David Reich in the New York Times:

In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.

It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.

But over the years this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction:

Yesterday, the media buzzed with the revelation that Stephen Hawking had completed a paper two weeks before his death. This paper supposedly contains some breathtaking insight.

The headlines refer to a paper titled “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation” in collaboration with Thomas Hertog. The paper was originally uploaded to the arXiv in July last year, but it was updated two weeks ago. It is under review with “a leading journal” which I suspect but do not know is Physical Review D. Thomas Hertog gave a talk about this at the conference which I attended last summer. You can watch the video of Hertog’s talk here.

According to The Independent the paper contains “a theory explaining how we might detect parallel universes and a prediction for the end of the world.” Furthermore, we learn, “Hawking also theorised in his final work that scientists could find alternate universes using probes on space ships, allowing humans to form an even better understanding of our own universe, what else is out there and our place in the cosmos.”

In the Sunday Times you can read that the paper “shows how we might find other universes” and in The Telegraph you find a quote by Carlos Frenk, professor of cosmology at Durham University who said: “The intriguing idea in Hawking’s paper is that [the multiverse] left its imprint on the background radiation permeating our universe and we could measure it with a detector on a spaceship.”

Since the paper doesn’t say anything about detecting parallel universes, I was originally confused whether the headlines were referring to another paper. But no, Thomas Hertog confirmed to me that the paper in question is indeed the paper that is on the arXiv. There is no other paper.

So what does the paper say?

More here.

Peter Woit in Not Even Wrong:

There’s a new popular book out this week about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, Adam Becker’s What is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics. Ever since my high school days, the topic of quantum mechanics and what it really means has been a source of deep fascination to me, and usually I’m a sucker for any book such as this one. It’s well-written and contains some stories I had never encountered before in the wealth of other things I’ve read over the years.

Unfortunately though, the author has decided to take a point of view on this topic that I think is quite problematic. To get an idea of the problem, here’s some of the promotional text for the book (yes, I know that this kind of text sometimes is exaggerated for effect):

A mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, [the] Copenhagen [interpretation] claims that questions about the fundamental nature of reality are meaningless. Albert Einstein and others were skeptical of Copenhagen when it was first developed. But buoyed by political expediency, personal attacks, and the research priorities of the military industrial complex, the Copenhagen interpretation has enjoyed undue acceptance for nearly a century.

The text then goes to describe Bohm, Everett and Bell as the “quantum rebels” trying to fight the good cause against Copenhagen.

Part of the problem with this good vs. evil story is that, as the book itself explains, it’s not at all clear what the “Copenhagen interpretation” actually is, other than a generic name for the point of view the generation of theorists such as Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Wigner and von Neumann developed as they struggled to reconcile quantum and classical mechanics. They weren’t solipsists with poor reasoning skills, but trying to come to terms with the extremely non-trivial and difficult problem of how the classical physics formalism we use to describe observations emerges out of the more fundamental quantum mechanical formalism.

More here.

Ari Berman in Mother Jones:

“Six minutes and about 20 seconds. In a little over six minutes, 17 of our friends were taken from us.” That’s how Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and one of the organizers of the March for Our Lives, began her remarkable speech on Saturday afternoon at the rally in Washington, DC.

After reading the names of her classmates who were killed in the mass shooting, Gonzalez stood at the podium in silence for six minutes, fighting back tears. It was an incredible, chilling moment. All of the major cable networks carried it live. “Loudest silence in the history of US social protest,” my colleague David Corn tweeted.

“Never again,” many in the crowd of 500,000 chanted in response. After her timer went off, Gonzalez said, “since the time when I came out here, it has been six minutes and twenty seconds. The shooter has ceased shooting and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest,” she said. “Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.” And then she left the stage.

More here.

Catherine Pond in Avidly:

Bret Morgen’s Jane opens on a shot of Gombe. Culled from 140 hours of footage shot by Goodall’s ex-husband, photographer Hugo van Lawick, the movie captures Jane in her mid-twenties, lithe and excitable, her movements set to a lush Phillip Glass soundtrack. Morgen’s film suggests a dual love story: that of Jane as she falls in love with Hugo, and that of Jane as she falls in love with the chimps around Lake Tanganyika. The love affair with Hugo ends after they have a child together: he wants to be on the Serengeti; Jane can’t tear herself away from Gombe. But her love for the chimps endures. Though it seems obvious to us now, the movie highlights the novelty of Jane’s experiences: she is the first, ever, to live among the chimpanzees and record their behavior. After witnessing their great empathy, their ability to nurture and sympathize with each other, and their communal lifestyle, Jane believes the chimpanzees not only to be human, but to be better than human — not our companion species, but our superior species. Humans, she reasons, have war, and bloodshed, and an endless need to inflict pain and conflict on themselves.

Amy Chozick in The New York Times:

DEAR MADAM PRESIDENT

An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World
By Jennifer Palmieri
180 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $20.

Not long after Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat to Donald J. Trump, her campaign’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, shopped around a book idea. “I was advised that if I didn’t have something juicy to share about Hillary, there wouldn’t be interest in me,” she writes in “Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World.” But, she adds, using Clinton’s frequent description of herself, “there aren’t any juicy things to share about Hillary because she’s a simple and serious person.”

In any other election year, an advice book from a high-ranking campaign official on the losing candidate’s side wouldn’t have much coin. But 2016 wasn’t like any other election year, and as it turns out Palmieri has plenty of wisdom — and even a little dish about Clinton — to dispense. In this slim volume, Palmieri neatly weaves her heartbreaking personal story of losing her sister to Alzheimer’s weeks after losing the election with lessons learned from her long career in Democratic politics and Mitch Albom-style wisdom (“When the unimaginable happens, imagine what else may be possible”). Palmieri had been President Obama’s White House communications director when she agreed to join the Clinton campaign. She (like most of us) thought Clinton would win and didn’t think her gender would be much of an obstacle, especially after Obama had broken racial barriers. Clinton warned Palmieri otherwise. Before the race started, Clinton “held forth for more than an hour” to recap each scandal, from the uproar in Arkansas when she resisted taking Bill Clinton’s name to the White House and her doomed 2008 presidential campaign. “She was as bewildered as anyone by the phenomenon of ‘Hillary Clinton,’” Palmieri writes.

More here.

Jamie Fisher in the London Review of Books:

Nominally a book that covers the rough century between the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s and that of computing in the 1950s, The Chinese Typewriter is secretly a history of translation and empire, written language and modernity, misguided struggle and brutal intellectual defeat. The Chinese typewriter is ‘one of the most important and illustrative domains of Chinese techno-linguistic innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries … one of the most significant and misunderstood inventions in the history of modern information technology’, and ‘a historical lens of remarkable clarity through which to examine the social construction of technology, the technological construction of the social, and the fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity’. It was where empires met.

Long before it could be a technological reality, the Chinese typewriter was a famous non-object. In 1900, the San Francisco Examiner described a mythical Chinatown typewriter with a 12-foot keyboard and 5000 keys. The joke caught on, playing to Western conceptions of the Chinese language as incomprehensible, impractical and above all baroque: cartoons showed mandarins in flowing robes, clambering up and down staircases of keys or key-thumping in caverns. ‘After all,’ Thomas Mullaney writes, ‘if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two ping-pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?’ To many Western eyes, the characters were so exotic that they seemed to raise philosophical, rather than mechanical, questions. Technical concerns masqueraded as ‘irresolvable Zen kōans’: ‘What is Morse code without letters? What is a typewriter without keys?’ A Chinese typewriter was an oxymoron.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

You see, when Pinker says he supports Enlightenment norms of reason and humanism, he really means to say that he supports unbridled capitalism and possibly even eugenics. As I read this sort of critique, the hair stands on my neck, because the basic technique of hostile mistranslation is so familiar to me. It’s the technique that once took a comment in which I pled for shy nerdy males and feminist women to try to understand each other’s suffering, as both navigate a mating market unlike anything in previous human experience—and somehow managed to come away with the take-home message, “so this entitled techbro wants to return to a past when society would just grant him a female sex slave.”

I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile mistranslation tactic. Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around and says, “and here’s what I’m not saying”—and then proceeds to ward off five different misreadings so wild they wouldn’t have occurred to me, but then if you read Leon Wieseltier or John Gray or his other critics, there the misreadings are, trotted out triumphantly; it doesn’t even matter how much time Pinker spent trying to prevent them.

More here.

Wael Ghonim:

In July of 2013, my tears fell as the plane took off. For the first time in my life, I was desperate to leave Egypt, despite not knowing when I would be able to return. A few days prior, a military coup had toppled our two-year-old struggling democracy.

I had lived most of my life as an outsider. I never belonged to a majority. As a child, I was the Egyptian kid growing up in Saudi Arabia, and when I moved to Egypt at the age of 13, I became “the kid who came back from Saudi.” At 17, I became religious, and my family and friends called me an extremist. At 30, I was an anonymous activist–who barely knew any activists. And now, at 37, I’m the Egyptian who just moved to the US and is once again struggling to prove his worth.

My early childhood seems to have been contained in a sheltered bubble I went to private schools in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, spent most of my time at home, and my parents knew everything about my friends. But at the age of 14, I burst that bubble. I decided to leave private school and join a public one.

On the first day in public school, I was shocked. Our classroom had benches for forty students but we were over seventy. There was no fan, no AC, no ventilation. The school yard was huge, but not enough to accommodate the thousands of students.

In my third day at school, a fight erupted in the yard. Kids were throwing rocks randomly in the middle of the yard. I saw blood, knives, and swords. The screams of anger and the ambulance sirens were all that I could hear.

More here.

Vidyan Ravinthiran at Poetry Magazine:

In “On the Move,” the verse-rhythm is already more susceptible, and uncertain, than it seems. The commas in the first two lines quoted are marvelously controlled — a delight for the savoring ear — but they also register that “doubt” which is eventually strapped in and hidden (where the fitting of rhyme to rhyme is the poet’s own 
version of this process). Writing of Thomas Hardy, Gunn says his “poetry is almost always robust, never fretful or neurotic.” Yet, in this poem, the hidden neurosis is acknowledged. And we shouldn’t miss, in either the essay on Hardy or “On the Move,” the genuinely mitigating (rather than habitual) word “almost” — as crucial here as when it appears twice at the close of Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb,” from which it tends to vanish whenever that poem is sentimentally quoted. The internal rhyme with “dust” and “robust” emphasizes the word: Gunn won’t wholly idealize his kinetic toughs.

Comparing this with the verse of his following books, we see how Gunn gradually learned to combine his rhymes with soft-hard meter. “In Santa Maria del Popolo” is slicker, less insistent and more insinuating — the syntactical distensions have become second nature. In 1965, Gunn collaborated with his brother Ander on the photo-book Positives (only “The Old Woman” makes the cut here); two years later, Touch appeared, containing the sequence “Misanthropos” (solipsism 
diagrammed, with a diamond-point chisel), and also the famous title poem.

more here.