Sean Carroll in Scientific American:

I first heard of Joe Polchinski in 1988, when I was applying to various graduate schools in physics. During a visit to Harvard, I talked with Sidney Coleman, one of the leading thinkers in the esoteric world of quantum field theory. Although he was happy to sing the praises of his own institution, Sidney couldn’t help but add, “But I wouldn’t blame you if you went to the University of Texas. Whoever gets Joe Polchinski as an advisor will be fortunate indeed.”

I didn’t follow the advice, but I remembered the name, and a few years later I had the wonderful good fortune of being a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. Joe had moved there in 1992, and my office was just down the hall from his. I can’t tell you how often I would knock on his door to ask a question about physics. In a milieu packed with very smart people, he was the go-to guy, renowned for his carefulness and open-mindedness to new ideas. It wasn’t just me, either; countless students and colleagues sought out just a bit of his time. Eventually, as he worked to finish his giant two-volume textbook on string theory, he took to simply closing his door and pretending he wasn’t in the office. Once the book was finished, however, the door was open again, and the constant stream of visitors resumed.

Joe died at his home last week, age 63, after having been treated for brain cancer for a few years. His passing leaves a hole in the physics community, as his research was as innovative and impactful as ever. Looking over the countless memories and sympathies posted online, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large and heartfelt outpouring of grief at the passing of a great physicist.

More here.

Guy Kahane, Jim A.C. Everett, Brian D. Earp, Lucius Caviola, Nadira Faber, Molly Crockett, and Julian Savulescu in Practical Ethics:

Last week, we invited people to find out “How Utilitarian Are You?” by filling out our newly published Oxford Utilitarianism Scale. The scale was widely shared – even by Peter Singer (who scored predictably highly). The Oxford Utilitarianism Scale does a pretty good job of measuring how well people’s views match up with “classical” utilitarians (think Bentham and Singer), which is the form of utilitarianism we used to anchor the scale. But that’s not all it does. It also teases apart two different dimensions of utilitarian thinking, tracking two ways in which utilitarianism departs from common-sense morality. Our new research recently published in Psychological Review links these two factors to distinct components of human psychology.

The first peculiar aspect of utilitarianism is that it places no constraints whatsoever on the maximization of aggregate well-being. If torturing an innocent person would lead to more good overall, then utilitarianism, in contrast to commonsense morality, requires that the person be tortured. This is what we call instrumental harm: the idea that we are permitted (and even required) to instrumentally use, severely harm, or even kill innocent people to promote the greater good.

The second way that utilitarianism diverges from common-sense morality is by requiring us to impartially maximize the well-being of all sentient beings on the planet in such a way that “[e]ach is to count for one and none for more than one” (Bentham, 1789/1983), not privileging compatriots, family members, or ourselves over strangers – or even enemies. This can be called the positive dimension of utilitarianism, or impartial beneficence.

What are the psychological roots of utilitarianism? Why does utilitarianism attract some people but strongly repel so many others? Psychologists have tried to answer these questions by using the now famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) ‘trolley problems’.

More here.

Christian G. Appy in The Boston Review:

Exactly a year before he was murdered, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave one of the greatest speeches of his life, a piercing critique of the war in Vietnam. Two thousand people jammed into New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, to hear King shred the historical, political, and moral claims that U.S. leaders had invoked since the end of World War II to justify their counterrevolutionary foreign policy. The United States had not supported Vietnamese independence and democracy, King argued, but had repeatedly opposed it; the United States had not defended the people of South Vietnam from external communist aggression, but was itself the foreign aggressor—burning and bombing villages, forcing peasants off their ancestral land, and killing, by then, as many as one million Vietnamese. “We are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure,” King said, “while we create a hell for the poor.”

The war was an “enemy of the poor” at home as well. Not only were poor black and white boys sent “to kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools,” but the vast expense required to obliterate an impoverished, nonwhite nation 8,000 miles away eviscerated the domestic social programs that had promised to narrow economic and racial inequalities at home. The military draft, for instance, offered deferments and exemptions that favored the privileged while programs such as Project 100,000 enlisted men from “the subterranean poor”—men so badly educated they would once have been rejected for military service. Project 100,000 was touted as a program of social uplift, but in reality, it sent poor men to the front lines as cannon fodder, further proving King’s point that the promises of the Great Society were “shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”

The Riverside Church speech alone should place King in the pantheon of 1960s antiwar activists. Yet in public memory, his opposition to the Vietnam War is largely forgotten. Why?

More here.

Victor Gomes in Nautilus:

Part of Vittorio Sebastiano’s job is to babysit a few million stem cells. The research professor of reproductive biology at Stanford University keeps the cells warm and moist deep inside the Lorry I. Lokey Stem Cell Research Building, one of the nation’s largest stem cell facilities. He’s joined there by an army of researchers, each with their own goals. His own research program is nothing if not ambitious: He wants to reverse aging in humans. Stem cells are the Gary Oldman of cell types. They can reprogram themselves to carry out the function of virtually any other type of cell, and play a vital role in early development. This functional reprogramming is usually accompanied by an age reset, down to zero. Sebastiano figures that if he can separate these different kinds of reprogramming, he can open up a whole new kind of aging therapy. Nautilus caught up with him last month.

What impact will your work have on aging research?

I’m studying whether we can separate the process of functional reprogramming of cells from the process of aging reprogramming of cells. Typically these two processes happen at the same time. My hypothesis is that we can induce cellular rejuvenation without changing the function of the cells. If we can manage to do this, we could start thinking about a way to stall aging.

What is the difference between functional and aging reprogramming?

The function of a skin cell is to express certain proteins, keratins for example that protect the skin. The function of a liver cell is to metabolize. Those are cell-specific functions. Reprogramming that function means that you no longer have a liver cell. You now have another cell, which has a totally different function. Age, on the other hand, is just the degree of usefulness of that cell, and it’s mostly an epigenetic process. A young keratinocyte cell is younger than an older keratinocyte but it is still a keratinocyte. The amazing thing is that if you take an aged cell that is fully committed to a certain function, and you transplant its nucleus into an immature egg cell called an oocyte, then you revert its function to a pluripotent, embryonic one, which means it can become any other cell of the body—and you also revert the age of that cell to the youngest age possible. It’s mind-blowing to me.

More here.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Sedition — a letter to the writer from Meri Mangakāhia

Here’s what I had in mind, kōtiro, this
clipping at words like overgrown maikuku — 
return the blankets of domestic life; don’t fold
washing or wear shoes, polish these rerenga kē.

Eh. But this world.
I s’pose neither of us planned to be in politics,
never did do what others told us to — 
wahanui though, go on, get

your sedition on girl,
your agitator, your defiant speak
to each other eye to eye — 
Māori been jailed for nouns, phrases;

butcher up a clause, get buried
in Pākehā kupu, then dig that
out like the old people. No one approved
of their language either.

by Anahera Gildea
from Poetry (February 2018)

David Marchese in New York Magazine:

In both music and manner, Quincy Jones has always registered — from afar, anyway — as smooth, sophisticated, and impeccably well-connected. (That’s what earning 28 Grammy awards and co-producing Michael Jackson’s biggest-selling albums will do.) But in person, the 84-year-old music-industry macher is far spikier and more complicated. “All I’ve ever done is tell the truth,” says Jones, seated on a couch in his palatial Bel Air home, and about to dish some outrageous gossip. “I’ve got nothing to be scared of, man.”

Currently in the midst of an extended victory lap ahead of his turning 85 in March — a Netflix documentary and a CBS special hosted by Oprah Winfrey are on the horizon — Jones, dressed in a loose sweater, dark slacks, and a jaunty scarf, talks like he has nothing to lose. He name-drops, he scolds, he praises, and he tells (and retells) stories about his very famous friends. Even when his words are harsh, he says them with an enveloping charm, frequently leaning over for fist bumps and to tap me on the knee. “The experiences I’ve had!” he says, shaking his head in wonder. “You almost can’t believe it.”

You worked with Michael Jackson more than anyone he wasn’t related to. What’s something people don’t understand about him?

I hate to get into this publicly, but Michael stole a lot of stuff. He stole a lot of songs. [Donna Summer’s] “State of Independence and “Billie Jean.” The notes don’t lie, man. He was as Machiavellian as they come.

How so?

Greedy, man. Greedy. “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” — Greg Phillinganes wrote the c section. Michael should’ve given him 10 percent of the song. Wouldn’t do it.

I used to kill him about the plastic surgery, man. He’d always justify it and say it was because of some disease he had. Bullshit.

More here.

Charles C. Mann in Breakthrough Journal:

On June 30, 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, DD, 36th Bishop of Oxford, attended the 30th annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Oxford University. Countless students have been taught that during the meeting, Wilberforce attacked evolution, setting off an impromptu debate which became a “tipping point” in the history of thought. I was one of those students. The debate, my biology professor explained, was the opening salvo of the war between Science and Religion — and Religion lost. My textbook backed him up. Wilberforce’s anti-evolution assault, it said, was swept aside by researchers’ “careful and scientific defense.” In a flourish unusual in an undergraduate text, it boasted that the pro-evolution arguments “neatly lifted the Bishop’s scalp.” That day the forces of empirical knowledge had beaten back the armies of religious ignorance.

None of this is accurate. There was no real debate that day in Oxford. Nor was there a clear victor, still less a scalping. Not that many people were paying attention; the “debate” was not mentioned by a single London newspaper. Still, the exchange was important, though the quarrel was less between scientific theory and religious faith than between two conceptions of humankind’s place in the cosmos. And far from being an enduring victory for rationality over faith, the debate inaugurated a conflict which continues to the present day, and is less about the past than about the future.

In 1860 science was not assumed to be inaccessible to ordinary people; the attendees at the Advancement of Science meeting included many ordinary, middle-class Britons, as well as Oxford students and faculty. The crowd packed a hall at the university’s new museum, standing in aisles and doorways. In that jammed, sweltering space, the subject on attendees’ minds was On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. Published just seven months before, the book had created a public uproar, dividing educated Britons into pro- and anti-evolution camps.

More here.

Richard Florida in The Atlantic:

Kate Mossman at The Guardian:

Beck once complained that the image had him written off as a clown. Slackers became hackers, became those Silicon Valley technology nerds of indeterminate age, wearing board shorts and running Google. At 23, he had an unusually forthright clause written into his record contract with Geffen, ensuring he could make as many side projects for independent labels as he wished. “For me it was just an insurance policy,” he says. He recalls that when he finished his best-selling album Odelay: “No one at the label called me to say, ‘We are so excited to be working on this, you did a great job.’ It did well, but that was a shock to everybody.”

His words call to mind what Richard Linklater said when asked what a slacker meant to him. “Someone who’s trying to live an interesting life, doing what they want to do, and if that takes time to find, so be it.”

Perhaps to show the industry that he was not a one-hit wonder, Beck did experimental versions of “Loser”, and worked extended jazz breaks into his set. He smashed instruments on stage, set things on fire, and once employed a leaf blower.

more here.

Roger White at n+1:

THERE ARE SOME PAINTERS WHOSE INFLUENCE on the course of painting is so diffuse as to become unremarkable. This is the case with the illustrious octogenarian David Hockney. Without him, it’s hard to imagine the category of queer figurative painting, for example, or the casual semi-abstraction seen lately in much American art. The point goes double for painting in Los Angeles, the city where Hockney has made most of his work, with its cerulean swimming pools, indolent bathers, and cubist highways, and which now looks (the city, and much of its painting) like the displaced Yorkshireman’s art.

By the same token it’s also banal to note these connections, along the lines of observing that many rock bands over the years really owe a lot to David Bowie. Hockney and his work have always been admired and distributed (among living artists perhaps only William Wegman, of the trained Weimaraner dog photos, has more publications to his name) and the price of this degree of middle-class, poster-above-the-dentist’s-chair cultural saturation is the dereliction of serious critical regard. I’m not alone in having encountered and idolized Hockney during my formative years as a painter, and therefore in having spent a lot of time over the years minimizing, second-guessing, if not disavowing altogether, that early artistic crush.

more here.

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

Scientists have developed a brain implant that noticeably boosted memory in its first serious test run, perhaps offering a promising new strategy to treat dementia, traumatic brain injuries and other conditions that damage memory. The device works like a pacemaker, sending electrical pulses to aid the brain when it is struggling to store new information, but remaining quiet when it senses that the brain is functioning well.

In the test, reported Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, the device improved word recall by 15 percent — roughly the amount that Alzheimer’s disease steals over two and half years. The implant is still experimental; the researchers are currently in discussions to commercialize the technology. And its broad applicability is unknown, having been tested so far only in people with epilepsy. Experts cautioned that the potential for misuse of any “memory booster” is enormous — A.D.H.D. drugs are widely used as study aids. They also said that a 15 percent improvement is fairly modest. Still, the research marks the arrival of new kind of device: an autonomous aid that enhances normal, but less than optimal, cognitive function. Doctors have used similar implants for years to block abnormal bursts of activity in the brain, most commonly in people with Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy. “The exciting thing about this is that, if it can be replicated and extended, then we can use the same method to figure out what features of brain activity predict good performance,” said Bradley Voytek, an assistant professor of cognitive and data science at the University of California, San Diego. The implant is based on years of work decoding brain signals, supported recently by more than $70 million from the Department of Defense to develop treatments for traumatic brain injury, the signature wound of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

More here.

Marissa Grunes at Paris Review:

In many ways Primitive Technology is in fact deftly attuned to the logic of the Internet. Witness the number of knockoff channels: Primitive Skills, Primitive Life, Survival Skills Primitive, et cetera. With his millions of subscribers, the channel’s creator earns a comfortable sum from YouTube. (In one of those tidy ironies of the Internet, his identity as thirty-something-year-old John Plant came to light after he complained to Facebook that users who posted his videos directly to the social media site were effectively robbing him of thousands of Australian dollars in YouTube views). Nor is this seeming contradiction so surprising. The channel’s carefully edited videos are streamlined, consistently and effectively branded, and even faintly humorous in their command of comic timing. Plant is adept at wielding both primitive and contemporary technology.

As one becomes aware of these incongruities, other questions bubble up. Plant lets us know that he lives a modern life, in a modern house. He has a college degree, and has been cutting lawns for a living while creating the world of Primitive Technology. He has access to power tools, safety matches—all sorts of equipment that would make his projects easier. Does he ever “cheat” offscreen?

more here.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Mara Naselli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I recently wandered through the Art Institute of Chicago and came upon Woman in Tub by Jeff Koons. His work is recognizable from a distance, and I often don’t stop to look. This time, I paused.

The porcelain sculpture is from his 1988 Banality series. A nude figure is seated in an incongruously small tub, one knee up, the other submerged or maybe missing. In the frothy water floats a heart-shaped sponge and what might be a colorful party hat. A blue breathing tube protrudes vertically from the suds as the woman’s mouth, rimmed in red lipstick, is open in an expression of shock, or perhaps, the artist hopes, delight. She clutches her breasts with her hands. A nipple peeks out from between fingers tipped with red nail polish, and the inside of her mouth is a toothless black hole. Her head, sliced off just above the nose, forms a flat, glassy white plane. The odd arrangement, amputations, and impossible dimensions are weirdly dreamlike. “When I was a kid, my grandparents had an ashtray on a table in their television room,” reads the artist’s statement on the didactic plaque. “It was a small porcelain of a girl in a bathtub. It was white, with pink and blue details, and the legs went back and forth. As a kid I was mesmerized. My Woman in Tub[1988] comes from that, though it also references Manet and Degas. I had such an experience of awe looking at that object.”

Many artists have taken the woman at her bath as a subject. Degas, Manet, Courbet, Picasso — all painted the bathing female nude in the modern era.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, studies the six-inch-long marbled crayfish. Finding specimens is easy: Dr. Lyko can buy the crayfish at pet stores in Germany, or he can head with colleagues to a nearby lake.

Wait till dark, switch on head lamps, and wander into the shallows. The marbled crayfish will emerge from hiding and begin swarming around your ankles.

“It’s extremely impressive,” said Dr. Lyko. “Three of us once caught 150 animals within one hour, just with our hands.”

Over the past five years, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of marbled crayfish. In a study published on Monday, the researchers demonstrate that the marble crayfish, while common, is one of the most remarkable species known to science.

Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant.

The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish.

More here.

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Over at The Real News, an interview with Thomas Ferguson:

Thomas Ferguson is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Welcome Professor Ferguson. Before we get into the overlooked factors that you found, let's look at the dominant narrative, which is that it was indeed Russian meddling and Comey that helped sway voters to turn on Clinton, who was leading in the polls, and vote for Trump. What is your though on that?

T. FERGUSON: This is the real heart of the problem with both the Comey and the Russian internet story — it's that when you actually look at what happened, not only did Hillary dip in the polls, but at the very same time the chances of the Democrats taking the Senate collapsed. When you've got two collapses, not one, and they very closely tracked each other, as we show in a figure in our paper, so, what's going on there? Well, when you look, first of all, you can take the Senate one very straightforwardly. There's no doubt about what happened. Mitch McConnell and company were going to donors and saying, as nice articles in Bloomberg and elsewhere on this that we cite, they're saying, "You guys can't afford to lose both the presidency and the Senate. So, you better help us."

They did. An enormous wave of cash came in for the Senate and the other thing we discovered when we looked was we created a day by day … Paul Jorgensen, Jie Chan and I created a day-by-day file of contributions into the Trump campaign and included dark money. You say, how do you know it's dark money? Obviously, it's not all provided. The answer is very straightforward. We'll see this cash coming in from an entity, usually has kind of a fake charitable name attached, and then you will see the cash coming out but no cash going in.

More here.