David Kordahl at The New Atlantis:

Why was the direction of cosmology altered so decisively when two radio engineers observed the cosmic microwave background? It wasn’t because of just one thing. The “hot big bang” scenario predicted the cosmic microwave background, since matter and light were presumed to be in thermal equilibrium at the beginning. As the universe expanded and cooled, the matter was thought to clump together gravitationally, becoming stars and galaxies, while the light was thought to zip around diffusely, becoming the cosmic microwave background. But the hot big bang also solved other problems. Steady-state theorists posited that hydrogen was being created ex nihilo, while heavier elements could be forged by nuclear fusion in the stars. But their numbers didn’t work out. Steady-state theorists found that helium was more abundant in stars than stellar fusion alone would predict. But in a hot big bang, hydrogen could also be fused into helium at the very beginning.

more here.

Bill Morris at The Millions:

Though never a household name, Bruce Duffy drew rapturous critical praise for his 1987 debut novel, The World as I Found It, a fictional biography of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Duffy was unfazed when the dense and challenging book failed to catch on with readers. “You know,” he said at the time, “you don’t always have a choice of what you’re going to write. You’re not like a cow that can give ice cream with one udder and milk with another. So I said, ‘Screw it!’ I don’t care what anybody thinks.”

Duffy, who died from complications of brain cancer on Feb. 10 at 70, produced just two more novels—an autobiographical tale about a 12-year-old boy who flees his home in the Maryland suburbs after his mother’s death, and a reimagining of the life of the scabrous French poet Arthur Rimbaud. All the while Duffy worked day jobs as a security guard, corporate consultant and speechwriter. Though The World as I Found It was reissued as a classic by NYRB in 2010, Duffy couldn’t find a literary agent willing to shop his fourth novel. Once again he said “Screw it!” and started writing a new book. He was working on it at the time of his death.

more here.

Jordi Graupera in The New Yorker:

This past spring, the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein taught his final two classes at the New School for Social Research, in New York, where he had been a professor since 1989. One was a course on American pragmatism, the tradition to which his own work belongs. The other was a seminar on Hannah Arendt, who, late in her life, was Bernstein’s friend. Years ago, when I got my Ph.D., I was Bernstein’s student. I still am, in a way. And so I asked him if I could audit the class on Arendt and write about it. He said that he didn’t like passive auditors—I would have to participate fully. That requirement struck me as a good description of what Bernstein had done all his life.

He was already in his seventies when I first met him, in 2008, but he still appeared more energetic than most of his students. You’d hear him coming down the hall, engaged in animated conversation, and then he’d stroll confidently and generously into the classroom, a small man in a black turtleneck, his sleeves rolled up, his wavy white hair swept gently back. He had a distinctively raspy voice that was somehow always half ironic and yet deeply sincere, and which sounded more streetwise than the other professors. Even a foreigner like me, from Barcelona, could hear the Brooklyn in it.

More here.

Katherine Irving in The Scientist:

In 1909, a chicken breeder approached Rockefeller Institute pathologist Peyton Rous with one of her hens. The chicken had a large, malignant tumor growing from the connective tissue in its breast, and Rous, who had long been fascinated by tumor biology and transmissibility, decided to investigate. He took biopsies and ground up the samples, then passed them through filters to remove any cells. Finally, he injected the mixture into healthy chickens of the same breed and watched as these chickens developed tumors of their own. This was to become the first major result that solid tumors can be infectious and spread through what some researchers at the time called “filterable agents,” now better known as viruses, which weren’t described in detail until the discovery of the electron microscope decades later.

These findings would eventually change the course of cancer research, but when Rous first reported his discoveries in 1910 and 1911, the scientific community was underwhelmed, according to Scripps Research cancer biologist Peter Vogt. “Rous made this big discovery, and at the time it was incredibly ahead of the field,” says Vogt, who coauthored a perspective piece on the virus, later named Rous sarcoma virus, or RSV (not to be confused with respiratory syncytial virus, also abbreviated to RSV). “People either didn’t believe him or belittled his work.”

More here.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy in The Hedgehog Review:

I’m not Michel Foucault, but here’s a history of sexuality, greatly abridged: First came the slut shamers. The traditionalist, patriarchal religious haranguers. Things weren’t great for men in the before times, but they were particularly unpleasant for women. Then came the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, which involved chucking all the rules. This had some good effects (ambitious women at last permitted to leave their houses and become doctors, lawyers, bosses) and some less good ones (moviemakers permitted to assault underage girls). In the 1990s and early 2000s, following however many backlashes against backlashes, the sexual revolution re-emerged as sex positivity.

In theory, sex positivity is friendlier to women than sexual liberation (more negotiated nonmonogamy, fewer bunny girls). It involves applying an open-minded but gender-neutral approach to sex and relationships. This is not the same as overtly catering to men but amounts to the same thing.

More here.

Sarah Scoles in Undark:

SOMETIME THIS COMING March, a network of 10 small satellites winged with solar panels is scheduled to launch into Earth’s low orbit. Though likely invisible to the naked eye, the satellites will be part of a future herd of hundreds that, according to the Space Development Agency, or SDA, will bolster the United States’ defense capabilities.

The SDA, formed in 2019, is an organization under the United States Space Force, the newly formed military branch that operates and protects American assets in space. And like all good startups, the agency is positioned as a disruptor. It aims to change the way the military acquires and runs its space infrastructure. For instance, the forthcoming satellite network, called the National Defense Space Architecture, will collectively gather and beam information, track missiles, and help aim weapons, among other tasks.

The SDA’s vision both mimics and relies on shifts that started years ago in the commercial sector: groupings of cheap little satellites — often weighing hundreds of pounds, instead of thousands — that together accomplish what fewer big, expensive satellites used to.

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

One name you don’t hear a lot these days is Thomas Piketty. In 2013, the French economist burst into the popular consciousness with the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The basic thesis was that unless extraordinary forces — war, or massive government action — intervened, capitalism would naturally tend toward greater and greater inequality. That thesis was summarized by the famous and pithy formula “r>g”, meaning that if the rate of return on capital is greater than the growth rate of the economy as a whole, inequality mechanically increases. In Piketty’s telling, only the extraordinary combination of the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War 2, and rapid postwar growth managed to save us from a social collapse due to spiraling inequality in the early 20th century, and now we were back in the danger zone.

More here.

Hannah Rachel Cole at JSTOR Daily:

Yet something strange happened in the history of this ostensibly symbiotic relationship. Although guinea grass was meant to support the sugar economy by feeding its beasts of burden, ironically, it became a virulent weed to the sugarcane plants. By 1977, guinea grass was rated the number one weed to sugarcane in Cuba. In 2012, the journal of the National Botanical Garden of Cuba (Revista del Jardín Botánico Nacional) listed it as one of the top 100 most noxious weeds on the island and an invasive species of greatest concern.

In this way, the two imported grasses became stalky antagonists in the daily competition for light, water, and soil nutrients. Their cultural meanings, however, had long since diverged. If sugarcane supported the economic interests of European planters, guinea grass was appropriated by enslaved and marooned Africans across the Caribbean for practical and religious purposes. Diasporic Africans in the Virgin Islands used the dried grass to make masquerade costumes for Carnival and other festivals.

more here.

Trevor Quirk at The Point:

The invisibility of the disaster presents a serious difficulty to the filmmakers, who need their viewers to perceive it as the expert does. Their ingenious solution is found in the technical disaster movie’s pronounced ambience: the bustled score and sweaty palettes of Contagion; Chernobyl’s ghostly clanks and drones; the blare of Bloomberg terminals and pristine skylines of Margin Call. Through these effects, viewers are invited to pretend we know things we manifestly do not. We work through the night with Sullivan as he discovers his financial firm’s impending demise, study his stubbled face as he looks up from his illegible scrawl of equations before a pulsing monotone—and we simply know he’s uncovered something. The camera of Contagion fixates upon “fomites” (common objects that facilitate disease transmission), such that we learn to almost see viruses slithering over bus handles, glassware and casino chips. Chernobyl represents the presence of radiation with the throaty static of dosimeters (audible radiological instruments) that is often so loud and unnerving we forget we don’t exactly know what the sound means. Technical knowledge becomes an artificial sensorium, a collage of abstractions forced onto the nerve endings, always attempting to compensate for its baselessness.

more here.

The Grand Guignol of Countries
……………….. or
Country of the Grand Guignol

the circus and its clowns
the theater and its marionettes
the carnival and its masks
the zoo and its monkeys
the arena and its bulls
the slaughterhouse and its black beef
the yankee and the money wheel
the native and the wheel of blood
voodoo and its grand Dons
the holy family and its demons
the people and their misery
exile and its survivors
without faith without law
Haiti and its cross
Haiti in hell
in the name of the father
and of the son
and of the zombie

by Paul Laraque
from Poetry Like Bread
…..—Poets f the Political Imagination
Curbstone Books, 1994

Hope Reese in The New York Times:

From SciTechDaily:

To learn to socialize, zebrafish need to trust their gut. Gut microbes encourage specialized cells to prune back extra connections in brain circuits that control social behavior, new University of Oregon research in zebrafish shows. The pruning is essential for the development of normal social behavior.

The researchers also found that these ‘social’ neurons are similar in zebrafish and mice. That suggests the findings might translate between species — and could possibly point the way to treatments for a range of neurodevelopmental conditions. “This is a big step forward,” said University of Oregon neuroscientist Judith Eisen, who co-led the work with neuroscientist Philip Washbourne. “It also sheds light on things that are going on in larger, furrier animals.” The team reports their findings in two new papers, published in PLOS Biology and BMC Genomics.

While social behavior is a complex phenomenon involving many parts of the brain, Washbourne’s lab previously identified a set of neurons in the zebrafish brain that are required for one particular kind of social interaction. Normally, if two zebrafish see each other through a glass partition, they’ll approach each other and swim side by side. But zebrafish without these neurons don’t show interest. Here, the team found a pathway linking microbes in the gut to these neurons in the brain. In healthy fish, gut microbes spurred cells called microglia to prune back extra links between neurons.

Galen Strawson in Aeon:

Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: ‘We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.’ And here’s the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: ‘We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.’ And, for good measure, another American philosopher, Daniel Dennett: ‘we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behaviour… and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self.’

So say the narrativists. We story ourselves and we are our stories. There’s a remarkably robust consensus about this claim, not only in the humanities but also in psychotherapy. It’s standardly linked with the idea that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life.

I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing.

More here.

Gary Marcus in his Substack newsletter:

What do Noam Chomsky, living legend of linguistics, Kai-Fu Lee, perhaps the most famous AI researcher in all of China, and Yejin Choi, the 2022 MacArthur Fellowship winner who was profiled earlier this week in The New York Times Magazine—and more than a dozen other scientists, economists, researchers, and elected officials—all have in common?

They are all worried about the near-term future of AI. The most worrisome thing of all? They are all worried about different things.

Each spoke last week at December 23’s AGI Debate (co-organized by Montreal.AI’s Vince Boucher and myself). No summary can capture all that was said (though Tiernan Ray’s 8,000 word account at ZDNet comes close), but here are a few of the many concerns that were raised…

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

The problems created by humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels are widely appreciated, and governments and businesses are now pursuing renewable energy and electric vehicles as the solution. Less appreciated is that this new infrastructure will require the mining of vast amounts of metals, creating different problems. In Volt Rush, Financial Times journalist Henry Sanderson gives a well-rounded and thought-provoking exposé of the companies and characters behind the supply chain of foremost the batteries that will power the vehicles of the future. If you think a greener and cleaner world awaits us, Volt Rush makes it clear that this is far from a given.

As Sanderson explains in his introduction, his aim in writing this book is to equip readers with the background knowledge needed to ask critical questions regarding our transition away from fossil fuels. Without it, we risk falling prey to feel-good narratives and corporate greenwash. Though not apparent from the title and flap text, Sanderson focuses on four metals important in the batteries of electric vehicles. Lithium is one of the substances that will be in high demand, and I am reviewing this book in tandem with Lukasz Bednarski’s Lithium, but as Volt Rush makes clear, cobalt, nickel, and copper are equally vital.

More here.

Claudia Hammond in The Guardian:

I really enjoy doing it: it makes me feel good about myself. It gives me a boost, mentally and physically.” If these were your reactions to an activity, you’d surely be inclined to do it as often as you could. After all, aren’t a lot of us looking for ways to find more meaning in life and to be happier and healthier? What, then, is the act that elicits such positive responses? The answer: being kind.

A growing body of evidence from the fields of psychology and neuroscience demonstrates that performing kind acts increases mental wellbeing, enhances physical health and might even improve life expectancy. Kindness is not just beneficial for the recipient, but also for the giver.

In 2021 I worked with a team at the University of Sussex to create the Kindness Test. This online study was launched on BBC Radio 4, and more than 60,000 people took part. We found that the more acts of kindness people told us they carried out, the greater their wellbeing.

More here.

Sitting With Others

The front seats filled last. Laggards, Buffoons,
and kiss-ups falling in beside local politicos,
the about to be honored, and the hard of hearing.

No help from the middle, blenders and criminals,
And the back rows: restless, intelligent, unable to commit.
my place was always left-center, a little to the rear.

The shy sat with me, fearful of discovery.
Behind me the dead man’s illegitimate children
and the bride’s and groom’s former lovers.

There, when lights were lowered, hands
plunged under skirts or deftly unzipped flies,
and, lights up again, rose and pattered applause.

Ahead, the bored practiced impeccable signatures.
But was it a movie or singing? I remember
the whole crowd uplifted, but not the event

or the word that brought us together as one —
One, I say now when I had felt myself many,
speaking and listening: that was the contradiction.

by Rodney Jones
from Salvation Blues
Mariner Books, 2007