Trevor Cribben Merrill at Genealogies of Modernity:

In his essay Testaments Betrayed Milan Kundera recalls taking lessons in musical composition from a friend of his father’s, a Jewish composer who was at that time required to wear the yellow star. Seeing the young Kundera out of the tiny Prague flat where he camped out with others whose apartments had been confiscated, the composer suddenly stopped: “There are many surprisingly weak passages in Beethoven. But it is the weak passages that bring out the strong ones. It’s like a lawn—if it weren’t there, we couldn’t enjoy the beautiful tree growing on it.” Some time after sharing this insight with his pupil, the composer was transported to Theresienstadt. Kundera was never to forget the moment: “. . . that brief remark from my teacher of the time has haunted me all my life (I’ve defended it, I’ve fought it, I’ve never finished with it) . . .”

Few of us will receive lessons in beauty under such circumstances. Yet anyone who has sought to make or comprehend art has probably come across at least a few similarly unforgettable statements—insights that, it seems, can never be exhausted. Some we accept unconditionally because they articulate an intuition we have had ourselves but were unable to express. Others we wrestle with for a long time, unwilling to give them our full assent yet equally unable to leave them behind.

more here (via The Book Haven).

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Depression is like waking up to a rainy, dreary morning, every single day. Activities that previously lightened the mood lose their joy. Instead, every social interaction and memory is filtered through a negative lens. This aspect of depression, called negative affective bias, leads to sadness and rumination—where haunting thoughts tumble around endlessly in the brain. Scientists have long sought to help people out of these ruts and back into a positive mindset by rewiring neural connections. Traditional antidepressants, such as Prozac, cause these changes, but they take weeks or even months. In contrast, psychedelics rapidly trigger antidepressant effects with just one shot and last for months when administered in a controlled environment and combined with therapy.

Why? A new study suggests these drugs reduce negative affective bias by shaking up the brain networks that regulate emotion. In rats with low mood, a dose of several psychedelics boosted their “outlook on life.” Based on several behavioral tests, ketamine—a party drug known for its dissociative high—and the hallucinogen scopolamine shifted the rodents’ emotional state to neutral.

Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, further turned the emotional dial towards positivity. Rather than Debbie Downers, these rats adopted a sunny mindset with an openness to further learning, replacing negative thoughts with positive ones.

More here.

Meghan Bartels in Scientific American:

Tiny tardigrades have three claims to fame: their charmingly pudgy appearance, delightful common names (water bear and moss piglet) and stunning resilience in the face of threats ranging from the vacuum of space to temperatures near absolute zero. Now scientists have identified a key mechanism contributing to tardigrades’ resilience—a molecular switch of sorts that triggers a hardy dormant state of being. The researchers hope that the new work, published on January 17 in the journal PLOS ONE, will encourage further exploration of the microscopic creatures’ ability to withstand extreme conditions.

The research began back when, on a whim, co-author Derrick Kolling, a chemist at Marshall University, put a tardigrade into a machine that detects “free radicals,” or atoms that contain unpaired electrons. And he did see such atoms being produced in the water bear. That finding isn’t surprising because an animal’s normal metabolic processes, as well as environmental stressors such as smoke and other pollutants, create free radicals inside cells.

When they build up, free radicals—most notably reactive forms of oxygen—snatch electrons from their surroundings to achieve stability in a process known as oxidation. In the process, these radicals damage cells and compounds such as DNA and proteins. But in small quantities, free radicals can act as signaling molecules, Hicks says, and her lab studies show how these atoms affect a cell’s behavior by glomming on to and popping off a variety of proteins. When Kolling told Hicks about seeing free radicals in a tardigrade, Hicks wondered if these atoms might play a role in the animal’s hardiness. The team devised several experiments to temporarily expose little water bears to stress-inducing, free-radical-producing conditions—including high levels of salt, sugar and hydrogen peroxide. Under these forms of stress, tardigrades curl up into a temporary protective state of dormancy called a tun. “When there’s a lot of stress, they’re masters of protecting themselves,” Kolling says.

More here.

Jon Michaud at The New Yorker:

In 2000, Dickson D. Despommier, then a professor of public health and microbiology at Columbia University, was teaching a class on medical ecology in which he asked his students, “What will the world be like in 2050?,” and a follow-up, “What would you like the world to be like in 2050?” As Despommier told The New Yorker’s Ian Frazier in 2017, his students “decided that by 2050 the planet will be really crowded, with eight or nine billion people, and they wanted New York City to be able to feed its population entirely on crops grown within its own geographic limit.” The class had calculated that by farming every square foot of rooftop space in the city, you could provide enough calories to feed only about two per cent of the 2050 population of New York.

Urban farming was a good idea, Despommier thought, but his students hadn’t taken it far enough. “What’s wrong with putting the farmer inside the building?” he asked them, remembering that at the time there were “hundreds to perhaps thousands” of empty buildings in New York City. Throughout the next decade, as he continued to teach the class, Despommier and his students developed this idea—including the use of cultivation techniques that required little or no soil—culminating in the 2010 book, “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century.”

more here.

I thought I was following a track of freedom
and for awhile it was  —Adrienne Rich

Rivers/Roads

Consider the earnestness of pavement
its dark elegant sheen after rain,
its insistence on leading you somewhere

A highway wants to own the landscape,
it sections prairie into neat squares
swallows mile after mile of countryside
to connect the dots of cities and towns,
to make sense of things

A river is less opinionated
less predictable
it never argues with gravity
its history is a series of delicate negotiations with
time and geography

Wet your feet all you want
Heraclitus says,
it’s never the river you remember;
a road repeats itself incessantly
obsessed with its own small truth,
it wants you to believe in something particular

The destination you have in mind when you set out
is nowhere you have ever been;
where you arrive finally depends on
how you get there,
by river or by road

by Michael Crummey
from Arguments With Gravity.
Quarry Press, Kingston, Ont. 1996.

Johannes Lichtman in The Paris Review:

As I considered the invitation, I kept wondering why I’d been invited. I don’t write about CIA-adjacent topics, nor am I successful enough a novelist that people outside a small circle—one that I doubt includes U.S. intelligence agencies—know my name. So the invite was a bit of a mystery. This was the second-most common question that came up when I told writer friends about it, topped only by: “No speaking fee?” At first, I wondered whether the gig was part of a recruitment strategy. But it doesn’t take a vast intelligence apparatus to know that I am not intelligence material, not least because I am a professional writer.

Next I wondered if my visit could be used as soft-diplomacy propaganda. Look how harmless we are! We let writers come to our headquarters and pose for pictures. The CIA had veered into this type of literary boosterism before—supporting, for example, the founding of the very magazine for which I am writing this piece. So it wasn’t out of the question.

More here.

Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist:

The amount of electricity used to mine and trade bitcoin climbed to 121 terawatt-hours in 2023, 27 per cent more than the previous year. While other cryptocurrencies in the same position have made bold changes to cut their impact, bitcoin’s decentralised community of developers, miners and investors are showing little interest in changing course. If bitcoin cannot clean up its own house, should governments step in to shut it down?

The latest data from the University of Cambridge shows that bitcoin currently accounts for 0.69 per cent of all electricity consumption worldwide. It also requires vast amounts of water, both for electricity production and for cooling at data centres. A study last year found that a single bitcoin transaction uses enough water to fill a swimming pool.

More here.

James B. Meigs in City Journal:

As 2024 dawns, the prospects for a nuclear revival in the U.S. look mixed. On one hand, many once-skeptical environmentalists now support the technology. Bipartisan majorities in Congress back funding for nuclear research and deployment. And more than two dozen startups are developing a new generation of small, innovative reactor designs. But momentum slowed in November, when NuScale Power, the Portland, Oregon-based company pioneering small modular reactors (SMRs), announced the cancellation of its showcase project to build a power facility in Idaho. If completed, the project would have been the nation’s first SMR power plant. Backers hoped that the endeavor would prove that this new approach to nuclear technology can deliver affordable, zero-carbon power to our electric grid. Instead, delays and escalating costs forced NuScale to shelve the project before it even broke ground.

More here.

Leila Sloman in Quanta Magazine:

Sarah Hart has always had an eye for the covert ways mathematics permeates other fields. As a child, she was struck by the ubiquity of the number 3 in her fairy tales. Hart’s mother, a math teacher, encouraged her pattern-seeking, giving her math puzzles to pass the time. Hart went on to earn a doctorate in group theory in 2000 and later became a professor at Birkbeck, University of London. Hart’s research probed the structure of Coxeter groups, more general versions of structures that catalog the symmetries of polygons and prisms. In 2023, she published Once Upon a Prime, a book about the ways math appears in fiction and poetry. “Since we humans are part of the universe, it is only natural that our forms of creative expression, literature among them, will also manifest an inclination for pattern and structure,” Hart wrote. “Mathematics, then, is the key to an entirely different perspective on literature.”

Since 2020, Hart has been the professor of geometry at Gresham College in London. Gresham has no traditional courses; instead, its professors each deliver several public lectures per year. Hart is the first woman to ever hold the 428-year-old position, which was occupied in the 17th century by Isaac Barrow, famous for teaching another Isaac (Newton). More recently, it was held by Roger Penrose, a mathematician who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. Hart spoke with Quanta about how mathematics and art influence one another. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

More here.

Charles Schmidt in Undark:

SITUATED IN A former sand and gravel pit just a few hundred feet from the Kennebec River in central Maine, the Riverside Station pumps half a million gallons of fresh groundwater every day. The well station processes water from two of five wells on either side of the river operated by the Greater Augusta Utility District, or GAUD, which supplies drinking water to nearly 6,000 local households. Most of them reside in Maine’s state capital, Augusta, just a few miles to the south. Ordinarily, GAUD prides itself on the quality of its water supply. “You could drink it out of the ground and be perfectly safe,” said Brian Tarbuck, GAUD’s general manager.

But in March 2021, environmental sampling of Riverside well water revealed trace levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or “forever chemicals,” as they’re better known. The levels at Riverside didn’t exceed Maine’s drinking water standard of 20 parts per trillion (ppt), which was a relief, Tarbuck said. Still, he and his colleagues at the utility were wary. PFAS have been linked to a variety of health problems, and Maine lawmakers at the time were debating an even stricter limit for the chemicals. Tarbuck knew a lower standard was coming someday. The only question was when.

As it turns out, a tougher standard is expected early this year. That’s when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is set to finalize an enforceable cap on PFAS in drinking water that will require GAUD and thousands of other utilities around the country to update their treatment methods. The standard, which in regulatory terms is called a maximum contaminant level or MCL, limits permissible amounts of the two most studied and ubiquitous PFAS compounds — PFOA and PFOS — to just 4 ppt in drinking water each.

More here.

Tobias Fischer at White Fungus:

Based in Thailand, the twelve members of the TEO ensemble give concerts almost every single day. Their music, performed on instruments including oversized drums, harmonicas, chimes, and the ranat (a Southeast Asian version of the xylophone), contains both composed and improvised sections and sounds, like a blend of local folk melodies and the music played in Buddhist temples.

All members have received a first-class education from Dave Soldier, a conceptual artist and guitarist who briefly performed in Bo Diddley’s band, collaborated with author Kurt Vonnegut, composed string arrangements for David Byrne, and worked with Pete Seeger (he is also a neuroscientist and professor working under his given name David Sulzer at Columbia University).

The TEO has recorded three albums so far and has been visited by journalists from renowned publications such as The Economist and The New York Times.

more here.

Indrajit Hazra in The Print:

In a 1972 interview conducted by Amitabh Basu in his column ‘Dainandin Jibone’ (In Everyday Life) where in every issue of the film magazine, Ultoroth, Basu posed a set list of questions to writers, Shibram had articulated the nous of laziness. Replying to the very first question, ‘When do you get up in the morning?’ he sets the warp, woof and tone:

It depends on the time. I try to get up as soon as I wake up. But after sleeping all night I feel so tired that to clear that very tiredness I need to sleep a bit more. As I keep doing this, when it becomes impossible not to get up, when it looks bad, then I just have to get up from bed.

This is languor as joie de vivre, the purest manifestation of freedom, life as unmovedness—until internal compulsion compels.

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

Robert M. Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology who you may remember from his 2017 best-seller Behave, a 790-page behemoth on the biology of human behaviour. Before delving in, let me immediately highlight that Determined is accessible, well-researched, witty, and irreverent; it regularly made me chuckle. For a book that could have gotten bogged down in philosophical and neurobiological jargon, this one is a joy to read.

Clearly, Sapolsky does not believe in free will. But what does that mean? He falls in the minority camp of hard incompatibilism: the world is deterministic (i.e. events result from both prior events and the laws of nature), this is incompatible with free will, and we are thus not morally responsible for our actions.

More here.

Charmaine Chua in the Boston Review:

Beginning in the late 1860s, the decade that it took to construct the Suez Canal, photographs depicting its feats of engineering circulated across the world. Sold to travelers as souvenirs, featured in Le Monde, and later exhibited at the 1889 Paris world fair, they enshrined on paper the industrial monumentality of the dredgers that excavated earth into sea.

As publicized images of the machinic wonders of modernity, they also served as promissory notes, enticing investors to purchase shares in the joint-stock Suez Canal Company. The photographs telegraphed seductive promises of financial gain, pictorializing the genius of European engineering that could dig a manmade channel across the African continent. Running through the pictures, historian Mohamed Gamal-Eldin discovered, was a striking pattern. For the technological sublime to work its wonder on the awed spectator, the photos had to be evacuated of the laboring subjects who made the feat possible: the many tens of thousands of dispossessed fellahin—peasants—who dug the monumental canal by hand.

More here.

Reverse Gentrification

If the law didn’t apply to me
I would squat in an upper income
suburb in SoCal the same way
Europeans squatted on land not their own.
And after stealing a home
not my own I would bulldoze the entire block to the ground.
Put up a 10-story apartment complex.
Siphon water and electricity
from the entire neighborhood
watching pools go empty,
and gardens wilt.

I would leave them with no choice,
but to move out or rent from me
at a cost equal to half or more
than the average family’s monthly income
while never fixing sewage, or power.
I would,
call the cops on all of them,
for walking their dogs at 11 PM,
for jogging in the middle of the street,
and for wearing yoga pants at 2 pm on a Wednesday afternoon.

Happily,
to boost the local economy,
I would open a pawn shop,
Paycheck loan management center
and liquor store.
While I’m at it,
I could get a 1980’s CIA connection,
traffic drugs on the block,
hand some nickels and dimes
and a glock.
Give them different colored bandanas.
Sit back and watch them tear each other apart.
Use the profit to fund an illegal war in some foreign country
and then call the cops on which ever group gets too big.

But I would never do this,
because it’s already been done to us.

by Ramon Jimenez
from Decomp Journal