Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

There is an intimate intensity to her work. Family Grief depicts McDonald’s father, who died in 1977, in his coffin, surrounded by family. “That same day I started using drugs,” she has said. Her father appears again in My Dad, My Hero (Will McDonald), a bust painted gold. He wears a camera around his neck — a tribute to his profession and calling — like a cross. Her father is both a source of anguish and a beaming emblem of pride.

So many of McDonald’s sculptures manage to convey the joy of inner transformation. The faces smile softly with their eyes closed, beatific in their bliss without falling into bathos. Glory (A Taste of Sweetness After Near Death) features McDonald in a luminous purple shawl, gazing heavenward. Beauty and the Peace shows a woman with a COVID mask falling from her face. Beauty in the Midst (Strength) is a three-faced being bedecked in pearls, radiating like a talisman. Mother’s Prayers echoes ancient votive statues in its compact elegance, while Covered With Love could be a folk version of a Renaissance-era Madonna and child.

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Leann Davis Alspaugh at Acroteria:

Recently, I read “The Pleasures of Patterns in Art” by Samuel Jay Keyser, a theoretical linguist at MIT. This essay, adapted from Keyser’s book Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts, is an engrossing mix of art appreciation, art history, and visual theory—an unbeatable combination for an art critic and designer.

Keyser opens by writing about how repetition and variation work in Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877). You don’t have to have a degree from MIT to figure out why this painting is great—that is patently obvious. Caillebotte could paint interiors and exteriors, country gardens and Parisian vistas; my favorites are his paintings of crews refinishing the hardwood floors of a Paris flat. He was considered an Impressionist but, unlike some of his peers, Caillebotte aimed for psychological realism, depicting modern life through snapshots of intimate moments with distinctly individual protagonists.

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Peter Mommsen at The Point:

The Christian case against pacifism is more convoluted, given the tension with the New Testament and early tradition. Yet in essence, it’s an appeal to common sense. While Jesus’s teachings may guide private life, this view holds, to apply them to public life is grossly irresponsible, since that would prevent Christians from defending the innocent or serving the state. After its legalization by Constantine in 313 CE, Christianity accepted a role in maintaining social order in the Roman Empire. Accordingly, bishops such as Ambrose and Augustine allowed Christians to participate in just wars and capital punishment. (They maintained the church’s ban on gladiatorial games, abortion and infanticide.) These churchmen didn’t deny Jesus’s teachings—they just made room for exceptions. To this end, they drew creatively on the Old Testament and philosophers like Cicero, or expanded on the apostle Paul’s dictum that government is ordained by God. Augustine, for example, reasoned that a soldier who slays on his superior’s orders doesn’t violate the prohibition on killing because he “does not himself ‘kill’—he is an instrument, a sword in its user’s hand.” Augustine thus offered Christians the kind of work-around that would enable them to punish and wage war with a good conscience.

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Joseph Howlett in Quanta:

In 2023, a mathematician named Anton Bernshteyn published a deep and surprising connection between the remote mathematical frontier of descriptive set theory and modern computer science.

He showed that all problems about certain kinds of infinite sets can be rewritten as problems about how networks of computers communicate. The bridge connecting the disciplines surprised researchers on both sides. Set theorists use the language of logic, computer scientists the language of algorithms. Set theory deals with the infinite, computer science with the finite. There’s no reason why their problems should be related, much less equivalent.

“This is something really weird,” said Václav Rozhoň, a computer scientist at Charles University in Prague. “Like, you are not supposed to have this.”

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications have been discussed at great length. To understand the origin and nature of this progress, it is useful to dig at least a little bit into the mathematical and algorithmic structures underlying these techniques. Anil Ananthaswamy takes up this challenge in his book Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI. In this conversation we give a brief overview of some of the basic ideas, including the curse of dimensionality, backpropagation, transformer architectures, and more.

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Sara Kozameh at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Cubans call it “el bloqueo” (the blockade). In the United States, we know it as “the embargo.” Technically speaking, US economic sanctions against Cuba comprise a set of laws in place since 1962 that prevent most avenues for trade between the two nations. However one refers to it, it is the longest trade embargo in modern history, and arguably one of the harshest. The measure was passed by President John F. Kennedy two years after the culmination of the Cuban Revolution, when armed insurgents toppled US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and ushered in an era of leftist radicalism and social transformation. Upon taking power in 1959, the insurgents’ leader, Fidel Castro, swiftly nationalized the land and assets of US nationals and companies across the island. Vastly underestimating the popularity of Castro and his movement, the US government responded with the sanctions and their explicit goal to “bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow” of the regime.

While a trade embargo implies legal constraints on bilateral economic trade, the term blockade carries a heavier connotation.

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Andrew Curry in Science:

In 2017, archaeologists digging in the middle of a Slovak wheat field uncovered four headless skeletons. The burials, in a ditch dug on the edge of a settlement more than 7000 years ago, belonged to one of Europe’s first farming communities. Burying people in or near settlements wasn’t unusual at the time—but burying them without heads was.

Year after year, the researchers have returned to find more and more headless skeletons on the outskirts of Vráble, a small village 100 kilometers east of Bratislava. “Everywhere we started to dig, we found bones. Everywhere we were sitting or standing, there were bones,” says Katharina Fuchs, a biological 
anthropologist at Kiel University (KU) who has excavated in Vráble every summer since 2021. In the summer of 2022, she and colleagues from KU and Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra recovered the skeletal remains of 34 people, piled on top of each other two or three deep in a space about the size of a parking spot. With the exception of one child, none of them had heads.

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From UC San Diego Today:

A new University of California San Diego study offers compelling evidence that GLP-1 receptor agonists — the class of drugs behind Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, for example — may do more than regulate blood sugar and weight. In an analysis of more than 6,800 colon cancer patients across all University of California Health sites, researchers found that those taking glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) medications were less than half as likely to die within five years compared to those who weren’t on the drugs (15.5% vs. 37.1%).

…The survival benefit appeared most pronounced in patients with very high BMI (over 35), hinting that GLP-1 drugs may help counteract the inflammatory and metabolic conditions that worsen colon cancer prognosis. Researchers believe several biological mechanisms could explain the link. Beyond regulating blood sugar, GLP-1 receptor agonists reduce systemic inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity and promote weight loss — all factors that can dampen tumor-promoting pathways. Laboratory studies also suggest that GLP-1 drugs may directly prevent cancer cell growth, trigger cancer cell death and reshape the tumor microenvironment.

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In The Beginning

We are in the book of Correlations:
In the beginning was the Void
like a turn-down of nothingness.
In that pre-dream of Creation, all things
equally plausible, the Maker sees:
If creativity is the control
of chaos through expression, then Creation
could abridge inchoate Chaos itself.
In a blink He gives the Word, and the black Void
floods with the hot thought of light.
In beams of brightness daylight posts its coming,
its going in scenes for which Bach
might have writ the Oratorio.
In the gravity outlay that follows, He sorts through
great swirling masses of alliterate star matter.
A notorious perfectionist, He goes through
art gum erasers at a prodigious rate.
The sun He moves around like a flood lamp–
such heat and aspiration coming
from a dime-sized portion of the sky!
He notices the moon, how its light
transliterates the sun’s. He tries it in evening,
but the stars dim in its government.
He tries it in morning, but the blue
of astronauts shows through. Unable
to decide, He tries it from time to time.
But then He looks back, sees he missed a ball
of consequence, a planet in its heat and heart.
He paints it with water, makes it a water ball.

But in oceans alone He does not see
the sum of things. “I see strokes of reef
like brush strokes of incompletion,
I see good growing latitudes gone to waste.
Let there be marked volcanics. Let islands
of igneous intrusion rise in the surge,
a cave at a time. And now,” He says,
“let the rest flow in Anent, Adroit, Ajoint.”
With fructifying rain He greens whole continents.
In the complete fragrance of the original earth,
hand over hand for light, the whitest green
breaks through. Black boughs put on green flesh.
Mushrooms, almost meat, almost speak.
Grubs, all maw, bore the loam’s abundance.
The size of hands, birds populate the hills,
make the land loud with bird bluster,
the plural voice of the island thrush. Recumbent kine
He makes to rest their wrinkled butts in meadow grass.
At this, the sixth instanter of Creation,
He rests his case. It was risky.
It was successful. How could He but be pleased?
And He partakes of the deep rest that Sunday enjowls.

by John Barr

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John Banville in The Guardian:

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Eric Drexler at AI Prospects:

When we think about advanced AI systems, we naturally draw on our experience with the only intelligent systems we’ve known: biological organisms, including humans. This shapes expectations that often remain unexamined—that genuinely intelligent systems will pursue their own goals, preserve themselves, act autonomously. We expect a “powerful AI” to act as a single, unified agent that exploits its environment. The patterns run deep: capable agents pursue goals, maintain themselves over time, compete for resources, preserve their existence. This is what intelligence looks like in our experience, because every intelligence we’ve encountered arose through biological evolution.

But these expectations rest on features specific to the evolutionary heritage of biological intelligence.1 When we examine how AI systems develop and operate, we find differences that undermine these intuitions. Selection pressures exist in both cases, but they’re different pressures.

More here.

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Calum Lister Matheson in The Conversation:

Everyone has looked up at the clouds and seen faces, animals, objects. Human brains are hardwired for this kind of whimsy. But some people – perhaps a surprising number – look to the sky and see government plots and wicked deeds written there. Conspiracy theorists say that contrails – long streaks of condensation left by aircraft – are actually chemtrails, clouds of chemical or biological agents dumped on the unsuspecting public for nefarious purposes. Different motives are ascribed, from weather control to mass poisoning.

The chemtrails theory has circulated since 1996, when conspiracy theorists misinterpreted a U.S. Air Force research paper about weather modification, a valid topic of research. Social media and conservative news outlets have since magnified the conspiracy theory. One recent study notes that X, formerly Twitter, is a particularly active node of this “broad online community of conspiracy.”

I’m a communications researcher who studies conspiracy theories. The thoroughly debunked chemtrails theory provides a textbook example of how conspiracy theories work.

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Jenna Ahart in Nature:

A gel-based artificial tongue can determine the spiciness of a wide range of foods, from the forgiving bell pepper to the more formidable ‘facing heaven’ chili of Sichuan cuisine. The device, as the researchers report¹ in ACS Sensors, might be the secret to determining the heat levels of spicy foods without risking any human taste buds. The artificial tongue itself is not a new feat. Scientists have created similar devices that can use electronic sensors to detect sweet, sour, spicy and umami tastes. But the authors of the new paper wanted to focus on spiciness in particular and to measure spice levels as precisely as possible, which is especially important for quality control in food, says co-author Jing Hu, a chemical engineer at the East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai.

The team’s solution was “inspired by the spicy-neutralizing effect of milk”, they write in the paper. Milk “proteins that affect our perception of spiciness” relieve the burn of a spicy dish, explains Carolyn Ross, a food scientist at Washington State University in Pullman.

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Kermit Pattison in The Harvard Gazette:

A few weeks after their arrival at the College, 15 first-year students settled into chairs for an unusual class — one with no answers.

The brainchild of Dean of Science Jeff Lichtman, “Genuinely Hard Problems in Science” explores mysteries of the natural world that have stubbornly resisted the best efforts to crack them. How did life emerge from non-biological matter? How did single cells evolve into complex life? What mechanisms drive the aging process — and can they be reversed? What is the relationship between brain anatomy and mental illness?

In this class, there is no assumption that scientific authorities are right. Rather than training conformists who follow their elders down well-worn routes — and possibly to dead ends — the instructors want out-of-the-box thinkers who can blaze new pathways.

“What we’re trying to do,” explained Lichtman, “is transform science, 15 students at a time.”

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Tristan Moyle at Aeon Magazine:

In contemporary parlance, the most common framework that ancient moral philosophy operated within is known as ethical partialism. For the ethical partialist, our relationships determine the reasons we have to act (or refrain from acting). That is why the question ‘Who belongs?’ is so important: the answer informs us about the ethical relationships in which we are implicated and by which we are obligated.

This ancient way of thinking about ethical matters is comprehensively rejected by dominant forms of modern moral philosophy. Whether deontological or consequentialist, the underlying ethical framework is impartialist. For the impartialist, factoring in personal relationships when deciding what to do is to introduce prejudice, parochialism and bias into one’s moral thinking. The question ‘Who belongs?’ is rejected as a legitimate starting point. For the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, the essential question is rather ‘Can they suffer?’ Whether I have a relationship to the being is morally irrelevant. Objectivity in one’s moral thinking requires strict neutrality. That is what justice is thought to demand.

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McNeil Taylor at Cabinet Magazine:

The Greek island of Syros is mentioned in The Odyssey: the titular hero’s swineherd, Eumaeus, tells us that his home island is “not so packed with people, still a good place, though, fine for sheep and cattle, rich in wine and wheat.”¹ Approaching Syros’s harbor city of Ermoupolis today, however, travelers weaned on these Arcadian visions will instead be confronted by the fruits of nineteenth-century industry. When Gérard de Nerval landed in Ermoupolis in 1842, the new city, draped over two vertiginous hills, began to melt in the hallucinatory swirl of Parisian flânerie: the view suggested first a sugared loaf of bread, then a Babylonian city, and finally the floating citadel of Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels (1726).² Surreal, exotic, futuristic, Ermoupolis was far from what he had been led to expect from the birthplace of Western civilization.

Nerval’s fanciful vision nonetheless attests to the seismic upheavals of the modern nation-state that were still tremoring in the 1840s: only twenty years earlier, a large influx of Greek Orthodox refugees from Chios, fleeing massacre by the Turks, had arrived on the island. It was one of many instances of diaspora, population exchange, and exile that would define the traumatic course of Greek history up until our present day.

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Paul Lay interviews Dan Wang on how China engineered its way to global power status, in Engelsberg Ideas:

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