From Nature:

PhD programmes often lead to an increasing narrowness and specialization, which results in graduate students who are not sufficiently exposed to wider aspects of their subject and of related subjects. Looking outside the immediate interests of a thesis project can lead to real creative advances. One way to expand thinking is to ensure that students have access to a series of inspirational speakers who will cover a wide range of scientific topics, with at least some who are more removed from their PhD focus. At the Francis Crick Institute, we will cover a wide range of biomedicine with truly inspirational speakers, but also look at other areas of science, such as high-energy physics, dark matter and aspects of biology, such as evolution and ecology, that are more distant from biomedicine.

Another suggestion is for what I call 'master classes', after the model of players of musical instruments. In science master classes, a group of graduate students would be exposed to a true expert, an excellent practitioner who would talk about doing science. I don't mean discussing the details of experiments, but discussing the broader questions: how do you do a satisfactory experiment, how do you do rigorous work, what is the nature of knowledge and so on. The final suggestion is to broaden expectations. When students are three-quarters of the way through their graduate degree, they should be intensively mentored and urged to discuss their future careers.

Carlin Wing at Cabinet Magazine:

All cultures engage in some form of ball play. Ball games are a basic way for us to hone what computational neuroscientist Beau Cronin calls “the quotidian spatiotemporal genius of the human brain,” and over the past two hundred years, they have come to dominate the popular imagination, with huge swaths of airtime and large volumes of ink given over to the dramas of soccer, basketball, baseball, American football, tennis, golf, rugby, cricket—the list goes on.¹ All ball sports are aleatoric structures organized, to greater or lesser degrees, around bounce. Aleatoric structures—structures of planned chance—produce a reliable kind of uncertainty. We don’t know who will win and who will lose, but we know that at the end of the day, there will be a winner and a loser. A ball introduces a second, more uncertain, kind of uncertainty into the fray. Its bounce dances along the edge of our predictive capacity, always almost but never fully under control. At least in the Anglophone world, this second kind of chance—the chance of the ball—seems to be especially important to our contemporary understanding of play.² While other kinds of contests are raced, run, rowed, and swum; wrestled, fenced, fought, and boxed; timed, weighed, measured, and judged; ball games are played. And only an athlete who contends with balls (or pucks, or shuttlecocks, or other third objects) earns the title “player.” We become players in and through bounce.

more here.

The Full Indian Rope Trick

There was no secret
murmured down through a long line
of elect; no dark fakir, no flutter
of notes from a pipe,
no proof, no footage of it –
but I did it,

Guildhall Square, noon,
in front of everyone.
There were walls, bells, passers-by;
a rope, thrown, caught by the sky
and me, young, up and away,
goodbye.

Goodbye, goodbye.
Thin air. First try.
A crowd hushed, squinting eyes
at a full sun. There
on the stones
the slack weight of a rope

coiled in a crate, a braid
eighteen summers long,
and me –
I’m long gone,
my one-off trick
unique, unequalled since.

And what would I tell them
given the chance?
It was painful; it took years.
I’m my own witness,
guardian of the fact
that I’m still here.
.

by Colette Bryce
from The Full Indian Rope Trick
publisher: Picador, London, 2004

Wes Marfield in The New Yorker:

Life No. 1

The cool thing about being a cat is that you can just wander from house to house and folks will take you in, feed you, and love you, no questions asked. I’ve got Canterbury Street on lockdown, man—from the Hansens’, on the corner, with the oversized litter box they installed for me in their back yard (or “sandbox,” as they euphemistically call it), to the Griffins’ colonial, with my special “doggy” door to the screened-in porch. Look! What’s that in the driveway? Is Mrs. Griffin’s Audi leaking antifreeze or did she leave me a saucer of blue Gatorade? Only one way to find out!

More here.

Andy Greenberg in Wired:

I was driving 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold.

Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.

As I tried to cope with all this, a picture of the two hackers performing these stunts appeared on the car’s digital display: Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, wearing their trademark track suits. A nice touch, I thought.

The Jeep’s strange behavior wasn’t entirely unexpected. I’d come to St. Louis to be Miller and Valasek’s digital crash-test dummy, a willing subject on whom they could test the car-hacking research they’d been doing over the past year. The result of their work was a hacking technique—what the security industry calls a zero-day exploit—that can target Jeep Cherokees and give the attacker wireless control, via the Internet, to any of thousands of vehicles. Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.

To better simulate the experience of driving a vehicle while it’s being hijacked by an invisible, virtual force, Miller and Valasek refused to tell me ahead of time what kinds of attacks they planned to launch from Miller’s laptop in his house 10 miles west.

More here.

Charles Comey in The Point:

The honeymoon as we know it, the postnuptial trip for two, hasn’t been around all that long. In the nineteenth century there was something called a “bridal tour,” where newlyweds would travel, sometimes accompanied by friends and family, to visit relatives who hadn’t been able to attend the wedding. The bridal tour made sense when a marriage was much more about social ties and the joining of two families than it is now: the pair journeyed not as tourists but as a tour. At the turn of the century couples began to adapt the bridal tour to make it a private pleasure trip instead. In Marriage, a History Stephanie Coontz talks about the transition from bridal tour to honeymoon as part of a larger revolution in the form of family life in general: the increasing interiority and privacy of the family unit, as well as marriage becoming obsessively all about the two individuals and their bond.

It’s easy to understand why, for the first half of the twentieth century, the honeymoon was so appealing. Until relatively recently a marriage came after courtship: after semi-public calls to an eligible girl, usually in her living room. The honeymoon provided some much needed one-on-one time. Naturally, in its privacy, this was also the time to cleave, carnally, finally, to one’s new spouse. In fact at first the honeymoon was a bit scandalous for this reason, because of the attention it drew to the bridal bed. But as the twentieth century softened in its attitude toward sexuality that turned around. To my grandparents’ generation, the thundering of Niagara Falls was a trope for newlywed sex, and going to Niagara was about giving in to an irresistible force of nature. (Thus the rhyming of “Viagra,” which is meant to draw on that association.)

More here.

Alex Rosenberg in the New York Times:

Moral disputes seem intractable — more intractable than other disputes. Take an example of a moral position that most of us would consider obvious: Honor killing is wrong. But honor killing has its supporters. Anyone who suggests that we can compromise with its supporters on the matter misunderstands the nature of this type of disagreement. It’s absolute. One party has to be right. Us. So why can’t we convince those who hold the opposite view?

With some exceptions, political disputes are not like this. When people disagree about politics, they often agree about ends, but disagree about means to attain them. Republicans and Democrats may differ on, say, health care policy, but share goals — a healthy American population. They differ on fiscal policy but agree on the goal of economic growth for the nation. Of course, this is often a matter of degree. Political disputes can have moral aspects, too. The two sides in the debate over abortion rights, for instance, clearly don’t agree on the ends. There is an ethical disagreement at the heart of this debate. It is safe to say that the more ethical a political dispute is, the more heated and intractable it is likely to become.

Honor killing is the execution of one’s own family member, often a woman, who is seen to have brought disgrace to the family. It is a practice most of us find absolutely wrong, no matter the goal — in this case, restoring dignity to the family. The fact that it is a practice long sanctioned in other cultures does not matter to us. Meanwhile, those who approve of or carry out honor killings reject our condemnation, and most likely see it as a moral lapse of ours.

What makes moral disagreements so intractable? Ethics shouldn’t be as hard as rocket science.

More here.

Liat Clark in Wired:

The most exciting innovations in digital currencies will come from developing countries, where financial infrastructure is not as strong, says MIT Media Lab director of digital currency, Brian Forde.

Speaking at WIRED Money 2015, Forde explained that the mainstream British and American public cannot quite grasp the gravity of the economic revolution we have at our fingertips, because in these countries an ATM is always a few hundred metres away and everyone accepts credit cards. In many places across the globe, though, the status quo is not quite so straightforward.

“Today, in 2015, I still can't use Paypal to send money to friends in Nicaragua,” says Forde, former senior adviser for mobile and data innovation at the White House. “But I can send them Bitcoin instantly.”

In Ukraine, during the three-month protest in Kiev's Independence Square in 2013-2014, activists managed to fund their activities by plastering QR codes on their signs, which led supporters of the cause to a Bitcoin address. 'They instantly had Bitcoin in their wallet they could use,” says Forde. He tells the story of a recent interlude with someone who works in social welfare for government, where he discovered the convoluted process of how they distribute physical cash. “25 percent of the population that receives this cash doesn't live near an ATM. Sometimes they have to put it in a canoe, and the insurance company that delivers the money will only allow a certain amount in each canoe. They spend more money on the delivery of cash than the cash that's delivered.”

More here.

From The Sync Project:

Music has the power to stimulate strong emotions within us, to the extent that it is probably rare not to be somehow emotionally affected by music. We all know what emotions are and experience them daily. Most of us also listen to music in order to experience emotions. The specific mechanisms through which music evokes emotions is a rich field of research, with a great number of unanswered questions. Why does sound talk to our emotional brain? Why do we perceive emotional information in musical features? Why do we feel the urge to move when hearing music? Through increasing scientific understanding of the universal as well as the individual principles behind music-evoked emotions, we will be able to better understand the effects that music-listening can have and make better use of them in an informed manner.

Perhaps the primary reason for music listening is the power that music has in stirring our emotions. Music has been reported to evoke the full range of human emotion (1, 2): from sad, nostalgic, and tense, to happy, relaxed, calm, and joyous. Correspondingly, neuroimaging studies have shown that music can activate the brain areas typically associated with emotions (3): the deep brain structures that are part of the limbic system like the amygdala and the hippocampus as well as the pathways that transmit dopamine (for pleasure associated with music-listening). The relationship between music-listening and the dopaminergic pathway is also behind the “chills” that many people report experiencing during music-listening. Chills are physiological sensations, like the hairs getting raised on you arm, and the experience of “shivers down your spine” that accompany intense, peak emotional experiences.

However, we don’t always listen to music to be moved – sometimes people use music for other effects.

More here.

Étienne Balibar at Eurozine:

The history of European construction is long enough to have traversed many distinct phases or stages, each tightly linked to the transformations of the “world-system”.^[1] It is convenient to identify them by way of the correspondence between the successive extensions of the European system and the growing complexity of the institutions that ensure its integrity while managing the unstable equilibrium between national sovereignty and communal governance. There are, arguably, three stages: the first stage, from the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) to the aftermath of the 1968 events and the oil crisis (without forgetting Richard Nixon's shock assault against the Bretton Woods system);^[2] the second stage, from the early 1970s to the fall of the Soviet Union and the German reunification in 1990; finally, the last stage, from the Eastward growth to the crisis generated by the bursting of the American speculative bubble in 2007 and, in Europe, the sovereign defaulting of Greece which was averted at the last moment under well-known circumstances in 2010.

Does the current moment signify the beginning of a new phase? I do think so, even if the tensions that we are observing are only the consequence of a forced entry into globalization, which has dominated the politics of the community for twenty years – or perhaps for this very reason: these national and social tensions have reached a rupture point. A period of uncertainty and of fluctuation has begun and with it the possibility of a new crossing, the terms of which are unpredictable.

more here.

Sandhini Poddhar in ArtAsiaPacific:

Since the early 1980s, Anish Kapoor’s investigation into notions of scale, volume, color and materiality has redefined contemporary sculpture. From the piles of pigment in his early works to the monumental building-embracing sculptures and installations for which the artist is now known, his focus has always remained on investigating the interaction between the subject and the object. In making his art, Kapoor himself stays hidden, describing his works as resulting from “the fiction of auto-generation.” Kapoor’s term “proto-object”—the object that comes into being before language, before aesthetics, before thought and before conditioning—is a leitmotif in his career. The enigmatic nature of this manifestation attracts viewers to each work, enticing them into a relationship, or even a role, in respect to its completion.

Born in Bombay in 1954, Kapoor moved to England in 1972 to study art at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design. At that time, Kapoor’s creative milieu was dominated by the compositional ideas of abstract sculptor Anthony Caro, known for his assemblages of pre-fabricated metal parts such as I-beams and steel plates. For inspiration, Kapoor turned instead to artists redefining the limits of sculpture through the use of evocative, non-art materials and unconventional presentation, such as Paul Neagu, Joseph Beuys and Paul Thek. Kapoor was also fascinated by another aspect of—in particular—Beuy’s work: a numinous but not ethereal quality that is often qualified as being shamanistic or alchemical.

More here.

Tim Requarth in The New York Times:

How did rocks, air and water coalesce into the first living creatures on the primordial Earth? Why did complex life like animals and plants arise from a single ancestor only once in the history of our planet? Why two sexes and not three or four or 12? Why do we age and die? In “The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life,” Nick Lane sets out to answer these questions and many more with a novel suite of ideas about life’s emergence and evolution. Dr. Lane, a biochemist at University College London, argues that with just a few principles of physics, we can predict why life is the way it is — on Earth and in the rest of the cosmos. (Read an excerpt.) Dr. Lane’s previous book, “Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution,” won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, and he again proves an able guide through treacherous scientific terrain. He writes in lucid, accessible prose, and while the science may get dense, the reader will be rewarded with a strikingly unconventional view of biology.

Dr. Lane’s most surprising idea concerns how complex life arose. For most of Earth’s history, he notes, life was microbial: no trees, no mushrooms, no mammals. While microbes display astonishing biochemical diversity, thriving on anything from concrete to battery acid, they’ve never evolved into anything more complicated than a single cell. So what made the great blooming of biodiversity possible? Dr. Lane, building on ideas developed with the evolutionary biologist William Martin, traces its origins to a freak accident billions of years ago, when one microbe took up residence inside another. This event was not a branching of the evolutionary tree but a fusion with, he argues, profound consequences. The new tenant provided energy for its host, paying chemical rent in exchange for safe dwelling. With this additional income, the host cell could afford investments in more complex biological amenities. The pairing thrived, replicated and evolved. Today we call these inner microbes mitochondria; nearly every cell in our body has thousands of these energy factories. Dr. Lane and Dr. Martin have argued that because of mitochondria, complex cells have nearly 200,000 times as much energy per gene, setting the stage for larger genomes and unfettered evolution.

More here.

Karen Kraven. Io, Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Thebe.

More here, here and here.

Isabel Wilkerson in The New York Times:

FOR as long as many Americans have been alive, the Confederate flag stood watch at the South Carolina capitol, and Atticus Finch, moral guardian-father-redeemer, was arguably the most beloved hero in American literature. The two symbols took their places in our culture within months of each other. The flag was hoisted above the capitol dome in April 1961, on the centennial of the Civil War during upheavals over civil rights. Atticus Finch debuted in July 1960 in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a novel that British librarians would later declare the one book, even before the Bible, that everyone should read. Given life by Gregory Peck in the 1962 Oscar-winning film, Atticus Finch would go on to be named the top movie hero of the 20th century. Nearly at once, both icons have fallen from grace in ways that were unimaginable just months ago. They are forcing a reckoning with ourselves and our history, a reassessment of who we were and of what we might become.

The flag was lowered and placed in storage on July 10 after the South Carolina Legislature voted to take it down in response to the massacre of nine black parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. The following Tuesday, as if receiving a message from the gods of history, the world was introduced to a new Atticus Finch with the publication of “Go Set a Watchman,” a young Harper Lee’s earlier manuscript, set 20 years after the fictional events in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” making it as much artifact as literature. Rather than the Atticus who urges his daughter, Scout, to climb into someone’s skin to understand him, this Atticus is now an old-line segregationist, a principled bigot who has been to a Klan meeting and asks his now-grown daughter visiting from New York City: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” It has seemed as if the force of history has led us to this moment, stirred as we have been by the recorded killings of unarmed black people at the hands of the police, the uprisings and hashtags, a diatribe of white supremacy from the young man accused in the Charleston rampage, a former slave ship captain’s “Amazing Grace” sung by a sitting president. History is asking us to confront the wistfulness that we had ever escaped racism’s deep roots.

More here.

Martin Chilton in The Telegraph:

“I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter,” said Charles Bukowski, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, prose and novels, including Ham on Rye and Post Office. Bukowski used his poetry and prose to depict the depravity of urban life in America. He was also an avid reader. A new book called Charles Bukowski: On Writing features previously unpublished letters. Here are 12 things we learned from them:

And don't look ahead

“The future's only a bad hunch; Shakespeare told us that.”

. . . or become famous

“Fame + immortality are games for other people. If we're not recognised when we walk down the street, that's our luck . . . getting famous when you're in your twenties is a very difficult thing to overcome. When you get half-famous when you're over 60, it's easier to make adjustments. Old Ez Pound used to say, 'Do your work'.”

Forget worrying

“Good and evil and right and wrong keep changing; it's a climate rather than a law (moral). I'd rather stay with the climates.”

More here.

Maude Barlow in The Nation:

For a long time, we in the Global North, especially North America and Europe, have seen the growing water crisis as an issue of the Global South. Certainly, the grim UN statistics on those without access to water and sanitation have referred mostly to poor countries in Africa, Latin America, and large parts of Asia. Heartbreaking images of children dying of waterborne disease have always seemed to come from the slums of Nairobi, Kolkata, or La Paz. Similarly, the worst stories of water pollution and shortages have originated in the densely populated areas of the South.

But as this issue of The Nation shows us, the global water crisis is just that—global—in every sense of the word. A deadly combination of growing inequality, climate change, rising water prices, and mismanagement of water sources in the North has suddenly put the world on a more even footing.

There is now a Third World in the First World. Growing poverty in rich countries has created an underclass that cannot pay rising water rates. As reported by Circle of Blue, the price of water in 30 major US cities is rising faster than most other household staples—41 percent since 2010, with no end in sight. As a result, increasing numbers cannot pay their water bills, and cutoffs are growing across the country. Inner-city Detroit reminds me more of the slums of Bogotá than the North American cities of my childhood.

More here.