Mark Haddon in The Telegraph:

My son’s nine-year-old friend Yahya said it most succinctly. Why is life in the first person? We think. We feel. We are aware of ourselves and the world around us. We have consciousness. We are made of the same raw materials as bacteria, as earth, as rock, as the great dark nebulae of dust that swim between the stars, as the stars themselves. But somehow, a vanishingly small fraction of that brute stuff (you, me, chimpanzees maybe, chickens possibly, worms probably not) has been cunningly arranged into objects which experience what the American philosopher William James calls “subjective life”. How is that possible? Why do most of us feel that we are something more than molecules? Why are even ardent materialists haunted by the sense of being something insubstantial inhabiting a physical vessel? The ancient Egyptians had a sophisticated model of a five-part soul attached to an earthly body. Doubtless simpler models go back much, much further. It is a puzzle which, in its manifold cognate forms, has fascinated, divided and defined human culture for at least as long as we have been able to write about these things. What do we mean by the soul? Does it live on after death? Can we be reincarnated in the body of someone not yet born? When does consciousness begin and when does it end?

When I was nine years old I was obsessed by a question similar to Yahya’s. Why am I me? It seemed extraordinary that of all possible times and places I was born in England in 1962. It gave me a thrilling shiver to think that I had narrowly escaped one of the terrifying lives I knew children lived in other centuries and in other parts of the world. I knew, even then, that there was something wrong with the question. It wasn’t possible for me to be anyone else. I was this body. I wasn’t a blob of spiritual jam which had been squirted into a material doughnut when I entered the world. It was this life which had made me. But that knowledge didn’t drive out the conviction that I was on the inside looking out. Turning this paradox over and over in my mind I felt as if I’d stumbled on a missed stitch in the fabric of the universe and that if I tugged and worried at it for long enough I might be able to tease out a loose strand and discover what the world was made of.

More here.

Peter Andrey Smith in The New York Times:

No problem in forensic science has been investigated more, and understood less, than the post-mortem interval. Medical investigators calculate the interval between death and the discovery of a body using three cardinal measurements: temperature (algor mortis), stiffness (rigor mortis) and the settling of blood (livor mortis). These factors vary depending on a person’s distribution of visceral fat, as well as their clothing, the ambient air temperature and other factors. After two days or so, though, these observations are no longer trustworthy. Schmidt keeps a copy of a statistical opus on post-mortem intervals, in which Claus Henssge and his co-authors warn against extrapolating much beyond 48 hours, but he takes an even more pessimistic view. “Post-mortem interval is one of the most pseudoscientific bits of information out there that, and I hate to use this, will never die.”

…Biologists now suspect that opportunistic micro-organisms that feed on corpses persist in trace quantities everywhere on earth. But when a person dies, the body begins to digest itself, and these mysterious organisms rapidly emerge and assemble on decomposing mammal flesh. (The microbiologist Jack Gilbert compares them to shore-bound pirates, lying in wait for the next shipwreck.) This hypothesis draws largely from a detailed study led by Jessica Metcalf, a biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who late last year confirmed that communities of the same bacteria, fungi and other eukaryotes bloomed at regular intervals after death, like a microbial clock. In dead mice and in donated human remains, under varying soil conditions and across a range of temperature fluctuations, the model predicted time of death accurately across experiments.

More here.

Minimum Wage

My mother and I are on the front porch lighting
each other’s cigarettes
as if we were on a ten-minute break from our jobs
at being a mother and son,
just ten minutes to steal a moment
of freedom before clocking back in,
before putting the aprons back on, the paper hats,
washing our hands twice and then standing
behind the counter again,
hoping for tips, hoping the customers
will be nice, will say some kind word, the cool
front yard before us and the dog
sin the back yard shitting on everything.
We are hunched over, two extras
on the set of “The Night of the Hunter.” I am pulling
a second cigarette out of the pack,
a swimmer rising from a pool of other swimmers.
Soon we will go back inside and sit
in the yellow kitchen and drink the rest of the coffee
and what is coming to kill us will pour milk into mine
and sugar into hers. Some kitchens
are full of mothers and sons with no mouths, no eyes,
and no hands, but our mouths are like the mouths of fire-
eaters and our eyes are like the million
yes of flies. Our hands are like the hands of the living.
.

by Matthew Dickman
from The New Yorker
Oct. 12, 2015
.
.

GMB Akash. Passengers Without Ticket.

From the series “Nothing To Hold On To”.

More here, here, and here.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester in FiveThirtyEight:

As a college student in New York City, I marveled that the city let me eat poached eggs with halloumi cheese and Moroccan spiced pita for breakfast, a spicy-sweet minced meat salad from northern Thailand for lunch, and Singaporean nasi lemak for dinner. My requisites were pretty straightforward: delicious, cheap and served in bulk. But if I was eating Chinese, I added one more: no MSG.

Like many people, I thought MSG — monosodium glutamate, a chemical compound used to enhance the flavor of food — was bad for me, and I was sure I felt terrible every time I ate it. After all, I was sluggish and had headaches and achy limbs whenever I ate a big meal in Chinatown. Now I know that the recurring headaches that plague me have little to do with what I eat. But at the time, avoiding those three letters brought me comfort and let me think I’d be eating some sort of sacredly pure meal made with food, not chemicals. Oh, how young and foolish I was.

That MSG isn’t the poison we’ve made it out to be has been well-established. News stories are written regularly about the lack of evidence tying MSG to negative health effects. (Read here and here, for example. Or here, here, here, here and here.) Still, Yelp reviews of Chinese restaurants tell tales of racing hearts, sleepless nights and tingling limbs from dishes “laden with MSG.” Even when the science is clear, it takes a lot to overwrite a stigma, especially when that stigma is about more than just food.

More here.

Ali Davis in Bitter Empire:

14. Ted Cruz

Let’s be clear here: Ted Cruz is not just the worst presidential candidate to have on your side in a bar fight. He is the worst possible human being to have on your side in a bar fight. And it’s not only because when he speaks he sounds like Eddie Murphy doing his nerd character. It’s that everyone hates Ted Cruz, and they hate him for a reason. Not just Democrats, everyone. Ted Cruz is famously and vigorously loathed by everyone in his own party. Fellow Republican Bob Dole has been out of politics for like 20 years and even he takes the time to hate Ted Cruz.

That is because Ted Cruz is on nobody’s side in any fight but that of Ted Cruz, and he’s more than happy to tank the side he’s supposed to be on if it will win him even the tiniest personal gain. Elderly moneyed relatives of Cruz must get distinctly jumpy when he comes to visit.

This isn’t just a warning about having Cruz on your side in a bar fight; don’t even enter the same bar as Cruz. As Cruz’s government shutdown stunt illustrates, he’s the guy who will goad, insult, and posture until you’re suddenly in a brawl you never wanted or needed to have. Once the fists start flying, he scoops the tips off the tables and weasels out the back.

Do not have Ted Cruz on your side in a bar fight.

More here. [Thanks to Kaitlin Solomine.]

As a kid, I enrolled in a study whose results were never published—meaning I'll live the rest of my life with a heart implant, but may never know how well it actually works.

Emma Yasinski in The Atlantic:

I was 7 years old when my doctor told my parents that watching and waiting was no longer an option.

I’d been diagnosed in the first year of my life with an atrial-septal defect, a hole in the heart that sends blood flowing the wrong way, forcing the right side of the heart to work harder than it should. In some cases the hole closes on its own during early childhood, but mine hadn’t shown any change, and now my heart was beginning to grow unevenly. Without surgery, I would face an adulthood characterized by fatigue, shortness of breath, and possibly heart failure. To prevent these things, a surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia would have to slice open my chest, crack my sternum, and stitch the hole in my heart together.

But there was another option, the doctor explained: He’d heard of a clinical trial that was recruiting pediatric patients with my condition. If I were placed in the experimental group, a cardiologist would insert a catheter into my upper thigh and direct it toward the hole in my heart. The catheter would deliver a tiny, metal mesh umbrella, which would cover the hole in my heart until my cells grew over it, making the umbrella a permanent part of my body. I would be in the hospital for just a weekend, with no broken ribs, no cardio-bypass machine, and no huge scar on my chest.

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Quanta:

Eight decades have passed since physicists realized that the theories of quantum mechanics and gravity don’t fit together, and the puzzle of how to combine the two remains unsolved. In the last few decades, researchers have pursued the problem in two separate programs—string theory and loop quantum gravity—that are widely considered incompatible by their practitioners. But now some scientists argue that joining forces is the way forward.

Among the attempts to unify quantum theory and gravity, string theory has attracted the most attention. Its premise is simple: Everything is made of tiny strings. The strings may be closed unto themselves or have loose ends; they can vibrate, stretch, join or split. And in these manifold appearances lie the explanations for all phenomena we observe, both matter and space-time included.

Loop quantum gravity, by contrast, is concerned less with the matter that inhabits space-time than with the quantum properties of space-time itself. In loop quantum gravity, or LQG, space-time is a network. The smooth background of Einstein’s theory of gravity is replaced by nodes and links to which quantum properties are assigned. In this way, space is built up of discrete chunks. LQG is in large part a study of these chunks.

This approach has long been thought incompatible with string theory.

More here.

Julia Medew in The Age:

For as long as the blue-eyed Shaw sisters can remember, they knew that their parents planned to one day take their own lives.

It was often a topic of conversation. Patricia and Peter Shaw would discuss with their three daughters their determination to avoid hospitals, nursing homes, palliative care units – any institution that would threaten their independence in old age.

Having watched siblings and elderly friends decline, Pat and Peter spoke of their desire to choose the time and manner of their deaths.

To this end, the Brighton couple became members of Exit International, the pro-euthanasia group run by Philip Nitschke that teaches people peaceful methods to end their own lives.

The family had a good line in black humour. The three sisters recall telephone conversations with their mother in which she would joke about the equipment their father had bought after attending Exit workshops. “He’s in the bedroom testing it,” Pat would quip.

More here.

W.D. Snodgrass in Paris Review:

From “Dabbling in Corruption,” an essay by W. D. Snodgrass, in our Spring 1994 issue. Snodgrass was born on this day in 1926; he died in 2009. Here, he recalls seeing Robert Frost read at a Washington D.C. poetry conference in October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis was at full tilt. Frost was eighty-eight then, and, as Snodgrass writes, “obviously in his last months”; he died the following January.

Our luncheon with Jacqueline Kennedy that day was suddenly canceled—rumor had it she was in a cave somewhere in a western state. Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles were steaming toward Cuba; American war ships were steaming toward them. If they met in mid-Atlantic, World War III would almost certainly begin; Washington would be wiped out in hours …

By the time [of Frost’s reading], I was even more drunk and … did not dare register what was happening until a day or so later. Frost began, as he almost never did, by reading someone else’s poem: “Shine, Perishing Republic” by Robinson Jeffers. The title alone might have outraged his audience but they were so preconditioned to reverence that nothing else could reach them. Moving to his own poem, “October,” he drew special attention to its relevance for the current autumnal crisis:

O hushed October morning mild.
The leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind if it be wild,
Should waste them all.

His next poem, “November,” developed that figure:

We saw leaves go to glory, …
And then to end the story
Get beaten down and pasted
In one wild day of rain.
We heard “’Tis Over” roaring.
A year of leaves was wasted.
Oh, we make a boast of storing,
Of saving up and keeping
But only by ignoring …
By denying and ignoring
The waste of nations warring.

He said that this was no waste “if it’s toward some meaning. But you can call it waste you can call it expense. Just for this evening.”

More here.

Look Not to Memories

wear your colors
like a present person
today is
here & now

let the innocent past
be
in dignity:
broken wing
wilted lily
shroud

don’t look back
the goodbook
advises
lest you become
a pillar of salt

…and I’m a fool
for not discarding
my worn-out
bags of guilt

by Angela de Hoyos
from After Atzlan, Latino Poets of the Nineties
publisher David R. Godine, Boston

Ed Yong in National Geographic:

“If you ask people what animal eyes are used for, they’ll say: same thing as human eyes. But that’s not true. It’s not true at all.”

In his lab at Lund University in Sweden, Dan-Eric Nilsson is contemplating the eyes of a box jellyfish. Nilsson’s eyes, of which he has two, are ice blue and forward facing. In contrast, the box jelly boasts 24 eyes, which are dark brown and grouped into four clusters called rhopalia. Nilsson shows me a model of one in his office: It looks like a golf ball that has sprouted tumors. A flexible stalk anchors it to the jellyfish.

“When I first saw them, I didn’t believe my own eyes,” says Nilsson. “They just look weird.”

Four of the six eyes in each rhopalium are simple light-detecting slits and pits. But the other two are surprisingly sophisticated; like Nilsson’s eyes, they have light-focusing lenses and can see images, albeit at lower resolution.

Nilsson uses his eyes to, among other things, gather information about the diversity of animal vision. But what about the box jelly? It is among the simplest of animals, just a gelatinous, pulsating blob with four trailing bundles of stinging tentacles. It doesn’t even have a proper brain—merely a ring of neurons running around its bell. What information could it possibly need?

More here.

Nakul Krishna in The Point:

I was summoned to my tutor’s office a day or so after I’d arrived in Oxford. It was the last day of summer. A bumpkin from the tropics, I’d never seen an autumn before. I watched the first leaves falling outside his window and heard the eighteenth-century staircase creaking with the weight of suitcases being heaved into new rooms. He told me I was to study moral philosophy that term and that if I wanted a head start on the reading I could get going on—he reached for his bookshelf with the air of someone going through a practiced routine—this book:Morality: An Introduction to Ethics by Bernard Williams.

My parents were part of the educated Indian middle class who approved of books only as long as they were called, say, Advanced Statistics; when they caught me with a copy of Middlemarch they told me I oughtn’t to be reading storybooks at my age. My adolescent rebellion consisted in spending my pocket money on dog-eared paperbacks with titles like The Logic of the Hydrogen Bomb or Trade Unionism and the Woman Question, and the opinions I acquired from them had somehow got me through my scholarship interview for Oxford. The blue-and-black Pelican before me belonged to the same reassuring aesthetic universe as these other books.

More here.

Robert Greenleaf Brice in his blog:

One topic that President Obama did not discuss during his final State of the Union address was his use of drone strikes in the so-called “War on Terror.” Perhaps this is not surprising, as the President and the CIA have permitted drone strikes to occur under an unknown set of rules, supported with an unknown set of reasons. But as someone who works in epistemology, I find the level of uncertainty here reckless, and as a citizen, I find it terrifying.

One year ago, on January 14, 2015, a U.S. drone strike inadvertently killed two hostages, a 73-year-old American, Warren Weinstein, and a 37-year-old Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto. While President Obama said that he grieves “when any innocent life is taken,” he also said that preliminary assessments indicate that this particular strike “was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct our counterterrorism efforts.” Included among these guidelines is a strict policy—mentioned briefly in a speech at the National Defense University and more fully articulated in the President’s Counterterrorism Policy and Procedure Directive—which requires “near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” But what does it mean to be “nearly certain”? Is such a level of assessment even attainable?

Philosophers have been evaluating the requirements that must be met for a person to claim that they “know something” at least since Plato first raised the issue in his dialogue the Theaetetus. Here, knowledge was defined as “true belief combined with a logos,” or “justification. That is, knowledge is justified true belief. A person’s belief may or may not be true, but their claim of belief doesn’t require any additional proof. It is enough that they say they believe it.

More here.