by Carl Pierer

Dear Mr F.

Your recent book was read with much appreciation and was very well received. It is truly impressive that you manage to translate a foreign author's essays with such accuracy and close attention to his many plays on words. Yet, as a native Austrian, your annotations and commentaries are the more valuable. Indeed, their meandering and digressing nature breathes life into those articles. Witty explanations mixed with your own experiences and brief autobiographical sketches help to understand a complex writer and to see his relevance. But praise has been manifold and you are probably very well aware what great contribution you have made with this book. This letter is addressed to you because your book prompted many questions. Most of them are very closely linked to the topic of the book, but a substantial minority is as digressing as your own commentaries. Certainly, the idea you put forward that a writer cannot possibly desire a completely egalitarian society due to its lack of linguistic differences is fascinating and harbours an explosive potential for controversy. Your other arguments to the quality of writing and your drawing of parallels between turn of the century feuilletonists and modern bloggers stimulate reflection. Still, none of these kept your devoted reader wide awake at night. More troubling than these are your implicit characterisations of what makes a good novelist. This should rather read: implicit mentioning of which characteristics a good novelist displays. Your own biography and those of many other writers seem to suggest that the youthful author should struggle with his fate, they should be submerged in the search for their self and isolation. Yet, even if we accepted this, it is far from evident that the other direction of implication should work as well. If a young person begins to ask the first questions about themselves and about their identity, it does not immediately follow that these questions put to paper will make for readable literature. Instead, they might commit the error of abusing art to assert a self they want to be.

This line of reasoning seems to have a strong pull. To write is to be cool. And what is cooler than to depict (and live) a solitary man's struggle with the world around him? Isolation and prophetic cynicism are perceived as cool. Simultaneously a sort of nihilism and defiance can be adopted. Akin to the Eastwoodian anti-hero, the self they aim at is a more refined and less moral protagonist. While eating their fire-roasted beans, they polish their “designed in California”-weapon. Its smooth aluminium enclosure equips the lonesome soldier with just the right cutting-edge fashion in their Mexican standoff with evil and society. In one of your early footnotes, you analyse precisely this feature of the cultivated Apple: “Isn't the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn't even matter what you're creating on your MacBook Air. Simply using a MacBook Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris.”

The temptation to slip into back patting self-affirmation of the young author's existential hermitism is well depicted in Male Novelist Jokes. The fact that these jokes take the form of low-brow amusements (How many x does it take to do y) stands in stark contrast with their smart but scorching sarcasm. However, their formal kinship with all too familiar misogynistic, racist or otherwise discriminating jokes, parallels the young male author's laddism. For instance, the following makes use of all of these elements:

Q: How many male novelists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: “The cocaine isn't the point. The cocaine is a metaphor,” he explained wearily over the pile of cocaine. She folded her arms. She didn't understand his cocaine. “Didn't you read my manifesto?” The prostitute had read his manifesto. Why couldn't she?

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history

History too important to be left to national politicians and their ideological visions of national identity and social engineering projects.

First, the principle. History should be truthful, relevant, and just. As an intellectual enterprise history is a matter of fact not opinion, the discovery and painstaking corroboration of contingent events by rigorous peer-reviewed methods. People have a right to an official story that is also true, even if that is upsetting or inconvenient for some politicians or dominant ethnic groups. Children have the right to study the truth rather than propaganda, to be respected as future citizens rather than being used as pawns in a game of social engineering. It is as ridiculous to have national politicians imposing their opinions and calling it history as it would be for them to choose what kind of evolutionary theory gets taught. The idea of ‘national histories' should be replaced with the idea of international history, in which a basic requirement is that every historical account should be compatible with each other. There should be no more of the competitive victimhood in which every country teaches its children that they were the ones attacked without provocation.

Of course it is reasonable for national governments to decide to some extent which areas of the country's history should be the main focus in schools. But national curriculums should not only meet the bare truth requirement. They should also pay adequate attention to the dark side of a nation's past – the oppression of empire, the moral quagmire of occupation, the crimes of autocrats and their accomplices, and so on. The victims of national crimes, and their descendants inside and outside the country, have a particular right to have the crimes against them acknowledged, as in the case of Turkey's Armenian genocide or Japan's war-time atrocities across Asia.

Second, there should be a grievance mechanism that reflects the fact that the way history is taught is a matter not only for national governments, but of human rights below and international relations above. I like the model of the European Court of Human Rights, to which both individuals and other member states can bring cases of rule-breaking by national governments. But instead of legal judges we would have a panel of internationally respected academic historians. False, substantially misleading, or unjust history curriculums would lead to legally binding rulings against propagandist governments including fines and reform requirements.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

This is an excerpt from my book manuscript on call center worlds in India. For five months of my research career, I worked the night shift in a transnational call center and taught workers how to speak in an American accent. What follows are my field notes, summarily rearranged into a modicum of a narrative. All names are pseudonyms in order to protect the identities of my interlocutors.

Media create unique aural and perceptual environments, everyday urban arenas through which people move, work, and become bored, violent, amorous and contemplative. (Larkin 2008: 3)

I cannot sleep. Tossing and turning and dreaming have become the order of the day. And yes, day, not night. Sleeplessness has a power over me that I would have scoffed at when in the throes of my diurnal state. In this nocturnality that is now my life, I just cannot sleep. In my now permanently half awake state, I see visions and stray in and out of states of deep dreaming. I snap myself out of one only to enter the next. The zombies of the daytime world amble along even as I deplete my reserves of energy. The milkman outside the door, the children home from school, the “fastest-finger-first” honkers of the cruel street. In one of my dreams, my father is a doppelganger. Of himself.

Every step feels like a potential fall. I tell myself that the trick is to continue the process of living even while fighting the prospect of that which allows us to become most human, sleeping. Smoke some more, drink some more, fight some more. Fight the light, draw the curtains, and dull the sound. Steal airline kits with blinkers and earplugs. Eat when standing. Quickly. Lest I forget to eat before I have to plop onto bed and enter hallucination central, and lest I lose the hand-eye co-ordination needed to last the route from morsel to mouth.

Staying awake is a technique and the call center, a living, breathing, demanding technology. One night I wake up, and I'm trembling. I have slept through my alarm, and I will miss being at work. My body has betrayed me. At this point, there is no clear disappointment or fear or anguish or disapproval. Just a shiver. And a silent anxiety building to nervous crescendo. I call the company's transport desk, already always on speed dial on my phone to see if a cab might be somewhere in my vicinity. The situation is managed, my out of control state abates, and I make it to work. Sashaying into my training session, I address the young workers in quiet confidence and tell them to manage their sleep.

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by Gerald Dworkin

It has been a well-recognized phenomenon for some time that how we frame our questions to others affects the answers they give. The best known work on the topic is by Kahneman and Tversky. They give examples such as the following.

Subjects were asked to choose between two treatments for 600 people who had a fatal disease. Treatment A was predicted to result in 400 deaths.

Frame Treatment A
Positive saves 200 lives
Negative 400 people will die

Treatment A was chosen by 72% of participants when it was presented with positive framing (“saves 200 lives”) dropping to only 22% when the same choice was presented with negative framing (“400 people will die”).

Another example: 92% of Ph.d students registered early when there was a penalty for late registration, but only 67% did so when the penalty was framed as a discount for early registration.

Those who choose because of these framing effects display a cognitive bias leading to choices that are less than fully rational.

More recently psychologists and philosophers who are part of the so-called experimental philosophy group (x-phi) turned their attention to whether such framing effects affect judgments about what to do in various well-known examples of moral dilemmas such as the notorious trolley problems. Those of you lucky enough to have escaped the latter will be exposed to them anon.

Here are some examples of framing effects in people's responses to the following hypothetical cases used by philosophers to determine what are called “moral intuitions.” These are the judgments that people make about what is right or wrong, and what they would choose to do in these cases.

1) Standard trolley case. A runaway trolley is heading for a track on which five people are trapped. You are standing by a switch that can divert the trolley onto a track where there is only one person trapped. Should you or should you not divert the trolley?

2) Heavy Man. There is a heavy man standing on a bridge over the tracks. He is standing on a trap door that you can release by pulling a lever. If he drops onto the track with the five people ahead his body will stop the trolley before it gets to them.

3) Heavy Man. Same as above but you are standing on the bridge and have to push him over.

Many people believe that while you ought to divert the trolley in the standard case one ought not to do so in the Heavy Man case. It does not matter, for our purposes, whether you agree or not. What you probably do not believe, and should not believe, is that the order in which you present the cases should affect your judgments about what to do. That is, if we present 1 and then 3, or 3 and then 1, the judgments about what one ought to do in the two cases should not be affected.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas”. – Albert Einstein, (Obituary forEmmy Nother)

The first time you encounter a truly dazzling idea, its light seems almost blinding; slowly, your eyes grow more accustomed, and the glare dulls down to a glow which pleasantly illuminates your outlook. At least, that's how it usually happens, but Noether's Theorem is in a class of its own. I first came across it as a graduate student, about fifteen years ago, and to this day, I am stunned by its unfading brilliance.

I find it a travesty that Emmy Noether and her beautiful work are not more widely known. With International Women's Day just behind us, and Noether's birth anniversary around the corner, this seems like a good time to right that wrong. But before I introduce you to Emmy Noether, let me first tell you about her work. That, I am convinced, is how she would have wanted it.

Symmetries & Conservation Laws

The fact that the total energy of a system must always stay fixed, has been used to tremendous effect, countless times and in several contexts; from calculating the height to which a ball will rise, to predicting the existence of the neutrino. The laws of conservation of energy, momentum and charge, have long been considered sacrosanct, but for centuries, no one knew where they came from. To what do we owe the pleasure of their (very welcome) protection? Emmy Noether figured it out: Conservation laws arise out of symmetries, she said. And suddenly, just like that, there was a deeper underlying reason behind these mysteriously powerful statements – they had an origin.

Noether's theorem states that, to every (continuous) symmetry of a theory, there corresponds a conservation law.

What exactly does that mean? Physicist Philip Morrison writes, “symmetry is related to the indiscernibility of differences. Once you walk into the hall of a Palladian building, you can't quite remember whether you turned left or right”. ‘The indiscernibility of differences', while not a formal definition, is a good working description. An object is symmetric if some operation can be performed on it without leaving a trace: a circle, for instance, is rotationally symmetric, because can be rotated (about its center) through any arbitrary angle, and no one will know the difference.

The symmetries Noether was concerned with are far more abstract – they are symmetries of the equations that describe a process (more properly speaking, symmetries of the Lagrangian), not symmetries of the objects participating in the process. In other words, they refer to differences that are indiscernable to the laws of physics.

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by Tamuira Reid

I.

It's hot out. We're by the pool.

“Shh – baby, we're talking. I'm talking to your father.” Mama slaps my butt playfully, not hard like when I ate all her thyroid pills. Not hard like when she's scared.

I climb onto her lap. Papa watches us from the pool. It's shaped like a peanut. He never really swims, just stands there in the water looking distracted. His elbows rest on the edge, big plastic cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Mama doesn't smoke, but she's got the plastic cup too. She closes her eyes when she takes a sip. Closes her eyes a lot.

I don't know it now, but he will kick these bad habits one day. Quit drinking and stop buying Winston's. He'll call me up to tell me how he threw his pipe into the ocean. I'll laugh at his story while I light my own cigarette, trying to picture him standing over a cliff, flinging his most prized possession into the cold winter waves.

Papa tells me to beat it for a while, he needs to talk to mama. She grabs me tighter, wet chest pressing into my back. He stares at the two of us for a minute, his brown eyes looking into our blue eyes, the father looking at the mother. The father looking at the daughter. A year from now he'll look at the pictures of us on his desk in his new apartment twenty minutes outside of town. He'll pick us up every other weekend and take us to the mall for corn dogs and soda, and wonder when his heart begins aching where he went wrong. How seventeen years of marriage went down the drain, and why the tears on her face and long vacant stares weren't enough to make him feel bad. He'll write a letter the following spring from inside that same apartment, and it'll start “Mien Liebe”, my sweetheart, and my mother will read it and think, and hurt, but not hurt enough. She will tuck it away in a wooden box under the bed, and only pull it out ten years later to show to her daughter in a single nostalgic moment.

Papa is still staring from the pool shaped like a peanut, and my sister has her goggles on. She can hold her breath under water. She sneaks up to daddy and wraps her arms around the hairy part of his belly. He takes another sip and tells her to get off him, no goddamn horseplay, this is a serious time. She's so pretty. Long blonde hair and a red bathing suit. The baby cries from her bouncy seat in the doorway, and mama winds it back up again.

Papa is drying off. He's wearing the blue shorts and they're all bunched between his legs, and he can smoke without using his hands. He can drive like that too – no hands or anything. Balancing a hot cup of coffee between his knees. One time he ran over a gopher that shot out of the lawn and into the street like a bottle rocket. He told me not to tell anybody and I swore I wouldn't because, like he said, mamas are sensitive about that kind of thing.

When they are both remarried and semi-happy, their past just a “fart in the wind” as my sister will put it, my parents find some sort of solace in a shared cup of coffee. “The girls ready yet?” “What do you think?” she'll reply and they'll both laugh. “Got a fresh pot?” “Just about to put it on and she'll scoot past him, squeezing into our small kitchen. Every other weekend pick-ups become their every other weekend visits and they both look forward to them in their own silent ways.

The sun looks like a giant orange sitting in the sky and mama keeps squeezing me. I love you baby, she whispers in my ear with that damp, sweet breath. Papa says he's taking all his books with him. And maybe the antiques, too. You can't leave me with nothing, mama says, and he tells her I'm not – I'm leaving you the kids.

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by Eric Byrd

Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air, or draughts of water to drink. But that is part of our lesson. (Specimen Days, “New Themes Entered Upon”)

Intensely artful, intensely vernacular – some draughts of the tipsy-making water Emerson talks about in the essay by which young Whitman was called (“The Poet”). But Whitman's waters do not flow in the clear stream of a style that refuses to call attention to itself – the bizarre ideal of those dismayed at the demanding perceptual detours and little linguistic renewals that constitute “good” writing, truly readable writing. Whitman recoiled from what he called “the sickliness of verbal melody,” and the prose of Specimen Days is among the most casual and colloquial in English – but the style still calls and holds one's attention. Style, Flaubert insisted, is an “absolute way of seeing,” and Whitman makes us to see what he sees, in the way he sees, with all the corporeal contours and spiritual subtleties apparent to him.

And did he see! He was everywhere. Metropolitan man of ferried crowds, omnibus flaneur and opera-goer in the booming Astoria of midcentury New York City – an ink-stained bohemian, arguing politics over sudsy steins in rowdy fireman taverns – a stroller of Broadway, where he sees Andrew Jackson, Dickens, and “the first Japanese ambassadors.” In 1861 he goes down to fort-belted wartime Washington (“her surrounding hills spotted with guns”) to nurse the wounded and watch over the dying – meets the bloody boatloads down at the wharf, dresses wounds, reads the Bible at bedsides, loans books, distributes money, stamped letters and writing paper – soda water and syrups when Lee is repulsed at Gettysburg – and pens letters home for the illiterate and feeble. He doesn't know how much good he does but he cannot leave them, stays on in the embattled, cemetery- and hospital-environed capital through the four years of carnage. When not in the wards, he loafs in army camps, observes and notes the goings-on, chills with the pickets through their watches, and clerks part-time in a government bureau until its indignant head realizes he's employing an “indecent poet.” Once stands in the street all night as endless columns file past to the front, savoring unseen the jokes and songs that waft through the dark. He and Lincoln nod to each other when they pass in the street. He chats with Rebel prisoners and Union deserters; compares eastern and western, northern and southern soldiers, speculates about regional types, local moldings, the looks of future Americans. The war – “the most profound lesson of my life,” with “the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Army Hospitals” – breaks his health, and the lusty rambler is confined paralyzed for a time. He regains much of his strength later, enough to resume “gaddings-about in cities” and even to manage “a long jaunt west”—to the “distances join'd like magic” by the railroad—and there to eyewitness the course of empire, to see America planting the prairies with world-feeding wheat, tunneling railways through mountains, feeding forests into steam-powered sawmills, the sublime statistics of this titanic industry yet dwarfed by the continent itself, by the tinted canyons and empyrean peaks, the melted snows thundering through gorges.

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by Matt McKenna

Over the past year, theatres have been inundated with terrific biopics: Leonardo DiCaprio won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, Matthew McConaughey won an Oscar for his rendition of Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club, and 12 Years a Slave won best picture for its depiction of the life of Solomon Northrup. Less talked about, but even more interesting than the aforementioned films is Non-stop, the recently released Ben Bernanke biopic starring Liam Neeson. Granted, the film isn't a straight retelling of the economist's life–at no point does Neeson's character open up an Excel document and ponder interest rates. Instead, Neeson's character spends most of his time texting terrorists and punching people in the nose, things for which Bernanke isn't particularly well known. Don't be fooled by these surface differences, however. Director Jaume Collet-Serra realized that, in order to adequately tell the story of Ben Bernanke's life as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, he would have to do it through the lens of a suspense-thriller set on a transatlantic flight.

Non-stop is a fantastic example of a high-concept film: an international flight is hijacked, and the accused hijacker happens to be Bill Marks, the American air marshal assigned to protect the plane. Because the movie is more of a mystery film than an action film, the overarching tension isn't so much about the safety of the passengers on board. Rather, audiences are expected to wonder whether or not Marks, played by Liam Neeson, is actually hijacking the plane or if he is, in fact, attempting to save it from being hijacked. The is-he-a-good-guy-or-is-he-a-bad-guy question that pervades Non-stop mirrors the questions surrounding Ben Bernanke and his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve. In a sense, Bernanke was the air marshal assigned to protect the United States economy. And indeed, the policies Bernanke enacted while the economy was “hijacked” by the Great Recession have engendered voluminous commentary on the subject of whether or not he did a good job or a bad job at improving the country's economic outlook.

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by Josh Yarden

The white pigeon

waiting perhaps worrying

perched high up on a shadowy ledge

does not know that wall

once supported an ancient shrine venerated and contested

The dove

does not know it is a symbol of peace

among the humans

seeking respite from the sun

in a safe, defensible position

We are no different

fashioning safe dwellings for our offspring

negotiating a delicate balance in a precarious place

confering our fears, hopes and dreams

upon unknowing creatures

by Leanne Ogasawara

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream. Vincent Van Gogh

It is my second favorite essay of all time: C.S Lewis' Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages. First delivered as a lecture in 1956, the piece was later published posthumuously in this collection of his essays in 1966. Unlike in my #1 favorite essay, William Golding's magnificent Hot Gates, CS Lewis does not seek to form arguments or to persuade. What he does instead is to transport the reader back in time, illuminating the medieval world-view using nothing more than words alone.

He begins his essay urging the reader to perform an experiment. He says,

Go out on any starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that pre-Copernican astronomy is true.

He says,

Look up at the sky with that assumption in mind. The real difference between living in that universe and living in ours will, I predict, begin to dawn on you.

Intrigued, I decided to take him up on his suggestion. It so happened that my beloved and I had found ourselves up on the summit of Mauna Kea, on the Big Island. Home to the world's greatest collection of large telescopes, the skies up there are dark and famously clear.

As a girl, I had wanted to become a cosmologist. It was my first great passion. And, in addition to reading astronomy books voraciously, I spent many nights using my amateur telescope to look up at the stars from my parent's house in Los Angeles. Growing up, I drifted away from cosmology, turning naturally toward philosophy. Still, I always loved the stars–for as Van Gogh said, they make me dream. Returning home to Los Angeles about twenty five years after leaving it, I have been dismayed by their disappearance. What happened to all those myriad of stars of my childhood? Indeed, I cannot recall the last time I saw the Milky Way–had never seen it in Japan and was sad to see it was simply invisible from LA now. It is dis-heartening, really, since the splendid vision of the stars at night is something that we used to just take for granted.

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by Grace Boey

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treating – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

* * *

In the poem, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, Emily Dickinson watches a part of herself die as she sinks into insanity. The fragmentation and loss of the Self that Dickinson describes is a common theme amongst victims of mental illness. By their very nature, conditions like schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder have profound impact on one's personality, behaviour and beliefs. Mental illness can rear its head and usurp one's identity at any time; what happens next can be confusing and frightening, for victims as well as their loved ones.

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by Bill Benzon

My earliest memory is of a song about a fly that married a bumblebee. I've been told–I don't really remember this–that early one morning I played that record so often that it drove a visiting uncle to distraction.

I don't know how many people count music as their earliest memory, but I surely can't be unique in that. For music is a basic and compelling form of human experience. Martin Luther believed that “next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits.” And so it does.

Which perhaps is why we are so ambivalent about it. If it can control us, then it is dangerous. Why else would repressive regimes have worked so hard to suppress jazz and rock and roll? Why would the Taliban attempt to suppress all music?

But let us set the danger aside. It is the power that interests me.

Some years ago Roy Eldridge, the jazz great trumpeter, told Whitney Balliett (American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz) about playing with Gene Krupa:

When … we started to play, I'd fall to pieces. The first three or four bars of my first solo, I'd shake like a leaf, and you could hear it. Then this light would surround me, and it would seem as if there wasn't any band there, and I'd go right through and be all right. It was something I never understood.

What's going on? I suppose we could say it had something to do with the brain and nervous system, but what?

In a similar vein Vladimir Horowitz, the classical pianist, told Helen Epstein (Music Talks: Conversations with Musicians): “The moment that I feel that cutaway–the moment I am in uniform–it's like a horse before the races. You start to perspire. You feel already in you some electricity to do something.” Again, the nervous system, getting him primed, for what?

For this?

“When I'm right and the band is right and the music is right,” [Sonny] Rollins said, “I feel myself getting closer to the place where the sound is less polished and more aboriginal. That's what I'm striving for. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge once told a guy he could only reach a divine state in performance four or five times a year. That sounds about right for me.”

A divine state? What's that – perhaps it's another one of those things that the nervous system rigs up, no? Perhaps. We might also wonder whether or not it's the same thing that Martin Luther had in mind when he talked of music as “the greatest treasure in the world.” And yet they lived in such different worlds, after all: Martin Luther, Sonny Rollins, Roy Eldridge, and Vladimir Horowitz.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

A few years ago I decided I should learn a few card tricks. Like tying a necktie, eating with chopsticks, or building a fire, it seemed like the sort of thing everyone should have in their skill-set. As a person with mediocre dexterity I need tricks which don't depend on slight-of-hand. Fortunately for me the combinations, symmetries, and probabilities of playing cards means there is a rich tradition of card tricks which depend on math more than skill. That's the sort of trick even I can do.

My current favorite is Colm Mulcahy's Ice Cream Flavor Trick. Mulcahy is a mathematician and magician at Spellman College. He has written numerous articles and books on math and card tricks. You can find links to many of them on his homepage.

While idly shuffling cards I stopped and wondered: what is the chance that a deck of cards has ever occurred before in exactly the same order as the ones in my hand? [1]

On the one hand, I knew that there are many, many, many possible orderings of a 52 card deck. On the other hand, there are millions of decks of cards being shuffled all the time. Just imagine all the shuffling in Vegas alone!

The answer is truly startling! I was surprised and delighted by the how incredibly likely my deck of cards had never occurred before. Let's do the numbers together.

First, how many orderings are there for 52 card deck?

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by Jalees Rehman

On the evening of March 3 in 1514, Steven is sitting next to Friar Clay in a Nottingham pub, covering his face with his hands.

“I am losing the will to live”, Steven sobs, “Death may be sweeter than life in this world of poverty, injustice and war.”

“Do not despair, my friend”, Clay says, “for the printing press will change everything.”

Let us now fast-forward 500 years and re-enact this hypothetical scene with some tiny modifications.

On the evening of March 3 in 2014, Steven is sitting next to TED-Talker Clay in a Nottingham pub, covering his face with his hands.

“I am losing the will to live”, Steven sobs, “Death may be sweeter than life in this world of poverty, injustice and war.”

“Do not despair, my friend”, Clay says, “for the internet will change everything.”

Clay's advice in the first scene sounds ludicrous to us because we know that the printing press did not usher in an era of wealth, justice and peace. Being retrospectators, we realize that the printing press revolutionized how we disseminate information, but even the most efficient dissemination tool is just a means and not the ends.

It is more difficult for us to dismiss Clay's advice in the second scene because it echoes the familiar Silicon Valley slogans which inundate us with such persistence that some of us have begun to believe them. Clay's response is an example of what Evgeny Morozov refers to as “Internet-centrism”, the unwavering belief that the Internet is not just an information dissemination tool but that it constitutes the path to salvation for humankind. In his book “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism“, Morozov suggests that “Internet-centrism” is taking on religion-like qualities:

“If the public debate is any indication, the finality of “the Internet”— the belief that it's the ultimate technology and the ultimate network— has been widely accepted. It's Silicon Valley's own version of the end of history: just as capitalism-driven liberal democracy in Francis Fukuyama's controversial account remains the only game in town, so does the capitalism-driven “Internet.” It, the logic goes, is a precious gift from the gods that humanity should never abandon or tinker with. Thus, while “the Internet” might disrupt everything, it itself should never be disrupted. It's here to stay— and we'd better work around it, discover its real nature, accept its features as given, learn its lessons, and refurbish our world accordingly. If it sounds like a religion, it's because it is.”

Morozov does not equate mere internet usage with “Internet-centrism”. People routinely use the internet for work or leisure without ascribing mythical powers to it, but it is when the latter occurs that internet usage transforms into “Internet-centrism”.

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