John Allen Paulos in Salon:

An example of an extremely significant, decidedly unintended result of a relatively tiny event can be nightmarish. This one is, at least for me. It concerns the role I played in getting George W. Bush elected president in 2000. That I was the butterfly whose fluttering cascaded into Bush’s election still pains me. I had written an op-ed for the New York Times titled “We’re Measuring Bacteria with a Yardstick” in which I argued that the vote in Florida had been so close that the gross apparatus of the state’s electoral system was incapable of discerning the difference between the candidates’ vote totals. Given the problems with the hanging chads, the misleading ballots (in retrospect, aptly termed “butterfly ballots”), the missing and military ballots, a variety of other serious flaws and the six million votes cast, there really was no objective reality of the matter.

Later when the Florida Supreme Court weighed in, Chief Justice Charles T. Wells cited me in his dissent from the majority decision of the rest of his court to allow for a manual recount of the undervote in Florida. Summarizing the legal maneuverings, I simply note that in part because of Wells’s dissent the ongoing recount was discontinued, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and George Bush was (s)elected president.

Specifically, Judge Wells wrote, “I agree with a quote by John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, when he wrote that, ‘the margin of error in this election is far greater than the margin of victory, no matter who wins.’ Further judicial process will not change this self-evident fact and will only result in confusion and disorder.”

More here.

Deana Heath in Scroll.in:

It took Britain a century to conquer most of the Indian subcontinent, which it then dominated for a further century. The subcontinent also witnessed a partition that led, by a recent estimate, to over three million deaths, and the largest mass migration of human beings in global history. The violence of colonialism is palpable even in the most cursory rendering of India’s past. But scholars have only recently begun to examine the many forms such violence takes, the rationales behind them and their impact on Indian bodies and minds.

When the violence of South Asia’s colonial history appears in academic scholarship, it largely does so only in certain forms: narratives of rebellion and resistance, religious or ethnic violence, and cataclysmic events. Framing violence in this way displaces it onto the colonised and underestimates the endemic, everyday forms of violence through which colonialism operated. Such erasure is not unique to Indian history. It merely illustrates the ways in which violence has been written out of the history of Britain’s imperial past.

More here.

Nick Smicek and Alex Williams at Bookforum:

The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to suffering. Everywhere one looks, there is a drive to make people suffer before they can receive a reward. The epithets thrown at homeless beggars, the demonization of those on the dole, the labyrinthine system of bureaucracy set up to receive benefits, the unpaid “job experience” imposed upon the unemployed, the sadistic penalization of those who are seen as getting something for free—all reveal the truth that for our societies, remuneration requires work and suffering. Whether for a religious or secular goal, suffering is thought to constitute a necessary rite of passage. People must endure through work before they can receive wages, they must prove their worthiness before the eyes of capital. This thinking has an obvious theological basis—where suffering is thought to be not only meaningful, but in fact the very condition of meaning. A life without suffering is seen as frivolous and meaningless. This position must be rejected as a holdover from a now-transcended stage of human history. The drive to make suffering meaningful may have had some functional logic in times when poverty, illness, and starvation were necessary features of existence. But we should reject this logic today and recognize that we have moved beyond the need to ground meaning in suffering. Work, and the suffering that accompanies it, should not be glorified. . . .

The dominance of the work ethic also runs up against the changing material basis of the economy. Capitalism demands that people work in order to make a living, yet it is increasingly unable to generate enough jobs. The tensions between the value accorded to the work ethic and these material changes will only heighten the potential for transformation of the system.

more here.

Zander Sherman at The Believer:

If it weren’t for the Unabomber, Zerzan probably would have continued to live and write in obscurity. But his ability to express Kaczynski’s ideas to the reading public—and his support, at the ideological level, of what Kaczynski was doing—made Zerzan what Wikipedia might call an “anarcho-celebrity.” After the Times interview ran on the front page and media interest began to build, Zerzan was invited to travel and speak all over the world, even delivering a talk at Stanford, his old alma mater. All the attention came with a downside. At home in Eugene, his house was broken into, and his address book and a pair of sneakers were stolen—for their tread. (Officially, Zerzan was never a suspect in the Unabomber case, but unofficially he appears to have been a person of interest.) After Kaczynski was discovered and dragged, bearded and feral, from the mountains of Montana to Sacramento County, Zerzan sent him a letter of introduction. Kaczynski wrote back, and the two became pen pals. Between 1997 and 1998, Zerzan visited Kaczynski in jail—the only writer allowed to do so. Even after Kaczynski was transferred and the visits stopped, Zerzan and Kaczynski traded letters until the late 2000s. Then, because of an obscure and essentially unprovable academic dispute, their friendship ended.

The debate begins ten thousand years ago, when humans stopped hunting and gathering their food and started farming it. Zerzan says that was our fall—the point where we lost contact with nature. To support his argument, he cites Marshall Sahlins, a highly respected anthropologist and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.

more here.

Nicholas Roe at Literary Review:

The Compasses, a dingy pothouse in High Wycombe, was not the most likely place to encounter John Milton, Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin. Yet it was here, in March 1794, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed to have met a man of ‘the greatest information and most original genius’. His ‘philosophical theories of heaven and hell’ and ideas of ‘daring impiety’ kept the poet awake until three the next morning. As Coleridge said to his brother, ‘Wisdom may be gathered from the maddest flights of imagination, as medicines were stumbled upon in the wild processes of alchemy.’ Reverend George Coleridge, a patient parish priest, would soon be hearing about ‘Pantisocracy’.

Is it possible that Coleridge’s genius was William Blake, author and printer of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell? We shall never know: certainly, Blake was a lifelong Londoner who rarely stepped beyond the bounds of the city. Rackety prophets and philosophers thronged the revolutionary 1790s – almost every tavern had a Bible-sodden seer with visions of the millennium. It was a decade when even mild-mannered Richard Price, a 67-year-old Unitarian, could be caricatured as an ‘Atheistical-Revolutionist’ insanely conspiring to overthrow Church and State.

more here.

Odling-Smee et al in Nature:

The ethics of human-genome editing is in the spotlight again as a large international meeting on the topic is poised to kick off in Washington DC. Ahead of the summit, which is being jointly organized by the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Britain’s Royal Society and held on 1–3 December, we bring you seven key genome-editing facts.

1. Just one published study describes genome editing of human germ cells.

In April, a group led by Junjiu Huang at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, described their use of the popular CRISPR–Cas9 technology to edit the genomes of human embryos. Only weeks before the researchers’ paper appeared in Protein & Cell¹, rumours about the work had prompted fresh debate over the ethics of tinkering with the genomes of human eggs, sperm or embryos, known collectively as germ cells. Huang and colleagues used non-viable embryos, which could not result in a live birth. But in principle, edits to germ cells could be passed to future generations.

2. The law on editing human germ cells varies wildly across the world.

Germany strictly limits experimentation on human embryos, and violations can be a criminal offence. By contrast, in China, Japan, Ireland and India, only unenforceable guidelines restrict genome editing in human embryos. Many researchers long for international guidelines, and some hope that the upcoming summit in Washington DC could be the start of the process to create them.

3. You don’t have to be a pro to hack genomes.

The CRISPR–Cas9 technology has made modifying DNA so cheap and easy that amateur biologists working in converted garages or community laboratories are starting to dabble.

More here.

Justin Gillis in The New York Times:

The issue can be overwhelming. The science is complicated. Predictions about the fate of the planet carry endless caveats and asterisks. We get it. And so, as the Paris climate talks get underway, we’ve provided quick answers to often-asked questions about climate change. You can submit your own questions here.

How much is the planet heating up?

1.7 degrees is actually a significant amount. As of this October, the Earth had warmed by about 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, when tracking began at a global scale. That figure includes the surface of the ocean. The warming is greater over land, and greater still in the Arctic and parts of Antarctica. The number may sound low, but as an average over the surface of an entire planet, it is actually high, which explains why much of the land ice on the planet is starting to melt and the oceans are rising at an accelerating pace. The heat accumulating in the Earth because of human emissions is roughly equal to the heat that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding across the planet every day. Scientists believe most and probably all of the warming since 1950 was caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. If emissions continue unchecked, they say the global warming could ultimately exceed 8 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet and undermine its capacity to support a large human population.

More here.

Update 28 December: Winners announced here.

Update 16 December: Finalists announced here.

Update 15 December: Semifinalists announced here.

Update 10 December: Voting round now open, will close on 14 December 11:59 pm EST. Go here to browse the nominated posts and vote.

* * *

We are very honored and pleased to announce that John Collins has agreed to be the final judge for our 6th annual prize for the best blog and online-only writing in the category of philosophy. Details of the previous five philosophy (and other) prizes can be seen on our prize page.

John Collins has a B.A. Hons. in Pure Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Sydney (1982) and a Ph.D. from Princeton University (1991) under the supervision of David Lewis. He is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and an editor of The Journal of Philosophy. He works in decision theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. With Laurie Paul and Ned Hall, Collins co-edited Causation and Counterfactuals (MIT Press 2004). His most recent publications are ''Decision Theory After Lewis” in Schaffer and Loewer (eds) Blackwell Companion to David Lewis (2015), ''Neophobia'' in Res Philosophica (2015) and a review of Lara Buchak's Risk and Rationality for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2015). Collins is currently at work on a pair of papers on (so-called) Causal Decision Theory: ''What is the Significance of Newcomb's Problem?'' and ''Causal Decision Theory and Quasi-Transitivity.

As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the editors of 3 Quarks Daily will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Dr. Collins.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of 500 dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of 200 dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a 100 dollar prize.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS Feed.)

The schedule and rules:

November 30, 2015:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win. Do NOT nominate a whole blog, just one individual blog post.
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are strongly discouraged, but we might make an exception if there is something truly extraordinary.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been first published on or after November 30, 2014.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 100 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.

December 9, 2015

• The public voting will be opened.

December 14, 2015

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

December 15, 2015

• The semifinalists are announced

December 16, 2015

• The finalists are announced

December 28, 2015

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey. Mother and Child, 2001.

” … By projecting a negative image onto a patch of grass under controlled light, Ackroyd & Harvey use grass's photosynthetic abilities to create living images. …”

More here, here, and here.

Jonathan Ball, PhD, at his eponymous website:

Karl Ove Knausgård’s new book is beyond long, and way past self-indulgent. You should read it! He can’t write well — his prose is clunky and often seems unedited. His translator’s not great. You should read it!

Knausgård seems like a horrible person, from all accounts, including his own lengthy account. He’s great! His life is not interesting, since he has done little worth writing about. Did I mention that he’s not that great a writer? Get off your ass and go get this book!

Knausgård is a whiny white male who has written a very long book whining about the struggles of being a white male today, and he titled the book after Hitler’s book. It’s sooooooo worth reading! Sorry, I meant to say a series of very long books.

A very long series of very long books, about a white dude’s struggles. All he wants to do is write super-long books, but he’s not that great a writer, so it’s hard! If you haven’t read Knausgård yet, then get crackin’, Jack! What are you waiting for?

Knausgård is kinda like Proust, except that he’s not Proust, because he can’t write that well. He’s the Proust of today! Don’t miss out!

More here.

Daniela Cascella in 3:AM Magazine:

I'm reading a book that collects a hundred book blurbs. It is titled Cento lettere a uno sconosciuto. It has a pale blue gatefold cover and, to date, no English translation from Italian. A Hundred Letters to a Stranger were selected and published in 2003 from over a thousand book blurbs written for the legendary Italian publishing house Adelphi by Roberto Calasso, who became Adelphi’s editor in 1971 and who is today its president, having worked for it since its inception in 1962. As he traces the antecedent of the blurb as a literary form to the 16th-century ‘epistola dedicatoria’—namely the ‘dedicatory letter’ in which a writer would address the prince who protected and financed his work—Calasso remarks: “Today there are no princes, there is a readership … made by individuals. Each reader whose eyes fall on a book blurb reads a letter addressed to a stranger.”

Between a multiplicity of readers unknown to authors, and books unknown to readers, Calasso’s blurbs don’t connect the Adelphi publications through the logic of a plan. Instead, connections are formed through the untidier, rapturous motions of reading and of the desire to read, holding together a multitude of contingent singulars. The anti-rational quality of each encounter with a book is favoured against any rationale. Presence overrides programme, in the same manner as Adelphi’s editorial output never followed a linear path but, rather, was prompted by ardor as the path to knowledge, maintaining that books do not hold stable original meanings but prompt intermittent and changing conversations. Knowledge is mutable, knowledge is the rhythm of rapture, “America is Lolita, Lolita is America.” Many Italians of my generation will still remember this sentence, partly a distant echo of “I am Heathcliff”, partly a lightning bolt of awareness as Calasso never aims to explain the books he writes around: he thrusts the readers in amongst the very texture of language. His blurbs have no claim to introduce or contextualise: they suggest possible ways of being with books, inside them, elliptical, undone, remade in reading, incomplete, blurred — and then, again, blurbed.

I always thought of the gatefold covers that enwrap Adelphi’s books and on which Calasso’s blurbs are printed as the other side of official words, as sites of otherness. Like the words in the blurbs that they support, the gatefolds point in their very form at what is concealed and unspoken; they outline a space of further thinking and further reading, where the resonance of a book rings and calls for connections beyond the book itself. In my eyes, Adelphi’s gatefold covers always instigated explorations behind the fold of a blurb, searching for the concealed matter of thought into words, for what is unwritten, hidden.

More here.

Wes Enzinna in the NYT:

The regime of President Bashar al-Assad doesn’t officially recognize Rojava’s autonomous status, nor does the United Nations or NATO — it is, in this way, just as illicit as the Islamic State. But if the reports I heard from the region were to be believed, within its borders the rules of the neighboring ISIS caliphate had been inverted. In accordance with a philosophy laid out by a leftist revolutionary named Abdullah Ocalan, Rojavan women had been championed as leaders, defense of the environment enshrined in law and radical direct democracy enacted in the streets.

But much of the information emerging from Rojava seemed contradictory and almost fantastical. To the Turkish government, the territory, which is now the size of Connecticut and has an estimated 4.6 million inhabitants, was nothing more than a front for a Turkish group known as the P.K.K., or Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Since its founding in 1978, the P.K.K., led by Ocalan, had been fighting for independence from Turkey, hoping to establish a homeland for the country’s 14 million Kurds. The effort had caused the deaths of 40,000 people, thousands of them civilians, and led to the imprisonment of Ocalan. The American State Department designated the P.K.K. a terrorist organization in 1997. Having failed in Turkey, officials claimed, the P.K.K. was trying to create a Kurdish homeland amid the disruption of war. ‘‘We will never allow the establishment of a state in Syria’s north and our south,’’ President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said in June. ‘‘We will continue to fight in this regard no matter what it costs.’’

But to sympathetic Western visitors, Rojava was something else entirely: a place where the seeds of the Arab Spring promised to blossom into utopia. ‘‘What you are doing,’’ said Raymond Joliffe, a member of Britain’s House of Lords, during a trip in May 2015, ‘‘is a unique experiment that deserves to succeed.’’ A Dutch professor named Jan Best de Vries arrived in December 2014 and donated $10,000 to help buy books for Kurdish university students. David Graeber, a founder of Occupy Wall Street, visited that same month and wrote before his trip that ‘‘the autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today, is one of few bright spots — albeit a very bright one — to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution.’’

More here.

Lawrence M. Krauss in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

As chair of the Board of Sponsors—a group initiated soon after Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein helped form the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945—I was humbled to speak at the publication's 70^thanniversary dinner, where supporters once again convened, following a symposium, to explore the greatest existential challenges facing the world today.

I was tempted to begin my talk by saying happy birthday, but of course the birth of the Bulletin was not a joyous moment; rather, it was a somber one. Founded as it was by Manhattan Project scientists who “could not remain aloof to the consequences of their work,” the Bulletin had an immediate, urgent purpose, but it would be preferable to live in a world in which the Bulletin was not necessary. As pressing as the need seemed in 1945 to alert the public to the dangers of nuclear war and to stem the growth of nuclear arsenals, however, theBulletin is more necessary today than perhaps at any other time in its 70 year history.

With the development of nuclear weapons, humanity crossed a threshold: For the first time, the human race had the power to almost instantaneously and globally change the conditions for all life on our planet, and alter the environment in ways that could lead, if not to the extinction of our species, to the end of civilization as we know it.

Seventy years after the Nuclear Age began, the 21st century has brought a host of new global challenges for humanity to face.

More here.

Abhay Ashtekar is a theoretical physicist and the founder of loop quantum gravity, an increasingly popular branch of physics that attempts to unify quantum mechanics with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity (which celebrates its centenary this year). Currently the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University, Ashtekar spoke to Nithyanand Rao and Swetamber Das at IIT Madras on October 7, 2015 about his inspirations, his encounters with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Roger Penrose, work on gravity and cosmology, and his criticisms of string theory.

Nithyanand Rao and Swetamber Das interview Abhay Ashtekar in The Wire:

I guess you took classes by Chandra [Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar] as well.

Yes, I came to know him quite well. I was very fortunate. After my Ph.D., I went to Oxford to work with Roger Penrose. That was also because of Chandra. But then they asked me to come back to Chicago. So I went to Chicago again. Particularly in this second stage, I came to know Chandra and his wife very well. They were kind. They used to invite me for dinners and so on. Chandra was so reserved; he was god-like, a completely different level of human being. But then he would get into the flow of things and he would tell all the stories – his memory was just phenomenal; there is nobody who comes anywhere close to him. He would remember what he was doing in, say, August 1931 and what had happened then. He would recall it with all the details – all the people and all the names and everything. I have trouble remembering what happened yesterday! He would tell these fantastic stories.

I was really fortunate that I got this exposure to three great people, my great teachers: One was my Ph.D. advisor Robert Geroch. Chandra told me that he felt that except for John von Neumann, he has never seen anyone as brilliant as Bob; and it was true. Bob is extremely brilliant.

More here.

Elizabeth Yuko in BitchMedia:

Last month, an all-female Russian astronaut crew spent eight days together in a mock spaceship to determine how a group of women would interact during space travel as a test run for a 2029 mission to the moon. Sadly, at a press conference preceding the experiment, reporters opted to ask questions on how they would manage without men and makeup for eight days. “We are doing work. When you're doing your work, you don't think about men and women,” noted astronaut-in-training Anna Kussmaul. Unfortunately, this treatment of women astronauts is as old as the space program itself. In the early days of space travel, much was unknown. For example, scientists were uncertain about even the basic idea of whether a human could safely exit the earth’s atmosphere, much less would happen to the human body in space. Sending people into space was the ultimate in human experimentation.

What we did know, however, was basic physics: the more weight contained in an aircraft, the more energy and fuel will be needed to propel it from earth, sustain it in space, and safely return. Because of this, women made the best candidates for space travel. It was not rocket science: On ships heading into orbit, every ounce matters. Women in general weigh less, eat less food, consume less oxygen, and therefore required less fuel to get into space. Despite the math being in their favor, women were excluded from being considered as astronauts during NASA’s earliest days. These days, women are still a minority at NASA. The team that engineered this summer’s spectacular flyby of Pluto was 25 percent women—very likely that’s the most women on any team in NASA history.

More here.

Tony Schwartz in The New York Times:

ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus. I was horrified. All my life, reading books has been a deep and consistent source of pleasure, learning and solace. Now the books I regularly purchased were piling up ever higher on my bedside table, staring at me in silent rebuke. Instead of reading them, I was spending too many hours online, checking the traffic numbers for my company’s website, shopping for more colorful socks on Gilt and Rue La La, even though I had more than I needed, and even guiltily clicking through pictures with irresistible headlines such as “Awkward Child Stars Who Grew Up to Be Attractive.”

During the workday, I checked my email more times than I cared to acknowledge, and spent far too much time hungrily searching for tidbits of new information about the presidential campaign, with the election then still more than a year away.“The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention,” Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” “We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.” Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life.

More here.