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Girl with a Blue Scarf

She sits against the porridge-coloured wall
watchful and suspicious,
with the look of a frightened fawn,
her oval face and Slavic eyes wary
beneath her ragged crow-black fringe,
her little rodent paws curled
in the mulberry pool of her skirt.
The room is freezing. The grate empty.
The carte de charbon far too dear.
Both of them might well ask
what they’re doing here,
shivering in this pale dun light,
one watchful, the other watching.
The concierge from the rue de l’Ouest,
the young painter from Tenby.
Late afternoon. Her paint is dry
as wood ash, laid down with tiny,
speckled strokes until the girl
appears timorous as a thought.
Silent as prayer.

by Sue Hubbard

From God’s Little Artist:
poems on the life of Gwen John
published @Seren Books

The Painting Here: 

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From The New York Times:

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Eshan Sharma at The Wire:

Amitava Kumar has long occupied a distinctive place in contemporary English writing. His work resists easy classification, blurring the boundaries between fiction, memoir, reportage, history and critique.

With its stark white cover and a painting of a train in blue, perhaps suggestive of an accumulation of all the colours, lives and histories that animate his earlier work, he is now out with The Social Life of Indian Trains. This new book deals with something that we have come to take for granted: the railways.

Trains have been an inseparable part of our lives. Since childhood, I have travelled in bogies of every kind – unreserved, sleeper, second AC, first AC. If anything binds this subcontinental country together, it’s the railways, far more than cricket and films. Many lives depend on it: from those who work, to those who travel long distances to get to work. For some, it’s routine, for others, it’s a lifeline, and for many, still, it’s a wonder they’ve never experienced. More than being a part of our claimed identity, the history of trains has been a strange reminder of colonialism, a time we fantasise about erasing from our collective memory.

Given how integral the railways are to a nation’s life, they naturally find their way into popular culture, from literature to cinema.

More here.

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Daniel Björkegren in Nature:

How will artificial intelligence reshape the global economy? Some economists predict only a small boost — around a 0.9% increase in gross domestic product over the next ten years. Others foresee a revolution that might add between US$17 trillion and $26 trillion to annual global economic output and automate up to half of today’s jobs by 2045. But even before the full impacts materialize, beliefs about our AI future affect the economy today — steering young people’s career choices, guiding government policy and driving vast investment flows into semiconductors and other components of data centres.

Given the high stakes, many researchers and policymakers are increasingly attempting to precisely quantify the causal impact of AI through natural experiments and randomized controlled trials. In such studies, one group gains access to an AI tool while another continues under normal conditions; other factors are held fixed. Researchers can then analyse outcomes such as productivity, satisfaction and learning.

Yet, when applied to AI, this type of evidence faces two challenges.

More here.

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Fred Pearce at Yale Environment 360:

More than international sanctions, more than its stifling theocracy, more than recent bombardment by Israel and the U.S. — Iran’s greatest current existential crisis is what hydrologists are calling its rapidly approaching “water bankruptcy.”

It is a crisis that has a sad origin, they say: the destruction and abandonment of tens of thousands of ancient tunnels for sustainably tapping underground water, known as qanats, that were once the envy of the arid world. But calls for the Iranian government to restore qanats and recharge the underground water reserves that once sustained them are falling on deaf ears.

After a fifth year of extreme drought, Iran’s long-running water crisis reached unprecedented levels in November. The country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, warned that Iran had “no choice” but to move its capital away from arid Tehran, which now has a population of about 10 million, to wetter coastal regions — a project that would take decades and has a price estimated by analysts at potentially $100 billion.

More here.

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From Time Magazine:

Jensen Huang needs a moment.

The CEO of Nvidia enters a cavernous ­studio at the company’s Bay Area headquarters and hunches over a table, his head bowed. At 62, the world’s eighth richest man is compact, polished, and known among colleagues for his quick temper as well as his visionary leadership. Right now, he looks exhausted. As he stands silently, it’s hard to know if he’s about to erupt or collapse. Then someone puts on a Spotify playlist and the stirring chords of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” fill the room. Huang puts on his trademark black leather jacket and appears to transform, donning not just the uniform, but also the body language and optimism befitting one of the foremost leaders of the artificial intelligence revolution.

Still, he’s got to be tired. Not too long ago, the former engineer ran a successful but semi-obscure outfit that specialized in graphics processors for video games. Today, Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world, thanks to a near-monopoly on the advanced chips powering an AI boom that is transforming the planet. Memes depict Nvidia as Atlas, holding the stock market on its shoulders. More than just a corporate juggernaut, Nvidia also has become an instrument of statecraft, operating at the nexus of advanced technology, diplomacy, and geopolitics. “You’re taking over the world, Jensen,” President Donald Trump, now a regular late-night phone buddy, told Huang during a recent state visit to the United Kingdom.

More here.

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From The Conversation:

A newly discovered biological signal in the blood could help health care teams and researchers better understand how children respond to brain injuries at the cellular level, according to our research in the Journal of Neurotrauma.

In the future, this information could help clinicians identify children who need more tailored follow-up care after a traumatic brain injury. As part of our work as a nurse scientist and neuropsychologist studying traumatic brain injury, we wanted to look for biological markers inside cells that might help explain why some children recover smoothly after brain injury while others struggle. To do this, we focused on DNA, the instruction manual of cells. DNA is organized into regions called genes, each of which codes for proteins that carry out different functions like repairing tissues. While your DNA generally stays the same throughout your life, it can sometimes collect small chemical changes called epigenetic modifications. These changes act like dimmer switches, turning genes up or down without changing the underlying code. In general, dialing up the activity of a gene increases production of the protein it codes for, while dialing down the gene decreases production of that protein.

More here.

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The Children of the Poor

What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less the Angelic, admirable or sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plenitude of plan shall not suffice
Not grief, nor love shall be enough alone
to ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

by Gwendolyn Brooks
from Poet’s Choice
Time Life Books, 1962

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Karthik Tadepalli at Asterisk:

The most widely endorsed reason productivity growth has faltered is that we are running out of good ideas. As this narrative has it, the many scientific and technology advances responsible for driving economic growth in the past were low-hanging fruit. Now the tree is more barren. Novel advances, we should expect, are harder to come by, and historical growth may thus be difficult to sustain. In the extreme, this may lead to the end of progress altogether.

This story began in 2020, with the publication of “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?,” by economists Nicholas Bloom and colleagues.¹ Bloom et al. looked across many sectors, from agriculture to medicine to computing. In each field, productivity measures have grown at the same rate as before. This sounds like good news, except that the number of researchers in each of these fields has exploded. In other words, each researcher produces much less than they used to — something you might expect if ideas really are getting harder to find.

The progress studies movement and the metascience community have risen, in part, in response to this challenge. Both seek ways to rethink how we do research: by making our research institutions more efficient or by increasing science funding.

But there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests ideas are not, in fact, getting harder to find.

More here.

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Joseph Howlett at Quanta:

In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in algebraic geometry — using entirely alien techniques. It instantly captivated the field, stoking excitement in some mathematicians and skepticism in others.

The result deals with polynomial equations, which combine variables raised to powers (like y = x or x² − 3xy = z²). These equations are some of the simplest and most ubiquitous in mathematics, and today, they’re fundamental to lots of different areas of study. As a result, mathematicians want to study their solutions, which can be represented as geometric shapes like curves, surfaces and higher-dimensional objects called manifolds.

There are infinitely many types of polynomial equations that mathematicians want to tame. But they all fall into one of two basic categories — equations whose solutions can be computed by following a simple recipe, and equations whose solutions have a richer, more complicated structure. The second category is where the mathematical juice is: It’s where mathematicians want to focus their attention to make major advances.

But after sorting just a few types of polynomials into the “easy” and “hard” piles, mathematicians got stuck. For the past half-century, even relatively simple-looking polynomials have resisted classification.

Then this summer, the new proof appeared.

More here.

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Kevin J. Harrelson at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

It is a rare book that combines rigorous argument, scientific fluency, and broad accessibility, but Owen Flanagan has managed that trifecta in his new monograph on the philosophy and science of addictions. What is it Like to Be an Addict? should serve as a standard reference-point for philosophers interested in the health sciences moving forward, as it clarifies and refines many of the basic questions in these fields. It is also a book that may be read with profit by anyone with even a passing interest in the science or ethics of addiction.

Flanagan aims “to explain what substance addictions are” as well as “to offer a humane and sensible ethics and politics of addiction” (ix). The plural in the first phrase is important, and readers will be discouraged from seeking reductive answers to many of the standard questions. Is addiction a disease? Is it a brain disease? Are people ever cured of addictions? Is addiction an individual or a social phenomenon? Much of the extant literature focuses narrowly on such binary questions, and Flanagan’s interventions are sweeping but inclusive: there is indeed a pathology and a neurology of addictions, but every disciplinary approach will be partial.

more here.

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Danielle Allen at Persuasion:

One side fears the shredding of safety nets, federal programs, and commitments to inclusion and honest history. The other side fears the destruction of traditional family mores, religion, and parental control.

Every two years, Americans spend an average of $15 billion on campaign advertising trying to fend off the wolves attacking them. But we just end up changing which wolves are briefly ascendant.

Maybe we could fend off those wolves once and for all—if we could just get our foot out of that dang trap.

But what’s the trap?

The trap is an electoral system that has been captured by party processes gone wrong.

More here.

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Bill Cheng at VQR:

Melon Floyd was born out in the Salts, 1881, in the border country between Winnemucca and Susanville—before they recorded Black voices on acetate, before his knife-throwing contest with Charlie Long, before “Laughing Man Blues.” His father was Terry Floyd, a freed slave and smuggler who hid out in the Salts for thirty-six years before the Reno law flushed him from the mountain crags. His mother was Anne Smith, who died while in labor.

Floyd was a sickly boy, an asthmatic. When he was four, his father sent him to Susanville, a flat country where the air wasn’t so thin, to live with his grandmother. He was schooled out of a single history book, sang in the church choir. By Floyd’s sixth birthday, his grandmother had saved enough to send away for a pine guitar from Sears-Roebuck.

When he was thirteen, he left home.

more here.

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