Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

The basic issue is that people hear the phrase “quantum mechanics,” or even take a course in it, and come away with the impression that reality is somehow pixelized — made up of smallest possible units — rather than being ultimately smooth and continuous. That’s not right! Quantum theory, as far as it is currently understood, is all about smoothness. The lumpiness of “quanta” is just apparent, although it’s a very important appearance.

What’s actually happening is a combination of (1) fundamentally smooth functions, (2) differential equations, (3) boundary conditions, and (4) what we care about.

This might sound confusing, so let’s fix ideas by looking at a ubiquitous example: the simple harmonic oscillator.

More here.

S. Mitra Kalita in Time Magazine:

On Monday of last week, I joined women from around the world at the Reykjavík Global Forum in Iceland, to talk democracy, technology, and artificial intelligence, among other topics. Four days later, Sam Altman was suddenly fired from his role as CEO of OpenAI, and I religiously followed the twists and turns, bravado, and infighting that unfolded over the weekend. The bookends of the week form a bit of a metanarrative around how to save or support innovation that creates massive societal upheaval. After Altman’s dismissal from the nonprofit behind ChatGPT, we are left pondering who should be in charge of these new technologies that spare no industry or institution.

OpenAI’s six-member board fired Altman, vaguely alluding to lies in his communications with them. The organization operates as a partnership between its nonprofit and for-profit arms, whereby the latter raised money from investors and promised that profits above a certain level would be donated to the former. As The Atlantic explained: “The company’s charter bluntly states that OpenAI’s ‘primary fiduciary duty is to humanity,’ not to investors or even employees.”

More here.

Sudden Sketch Poem

Gary’s sink has a shroud burlap
the rub brush tinware plout
leans on right side
like a red woman’s hair
the faucet leaks little lovedrops
The teacup’s upsidedown with visions
of green mountains and brown lousy
Chinese mysterious up heights
The frying pan’s still wet
The spoon’s by two petals of flower
The washrag’s hung on edge like bloomers
I don’t know what to say
about the dishpan, the soap
The sink itself inside or what
is hidden underneath the bomb burlap
Shroudflap except two onions
And an orange and old wheat germ.
Wheat meal. The hoodlatch heliograph
With the cross that makes the devil
Hiss, ah,  the upper coral sensen soups
And fast condiments, curries, rices,
Roaches, reels, tin, tip, plastickets,
Toothbrushes and armies, and armies
of insulated schiller, squozen gumbrop
Peste pans, light of marin, pirshar,
Magic dancing lights of gray and white
And all for verse I wrote it.

by Jack Kerouac
April 1956, McCorkle’s Shack
from Kerouac- Poems All Sizes
City Light Books, 1992

Youmna El Sayed at The Nation:

Things in Gaza have been in constant deterioration. Every single day that passes, new crises are compounded over the crises that already exist. It’s been over 40 days of non-stop bombardment. I’ve been saying many times throughout my coverage that what we have seen in this war, what we are witnessing is unlike any other war in any other place that anyone else has witnessed or lived through. The bombardments of hospitals, of UNRWA schools, residential homes—there’s no place that is not under fire. There’s no place that is not targeted from day one.

More here.

Hannah Gold in Harper’s Magazine:

It is difficult to predict when one will spend the night at a hotel in Newark, let alone three, and uncommon to agree to such a scenario willingly. If you live there already, you stay home. If you’re there for a professional engagement, your boss made you go. If your flight has been canceled, you go there as a last resort. Whereas, though I felt compelled to be there, I couldn’t point to an authority outside of myself that had forced my hand. The room had been booked a week in advance.

I was in town, in March, for Philip Roth Unbound, a weekend-long festival hosted by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, on the occasion of what would have been the author’s ninetieth birthday. A decade earlier, Roth had celebrated his eightieth in his hometown, with an elaborate party at the Newark Museum. He sat beside the podium and read from Sabbath’s Theater. “He was very much the author of his own birthday party,” David Remnick reported then, “and he seemed to enjoy it to the last.” This time, though, Roth’s allies and acolytes would need to put on the show all by themselves. What would it mean to reinscribe the decades of life and work within a context that the author has left behind?

More here.

Nicola Jones in Nature:

OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, California, was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization. In 2019, it shifted to an unusual capped-profit model, with a board explicitly not accountable to shareholders or investors, including Microsoft. In the background of Altman’s firing “is very clearly a conflict between the non-profit and the capped-profit; a conflict of culture and aims”, says Jathan Sadowski, a social scientist of technology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and a member of the board that ousted Altman, this July shifted his focus to ‘superalignment’, a four-year project attempting to ensure that future superintelligences work for the good of humanity.

It’s unclear whether Altman and Sutskever are at odds about speed of development: after the board fired Altman, Sutskever expressed regret about the impacts of his actions and was among the employees who signed the letter threatening to leave unless Altman returned.

More here.

Rachel Fraser in Boston Review:

In 1980 Frances Gabe applied for a patent for a self-cleaning house. The design was based on her own home, which she had worked on for more than a decade. Each room had a sprinkler system installed; at the push of a button, Gabe could send sudsy water pouring over her specially treated furniture. Clean water would then wash the soap away, before draining from the gently sloped floors. Blasts of warm air would dry the room in less than an hour, and the used water flowed into the kennel, to give the Great Dane a bath.

The problem with most houses, Gabe thought, was that they were designed by men, who would never be tasked with cleaning them. The self-cleaning house, she hoped, would free women from the “nerve-twangling bore” of housework. Such hopes are widely shared: a 2019 survey found that self-cleaning homes were the most eagerly anticipated of all speculative technologies.

Cleaning, like cooking, childbearing, and breastfeeding, is a paradigm case of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is a special form of work. It doesn’t itself produce commodities (coffee pots, silicon chips); rather, it’s the form of work that creates and maintains labor power itself, and hence makes the production of commodities possible in the first place. Reproductive labor is low-prestige and (typically) either poorly paid or entirely unwaged. It’s also obstinately feminized: both within the social imaginary and in actual fact, most reproductive labor is done by women. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that political discussions of work often treat reproductive labor as an afterthought.

One place this elision shows up is in the “post-work” tradition.

More here.

Saul Nelson in Sidecar:

Philip Guston didn’t sleep well. The first room in Tate Modern’s current retrospective is hung with two late images of insomnia: a painting, Legend (1977) and a print, Painter (1980). They show different stages of the same sickness. Legend has the painter in bed, eyes squeezed shut, surrounded by half-formed clapped-out thoughts. Painter shows him at work, all hope of sleep abandoned, eyes gummed near-shut, face pushed as close to his canvas as it will go. The pairing is inspired. It gives clues to the meaning of figuration in Guston’s paintings – to his entire epistemology.

Legend is a large painting, almost two metres across. It shows that unique feeling for colour, or rather for a particular range of colour – roughly, between salmon pink and cadmium red – that Guston tested throughout his career. The painter’s face is a study in this range, from the delicate pinks of his crumpled forehead, flaccid and puffy like uncooked sausages, to the glistening reds of his temples. Pink suffuses the atmosphere and tints each object: the boot heel, the tin can, the billy-club raised by a disembodied fist. Guston’s pillow is crimped like a thought-bubble in a comic strip, and clearly we are meant to read at least some of the objects surrounding him as thoughts, projections of his sleepless brain. They float in pink space. Some cast no shadows.

More here.

Andrew Sepielli in Aeon:

Many academic fields can be said to ‘study morality’. Of these, the philosophical sub-discipline of normative ethics studies morality in what is arguably the least alienated way. Rather than focusing on how people and societies think and talk about morality, normative ethicists try to figure out which things are, simply, morally good or bad, and why. The philosophical sub-field of meta-ethics adopts, naturally, a ‘meta-’ perspective on the kinds of enquiry that normative ethicists engage in. It asks whether there are objectively correct answers to these questions about good or bad, or whether ethics is, rather, a realm of illusion or mere opinion.

Most of my work in the past decade has been in meta-ethics. I believe that there are truths about what’s morally right and wrong. I believe that some of these truths are objective or, as they say in the literature, ‘stance-independent’. That is to say, it’s not my or our disapproval that makes torture morally wrong; torture is wrong because, to put it simply, it hurts people a lot. I believe that these objective moral truths are knowable, and that some people are better than others are at coming to know them. You can even call them ‘moral experts’ if you wish.

Of course, not everyone agrees with all of that. Some are simply confused; they conflate ‘objective’ with ‘culturally universal’ or ‘innate’ or ‘subsumable under a few exceptionless principles’ or some such. But many people’s misgivings about moral objectivity are more clear headed and deeper. In particular, I find that some demur because they think that, for there to be moral truths, let alone objective, knowable ones, morality would have to have a kind of ‘foundation’ that, in their view, is nowhere to be found. Others, anxious to help, try to show that there’s a firm foundation or ultimate ground for morality after all.

It’s my view that both sides of this conflict are off on the wrong foot. Morality is objective, but it neither requires nor admits of a foundation.

More here.

Dan Kois in Slate:

Is it appropriate to call the three members of the sketch comedy group Please Don’t Destroy “boys”? They are grown men, in a sense, with jobs (Saturday Night Live writers) and, one assumes, growing 401(k)s. They’re in their mid-to-late 20s, six years into a career that started at New York University. Yet in other ways they are very obviously still tweens, gangly and silly, still figuring it all out. They’ve been known to sign emails to reporters “The Boys.” (This was revealed in a Vulture profile headlined “Boys, Interrupting.”) Their comedy depends on the kind of hothouse riffing in which boys stuck together in a room will always engage. (That room started as an Upper West Side living room, and is now usually their office in Rockefeller Center.) Most of all, the Please Don’t Destroy boys are boys, in the sense of yelling “Ma boyz!” upon walking into a room and seeing ya boyz.

The boys are Ben Marshall (the redheaded one), Martin Herlihy (the one with glasses), and John Higgins (the other one). You have probably seen their rapid-fire sketches on YouTube or Twitter, where they first came to prominence with a sketch about a shady COVID vaccine (not Pfizer or Moderna, but [Eastern European accent] Dumbrekka), or on SNL, where their pre-taped bits (“Three Sad Virgins,” “Dawg Food”) are so obviously highlights of the show that no one really even gets annoyed that two of them are the children of former SNL writers.

More here.

American Myth

I flew out of bradley snow
sick & tired of lawyers      rocked

back over erie’s shivering green
gunk    saw the fat fingered river that cuts

down american belly     coasts of nebraska
chalk dust plains      & jagged white slung

rocky & sierra nevada mountains
this land that rolls
west in one giant gulp      that slides

into frisco at the end of a thumb   I pissed
in kerouac alley      opened my red door

painted nothing black            my limits were
new to me    I watched the dead drug

eyes on telegraph  &  let berkley become
my jingle jangle morning          dropping

back in   the musty church basement in dolores
barrio where a skinny girl with green hair &

pierced eyebrows named dragon asked
me to read the promises

by Jim Bell
from Crossing the Bar
Slate Roof Publishing Collective
Northfield, Ma. 2005

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

“The ancien regime”, as applied to 18th-century France, always sounds like such a solid proposition. It speaks of arbitrary power, stiffened with protocol, girded by gold, topped by a dusting of icing sugar (you could always spot a noble by their terrible teeth) and utterly stuck in its ways. Until, that is, revolution arrived in 1789 with a clap of thunder to reset the clock so that everything could start over. Yet, as Robert Darnton shows in this enthralling book, the last 50 years of old France were in fact febrile and shifting, rocked by a series of social and political affaires that reached far beyond elite circles, engaging men and women who were more used to worrying whether the cost of bread would rise by another two sous.

Darnton calls this new flexible mood the “revolutionary temper”, by which he doesn’t simply mean that French people eventually became so cross that they embarked on a programme of violent protest that led to the guillotining of the king and queen in 1793. Rather, by “temper” he is referring to “a frame of mind fixed by experience in a manner that is analogous to the ‘tempering’ of steel by a process of heating and cooling”.

more here.

Caroline Alexander at the New York Times:

This format ensures an extraordinary — and bewildering — range of striking details. We learn that the bloated bodies of those who died in German U-boat attacks wash up along the coastline of Savannah, Ga.; that at the Treblinka death camp “there is almost always a jam when the door of one of the gas chambers is opened,” as the limbs of the corpses are so densely entangled; that when British soldiers in North Africa take five Italian prisoners, one of them happens to be a tenor from the Milan opera, and all five sing as they help with breakfast; that a Chinese civil servant tasked by the Nationalist government with collecting taxes from the starving population of Henan reports that people are eating bark and grass and selling their children for steamed rolls; that U.S. troops at Guadalcanal, desperate for alcohol of any kind, drink after-shave lotion “filtered through bread”; and that when a private with the Red Army northwest of Stalingrad peers out from his trench one night, he discovers a scene of terrible and staggering beauty — a freezing rain, reflecting the full moon’s light, has formed a shimmering veil over the landscape and the corpses of his dead companions.

more here.

Alena Dvořáková at the Dublin Review of Books:

The good Kundera – the best-known twentieth century Czech writer – has been ubiquitous, his work available in many languages. Meanwhile, the darker Kundera – a constant presence on the Czech scene, the Kundera of Laughable Loves and The Joke who later sold out – has mostly skulked in the background, among the people of whom we know nothing, muttering in their incomprehensible Czech. This Kundera-in-hiding might make an occasional appearance in the writing of Western critics, but mostly tonly o be dismissed as a spectre without substance, the creation of those left behind (sometimes also called dissidents) who, filled with envy, cannot but consider the willing and successful emigrant as a traitor to the mother country. Imagine, he even dared to switch his writing language from Czech to French! And he chose not to return home after 1989! The bad faith of these Czech begrudgers would be inferred from their attempts to smear Kundera’s good name with baseless accusations, for example that he was a police informer. (For a dismissal much like this, see Jean-Dominique Brierre’s 2019 biography Milan Kundera, Une vie d’écrivain.)

more here.