Oliver Kamm in The Times of London:

Almost at random, I pick from my shelves the celebrated American manuals The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White and On Writing Well by William Zinsser, along with On Writing by the bestselling author Stephen King and Do I Make Myself Clear? by the former newspaper editor Sir Harold Evans. All say the same thing: omit needless words, avoid the passive voice, and cut out adjectives and adverbs.

The hollowness of this advice is inadvertently demonstrated by the authors themselves, for in giving it (and apparently without realising it) they extensively employ the passive voice along with adjectives and adverbs. “Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind,” writes King (the words I’ve italicised are a passive clause). Most adjectives are “unnecessary”, declares Zinsser, using the adjective unnecessary. Adjectives are “seductive”, warns Evans, using the adjective seductive. “With adverbs,” continues King, “the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across” — using the adverbs usually, clearly and across.

See what I mean? Even famous writers aren’t necessarily able to explain good writing or even understand grammatical categories.

More here.

Robert J. King in Psychology Today:

(Typically, I wait until our work has gone through peer review before blogging about it. This work is technically in review at the moment, but several people (including journalists) have asked about it for reasons that will shortly become obvious.)

Mass killings are unusual events but devastating when they occur. Although the absolute risk of dying at the hands of such a killer is low, people stubbornly refuse statisticians’ earnest assurances of relative safety. This should not surprise us. Mass killings are, among many other things, a deliberate attempt to drive a wedge into the existing social order. That is why they are public, and why the killer seeks to maximise attention, and rarely seeks to escape. Some of these motives are obviously political—the intent is to sow fear and destabilize government–and I am not going to have anything much to say about those. What about people with more individual motives?

Attention to our evolved natures can cast some light on this. (1) Notice I say some light. The evolutionary perspective adds depth to existing accounts—it is an “added value” aspect of psychology, not a replacement for other—more local—explanations such as individual pathology, or why a location or victim was chosen.

I’ve likened the evolutionary account of a trait, to knowing the etymology of a word. For instance, knowing that the origin of the word “lemur” (those beautiful dark-eyed primates) comes from the Latin for “spirits of the dead” adds something to our understanding of the word. Not everything. Something. Sorry to have to keep saying this but, well, apparently I have to keep saying this. Let’s move on.

More here.

Bente Scheller at the Heinrich Böll Stiftung:

Those of you who visited Syria before 2011 may tend to remember their journeys as fondly as I do: A country in which buildings from a variety of eras bear witness to a long history of many peoples and religions. The old town of Damascus in which the Umayyad mosque rises atop the foundations of the ancient Roman temple of Jupiter, an environment characterised by tradition in which people, in between prayer calls and church bells, go about their everyday lives which in turn could be thought to have emerged from the tales of the Arabian Nights.

Engulfed by the scent of jasmine and cardamom coffee, a foreigner can easily forget about the dark side of Syrian life. Syria was not only a country in which you could positively feel the heartbeat of thousands of years of ancient societies, but also a state in which the most enormous security apparatus in the Middle East virtually strangled its citizens.

The widely praised peaceful coexistence of religions was certainly no feat of Hafez al-Assad who had gained hold of power in the country by means of a coup in the 1970s. It was rather a characteristic of Syrian history without which so many small and minuscule communities of different religious affiliations could never have developed and persisted.

Yet his grasp for power brought on a religio-political issue for Hafez al-Assad.

More here. [Thanks to Idrees Ahmad.]

Xaq Rzetelny in Ars Technica:

According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, when a person steps onto the transporter pad, the computer uses “molecular imaging scanners” to scan his or her body, before the person is converted into a “subatomically debonded matter stream.” In other words, a crew member is taken apart piece by piece, breaking apart the bonds between individual atoms. Then, particles are streamed into a “pattern buffer," where they remain briefly before being sent to their destination.

This sounds an awful lot like death. In fact, it’s even more death-y than conventional death where, after the body’s processes have stopped, the body slowly decomposes. The effect is the same—the pieces of you come apart—the transporter’s just a lot more efficient at it.

Once the matter stream arrives at its destination, the person is somehow “rematerialized” or put back together. While the transporter tends to use the person’s atoms to reconstruct a human, it really doesn’t have to. The machine could use totally different atoms, and the effect would be exactly the same.

In fact, in the Deep Space Nine episode “Our Man Bashir," Captain Sisko and a few other officers are nearly lost during a transporter accident. They beam out from their sabotaged runabout at the last second, but the transporter malfunctions and their patterns must be sent into the station’s computer somehow to save them. Their physical bodies are saved as holographic characters in Dr. Bashir’s holosuite program. Later in the episode, they’re reconstituted using the patterns stored in the holodeck—almost certainly with entirely new atoms.

That sounds an awful lot like a copy—or like a new person. If the transporter is just scanning your data and creating an identical copy somewhere else, then by any reasonable definition, the original person is dead. By analogy, consider a car model. Many cars are produced by the same manufacturer, all from the same design. There’s no way to tell these cars apart, but they’re not the same car.

More here.

Judith Duportail in The Guardian:

Reading through the 1,700 Tinder messages I’ve sent since 2013, I took a trip into my hopes, fears, sexual preferences and deepest secrets. Tinder knows me so well. It knows the real, inglorious version of me who copy-pasted the same joke to match 567, 568, and 569; who exchanged compulsively with 16 different people simultaneously one New Year’s Day, and then ghosted 16 of them.

“What you are describing is called secondary implicit disclosed information,” explains Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “Tinder knows much more about you when studying your behaviour on the app. It knows how often you connect and at which times; the percentage of white men, black men, Asian men you have matched; which kinds of people are interested in you; which words you use the most; how much time people spend on your picture before swiping you, and so on. Personal data is the fuel of the economy. Consumers’ data is being traded and transacted for the purpose of advertising.”

Tinder’s privacy policy clearly states your data may be used to deliver “targeted advertising”.

What will happen if this treasure trove of data gets hacked, is made public or simply bought by another company? I can almost feel the shame I would experience. The thought that, before sending me these 800 pages, someone at Tinder might have read them already makes me cringe.

More here.

Henry Graber in Slate:

The first time Shane Moon lost his driver’s license was in 2013, when his girlfriend was pregnant with his first child. Moon, a construction worker in Lapeer, Michigan, near Flint, was having trouble making ends meet and had let his car insurance lapse. “I don’t make a whole lot of money,” Moon said. “It’s the only thing I could possibly get away with not paying.” He got a ticket for driving without insurance and a special Michigan penalty called a “driver responsibility fee,” which can cost violators up to $1,000 over two years. He couldn’t afford to pay that either and missed his court appearance. His license was suspended, bringing on an additional reinstatement fee. But he had to keep driving to get to construction jobs, often 90 miles from home. Each time he was pulled over—often for his outdated tags—the state hit him with another ticket for hundreds of dollars. Four years later, Moon is homeless and struggling to keep up with tickets that have him paying as much as a third of his income to local and state governments each year for fines and fees alone. “My ship has sank. I don’t know how I’ll make it out of it this time. I feel like a total loser failing my family,” he told me. “If I can’t pay my tickets, shame on me, but don’t take my license away from me. Don’t take my standard of living away from me.” He continues to drive to work every day, without insurance or a license.

Moon is one of tens of thousands of Michiganders who have been trapped in a cycle of debt and criminality stemming from a suspended driver’s license and the accompanying series of fines that begin with the state’s driver responsibility fee. The penalty was first proposed in 2003, by Michigan state Sen. Jud Gilbert, who sponsored a bill to create an automatic fine tacked onto vehicular offenses both mundane ($100 for hitting seven points on a license) and serious ($1,000 for murder). The state was in a financial crisis, but as the fee’s name implied, Gilbert thought the new penalties—suggested to him by the majority leader at the time—would improve driver safety. They were portrayed that way in the press, too: The Detroit Free Press’ driving columnist called the fee an “immaturity penalty.” In 2014, the Republican-controlled statehouse voted by an overwhelming majority to abolish the policy, in recognition that the fee had simply been a “money grab,” in the words of Joe Haveman, the representative who sponsored the repeal.

More here.

Simon Makin in Scientific American:

About 10 years ago David Adam scratched his finger on a barbed wire fence. The cut was shallow, but drew blood. As a science journalist and author of The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought, a book about his own struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Adam had a good idea of what was in store. His OCD involved an obsessive fear of contracting HIV and produced a set of compulsive behaviors revolving around blood. In this instance he hurried home to get some tissue and returned to check there was not already any blood on the barbed-wire. “I looked and saw there was no blood on the tissue, looked underneath the fence, saw there was no blood, turned to walk away, and had to do it all again, and again and again,” he says. “You get stuck in this horrific cycle, where all the evidence you use to form judgments in everyday life tells you there’s no blood. And if anyone asked, you’d say ‘no.’ Yet, when you ask yourself, you say ‘maybe.’” Such compulsive behaviors, and the obsessions to which they are typically linked are what define OCD. Far from merely excessive tidiness, the mental disorder can have a devastating impact on a person’s life. Adam's story illustrates a curious feature of the condition. Sufferers are usually well aware their behavior is irrational but cannot stop themselves from doing whatever it is they feel compelled to do.

A new study published September 28 in Neuron uses mathematical modeling of decision-making during a simple game to provide insight into what might be going on. The game looked at a critical aspect of the way we perceive the world. Normally, a person's confidence about their knowledge of the surrounding environment guides their actions. “If I think it’s going to rain, I'm going to take an umbrella,” says lead author Matilde Vaghi. The study shows this link between belief and action is broken to some extent in people with OCD. As a consequence, what they do conflicts with what they know. This insight suggests compulsive behaviors are a core feature rather than merely a consequence of obsessions or a result of inaccurate beliefs.

More here.

From the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Libraries are often seen as places of wonder, mystery, and excitement. John Kaag’s American Philosophy: A Love Story credits a library with all these things, as well as for being the backdrop for an existential crisis, the end of a marriage, the spark of new love, and contracting Lyme disease. The book traces Kaag’s discovery of a largely forgotten library owned by a largely forgotten Harvard philosopher, William Ernest Hocking, on a remote estate in a dark wood in New Hampshire. Kaag found the library full of mouse droppings and rotting books, including extremely rare first editions of Descartes and Kant with handwritten notes from Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and William James. He wasn’t the first to trespass upon the library, however, nor to recognize its importance. A heroin addict stole 400 of the books worth more than $250,000, and succeeded in selling some of them before the FBI tracked him down.

While Kaag’s previous two books were also about American philosophy — one on Charles Sanders Peirce and imagination, the other an introduction to Ella Lyman Cabot’s philosophy — this is his first memoir-style book. NPR nominated it as one of the Best Books of 2016, it was listed as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and in April 2017 it was one of the top 10 nonfiction audiobooks on Audible.com.

SKYE C. CLEARY: Why did you write this book?

JOHN KAAG: Philosophy often gets pooh-poohed as the most useless of subjects — impractical, impersonal, intentionally arcane. But it’s not. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I wanted to explain how philosophy could inform a human life or, in my case, save one.

Tell me more about the person who gets saved in American Philosophy: A Love Story.

Sure. In 2009, I was a complete mess. My father died, my first marriage was a shambles, and I tried to commit suicide — that didn’t go in the book. Then I came across a private, largely abandoned, library in the heart of the White Mountains, which was chock-full of American philosophy — from Emerson to Whitman to William James — and my life started, very slowly, turning around.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

This morning, physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish received the Nobel Prize for Physics, for their discovery of gravitational waves—distortions in the fabric of space and time. The trio, who led the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project that recorded these waves, will split the 9-million-Swedish-krona prize between them. Perhaps more importantly, they will carry the status of “Nobel laureate” for the rest of their lives.

But what of the other scientists who contributed to the LIGO project, and whose names grace the three-page-long author list in the paper that describes the discoveries? “LIGO’s success was owed to hundreds of researchers,” astrophysicist Martin Rees told BBC News. “The fact that the Nobel Prize 2017 committee refuses to make group awards is causing increasingly frequent problems and giving a misleading impression of how a lot of science is actually done.”

This refrain is a familiar one. Every year, when Nobel Prizes are awarded in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine, critics note that they are an absurd and anachronistic way of recognizing scientists for their work. Instead of honoring science, they distort its nature, rewrite its history, and overlook many of its important contributors.

There are assuredly good things about the prizes. Scientific discoveries should be recognized for the vital part they play in the human enterprise. The Nobel Prize website is an educational treasure trove, full of rich historical details that are largely missing from published papers. And it is churlish to be overly cynical about any event that, year after year, offers science the same kind of whetted anticipation that’s usually reserved for Oscar or Emmy nominees. But the fact that the scientific Nobels have drawn controversy since their very inception hints at deep-rooted problems.

More here.

Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian in The Nation:

David Barsamian: You have spoken about the difference between Trump’s buffoonery, which gets endlessly covered by the media, and the actual policies he is striving to enact, which receive less attention. Do you think he has any coherent economic, political, or international policy goals? What has Trump actually managed to accomplish in his first months in office?

Noam Chomsky: There is a diversionary process under way, perhaps just a natural result of the propensities of the figure at center stage and those doing the work behind the curtains.

At one level, Trump’s antics ensure that attention is focused on him, and it makes little difference how. Who even remembers the charge that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Clinton, depriving the pathetic little man of his Grand Victory? Or the accusation that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower? The claims themselves don’t really matter. It’s enough that attention is diverted from what is happening in the background. There, out of the spotlight, the most savage fringe of the Republican Party is carefully advancing policies designed to enrich their true constituency: the Constituency of private power and wealth, “the masters of mankind,” to borrow Adam Smith’s phrase.

These policies will harm the irrelevant general population and devastate future generations, but that’s of little concern to the Republicans. They’ve been trying to push through similarly destructive legislation for years. Paul Ryan, for example, has long been advertising his ideal of virtually eliminating the federal government, apart from service to the Constituency—though in the past he’s wrapped his proposals in spreadsheets so they would look wonkish to commentators. Now, while attention is focused on Trump’s latest mad doings, the Ryan gang and the executive branch are ramming through legislation and orders that undermine workers’ rights, cripple consumer protections, and severely harm rural communities. They seek to devastate health programs, revoking the taxes that pay for them in order to further enrich their constituency, and to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed some much-needed constraints on the predatory financial system that grew during the neoliberal period.

That’s just a sample of how the wrecking ball is being wielded by the newly empowered Republican Party. Indeed, it is no longer a political party in the traditional sense. Conservative political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have described it more accurately as a “radical insurgency,” one that has abandoned normal parliamentary politics.

More here.