Saturday Poem

License to Kill

Man thinks ’cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please
And if things don’t change soon, he will
Oh, man has invented his doom
First step was touching the moon

Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there as the night grows still
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Now, they take him and they teach him and they groom him for life
And they set him on a path where he’s bound to get ill
Then they bury him with stars
Sell his body like they do used cars

Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there facin’ the hill
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Now, he’s hell-bent for destruction, he’s afraid and confused
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies

But there’s a woman on my block
Sitting there in a cold chill
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Ya may be a noisemaker, spirit maker
Heartbreaker, backbreaker
Leave no stone unturned
May be an actor in a plot
That might be all that you got
’Til your error you clearly learn

Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool
And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled
Oh, man is opposed to fair play
He wants it all and he wants it his way

Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there as the night grows still
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Bob Dylan
© 1983 by Special Rider Music

What Are We Arguing About When We Argue About Rationality?

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Let’s talk about this tweet:

The backstory: Steven Pinker wrote a book about rationality. The book concludes it is good. People should learn how to be more rational, and then we will have fewer problems.

Howard Gardner, well-known wrong person, sort of criticized the book. The criticism was facile, a bunch of stuff like “rationality is important, but relationships are also important, so there”.

Pinker’s counterargument is dubious: Gardner’s essay avoids rationality pretty carefully. But even aside from that, it feels like Pinker is cheating, or missing the point, or being annoying. Gardner can’t be arguing that rationality is completely useless in 100% of situations. And if there’s any situation at all where you’re allowed to use rationality, surely it would be in annoying Internet arguments with Steven Pinker.

More here.

What Rule-Based International Order?

Simon Waxman in the Boston Review:

In announcing that Russia would intensify its eight of years aggression against Ukraine in the interests of “denazification” and protecting oppressed Russian speakers (read: pro-Moscow separatists), Vladimir Putin has offered the thinnest pretext for cross-border war since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. And yet, the official position of the United States is that Russia is undermining a rule-based global order that supposedly has prevailed since the close of World War II.

Of course, Putin’s true goal is not humanitarian. It has more to do with suppressing a democracy in Russia’s sphere of influence—a democracy whose mere presence makes his own tyranny the more obvious and distasteful at home. The invasion of Ukraine must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. But we cannot at the same time ignore the duplicity of the United States and its allies, not least because that duplicity is a key element of Putin’s propaganda. Putin lies about many things, but he is right when he says that the West holds Russia to standards to which it doesn’t itself abide—a grievance that Russians appear widely to share and that imbues his own unjust and illegal war with a patina of legitimacy.

More here.

The Kind of Smarts You Don’t Find in Young People

Arthur C Brooks in The Atlantic:

Silicon valley has a famously youth-dominated culture and economy. According to Business Insider, most employees in the tech industry are in their late 20s. At eBay, for example, the median employee age was 32 in 2017—and eBay is in the older half of the top tech companies. This is a problem for these businesses. Fairly or unfairly, many tech companies with disproportionately young employees and leaders have gone from a shining example of how entrepreneurial capitalism can improve our lives to something that seems unhealthy and even sinister over the past several years. As one tech writer put it, “the world fell out of love with Silicon Valley.”

With each controversy about harmful products, anticompetitive practices, and “bro culture,” my older friends in business look on in amazement at errors they find obvious. And therein lies a solution to the problem: As I argue in my book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, companies need to hire more older people into the ranks of their leadership. To foster innovation and success that lasts, America needs more than innovation; it needs wisdom.

More here.

Artificial Neuron Snaps a Venus Flytrap Shut

Joanna Thompson in Scientific American:

When a Venus flytrap snaps its fleshy lobes around an unsuspecting insect, it’s game over for the prey. The plant’s unusual habit of snacking on animals has captured the imagination of people ranging from Charles Darwin to playwright Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken (the latter two created the 1982 musical Little Shop of Horrors, which stars a human-eating plant). Now, in an experiment that might seem straight out of a pulp science-fiction novel, scientists have harnessed the flytrap’s power for themselves: they have developed a method to trigger its trap using soft, semi-organic artificial neurons.

“The overarching goal of our research is to try to develop devices that can mimic the functioning of building blocks in our body,” says study co-author Simone Fabiano, an organic nanoelectronics researcher at Linköping University in Sweden. The Venus flytrap provides an efficient testing ground for an interface between living creatures and electronics that, Fabiano and his team hope, may one day lead to fully integrated biosensors for monitoring human health—or a better interface for people to control advanced prostheses with their nerves. The results were published in Nature Communications last week.

More here.

The Radical Transformation of Fresh Kills

Cal Flyn at VQR:

Jade Doskow’s extraordinary photographs of Freshkills Park, a “wilderness area” created on the site of Staten Island’s notorious landfill, offer us a new, unsettling approach to the pastoral in the twenty-first century. In this jarringly beautiful sequence of images, she presents us with a discomfiting environmental vision that interrogates what it means to be wild in a human-impacted world.

Initially opened as a stopgap measure in 1948, the Fresh Kills Landfill quickly swelled to become the world’s largest garbage dump. By the 1990s, it was the sole receptacle for all of New York City’s residential waste. At its peak, the landfill filled 2,200 acres—an area about three times the size of Central Park. Steaming garbage towered in heaps twenty stories high.

more here.

Pankaj Mishra’s Divided Self

Lola Seaton at The New Statesman:

One thing Pankaj Mishra seems certain of is that humans are uncertain creatures, but uncertain in a notably coherent way. “Human identity,” Mishra wrote in the prologue to Age of Anger (2017), is “manifold and self-conflicted”. He thus feels “unqualified regard for a figure like Montaigne”, for he recognised “the acute self-divisions of individual selves”. Mishra is hardly alone in emphasising human ambivalence, but his is a rather spruce, even schematic vision of perplexity: we are less awash in inarticulate doubt or disarrayed by our unconscious than intelligibly sundered between our “inner and public selves”.

As a writer, Mishra’s public self has had the upper hand for most of his career.

more here.

Friday Poem

To His Three Friends

by Li Bai (701-762)

When the hunter sets traps only for rabbits,
Tigers and dragons are left uncaught.
Even so, men of blue-cloud ambition remain unsought,
Singing aloud at the door of their rocky den.

My friend, Han, you are rare and profound;
Pei, you possess a true clean breast;
And Kung, you, too, are an excellent man;
And all you three are lovers of cloud and mist.
Your stout and straight souls
Are loftier than the loftiest pine.
A flat boulder for a bed, you sleep together under one cover;
You hack the ice and sip water from the winter stream;
You own two pairs of shoes to wear among you three.

Once wandering as you please
Like the vagrant clouds,
You came out of the mountains to greet the governor.
Indifferently you wore cap and mantle a while,
Whistling long.

Last night you dreamed of returning to your old haunt,
And enjoying, you say, the moon of the Bamboo Valley.
This morning outside the east gate of Luh
We spread the tent and drink the farewell cup.

Be careful as you go!
The cliffs are snowy, and your horses may slip;
And the road of tangled vines may perplex you.
Pray remember,
My thoughts of longing are like the smoke grass,
That grows always in profusion, winter or spring!

translated by Shigeyoshi Obata

About Li Bai at Read More below

Read more »

The Origin Of Venus Of Willendorf

Jasmine Liu at Hyperallergic:

The Venus of Willendorf, estimated at between 25,000 to 30,000 years old, has long been a source of contemporary mystery and intrigue, and for good reason — little was known about its origins and purpose. The statuette, as suggested by its name, was quickly saddled with the burdens of human history, sexualized with a blithe reference to antiquity although the context of its creation in Paleolithic times remained obscure. Now, thanks to research led by anthropologist Gerhard Weber at the University of Vienna, we know that the stone used to mold the figurine originated from northern Italy, over 350 miles away from Willendorf in Austria and across a formidable mountain range, the Alps. First excavated in 1908, the statuette, which measures less than four and a half inches in height, is a prime example of portable art — objects made out of stone, ivory, and other types of animal bone that would be easily transportable for migratory people during the Paleolithic period.

more here.

2022 Olympics Recap

Miles Osgood at n+1:

Toward the beginning of the games, NBC started to realize it had problems with its own script. The network’s carefully crafted redemption epic of the skier Mikaela Shiffrin was shifting genres into televised tragedy. Before Shiffrin competed in the giant slalom, NBC played intimate interviews of Shiffrin in her Colorado home, processing the grief of having lost her father two years ago and recalling a moment when she nearly gave up skiing. This has been a reliable formula for the network: give the home crowd the emotional backstory behind one of Team USA’s likeliest gold-medal stars, then wait for the athlete to write her own feel-good ending, turning adversity into triumph. But at the start of the giant slalom, Shiffrin skidded out at the fifth turn and missed a gate. Two days later, in the regular slalom, it happened again: having missed another early turn, Shiffrin turned uphill, took off her skis, and sat down on the snow by the edge of the course for twenty minutes with her head in her arms. Watching, one wanted desperately to look away, but the camera stayed fixed. An interviewer asked her, “What are you still processing?” Shiffrin replied, “Pretty much everything . . . makes me second-guess the last fifteen years.”

more here.

Trade Justice and the Least-Developed Countries

Tadhg Ó Laoghaire and Thomas R. Wells at the Wiley Online Library:

In this article, we argue that least-developed countries (LDCs) should be treated as a distinct group from developing countries within theories of international justice generally, and theories of trade justice more specifically. While authors within the trade justice literature occasionally make passing reference to LDCs’ entitlement to special favourable treatment from other states, they say little about what form this treatment should take, and how such entitlements relate to the obligations and entitlements of their trade partners, both developed and developing. This oversight is untenable because it overlooks the significantly different needs that LDCs have compared to developing countries with respect to the economic opportunities afforded by international markets. Moreover, by grouping states into the binary categories of developed and developing (or rich and poor), trade justice theorists have ended up obscuring and passing over a fundamental conflict between least-developed and developing countries’ interests, the weighing of which should be central to any complete normative evaluation of the trade regime.

More here.

A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists spend long periods taking small steps. They pose and solve puzzles while collectively interpreting all data within a fixed worldview or theoretical framework, which Kuhn called a paradigm. Sooner or later, though, facts crop up that clash with the reigning paradigm. Crisis ensues. The scientists wring their hands, reexamine their assumptions and eventually make a revolutionary shift to a new paradigm, a radically different and truer understanding of nature. Then incremental progress resumes.

For several years, the particle physicists who study nature’s fundamental building blocks have been in a textbook Kuhnian crisis.

The crisis became undeniable in 2016, when, despite a major upgrade, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva still hadn’t conjured up any of the new elementary particles that theorists had been expecting for decades. The swarm of additional particles would have solved a major puzzle about an already known one, the famed Higgs boson. The hierarchy problem, as the puzzle is called, asks why the Higgs boson is so lightweight — a hundred million billion times less massive than the highest energy scales that exist in nature.

More here.

Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes

Maura Reynolds in Politico:

For many people, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has felt like a series of “He can’t be doing this” moments. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has launched the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. It is, quite literally, mind-boggling.

That’s why I reached out to Fiona Hill, one of America’s most clear-eyed Russia experts, someone who has studied Putin for decades, worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations and has a reputation for truth-telling, earned when she testified during impeachment hearings for her former boss, President Donald Trump.

I wanted to know what she’s been thinking as she’s watched the extraordinary footage of Russian tanks rolling across international borders, what she thinks Putin has in mind and what insights she can offer into his motivations and objectives.

More here.

Thursday Poem

And Then My Heart With Pleasure Fills

—for Miss Hobson

At Cathedral Girls High School
the Sisters of St. Joseph reigned
in raven robes and starched wimples.

My heart was loyal to Miss Hobson
her Chanel suits, pink or lilac
adorned with pastel green and cream silk blouses.

The voluminous skirts of the Sisters of St. Joseph
trapped stale incense.

Miss Hobson’s fragrance, a spring bouquet
roses, peonies and lilies of the valley.

The Sisters of St. Joseph
loved Jesus and students of wealthy parents.

Miss Hobson chose me
to read from our literature textbook
saying I had a musical voice.

The Sisters of St. Joseph championed
fear of hell’s terrors.

Miss Hobson led us
into Wordsworth’s “ … host of garden daffodils;
beside the lake, beneath the trees,
fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”

by Venera Fazio
from
Paterson Literary Review,
Paterson, NJ, 2015