From Scientia Salon:

This article focuses on a case that expert practitioners count as an explanation: a mathematical account of Plateau’s laws for soap films. I argue that this example falls into a class of explanations that I call abstract explanations. Abstract explanations involve an appeal to a more abstract entity than the state of affairs being explained. I show that the abstract entity need not be causally relevant to the explanandum for its features to be explanatorily relevant. However, it remains unclear how to unify abstract and causal explanations as instances of a single sort of thing. I conclude by examining the implications of the claim that explanations require objective dependence relations. If this claim is accepted, then there are several kinds of objective dependence relations.

More here.

Matthew Beaumont in The Guardian:

Who walks alone in the streets at night? The sad, the mad, the bad. The lost, the lonely. The sleepless, the homeless. All the city’s internal exiles. The night has always been the time for daylight’s dispossessed – the dissident, the different. Walking alone at night in the city by both men and women has, since time immemorial, been interpreted as a sign of moral, social or spiritual dereliction…

If solitary men on the streets at night have exercised a right to the city denied to solitary women, then they too have often been identified or represented as pariahs. People who walk about at night with no obvious reason to do so, whether male or female, have attracted suspicion, opprobrium and legal recrimination from patriarchs, politicians, priests and others in authority, including the police, for thousands of years. In 1285, Edward I introduced a specific “nightwalker statute” in order to police the movement of plebeian people – especially migrants, vagrants and prostitutes – after the 9pm curfew. But long after this statute became impossible to implement, because of the rise of “nightlife”, the authorities continued to construe nightwalking as deviant.

Today, more than ever, solitary walking at night in the streets of the city does not necessarily mean deviant movement. It may well be perfectly legitimate, purposeful. Contemporary capitalist society requires what Jonathan Crary has identified as the despoliation of sleep in the interests of maximising the individual’s potential – both as a producer and a consumer – for generating profit. The political economy of the night, in this dispensation, means that plenty of people have to commute after dark, sometimes on foot, sometimes across considerable distances.

Read the rest here.

Simon Worrall in National Geographic:

He was hailed after his death as “The Uncrowned King,” a philosopher whose sound bites of wisdom became China’s handbook on government and its code of personal morality for thousands of years. But little is known about Confucius, and what is known is full of contradiction and myth. Speaking from Washington, D.C, during a break on his book tour, Michael Schuman, author of Confucius and the World He Created, teases out fact from fiction; explains why he had to take bowing lessons before his wedding; and tells us why the influence of a scholar who died nearly 3,000 years ago is still felt in the boardrooms, bedrooms, and classrooms of nearly a quarter of humanity.

…Let’s scroll back now to 551 B.C. What do we know about Confucius, the man?

According to the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands “a remarkable thing happens to the spirit immediately after its exodus from the body. …the baloma (which is the main form of the dead man's spirit) goes to Tuma, a small island…” —from Bronislaw Malinowski's Magic, Science and Religion

Small Island

I hope my turn to leave comes in July
and there's someone willing to launch the scuffed canoe
loon barking in alarm at the sudden shadow
cast over its territory, annoyed ducks
nattering

let it be at the moment
the lake's precisely balanced — the sun holding it
by one end the moon by the other, water thick, shiny
crepuscular cream insects slurp
with a terrible greed

for incense, juniper will do
sweetened with fermenting leaves, an aroma
that follows from the shore, lingers on the skin
like old memories, fades with each stroke
of the paddle

the island — a black pincushion
cormorant and heron nests up and down dried up spruce trees
reclining fledglings, sleek Buddhist monks
in calm contemplation of sticks they've plucked
from the floor, the wall

until the next fish is flown in
and then the jostling, the squawking, the island lifting
quivering, cries of triumph and self-pity such perfect
cacophony against the deepening
silence —

let it be that island
let it be an old spruce trunk, even a clump
of reeds nearby, I could do worse than spend eternity
in the company of birds

by Anna Mioduchowska
from In-Between Seasons
Rowan Books, 1998

More here.

Ilyana Kuziemko, Michael Norton, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva over at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth:

There are several novel findings that emerge from our survey. When respondents are given the actual data on the growing income gap in the United States, their concern about the problem increases by a staggering 35 percent—an effect equal in size to roughly 36 percent of the liberal-conservative gap on this question. Moreover, viewing information about inequality also significantly influences attitudes toward two redistributive policies: the estate tax and the minimum wage (See Figure 2).

Figure 2

When respondents in the treatment group learn the small share of estates subject to the estate tax (roughly one in 1,000), they support increasing it at three times the rate of the control group—akin to cutting the political gap in half (See Figure 3). This finding is mirrored in a recent study by political scientist John Sides of George Washington University, who finds that accurate information on the small number of families subject to the estate tax substantially reduces support for repealing the tax.

More here.

Lee Billings in Scientific American:

Every once in a great while, something almost unspeakable happens to Earth. Some terrible force reaches out and tears the tree of life limb from limb. In a geological instant, countless creatures perish and entire lineages simply cease to exist.

The most famous of these mass extinctions happened about 66 million years ago, when the dinosaurs died out in the planet-wide environmental disruption that followed a mountain-sized space rock walloping Earth. We can still see the scar from the impact today as a nearly 200-kilometer-wide crater in the Yucatan Peninsula.

But this is only one of the “Big Five” cataclysmic mass extinctions recognized by paleontologists, and not even the worst. Some 252 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic mass extinction wiped out an estimated nine of every ten species on the planet—scientists call this one “the Great Dying.” In addition to the Big Five, evidence exists for dozens of other mass extinction events that were smaller and less severe. Not all of these are conclusively related to giant impacts; some are linked instead to enormous upticks in volcanic activity worldwide that caused dramatic, disruptive climate change and habitat loss. Researchers suspect that many—perhaps most—mass extinctions come about through the stresses caused by overlapping events, such as a giant impact paired with an erupting supervolcano. Maybe the worst mass extinctions are simply matters of poor timing, cases of planetary bad luck.

More here.

Tom Bartlett in The Chronicle:

Alice Dreger is feverish. On a wet, chilly Wednesday evening, in a high-ceilinged, beige ballroom at the Marriott in downtown Philadelphia, she is taking to task — eviscerating, really — the American Anthropological Association for its ham-fisted handling of allegations made in Darkness at El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, a much-heralded but ultimately discredited book by Patrick Tierney, a journalist whose tales tended toward the fanciful. That controversy needn’t be chewed over again here, and besides, Dreger isn’t talking about just one misguided book or one feckless group of scholars. She is casting a wider net, diagnosing a disorder that she fears pervades too much of what passes for reasonable intellectual discourse. “Forms of scholarship that deny evidence, that deny truth, that deny the importance of facts, even when performed in the name of good, are dangerous, not only to science and to ethics but to democracy,” she tells the Philadelphia crowd.

You’re not just hurting yourselves, people. You’re hurting America. That was in December 2009. I happened to be in the room that night, scribbling in a steno pad, pleased to have something interesting to cover. The rebuttal to her rousing remarks seemed sniffy and weirdly muted, embarrassed almost. Perhaps Dreger had violated the bylaws by saying precisely what she meant. Dreger writes about that skirmish, and many others, in her new book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (Penguin Press), and reveals in passing that she was suffering from whooping cough that night and running entirely on adrenaline and a highly developed sense of outrage. The book is not about Galileo, except glancingly, and it’s not about anthropology, except in the section discussing the El Dorado debacle. Much of it is about gender and genitalia. There is a chapter on the motivations of rapists. There is an account of Dreger’s difficult, years-long and still-active campaign against a steroid sometimes given to pregnant woman, an effort that succeeded in “nearly crushing my reputation and my spirit.”

There is swearing (“postmodernist horseshit”) and drinking (“I ordered a gin and tonic for myself, and then another”). Insults are hurled. Enemies are made. Tears are shed.

More here.

Eula Bliss at The New York Times:

Heidi Julavits once said that keeping a diary when she was young is what made her a writer. Julavits, the author of four novels, ­revisits that story in the opening pages of her latest work, “The Folded Clock.” She tells of returning to her childhood diaries ­after making that claim, looking for ­evidence of the writer she would ­become. “The actual diaries, however, fail to corroborate the myth I’d concocted for ­myself,” she admits. “They reveal me to possess the mind, not of a future writer, but of a future paranoid tax auditor. I exhibited no imagination, no trace of a style, no wit, no personality.” With “The ­Folded Clock,” she corrects the ­record. Keeping a ­diary may not have made her a writer, but becoming a writer has made it ­possible for her to produce, now, an exquisite diary.

This diary is a diary in the way that Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” is a confession, or that Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” is a journal, or that Sei Shonagon’s “Pillow Book” is a pillow book. Meaning it is, and it isn’t. “The Folded Clock” refuses one of the primary conventions of the diary: chronology. The entry for July 16 is followed by Oct. 18, which is followed by June 18. Time moves loosely forward, so that the final entries occur a year or two after the initial entries, but time loops and circles forward.

more here.

Orem Ochiel at The Quarterly Conversation:

New anthologies of African fiction seem to materialize virtually every year, if not more often in recent years. When presented with the physical fact of yet another new anthology of African fiction, the immediate question, one which I was asked when I pressed the warm, bound pages of the Africa39 anthology into the even warmer hands of a new acquaintance, was: why should I read this?

One might consider merit and credentials. For African writers and readers there are a clutch of big-ticket prizes, scholarships, and fellowships that are relevant (in order of increasing size of cash payout): The African Poetry Prize, The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, The Caine Prize (which The Guardian calls “the African Booker”), The Etisalat Prize, The Morland Scholarship. These endowments are, to coin a phrase, optimally relevant because they guarantee the authors (roughly in order of priority): international exposure (The New York Times recently hailed, as a trend, the “new wave of African writers with an internationalist bent,” some of whom are part of the Africa39, others who are friends or mentors to a number of the less well-known Africa39), Africa-wide recognition, reliable publishing opportunities, renowned mentors/editors, future awards, a sustainable life as a professional writer, and lots of travel. These award recipients are the authors who, in the decades of their ascendancy, will be read widely, will speak prodigiously, will be quoted and cited extensively, and whose names will come to characterize (if not define, and even represent) who African writers are and what African literature is on the world stage.

more here.

Andrew Brown at The Guardian:

He wrote in exceptionally pure, cold Swedish without frills. His descriptions of nature were as sparse and alive as a Japanese painting. In fact, in later life, he attempted to write haiku in Swedish. Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, said: “One of the secrets of his success around the world is that he’s writing about everyday stuff. The economy of words that you can see in his poems is manifested in the economy of his output; you can get the core of his work in a pocket book of 220 pages. You can get through it in an evening.”

Björn Wiman, writing in the Stockholm paper Dagens Nyheter, praised him for his capacity to transform the everyday into astonishment. “His poem C Major is almost unique in the history of literature, since it both describes and summons up pure delight.”

The Guardian praised him when he won the prize as “unobtrusively unforgettable”, a writer “whose style is so simple as to make most words seem vain and superfluous. In translation, some of the slippery hard simplicities of his lyricism can melt like ice. But enough remains to show a poet who transforms the ordinary in apparently ordinary language. The world he sees is sometimes bleak or terrible, but it is always also full of promise no less real for being inexpressible: ‘The only thing I want to say glints out of reach, like silver in a pawnbroker’s’.”

more here.

William Langewiesche in The Atlantic (originally published 2001):

But that's getting ahead of the story. Back on October 31, 1999, with the first news of the crash, it was hard to imagine any form of pilot error that could have condemned the airplane to such a sustained and precipitous dive. What switch could the crew have thrown, what lever? Nothing came to mind. And why had they perished so silently, without a single distress call on the radio? A total electrical failure was very unlikely, and would not explain the loss of control. A fire would have given them time to talk. One thing was certain: the pilots were either extremely busy or incapacitated from the start. Of course there was always the possibility of a terrorist attack—a simple if frightening solution. But otherwise something had gone terribly wrong with the airplane itself, and that could be just as bad. There are more than 800 Boeing 767s in the world's airline fleet, and they account for more transatlantic flights than all other airplanes combined. They are also very similar in design to the smaller and equally numerous Boeing 757s. So there was plenty of reason for alarm.

One of the world's really important divides lies between nations that react well to accidents and nations that do not. This is as true for a confined and technical event like the crash of a single flight as it is for political or military disasters. The first requirement is a matter of national will, and never a sure thing: it is the intention to get the story right, wherever the blame may lie. The second requirement follows immediately upon the first, and is probably easier to achieve: it is the need for people in the aftermath to maintain even tempers and open minds. The path they follow may not be simple, but it can provide for at least the possibility of effective resolutions.

Read the rest here.

Michael White in Pacific Standard (Photo: epsos/Flickr):

The idea that our DNA, rather than being an immutable fact of our biology, is actually responsive to changes in our health and our environment is what makes people so enthusiastic about epigenetics. According to a popular metaphor, our genes themselves may be written in ink, but they're marked up in pencil—which can be erased and re-done. By developing drugs or treatments that modify these pencil marks, so the thinking goes, we can escape the limits imposed by our genes, which can't be changed. Cancer, for example, is caused by genetic mutations that can't be undone, but it is also characterized by abnormal epigenetic marks, which can potentially be reversed. Researchers have struggled for years, with little success, to fix our genetic print by repairing mutations with gene therapy. But in some cases we may not need to repair mutations if we can re-work the epigenetic pencil marks instead.

If this idea is right, the impact could be tremendous, because researchers have found epigenetic changes associated with almost everything. Distinct patterns of epigenetic marks are found not only in cancer, but most other common diseases as well, including psychiatric ones like depression and addiction. Differences in epigenetic marks are being linked with differences in socioeconomic status, and one study found epigenetic changes in suicide victims who had suffered childhood abuse. Even more worrying is the idea (still largely speculative) that epigenetic marks can be passed on from one generation to the next, meaning that parents may pass on the effects of their poor health choices, diet, or social environment to their children.

The potentially broad impact of epigenetics has drawn the attention of social scientists, who are not usually worried about the details of molecular biology. A team of bioethicists has called epigenetics one of the most “legally and ethically significant cutting-edge subjects of scientific discovery” because “a large range of environmental, dietary, behavioral, and medical experiences can significantly affect the future development and health of an individual and their offspring.”

This sounds both liberating and terrifying at the same time: Our destinies are not fixed by our genes, and yet much of what we do and experience could have a profound effect on the biological make-up of ourselves and our children. But the hype has outrun the science.

More here.

Over at Radio Open Source:

In his latest book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, Lewis sounds worried. After that last great crash, finance has gone digital. The action has moved off the downtown trading floors and into black-box servers stationed in New Jersey. Wall Street’s work has become so automatic, algorithmic and obscure that ordinary buyers and sellers have less understanding than ever of what’s happening with their savings.

In Flash Boys Michael Lewis focused on the practice of ‘high-frequency trading’ — a game of arbitrage conducted in the course of microseconds, well handled on Radiolab. But in a new afterword he says HFT is just a symptom of a larger problem. The market’s big players have once again abdicated their “clear responsibility to protect investors… and to create a fair marketplace,” meaning that the game may be more dangerous than ever.

So we’re asking the $64,000 question: can we build a more crash-proof, less leveraged, more equitable financial system? Our guest Jeremy Allaire would argue that the technology known as Bitcoin can do just that: bring back transparency and a simple standard of honest exchange. But we’re reminded that the American dream runs on credit — and we may just be too dependent on the boom-and-bust market we’ve made.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Malaria is caused by single-celled parasites called Plasmodium. A female mosquito carries them in its gut as it flies around in search of a victim to bite. After the parasites mature, they push through the insect’s gut wall, eventually making their way into its salivary glands. When the mosquito lands on a person and drills into the skin, it pushes some of its Plasmodium-laden saliva into the wound.

The parasites now begin their long journey through the human body. They get pushed by the surges of the bloodstream to the liver, where they invade cells and multiply inside them. The infected liver cells erupt with the next stage of Plasmodium’s life cycle, called merozoites. The merozoites end up back into the bloodstream, where they now invade red blood cells. They multiply yet again, rupturing the blood cells and invading new ones. Eventually the parasites achieve the next stage in their life cycle, when they’re ready at last to get sucked up by a hungry mosquito in a meal of blood.

If Plasmodium can’t get into a mosquito, all of this multiplication is for naught. So anything that the parasite can do to increase the odds of a successful exit can potentially be favored by natural selection. Last year, for example, a team of researchers found that mosquitoes were attracted to mice infected with Plasmodium parasites–but only when they were ready to leave their rodent host. The scientists found evidence that the parasites engineer this attraction by changing the odor of the mice. Infected mice give off odor molecules that draw mosquitoes to them.

More here.