Robert Sullivan at the NY Times:

What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger. When it comes to nature’s toxins, they might even save your life (or at least blunt the sting of its finality). The distinction, as the evolutionary biologist Noah Whiteman explores in “Most Delicious Poison,” is all in the dosage.

Take alcohol. Ethanol is likely born of plants’ evolutionary search for protection. Long before the first happy hour, yeast’s alcohol-making evolved as a means for the fungi residing in rotting fruit to survive oxygen deprivation. Ethanol thwarts most microbes; but yeast thrives, burning energy from sugar in oxygen’s absence. The same ethanol that might jump-start a party can, through addiction, mean the destruction of the liver — not to mention lives. Alcohol’s paradox, Whiteman writes, is tied to ethanol’s ability to mimic (or possibly bind to) gamma-aminobutyric acid — that is, the neurotransmitter our brains use to soften the nervous system’s activity.

more here.

Surfacing

Eight or nine years old,
I stood on the dock
over the dark, slatted river,
waiting for the sea cow
to surface. I didn’t know
the word manatee,
didn’t know men
had mistaken her
for a mermaid.
I only knew that if I waited
she would arrive.

The river smelled
part bracken, part small-
engine oil and kissed the wall
with a sound so sexual
I was glad no one was near
to be embarrassed for.
A chubby kid, I was sure
my way into the world
wouldn’t be through beauty.
And so, I had already begun
to run my fingers along
the fronts of words,
feeling for hinges.

The plastic bag of bread-ends
clammy in my hand,
sweat in my palm senseless
as hope—and then I saw her.
Ponderous, oblong, she wallowed
first, then spiraled up,
her face glamorous, human,
until she shed the glimmering
skin of water, broke the spell
with a comical snort.

I minded that she sloughed
her mystery off so easily,
though it comforted me too—
now I could give her bread
and watch her eat it.
But it was strange
to think she knew me.
Strange that she turned
from the soft weed
along the bank—every day
about this time—nosed
into the current, pushing
toward me.

by Trish Crapo
from Walk Through Paradise Backward
Slate Roof Press
Northfield, MA

Ed Gent in Singularity Hub:

Teaching algorithms to mimic humans typically requires hundreds or thousands of examples. But a new AI from Google DeepMind can pick up new skills from human demonstrators on the fly. One of humanity’s greatest tricks is our ability to acquire knowledge rapidly and efficiently from each other. This kind of social learning, often referred to as cultural transmission, is what allows us to show a colleague how to use a new tool or teach our children nursery rhymes. It’s no surprise that researchers have tried to replicate the process in machines. Imitation learning, in which AI watches a human complete a task and then tries to mimic their behavior, has long been a popular approach for training robots. But even today’s most advanced deep learning algorithms typically need to see many examples before they can successfully copy their trainers.

When humans learn through imitation, they can often pick up new tasks after just a handful of demonstrations. Now, Google DeepMind researchers have taken a step toward rapid social learning in AI with agents that learn to navigate a virtual world from humans in real time. “Our agents succeed at real-time imitation of a human in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data,” the researchers write in a paper in Nature Communications. “We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission.”

More here.

Jeffrey Meyers at Salmagundi:

The English novelist Geoff Dyer remarked that “creative writing courses emphasise the importance of point-of-view and p.o.v. characters. Salter blows much of that stuff out of the water.” After the austere prose of his early war books he was no longer interested in traditional narrative and chronological structure, and used a radically different style and form in his third and fourth novels, A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years.    The narrator in Sport is admittedly unreliable and cannot possibly have seen everything he describes. Salter told Phelps (punning in French on his name) that his sentence fragments—which suggest broken thoughts and incomplete speech—are “going to have many beautiful jumps, sauts, perhaps will be a ballet.” One puzzled critic noted that “Salter jumps the gap from one kind of time to another, from broad narrative time to tight episodic time, without a safety net, trusting the reader to follow him.” Salter also alienated readers by killing his main characters at the end of the novels: Connell in The Hunters, Cassada in Arm of Flesh, Dean in Sport, Nedra in Light Years.

more here.

David Hudson at The Current:

When Kiju Yoshida, whose work will be celebrated with a weeklong, sixteen-film retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center in New York starting Friday, died last December, several obituaries began along the same lines as Jean-François Rauger’s in Le Monde: “Along with Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, and Masahiro Shinoda, he was one of the great figures of the Japanese New Wave. He was the most secretive and the most intellectual, too.” Yoshida probably would have raised a few objections to that first sentence, but he may well have given a modest yet affirmative nod to the second.

Ezra Pound’s Proposition

Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
“How about a party, big guy?”

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam’s great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazeres Freres in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.

by Robert Haas
from Time and Materials
Ecco Press, 2007

Jacqui Palumbo at CNN:

So you want to live like you’re from the Middle Ages? Well, maybe that’s not a common aspiration, but nevertheless, it’s a subject that’s become Olivia M. Swarthout’s expertise.

Swarthout is the researcher behind the popular art history-inspired social media account Weird Medieval Guys, which has attracted nearly 700,000 followers on X, formerly Twitter, since she began posting with the handle @WeirdMedieval in April 2022. Now, she’s the author of a book with a tongue-in-cheek guide to living like it’s 999 AD — or thereabouts — called “Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Love, Laugh (and Die) in Dark Times.”

You might well have seen Swarthout’s handiwork in your feeds even if you don’t follow the account: Paired with her zeitgeisty captioning, many of the strange, cute and often absurd illustrations from 6th- to 15th-century manuscripts — showing jovial skeletons and wan angels, strangely drawn animals and the daily affairs of commonfolk — have become popular memes. There’s weird floating babies, a knight stabbing himself with the caption “I’m out,” a sneaky cat with a severed penis in its mouth, and a pair of men demonstrating not-so-vaguely sexual sword-fighting tactics.

More here.

Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist:

Buying or selling bitcoin uses 16,000 litres of clean water for every single transaction, which could exacerbate existing droughts around the world. While the energy consumption and carbon emissions produced by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been well studied, this is the first assessment of its water use and wider environmental impact.

Alex de Vries at the VU Amsterdam School of Business and Economics in the Netherlands has calculated that mining – the computational process that secures the bitcoin network – uses between 8.6 and 35.1 billion litres of water per year in the US alone. He says that bitcoin used 1.6 trillion litres of water globally in 2021, and expects this to rise to 2.3 trillion litres this year. Broken down per transaction, that means a single bitcoin trade consumes 16,000 litres of water – enough to fill a small swimming pool. This is “increasingly hard to defend”, says de Vries.

More here.

Lynn Greenky in The Conversation:

The First Amendment does not protect messages posted on social media platforms.

The companies that own the platforms can – and do – remove, promote or limit the distribution of any posts according to corporate policies. But all that might soon change.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear five cases during this current term, which ends in June 2024, that collectively give the court the opportunity to reexamine the nature of content moderation – the rules governing discussions on social media platforms such as Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter – and the constitutional limitations on the government to affect speech on the platforms.

Content moderation, whether done manually by company employees or automatically by a platform’s software and algorithms, affects what viewers can see on a digital media page. Messages that are promoted garner greater viewership and greater interaction; those that are deprioritized or removed will obviously receive less attention. Content moderation policies reflect decisions by digital platforms about the relative value of posted messages.

More here.

Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:

DNA mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes drive tumorigenesis, but epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation, take center stage in a new era of cancer research.¹ In a study published in Cancer Cell, researchers cast a wide -omics net to capture extensive DNA methylation, transcriptomic, and proteomic data from almost 700 tumors and healthy tissues. ² Their findings help unravel the complex effects of methylation on tumor development. “This study really provides the first look at how methylation and epigenetic modification of the DNA eventually have an impact on the protein abundance, and that those proteins are actually driving cancers,” said Li Ding, an expert in cancer genomics at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the paper.

Scientists often use proteomics data in a targeted way in cancer research, for example, to detect biomarkers in blood for specific cancer types.³ Ding and her colleagues wanted to perform a much broader study to identify entirely new factors involved in the onset of cancer. It was no small feat. They simultaneously ran DNA methylation, transcriptomic, and proteomic analyses to investigate more than 10,000 genes and proteins across seven different cancer types. This unbiased approach allowed them to discover previously unknown methylation events that affect protein levels and drive cancer.

More here.

Amol S. Nayathe in The New York Times:

We’ve Come to Expect

—an excerpt

Let’s remember not only the local wars
over claims but a late conflict of siblings
in aristocracy and the stock market,
………….. sharing destruction.

Or recollect the brothers who stayed back east
laboring in the shoe factory, or their
bosses who summered hunting in Scotland and
………….. reside forever

in the protestant cemetery at Rome
among cats, the pyramid of Cestius,
and Keats’s grave. What use are those forefathers
…………..to our condition?

We want comfort: . . .

…………..…………..~~~~

…………..Or say: We’re sixty
…………..years old we know better
…………..and do less. Things we
…………..know better are antinomian
…………..adventure, sequent despair,
…………..error, self-deception, failure,
…………..and good cheer. No wonder
…………..that we’d prefer, with
…………..the dying Irish poet, to
…………..be “young” and “ignorant.”

by Donald Hall
from The Museum of Clear Ideas
Ticknor and Fields 1993

Robyn White in Newsweek:

Biologists have discovered another incredible skill of ants that put humans to shame—they have a special technique to avoid traffic jams. Scientists from Texas Tech University and other institutions studied the 20-minute rhythms of the Leptothorax ant and discovered that their clever synchronization skills allowed them to avoid congestion. Their findings are published in a Proceedings of the Royal Society study.

After observing several Leptothorax nests for some time, it became clear that it was the ants’ sudden bursts of activity, performed simultaneously, that allowed them to avoid these jams. Ants are considered to be one of the smartest insects on Earth and are highly social. They are well known for their synchronization and complex behaviors, such as the way they collectively transport prey, their coordinated movements, and their “consensus-decision making when choosing a nest,” the study reported.

More here.

Mara Naselli at Literary Hub:

On that gray February morning, the exhibit galleries smelled of perfumed wool and vibrated with a hushed reverence for Picasso’s creatures—two-legged, four-legged, winged, taloned, hooved. A man with a goat, a tiny horse with casters for feet, a girl jumping rope, Picasso’s ever-present Minotaur. And many, many women.

“Subjects are a bore, anyway,” Picasso told his friend the art critic Carlton Lake in 1957. “I’ve always said there are no subjects anymore.” And yet in the galleries I was surrounded: a Venus in a stove burner, a cock in bronze, a hand in plaster, the head of a woman in sheet metal and kitchen tools. Bodies changed from one form into another. Everyday objects transformed.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

The Artificial Intelligence landscape is changing with remarkable speed these days, and the capability of Large Language Models in particular has led to speculation (and hope, and fear) that we could be on the verge of achieving Artificial General Intelligence. I don’t think so. Or at least, while what is being achieved is legitimately impressive, it’s not anything like the kind of thinking that is done by human beings. LLMs do not model the world in the same way we do, nor are they driven by the same kinds of feelings and motivations. It is therefore extremely misleading to throw around words like “intelligence” and “values” without thinking carefully about what is meant in this new context.

More here.

Henry Farrell and Mark Blyth at Good Authority:

Henry Farrell: You’ve written a very influential book on economic austerity and why Europe embraced it. Your work helps explain why Germany introduced a “debt brake” into its constitution that minimized government borrowing except under emergency conditions. Last week, the German Constitutional Court said that the debt brake prevented the government from borrowing money to finance green measures. What does this mean for Europe’s transition to a post-carbon economy?

Mark Blyth: Well, it’s not very good for it. The real question is, why do countries keep introducing pro-cyclical fiscal rules that make crises worse? In Germany, it allowed the Greens, who wanted to spend lots of money on heat pumps in every house, and the liberals, who wanted to spend no money, to join together with the social democrats to form a government. They compromised on doing the spending through what are called “off balance sheet vehicles,” which are like the “special purpose vehicles” that banks used in the run up to the financial crisis. The Court said they couldn’t do this.

Politicians don’t want to acknowledge what the carbon transition will cost. What could possibly go wrong when you hide debt from your voters, not acknowledging it as part of your balance sheet, taking the risk that interest rates go up and your asset values go down?

More here.

Mark Peplow in Nature:

On the outskirts of Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, nestled among car dealerships and hardware shops, sits a two-storey factory stuffed with solar-power secrets. It’s here where UK firm Oxford PV is producing commercial solar cells using perovskites: cheap, abundant photovoltaic (PV) materials that some have hailed as the future of green energy. Surrounded by unkempt grass and a weed-strewn car park, the factory is a modest cradle for such a potentially transformative technology, but the firm’s chief technology officer Chris Case is clearly in love with the place. “This is the culmination of my dreams,” he says.

The firm is one of more than a dozen companies betting that perovskites are finally poised to push the global transition to renewable energy into overdrive.

More here.