(Known Miniscule) + (Unknown Immense) is . . .

before the sun rose, they rose,
they were soft-spoken to shadows
so as not to stir them

they let blood and would sometimes sweat and spit.
when shadows were too cruel. they prayed for light

tree’s sunlit shadow: big trunk moves in wind
limb dangling, brushes asphalt

ah! Matryoshkas, nesting shadows easily swallowing
tiny others,
……………….huge devours small
shadow peas in a shell-game of
ballooning unknowns in onion-like layers of doubt
balanced upon a fulcrum, at rest in a dissatisfying
but absolute equation:

(the known-miniscule) + (the unknown-immense)
are ever balanced
…………………………………………………………………………  So,

Jim Culleny
©11/15/15-Rev. /6/25/23

by Joseph Shieber

In “The Bizarre Bad Criticisms of Our Merit Paper,” a recent blog post in defense of the “Defense of Merit in Science” paper, the Rutgers psychology professor Lee Jussim doubles down on the conflation of “merit” with “objective truth.”

For example, in highlighting what he takes to be an underlying logical incoherence of criticisms of the “Merit” paper, Jussim writes this:

Anyone who believes the critics [sic] claims have merit (including the critics themselves) implicitly accepts our central argument that science has to be judge [sic] on its merits, even if they pose as critiques of our paper.

And this:

It is impossible for there to be no scientific merit and for the claim that there is no scientific merit to … have merit.

The problem is that there is a difference between saying that scientific CLAIMS should stand and fall on their merits and that scientists’ success should be determined by their merits. The former statement has to do with standards of evidence and objective truth. The latter statement, in contrast, has to do with qualities of scientific researchers correlated with advancing science, as well as with our confidence in our abilities accurately to assess those qualities.

It shouldn’t need stressing, but perhaps it does. What makes a statement or claim meritorious – its originality, interest, truth-likelihood, etc. – is different than what makes a PERSON meritorious. One obvious difference, of particular importance given Jussim’s own focus on objective truth, is that PERSONS aren’t truth-evaluable.  Read more »

by Jochen Szangolies

In the previous column, I wrote about how forces originate from quantum mechanics, using the electric force as an example. Rather than being caused by ‘virtual’ particles being tossed back and forth, which is a picture that seems alluringly intuitive, but ultimately misleads more than it clarifies, a better way is to think in terms of the most characteristic feature of quantum mechanics: interference. Quantum objects, you recall, may appear as particle-like dots upon measurement (say, causing a tiny dark spot on a photographic plate), but are best described in a wave-like manner otherwise. And, while particles can only pile up, waves can both reinforce each other and cancel out, which leads to the familiar pattern of interference.

Interference is most often discussed in terms of the double slit experiment, where, say, electrons are aimed at two narrow, nearby apertures, and, rather than just piling up behind each slit, produce a picture of bands of greater and lesser intensity. But in fact, interference isn’t just important in the quantum realm in the course of clever experiments in which scientists try to get the quanta to identify, once and for all, as wave or particle, only to be frustrated by their refusal. In an often quoted heuristic, suppose what happens if one particle is sent to an aperture with three slits, or four, or five, or more than one aperture: each time, you have to sum the contributions along each possible path to obtain the final intensity at any possible end point of its journey. But once you take that process to the limit, where you have ‘slits everywhere’, at every point in space, you find you can still use that same prescription: sum up the contribution of every possible path, to obtain the intensity (or the probability of finding the particle) at each final point. Thus, we were led to Feynman’s ‘sum over paths’-picture of quantum mechanics. Read more »

Demas Nwoko. Dominican C Church, Ibadan, Nigeria, 1970’s.

More here and here.

by Ada Bronowski

Nanni Moretti has always been a melancholic in denial. Perhaps more than any other film-director raised on the French New Wave – born in 1953, shooting his first short in 1973 – Moretti has been turning around the question that François Truffaut posed as a key to the seventh art: is cinema more important than life? But where for Truffaut, or Rossellini, as for many amongst their long and glorious lineage (from Spielberg to Tran Anh Hung) the dilemma has been between a painful reality full of obstacles on one side and a ‘harmonious’ path where ‘there are no traffic jams’ (to speak like Truffaut in his 1973 Day for Night), on the other – in other words, where cinema is the path of escape towards a world where dreams (or nightmares) come true – for Moretti, it is the dilemma itself which is the essence of cinema.

Film is a fact not a possibility. As such, the world of film-making, from its fabrication to the way “these people” are and speak is part of everyday life. In a Moretti film, it is completely normal for the characters to walk down a street and pass by a film crew setting up for a shoot, to comment on it, walk in and out of a scene.  Films in the film are the norm: sometimes we see the shoot and sometimes we hear a shoot is taking place. With Moretti, what is in the frame and what is out of the frame is always arranged so as to give us the impression of mere chance: when we see in the frame first a group of high school kids plotting to occupy their school (and therefore think the occupation is the drama) in Ecce Bombo (Moretti’s second film from 1978), and then realise, because the camera moved back a little, that the older brother of one of the kids, played by Moretti himself, is staring at the group barely hidden behind the door, only to then, through a further retreat of the camera, see that Moretti’s father is standing behind him watching his son watching his sister, it is a whole new philosophy of the camera that is put in place. A philosophy whose axiom is that the unframed life is not worth living, by Socrates-the-Cameraman. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mike O’Brien

Montreal is quite safe from natural disasters, relatively speaking. We should be regularly tossed by earthquakes, given our tectonic environs, but in my two-score-and-change lifetime the rumblings have been so minor as to be mistaken for a passing truck. When everyone on the island feels a passing truck at the same moment, it is evident that the disturbance was rather an earthquake, but only for reasons of statistical probability.

We are also subject to invasions of smoke from the burning forests north of us, but, owing to the vagaries of wind currents, not much more so than are New York or Philadelphia, apparently. We had a tornado years back, striking the only mobile home park in the area (apparently tornadoes have bought into the myth that they are especially drawn to such modes of living). We also have worsening heat waves, exacerbated by the swampy humidity of the St-Lawrence valley and the thermal properties of modern city construction. But this is hardly a distinguishing mark, given that every place from the Arctic to the Antarctic suffers heat waves these days.

The natural disaster that really sets Montreal apart from other cities is ice storms. Historically, this city has suffered nasty winters. They are cold, but not so cold as the wind-lashed prairies out west. It is the snowfall that really makes them iconic, and also expensive, given that our car-based infrastructure requires us to scoop up and relocate all the snow that falls on our roadways. The cold has abated over my lifetime; I can remember waiting for delayed trains in -40C weather (factoring in “wind chill”, which is a deceptively mild label for something that can cost you your fingers and toes, or even your life). Such extreme cold is rarer now, but so is cold in general. Read more »

Water lilies on a pond in Auer, South Tyrol.

by Derek Neal

An essay about Stoicism appeared on this website about a month ago. The essay was critical, seeing Stoicism and its contemporary manifestation as a sort of individualistic therapy that excluded the possibility of political and collective action. Instead of attempting to improve society or grapple with its problems, the turn to Stoicism, the article seemed to be saying, allowed one to ignore political and social ills in favor of a personalized approach focusing on one’s wellbeing. This is probably true, at least with regard to the way Stoicism is portrayed on social media and the internet, but it is also an argument could that be made about almost any mental health approach, whether it’s ancient philosophy repackaged for the 21^st century or a contemporary self-help routine.

This may simply be a result of living at the end of history. When other possible constructions of society become unimaginable, there is no reason to diagnose society’s ills because one cannot hope to change them. Thus, one turns inward, or, on the other hand, embraces their fate by turning themselves into a self-optimizing marketable product. What other choices are there? My father and I were discussing this the other day when planning the movies we would watch at our family cottage. At the moment, our favorite genre is European thrillers about political corruption from the 70’s. So far, we’ve watched French Conspiracy (1972), Illustrious Corpses (1976), and next on our list is Z (1969) by Costa-Gavras. In these films, everyone is guilty; everyone is corrupt. The people who try to do the right thing end up sacrificing their ideals, or if not, dead. There is no escape. My father argued that this genre doesn’t exist anymore because it was one that expected the audience to be outraged by political scandal. Now, we are desensitized. Scandals come and go with such regularity that we turn off the news and go do yoga instead. I, being a millennial, argued that this was, on the whole, a sensible choice. My father was disconcerted by this but found it difficult to disagree. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

To 3 Quark Daily Readers:

I write to you as an ambassador from the Kingdom of Old Age. It a country near to some of you and far, far away for others. It is a good country to be able to visit. I hope you can come, but don’t hurry. It will be there when you have time.

On Houses and Towers

Living in a house/ we live in/ the body of our lives….   “House,” Robert Hass

Packing up to leave the house I’ve lived in for 50 years, deciding what books to take and what to leave behind to create their own fate, I came across Hass’s Field Guide. It won for him the Yale Younger Poets Prize. I’d already packed his collected poems so I thought to leave it behind with a couple a hundred other poetry books finding their own fates, but I leafed through and eye caught the words above.  They seemed so true, I tucked it in the bag I was taking with me in my drive north with my younger daughter and my dog.

For fifty years the house I’m leaving made up the body of my life and the life of my wife and daughters. My daughters tell me they think of it as “Home,” even though neither one has lived in it for 30 years and more. 

Mostly it was a good body, though like even in the best of bodies, there were aches and pains in it and us. The new owners will have to exercise it some to renew its elegance but it has, as is sometimes said of a face that looks good no matter what its age, good bones.

I found this this morning in The London Review of Books, “There is a fine Scots word for the sale of a house, farm or factory: a displenishment.” Well yes, that’s exactly what the emptying of my house felt like, a displenishment, the “plenish” of 50 years is gone, and one heads towards a minimalist world. Haven’t gotten there yet. Dragged a lot of stuff with me. Daughters not yet off the hook. 

Illness and aging have made this move necessary. Read more »