Dear Reader,

As you may already be aware, I have recently published a cookbook of South Asian food for beginners. I don't have any turkey recipes in the book but I thought I would share with you a recipe for a vegetarian side dish (one of my favorites from the book) as a way of thanking you, on this day of gratitude, for being a 3 Quarks Daily reader.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at 3QD!

In this recipe, you can skip the fennel seeds, kalonji (nigella), and methi (fenugreek) seeds if you don't have them. It will still be very good, even if a little less authentically South Asian (the difference those ingredients make is subtle). You'll be surprised at just how good this is, I say with confidence! (Or you may register complaints in the comments!) You can just double (or even triple) the amounts of everything if you have a lot of guests coming. Do try it:

Ingredients

• 4 fluid ounces (120 milliliters) oil
• 1 teaspoon yellow or black mustard seeds
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 1 Tablespoon fennel seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon kalonji (nigella)
• 1/4 teaspoon methi (fenugreek) seeds (optional), they add a certain depth but are not necessary
• 1 large onion (12 ounces or 350 grams), chopped finely
• 5 medium sized cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• 16 ounces (450 grams) green beans, ends trimmed off and then cut into 1 inch (2.5 centimeter) lengths
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 6 fluid ounces (180 milliliters) of water
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 2 limes' worth of juice (60 milliliters).

Method

• Heat the oil in a large frying pan (or a large pot) on high heat for two minutes.
• Put in the mustard seeds, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, kalonji, and methi seeds (optional), and fry for 1 minute.
• Add the onion and fry for 2 minutes, stirring frequently.
• Add the garlic and fry for 1 minute, stirring frequently.
• Add the cayenne pepper and turmeric and mix well.
• Add the water, green beans, sugar, and salt, and turn heat down to medium-high (7 on a scale of 1 to 10), stir well once or twice, then cover and cook for 10 minutes.
• Uncover and turn heat to high and cook while stirring for 3 more minutes, or until most of the water is evaporated.
• Turn heat off and add the ground black pepper and lime juice, and mix well.
• Taste and add salt and lime juice if needed.
• DONE.

This recipe makes about four servings as a side dish. Oh, and there is much more information about the cookbook here:

Pakistan-India-Cooking.com

Sean Carroll at his own blog, Preposterous Universe:

Now, the thing everyone has been giving thanks for over the last few days is Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which by some measures was introduced to the world exactly one hundred years ago yesterday. But we don’t want to be everybody, and besides we’re a day late. So it makes sense to honor the epochal advance in mathematics that directly enabled Einstein’s epochal advance in our understanding of spacetime.

Highly popularized accounts of the history of non-Euclidean geometry often give short shrift to Riemann, for reasons I don’t quite understand. You know the basic story: Euclid showed that geometry could be axiomatized on the basis of a few simple postulates, but one of them (the infamous Fifth Postulate) seemed just a bit less natural than the others. That’s the parallel postulate, which has been employed by generations of high-school geometry teachers to torture their students by challenging them to “prove” it. (Mine did, anyway.)

It can’t be proved, and indeed it’s not even necessarily true. In the ordinary flat geometry of a tabletop, initially parallel lines remain parallel forever, and Euclidean geometry is the name of the game. But we can imagine surfaces on which initially parallel lines diverge, such as a saddle, or ones on which they begin to come together, such as a sphere. In those contexts it is appropriate to replace the parallel postulate with something else, and we end up with non-Euclidean geometry.

More here.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in the New York Times:

The philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, beloved by generations of Columbia University students (including me), was known for lines of wit that yielded nuggets of insight. He kept up his instructive shtick until the end, remarking to a colleague shortly before he died: “Why is God making me suffer so much? Just because I don’t believe in him?” For Morgenbesser, nothing worth pondering, including disbelief, could be entirely de-­paradoxed.

The major thesis of Tim Whitmarsh’s excellent “Battling the Gods” is that atheism — in all its nuanced varieties, even Morgenbesserian — isn’t a product of the modern age but rather reaches back to early Western intellectual tradition in the ancient Greek world.

The period that Whitmarsh covers is roughly 1,000 years, during which the Greek-speaking population emerged from illiteracy and anomie, became organized into independent city-states that spawned a high-achieving culture, were absorbed into the Macedonian Empire and then into the Roman Empire, and finally became Christianized. These momentous political shifts are efficiently traced, with astute commentary on their reflection in religious attitudes.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

You're sitting at a table with a friend and a stranger offers you some candy. Hooray! Who doesn't like candy? But wait! You're not getting the same amounts. One of you gets four delicious pieces, and the other gets a measly one. Does that feel unfair? Do you bristle? Do you forfeit your candy and your friend’s candy, because they’re unevenly distributed?

For decades, psychologists have argued that the answers depend on how old you are, and whether you're the one with the bigger or smaller share. Adults seem to reject inequality of any form, and will pay a personal cost to avoid it even if they stand to get a bigger slice of the pie. Children are more nuanced.

In 2011, Katherine McAuliffe and Peter Blake showed that 8-year-olds, like adults, will reject any unequal offer. But younger children, aged 4 to 7, only bristle at situations when they are disadvantaged. In other words, they'd take the four pieces of candy, thank you very much, and screw the other kid.

“They start out with this very self-focused idea that they recognize unfairness when it’s unfair to me,” says Blake. “It takes more years for different psychological processes to kick in before they can flip that, and say: What's unfair to you is also unfair in general.”

These and other experiments have shown that our aversion to advantageous inequity (when we get more than others) is distinct from our aversion to disadvantageous inequity (when others get more than us). These two reactions involve different parts of the brain. They appear at different ages. They appear in different species: Chimpanzees and capuchins don't like disadvantageous inequity, but they'll tolerate the advantageous kind just as much as 4-year-old humans.

Now, McAuliffe and Blake have found that this distinction also depends on where we come from.

More here.

Editorial in The Feminist Wire:

Last week, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump expressed support for a database of Muslims in the United States, a registry so that “we” can keep track of “them.” Trump, of course, is no friend to civil liberties. We know this from his 1989 advocacy of the death penalty for five Black New York boys whom police had forced to confess to a rape and attempted murder they did not commit and Trump’s subsequent refusal to apologize to the boys in the face of exculpatory evidence so overwhelming that the state has dropped the charges. The youths (now adults) have been awarded millions of dollars in compensation for their wrongful imprisonment and received an apology from the state. But Trump is not alone.

…But let’s be clear about what just happened: in a nation founded on principles of religious freedom and expression, a major candidate in a presidential race has suggested that we target, profile, and “manage” a group of people on the basis of their religious beliefs and presumed ethnicity. This is fascism, not democracy, and it represents the fullest expression of the state’s racist and xenophobic biopolitical impulses. Little surprise that pundits are connecting Trump’s comments to Nazi Germany. Hitler, who felt it useful for governments that “men do not think,” moved far beyond registries and special identification badges to containment and extermination. Hate is a slippery slope, but the U.S. has an insidious history of draping itself in the mantle of patriotism while squelching human rights both here and elsewhere.

…Trump’s Islamophobia, shared by all too many around the world, in which the Other becomes a datapoint to be managed rather than a human being, and Congress’s anti-refugee bill embody a “logical” connection between biopolitics and fascism. Michel Foucault theorized biopolitics as the application of political power to human life, with “race” positioned as a technology of classification. Achille Mbembe moved beyond biopower, which he saw as insufficient to account for contemporary forms of killing, to necropolitics, locating the sovereign state’s right to kill in histories of colonization. Fascism is an ideal political form for the expression and operation of necropolitics, allowing the authoritarian state to decide whose lives matter.

More here.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing back
one sees the path
that must never be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road—
Only wakes upon the sea.
.

by Antonio Machado

Maria Popova reviews Lisa Randall's Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe in The NYT Book Review:

A good theory is an act of the informed imagination — it reaches toward the unknown while grounded in the firmest foundations of the known. In “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs,” the Harvard cosmologist Lisa Randall proposes that a thin disk of dark matter in the plane of the Milky Way triggered a minor perturbation in deep space that caused the major earthly catastrophe that decimated the dinosaurs. It’s an original theory that builds on a century of groundbreaking discoveries to tell the story of how the universe as we know it came to exist, how dark matter illuminates its beguiling unknowns and how the physics of elementary particles, the physics of space, and the biology of life intertwine in ways both bewildering and profound.

If correct, Randall’s theory would require us to radically reappraise some of our most fundamental assumptions about the universe and our own existence. Sixty-­six million years ago, according to her dark-matter disk model, a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the cosmos hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan toward Earth at least 700 times the speed of a car on a freeway. The collision produced the most powerful earthquake of all time and released energy a billion times that of an atomic bomb, heating the atmosphere into an incandescent furnace that killed three-quarters of Earthlings. No creature heavier than 55 pounds, or about the size of a Dalmatian, survived. The death of the dinosaurs made possible the subsequent rise of mammalian dominance, without which you and I would not have evolved to ponder the perplexities of the cosmos.

More here.

Paul Churchland reviews Richard Rorty's Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers in Notre Dame Philosophical Review:

This glowing collection includes Rorty's earliest publications — from 1961 through 1972 — and his earliest attempts to deal with the broad landscape of problems that engulfed our discipline in the second half of the 20^th Century: most centrally (for Rorty), analytical reductionism, the mind/body problem, the distinguishing or defining feature of the mental, and the proper methodology for philosophy itself. The arc of Rorty's adventures here mirrors the arc of our professional concerns generally in that period, not least because Rorty was an influential contributor to those discussions, but also because he addressed in depth the work of his most prominent philosophical contemporaries, such as Carnap, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Strawson, Sellars, Quine, and Dennett. His insightful commentaries on these figures, and others, are worth the price of this collection all by themselves.

But a larger issue shapes the relevance of Rorty's essays here. Despite an initial philosophical education that was decidedly classical, Rorty was captured by C.S. Peirce's late 19^th-century pragmatism, a philosophical perspective that never left him. And that fertile perspective dominates all of his philosophical activity throughout these essays. For example, given the basic pragmatist conviction that the ultimate function of cognitive activity is to survive in and to navigate the peculiar environment in which one happens to be embedded, a philosopher is very unlikely to find plausible a story that attempts to reduce or translate all empirical statements into a unique and philosophically basic vocabulary of sensory simples. For the sensory vocabulary we happen to use is also plastic, is also in the business of helping us to navigate the world, and is ultimately to be evaluated by the pragmatic virtues that drive and select our conceptual resources generally. Understanding our sensory access to the world is indeed of major importance, and it commands constant evaluation and reevaluation. But our first-person sensory judgements themselves do not constitute an independent touchstone, forever free from pragmatic evaluation. According to Rorty, they are an integral part of the overall epistemic contest. Classical empiricism is thus pushed aside.

More here.

Over at Todd W. Schneider's website:

NYC Taxi Data

The official TLC trip record dataset contains data for over 1.1 billion taxi trips from January 2009 through June 2015, covering both yellow and green taxis. Each individual trip record contains precise location coordinates for where the trip started and ended, timestamps for when the trip started and ended, plus a few other variables including fare amount, payment method, and distance traveled.

I used PostgreSQL to store the data and PostGIS to perform geographic calculations, including the heavy lifting of mapping latitude/longitude coordinates to NYC census tracts and neighborhoods. The full dataset takes up 267 GB on disk, before adding any indexes. For more detailed information on the database schema and geographic calculations, take a look at the GitHub repository.

Uber Data

Thanks to the folks at FiveThirtyEight, there is also some publicly available data covering nearly 19 million Uber rides in NYC from April–September 2014 and January–June 2015, which I’ve incorporated into the dataset. The Uber data is not as detailed as the taxi data, in particular Uber provides time and location for pickups only, not drop offs, but I wanted to provide a unified dataset including all available taxi and Uber data. Each trip in the dataset has a cab_type_id, which indicates whether the trip was in a yellow taxi, green taxi, or Uber car.

Borough Trends, and the Rise of Uber

The introduction of the green boro taxi program in August 2013 dramatically increased the amount of taxi activity in the outer boroughs. Here’s a graph of taxi pickups in Brooklyn, the most populous borough, split by cab type:

From 2009–2013, a period during which migration from Manhattan to Brooklyn generally increased, yellow taxis nearly doubled the number of pickups they made in Brooklyn.

Once boro taxis appeared on the scene, though, the green taxis quickly overtook yellow taxis so that as of June 2015, green taxis accounted for 70% of Brooklyn’s 850,000 monthly taxi pickups, while yellow taxis have decreased Brooklyn pickups back to their 2009 rate. Yellow taxis still account for more drop offs in Brooklyn, since many people continue to take taxis from Manhattan to Brooklyn, but even in drop offs, the green taxis are closing the gap.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Take a slice of cake and cut it in two. Eat one half, and let a friend scoff the other. Your blood-sugar levels will both spike, but to different degrees depending on your genes, the bacteria in your gut, what you recently ate, how recently or intensely you exercised, and more. The spikes, formally known as “postprandial glycemic responses” or PPGR, are hard to forecast since two people might react very differently to exactly the same food.

But Eran Elinav and Eran Segal from the Weizmann Institute of Science have developed a way of embracing that variability. By comprehensively monitoring the blood sugar, diets, and other traits of 800 people, they built an algorithm that can accurately predict how a person's blood-sugar levels will spike after eating any given meal.

They also used these personalized predictions to develop tailored dietary plans for keeping blood sugar in check. These plans sometimes included unconventional items like chocolate and ice-cream, and were so counter-intuitive that they baffled both the participants and dieticians involved in the study. But they seemed to work when assessed in a clinical trial, and they hint at a future when individuals will get personalized dietary recommendations, rather than hewing to universal guidelines.

More here.

John McWhorter in Aeon:

English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.

Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels ‘normal’ only until you get a sense of what normal really is.

There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao.

More here.

Greg Rienzi in HUB:

Math as both profession and course of study can be a hard sell, something even Don Draper might have trouble pitching. The field unites numbers, theories, and ideas that, yes, can be physically represented but remain intangible. Math is a language unto itself that for some might as well be Latin or Klingon. Even its rare turns in popular culture—A Beautiful Mind,Proof, and The Big Bang Theory come to mind—typically depict brilliant but troubled and/or socially handicapped thinkers more absorbed by theory than reality.

To Richard Brown, however, math can be as beautiful as a ray of morning sunlight cast upon an orchid's petals, as lyrical as a Beethoven symphony. “Math is not about the numbers,” says Brown, director of undergraduate studies in Department of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University. “It's the ideas behind the numbers. Yes, you can say it's built on a rigid set of rules, but out of that comes an infinite amount of creativity.” And, he adds, beauty.

In recent years, Brown has served as math spokesman of sorts. Last year, he presented a talk at the inaugural TedxJohnsHopkinsUniversity titled “Why Mathematics?”. He opened up with a question: “Why on earth would anyone choose math as a field of discipline to study, or construct a career in the field?”

More here.

From KurzweiAI:

UC San Francisco researchers have discovered that even brainless single-celled yeast have “sensory biases” that can be hacked by a carefully engineered illusion — a finding that could be used to develop new approaches to fighting diseases such as cancer. In the new study, published online Thursday November 19 in Science Express, Wendell Lim, PhD, the study’s senior author*, and his team discovered that yeast cells falsely perceive a pattern of osmotic levels (by applying potassium chloride) that alternate in eight minute intervals as massive, continuously increasing stress. In response, the microbes over-respond and kill themselves. (In their natural environment, salt stress normally gradually increases.) The results, Lim says, suggest a whole new way of looking at the perceptual abilities of simple cells and this power of illusion could even be used to develop new approaches to fighting cancer and other diseases.

“Our results may also be relevant for cellular signaling in disease, as mutations affecting cellular signaling are common in cancer, autoimmune disease, and diabetes,” the researchers conclude in the paper. “These mutations may rewire the native network, and thus could modify its activation and adaptation dynamics. Such network rewiring in disease may lead to changes that can be most clearly revealed by simulation with oscillatory inputs or other ‘non-natural’ patterns. “The changes in network response behaviors could be exploited for diagnosis and functional profiling of disease cells, or potentially taken advantage of as an Achilles’ heel to selectively target cells bearing the diseased network.”

More here.

Jacqueline Feldman in Harvard Magazine:

As Of Men and War opens, a trumpet moans and won’t resolve into taps, and a van traps men who let it bounce them. They rarely come to town, they say. They are quick to road rage. They wear sunglasses. Later, one man tells his wife, “If we never had to leave the house, I’d be all right, but it’s going outside I can’t handle too much.” The French documentary (released in many U.S. cities this week after playing at theaters in France and at international festivals), follows veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan as they undergo trauma therapy at a residential center called Pathway Home, founded by therapist Fred Gusman. These characters are archetypal—“almost mythological”—says Isidore Bethel ’11, the head editor for the film and one of its associate producers: “These men could have served in any war.” Their transposition into an older pantheon of suffering is nimble. The contemporary term “PTSD” is used exactly twice, once by a vet guilt-tripping a too-persistent caller and then by another vet’s wife. Otherwise, no character mentions diagnoses or pills, only men and death and their closeness to it.

Of Men and War is the second film in Laurent Bécue-Renard’s series A Genealogy of Wrath. As a young man, the director spent several months in besieged Sarajevo for “purely romantic” reasons. He found the city’s high pitch catching and vaguely familiar. There, while writing news dispatches and short stories, he met a therapist who worked with war widows. He focused on three of these women for his first documentary, War-Wearied (2003). It dawned on him that a personal “quest” had drawn him to his project. His grandfathers served in the First World War, which killed some 1.7 million French, about 5 percent of the country’s population. “All of us who grew up in the second half of the twentieth century inherited the legacy of the wars in the first part of the twentieth century,” Bécue-Renard said. “It has been shaping the psyches of the families we belong to.”

More here.

……… Alone together a moment
on the twenty-second anniversary
……… of their wedding
he clasped her as she stood
……… at the sink, pressing
into her backside, rubbing his cheek
……… against the stubble
of her skull. He gave her a ring
……… of pink tourmaline
with nine small diamonds around it.
……… She put it on her finger
and immediately named it Please Don’t Die.
……… They kissed and Jane
whispered, “Timor mortis conturbat me.”

by Donald Hall
from Without
Mariner Books, 1999

On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the publication of General Relativity by Albert Einstein, Sean Carroll asks, “Einstein's legacy: if spacetime is dynamical rather than absolute, what else about the universe might be flexible?” at PBS Newshour:

Nicolaus Copernicus is famous for having suggested that the Earth moves around the sun, rather than the other way around. That’s a big deal, as it displaces the Earth from its presumed position at the center of the universe. But it’s easy for us to forget something equally amazing: the idea that the Earth can actually move at all. If anything seems like a solid foundation, it’s the Earth itself. But in our post-Copernican world, we know better.

Albert Einstein, with his general theory of relativity, took this conceptual revolution one step forward. Not only is the Earth not a fixed fulcrum around which the rest of the universe revolves, space and time themselves are not fixed and unchanging. In Einstein’s universe, space and time are absorbed into a single, four-dimensional “spacetime,” and spacetime is not solid. It twists and turns and bends in response to the motion of matter and energy. We perceive that stretching and distortion of the fabric of spacetime as the force of gravity.

The idea that space and time themselves are not immutable, but are dynamical quantities that can evolve through the history of the universe, is one of Einstein’s most dramatic legacies. It was so profound that Einstein himself had trouble accepting all the implications of the idea. When he investigated the universe as a whole in general relativity, he found that it should be expanding or contracting, not staying at a fixed size. That went contrary to his intuition, as well as to what astronomers of the time actually thought the universe was doing. When Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe in the 1920’s, Einstein realized that he had missed the opportunity to make one of the great predictions in the history of science.

More here.