Emily Becker in Mental Floss:

Sometimes, the act of teaching is a work of art. In the days before clip art and Google image search, artistically-challenged teachers had few alternatives to the chalkboard for their visual-based lessons. Enter Frederik Whitney, author of Blackboard Sketching, who wrote his guide in 1909 with the promise that, with a few basic strokes and some practice, anybody could turn a chalkboard into a canvas. Check out the virtual art gallery below of chalk art that’s too good for the sidewalk.

More here.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

The 70^th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has reminded me of an extraordinary incident that occurred during the Manhattan Project, when Edward Teller and other physicists feared the fission bomb they were building might incinerate the planet. I heard about the incident in 1991 while preparing for an interview with Hans Bethe, who headed the Manhattan Project’s theoretical division. Teller reportedly did calculations suggesting that a fission explosion might generate heat so intense that it would trigger runaway fusion in the atmosphere. (Ironically, Teller later helped create thermonuclear bombs, in which fission catalyzes a vastly more powerful fusion explosion.) Teller brought his concerns to other physicists, including Bethe, an authority on fusion (and pretty much everything else in nuclear physics). After considering Teller’s concerns, Bethe and others concluded… Well, I’ll let Bethe tell the story in his own words. Here is an exact transcript of my interview with him, which took place at his home in Ithaca, New York.

Horgan: I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the story of Teller's suggestion that the atomic bomb might ignite the atmosphere around the Earth.

Bethe: It is such absolute nonsense [laughter], and the public has been interested in it… And possibly it would be good to kill it once more. So one day at Berkeley — we were a very small group, maybe eight physicists or so — one day Teller came to the office and said, “Well, what would happen to the air if an atomic bomb were exploded in the air?” The original idea about the hydrogen bomb was that one would explode an atomic bomb and then simply the heat from the atomic bomb would ignite a large vessel of deuterium… and make it react. So Teller said, “Well, how about the air? There's nitrogen in the air, and you can have a nuclear reaction in which two nitrogen nuclei collide and become oxygen plus carbon, and in this process you set free a lot of energy. Couldn't that happen?” And that caused great excitement.

More here.

Rukmini Callimachi in the New York Times:

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

More here.

Amanda Schaffer in The New Yorker:

Pennsylvania Hospital, in downtown Philadelphia, was Colonial America’s first hospital, founded in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin and the physician Thomas Bond. For much of its history, the hospital’s staff treated conditions from pneumonia to gangrene and headaches with aggressive bloodletting, a practice that may have originated in ancient Egypt, and that persisted for millennia, despite the scarcity of evidence that it cured patients of disease. Benjamin Rush, who was a co-signer of the Declaration of Independence and practiced at Penn Hospital in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was known by colleagues as the Prince of Bleeders. His enthusiasm arose from the belief that “all disease arose from excitation of blood vessels, which copious bleeding would relieve,” according to the author Douglas Starr. “If the patient fainted, so much the better, for it meant that the harsh measures were taking effect.” During the yellow-fever outbreak of 1793 in Philadelphia, Rush reportedly treated more than a hundred patients a day with bloodletting; years later, the provost of the University of Pennsylvania recalled that “his house was filled with the poor whose blood, from want of a sufficient number of bowls, was often allowed to flow upon the ground.”

Widespread blood transfusion, by contrast, is less than a century old. Yet it, too, was popularly adopted without rigorous testing of when, exactly, it benefitted patients. Just as early practitioners accepted the virtues of draining blood away, most mid-twentieth-century doctors took it on faith that infusing more was better. On a warm Saturday in April, however, more than a hundred Jehovah’s Witnesses gathered in the auditorium at Penn Hospital to learn about a program in bloodless medicine, in which patients choose to forego transfusion under all circumstances, and instead receive, in the course of their care, a range of treatments designed to build up their own red-blood-cell counts and painstakingly conserve as much of their blood as possible. Jehovah’s Witnesses object to transfusion because they believe that scriptural passages forbid it. But the attendant reasoning—that an individual’s singular qualities, life and soul, are carried in blood—does not fall so far outside of the mainstream imagination. When we get hurt as kids, the first thing we notice is whether it’s bleeding. Blood rushing down an arm or a leg is a badge of honor. But blood also gives us away, revealing embarrassment when it rushes to the face, or lust when it rushes elsewhere. If we are sick or pregnant or dying, the proof is in our blood, more often than in our sweat or tears or spit. If we don’t know what’s wrong with us, we expect our blood to provide an answer. Blood symbolizes murder, birth, passion, danger, and conquest, as when hunters drink from a slain animal. Martian blood is never red like ours. Vampires can’t survive without sucking the lifeblood from people. In movies, when a drop of blood trickles from a wounded hero’s nose we know he is about to keel over. Blood is how we learn what our bodies can and cannot take. Patricia Ford has led the bloodless-medicine program at Penn since 1998.

More here.

Samantha Weinberg in More Intelligent Life:

The first time I met Anne McLaren, I was quite daunted. I knew she was a genius and I was in my very early days as a scientist. I went to see her with a problem: I couldn’t get my eggs to fertilise. She was then at University College London. She looked at me rather quizzically and said: “When my mouse embryos don’t grow, I think it’s something to do with sun spots.” And then she laughed. Anne was born in London and read zoology at Oxford, where she got her PhD before moving to UCL in 1952. It was there that she started work on mouse genetics with Donald Michie. They married the same year and went on to have three children before divorcing seven years later. She brought up the children as a single mother and always campaigned for government help with child care. She and Michie remained friends, though, and got back together when they were both in their 70s. They died together, in a car accident on the M11 on the way back from Cambridge in 2007. It was a tragedy—she was still in full possession of her faculties, still full of life.

She was a remarkable woman and a brilliant scientist. Anne’s work became very important to mine: in my view she was more important in the development of IVF than Robert Edwards, who won the Nobel prize for his work on IVF. But she doesn’t get the plaudits she deserves. She wasn’t a doctor, she didn’t treat humans, and she wouldn’t have said that IVF was her key subject; she was an embryologist who was interested in how fertilisation worked. But she developed many of the techniques now used in human IVF by working on mice—which is very difficult. She discovered how to fertilise an embryo and transfer it back into the animal, and how to cut an embryo in half to make twins. It was highly significant—her long record of published papers and books is testament to the importance of her work.

More here.

Navneet Alang in TNR:

Soylent—a pale, powdery drink that is meant to satisfy all of a person’s nutritional needs—is perhaps the perfect symbol of the Silicon Valley mentality: efficient, soulless, and naïve. Of late, it’s been a lightning rod for criticizing “solutionism,” that term coined by tech critic Evgeny Mozorov to connote the tech industry’s habit of finding a technological answer to every question, even the unasked ones. Soylent seems to starkly reject the recent, almost religious fervor around food and gourmet culture—particularly its turn to the artisanal and the organic. If you have the slightest feeling that solutionism robs us of our sensual connection to the world, Soylent and its robotic creator, Rob Rhinehart1, are the perfect symbols to prove the sentiment true.

It is easy to gently mock Rhinehart’s idealistic, odd proselytizing, and, in turn, Valley culture itself. Soylent and other solutionist ideas are hyper-efficient in ethos, but also joyless and self-righteous in their asceticism. Yet the scorn laid upon both Soylent and Silicon Valley in particular might better be aimed at those creating the products, rather than the actual products themselves.

It is important to keep in mind that there is a disparity between the rhetoric of certain, powerful actors—Rhinehart included—and how their ideas are eventually implemented. Consider: Soylent isn’t actually that bad. When you divorce the product from the ideology of its creator, what you end up with is actually something rather useful and benign—a relatively cheap, durable, and increasingly sustainable source of nutrition for those times that a leisurely al fresco meal with a crisp Riesling just isn’t feasible.

If it were Rhinehart alone hawking an odd product, a crackpot technological voice crying out in the wilderness, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, he isn’t alone in speaking and acting in a manner that reveals a fundamental shakiness in his grasp of ethical and existential concerns: such obliviousness is endemic to the tech industry.

More here.

Over at Radio Open Source:

If Jeb Bush were caught, on a secret recording, dissing John McCain for getting captured by the North Vietnamese, he’d be denounced by every Republican living, even his dad. If Ted Cruz told a female staffer she’d look better on her knees, he’d be sent back to Canada.

So why is that from the billionaire candidate Donald Trump, wide-open narcissism, sexism, and anti-Mexican racism are accepted, even applauded? Maybe because Trump fits so comfortably into a mood of malcontent skepticism. Think George Wallace and Curtis LeMay before him: crazy or cynical, maybe, but in a familiar, American way.

So this week we’re looking for the many meanings in the Donald’s for-now popularity, and asking what his long candidacy might mean a new understanding of what America’s looking forward after Obama. So with historians Rick Perlstein and Heather Cox Richardson, and a chorus of voices, let us count the ways.

1. Trump’s a TV brand.

Trump has brought a certain televisual atmosphere with him — the look of entertainment news, The Apprentice and advertising, roasts and resort vacations — into an otherwise stale and overcrowded horse race. Our guest Jeet Heer says the Trump candidacy works like professional wrestling — it becomes scripted battle, and spectacularly vulgar. (We shouldn’t forget Trump himself has thrown a few punches at Wrestlemania.)

More here.

William Deresiewicz in Harper's:

I recently spent a semester teaching writing at an elite liberal-arts college. At strategic points around the campus, in shades of yellow and green, banners displayed the following pair of texts. The first was attributed to the college’s founder, which dates it to the 1920s. The second was extracted from the latest version of the institution’s mission statement:

The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.

leadership
service
integrity
creativity

Let us take a moment to compare these texts. The first thing to observe about the older one is that it is a sentence. It expresses an idea by placing concepts in relation to one another within the kind of structure that we call a syntax. It is, moreover, highly wrought: a parallel structure underscored by repetition, five adverbs balanced two against three.

A spatial structure, the sentence also suggests a temporal sequence. Thinking clearly, it wants us to recognize, leads to thinking independently. Thinking independently leads to living confidently. Living confidently leads to living courageously. Living courageously leads to living hopefully. And the entire chain begins with a college that recognizes it has an obligation to its students, an obligation to develop their abilities to think and live.

Finally, the sentence is attributed to an individual. It expresses her convictions and ideals. It announces that she is prepared to hold herself accountable for certain responsibilities.

The second text is not a sentence. It is four words floating in space, unconnected to one another or to any other concept. Four words — four slogans, really — whose meaning and function are left undefined, open to whatever interpretation the reader cares to project on them.

More here.

Michael Taussig in Public Seminar:

As I write, the plug is being pulled on the steady-state.

Violence and tragedy take revenge on humanity through routinization. Sooner or later we become immune.

But is there a reverse process, such as Freud writes about in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the nightmare recurs so as to provide the anxiety that would have defended you against the worst excesses of shock?

Talking in Istanbul in the Kurdish restaurant (where I was never allowed to pay), where once he knew I was born in Sydney, the waiter showed me his cell phone photo of Ashley Johnston, a young Australian who had died fighting in the siege of Kobane; or dining with Nazan and Deniz outside at night with a sea breeze in my face; or in the seminar room in the anthropology and sociology department of Bogazici university, I was de-immunized — not only by the recurrence of the nightmare but by its counter-wave of sensitivity and friendship, and by what I discerned as a specific warp to Turkish culture provided by Kurdish Being, that ever-desired enemy within. It was as if Turkish culture, or at least its Stately essence, was utterly dependent on that which it had to deny and destroy and thus make spectral, every day more powerful.

This warp is a sick state of affairs, predisposed to surreal twists — as with Nazan’s story of the drone and the black umbrellas. A PKK woman combatant in the mountains in eastern Turkey unfurled her umbrella when a drone passed overhead. All the other women were killed. So the guerrillas ordered black umbrellas from Russia. But the trucks were intercepted by the Turkish army expecting arms, only to find . . . black umbrellas.

Then there was the video of a woman dancing in the ruins of Kobane. As the film stopped, lo and behold, that same woman emerged from the darkness to dance in the audience there in Istanbul. Kobane is everywhere! And we are dancing. Right?

Like the ships in the Bosphorous that from my window seemed to be passing through the forest I was being re-scaled, alive with the turbulence of internal relations; of the Other within.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

This is a transcript of my TB Davie Memorial lecture that I gave at the University of Cape Town on Thursday 13 August.

It is truly an honour and pleasure to be able to deliver this lecture, and to be able to follow the speakers who have gone before me, speakers such as Walter Sisulu, Wole Soyinke, Edward Said and Noam Chomsky. It is an honour, too, to be the fiftieth speaker in this great series. But being the fiftieth speaker raises an interesting question: Is there anything left to say about academic freedom that the 49 before me have not already said?

To appreciate why the debate about academic freedom is not yet exhausted, and probably never will be exhausted, we need to understand two points. First, that while there is something special about the academy that requires freedom of speech, there is nothing that should make us privilege academic freedom above other forms of freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is a right, not a privilege. We need to defend academic freedom. But we need to recognize, too, that freedom of expression in the academy is intimately related to freedom of expression more widely in society. Our ability to defend academic freedom is intimately linked to our ability and willingness to defend freedom of expression more widely. So, I will talk today about the academy and academic freedom. But I will talk much more about the wider social context of free speech and the assault upon it.

And second, to defend free speech, whether in the academy or in society more widely, we need to know not simply why freedom of expression is important but also in what ways that freedom is being threatened.

More here.

In the wake of the Iran nuclear deal announced last month, US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has become a prominent figure in the Obama administration's wide-ranging efforts to convince Congress and the American people to support the deal. In the process, the physicist and longtime MIT professor—who was a key advisor on the US team during negotiations with Iran—has been praised for his ability to translate complex science into language accessible to laymen (and lay-congressmen) and has at the same time become something of a media favorite.

John Mecklin in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Bulletin: I’ll get right to it because I know you’re busy, and we have a short time window here. You and other administration officials have been on kind of a road show lately, explaining the Iran deal to a lot of different groups and people. Have you learned anything from doing that? Have any of the reactions surprised you?

Moniz: No, I don’t think so surprised. What I’m finding is, I think, that when all is said and done, the strengths of the nuclear dimensions of the agreement are being quite well appreciated. The two major issues that I think are on people’s minds are, number one, this idea that—of course it was part of the construct of the negotiation following the President’s strategic choice years ago—that the agreement is focused specifically on the nuclear weapons issue in Iran and is not, at the same time, addressing other regional issues that we have with Iran. But again, that was a choice made years ago.

Secondly, while the agreement very clearly is very restrictive on Iran’s nuclear program, say for 15 years, there’s a concern that okay, after 15 years they become a threshold state. But of course, we point out that they are today a threshold state. The difference is whether one is going to be confronted with a very large Iranian nuclear program essentially tomorrow, with little verification and, if the agreement is undermined, very little international unity, versus an Iran that could rebuild a substantial program after 15 years, but with considerable enhanced verification and international unity. So that’s kind of the reality.

More here.

Joy as mathematicians discover a new type of pentagon that can cover the plane leaving no gaps and with no overlaps. It becomes only the 15th type of pentagon known that can do this, and the first discovered in 30 years.

Alex Bellos in The Guardian:

In the world of mathematical tiling, news doesn’t come bigger than this.

In the world of bathroom tiling – I bet they’re interested too.

If you can cover a flat surface using only identical copies of the same shape leaving neither gaps nor overlaps, then that shape is said to tile the plane.

Every triangle can tile the plane. Every four-sided shape can also tile the plane.

Things get interesting with pentagons. The regular pentagon cannot tile the plane. (A regular pentagon has equal side lengths and equal angles between sides, like, say, a cross section of okra, or, erm, the Pentagon). But some non-regular pentagons can.

The hunt to find and classify the pentagons that can tile the plane has been a century-long mathematical quest, begun by the German mathematician Karl Reinhardt, who in 1918 discovered five types of pentagon that do tile the plane.

(To clarify, he did not find five single pentagons. He discovered five classes of pentagon that can each be described by an equation. For the curious, the equations are here. And for further clarification, we are talking about convex pentagons, which are most people’s understanding of a pentagon in that every corner sticks out.)

Most people assumed Reinhardt had the complete list until half a century later in 1968 when R. B. Kershner found three more. Richard James brought the number of types of pentagonal tile up to nine in 1975.

More here.

Ian Bogost in The Atlantic:

One of the ironies of modern life is that everyone is glued to their phones, but nobody uses them as phones anymore. Not by choice, anyway. Phone calls—you know, where you put the thing up to your ear and speak to someone in real time—are becoming relics of a bygone era, the “phone” part of a smartphone turning vestigial as communication evolves, willingly or not, into data-oriented formats like text messaging and chat apps.

The distaste for telephony is especially acute among Millennials, who have come of age in a world of AIM and texting, then gchat and iMessage, but it’s hardly limited to young people. When asked, people with a distaste for phone calls argue that they are presumptuous and intrusive, especially given alternative methods of contact that don’t make unbidden demands for someone’s undivided attention. In response, some have diagnosed a kind of telephoniphobia among this set. When even initiating phone calls is a problem—and even innocuous ones, like phoning the local Thai place to order takeout—then anxiety rather than habit may be to blame: When asynchronous, textual media like email or WhatsApp allow you to intricately craft every exchange, the improvisational nature of ordinary, live conversation can feel like an unfamiliar burden. Those in power sometimes think that this unease is a defect in need of remediation, while those supposedly afflicted by it say they are actually just fine, thanks very much.

But when it comes to taking phone calls and not making them, nobody seems to have admitted that using the telephone today is a different material experience than it was 20 or 30 (or 50) years ago, not just a different social experience. That’s not just because our phones have also become fancy two-way pagers with keyboards, but also because they’ve become much crappier phones. It’s no wonder that a bad version of telephony would be far less desirable than a good one. And the telephone used to be truly great, partly because of the situation of its use, and partly because of the nature of the apparatus we used to refer to as the “telephone”—especially the handset.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Violence has erupted across a broad swath of territory in recent months: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia and the American south. Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and the strangest – of world wars. Certainly, forces larger and more complex than in the previous two wars are at work; they outrun our capacity to apprehend them, let alone adjust their direction to our benefit. The early post cold war consensus – that bourgeois democracy has solved the riddle of history, and a global capitalist economy will usher in worldwide prosperity and peace – lies in tatters. But no plausible alternatives of political and economic organisation are in sight. A world organised for the play of individual self-interest looks more and more prone to manic tribalism.

In the lengthening spiral of mutinies from Charleston to central India, the insurgents of Iraq and Syria have monopolised our attention by their swift military victories; their exhibitionistic brutality, especially towards women and minorities; and, most significantly, their brisk seduction of young people from the cities of Europe and the US. Globalisation has everywhere rapidly weakened older forms of authority, in Europe’s social democracies as well as Arab despotisms, and thrown up an array of unpredictable new international actors, from Chinese irredentists and cyberhackers to Syriza and Boko Haram. But the sudden appearance of Islamic State (Isis) in Mosul last year, and the continuing failure to stem its expansion or check its appeal, is the clearest sign of a general perplexity, especially among political elites, who do not seem to know what they are doing and what they are bringing about.

More here.