From Blackpast.org:

He was born to John C. and Sarah Peck in Carlisle, Pennsylvania around 1826. John Peck was a prominent abolitionist and minister who founded the local African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Carlisle. Peck was also a barber and wigmaker. John and Sarah Peck moved to Pittsburgh in the early 1830s where they established the first school for black children in the area. David was one of their first students. Between 1844 and 1846 David Peck studied medicine under Dr. Joseph P. Gaszzam, an anti-slavery white doctor in Pittsburgh. He then entered Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1846, three years after the institution opened. After he graduated in 1847, Peck toured the state of Ohio with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass promoting abolitionist ideals. His status as the first black graduate of a medical college was used by abolitionists to promote the idea of full black citizenship and was implicitly an attack on slavery. In 1849 Peck established his practice in Philadelphia. He lived in and worked from a red brick row house with his wife, Mary E. Peck, whom he married on July 24, 1849. Peck's medical practice, however, was not successful. Few doctors recognized his status, referred patients to him, or consulted with him.

Peck closed his medical practice in Philadelphia in 1851 and was preparing to travel to California when Martin Delany, an old friend and fellow Pittsburgh abolitionist, persuaded him instead to participate in an emigration project that would resettle U.S. free blacks in Central America. Delany, Peck, and other black emigrants moved to Nicaragua in 1852, settling on the east coast of the nation. The emigrants established San Juan Del Norte with Delaney as the mayor and commander of the militia. Peck practiced medicine and became the town physician. In 1854 he joined the Liberal side in the Nicaraguan Civil War and was killed by cannon fire in the town of Granada in January 1855. Dr. Peck was buried in the town square of the city of Granada.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Giulio Chiribella in Nautilus:

Let’s play a game. You get a box with two compartments and one ball. The ball could be in either compartment with equal probability, and my job is to guess which one. Ok, it’s not the most exciting game, but at least it’s fair. My odds are 50/50.

But suppose I know that your box was produced in a factory where a conveyor belt brought boxes to a cannon, which shot balls into one compartment or another depending on a coin toss. The coin toss was done once a day, and all the boxes produced on the same day have the ball in the same compartment. If I managed to get a box that was produced on the same day as yours, I would be able to win the game with certainty. So much for being fair.

The lesson is clear: Whether or not our game is fair depends on whether or not the ball in your box is correlated with some other system in my possession. In order to be sure that I don’t cheat, you need to collect all the systems that are correlated with your box and keep them safely in your control. But how can you be confident that you’ve collected all of them? The strongest guarantee is that your systems are in what physicists call a “pure state,” which means that nothing else can be correlated with it, and that you have maximal knowledge of your systems. A “mixed state,” on the other hand, gives you only partial knowledge, and some essential information can hide elsewhere.

And just like that, we have come to an idea at the heart of quantum mechanics, called the Purification Principle.

More here.

Before he entered politics, Yanis Varoufakis, the iconoclastic Greek finance minister at the centre of the latest eurozone standoff, wrote this searing account of European capitalism and and how the left can learn from Marx’s mistakes.

Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian:

In 2008, capitalism had its second global spasm. The financial crisis set off a chain reaction that pushed Europe into a downward spiral that continues to this day. Europe’s present situation is not merely a threat for workers, for the dispossessed, for the bankers, for social classes or, indeed, nations. No, Europe’s current posture poses a threat to civilisation as we know it.

If my prognosis is correct, and we are not facing just another cyclical slump soon to be overcome, the question that arises for radicals is this: should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising European capitalism?

To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath, while extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come.

For this view I have been accused, by well-meaning radical voices, of being “defeatist” and of trying to save an indefensible European socioeconomic system. This criticism, I confess, hurts. And it hurts because it contains more than a kernel of truth.

I share the view that this European Union is typified by a large democratic deficit that, in combination with the denial of the faulty architecture of its monetary union, has put Europe’s peoples on a path to permanent recession. And I also bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated. I confess I would much rather be promoting a radical agenda, the raison d’être of which is to replace European capitalism with a different system.

Yet my aim here is to offer a window into my view of a repugnant European capitalism whose implosion, despite its many ills, should be avoided at all costs. It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

You don’t need a field guide to recognise a luna moth. This large insect, found throughout the eastern half of North America, is unmistakeable. It has a fuzzy white body, red legs, feathery yellow antennae, and huge lime-green wings that can stretch up to 4.5 inches across. And at the end of its hindwings are a pair of long, streaming tails that can double the moth’s length.

In 1903, an entomologist named Archibald Weeks suggested that the tails direct predators away from the moth’s body. “Again and again may predator bat or bird, in an effort to capture a moth or butterfly, successively tear away sections of the tails, of which a sacrifice can be readily afforded, without disabling it or retarding its flight,” he wrote.

He was roughly right. More than a century on, Jesse Barber from Boise State University has shown that the luna moth’s tails are the equivalent of eyespotson fish and butterflies. These distinctive markings are typically found on dispensable body parts like tails and outer wings. They serve to draw a predator’s attention away from more vulnerable regions; better to lose a tail than a head.

Eyespots are visual defences, and bats—the main nemeses of moths—are not visual hunters. They find their prey with sonar—they make high-pitched squeaks and visualise the world using the rebounding echoes. To divert a bat, you need something that makes distracting echoes.

More here.

Oliver Sacks in the New York Times:

A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

More here.

From Blackpast.org:

Macon Bolling Allen is believed to be the first black man in the United States who was licensed to practice law. Born Allen Macon Bolling in 1816 in Indiana, he grew up a free man. Bolling learned to read and write on his on his own and eventually landed his first a job as a schoolteacher where he further refined his skills. In the early 1840s Bolling moved from Indiana to Portland, Maine. There he changed his name to Macon Bolling Allen and became friends with local anti-slavery leader General Samuel Fessenden, who had recently begun a law practice. Fessenden took on Allen as an apprentice/law clerk. By 1844 Allen had acquired enough proficiency that Fessenden introduced him to the Portland District court and stated that he thought Allen should be able to practice as a lawyer. He was refused on the grounds that he was not a citizen, though according to Maine law anyone “of good moral character” could be admitted to the bar. He then decided to apply for admission by examination. After passing the exam and earning his recommendation he was declared a citizen of Maine and given his license to practice law on July 3, 1844.

Finding work in Maine, however, was difficult. There were few blacks there willing and able to hire Allen and most whites were unwilling to have a black man represent them in court. In 1845 Allen moved to Boston, Massachusetts where he met his wife Hannah Allen. They had five sons together, most of whom became teachers. Allen passed the Massachusetts Bar Exam on May 5, 1845. Shortly afterwards he and Robert Morris, Jr., opened the first black law office in the United States. Allen soon set his sights even higher; in 1848 he passed another rigorous exam to become Justice of the Peace for Middlesex County, Massachusetts. In addition to his license to practice law he is believed to be the first black man to hold a judiciary position.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Tennis in the Snow

You looked up from your book, and apropos
of nothing, asked: Did I ever tell you
I played tennis once in the snow?

No, I said. You didn't. Where was this?

Tennis in the snow! you said again.
It was … in Colorado. No, in Kansas.
I was a young captain.

Did you win?

I don't know. I'd play this guy at the base.
Marty. I can see us laughing,
slipping and sliding all over the place.

Were tennis balls still white back then?

(A smile from you.) No, they were yellow
already. It was the early eighties.
It wasn't all that long ago.

*

Oh, I said. That's a shame.
I'm picturing the big white flakes
whirling around, and part of the game

is that you guys could hardly tell
the difference between falling snow
and the big white fuzzy tennis ball

or even the full moon that would seem
to lob over the net that night,
like a movie or in a dream.

Sorry, I said. I should leave it there.
I just wanted to be mixed up in it,
the place where your memories are.
.

by Mary Jo Salter
from The Antioch Review, Winter 2015

Claire Ainsworth in Nature:

As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex. A 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited his clinic at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby's chromosomes for abnormalities. The baby was fine — but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother's womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male¹. “That's kind of science-fiction material for someone who just came in for an amniocentesis,” says James.

Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD². When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions.

…So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

More here.

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan in Gizmodo:

No one seemed to notice him: A dark figure who often came to stand at the edge of London's Hammersmith Bridge on nights in 1916. No one seemed to notice, either, that during his visits he was dropping something into the River Thames. Something heavy.

Over the course of more than a hundred illicit nightly trips, this man was committing a crime—against his partner, a man who owned half of what was being heaved into the Thames, and against himself, the force that had spurred its creation. This venerable figure, founder of the legendary Doves Press and the mastermind of its typeface, was a man named T.J. Cobden Sanderson. And he was taking the metal type that he had painstakingly overseen and dumping thousands of pounds of it into the river.

As a driving force in the Arts & Crafts movement in England, Cobden Sanderson championed traditional craftsmanship against the rising tides of industrialization. He was brilliant and creative, and in some ways, a luddite—because he was concerned that the typeface he had designed would be sold to a mechanized printing press after his death by his business partner, with whom he was feuding.

So, night after night, he was making it his business to “bequeath” it to the river, in his words, screwing his partner out of his half of their work and destroying a legendarily beautiful typeface forever. Or so it seemed.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Starts With A Bang:

This past week, the Powerball lottery jackpot went past $500,000,000, one of the largest sums in history, where the $564.1 million jackpot wound upbeing split by three winners. In order to win, you need to match five normallottery numbers — white balls numbered 1-through-59 — plus the Powerball: a red ball numbered 1-through-35. Each Powerball ticket costs $2, plus you have the option to pay an extra $1 to activate the power play, a multiplier that increases your payout for non-jackpot prizes.

Of course, if you win, you’ll conclude it will have been worth it, even if the payout was small, while if you lose, you’ll probably conclude that it wasn’tworth it. (Until the next drawing, of course, when you get another chance!)

But what does mathematics have to say about this? In particular:

• What are your odds of winning each individual combination?
• How much does each winning possibility pay out?
• Is it worth it to activate the power play option?
• And finally, how big does the jackpot have to be in order for playing the Powerball lottery to be “worth it”?

When you say worth it, by the way, it has a very specific meaning when it comes to mathematics. It means that the amount you can expect to win, on average, is greater than the amount you have to bet in order to play.

More here.

Roger Cohen in the New York Times:

After a Danish movie director at a seminar on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” and a Danish Jew guarding a synagogue were shot dead in Copenhagen, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the prime minister of Denmark, uttered a familiar trope:

“We are not in the middle of a battle between Islam and the West. It’s not a battle between Muslims and non-Muslims. It’s a battle between values based on the freedom of the individual and a dark ideology.”

This statement — with its echoes of President Obama’s vague references to “violent extremists” uncoupled from the fundamentalist Islam to which said throat-cutting extremists pledge allegiance — scarcely stands up to scrutiny. It is empty talk.

Across a wide swath of territory, in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, the West has been or is at war, or near-war, with the Muslim world, in a failed bid to eradicate a metastasizing Islamist movement of murderous hatred toward Western civilization.

To call this movement, whose most potent recent manifestation is the Islamic State, a “dark ideology” is like calling Nazism a reaction to German humiliation in World War I: true but wholly inadequate. There is little point in Western politicians rehearsing lines about there being no battle between Islam and the West, when in all the above-mentioned countries tens of millions of Muslims, with much carnage as evidence, believe the contrary.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

In the 1930s, when the Nazis took power in Germany, Frans Masereel’s works were almost immediately given the “degenerate” label and banned. Masereel and his wife fled to London and then Paris. During the German occupation of France, they assumed false identities and lived in hiding, traveling from town to town until the war’s end. In 1949, Masereel settled in the old port in Nice, where he lived quietly until his death in 1972.

War, affirmed Thomas Mann, was the inspiration behind Masereel’s art. This is a funny observation to make about an artist who was a devout pacifist. Of himself, Masereel said, “If someone were to wish to sum up my work in a few words, he could say that it is dedicated to the tormented, directed against tormentors in all areas of social and spiritual life, it speaks out for the fraternity of humanity, turns against all whose aim is to set people at odds with each other or incite conflict, it is addressed to those who desire peace and despise warmongers.” Like many European artists of his generation, Frans Masereel was in physical exile. But he was, as a pacifist during two great wars, a spiritual exile. In refusing to take up arms, Frans Masereel spent much of his life watching.

Throughout his career, Masereel found himself in the curious position of re-creating scenes of war in which he did not actually fight. Although he was, as Mann said, very much influenced by war, the primary tension in Frans Masereel’s work is that of an artist caught between the roles of participant and observer.

more here.

Dominic Sandbrook at Literary Review:

The real pleasure of this book, though, comes from Judt's evisceration of other historians. He was a quite brilliant bad reviewer. Some of his targets seem a little too easy: among the pieces here is a full-blooded assault on Vesna Goldsworthy's bookInventing Ruritania, a sub-Edward Said account of the Western 'invention' of the Balkans, in which 'everything is imagined, represented, constructed, Orientalized'. But what was refreshing about Judt is that he was not afraid to go out big game hunting. The very first essay in the book, for example, is a supremely perceptive review of Eric Hobsbawm's book The Age of Extremes, absurdly overpraised in many circles. Judt rightly acknowledges Hobsbawm's strengths: the sweep of his narrative, the accessibility of his prose. But he shows very clearly how Hobsbawm, as an unrepentant Marxist, fudged and distorted the history of the early Cold War and failed to deal properly with the terror of Stalin's regime, which he implicitly supported for so long.

The book's most blistering essay, though, is an extraordinary review of Norman Davies's bestseller Europe: A History. Indeed, I am not sure I have ever read a long review that is quite so damning. Europe is not just 'littered with embarrassing and egregious errors', says Judt, 'it is a truly unsavoury book'. In one unforgettable aside, he develops an elaborate comparison between Professor Davies and Mr Toad, united by their 'unself-conscious immodesty'.

more here.

Thomas Chatterton Williams at The Point:

This improbable, practically monastic midlife pivot away from the demands and rewards of artistic production and toward the cerebral pleasures of this insular game both mirrored and anticipated the progression of modern art—the impulse being always to strip down and arrive at what is most essential. “Reduce, reduce, reduce was my thought,” he explained years later. “But at the same time my aim was turning inward, rather than toward externals. And later, following this view, I came to feel that an artist might use anything—a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol—to say what he wanted to say.”

Duchamp’s sudden turn to chess might be seen as nothing more than this modernist impulse taken to its logical extreme. Though in the popular imagination we tend to think of the game of chess, when taken as a serious pursuit, as the domain of extreme nerds of the Bobby Fischer mold, in the figure of Duchamp we can see something much more romantic and daring at work. Chess, far from being some dry or merely scientific hobby, becomes a legitimate artistic endeavor in its own right—and perhaps even a purer creative expression than all of the rest. Duchamp seemed to conclude as much: “Not all artists are chess players,” he famously quipped, “but all chess players are artists.”

more here.

Laura Levis in Harvard Magazine:

Could genetic code determine someone’s Starbucks habit? Apparently so, according to a new study by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). Their data suggest that people instinctively regulate their coffee intake in order to experience the optimal effects of caffeine. Produced with the support of the Coffee and Caffeine Genetics Consortium and published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry this past fall, the study—one of several recent HSPH investigations of the popular beverage—involved a meta-analysis of genomic data from more than 120,000 regular coffee drinkers of European and African ancestry. The researchers analyzed their subjects’ genetic makeup through DNA sequencing, and compared those results to self-reported coffee-drinking figures, in an effort to understand why some people need more of the stimulant than others to feel the same effect.

Lead author Marilyn Cornelis, a former research associate in the HSPH nutrition department who is now assistant professor in preventive medicine at Northwestern, says their findings provide insight not only on why caffeine affects people differently, but also on how these effects influence coffee-drinking behavior. One individual, for example, may need three cups of coffee to feel invigorated, while another may need only one. If that one-cup-a-day person consumes four cups instead, Cornelis explains, any jitters or other ill effects that result may discourage that level of consumption in the future.

More here.

Soffly Soffly Nesta Skank
.

boy Marley
armed & ganjaras
soffly soffly his spliff a mystrical cloud
thirsty as he pores into the book
of nolej of wrong & rise
ever so the drumthud & bass gong
move us to skank
while they having fun/k in Babylon
as one more of my peopleses
slumps into his mouthful of gurgling blood

for the pigses
who haven’t known the sun
but interstellar con & contraption
for their politishams
who haven’t known love
but the bleeding triggah of lies
that quiets the poor
for the slipperous slime
home in their shrunken hearts
we’ll be burning all illusion tonight
& banging munition all night
.

by Seitlhamo Motsapi
from: earthstepper/the ocean is very shallow
publisher: Deep South, South Africa

Dimiter Kenarov at VQR:

Crimea has fascinated the Russian imagination for centuries. Once governed by the powerful and terrifying Crimean Khanate, a Turco-Mongol vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, the peninsula became part of Russia in 1783, when it was annexed by Catherine the Great. If St. Petersburg was the empire’s modern “window to the West,” Crimea was the southern casement overlooking the classical world, an ancient land of fairy tales and oriental myth. With its verdant mountains rising out of a wine-dark sea, Crimea, along with the Caucasus region a bit farther down the coast, became a locus of inspiration for the Russian Romantic movement. It was an “enchanting region” and a “spot of fairy dreams,” as Alexander Pushkin wrote in “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray,” a long poem about the tragic love of a Crimean khan for one of his Christian captives.

Drawn to its romantic aura, noblemen and artists slowly began to transform the region into a bohemian playground dotted with palaces and elaborate villas, casinos and bathing establishments and fashionable promenades that ran along the rugged coast. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Crimea had become “the garden of the empire” and “the Russian Riviera.” Peace was briefly interrupted in the 1850s by the Crimean War, in which Leo Tolstoy fought as an army officer.

more here.