Jimena Canales in Nautilus:

On April 6, 1922, Einstein met a man he would never forget. He was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the century, widely known for espousing a theory of time that explained what clocks did not: memories, premonitions, expectations, and anticipations. Thanks to him, we now know that to act on the future one needs to start by changing the past. Why does one thing not always lead to the next? The meeting had been planned as a cordial and scholarly event. It was anything but that. The physicist and the philosopher clashed, each defending opposing, even irreconcilable, ways of understanding time. At the Société française de philosophie—one of the most venerable institutions in France—they confronted each other under the eyes of a select group of intellectuals. The “dialogue between the greatest philosopher and the greatest physicist of the 20th century” was dutifully written down.¹ It was a script fit for the theater. The meeting, and the words they uttered, would be discussed for the rest of the century.

The philosopher’s name was Henri Bergson. In the early decades of the century, his fame, prestige, and influence surpassed that of the physicist—who, in contrast, is so well known today. Bergson was compared to Socrates, Copernicus, Kant, Simón Bolívar, and even Don Juan. The philosopher John Dewey claimed that “no philosophic problem will ever exhibit just the same face and aspect that it presented before Professor Bergson.” William James, the Harvard professor and famed psychologist, described Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) as “a true miracle,” marking the “beginning of a new era.” For James, Matter and Memory (1896) created “a sort of Copernican revolution as much as Berkeley’s Principles or Kant’s Critique did.” The philosopher Jean Wahl once said that “if one had to name the four great philosophers one could say: Socrates, Plato—taking them together—Descartes, Kant, and Bergson.” The philosopher and historian of philosophy Étienne Gilson categorically claimed that the first third of the 20th century was “the age of Bergson.” He was simultaneously considered “the greatest thinker in the world” and “the most dangerous man in the world.” Many of his followers embarked on “mystical pilgrimages” to his summer home in Saint-Cergue, Switzerland.

More here.

Jacob Harris in The Atlantic:

One of the joys of modern technology is how easy it is to immerse yourself in the past. Every day, more libraries and archives are pushing pieces of their collections online in easily browsable interfaces.

The New York Public Library, for instance, has historic menus and interactive floor plans. Chronicling America is a searchable repository of newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from the Library of Congress, which is also one of the many institutions in the Flickr Commons public image archive. Wikipedia has its own Wikimedia Commons, to which anybody can upload images and videos. Project Gutenberg continues to add new public-domain books to its collection every day, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has posted thousands of images online with metadata as part of its Open Access for Scholarly Collections initiative.

My personal favorite however is TimesMachine, a site available to all New York Times subscribers that lets readers virtually flip through any historical issue of The New York Times all the way up through 2002. The site delivers the reader directly to the past, making you feel like a cross between a tourist and an archaeologist. You might start by visiting a historic event—say, coverage of the Titanic sinking—but the real fun is wandering off the beaten path and exploring all the other news of the day. On the same day the Titanic sank, there was also coverage of a gun battle in Greenwich Village, and a passenger lost in a runaway balloon. On any day, such vignettes sometimes become rabbit holes to the past.

This is the story of how I ended up captivated by a chance encounter with a 135-year-old newspaper advertisement—and how the random face staring back at me from the archives would reveal the surprising origins of ASCII art, a graphic design technique that’s usually associated with 20th-century computer art.

More here.

Alex Wellerstein in The New Yorker:

The demonstration began on the afternoon of May 21, 1946, at a secret laboratory tucked into a canyon some three miles from Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atom bomb. Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist, was showing his colleagues how to bring the exposed core of a nuclear weapon nearly to the point of criticality, a tricky operation known as “tickling the dragon’s tail.” The core, sitting by itself on a squat table, looked unremarkable—a hemisphere of dull metal with a nub of plutonium sticking out of its center, the whole thing warm to the touch because of its radioactivity. It had been quickly molded into shape after the bombing of Nagasaki, to be used in another attack on Japan, then reallocated when it turned out not to be needed for the war effort. At that time, Slotin was perhaps the world’s foremost expert on handling dangerous quantities of plutonium. He had helped assemble the first atomic weapon, barely a year earlier, and a contemporary photograph shows him standing beside its innards with his shirt unbuttoned and sunglasses on, cool and collected. Back then, the bomb was a handmade, artisanal product.

Slotin’s procedure was simple. He would lower a half-shell of beryllium, called the tamper, over the core, stopping just before it was snugly seated. The tamper would reflect back the neutrons that were shooting off the plutonium, jump-starting a weak and short-lived nuclear chain reaction, on which the physicists could then gather data. Slotin held the tamper in his left hand. In his right hand, he held a long screwdriver, which he planned to wedge between the two components, keeping them apart. As he began the slow and painstaking process of lowering the tamper, one of his colleagues, Raemer Schreiber, turned away to focus on other work, expecting that the experiment would be uninteresting until several more moments had passed. But suddenly he heard a sound behind him: Slotin’s screwdriver had slipped, and the tamper had dropped fully over the core. When Schreiber turned around, he saw a flash of blue light and felt a wave of heat on his face.

More here.

Edward Docx in Prospect:

Dylan turns 75 on 24th May. For millions of devotees like myself—many of whom consider him the world’s greatest living artist—it is a moment of celebration tinged with apprehension. Joan Baez, his most significant early anointer-disciple (Joan the Baptist), best expresses what might be described as “the Dylan feeling” in the excellent Martin Scorsese 2005 documentary when she says: “There are no veils, curtains, doors, walls, anything, between what pours out of Bob’s hand on to the page and what is somehow available to the core of people who are believers in him. Some people would say, ‘not interested,’ but if you are interested, he goes way, way deep.” I love this for lots of reasons but most of all because it captures not only the religious devotion that many who love him feel, but also the bemused indifference of the sane and secular who do not.

Of course, the first order of business when writing about Dylan is to urge readers to ignore writers who write about Dylan. We are like Jehovah’s Witnesses, forever tramping door to door with our clumsy bonhomie and earnest smudgy leaflets; in all honesty, you would be much better off seeking out the resonant majesty of the actual work. Indeed, you’ll be relieved—and possibly endeared—to hear that Dylan himself considers his disciples to be deranged. “Why is it when people talk about me they have to go crazy?” Dylan asked in a recent interview for Rolling Stone. “What the fuck is the matter with them?”

More here.

Ralph Jones in New Humanist:

Few atheists know the Bible as intimately as Dan Barker. Few, after all, can profess to have begun their careers as fundamentalist Christian preachers. Currently co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, an American non-profit organisation, Barker was a self-proclaimed “extremist” for 19 years, until he renounced the faith. Given how vehemently the 66-year-old now defends a life free of any supernatural authority, I ask him if he regrets the consequences that his Christian ministry may have had on people he would now describe as vulnerable. “Yes, I do regret a lot of it,” he says with candour. “I would counsel people to pray for healing. That’s dangerous. That’s harmful. People die from that. And I acted irresponsibly with my health, because I knew that God was going to take care of me.” This is a window that, once opened, is difficult to close. Barker reels off multiple instances in which he believes that he seriously damaged the lives of his parishioners.

In Arizona, a woman approached him, looking for faith healing to cure her of an illness. The two prayed together and when, inevitably, it did nothing, he said, “Let it be unto you according to your faith” (a reference to a line originally found in Matthew 8:13). “In other words,” Barker says, “it was her fault. She walked out of that meeting not only not healed but feeling chastised. It’s not a kind way to treat another human being.” In his mid-twenties, he counselled a woman who was struggling with an abusive husband. Barker told her to persevere with him because, as the Bible says, he would eventually see the light. “So I counselled a woman to stay in an abusive relationship, because the Bible says that you are married for life.” What would he say if she approached him with the same problem now? “I would tell her to run for the nearest shelter and get out of there.” Barker may have left religion behind but he is still a preacher of sorts. His latest book, God: the Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, draws on his knowledge of scripture to attack the Bible’s claim to moral authority.

…I am interested in Barker’s views on Donald Trump, the man taking alarmingly large strides up the escalator of US politics. “It seems to me that there’s an awful lot of shallow support for people like Trump,” he says. The Republican candidate has appealed to the supposed “Christian” character of the US as a way to mobilise prejudice against Muslims. His followers seem to believe that he is a Christian but Barker sees this more as identity politics than evangelism. “He doesn’t know that much about the Bible. He doesn’t speak the Christian lingo.”

More here.

Jennifer Hackett in Scientific American:

For most people a single bee or wasp sting is one too many. But University of Arizona entomologist Justin Schmidt is a dramatic exception: By his own estimation he has been stung more than 1,000 times by at least 80 kinds of insects as part of his job. After unintentionally collecting a few different types of stings while conducting fieldwork to investigate the social behavior of stinging insects, Schmidt decided to take a cue from medical science and create a sting pain index that ranked each sting on a scale of 1 to 4 with eloquent, almost poetic descriptions of the pain (or lack thereof) they caused. The scale, Schmidt hoped, would help reveal how the ability to sting—and the type of sting delivered—serve different insects and enable their respective social structures.

In his new book The Sting of the Wild, which came out this week and was published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Schmidt explains the roles of stings in insect society in great detail. He devotes chapters to how different insects inflict their respective flavors of pain, covering creatures from fire ants to tarantula hawk wasps to honeybees. For the first time, Schmidt’s full sting pain index and his thoughts on each experience—including such comments as “like coffee, but oh so bitter” for a low-level sting or “like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut” for a higher one—is published at the end of the book. Even though the pain-laced topic might leave you wincing, Schmidt’s engaging and entertaining writing makes for a tale worth reading.

More here.

Afternoon in Siena

—After Cavafy

Soon I will know this room.
It will have become familiar.
Then sometime after I’ve left
they’ll rent it to another writer
or student, a couple on holiday
for a long weekend.
For now I’ll try to fix it in my mind,
this ordinary room with its cold
tile floor without a rug,
the low chair and ugly wardrobe
with its foxed glass,
the shuttered windows that open
onto the narrow street where
in the evening a small dog yaps
and yelps beneath the washing line,
the purple canopy of wisteria.
And in the corner, of course,
the messy bed, where in another life
we might have made love –
the afternoon sun
bathing us in liquid light –
if only I knew who you were.

by Sue Hubbard
.

S. Abbas Raza. Untitled, 2016.

Digital photograph.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Of the thousand images stored in my mind’s archives, there is only one of me holding a book. The result of what they call a flashbulb memory, where a shock imprints every detail of a scene on the mind forever, it permits me to view a single moment in my dorm at high school: were it not for the book, I would have forgotten everything — the peculiar darkness that used to fall across only half the room, its twin closets, the honey color of their wood, the fact that my hair reached the bottom of my shoulder blades in 1974. The book I hold, frozen in mid-turn, isPilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Pilgrim blew apart what I knew about writing at age 16: up until I read it, my notions were based on the usual pack of novels, poetry, philosophy, and exposition, all of which stayed neatly in their categories. This book, though, bled across lines (sometimes quite literally; it included plenty of death and injury): it refused to be held to one purpose. It coursed like a river swollen with snowmelt in spring from thing to thing, from inner life to outer. Or, rather, it found the edge where mind meets world. Annie Dillard sang this line, loud and imperative.

I’d thought the stuff I had spent my youth doing was something I’d come up with all on my own, and (to the mind of a self-doubting girl) must therefore be unimportant; but now I’d found someone who made a literature of wandering alone in the woods, watching, listening, poking at flora and fauna, describing views and pieces of nature, and trying to make a whole of her experience.

More here.

As he appears in new documentary The Divide, the great intellectual explains why Brexit is unimportant, why Trump’s climate change denial is catastrophic – and why revolution is easier than you think.

Leo Benedictus in The Guardian:

You talk about capitalism, politics and inequality a lot. Do you ever tire of it? Do you ever wish someone would ask you about something else? Well, from my point of view, there are two major categories of issues. There are the kind that are humanly important but intellectually pretty shallow. There are the kind that are intellectually quite deep and challenging, but don’t have the immediate human significance. If I had my choice, I’d rather stay on the second, but unfortunately the world won’t go away.

Do you not feel you’ve had enough sometimes? It’s like seeing a child in the street and a truck coming rapidly. Do you say, “Look, I’m too busy thinking about interesting questions, so I’ll let the truck kill the child”? Or do you go out into the street and pull the child back?

But if it was another child, every day, for decades? It doesn’t matter. I remember the philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked why he spent his time protesting against nuclear war and getting arrested on demonstrations. Why didn’t he continue to work on the serious philosophical and logical problems which have major intellectual significance? And his answer was pretty good. He said: “Look, if I and others like me only work on those problems, there won’t be anybody around to appreciate it or be interested.”

More here.

Brian Boutwell & J.C. Barnes in Nautilus:

For the past few years, social scientists have been buzzing over a particular topic in molecular biology—gene regulation. The hype has been building steam for some time, but recently, it rocketed to the forefront of public discussion due to a widely circulated piece in the New Yorker. Articles on the topic are almost always fascinating: They often give the impression that this particular area of biology stands poised to solve huge mysteries of human development. While that conclusion may be appropriate in fields like medicine and other related disciplines, a number of enthusiasts have openly speculated about its ability to also explain lingering social ills like poverty, crime, and obesity. The trouble is, this last bit isn’t really a feeling shared by many of the genetics experts.

Social scientists’ excitement surrounds what we can refer to broadly as transgenerational epigenetics. To understand why social scientists have become enamored with it, we must first consider basic genetics. Many metaphors exist for describing and understanding the genome; they all capture the reality that genes provide the information for building and running biological machinery like the human body.

From the moment sperm manages to infiltrate an egg cell, genes (segments of our DNA that ultimately produce proteins) are at work knitting together the necessary components to make life possible. This requires exquisite coordination. Even though every cell in your body (minus red blood cells) carries your complete genetic code, not every gene is “turned on” all at once all over the body.

More here.

Sergio Graziosi in his blog:

Sometimes reading a flawed argument triggers my rage, I really do get angry, a phenomenon that invariably surprises and amuses me. What follows is my attempt to use my anger in a constructive way, it may include elements of a jerk reaction*, but I’ll try to keep my emotions in check.
Dr. Epstein recently published a badly misguided essay on Aeon, entitled “The empty brain“, the subtitle makes it clear what the intended take home message is: “Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer“.

Unfortunately, the essay is systematically wrong: virtually every key passage is mistaken, and yet, overall, it tries to make an argument that is worth making. Thus, I grew annoyed by the mistakes and misrepresentations (my immediate comment was “this is so wrong it hurts”), and then descended into angerbecause Epstein is actually damaging the credibility of an approach that I find promising, but is all too often misunderstood or straw-manned.

In what follows, I will blatantly ignore the first rule of civilised debate: I will not try to give a charitable reading of the original essay. I won’t because it would effectively hide the reasons for writing my reply. Instead, I will report the key arguments proposed by Dr. Epstein, explain why I think they are wrong, and then finish off by outlining why I nevertheless sympathise with some of the science it endorses (as I understand it).

More here. [Thanks to Sean Carroll.]

Marten Scheffer in Nature:

Few topics are as disparate as mathematics and love — or are they? Modeling Love Dynamics (World Scientific, 2016) by systems theorist Sergio Rinaldi and others playfully, but convincingly, makes the point that even amorous relationships cannot escape the fundamental laws of dynamical systems. The argument propounded by Rinaldi and colleagues builds on the classical framework of coupled differential equations, which have proven so powerful in describing the essence of relationships in nature such as competition, cooperation and predation. The book’s cover illustration hints at the road ahead: it shows Gustav Klimt’s 1908 painting The Kiss (Lovers). A glance inside reveals that art is an essential part of the analysis of the drama of passion — a drama resulting in large part from the interplay of two strong forces, attraction and repulsion. Simple equations illustrated with elegant diagrams show how, depending on personalities, those forces can result in a transient affair, long-lasting stable equilibrium, or everlasting cycles of attraction and repulsion.

The tales and poems chosen masterfully illustrate a range of mathematical features. The limit cycle, known for driving the oscillating dynamics of many economic or biological systems, is linked, for instance, to one of the greatest love stories in Western culture. That is, the cyclical 21-year platonic relationship between fourteenth-century Italian humanist and poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and the married Laura (possibly the Provençal noblewoman Laure de Noves), charted in Petrarch’s celebrated collection Il Canzoniere. If three variables are mixed in the differential equations of passion, chaotic dynamics can arise. This is illustrated vividly in Henry-Pierre Roché’s semi-autobiographical 1953 novel Jules et Jim (which inspired François Truffaut’s 1962 film of the same name). Roché documents the love triangle between himself, the brilliant and charming journalist Helen Grund and her shy husband Franz Hessel, his best friend. As with the weather, the course of these dynamics is fundamentally unpredictable in the long run, as the smallest event can put things on a different trajectory. This phenomenon is also known as ‘the butterfly effect’, hinging on the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing may eventually lead to a hurricane in a distant place.

More here.

.
Tonight I've watched
the moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone
.

by Sappho
.