Jay Ownes in New Humanist:

The metaverse leapt into popular awareness in 2021, in a world all too prepared for virtual sociality thanks to a year and counting of pandemic social distancing and Zoom Christmases. Last April, Epic Games announced $1 billion in investment to build “revolutionary” connected social experiences. In June, Facebook announced itself as “a metaverse company”, with 10,000 employees working on virtual reality products and experiences, and by October, it had rebranded itself as Meta, driving a flurry of commentary as people scrambled to work out what that might actually mean.

The word quickly made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, where it’s defined as “a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users”. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball, whose “Metaverse Primer” essays have done a lot to shape thinking around the concept, wrote of it: “You can walk into any experience or activity, and potentially address almost any of your needs, from a single starting point or world that’s also populated by everyone else you know.”

Online video games are probably the easiest way in to imagining the metaverse. They allow for flexibility of interaction (for example, while Fortnite began as a shooter game, it now tags itself as the place where you can “Watch a concert, build an island or fight”) as well as scale (Fortnite has over 200 million players). There are also their highly developed internal economies and social organisation – in Second Life, for instance, users can build houses and open businesses, which contribute to its $600 million economy. But the metaverse is potentially more than just a gateway to digital experiences. It crosses over into physical experiences too. Augmented reality, where the so-called IRL (“in real life”) world is visible alongside digital content, does not require special headsets or fancy glasses.

More here.

Elizabeth Pennisi in Science:

With more microbes than cells in our body, it’s not surprising that bacteria and other invisible “guests” influence our metabolism, immune system, and even our behavior. Now, researchers studying mice have worked out how bacteria in the mammalian gut can ping the brain to regulate an animal’s appetite and body temperature—and it involves the same molecular pathway the immune system uses to detect bacterial pathogens.

“It’s quite an important finding,” says Antoine Adamantidis, a neuroscientist at the University of Bern who was not involved with the work. “Our life depends on food intake, and this is one more [thing] that bacteria can [influence].”

Over the past 20 years, researchers have uncovered connections between the human gut and the rest of the body. They have linked certain intestinal microbes to conditions such as depression, multiple sclerosis, and immune system disorders; they have also documented nervous system connections between the gut and the brain. But researchers have been hard pressed to understand exactly how gut microbes—or the molecules they make—influence the brain.

More here.

Gavin Jacobson in The New Statesman:

The history of economics owes many of its greatest contributions to the philosophers. Like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and Friedrich von Hayek, Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998, has a formidable reputation both as a world authority on development, welfare and famine, and as a distinguished theorist and moral philosopher. Born in Bengal in 1933, Sen’s life has been one of border-crossings – geographic and intellectual – as well as the rejection of narrow identities. He is, as he once put it:

“An Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or Great Britain resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a non-religious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, a non-believer in an afterlife, and also, if the question is asked, a non-believer in before-life. This is just a small sample of diverse categories. There are a number of other categories which can inform and engage me.”

Home in the World (2021) is a memoir of an intellectual life, one that trades inner revelation for sharp scholarly observation and social insight. Humbly recounting his upbringing and then his career as a young academic, the book charts Sen’s peregrinations through the key imperial quarters – India, Burma, Cambridge – as well as offering elegant disquisitions on those thinkers who helped shape his own work and world-view.

Amartya Sen recently spoke from his home in Cambridge Massachusetts to the New Statesman’s ideas editor, Gavin Jacobson.

More here.

Jacopo Prisco at CNN:

What caught your eye the last time you looked out of your airplane window? It might have been the winglet, a now ubiquitous appendage at the end of each wing, often used by airlines to display their logo and put their branding in your travel pictures.

But the winglet isn’t there for marketing purposes alone — it actually saves fuel. On average, an aircraft equipped with them can use up to 5% less fuel, and for a typical Boeing 737 commuter plane that can mean 100,000 gallons of fuel a year, according to NASA. The collective savings for airlines are in the billions of dollars.

They do so by reducing the natural vortices that form at the wingtips, which can be so strong that smaller aircraft can even flip in mid-air when crossing the wake of very large planes. The effect is so obvious that aerodynamicists were thinking about it even before the Wright brothers completed their first flight. The widespread adoption of winglets, however, is far more recent.

More here.

Alan Jacobs in The New Atlantis:

On January 6, 2021, Samuel Camargo posted a video on Instagram showing him struggling to break through a police barrier to get into the U.S. Capitol building. The next day he wrote on Facebook: “I’m sorry to all the people I’ve disappointed as this is not who I am nor what I stand for.”

A month after the riot, Jacob Chansley, the man widely known as the QAnon Shaman, wrote a letter from his jail cell in Virginia asking Americans to “be patient with me and other peaceful people who, like me, are having a very difficult time piecing together all that happened to us, around us, and by us.”

“This is not who I am,” “all that happened … by us” — it is commonplace to hear such statements as mere evasions of responsibility, and often they are. But what if they reflect genuine puzzlement, genuine difficulty understanding one’s behavior or even seeing it as one’s own, a genuine feeling of being driven, compelled, by something other than one’s own will?

More here.

Matthew Hutson in The New Yorker:

Each year, researchers from around the world gather at Neural Information Processing Systems, an artificial-intelligence conference, to discuss automated translation software, self-driving cars, and abstract mathematical questions. It was odd, therefore, when Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, gave a presentation at the 2018 conference, which was held in Montreal. Fifty-one, with light-green eyes and a dark beard that lend him a mischievous air, Levin studies how bodies grow, heal, and, in some cases, regenerate. He waited onstage while one of Facebook’s A.I. researchers introduced him, to a packed exhibition hall, as a specialist in “computation in the medium of living systems.”

Levin began his talk, and a drawing of a worm appeared on the screen behind him. Some of the most important discoveries of his career hinge on the planarian—a type of flatworm about two centimetres long that, under a microscope, resembles a cartoon of a cross-eyed phallus. Levin is interested in the planarian because, if you cut off its head, it grows a new one; simultaneously, its severed head grows a new tail. Researchers have discovered that no matter how many pieces you cut a planarian into—the record is two hundred and seventy-nine—you will get as many new worms. Somehow, each part knows what’s missing and builds it anew. What Levin showed his audience was something even more striking: a video of a two-headed planarian. He had cut off the worm’s tail, then persuaded the organism to grow a second head in its place. No matter how many times the extra head was cut off, it grew back.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

The first study to compare the accumulation of mutations across many animal species has shed new light on decades-old questions about the role of these genetic changes in aging and cancer. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute found that despite huge variation in lifespan and size, different animal species end their natural life with similar numbers of genetic changes. The study, published today in Nature, analyzed genomes from 16 species of mammal, from mice to giraffes. The authors confirmed that the longer the lifespan of a species, the slower the rate at which mutations occur, lending support to the long-standing theory that somatic mutations play a role in aging.

Genetic changes, known as somatic mutations, occur in all cells throughout the life of an organism. This is a natural process, with cells acquiring around 20 to 50 mutations per year in humans. Most of these mutations will be harmless, but some of them can start a cell on the path to cancer or impair the normal functioning of the cell. Since the 1950s, some scientists have speculated that these mutations may play a role in aging. But the difficulty of observing somatic mutations has made it challenging to study this possibility. In the last few years, technological advances have finally allowed genetic changes to be observed in normal tissues, raising hopes of answering this question.

More here.

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all

by Denise Levertov
from Naked Poetry
Bobbs-Merrill Company,1969

Kevin Berger at Nautilus:

Describing ourselves in the language of neurobiology has got to be one of the stranger trends in our medical age. I’m depressed because my serotonin levels are low. I cried in the movie because the grieving mother activated my mirror neurons. The dopamine boost from the pinot noir planted me in a garden of bliss. For one thing, simplistic explanations for multivalent situations are a license to charlatans to ring up their cash registers with nostrums for happiness and longevity. More consequently, defining our behaviors in the confines of the brain is a pinched portrait of the ways the world draws out our potential like a conductor draws music from notes on a page. Get with it, people, you are more than your neurons.

This is the passionate point of view of Alva Noë, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of lively books that counter the notion popular among the chattering classes that you are your brain. Noë’s books include Out of Our Heads, Strange Tools, and most recently, Learning to Look, a collection of short essays in which Noë upends theories, mostly hatched in neuroscience, that shortchange the richness of experience, especially the experience of art.

more here.

Sam Gee and Jeff Deutsch at The Point:

I’m not convinced by moralizing, I’m not convinced by “Amazon is terrible and Netflix is terrible and you should all read more, because movies are stupid.” I don’t believe any of that anyway, and even if I did, it’s not persuasive. We live a completely meaningful life without ever reading a book, full stop. You don’t need books to live a meaningful life. And yet, many people will live a more enhanced life if they read even just a couple more books. And some won’t—I mean, it’s not for everyone. So the work became articulating the pleasures and the purpose and meaning of these spaces, and hopefully doing it in a somewhat entertaining way.

I think that one of the key qualities of any bookseller, certainly a great bookseller, is enthusiasm. And so it’s not lamentation—we don’t lament the state of the world, we’re enthusiastic about the state of books, or particular books, and share that enthusiasm.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in Foreign Policy:

The occasion for this satirical treatment was Houellebecq’s new novel, Submission, whose official publication date was the very day of the attacks. In it, Houellebecq imagines a France of the near future in which the citizenry, atomized and starved of meaning in their post-Christian anomie, elect a Muslim leader into power and are converted en masse for life in a French Islamic theocracy.

Of course, what Houellebecq describes has not in fact come to pass.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

For more than 250 years, mathematicians have been trying to “blow up” some of the most important equations in physics: those that describe how fluids flow. If they succeed, then they will have discovered a scenario in which those equations break down — a vortex that spins infinitely fast, perhaps, or a current that abruptly stops and starts, or a particle that whips past its neighbors infinitely quickly. Beyond that point of blowup — the “singularity” — the equations will no longer have solutions. They will fail to describe even an idealized version of the world we live in, and mathematicians will have reason to wonder just how universally dependable they are as models of fluid behavior.

But singularities can be as slippery as the fluids they’re meant to describe. To find one, mathematicians often take the equations that govern fluid flow, feed them into a computer, and run digital simulations. They start with a set of initial conditions, then watch until the value of some quantity — velocity, say, or vorticity (a measure of rotation) — begins to grow wildly, seemingly on track to blow up.

Yet computers can’t definitively spot a singularity, for the simple reason that they cannot work with infinite values.

More here.

Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic:

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

More here.

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen at Artforum:

FEW FACES TO MEET the public spotlight in recent years have more to tell about the mental mechanisms of male shame, impunity, and self-absolution than that of the furry brown-and-white-spotted Spanish pointer staring out of Titian’s Diana and Callisto, 1556–59. This dog has been a bad dog, as he seems to know. (I say “he” since, according to the visual logic of gender organizing the suite of pictures of which Diana and Callisto forms one-sixth, Titian’s “big dog” simply can’t be a bitch.)¹ Sometime previously, on a hunting trip that took an unexpected twist, this Spanish pointer turned against and devoured his master, Actaeon, a human hunter whom Diana, goddess of chastity, transformed into a stag after he came upon her bathing naked. Diana and Callisto asks its viewer to contemplate the aftermath of that attack; his master having passed through his digestive system, Actaeon’s dog, portrayed in another of the series’ pictures, reappears as a tagalong—or the captive?—of Diana’s band of proto-feminist separatists. Titian gives us the gaze of this pointer at the moment Diana is exiling Callisto, a favorite nymph who broke—unwillingly—her vow of virginity.

more here.

Claudia Roth Pierpont at The New Yorker:

The linchpin of the Met’s show, “The Gulf Stream” intensifies the artist’s racial focus even as it universalizes its sailor’s plight. A single Black man, the drama’s protagonist, is shown bare-chested and casually majestic—“modelled with a musculature and physical power,” Alain Locke wrote in 1936, that “broke the cotton-patch and back-porch tradition” and “began the artistic emancipation of the Negro subject.” But his innate power is to no avail. He lies across the deck of a devastated boat, as gape-mouthed sharks close in; the water nearby is flecked with blood. A few stalks of sugarcane coil across the deck, either a plain fact of his cargo or a sign of centuries of slave trade. “I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description,” Homer replied with typical asperity to questions about its meaning. He also mentioned, though, the influence of Turner’s painting “Slave Ship” (originally titled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On”), which Ruskin had once owned but said he found too painful to keep.

more here.

Johanna Thomas-Corr in New Statesman:

I’m dreaming of a book. It has the lightly worn wit of a Nora Ephron column combined with the empathy of Esther Perel. It combines the savage contrarianism of Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath with the virtuoso noticing of Joan Didion, the force of numbers that powered Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women and the historical sweep of a Thomas Piketty treatise.

It examines the institution of marriage from the inside and out and answers, at last, why we continue to do this thing. Why – no one is forcing us any more! – do so many of us lash ourselves to another imperfect human being forever more and act surprised when this person fails to make us elated all the time? Why are people so outraged when presented with alternatives to a system rooted in the most regressive patriarchal property law? Why do we minimise freedom and maximise submission? Who would do that to the person they claim to love most? Besides half of the British adult population?

More here.