Geneology

Outside, it’s cold like the day
my father’s grandpa drowned
while Sigrid salted cod on walls
of stacked antlers. Their sons
and daughter fled to Eden
Prairie. One, my father’s uncles, lost
a claim in Manitoba, another crashed
a Hupmobile. One died ice-fishing.

My father’s mother, pink and vicious, made
him cover the bidet with plywood
when we lived in Tehran. Made me drive
all over Fairfax County in search
of Carnival glass. Told me “Never
marry a woman for her looks.” My mother’s
dad lost his lungs to mustard gas. Her mom

never gambled. Betty lived in Hollywood
working at the studios, roller-skating
with a man who would later play
Tonto. She rented a room
in a house with a victory garden until
the Tamuras were shipped
to Utah, then married Dad, who left
to kill Koreans. On the ship

to Japan to join him in Kobe, my sister
scared me with stories of dwarves. My children’s
mom is small and pale, like the pages
of an appointment book, except when speaking
Spanish. Then, her hands become larakeets, her eyes
marcasite. Her grandfather knew the Franks
before they moved to Holland, and he
to Pasadena, where he never met

my mother who skis like she’s waltzing,
or my father, who came home and built
a barbeque of brick, or my sister the shrink,
or my brother who sells drugs, or my other sister
for that matter. They all live
in California and no one
ever dies. There’s a boy

at the bus stop who dances
in place: knit cap, heavy coat, an extra
chromosome, perhaps. Sometimes he raises
his arms and spins. The world starts with him.

by Jeffery Bahr
from Rattle Magazine
#16, Winter, 2001

Søren Wichmann in Aeon:

Simple questions often yield complex answers. For instance: what is the difference between a language and a dialect? If you ask this of a linguist, get comfortable. Despite the simplicity of the query, there are a lot of possible answers.

The distinction might depend on one’s point of view. From a political perspective, a language is simply that which is standardly spoken by a nation. From about 1850 to 1992, for instance, there was a language known as Serbo-Croatian, which had several dialects including Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. But since Yugoslavia dissolved into several independent countries in the mid-1990s, those dialects have come to be recognised as distinct languages. This political definition works to some extent, though it poses more problems than solutions: there are languages that extend across different countries, notably Spanish in Latin America. Nobody would claim that Mexican Spanish and Colombian Spanish are different languages. Perhaps Spanish as spoken in some parts of Spain is different enough from the Latin American varieties that it deserves to be called a separate language, but that isn’t clear.

Perhaps the distinction between language and dialect can be made in terms of mutual intelligibility? Unfortunately, there are immediate problems with this approach. A Dane will understand Swedish somewhat better than a Swede will understand Danish. Similarly, someone speaking a peculiar, rural dialect of British English will understand an American from Los Angeles far better than the other way around. Mutual intelligibility often depends on exposure, a fairly uncontrollable variable, rather than anything intrinsic to language.

More here.

Emily Temple in Literary Hub:

If you can believe it, Japanese novelist, talking cat enthusiast, and weird ear chronicler Haruki Murakami turned 70 years old this weekend. 70! But I suppose we should believe it, despite the youthful gaiety and creative magic of his prose: the internationally bestselling writer has 14 novels and a handful of short stories under his belt, and it’s safe to say he’s one of the most famous contemporary writers in the world. To celebrate his birthday, and as a gift to those of you who hope to be the kind of writer Murakami is when you turn 70, I’ve collected some of his best writing advice below.

Read.

I think the first task for the aspiring novelist is to read tons of novels. Sorry to start with such a commonplace observation, but no training is more crucial. To write a novel, you must first understand at a physical level how one is put together . . . It is especially important to plow through as many novels as you can while you are still young. Everything you can get your hands on—great novels, not-so-great novels, crappy novels, it doesn’t matter (at all!) as long as you keep reading. Absorb as many stories as you physically can. Introduce yourself to lots of great writing. To lots of mediocre writing too. This is your most important task.

More here.

David Gunderman in The Conversation:

There are two things that connect the names Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert and Noether. One is their outstanding breadth of contributions to the field of mathematics. The other is that each was a professor at the same university in Göttingen, Germany.

Although relatively unknown today, Göttingen, a small German university town, was for a time one of the most productive centers of mathematics in history.

Göttingen’s rise to mathematical primacy occurred over generations, but its fall took less than a decade when its stars were pushed abroad by the advent of National Socialism, the ideology of the Nazi Party. The university’s best minds left Germany in the early 1930s, transferring its substantial mathematical legacy to Princeton, New York University, and other British and American universities. By 1943, 16 former Göttingen faculty members were in the U.S.

More here.

Gary Smith in Wired:

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once asked his Caltech students to calculate the probability that, if he walked outside the classroom, the first car in the parking lot would have a specific license plate, say 6ZNA74. Assuming every number and letter are equally likely and determined independently, the students estimated the probability to be less than 1 in 17 million. When the students finished their calculations, Feynman revealed that the correct probability was 1: He had seen this license plate on his way into class. Something extremely unlikely is not unlikely at all if it has already happened.

The Feynman trap—ransacking data for patterns without any preconceived idea of what one is looking for—is the Achilles heel of studies based on data mining. Finding something unusual or surprising after it has already occurred is neither unusual nor surprising. Patterns are sure to be found, and are likely to be misleading, absurd, or worse.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4xmh_WtE

New World

Then after Eden,
was there one surprise?
O yes, the awe of Adam
at the first bead of sweat.

Thenceforth, all flesh
had to be sown with salt,
to feel the edge of seasons,
fear and harvest,
joy that was difficult,
but was, at least, his own.

The snake? It would not rust
on its forked tree.
The snake admired labor,
it would not leave him alone.

And both would watch the leaves
silver the alder,
oaks yellowing October,
everything turning money.

So when Adam was exiled
to our new Eden, in the ark’s gut,
the coined snake coiled there for good
fellowship also; that was willed.

Adam had an idea.
He and the snake would share
the loss of Eden for a profit.
So both made the New World. And it looked good.

by Derek Walcott
from Derek Walcott Collected Poems
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986

Michelle Alexander in The New York Times:

Leila McNeill in Smithsonian:

On the morning of June 10, 1898, Alice Lee marched into the all-male Anatomical Society meeting at Trinity College in Dublin and pulled out a measuring instrument. She then began to take stock of all 35 of the consenting society members’ heads. Lee ranked their skulls from largest to smallest to find that—lo and behold—some of the most well-regarded intellects in their field turned out to possess rather small, unremarkable skulls. This posed a problem, since these anatomists believed that cranial capacity determined intelligence. There were two possibilities: Either these men weren’t as smart as they thought they were, or the size of their skulls had nothing to do with their intelligence.

“In fact,” Lee would write in her thesis, “a number of the most capable men fall into the last nine, and J. Kollman, one of the ablest living anthropologists, has absolutely the smallest skull capacity!” Though only a doctoral student when she launched into her study of male and female intellectual difference, Lee’s study proved the most sophisticated criticism of cranium science to date, according to historian Cynthia Eagle Russet. Within a decade of publishing her findings in 1900, the field of craniology—and with it, the days of measuring skulls to interpret supposed biological human difference—would be no more. Ironically, Lee used craniologists’ own tools to cast doubt on the techniques they employed to argue their superiority to women, as well as to other races. In doing so, she waded into one of the most hotly debated social issues of her day: woman’s place in society.

More here.

Daniel J. Woodhouse in McSweeney’s:

Dear colleagues,

There is no escaping the widespread dissatisfaction within modern academia. With neoliberal upper management, bloated administration, recklessly expanded undergraduate programs, and shrinking departmental budgets, there isn’t much to be optimistic about. Those joining the ranks can look forward to bleak job prospects, excessive teaching loads, and writing stupefying grant proposals. All disciplines will have to adjust to the changing landscape. Within the sphere of pure mathematics — the oldest and most successful of humanity’s intellectual endeavors — I believe our best chance at preserving the integrity and dignity of our tradition is to return to our Pythagorean roots. We should become a cult.

Let us do away with the job market and mathjobs.com and reference letters. Let us stop pretending we understand each other’s respective sub-fields. Let us abandon those fuck-ugly Brutalist travesties we call our department buildings and leave them to those shills in applied math. Let us seclude ourselves in mountain caves and daub mysterious equations in blood across rock-faces to ward off outsiders. Let us embrace our most impenetrable mathematical texts as sacred and requiring divinely distributed revelation.

More here.

Damian Carrington in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Global warming has heated the oceans by the equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years, according to analysis of new research.

More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the seas, with just a few per cent heating the air, land and ice caps respectively. The vast amount of energy being added to the oceans drives sea-level rise and enables hurricanes and typhoons to become more intense.

Much of the heat has been stored in the ocean depths but measurements here only began in recent decades and existing estimates of the total heat the oceans have absorbed stretch back only to about 1950. The new work extends that back to 1871. Scientists have said that understanding past changes in ocean heat was critical for predicting the future impact of climate change.

A Guardian calculation found the average heating across that 150-year period was equivalent to about 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. But the heating has accelerated over that time as carbon emissions have risen, and was now the equivalent of between three and six atomic bombs per second.

More here.

Jonathan A. Rodden at Edge:

Over the last decade, I’ve been asking myself a couple of closely related questions. First, what explains the incredible growth in what we might call urban-rural polarization? What explains the fact that voting behavior has become so highly correlated with population density over time? This is something that’s happened not just in the United States, but also in a number of other industrialized countries. Secondly, what are the implications of this polarization for who wins and loses and whose policy agenda gets put into place?

In a political system like the United States, or Great Britain, or any of the countries that were colonized by Great Britain—including Australia, Canada and, for most of the postwar period, New Zealand—we draw single-member districts, and the way we form a legislature is by electing one individual from each of those districts. When we divide the world in that way, we end up concentrating voters for the urban parties of the left in urban districts, and end up with more dispersed support for the parties of the right elsewhere. This creates an important pattern in the transformation of votes to seats that has existed throughout the postwar period. It affects who gets represented and whose policies end up as law. In politics, geography matters in a way that we’ve been somewhat aware of for a long time, but all of these factors have become much more important over time, especially in the United States.

More here.