wanted to build a “storybook” world—a child’s late-capitalist hell—and she has done so brilliantly.

More here.

From Phys.org:

Countless devices around the world use GPS for wayfinding. It’s possible because atomic clocks, which are known for extremely accurate timekeeping, hold the network of satellites perfectly in sync.

But GPS signals can be jammed or spoofed, potentially disabling navigation systems on commercial and military vehicles alike, Schwindt said.

So instead of relying on satellites, Schwindt said future vehicles might keep track of their own position. They could do that with on-board devices as accurate as atomic clocks, but that measure acceleration and rotation by shining lasers into small clouds of rubidium gas like the one Sandia has contained.

More here.  [Thanks to Georg Hofer.]

Daniel Bromfield at Pitchfork:

Liz Harris always seems to be telling us a secret. The catch—and the thing that makes her music as Grouper so fascinating—is we’re never sure what. Titles like “Thanksgiving Song” and “The Man Who Died in His Boat” hint that she’s letting us in on specific moments and memories, but the lyrics lean toward abstraction, and that’s when you can make them out from behind a thick wall of reverb. From 2014’s Ruins onward, Harris has scrubbed away much of the grit from her sound, and it’s been a thrill to watch her music hint at candor before ducking back into the shadows where it thrives. Shade takes this knife’s-edge balance between intimacy and inscrutability to the extreme.

Many of Shade’s nine tracks feel like experiments in how much Harris can remove from her music while retaining its essential mystery. The album’s most notable development is to present her voice and acoustic guitar largely unadorned. The setting is so spare we can hear the buzz of the room and the squeak of her fingers on the frets.

more here.

Sunlight

I’m utterly helpless.
I’ll just have to swallow my spit
and adversity, too.
But look!
A distinguished visitor deigns to visit
my tiny, north-facing cell.
Not the chief making his rounds, no.
As evening falls, a ray of sunlight.
A gleam no bigger than a crumpled postage stamp.
I’m crazy about it! Real first love!
I try to get it to settle on the palm of my hand,
to warm the toes of my shyly bared foot.
Then as I kneel and offer it my undevout, lean face,
in a moment that scrap of sunlight slips away.
After the guest has departed through the bars
the room feels several times colder and darker.
This special cell of a military prison
is like a photographer’s darkroom.
Without any sunlight I laughed like a fool.
One day it was a coffin holding a corpse.
One day it was altogether the sea. How wonderful!
A few people survive here.
Being alive is a sea
without a single sail in sight.

by Ko Un
from Songs for Tomorrow
Green Integer Books, 2009

Sana Goyal in The Guardian:

Now at university in England, Sara looks back on her hometown in southern India. “This is the west,” where almost everything is within reach, but where she comes from, people have always known that “ordinary days can explode without warning, leaving us broken, collecting the scattered pieces of our lives”. Anuradha Roy’s carefully crafted fifth novel shows how, in such a place, things can change in extraordinary ways, even if new beginnings and worlds are hard to come by.

Elango is a Hindu potter. His dream is to create a terracotta horse; his crime is falling in love with a Muslim girl, Zohra, and wanting the “unbridgeable crevasse” between them to close (“the space between the two was a charnel house of burnt and bloodied human flesh, a giant crack through the earth that was like an open mouth waiting to swallow him”). What follows is a story of love, loss and longing; tradition, creation and destruction; and the invisible lines that divide humans, animals and the divine.

Told between the first and the third person, the novel revisits themes that readers of Roy will be familiar with: myth, memory and history. As in her previous novel, All the Lives We Never Lived, she engages with the epistolary form. But it is Roy’s longstanding fascination with the figure of the artist, who fathoms new objects from what the earth has to offer, that is fully fleshed out in this novel. As Sara, the narrator, recalls: “A caterpillar had escaped a fire and turned into a butterfly, and my clay had become my first cup on a new wheel. Anything was possible.” What propels the book forward is this constant brink of possibility and potential for transformation.

More here.

Perry and Gabriele in Smithsonian:

The dragon resting on its golden hoard. The gallant knight charging to rescue the maiden from the scaly beast. These are images long associated with the European Middle Ages, yet most (all) medieval people went their whole lives without meeting even a single winged, fire-breathing behemoth. Dragons and other monsters, nights dark and full of terror, lurked largely in the domain of stories—tales, filtered through the intervening centuries and our own interests, that remain with us today.

As Halloween approaches, we’re naturally thinking about scary stories. Though horror today is most often about entertainment—the thrill of the jump scare or the suspense of the thriller—it hasn’t always been that way. In the European Middle Ages, monster stories served as religious teaching tools, offering examples of what not to do, manifestations of the threats posed by the supernatural and the diabolical, and metaphors for the evil humans do to one another.

Medieval people told tales about all kinds of monsters, including ghosts, werewolves and women who turned into serpents on Saturdays. But dragons held a special place in both the modern imagination and the medieval one. As historian Scott Bruce, editor of the newly released Penguin Book of Dragons, explains, dragons in the medieval mindset stood “as the enemies of humankind, against which we measure the prowess of our heroes.” As such, they were neatly and easily folded into Christian tradition, “often cast … as agents of the devil or demons in disguise.”

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

A man is standing on the parapet of a bridge. He is about to jump. What should you do? Most people would agree that the moral act would be to talk to him to try to persuade him not to. Most people would also agree that giving him a push because “that’s what he wanted” would be committing murder.

Your grandmother is dying. She is in great pain, has only a few days to live and wants you to end her life now. It’s unlikely that most people could bring themselves to do that. But most would probably understand if you did accede to her wishes, however tormented you felt. And even more were a doctor to give her sufficient painkillers to allow her to die in peace.

The debate about assisted dying is one in which there are no simple answers; a debate in which we need to acknowledge that truth and moral decency lie on both sides and in which context is particularly important in judging what is right and wrong.

More here.