Scott Aaronson over at Shtetl-Optimized:

Strong AI. The Turing Test. The Chinese room. As I’m sure you’ll agree, not nearly enough has been written about these topics. So when an anonymous commenter told me there’s a new polemic arguing that computers will never think — and that this polemic, by one Mark Halpern, is “being blogged about in a positive way (getting reviews like ‘thoughtful’ and ‘fascinating’)” — of course I had to read it immediately.

Halpern’s thesis, to oversimplify a bit, is that artificial intelligence research is a pile of shit. Like the fabled restaurant patron who complains that the food is terrible and the portions are too small, Halpern both denigrates a half-century of academic computer science for not producing a machine that can pass the Turing Test, and argues that, even if a machine did pass the Test, it wouldn’t really be “thinking.” After all, it’s just a machine!

(For readers with social lives: the Turing Test, introduced by Alan Turing in one of the most famous philosophy papers ever written, is a game where you type back and forth with an unknown entity in another room, and then have to decide whether you’re talking to a human or a machine. The details are less important than most people make them out to be. Turing says that the question “Can machines think?” is too meaningless to deserve discussion, and proposes that we instead ask whether a machine can be built that can’t be distinguished from human via a test such as his.)

More here.

Isaac Butler is a writer currently collaborating with Darcy James Argue's Secret Society on Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of America’s conspiracy theories, this month at The Brooklyn Academy of Music. Secret Society played an amazing one of 3QD's early balls. Isaac Butler in Slate:

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Barry Day at Literary Hub:

Looking at Chandler’s work in retrospect, it seems fair to say that he wasn’t really a “mystery writer”—or not first and foremost. Plots didn’t interest him much. They were just pegs on which to hang characters and language. His plots were not particularly original but that never bothered him. “Very likely Agatha Christie and Rex Stout write better mysteries. But their words don’t get up and walk. Mine do.” And: “I don’t care whether the mystery is fairly obvious but I do care about the people, about this strange, corrupt world we live in and how any man who tries to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or just plain foolish.”

Story construction and the tying up of loose ends never bothered him. When director Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep, he cabled Chandler: “Who killed the chauffeur?” Chandler cabled back: “No idea.”

When he himself collaborated with the young Billy Wilder on what was Chandler’s first Hollywood film, Double Indemnity, Wilder observed that “Chandler was a dilettante. He did not like the structure of a screenplay… He was a mess but he could write a beautiful sentence. ‘There is nothing as empty as an empty swimming pool.’ That is a great line.” He would later give his moody one-time partner credit for being “one of the greatest creative minds I’ve ever encountered.”

more here.

Rowan Williams at The New Statesman:

Paul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo are usually regarded as pantomime villains by right-thinking moderns. Any number of historical outrages and injustices have been laid at their door, jointly and severally; patriarchal oppression, collusion in slavery, the Inquisition, the collective Christian neurosis about sexuality – almost everything except the common cold. What is most interesting about these two books is that two seasoned and scholarly authors without any religious axes to grind are arguing that this profound suspicion warrants significant qualification. Neither Karen Armstrong nor Robin Lane Fox would want to absolve the two great theologians from every reproach: Paul and Augustine are men of their age, using the familiar rhetorical forms of their cultures, marked by the patterns of power they live in, uncritical of much that we would indignantly repudiate. But what both these books do is to show how, although neither Paul nor Augustine existed in a timeless world of liberal virtue, they still offer an intellectually and imaginatively serious perspective on our humanity as well as theirs and that of their contemporaries.

Both are of course frequently cited as examples of lives that have changed course dramatically in midstream. Paul describes himself as originally a passionate enemy of the incipient Christian movement; but just a few years after the crucifixion of Jesus, a traumatic visionary encounter with Jesus sets his life on a profoundly risky course as a traveling advocate for the new faith, for which, according to tradition, he eventually died a martyr under Nero.

more here.

Julian Barnes at the NYRB:

There is much slowness in The Crime and the Silence, Anna Bikont’s magisterial investigation into a small massacre of Jews in the town of Jedwabne in northeastern Poland in July 1941. Part of this is authorial: the necessarily slow steps toward as much irrefutable truth as can be possibly found this far after the event. Part of it is lectoral: her text is dense with names—some of them confusingly similar, yet whose owners had diametrically opposed destinies—with places and details to remember, and several overlapping timescales. But there is also a slowness imposed on the reader by the dreadfulness of the subject matter. In January 2004, Bikont showed her typescript to Jacek Kuroń, the “theorist of Solidarity,” then in the last months of his life. His response was apparently discouraging:

“I don’t know how many people will read this,” he worries. “Theoretically I was prepared for the whole thing, you’d already told me so much about it, but even so I had to stop reading every several dozen pages, so hard did I find it.”

Even those who come at the book from a historical and geographical distance will be obliged to pace themselves. It is not just a question of taking in individual spasms of bestial cruelty. It is also a broader question: the rate at which we can stomach the truths of man’s inhumanity to man, and ruminate on their causes.

more here.

Christina Cauterucci in Slate:

From PhysOrg:

When Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy needs to diagnose an ill member of the Starship Enterprise, he simply points his tricorder device at their body and it identifies their malady without probing or prodding. Similarly, when Capt. Kirk beams down to an alien world, his tricorder quickly analyzes if the atmosphere is safe to breathe. Now Stanford electrical engineers have taken the latest step toward developing such a device through experiments detailed in Applied Physics Letters and presented at the International Ultrasonics Symposium in Taipei, Taiwan. The work, led by Assistant Professor Amin Arbabian and Research Professor Pierre Khuri-Yakub, grows out of research designed to detect buried plastic explosives, but the researchers said the technology could also provide a new way to detect early stage cancers. The careful manipulation of two scientific principles drives both the military and medical applications of the Stanford work.

First, all materials expand and contract when stimulated with electromagnetic energy, such as light or microwaves. Second, this expansion and contraction produces ultrasound waves that travel to the surface and can be detected remotely. The basic principle of this interaction was first revealed in 1880 when Alexander Graham Bell was experimenting with wireless transmission of sound via light beams. Bell used light to make sound emanate from a receiver made of carbon black, which replicated a musical tone. The Stanford engineers built on the principles demonstrated in Bell's experiment to develop a device to “hear” hidden objects.

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Stephen Heyman interviews Roberto Calasso, in the NYT:

The Paris Review once described Roberto Calasso, 74, as a “literary institution of one.” The author of more than 12 books on everything from Kafka to Indian mythology, he’s also a translator, a rare book collector, and the majority owner and longtime publisher of Adelphi Edizioni, among Italy’s most esteemed, and unpredictable, publishing houses. Adelphi specializes in what others overlook, bringing together underappreciated literary titans like Robert Walser alongside fantasy novels, Tibetan religious texts and popular books on animal behavior. How a publishing house can unite such disparate things, and not go bankrupt, is the subject of Mr. Calasso’s new memoir, “The Art of the Publisher,” which comes out this week in Britain and the United States. By phone from Milan, Mr. Calasso said that Adelphi’s interests have long stumped its critics. “At the beginning,” he said, “we were considered rather eccentric and aristocratic. Then, when we started to have remarkable commercial successes, we were accused of being too populist. That was curious because we were publishing exactly the same books.”

Q. Where does the idea of publishing as an art form come from?

A. It starts with the greatest of publishers and printers, Aldus Manutius, who lived in the Renaissance. He was the first one who considered how books should be presented. He invented the form of the paperback. He called it libelli portatiles, a portable book. In the 20th century, the best example may be Kurt Wolff. He’s famous now because he was the first publisher of Kafka. But he published totally unknown writers who were very different from each other but who belonged, in some way, to the same literary landscape.

Q. Starting in the 1970s, Adelphi championed a lot of Mitteleuropean authors like Joseph Roth and Arthur Schnitzler. Is it surprising to see how they have infiltrated popular culture?

A. We had no idea these people would become so popular. At the time some were not even in print in Germany. The reason why we published them was not about a kind of geographical inclination. You cannot do without Vienna in a way. From Joseph Roth to Wittgenstein from Adolf Loos to Schiele, they are all essential figures of the 20th century. I remember, when I myself was translating Karl Kraus’s aphorisms, I met Erich Linder, who was maybe the greatest literary agent of those years. He told me, “Ya, that’s good that you’re doing Kraus. You’ll sell 20 copies.” By now Kraus is near his 20th printing. So a lot has changed.

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Jennifer Kahn in The New York Times:

One day in March 2011, Emmanuelle Charpentier, a geneticist who was studying flesh-eating bacteria, approached Jennifer Doudna, an award-winning scientist, at a microbiology conference in Puerto Rico. Charpentier, a more junior researcher, hoped to persuade Doudna, the head of a formidably large lab at the University of California, Berkeley, to collaborate. While walking the cobblestone streets of Old San Juan, the two women fell to talking. Charpentier had recently grown interested in a particular gene, known as Crispr, that seemed to help flesh-eating bacteria fight off invasive viruses. By understanding that gene, as well as the protein that enabled it, called Cas9, Charpentier hoped to find a way to cure patients infected with the bacteria by stripping it of its protective immune system.Among scientists, Doudna is known for her painstaking attention to detail, which she often harnesses to solve problems that other researchers have dismissed as intractable.

…At the time, bacteria were thought to have only a rudimentary immune system, which simply attacked anything unfamiliar on sight. But researchers speculated that Crispr, which stored fragments of virus DNA in serial compartments, might actually be part of a human-style immune system: one that keeps records of past diseases in order to repel them when they reappear. ‘‘That was what was so intriguing,’’ Doudna says. ‘‘What if bacteria have a way to keep track of previous infections, like people do? It was this radical idea.’’ The other thing that made Crispr-Cas9 tantalizing was its ability to direct its protein, Cas9, to precisely snip out a piece of DNA at any point within the genome and then neatly stitch the ends back together.

…The tool Doudna ultimately created with her collaborators paired Crispr’s programmable guide RNA with a shortened tracer RNA. Used in combination, the system allowed researchers to target and excise any gene they wanted — or even edit out a single base pair within a gene. (When researchers want to add a gene, they can use Crispr to stitch it between the two cut ends.) Some researchers have compared Crispr to a word processor, capable of effortlessly editing a gene down to the level of a single letter. Even more surprising was how easy the system was to use. To edit a gene, a scientist simply had to take a strand of guide RNA and include an ‘‘address’’: a short string of letters corresponding to a particular location on the gene. The process was so straightforward, one scientist told me, that a grad student could master it in an hour, and produce an edited gene within a couple of days.

More here.

More here. [Thanks to Sean Carroll.]

Over at the LA Review of Books:

In his new book, popular secular critic and bestselling author Sam Harris puts his views in dialogue with Maajid Nawaz, a once radical Islamist who reformed and co-founded Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank based in London. In a bit of a departure from his earlier work, which some on the left have viewed as aggressive and intolerant criticism of Islam, Harris hopes this partnership with Nawaz will feel more accessible to the Muslim world, which he says doesn’t need more criticism from “infidels like me, but from self-identifying Muslims who want to find some basis for reform.” The interview features Harris’s take on the effect of Islamic doctrine compared with other religious doctrines both past and present, the challenges of reforming Islam, and his response to his liberal critics.

More here.

Ems Lord in Plus Magazine:

The story of George Boole (1815-1864) is an extraordinary example of collaboration across the centuries. Boole's work provided the foundations for today's computers and mobile phones, yet he died many years before the first computers were invented. How did a mathematician who lived, and died, in the nineteenth century have such an impact on our twenty-first century technology? This is the tale of self-taught mathematician George Boole and the modern day engineers who recognised the power of his ideas.

Boole's early life

George Boole's early life did not mark him out as a ground-breaking mathematician. Born in Lincoln in 1815, he was the son of a local cobbler and would have been expected to work in the family shoe making business as he grew older. But his father's business collapsed and Boole became a local school teacher instead. By the age of 19, he was already a head teacher, spending his evenings and weekends exploring his mathematical ideas. His initial writings appeared in the Cambridge Mathematics Journal and his work soon attracted the attention of the Royal Society. In 1844 Boole was awarded the Royal Society's Royal Medal for his paper On a general method of analysis. His increased profile led to the offer of a professorship in mathematics. Boole left behind his Lincolnshire teaching career and headed off to Cork University to pursue his mathematics full-time, and make the break-through that still impacts on our lives today.

The breakthrough

During his time in Ireland, Boole focused on combining logical deduction with algebra. He argued that the logical approach taken by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and his followers was insufficient for addressing certain types of problems. He focused on those problems where individual statements, or propositions, could either be described as true or false. Boole's work required the development of a new branch of algebra and its associated arithmetical rules.

To introduce Boole's ideas, consider these two propositions:

A = David Beckham is a footballer

B = Quidditch is an Olympic sport

We know that one of them is true and the other is false (I'll let you decide which is which!). But what about the statement A AND B: David Beckham is a footballer AND Quidditch is an Olympic sport? It's clearly false! For it to be true, we would need each of A and B to be true, which isn't the case. Therefore, the statement A AND B is false. If we assign the truth value 0 to a false statement and the value 1 to a true one, then we can write the AND connective as a kind of multiplication: AB stands for A AND B, and since one is true and the other false, we see that AB has the truth value 0 x 1 = 0.

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Robert Rauschenburg and Susan Weill. Female Figure, 1950.

Monoprint on blueprint paper.

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This original print can be seen in the current show at Boston's ICA: Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957

Fintan O’Toole in NY Review of Books:

Even by its own standards of extremity, King Lear ends on a note of extraordinary bleakness. The audience has just been through the most devastating scene in all of theater: Lear’s entrance with his dead daughter Cordelia in his arms and the words “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” coming from somewhere deep inside him. All is, as Kent puts it, “cheerless, dark, and deadly.”

Albany, the weak, widowed, and childless man who is all that remains of political authority, goes through the ritual end-of-play motions of rewarding the good and punishing the bad, but these motions are self-consciously perfunctory. When he says, “What comfort to this great decay may come/Shall be applied,” we know that the comfort will be small and cold. Albany promises to restore Lear to his abandoned kingship, but the old king utterly ignores the offer of power, and promptly dies.

Albany then tries to appoint Edgar and Kent as joint rulers, but Kent replies that he, too, intends to die shortly. No one, it seems, is willing to perform the necessary theatrical rites of closure, to present even the pretense that order has been restored. And so the only possible ending is the big one. Because the play cannot end, the world must end. In the original version that Shakespeare completed in 1606, the last lines are Albany’s:

The oldest have borne most. We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Why will the young not live to be old? Because the end of the world is coming. The bad news does not end there. This is not even the Christian apocalypse, in which the bad are damned to Hell and the good ascend into the eternal bliss of Heaven.

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Mark Fried in Brick:

I began reading Eduardo Galeano when I arrived in Mexico for the first time—it was 1973—and met Cedric Belfrage, whose translation of Open Veins of Latin America had just been published. Open Veins was a treatise on history and political economy written like a novel about love or pirates. It thrilled me: here was the mysterious continent explained.

At the time, Eduardo was being persecuted in his native Uruguay for the crime of spreading dangerous ideas. By then, at thirty-three, he had also written a book of short stories and a novel but was better known for the editorial cartoons he had been publishing since the age of thirteen. In 1974 he fled to Buenos Aires and then, when military rule swept Argentina too, on to Spain, where he lived for eight years.

He credits the Uruguayan and Argentinean generals with giving him the time and perspective to step back from political agitation and return to literature. By a curious twist of fate, the result of his labours in exile, the marvellous trilogy Memory of Fire, became the translation sea in which I first swam.

Cedric Belfrage and I were working together on a Mexico City magazine, the year was 1980 or 1981. Cedric himself was a character out of a novel. He started as a publicist in England for the unknown Alfred Hitchcock, then in the 1920s covered Hollywood for Fleet Street, managed to survive marriage to a starlet who stabbed him in the bath, and was suddenly radicalized by the rise of Hitler.

He was nearly eighty and had begun translating the first volume of the trilogy when a stroke left him paralyzed on one side. Like most journalists, he had always typed with his two index fingers; now he was down to one. He appealed to me for help, and thus began my apprenticeship in literary translation. In his tiny office reeking of pipe smoke, Cedric would translate longhand on yellow legal pads, a barely legible scrawl. I would type for him, following the Spanish original at hand, and offer suggestions. Over the next four years, well oiled with frequent tequilas, he put out the first two volumes of Memory of Fire, and I learned a thing or two about translation.

More here.

Pradeep Mutalik in Quanta Magazine:

Our Insights puzzle this month challenged Quanta readers to create pleasing symmetrical curves using mathematical expressions after solving a couple of problems, which were intended to help them divine the principles behind examples given by Frank Farris in his book Creating Symmetry: The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns (Princeton University Press, 2015). As usual, our readers rose to the occasion, clearly explaining how the mathematics works to generate the symmetries, and then producing some breathtaking curves of their own.

Here are the questions and their solutions:

Question 1:

Look at the family of symmetrical curves below, one of which is featured in Farris’ book as a “mystery curve”:

Each of these curves has an ordered pair of numbers associated with it, shown at the lower left of the curve. These two numbers determine the type of symmetry and complexity exhibited by the curve, and a simple mathematical relationship between the two numbers is required to generate the curve’s pleasant symmetry. In the second question below, we’ll give you the precise way these numbers are used to generate their curve. Without looking ahead, ponder these numbers and try to get an intuitive sense of how the curves change as the numbers do. Then look at curves A and B below and see if you can match them to the correct pairs of numbers, from the 10 choices given. Give your reasons for choosing your particular pairs and describe what you think the relationship is between the two numbers.

Choices:

1. (5, –19) 2. (6, –19) 3. (7, –17) 4. (7, –12) 5. (7, –19)
6. (8, –20) 7. (8, –12) 8. (8, –13) 9. (8, –19) 10. (6, –24)

With careful observation it is not hard to establish a simple intuitive correlation between each curve and its pair of numbers, without any reference to the actual equations that generated them. From left to right, our example curves have sixfold, fivefold, fourfold and fourfold symmetry, while the first numbers associated with them are 7, 6, 5 and 5, respectively.

More here.