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Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

Wearable devices are popular these days, but they’re largely restricted to watches, rings, and eyewear. Researchers have now developed a thread-based computer that can be stitched into clothes. Being able to sense what our bodies are up is useful in areas like healthcare and sports. And while devices like smartwatches can track metrics like heart rate, body temperature, and movement, humans produce huge amounts of data that devices tethered to specific points of the body largely miss. That’s what prompted MIT engineers to create a fabric computer that can be stitched into regular clothes. The device features sensors, processors, memory, batteries, and both optical and Bluetooth communications, allowing networks of these fibers to provide sophisticated whole-body monitoring.

“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health,” MIT professor Yoel Fink, who led the research, said in a press release. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?” The MIT team has been working on incorporating electronics into fibers for more than a decade, but in a recent paper in Nature they outline a breakthrough that significantly boosts the sophistication of the devices they can build.

More here.

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When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

by William Butler Yeats

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To meticulously reproduce a photograph by hand is to know it most intimately—to pore over its details and devote inordinate amounts of time to re-creating a moment captured in a flash. Such exacting realism commits to the specificity of its subject, elevating its significance in turn. And yet, despite the level of care and determination relating to the practice, Photorealism has largely been looked down upon as cheap illusionism, slick eye candy, or conservative fluff in the art-historical canon of the past half century. Though long associated with crass commercialism and advertising, Photorealism’s easy legibility and apparent superficiality belie more complex depths. Turning purported deficits and liabilities into strengths, curator Anna Katz has staged a thoughtful reappraisal of American Photorealism, both as an historical movement (emerging in the late 1960s and ’70s, when cameras became widely available) and as an ongoing strategy prevalent among contemporary artists.

In “Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968,” Katz undertakes a recuperative project, positioning Photorealism in its American flowering as an extension of progressive political impulses.

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Michael Autrey at The American Scholar:

To forage is to look for things that aren’t lost. Birding, mushrooming, hunting agates in the wet sand at ebb tide or arrowheads in the sagebrush along the edge of a dry playa—everything I’ve spent time seeking has been right where it belonged, indifferent to whether it was found. If I failed to see birds when I could hear them or gather mushrooms when I could smell them, I considered it a failure to live in the right relation to my senses. The most apt phrase I know for the necessary state of attunement comes from psychoanalysis. The analyst, in Freud’s idealized therapeutic environment, cultivates “evenly hovering attention”—hard to cultivate, harder to maintain, no matter how early one starts.

I was introduced to foraging early, not long after I could walk. My great-aunt Jara would take me by the hand, and as we ambled, she pointed at each mushroom we came across, mixing nicknames and Latin names: Russula, cep, amanita, slippery jack. My mother’s family came to the United States as refugees from what was then Czechoslovakia. As in so much of Eastern Europe, mushrooming is cultural, the people mycophilic.

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Arlin Cuncic at Verywell Mind:

You know that creepy phenomenon where some people remember historic events differently than others? Like when people thought the classic kid’s book was called the “Berenstein Bears” instead of its actual title, the “Berenstain Bears.” Yep, this weird event is called the Mandela Effect.

Basically, the Mandela effect refers to a situation in which a large mass of people believe an event occurred when it did not. The term originated in 2009 by Fiona Broome, after she discovered that she, along with a number of others, believed that Nelson Mandela had died in the 1980s (when he actually died in 2013).

Where does the Mandela effect come from—and why do these strange perceptions of history keep happening?

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Benjy Barnett in Aeon:

When I’m birdwatching, I have a particular experience all too frequently. Fellow birders will point to the tree canopy and ask if I can see a bird hidden among the leaves. I scan the treetops with binoculars but, to everyone’s annoyance, I see only the absence of a bird.

Our mental worlds are lively with such experiences of absence, yet it’s a mystery how the mind performs the trick of seeing nothing. How can the brain perceive something when there is no something to perceive?

For a neuroscientist interested in consciousness, this is an alluring question. Studying the neural basis of ‘nothing’ does, however, pose obvious challenges. Fortunately, there are other – more tangible – kinds of absences that help us get a handle on the hazy issue of nothingness in the brain. That’s why I spent much of my PhD studying how we perceive the number zero.

More here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

I’ve been waiting a long time for this book. Late in 2021, Ezra Klein wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting”, in which he called for a new “supply-side progressivism”. Four months later, Derek Thompson wrote an article in The Atlantic titled “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems”, in which he called for an “abundance agenda”. Many people quickly recognized that these were essentially the same idea. Klein and Thompson recognized it too, and teamed up to co-author a book that would serve as a manifesto for this new big idea. Three years later, Abundance has hit the stores. It’s a good book, and you should read it.

The basic thesis of this book is that liberalism — or progressivism, or the left, etc. — has forgotten how to build the things that people want. Every progressive talks about “affordable housing”, and yet blue cities and blue states build so little housing that it becomes unaffordable. Every progressive talks about the need to fight climate change, and yet environmental regulations have made it incredibly difficult to replace fossil fuels with green energy. Many progressives dream about the days when government could accomplish great things, and post maps of imaginary high-speed rail networks crisscrossing the country, yet various progressive policies have hobbled the government’s ability to build infrastructure.

More here.

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The Difference Between Things and Events

Things persist in time, events have limited duration.
A stone is a thing. We can ask, “Where will it be
tomorrow?” Conversely, a kiss is an event. It makes
no sense to ask where a kiss will be tomorrow.

……………. The world is made up of a network
……………. of kisses, not stones:

The basic units, the terms by which we comprehend
the world, are not in some specific point in space.
They are, if they are at all, in both a where and a when,
spatially and temporally delimited. They are events.

In fact, with a closer look, even things that are most
“thinglike” are but long events. The hardest stone
in light of what we’ve learned — of chemistry, of physics,
mineralogy, geology, from psychology, are but
complex vibrations of quantum fields, momentary
interactions of forces, a momentary process that
keeps its shape, holding itself in equilibrium before
disintegration, before turning again into dust.

by Carlo Rovelli
from The Order of Time—Chapter 6
Riverhead Books, NY, 2017

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Rick Moody at Salmagundi:

I saw Eraserhead in Providence in late 1979, I think, and I suspect it was at the Avon on Thayer Street. I liked cheeseball, poorly-constructed horror films in those days and I think Lynch’s film was being sold as midnight cult film fare, a more horrifying Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I went. At a similar moment, in undergraduate school at Brown University, I was also taking, or had just taken, Keith Waldrop’s survey course on this history of the silent film, which had offered me my first interaction with Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou. In my recollection these experiences are utterly conjoined. Like the Bunuel film, Eraserhead scared me very thoroughly—it was merciless and unforgiving and also very funny—and likewise it established in my mind a set of filmic values (for which Un Chien Andalou was also partly responsible), antithetical to the barbarous Hollywood values, and from these I never really strayed: 1) cheap is fine, 2) black and white tells you some things, 3) good sound design is crucial, 4) non-actors are very often better than actors, 5) subjectivity is in a circular container, and thus the reiterations, 6) linearity in storytelling is a con, and 7) when in doubt stick a lady in a radiator and have her sing.

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Rebekah Wallace at Aeon Magazine:

What do the angelic forces of the Heavenly Host have to do with orgasms? The answer, according to the 12th-century philosopher and theologian Maimonides, was simple. Some invisible forces that caused movement could be explained by God working through angels. Quoting a famous rabbi who talked about ‘the angel put in charge of lust’, Maimonides commented that ‘he means to say: the force of orgasm … Thus this force too is called … an angel.’

Before the discovery of gravity, energy or magnetism, it was unclear why the cosmos behaved in the way it did, and angels were one way of accounting for the movement of physical entities. Maimonides argued that the planets, for example, are angelic intelligences because they move in their celestial orbits. While most physicists would now baulk at angelic forces as an explanation of any natural phenomena, without the medieval belief in angels, physics today might look very different. Even when belief in angels later dissipated, modern physicists continued to posit incorporeal intelligences to help explain the inexplicable.

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Audrey Wollen in The Yale Review:

There is a phrase to describe the first twelve weeks of human life: “the fourth trimester.” Some mammal babies slip out of their mother’s body wrapped in their own ghost, something between alive and not—a gaunt cloud, wetting the dust. A deluge of liquid and cramped muscle, sunset-colored. Within seconds, limbs flex and cohere, the spectral casing tears (sometimes licked off by a corrugated tongue), and suddenly, slowly, there is a new creature on earth. In comparison to our fellow animals, we humans are still virtually fetal for the first few months of our lives. Always born prematurely, we depend on the parent’s body for warmth, sustenance, or any significant relocation. Our flat bones still stray, like ancient continents shuffling across cranial oceans. At birth, we can’t even lift up our own heads. We can’t look around the room, let alone lollop alongside our herd, flock, pack, or pod.

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Serena Jampel in Harvard Magazine:

I recently copy-pasted an essay I’d written on Boston abolitionist movements into ChatGPT. “Chat,” I commanded, “please list three ways this essay is successful, and three areas for potential improvement.” The machine spat out an answer instantly, and as I watched it unfold, I was mesmerized. The computer pointed out that my thesis could have been more argumentative, suggested areas that could be more concise, and highlighted phrases I’d inadvertently repeated. In short, it did everything that I, a tutor at the Harvard Writing Center, am paid to do. And it took only 10 seconds.

Not all the advice was useful, but as a semi-professional writer and editor, I felt reasonably confident that I could separate the good tips from the chaff. The best part about my AI tutor was that it never tired, and I could correct it all I wanted. “That’s bad advice,” I typed, not caring that it was rude. It promptly revised its suggestions.

I feel obligated to issue the disclaimer that this paper was years old, and I used AI to revise it out of curiosity.

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Peter Coviello at n + 1:

As anyone who has had the job can attest, the enterprise of being chair of an English department—or, in my case, “head,” a term meant to designate a role still more managerial—comes with more than its share of these scenes of demoralized compliance and low-grade surrender. “A two-fisted engine of aggravation and despair” is how I recently described the gig to a friend, and it’s hard to find anyone who would disagree. So imagine my surprise, my wonder even, in having found for myself a nourishing antidote to all the in-built tedium, joylessness, and metastatic irritation. Yoga? Hypnosis? Ketamine? No. It has appeared in nothing so much as the revelation that my colleagues are, in ways and degrees I hadn’t quite grasped, extraordinarily good at what they do.

I don’t just mean that they write beautiful and field-shifting books that widen the circumference of humanist knowledge and proffer solace and delight. I mean something else. For instance: do you have any idea what kinds of foresight, acuity, and procedural fluency are required to run, say, a program designed to teach collegiate writing to thousands of new students previously unfamiliar with the concept? Can you imagine the resolve, the patience, and the extremes of pedagogical inventiveness necessary to keep lessons lively rather than rote, to make the axiomatically laborious and frustrating enterprise of learning how to write a scene of curiosity, imagination, even nourishment?

More here.  [Thanks to Margit Oberrauch.]

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

We often study cognition in other species, in part to learn about modes of thinking that are different from our own. Today’s guest, psychologist/philosopher Alison Gopnik, argues that we needn’t look that far: human children aren’t simply undeveloped adults, they have a way of thinking that is importantly distinct from that of grownups. Children are explorers with ever-expanding neural connections; adults are exploiters who (they think) know how the world works. These studies have important implications for the training and use of artificial intelligence.

More here.

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Jon Mills at the Politics and Rights Review:

As we observe our current world order becoming less cohesive, more volatile, socially fractured, politically polarized, and hence arguably less predictable, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand why.

Difference, prejudice, and group identification in opposition to alterity, as well as tolerance and cooperation based in mutual self-interest, have always existed among civilized collectives; but within today’s multicultural societies tolerance has given way to contempt, if not outright animosity, directed toward others without filters or restraint.

It is not uncommon to witness verbal aggressiveness, uncouth swearing, and intimidation displayed toward strangers while having a morning coffee. Such unbridled disdain in public spaces has sometimes led to civil disobedience—even violence, where interpersonal courtesy, mutual respect, and common decency have given way to what some people feel are acceptable ways of expressing their acrimonious attitudes and opinions, what we may call the new abnormal.

If I may venture a hypothesis, I would say two main reasons that divide people in our contemporary societies are…

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Audrey Curry in Science:

On the wall of his living room in Lier, Belgium, Werner van Beethoven keeps a family tree. Thirteen generations unfurl along its branches, including one that shows his best known relative, born in 1770: Ludwig van Beethoven, who forever redefined Western music with compositions such as the Fifth Symphony, Für Elise, and others. Yet that sprig held a hereditary, and potentially scandalous, secret.

That Beethoven, Werner learned to his dismay in 2023, is biologically unrelated to Werner and his contemporary kin. This uncomfortable fact was brought to light by Maarten Larmuseau, a geneticist at KU Leuven who specializes in answering a question relatively few others have explored: How often do women have children with men they’re not partnered with?

In most societies, kinship is at least partly socially constructed, and for example can include adoption and stepfamilies. Yet questions about biological paternity have roiled families and fueled cultural anxieties for eons. Male authors have written about hidden paternity for millennia, including in Greek dramas and The Canterbury Tales; William Shakespeare and Molière wrote plays about it. Knowing a child’s biological father is also important for forensically identifying cadavers, recording accurate medical histories, and charting the manifold ways in which people structure families around the world.

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