Jan Marsh at the Times Literary Supplement:

In 1893 William Morris predicted the end of the book, saying “within fifty years printing books would be an extinct art – we should be carrying all our books about in bottles with patent stoppers. While there was still a chance, [we] should try and produce a few specimens of what was really good printing”.

At the time the Kelmscott Press was in its third year and Morris had been asked to speak on printing for the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society. His talk “On the Printing of Books” took place on November 2, 1893 at the New Gallery in Regent Street, and was reported in The Times on November 6. Morris, who was received with cheers at the beginning and end of the lecture, “demonstrated by means of lantern slides the various stages which printing had passed through from the time of its invention until the third decade of the 16th century” and concluded with illustrations from Caxton’s Golden Legend and Historyes of Troy, printed at the Kelmscott Press.

When published, the lecture traced the origins of European printing with moveable metal type when “it was a matter of course that . . . when the craftsmen took care that beautiful form should always be a part of their productions whatever they were, the forms of printed letters should be beautiful, and that their arrangement on the page should be reasonable and a help to the shapeliness of the letters themselves”.

more here.

Max Tegmark at Nautilus:

The idea of spacetime does more than teach us to rethink the meaning of past and future. It also introduces us to the idea of a mathematical universe. Spacetime is a purely mathematical structure in the sense that it has no properties at all except mathematical properties, for example the number four, its number of dimensions. In my book Our Mathematical Universe, I argue that not only spacetime, but indeed our entire external physical reality, is a mathematical structure, which is by definition an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time.

What does this actually mean? It means, for one thing, a universe that can be beautifully described by mathematics. That this is true for our universe has become increasingly clear over the centuries, with evidence piling up ever more rapidly. The latest triumph in this area is the discovery of the Higgs boson, which, just like the planet Neptune and the radio wave, was first predicted with a pencil, using mathematical equations.

That our universe is approximately described by mathematics means that some but not all of its properties are mathematical. That it is mathematical means that all of its properties are mathematical; that it has no properties at all except mathematical ones. If I’m right and this is true, then it’s good news for physics, because all properties of our universe can in principle be understood if we are intelligent and creative enough. It also implies that our reality is vastly larger than we thought, containing a diverse collection of universes obeying all mathematically possible laws of physics.

more here.

The Roads of Western Europe

The roads of Western Europe hum
like parachute lines stretched taut:
there you see the patches of Central Europe –
a cup of poison, a few ravines with grapevine,
and here is Eastern Europe, a partly rotted watermelon . . .
Some put the blame on Tartars, some on Communism.

It was not long ago that bashful Franz,
a pariah with his earlocks shaved off,
wandered amidst the pines and churches
of Europe where you will never find
a mate for a one-night stand, a man to share
a drink of pure alcohol with. He should have fled
to our land of tolstoys and dostoyevskys, where
the red hag trots in the deathly foam of sweat,
where he would write and shine until the day
they would do him in . . .
.

by Bakhyt Kenzjejev
from Nevidimye
publisher: OGI, Moscow, 2004

translation: 2011, Steven Seymour

Emily Greenhouse in Dissent:

For those of us born in the eighties and nineties, unpleasantly called Millennials, prosperity has long seemed out of reach. We who rushed into the economy right as the “lesser Depression” peaked were worse off by nearly every metric possible: income, employment, mobility, home ownership, student loan debt. In 2012, according to the New York Times, the median household income for twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds was about the same, adjusted for inflation, as it was in 1980—and almost $8,000 less than it was in 2000. By last year’s measure, around 14 percent of my demographic—that’s 2.5 million people—were living with their parents. Of those, 43 percent would be below the poverty line if they moved out on their own. Plainly, we should not expect what our parents had: we will not be getting it. Better educated though our generation may be, the opportunities out there are increasingly slim. For all the facetious mewling we confront—the mainstream knocking of spoiled liberal arts grads by people confused by Lena Dunham’s persistent nudity—the chance to make our way, creating and thinking, is slimmer than ever. In twenty years’ time, how many significant literary fiction writers will have grown up working class? How many career artists at all who weren’t endowed with a trust fund?

Maybe we’re oblivious, or maybe just stretched thin, but not enough people are talking about this. The late cultural critic Ellen Willis did—and years before the worst of it hit. With a clarity of thought and the kind of fury that pangs and never scabs over, she diagnosed, snarled, and illuminated what she considered a central plague of her day: the way our economy limits our creative expressions. As she put it in her essay “Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity”: “On the crudest level, the lives of American intellectuals and artists are defined by one basic problem: how to reconcile intellectual or creative autonomy with making a living.” Willis, who died at the age of sixty-four in 2006, did not set out to write about austerity and economic inequality. But she couldn’t stand to see folks around her struggling, being denied what, in her mind—“in a rich postindustrial economy like ours”—should be guaranteed: job (and income) security, freedom of expression, time off. This insistence on everyone’s right to full and free human satisfaction was at the center of her politics from the get-go. How women were denied this satisfaction became her subject.

More here.

Jason Tetro in Popular Science:

You have to hand it to the immune system. The collection of specialized cells works endlessly throughout our lives to keep us safe. They are involved in almost every aspect of our daily life and are the front lines of defense against infection.

Normally, when a pathogen enters the body, an able immunity is capable of defeating most invasions. B-cells, T-cells, macrophages, neutrophils and others work in combination with one another to eliminate the threat and restore us back to health. It’s not always an easy process, however, and at times can lead to exhaustion. When this happens, our ability to fend off other invaders decreases. We essentially become more susceptible to other ailments. One of the most common causes of exhaustion happens with chronic viral infection, such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or hepatitis C virus (HCV). Both of these pathogens have the ability to evade the defenses and maintain a presence for years. As this happens, the immune system continues to fight without any progress towards victory.

A vital immune cell in the fight against viral infection is called the CD8 T-cell. It has the task of finding these tiny pathogens and purging them from the body. The cell accomplishes this by either signaling an infected cell to kill the virus or, more viciously, to kill the infected cell altogether. Depending on the type of signal they receive their population can be controlled such that the response is just right for the situation. Once an infection is cleared, most of the cells die but some are kept around to serve as memory for any future viral attacks. Unfortunately, when a chronic infection happens to occur, this process is interrupted and some of the CD8 T-cells lose their ability to function. This is known as exhaustion and can cause significant detriment against the current infection and worse, any new ones that happen to arrive. In HIV and HCV positive individuals, exhaustion is a serious concern as it may be the basis for even greater susceptibility to secondary infections.

More here.

Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal:

Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.

Suppose Thomas Edison had died of an electric shock before thinking up the light bulb. Would history have been radically different? Of course not. No fewer than 23 people deserve the credit for inventing some version of the incandescent bulb before Edison, according to a history of the invention written by Robert Friedel, Paul Israel and Bernard Finn.

The same is true of other inventions. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed for a patent on the telephone on the very same day. By the time Google came along in 1996, there were already scores of search engines. As Kevin Kelly documents in his book “What Technology Wants,” we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is “one endless chain of parallel instances.”

It is just as true in science as in technology. Boyle’s law in English-speaking countries is the same thing as Mariotte’s Law in French-speaking countries. Isaac Newton vented paroxysms of fury at Gottfried Leibniz for claiming, correctly, to have invented the calculus independently. Charles Darwin was prodded into publishing his theory at last by Alfred Russel Wallace, who had precisely the same idea after reading precisely the same book, Malthus’s “Essay on Population.”

Increasingly, technology is developing the kind of autonomy that hitherto characterized biological entities.

More here.

David Deutsch in The Guardian:

To state that the human brain has capabilities that are, in some respects, far superior to those of all other known objects in the cosmos would be uncontroversial. The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists. Nor are its unique abilities confined to such cerebral matters. The cold, physical fact is that it is the only kind of object that can propel itself into space and back without harm, or predict and prevent a meteor strike on itself, or cool objects to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, or detect others of its kind across galactic distances.

But no brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do in order to achieve any of that functionality. The enterprise of achieving it artificially – the field of “artificial general intelligence” or AGI – has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence.

Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. That is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the universality of computation. It entails that everything that the laws of physics require physical objects to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory.

So why has the field not progressed?

More here.

From Open Culture:

At the lower of range of hearing, it’s said humans can detect sound down to about 20 Hz, beneath which we encounter a murky sonic realm called “infrasound,” the world of elephant and mole hearing. But the truth is most of us can’t actually hear frequencies below the 40-60 Hz range. Instead, we feel these sounds in our bodies, as we do many sounds in the lower frequency ranges—those that tend to disappear when pumped through tinny earbuds or shopping mall speakers. Since bass sounds don’t reach our ears with the same excited energy as the high frequency sounds of, say, trumpets or wailing guitars, we’ve tended to dismiss the instruments—and players—who hold down the low end (know any famous tuba players?).

In most popular music, bass players don’t get nearly enough credit—even when the bass provides a song’s essential hook. As Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones joked at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1995, “thank you to my friends for remembering my phone number.” And yet, writes Tom Barnes at Mic, “there’s scientific proof that bassists are actually one of the most vital members of any band…. It’s time we started treating bassists with the respect they deserve.” Research into the critical importance of low frequency sound explains why bass instruments mostly play rhythm parts and leave the fancy melodic noodling to instruments in the upper range. The phenomenon is not specific to rock, funk, jazz, dance, or hip hop. “Music in diverse cultures is composed this way,” says psychologist Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster University Institute for Music and the Mind, “from classical East Indian music to Gamelan music of Java and Bali, suggesting an innate origin.”

More here.

Hilary Plum at Bookforum:

There is something deeply affecting about Kurniawan’s portrayal of the women in his novels, whom he lets us see at first through others’ oft-dismissive eyes—the prostitute; the timid, abused wife and mother—but who then assume their place at the story’s center, commanding the fullest empathy. In translation, Kurniawan’s mode of politically incisive fabulism may place him in the company of such writers as George Saunders and Kate Bernheimer—the latter, especially, shares his focus on the violence of women’s lives, as refracted through the lens of fairytale.

Like other great fabulists, Kurniawan has ducked the conventions of E. M. Forster’s classic distinction between “round” and “flat” characters, avoiding the focus on individual psychology that has dominated the tradition of the novel in English. With his keen sense of voice and perspective, combined with a freedom from realism and bold use of exaggeration, he is able to portray collective as well as individual experience, to make both at once the subject of his fiction. In interviews, Kurniawan has discussed how the form and tone ofBeauty Is a Wound was influenced by the all-night shadow-puppet performances known aswayang. To read it is to be reminded that while the novel may be a solitary form—born of one experience of solitude, and offering another—the folktale is always communal. The audience gathers round, and the story must bind them there together, tell them who they are to one another. What good fortune that English-speaking readers may now find ourselves enchanted, confronted, and perhaps transformed by Kurniawan’s work.

more here.

Chris Patten at The New Statesman:

Benjamin Disraeli, Margaret Thatcher’s 19th-century predecessor as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, hinted that he preferred biographies to history books on the grounds that biography is “life without theory”. At the risk of provoking unrest among any surviving members of the Primrose League, I am not sure that this is correct. There is plenty of theory about biography, above all the question of whether there are great leaders who shape history or whether such figures are simply history’s foundlings, at most listening out, as Bismarck said, for “the rustle of God’s cloak”.

That this question comes immediately to the fore on reading the second volume of Charles Moore’s superb biography of Margaret Thatcher – covering the period of her pomp, from the aftermath of the Falklands campaign in 1982 to her third election victory in 1987 – reflects how she was the most partisan and domineering British prime minister in the period since the Second World War. You can avoid having a view on most people and things (even, unless you are Australian, on Marmite). But I know no one who does not have a view on Lady Thatcher, from those who in Ian McEwan’s phrase “liked disliking her”, some of them celebrating her death, to those for whom she has been a totemic focus of almost spiritual devotion and inspiration. The forceful expression of these judgements brings to mind the tripartite distinction of strong opinions offered by the authors of Yes Minister: “I am principled. You are an ideologue. He is a mindless fanatic.”

more here.

Stephen Lovell at the Times Literary Supplement:

The twists and turns of Pavlov’s biography were matched by the tensions in his personality. Although himself a convinced atheist, in 1881 he married a devout fellow provincial who had come to St Petersburg to study on the recently established pedagogical courses for women. In the days of their courtship, he had to reckon with her enthusiasm for the messianic Fyodor Dostoevsky, swapping impressions of The Brothers Karamazov as it first came out. Much later, after more than twenty years of impeccably patriarchal family life, he formed a romantic attachment that would last the rest of his days. Pavlov’s lover and confidante after 1912 was Maria Petrova, by then only nominally the wife of the celebrity priest Grigory Petrov, who had thrown herself into a medical career in her late twenties and became Pavlov’s most devoted lab worker. Although Pavlov adhered to a strict daily routine, professed the value of self-discipline, and envisaged his labs as the domain of dispassionate rationality, he was possessed of a volcanic temper and regularly browbeat assistants who had the temerity to disagree with him or to follow their own hunches. Pavlov’s near fanatical pursuit of orderliness in his domestic and professional lives was evidently a way of taming his tempestuous nature and of minimizing the effects of the “random events” (sluchainosti) that he identified as the source of much human unhappiness.

More interesting still is the extent to which these tensions were also present in Pavlov’s thinking. Like most other scientists of his generation, he professed the absolute authority of the “fact”. The task of the scientist was to accumulate a large amount of data from rigorously controlled and meticulously conducted experiments. The conclusions would then take care of themselves.

more here.

Simon Heffer in The Telegraph:

In one respect Marcel Proust is like Richard Wagner: each created one world-famous work of such scope and depth that people hesitate to explore them. Complexity should never be a barrier to intellectual curiosity, especially when the pleasure and enlightenment to be obtained are of the magnitude both these artists offer. Wagner's Ring cycle, around 16 hours of drama and music in four separate operas, is one of the greatest achievements in music and also one of the most rewarding. Likewise, the sequence of seven novels that make up Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu is to my mind the finest work of fiction ever written in any language. It leaves the reader with an altered understanding of the nature of reality, human relationships and perceptions. Proust wrote the novels between 1909 and his death in 1922 at the age of 51. One wonders what he might have accomplished had he lived a normal span. In one sense he was a late casualty of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71: he was born not long after the lifting of the Siege of Paris to a mother whose considerable wealth had not helped her, in those circumstances, find sufficient food to sustain her during her pregnancy. Her baby was a weakling and it was feared he would not live. Throughout his life Proust was subject to ill health, its effect made worse by his resolute hypochondria.

…The novels were hugely influential on writers all over the world, in that they introduced the idea of writing about “streams of consciousness”. Through Proust's ubiquitous narrator, they relay in great detail not just what is perceived, but also what is remembered, and the repeated and constant links between perception and memory. Even those who have not read the novels are aware of the journey of memory on which the narrator goes when he tastes a madeleine dipped in tea; it has become “the Proustian moment”.

More here.

David P Barash in Aeon:

Coming from a scientist, this sounds smug, but here it is: science is one of humanity’s most noble and successful endeavours, and our best way to learn how the world works. We know more than ever about our own bodies, the biosphere, the planet and even the cosmos. We take pictures of Pluto, unravel quantum mechanics, synthesise complex chemicals and can peer into (as well as manipulate) the workings of DNA, not to mention our brains and, increasingly, even our diseases.

Sometimes science’s very success causes trouble, it’s true. Nuclear weapons – perhaps the most immediate threat to life on Earth – were a triumph for science. Then there are the paradoxical downsides of modern medicine, notably overpopulation, plus the environmental destruction that science has unwittingly promoted. But these are not the cause of the crisis faced by science today. Today science faces a crisis of legitimacy which is entirely centred on rampant public distrust and disavowal. A survey by the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC, conducted with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reported that in 2015 a mere 33 per cent of the American public accepted evolution. A standard line from – mostly Republican – politicians when asked about climate change is ‘I’m not a scientist’… as though that absolved them from looking at the facts. Vaccines have been among medical science’s most notable achievements (essentially eradicating smallpox and nearly eliminating polio, among other infectious scourges) but the anti-vaccination movement has stalled comparable progress against measles and pertussis.

How can this be? Why must we scientists struggle to defend and promote our greatest achievements?

More here.

Rhythm

What harm could there be in following
the hidden rhythm of things.
What harm in tapping with my feet
the beat of the rain pounding puddles.

What, in turning noise into beat,
blinking eyelids into tambourines.
Carrying with my feet
the tired passage of secret things.

Like when the cats were
one single ruckus overhead.
The rooftiles groaned like
pins of a broken piano.

What harm will there be in following the rhythm
of things. The form of the curve
the oat fields take
when the wind caresses their back.

What, in turning noise into beat,
fluttering eyelashes into tambourines.
Sealing with soft lips the slow
passage of secret things.

Read more »

Suzi Gage in The Guardian:

Vegetarians are probably breathing a sigh of relief today as headlines are warningus that processed and cured meats cause cancer. But the way this message has been framed in the media is extremely misleading.

Comparing meat to tobacco, as most news organisations who’ve chosen to report this have done, makes it seem like a bacon sandwich might be just as harmful as a cigarette. This is absolutely not the case.

The headlines are referring to the news that the World Health Organisation has classified cured and processed meats (bacon, salami, sausages, ham) as group 1 carcinogens, because there is a causal link between consuming these meats and bowel cancer. This group also includes tobacco, alcohol, arsenic and asbestos, all known to cause certain cancers.

But just because all these things cause cancer, doesn’t mean they’re all as risky as each other. A substance can increase your risk of cancer a small amount, or, like tobacco, a huge amount. Comparing them like for like is just really confusing to anyone trying to work out how to lead a healthy life.

These brilliant infographics from Cancer Research UK illustrate this perfectly. The risk of lung cancer from smoking is extremely high. Of all cases of lung cancer (44,488 new cases in the UK in 2012), evidence suggests that 86% of these are caused by tobacco. And lung cancer isn’t the only type of cancer caused by smoking. CRUK estimate that 19% of all cancers are caused by smoking. Another way of looking at this is that if smoking was completely eliminated, there would be 64,500 fewer cases of cancer in the UK per year.

More here.

Christie Wilcox in Discover Magazine:

Poison dart frogs are some of the most stunning species on Earth. But their vivid colors aren’t for aesthetics: they’re meant as a warning to potential predators. For while these frogs are visually stimulating, they are also armed with potent toxins. The poisons in their skin are so powerful that local tribes have been known to create deadly darts simply by rubbing them on the frogs’ backs — hence the name.

One might expect that the evolution of such a successful defense would allow these frogs to diversify faster than their relatives and outcompete their kin for resources and habitats — and, according to a study published in the early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, their toxins do give them a speciation advantage. But, their defenses don’t come cheap: poisonous frog species also go extinct at a faster rate.

“Amphibians are facing global population declines and extinctions,” explained Kevin Arbuckle, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool. “I thought it might be useful to figure out whether defense can influence their chances of diversifying or going extinct.”

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Four years ago, the mathematician Maria Chudnovsky faced an all-too-common predicament: how to seat 120 wedding guests, some of whom did not get along, at a dozen or so conflict-free tables. Luckily, the problem fell squarely in her realm of expertise. She conceived of the guests as nodes in a network, with links between incompatible nodes. Her task was to color in the nodes using a spectrum of colors representing the different tables. As long as connected nodes never had the same color, there would be no drama at the reception.

As a master of this pursuit, known as “graph coloring,” Chudnovsky did the whole thing in her head and finished the seating chart in no time. “My husband was very impressed,” she said.

Networks of related objects, be they nodes or wedding guests, are known to mathematicians as “graphs,” and graph coloring is the much-studied act of partitioning these objects into conflict-free sets. Most graphs, with their tangle of interconnections, are impossible to color with a limited palette. The larger they are, the more colors you need. Moving from node to node, alternating between colors, you inevitably get into traffic jams that force you to pull new hues out of the box. Likewise, in the real world, seating charts, meeting schedules and delivery routes can seldom be made optimal. But since the 1960s, mathematicians have escaped these coloring frustrations by working with so-called perfect graphs, which “behave very nicely with respect to coloring,” said Chudnovsky, a 38-year-old math professor at Princeton University.

More here.

Nicholas Brown at nonsite:

Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture is a full-scale, monochrome rendering in fiberglass, duplicated piece by piece through a mechanical process, of a totaled Pontiac Grand Am. The accident that wrecked the original car was a fatal one:

If ghosts existed, would they haunt the actual substance of a place or object? Or would the object’s topology, geometry, or shape be enough to hold the ghost? Unpainted Sculpture began as an investigation into the nature of a haunting. I studied many automobiles that were involved in fatal collisions. Eventually I chose a car that I felt held the presence of its dead driver. (Charles Ray 106).

It is initially difficult to imagine a non-bullshit meaning for this paragraph, whose form acknowledges its own nonsensicality. One cannot run an experiment on initial conditions that are themselves counterfactual: since ghosts are acknowledged not to exist, the success or failure of the sculpture can’t establish how they would act if they did. When one begins to examine the sculpture, however, it is hard not to be struck by a certain presence, physical (or better, indexical) rather than ghostly, in the force with which the steering wheel has been smashed in by the body of the driver, and in the tremendous crumpling of the front of the car on the driver’s side. It is hard not to narrativize this observation as a kind of shock: “Something has happened here, someone has died.”

more here.