Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing
flowers home.
…………… –Wisława Szymborska

Why I Don’t Mention Flowers When Conversations
with My Brother Reach Uncomfortable Silences

In the Kashmir mountains,
my brother shot many men,
blew skulls from brown skins,
dyed white desert sand crimson.

What is there to say to a man
who has traversed such a world,
whose hands and eyes have
betrayed him?

Were there flowers there? I asked.

This is what he told me:

In a village, many men
wrapped a woman in a sheet.
She didn’t struggle.
Her bare feet dragged in the dirt.

They laid her in the road
and stoned her.

The first man was her father.
He threw two stones in a row.
Her brother had filled his pockets
with stones on the way there.

The crowd was a hive
of disturbed bees. The volley
of stones against her body
drowned out her moans.

Blood burst through the sheet
like a patch of violets,
a hundred roses in bloom.

by Natalie Diaz
From When My Brother Was an Aztec
Copper Canyon Press, 2012

Tim Cross in More Intelligent Life:

For those who believe in the distinction between high art and low, video games have long been near the bottom of the pile. Fortunately, that has not stopped some of the world’s great art museums from putting on exhibitions. The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, began acquiring games in 2012 and a year later invited visitors to play some of them in a show called “Applied Design”. The most recent video-games exhibition, “Videogames Design/Play/Disrupt”, takes place at an even grander instituion – the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The arriviste status of video games means that exhibitions about them – and especially those that take place in marbled bastions of established culture – risk coming across as cringing and defensive. The V&A, to its credit, mostly manages to avoid that trap. Instead it unapologetically addresses video games on their own terms, as a medium that, more than any other, combines art and storytelling with engineering and technology. The show kicks off with a quote from Frank Lantz, an academic and developer, that neatly summarises the blend of skills required. “Making games combines everything that’s hard about building a bridge with everything that’s hard about composing an opera. Games are operas made out of bridges.”

Parts of the process look like storyboarding for a film. The concept art and character sketches for the protagonists of “The Last of Us”, a post-apocalyptic survival game, show the attention to detail present in the designers’ creation of Ellie, the teenage girl that is the focus of the story. Other parts have no real parallel with other forms of art. Books and films, for instance, railroad readers and viewers along the plotlines invented by their authors. Games are different. Even those that focus on narrative rather than gameplay must give players enough choice and freedom to maintain the illusion that they are influencing a coherent, believable world – but not so much that anarchy reigns and storytelling becomes impossible. “Journey”, which puts players in the shoes of a pilgrim travelling towards a mysterious mountain, nudges its players towards interesting encounters with subtle tricks of light and shadow.

More here.

Sarah Zhang in Nautilus:

From bulging biceps to 7-foot wingspans to a striking paucity of fat, elite athletes’ bodies often look quite different from those of the rest of us. But it’s not only athletes’ bodies that are different; their brains are just as finely tuned to the mental demands of a particular sport. Here are seven areas of the brain that enable seven different athletes to pull off extraordinary feats.

Winning a Battle of Wills

When the 1988 World Series started, Kirk Gibson, the best hitter on the underdog Los Angeles Dodgers, had injured both legs. He wasn’t even supposed to play. But at a key moment in Game 1, he was nevertheless called to pinch hit. He promptly took on one of a baseball player’s most challenging jobs: getting inside the head of the opposing pitcher. It was the bottom of the ninth, and the Dodgers were down by one, with a runner on base and two outs. Dennis Eckersley, one of the greatest closers in baseball history, was pitching. The count on Gibson went to three balls and two strikes. Douglas recalled a bit of advice from Mel Didier, a Dodgers scout. “Now remember, and don’t ever forget this, if you’re up in the ninth inning and we’re down or it’s tied and you get to 3-and-2 against Eckersley,” said Didier retelling the conversation later in ESPN, “Partner, sure as I’m standing here breathing, you’re going to see a 3-2 backdoor slider.” Sure enough, a slider came breaking toward Gibson. He swung awkwardly, unable to use his legs, but he had the advantage of knowing exactly what pitch was coming. The ball sailed into the stands in right field. The Dodgers won the game and, eventually, the series.

More here.

Theodore P. Hill in Quillette:

In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.

Evidence for this hypothesis is fairly robust and has been reported in species ranging from adders and sockeye salmon to wasps and orangutans, as well as humans. Multiple studies have found that boys and men are over-represented at both the high and low ends of the distributions in categories ranging from birth weight and brain structures and 60-meter dash times to reading and mathematics test scores. There are significantly more men than women, for example, among Nobel laureates, music composers, and chess champions—and also among homeless people, suicide victims, and federal prison inmates.

Darwin had also raised the question of why males in many species might have evolved to be more variable than females, and when I learned that the answer to his question remained elusive, I set out to look for a scientific explanation.

More here.  And here is a rebuttal by the Fields Medalist Sir Tim Gowers writing in his own blog:

I was disturbed recently by reading about an incident in which a paper was accepted by the Mathematical Intelligencer and then rejected, after which it was accepted and published online by the New York Journal of Mathematics, where it lasted for three days before disappearing and being replaced by another paper of the same length. The reason for this bizarre sequence of events? The paper concerned the “variability hypothesis”, the idea, apparently backed up by a lot of evidence, that there is a strong tendency for traits that can be measured on a numerical scale to show more variability amongst males than amongst females. I do not know anything about the quality of this evidence, other than that there are many papers that claim to observe greater variation amongst males of one trait or another, so that if you want to make a claim along the lines of “you typically see more males both at the top and the bottom of the scale” then you can back it up with a long list of citations.

You can see, or probably already know, where this is going: some people like to claim that the reason that women are underrepresented at the top of many fields is simply that the top (and bottom) people, for biological reasons, tend to be male. There is a whole narrative, much loved by many on the political right, that says that this is an uncomfortable truth that liberals find so difficult to accept that they will do anything to suppress it. There is also a counter-narrative that says that people on the far right keep on trying to push discredited claims about the genetic basis for intelligence, differences amongst various groups, and so on, in order to claim that disadvantaged groups are innately disadvantaged rather than disadvantaged by external circumstances.

I myself, as will be obvious, incline towards the liberal side, but I also care about scientific integrity, so I felt I couldn’t just assume that the paper in question had been rightly suppressed.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. It can, as Homer Simpson once memorably noted, be exchanged for goods and services. But who decides exactly how many goods/services a given unit of money can buy? And what maintains the social contract that we all agree to go along with it? Technology is changing what money is and how we use it, and Neha Narula is a leader in thinking about where money is going. One much-hyped aspect is the advent of blockchain technology, which has led to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We talk about what the blockchain really is, how it enables new kinds of currency, and from a wider perspective whether it can help restore a more individualistic, decentralized Web.

More here.

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb at the Poetry Foundation:

In halls and moods of violent possession, we speak of languages as things we “have.” This mood comes easy when the books are small and green—a Loeb’s fits in the palm like a secret jewel, a perfect bun. Its loose-woven ribbon reminds us the gift is inside, our reading an unwrapping—happy birthday to our most serious, our highest mind. In the early aughts, I was often high haha.

In those days, when I was still a teenager, I went over and over the lines in the Timaeus that told me what we might be about. Our atoms and waves, our tides and our matter. I didn’t know then how much of this is in Lucretius, too, from the Atomists, and also in a lot of hokey theory that comes out now about mycology and the end times. I worry that if these idiot dialogues are the kind of philosophy that covers up its poetry—lets people forget about, well, people and their errors, language and its habit of always running away and wild, which also means forgetting about justice—then maybe the Timaeus is also bad, since it telegraphs messages about ideal forms and eternal essences, whether it wants to or not. I mostly think philosophy is bad when we forget it’s poetry. Don’t talk to me about Plato on this subject.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

GORONGOSA NATIONAL PARK, Mozambique — We are flying in a Bat Hawk aircraft — which may be named for a raptor that preys on bats but looks more like a giant, lime-green dragonfly — and my hair, thanks to the open cockpit, has gone full Phyllis Diller. Scudding above flood plains the color of worn pool table felt and mud flats split like jigsaw puzzles, we dip toward the treetops and see herds of waterbuck scatter with an impatient flash of their bull’s-eye rumps. We are searching for the elusive tuskless elephants of Gorongosa, elephants that naturally lack the magnificent ivory staffs all too tragically coveted by wealthy collectors worldwide. Tuskless elephants can be found in small numbers throughout Africa, but Gorongosa is known to harbor a sizable population of them, the legacy of a violent 15-year civil war. Tusked elephants were slaughtered for their ivory at a harrowing rate, and the park’s rare tusk-free residents thus gained a sudden Darwinian advantage. Today, about a quarter of the park’s 700 or so elephants are tuskless, all of them female, and I am determined to catch a glimpse of at least one. Yet a week of ground searches has proved fruitless, and now we are circling in a plane and still nothing and, holy mother of Horton, how can such massive creatures go missing?

“There!” Alfredo Matavele, the pilot, cries triumphantly, pointing toward a cluster of trees. “And there!” pointing toward a watering hole. And there and there. “Do you see them?” he demands. Oh yes, I see them. Dozens, scores, cliques and claques of elephants, ears flapping like flags, trunks slowly swinging, and many of their faces decidedly free of ivory eruptions. I have found them at last, my sisters in dental deprivation. Other people may admire elephants for their brains or their complex social lives; I feel a bond with this mutant crew. After all, I’ve learned that we share a basic developmental anomaly, which may well be traceable to the same underlying glitches in our DNA. Elephant tusks happen to be overgrown versions of the upper lateral incisors — the teeth right next to the front teeth, before you get to the canines. Simply put, tuskless elephants lack lateral incisors.

More here.

Eric Boodman in Stat News:

WASHINGTON — As deals struck by health care behemoths go, this was one of the stranger ones. On one side, you had a medical device giant, with a phalanx of PR professionals carefully guarding the company’s image. On the other, you had a consultant who didn’t sound much like a consultant:

“I am synthetic life form ‘Yoko K.,’ assembled in the US with components made in Japan,” one of her websites explained. “I am designed to assume the role of an ‘electronic musician.’ I am one of many secret agents sent to this time to plant magical thinking in people through the use of ‘pre-22nd century nostalgia Mars pop music.’”

In other words, Yoko K. Sen is an ambient electronic musician, born in Japan but transplanted to the United States, where she’s layered her breathy, machine-modulated vocals over ethereal blooms of synth at galleries, in concert halls, and on award-winning albums. In recent years, though, she’s created a new, more corporate niche for herself: revamping the soundscape in hospitals. Medtronic had hired her, late in 2017, for a related project, to help design the beeps patients would hear from their cardiac monitors at home.

We live in an era of constant redesigns, and health care — with its cheerless institutional bent and vomit-like color palette — has proven especially ripe for reimagining. Fashion icons have taken on the hospital gown. Architects have gone after the hospital room, and celebrity chefs have barged into the cafeteria. One bigwig San Francisco designer even tried to rebrand death. You name it, there’s probably someone out there working to give it a makeover. And sometimes, these aesthetic changes might just save lives. As the New York Times reported in 2014, when patients moved into homier hospital rooms as a test, they not only felt more comfortable but also requested less pain medication.

More here.

Violets

Down by the rumbling creek and the tall trees—
…. where I went truant from school three days a week
…….. and therefore broke the record—
there were violets as easy in their lives
….. as anything you have ever seen
……… or leaned down to intake the sweet breath of.
Later, when the necessary houses were built
…… they were gone, and who would give significance
………. to their absence.
Oh, violets, you did signify, and what shall take
…… your place?

by Mary Oliver
from Evidence
Beacon Press, 2009