Sarah Lazarus at CNN:

Karen Lamb and David Farmer in The Conversation:

This St Patrick’s Day, revellers around the world will crowd the streets seeking one of Ireland’s national drinks: a pint of Guinness. But besides this tasty stout, one of the most fundamental and commonly used tools of science also has its origins at the Guinness brewery.

Towards the end of the 19th century, Guinness was scaling up its operations, and was interested in applying a scientific approach to all aspects of Guinness production: from barley growth right through to the Guinness taste.

Before adopting a scientific approach, brewers at Guinness relied on subjective methods, such as the appearance and scent of hops, to assess produce quality.

Once scientific brewers were recruited, a more objective approach was taken. The first scientific brewer, Thomas Bennett Case, was hired in 1893 and he believed that the amount of soft resins in hops was related to the quality of Guinness. He was therefore keen to estimate the amount of soft resin in particular crops of hops.

The challenge facing Case was that he, like any scientist, could not measure everything at once. It was not possible for him to assess the amount of soft resin in every single one of the countless hop flowers (added by the thousands to enormous vats of soon-to-be Guinness) in his charge.

More here.

Alec Schierenbeck in the New York Times:

If Mark Zuckerberg and a janitor who works at Facebook’s headquarters each received a speeding ticket while driving home from work, they’d each owe the government the same amount of money. Mr. Zuckerberg wouldn’t bat an eye.

The janitor is another story.

For people living on the economic margins, even minor offenses can impose crushing financial obligations, trapping them in a cycle of debt and incarceration for nonpayment. In Ferguson, Mo., for example, a single $151 parking violationsent a black woman struggling with homelessness into a seven-year odyssey of court appearances, arrest warrants and jail time connected to her inability to pay.

Across America, one-size-fits-all fines are the norm, which I demonstrate in an article for the University of Chicago Law Review. Where judges do have wiggle room to choose the size of a fine, mandatory minimums and maximums often tie their hands. Some states even prohibit consideration of a person’s income. And when courts are allowed to take finances into account, they frequently fail to do so.

Other places have saner methods. Finland and Argentina, for example, have tailored fines to income for almost 100 years. The most common model, the “day fine,” scales sanctions to a person’s daily wage. A small offense like littering might cost a fraction of a day’s pay. A serious crime might swallow a month’s paycheck. Everyone pays the same proportion of their income.

More here.

Charlie Tyson in THR:

I begin to doubt beautiful words. How one longs sometimes to have done something in the world.

Sean Carroll in The Atlantic:

As a theoretical physicist who specializes in cosmology and gravitation, I naturally had many opportunities to interact with Stephen Hawking before his death. We attended the same physics conferences, where he was always rightfully celebrated as one of the world’s great scientists. He regularly visited the California Institute of Technology, where I work as a researcher. And, in perhaps my greatest contribution to world culture, I helped arrange Stephen’s cameo appearance on The Big Bang Theory.

But to get a glimpse of what Stephen was really like, let me tell you the story of time I picked him up at the airport.

Usually picking someone up at the airport is not a major logistical operation. Stephen, who lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, traveled with a retinue of students and nurses, as well as his custom-made wheelchair and various pieces of medical equipment. But this should have made my job easier, rather than harder: All I was actually asked to do was to meet them upon their arrival and point them toward the special van that had been rented for Stephen’s use. In-and-out job, right?

Stephen Hawking, despite an overwhelming physical disability, did not put his fate into the hands of others. He was in control; he was The Decider. None of his extraordinary characteristics—intelligence, charisma, humor, courage—might have amounted to much, if it weren’t for his singular, stubborn insistence on living life on his own terms.

More here.

The Juggler at Heaven's Gate

Behind the dirty table where Kristofferson is having
breakfast, there's a window that looks onto a nineteenth-
century street in Sweetwater, Wyoming. A juggler
is at work out there, wearing a top hat and a frock coat,
a little reed of a fellow keeping three sticks
in the air. Think about this for a minute.
This juggler. This amazing act of the mind and hands.
A man who juggles for a living.
Everyone in his time has known a star,
or a gunfighter. Somebody, anyway, who pushes somebody
around. But a juggler! Blue smoke hangs inside
this awful café, and over that dirty table where two
grownup men talk about a woman's future. And something,
something about the Cattlemen's Association.
But the eye keeps going back to that juggler.
That tiny spectacle. At this minute, Ella's plight
or the fate of the emigrants
is not nearly so important as this juggler's exploits.
How'd he get into the act, anyway? What's his story?
That's the story I want to know. Anybody
can wear a gun and swagger around. Or fall in love
with somebody who loves somebody else. But to juggle
for God's sake! To give your life to that.
To go with that. Juggling.

by Raymond Carver
from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water
Random House 1986

Robert F. Worth in the New York Times:

The V.I.P. terminal of Baghdad International Airport is a clean and quiet place, about a quarter-mile removed from the noise and squalor of the main arrivals-and-departures hall. If you have the right connections and $150 — American dollars only — you can wait for your flight in comfort on one of the soft white leather couches, sipping an espresso and getting a close-up view of some of the colorful people who run today’s Middle East. On a typical afternoon, your fellow passengers may include Iranian-trained guerrillas and death-squad veterans who have grown rich on embezzlement. If you stay long enough, gulf oil barons may glide by with their white-robed entourages, perhaps brushing past Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen in uniform or diplomats from Turkey or Russia, all of them hoping to bully or bribe Iraq’s weak state to their own preferred shape. Everyone is welcome as long as you speak the language of money. On the wall above you are wide-screen TVs and a stylized mural of ancient Iraq, so that you can compare today’s catastrophes with those of yesteryear. Before you leave, a customs official in a dark suit will take your ticket and passport and then return 10 minutes later, smiling obsequiously and extending your stamped documents with both hands.

But even here, special treatment has its limits. On April 15 last year, a Qatari man arrived in the V.I.P. terminal on an evening flight from his country’s capital city, Doha. After identifying himself as a senior government envoy, he announced that he and his 14 colleagues, all dressed in crisp white ankle-length tunics called thobes, did not want their luggage inspected. The Qataris had brought 23 identical black duffels, a small peninsula of black nylon that covered a sizable portion of the lounge’s hardwood floor. Each bag was so heavy — well over 100 pounds — that the porters had trouble rolling them into the room.

The Iraqis insisted, politely, that all bags must be screened, even in the V.I.P. terminal. The leader of the Qatari team was visibly shocked to hear this. He asked for time. The Qataris huddled for a quiet discussion and then made a number of phone calls. Eventually, they relented and allowed the bags to be screened. Each of them contained stacks of bricklike squares, wrapped in black tape that the scanner could not penetrate. When customs officials asked what was under the tape, the Qataris refused to say. The standoff lasted all night, and finally, near dawn, the exasperated Qataris gave in and drove to Baghdad without their luggage. It was only later that the Iraqis opened the 23 duffels and discovered a mix of dollars and euros, amounting to some $360 million. The bills alone weighed more than 2,500 pounds.

More here.

Say Grace

In my country our shamans were women
and our gods multiple until white people brought
an ecstasy of rosaries and our cities today
glow with crosses like graveyards. As a child
in Sunday school I was told I’d go to hell
if I didn’t believe in God. Our teacher was a woman
whose daughters wanted to be nuns and I asked
What about babies and what about Buddha, and she said
They’re in hell too and so I memorized prayers
and recited them in front of women
I did not believe in. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet Virgin Mary, amen. O sweet. O sweet.
In this country, which calls itself Christian,
what is sweeter than hearing Have mercy
on us. From those who serve different gods. O
clement, O loving, O God, O God, amidst ruins,
amidst waters, fleeing, fleeing. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet, O sweet. In this country,
point at the moon, at the stars, point at the way the lake lies,
with a hand full of feathers,
and they will look at the feathers. And kill you for it.
If a word for religion they don’t believe in is magic
so be it, let us have magic. Let us have
our own mothers and scarves, our spirits,
our shamans and our sacred books. Let us keep
our stars to ourselves and we shall pray
to no one. Let us eat
what makes us holy.
.

by Emily Jungmin Yoon
from Poetry, Nov. 2017

Becca Rothfeld at The New Republic:

One of the great secrets of modern life is that we don’t actually want what we want. Instead, we want to go on wanting, luxuriating in our deprivation. The British novelist J.G. Ballard, a lifelong foe of gratified desire, predicted our predicament with eerie prescience. In two essential novels reissued by Picador, the exquisitely grotesque Crash (1973) and the eerily civilized Super-Cannes (2000), Ballard warns against the lures of easy satisfaction.

Reviewers have often called Ballard’s dystopian visions “prophetic”: He foresaw self-driving cars, Uber-style ridesharing, and the lavish corporate campuses where life and labor blur into one another. But perhaps his canniest forecast was that comfort would prove so lethally uncomfortable. “Suburbs,” he reflected in an interview in the Paris Review,

are far more sinister places than most city dwellers imagine. Their very blandness forces the imagination into new areas. I mean, one’s got to get up in the morning thinking of a deviant act, merely to make certain of one’s freedom. It needn’t be much; kicking the dog will do.

Super-Cannes is set in such a suburb: Eden-Olympia is a corporate park on the outskirts of Cannes in “Europe’s silicon valley.”

more here.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

There’s a great story behind “Miles Davis and John Coltrane—The Final Tour,” the sixth volume in Sony’s “Bootleg Series” of live recordings by Davis (it comes out March 23rd), and that story makes itself heard in the music. In 1960, the trumpeter Miles Davis, along with his regular band, was booked to go on a concert tour in Western Europe as part of the ongoing, and internationally famous, “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concert series. However, at exactly that time, Coltrane, who played tenor saxophone, was preparing to leave Davis’s quintet and form his own working group. Coltrane had been a sideman with Davis on and off since 1955; they were both born in 1926, but their careers took drastically different paths. Davis was already a minor star in 1945, at the age of nineteen, when he recorded with Charlie Parker. Three years later, at twenty-two, he led a nonet, featuring intricate arrangements, that proved vastly influential. (They’re gathered under the title “Birth of the Cool.”) Davis had a huge and significant discography as a leader by the time he hired Coltrane, an unheralded musician best known as a rarely soloing sideman, who’d never yet led a record date. With Davis, Coltrane quickly found his voice, and expanded it during a stint in 1957 with Thelonious Monk. Coltrane had led dates on several labels; recorded the influential “Giant Steps,” in 1959; and was ready to go out on his own.

Davis’s group, featuring the pianist Wynton Kelly, the bassist Paul Chambers, and the drummer Jimmy Cobb—which had been a sextet for several years, featuring Cannonball Adderley’s alto sax alongside Coltrane’s tenor—was now depleted. Adderley left in the fall of 1959, and Coltrane was feeling his oats.

more here.

Tom Rachman at the TLS:

Virtual reality – and much breathless exaggeration regarding it – has been part of tech daydreaming for a few decades, without yet becoming something anyone might keep in their living room. During a previous flare of VR hopes in the 1980s and 90s, microprocessors lagged behind programmers’ visions. Today, computing power has nearly caught up, and it is up to coders to conjure dreamscapes desirable enough for us to buy. Once VR goes mainstream, optimists say, new universes will open. We’ll be able to fly. Or become trout. Or walk through others’ bodies. Any kookiness or fantasia could be concocted and shared. Pessimists, however, warn that VR will produce aimless addicts, lost in non-existent worlds to the detriment of the one we have contended with for millennia.

Whether VR proves grand or ghastly, tech corporations are hurrying to profit. Months after Zuckerberg wavered at the pit’s edge, Facebook paid $2 billion for a leading headset maker, Oculus VR. Also that year, Google released a viewer made of cardboard that allowed users to transform their smartphones into rudimentary VR screens. In the years since, the Samsung Gear VR has come out, along with the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and the Sony PlayStation VR. None has sold in society-changing numbers, but each product inches ahead.

more here.

From KurzweilAI:

Throat-motion sensor monitors stroke effects more effectively: A radical new type of stretchable, wearable sensor that measures vocal-cord movements could be a “game changer” for stroke rehabilitation, according to Northwestern University scientists. The sensors can also measure swallowing ability (which may be affected by stroke), heart function, muscle activity, and sleep quality. Developed in the lab of engineering professor John A. Rogers, Ph.D., in partnership with Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago, the new sensors have been deployed to tens of patients. “One of the biggest problems we face with stroke patients is that their gains tend to drop off when they leave the hospital,” said Arun Jayaraman, Ph.D., research scientist at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and a wearable-technology expert. “With the home monitoring enabled by these sensors, we can intervene at the right time, which could lead to better, faster recoveries for patients.”

Jonathan Beckman in The Economist:

At cocktail hour on a mild October evening, as thousands of Londoners are wadded face to armpit on their tube journeys home, half a dozen residents of a handsome, brown-brick townhouse in Chelsea have gathered in the basement kitchen. Jonny Sywulak, a 34-year-old software engineer and former bartender, is standing behind a balustrade of vodka bottles, demonstrating how to concoct a Bloody Mary. Each glass is served with an elaborate garnish – a slice of lime, a slice of lemon, an olive, a nub of blue cheese and a shrimp – that slumps against the rim like a half-felled totem pole. “I’m just following instructions here,” says Isa Landaeta, the house’s community manager. “I’ve never made a garnish like this before. Also, do olives really taste good with shrimp?”

Nicolas Geeraert in The Conversation:

The academic discipline of psychology was developed largely in North America and Europe. Some would argue it’s been remarkably successful in understanding what drives human behaviour and mental processes, which have long been thought to be universal. But in recent decades some researchers have started questioning this approach, arguing that many psychological phenomena are shaped by the culture we live in.

Clearly, humans are in many ways very similar – we share the same physiology and have the same basic needs, such as nourishment, safety and sexuality. So what effect can culture really have on the fundamental aspects of our psyche, such as perception, cognition and personality? Let’s take a look at the evidence so far.

Experimental psychologists typically study behaviour in a small group of people, with the assumption that this can be generalised to the wider human population. If the population is considered to be homogeneous, then such inferences can indeed be made from a random sample.

However, this isn’t the case. Psychologists have long disproportionately relied on undergraduate students to carry out their studies, simply because they are readily available to researchers at universities. More dramatically still, more than 90% of participants in psychological studies come from countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D). Clearly, these countries are neither a random sample nor representative for the human population.

More here.

Leonard Mlodinow in the New York Times:

I always thought that Stephen Hawking would outlive me. I broke into tears when I heard on Wednesday that he had not. He died at his home in Cambridge, England, at 76, after more than half a century of living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

When a man is given three years to live at 21, and he dies 55 years later, it shouldn’t come as a shock. But though I’m 15 years younger then Stephen was, and he had been gravely ill for years, if you knew him you couldn’t help thinking that he would always be around, that his life force was inexhaustible, that he would always have another miracle to pull off.

The scientific community rightly makes much of one of his miracles, a discovery he made in 1974 of something now known as Hawking radiation: the phenomenon in which black holes — so named because nothing can escape them — actually allow radiation to get out.

In popular culture Stephen was another kind of miracle: a floating brain, a disembodied intellect that fit snugly into the stereotype of the genius scientist.

But to me Stephen was also the everyday miracle of an ordinary embodied human — albeit one who had to battle in heroic ways within the confines of his particular shell.

More here.

Here's David Byrne's original video of "Everybody's Coming to my House" from his new album American Utopia:

And here is the version from the Vocal Jazz Ensemble of the Detroit School of Arts:

Benjamin A. Schupmann in the Oxford University Press Blog:

The rise of extremist populism in recent years places liberal democracy, not to mention committed liberal democrats, in an awkward position. There has been an alarming rise in public support for such extremist movements, even in established liberal democratic states. In states such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela, democratically elected governments are enacting illiberal and anti-democratic political goals and values into law and in some cases directly into their constitutions. Once in power, these movements have sought – among other things – to concentrate political power in the executive branch, subordinate the judiciary and the civil service to the executive, intimidate and disempower domestic opposition, undermine press freedoms, infringe on minority rights, limit freedoms of expression and assembly, control universities, and finally stoke xenophobic, anti-pluralist, anti-Semitic, and racist sentiments.

Victor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, has characterized this development as “illiberal democracy.” Defenders of liberal democracy and theorists of populism, in turn, have responded by condemning this turn as simply undemocratic. The abuse of democratically obtained powers to dismantle liberal and democratic commitments is democratic suicide.

A sort of paradox sits at the heart of democratic suicide, however. If a majority or supermajority legallyseeks to enact laws that undermine liberal constitutionalism and democracy, is it best characterized as undemocratic? What constitutional measures can be taken to prevent democratic suicide from happening, if any?

It is widely believed in the West today that democracy is the ultimate basis of political authority. If true, liberal democrats have little recourse when a majority or super majority of the people legally amend liberal and democratic values out of the constitution – except to hope that voters will come around by the next election.

Gillian Osborne in Nautilus:

There was no single job title for those who practiced science prior to 1834. Naturalists, philosophers, and savans tramped around collecting specimens, recorded astral activity, or combusted chemicals in labs, but not as “scientists.” When William Whewell proposed this term, he hoped it would consolidate science, which he worried otherwise lacked “all traces of unity.” Whewell saw scientists as analogous to artists. Just “as a Musician, Painter, or Poet,” are united in pursuit of a common goal—the beautiful—Whewell believed a botanist, physicist, or chemist should be united in their common pursuit of understanding nature.

Built into his concept of what it means to be a scientist was a relation between what the poet and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a contemporary of Whewell, called “Each and All”: an attention to the particular that keeps the big picture in sight. For Emerson, the “All” was Nature and the “Each” could be a shell, or bird, a humblebee, or a Rhododendron. The point of science, according to Whewell and Emerson, was to investigate the relation between these two scales. Today, we have other terminology for “Each and All”: the reflection within the local, for example, of global phenomenon. Consciousness emerging from the activity of individual neurons. Spring flowers in Concord whose earlier blooming reflect changes in planetary climate patterns. In the video below, Harvard professor Elisa New sits down with former Vice President Al Gore to discuss Emerson’s poem, “Each and All,” in conjunction with 19th-century science, 20th-century space exploration, and contemporary climate change. The conversation, along with others featured on Nautilus, are part of New’s Poetry in America project. New’s conversation with Gore is part of a new Poetry in America initiative focused on the “Poetry of Earth, Sea, and Sky.”

More here.