Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

László Rátz

A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, after which they decided the planet was unsuitable for their needs and disappeared. The only clue to their existence were the children they had with local women.

The joke was that this explained why the Manhattan Project was led by a group of Hungarian supergeniuses, all born in Budapest between 1890 and 1920. These included Manhattan Project founder Leo Szilard, H-bomb creator Edward Teller, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Eugene Wigner, and legendary polymath John von Neumann, namesake of the List Of Things Named After John Von Neumann.

The coincidences actually pile up beyond this. Von Neumann, Wigner, and possibly Teller all went to the same central Budapest high school at about the same time, leading a friend to joke about the atomic bomb being basically a Hungarian high school science fair project.

But maybe we shouldn’t be joking about this so much. Suppose we learned that Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach all had the same childhood piano tutor. It sounds less like “ha ha, what a funny coincidence” and more like “wait, who was this guy, and how quickly can we make everyone else start doing what he did?”

In this case, the guy was Laszlo Ratz, legendary Budapest high school math teacher. I didn’t even know people told legends about high school math teachers, but apparently they do, and this guy features in a lot of them. There is apparently a Laszlo Ratz Memorial Congress for high school math teachers each year, and a Laszlo Ratz medal for services to the profession. There are plaques and statues to this guy. It’s pretty impressive.

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

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Elaine Mokhtefi in the LRB:

In 1962, with independence declared, I went back to Algeria. Vacancies left by close to a million fleeing Europeans meant that jobs were on offer in every ministry and sector. Before long, I found myself working in President Ahmed Ben Bella’s press and information office, where I received foreign journalists, scheduled appointments and dished out information to the reporters from Europe and the US who were streaming in. I even learned to fake Ben Bella’s signature for his admirers.

I stayed on after the coup that brought Houari Boumediene to power in 1965. I had made a home in Algeria; I was happy with my life and my work in the national press. In 1969, events took an extraordinary turn. Late one night I received a call from Charles Chikerema, the representative of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, one of many African liberation movements with an office in the city. He told me that the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was in town and needed help.

It was June. I remember it very clearly. I can see myself walking down a side street between the Casbah and the European sector of Algiers towards the Victoria, a small, third-rate hotel. I climbed four flights of stairs and knocked. The door opened and there was Cleaver, and beyond him, flat out on the bed, his wife, Kathleen, eight months pregnant. The sense of awe I felt that day never left me. The shortcomings of the Black Panther Party are clear enough in retrospect, but they took the battle to the streets, demanded justice and were prepared to bear arms to protect their community. Their slogans – ‘The sky’s the limit’, ‘Power to the People’ – resounded through black ghettoes across the US. They denounced American imperialism as the war in Vietnam gathered pace.

More here.

Our friend Ori Weisberg in Jerusalem, writing for Haaretz:

No day of the year demonstrates the division of Jerusalem like Jerusalem Day, which was marked last week. Most Israelis see it as marking the city’s “liberation” and “unification”, but Palestinians, who make up a third of the population, and a minority of Israelis, see it as the beginning of its occupation.

The Jerusalem municipality annually authorizes a march through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter, shutting it down for the protection of its residents. These Jerusalemites are forced to sacrifice a half day’s revenue, which many of them sorely need, while marchers punctuate their songs with chants like “Death to Arabs!”, “Mohammed was a pig!”, “Burn the villages!”, and “Burn the mosques!” Residents are locked into or out of their homes for the duration while marchers bang on the metal shutters of their closed storefronts, often causing damage that they must repair at their own cost. Even if such a march proceeds peacefully, it would be still be experienced by Palestinians as a form of violence.

The Muslim Quarter was never part of biblical Jerusalem, but was included by Suleiman the Magnificent’s 16th-century expansion of the walls. It has no religious or historical significance for Jews looking to connect with antiquity. The march could easily proceed around to enter the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall to celebrate its liberation. Life in the Muslim Quarter would continue apace. Shopkeepers might even benefit from increased revenue due to the traffic. But instead, they are closed down for their own safety.

more here.

Ari N. Schulman at The New Atlantis:

We arrive then at the perplexing sense that dualism apes physicalism by creating special non-physical objects, while physicalism apes dualism by creating special experiential categories of physical knowledge. We can begin to make sense of this mutual parasitism by turning to a different debate, about the place of rational thinking in human experience, waged between the philosophers John McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus.

The debate seems to reveal fundamental fault lines in how philosophers understand the relationship between reason and experience. Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at UC Berkeley, made his name in the 1960s, critiquing early artificial intelligence researchers for treating cognition as essentially rule-based and abstract rather than felt and intuitive. Whereas AI researchers saw chess and physics as the best models for understanding the mind, Dreyfus emphasized informal everyday activities like stacking blocks and opening doors.

Then, in the 1990s, McDowell, a South African philosopher teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, argued that there was an important problem in the ordinary way our culture talks about experience. In a lecture series eventually published as the 1994 book Mind and World, McDowell notes that modernity has disenchanted matter, rejecting ancient and medieval views that rational forces are at work in the operations of the natural world. Experience seems to be part of that disenchanted world, since it is created by natural processes, such as perception.

more here.

Richard Marshall and Alexander Nehamas at 3:AM Magazine:

Moral values, however, Nietzsche insists, are not the only values there are (in fact, he often writes as if moral values are not values at all). There are also values that depend not on our similarities but on our differences, values that bear a close relationship to the values of aesthetics and the arts. In the arts we always admire new and different ways of representing the world and expressing ourselves: we admire the artists whose work differs significantly from the work of those around them. It is on such values that Nietzsche wants to model the values of the rest of life.

The arts have another advantage, which fits very well with his perspectivism. Perspectivism consists in part in the view that there is no privileged representation of the world, no theory that can explain once and for all every worldly phenomenon. Many of its critics infer from this that perspectivism reduces to a relativism according to which every view is as true as any other. There are several answers to this charge. But the connection with the arts provides one of the strongest. For, although it makes no sense to think of “the greatest” artist or “the greatest” work, we are still perfectly capable of distinguishing between the quality of different artists and different works. Why, then, should that be impossible in the rest of life as well?

more here.

Clair Wills at Literary Review:

Tóibín has long been interested in writing about characters who don’t talk much, people who withhold information, including from their own inner selves. The elderly judge in The Heather Blazing, Henry James in The Master and the series of women in his recent fiction (Eilis Lacey’s mother in Brooklyn, Nora Webster, even Mary the mother of God in The Testament of Mary): all of them believe the risk of keeping secrets is outweighed by the cost of speaking. They try to protect themselves from vulnerability by staying silent. In House of Names, Clytemnestra learns early on that speaking out is no use. All she has on her side are prayers and curses, but the gods pay no heed to her and she turns to human-scale plotting instead. The voices that swirl through this novel are whispers and undertones, murmurs behind palace doors, rumours carried by servants, nods, winks and hand gestures. This is a world in which power is synonymous with those who police the right to speak openly, in edicts and injunctions; in such a world, the keeping of secrets is a weapon.

The trouble, as both Clytemnestra and Electra discover, is knowing whom to trust. Mother and daughter are enemies who have to sit down at table with one another. They are imprisoned together in the echo chamber of the palace and they prove to be equally at the mercy of the men they need to help them get things done. Both of them tell their stories in the first person, in voices that Tóibín brilliantly manipulates to suggest just how little, rather than how much, they are in control. The story of the third member of the family, the young Orestes (a mere boy at the time of Iphigenia’s murder), is narrated in the third person.

more here.

James Gorman in The New York Times:

Not long ago, a physicist at Stanford posed a rhetorical question that took me by surprise. “Why is there so much beauty?” he asked. Beauty was not what I was thinking the world was full of when he brought it up. The physicist, Manu Prakash, was captivated by the patterns in seawater made as starfish larvae swam about. But he did put his finger on quite a puzzle: Why is there beauty? Why is there any beauty at all? Richard O. Prum, a Yale ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, offers a partial answer in a new book, “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us.” He writes about one kind of beauty — the oh-is-he/she-hot variety — and mostly as it concerns birds, not people. And his answer is, in short: That’s what female birds like. This won’t help with understanding the appeal of fluid dynamics or the night sky, but Dr. Prum is attempting to revive and expand on a view that Charles Darwin held, one that sounds revolutionary even now.

The idea is that when they are choosing mates — and in birds it’s mostly the females who choose — animals make choices that can only be called aesthetic. They perceive a kind of beauty. Dr. Prum defines it as “co-evolved attraction.” They desire that beauty, often in the form of fancy feathers, and their desires change the course of evolution. All biologists recognize that birds choose mates, but the mainstream view now is that the mate chosen is the fittest in terms of health and good genes. Any ornaments or patterns simply reflect signs of fitness. Such utility is objective. Dr. Prum’s — and Darwin’s — notion of beauty is something more subjective, with no other meaning than its aesthetic appeal. Dr. Prum wants to push evolutionary biologists to re-examine their assumptions about utility and beauty, objectivity and subjectivity. But he also wants to reach the public with a message that is clear whether or not you dip into the technical aspects of evolution. The yearning to pick your own mate is not something that began with humans, he says. It can be found in ducks, pheasants and other creatures. “Freedom of choice matters to animals,” he said recently on a birding trip to a beach near his office in New Haven. “We’ve been explaining away desire rather than actually trying to understand or explain it. That’s one of the biggest shifts that the book is about.”

More here.

Matt Bruenig in Jacobin:

When American Airlines announced last month that it would boost the pay of its pilots and flight attendants by around $1 billion, investors were livid. One Citi analyst fumed: “This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first. Shareholders get leftovers.” Traders swiftly punished the company for its temerity, with American Airlines’ market capitalization shrinking by 9.7 percent, or $2.2 billion, in the three days following the news.

But while the amusing outrage and simple narrative of the American Airlines story caused it to attract a good deal of attention, it is far from unique. Quarterly earnings statements and company announcements regularly send the market value of businesses soaring or plummeting. As shareholder expectations about the future profits of companies change, so too does the price of corporate shares.

This basic point lies at the core of some recently published critiques of Thomas Piketty’s seminal work Capital in the Twenty-First Century. According to economists like Suresh Naidu, a contributor to the new volume After Piketty, asset valuation dynamics like those at American Airlines could be at the heart of the changing wealth landscape in the US and other developed economies.

If Naidu and others are right, Piketty’s theory of how wealth and income inequality develop may be exactly backwards. And his prescriptions for reversing skyrocketing inequality may suffer accordingly.

More here.

Raghu Raman writes:

For all the xenophobic war mongering touted in every medium, India cannot ‘win’ a war against Pakistan and the sooner we appreciate this politico-military reality, the more coherent and serious we will sound to our adversaries and the world community. The demands for a ‘once and for all’ resolution of Kashmir/Pakistan emanating from several quarters, which surprisingly includes some veterans – equating India’s non-retaliation with impotence – perhaps don’t factor the larger picture and the stark truth of modern military warfare.

Matter of fact, short of total genocide, no country regardless of its war-withal can hope to achieve a decisive victory with a ‘short war’ in today’s world. As the US is discovering eight years, trillion dollars and over 25,000 casualties later – in Afghanistan. That era of “decisive” short wars – especially in context of an Indo-Pak war is largely over because of several reasons.

Firstly – the much vaunted Indian military superiority is largely an accounting subterfuge. Sure we have more soldiers, tanks, aircrafts and ships than Pakistan, but banking on mere numbers is misleading and irrelevant in military strategy. Pakistan has successfully locked down over 30% of our Army in internal counter insurgency roles that not only sucks in combat troops from their primary roles for prolonged periods, but also alienates the local population in the valley.

More here.

Oliver Kamm in The Sunday Times of London:

Not knowing what a passive is, Evans just throws the term around regardless. He claims to have “identified four occasions where the passive voice may be preferred”, but two of his purported examples are in the active voice and he hasn’t noticed. (Here’s one, which Evans labels the pussyfooting passive: “The last of the chocolate ice cream was missing from the freezer . . .” And here’s the other: “The complexity of designing an aerial propeller was troubling to Wilbur . . .” No passives in sight.)

Evans’s advice is balderdash born of ignorance and ineptitude, but luckily he’s too incompetent to follow it, for the book is replete with passive clauses (real ones, I mean, like “the denial was reviewed by Dr Kenneth Robbins . . .”). Blunders pile up. Evans warns against misplaced modifiers yet the example he gives of that mild stylistic blemish isn’t a misplaced modifier.

He says: “There is no such condition as nearly unanimous. The vote is either unanimous or not.” (Try googling “nearly unanimous” and see whether or not it exists.) He scorns use of less in place of fewer: “Nobody would think of saying fewer coffee, fewer sugar, but every day somebody writes less houses.” Well, indeed; the obvious (and correct) inference is that less with count nouns is grammatical standard English whereas fewer with mass nouns isn’t.

More here.

Timothy Revell in New Scientist [h/t: Jennifer Ouellette]:

Want to borrow my tent? No problem, that will be £25 please. That might sound annoying, but it will be better for society in the long run. Surprisingly, this is the conclusion reached by a new game theory analysis of sharing goods.

With larger and more expensive items that are used infrequently, like power tools and hiking gear, people often face a choice between buying one themselves or borrowing from a friend. Assuming that this choice solely comes down to cost, Ariel Procaccia and colleagues at Carnegie Melon University in Pennsylvania wanted to see what outcome these individual decisions have on society as a whole.

In their first simulation, people were able to borrow items for free from their friends. Considering overall wealth, “in this situation the cost for society was really bad,” says Procaccia. “Everyone tried to optimise their own situation, but this was far from the optimum for society,” he says.

To picture what goes wrong, imagine a town where people very occasionally want access to a circular saw. Most of the time the item remains unused, so anyone who owns one is happy to lend it to friends for free.

More here.

Terry Eagleton in The Guardian:

The title of the Conservative party manifesto is “Forward, Together”, presumably because “Backward, Apart” isn’t much of a vote catcher. The prime minister’s mind-numbing mantra, “strong and stable government” (anyone for the weak and turbulent kind?) crops up twice in consecutive lines on the first page, suggesting that the authors have a rather dim-witted audience in mind. Less blandly, Labour calls its manifesto “For the Many, Not the Few”, cunningly calculating that this might have a wider appeal than “For the Posh and Powerful, Not For Riff-Raff Like You”.

Writing these things can’t be easy. You need to talk about the British Coal superannuation scheme surplus while still managing to sound a high moral tone. Party manifestos are part sermon, part technical guide. They must be morally uplifting but down to earth, confident but not complacent, inspirational yet briskly practical. The luckless hacks who write them must also resign themselves to the fact that, apart from journalists and political nerds, they probably attract a smaller readership than War and Peace.

The Tory manifesto errs on the sermonising side, full of pious sentiment and high-minded rhetoric. Most of the sentiments are drearily predictable (“Britain has always been a great trading nation”) while one or two are not, such as: “We do not believe in untrammelled free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality.”

The phrase “except in practice” seems to have been accidentally omitted.

More here.

Josie Delap in More Intelligent Life:

On an ordinary Monday evening Nando’s in Whitechapel in east London is buzzing. Gaggles of girls in hijabs, groups of young men with bulging biceps, families with chubby babies, smartly dressed single women – everyone is there. They choose their chicken (boneless thighs, whole birds, spatchcocked, platters of wings, blander breasts), then its seasoning, lemon and herb, mango and lime, hot, extra hot, before anointing it with lashings of peri-peri sauce. It is a long way from Chickenland, the small café in a grotty mining suburb of Johannesburg where Nando’s began in 1987. It was there that Robbie Brozin, one of the company’s founders, says he discovered peri-peri chicken. Spicy, healthy, different, delicious; he loved it. So he and Fernando Duarte – after whom the restaurants are named – bought the diner and gave peri-peri chicken to the world. And the world has fallen in love with it too. Its appeal is democratic in the extreme. It cuts across boundaries of age, class, ethnicity and status. Jay-Z, Oprah Winfrey and David Beckham can be counted among its devotees. Beyoncé once spent nearly £1,500 ($1,865) in a British branch. Prince Harry and David Cameron have been spotted getting their peri-peri fix. Before South Africa’s liberation, the African National Congress’s shadow cabinet used to eat at Nando’s. Nelson Mandela was a huge fan, says Brozin.

…At the heart of Nando’s success is peri-peri. In its original form the flavouring dates back to the 15th century when Portuguese colonisers in Mozambique added locally grown chillies to their lemon-grilled chicken. It spread throughout southern Africa, evolving as it went. In northern Mozambique, coconut plays a strong role. In the south, lemon and garlic are more dominant. Brozin says they tweaked Chickenland’s peri-peri sauce for a couple of years at the start, but since then it has been more or less the same the world over. Its base is the African bird’s-eye chilli. Such is Nando’s output that 1,400 farmers in southern Africa now grow a unique variety of the plant just for the chain. Chillies are like wine, explains Sam Hirst, who oversees the farms; terroir matters. The sun, the soil, the management of the plants all influence the flavour.

More here.