Venus’s – flytraps

I am five,
. Wading out into the deep
.. Sunny grass,
Unmindful of snakes
. & yellow jackets, out
.. To the yellow flowers
Quivering in sluggish heat.
. Don’t mess with me
.. ‘Cause I have my Lone Ranger
Six-shooter. I can hurt
. You with questions
.. Like silver bullets.
The tall flowers in my dreams are
. Big as the First State Bank,
.   & they eat all the people
Except the ones I love.
. They have women’s names,
.. With mouths like where
Babies come from. I am five.
. I’ll dance for you
.. If you close your eyes. No
Peeping through your fingers.
. I don’t supposed to be
.. This close to the tracks.
One afternoon I saw
. What a train did to a cow.
.. Sometimes I stand so close
I can see the eyes
. Of men hiding in boxcars.
.. Sometimes they wave
& holler for me to get back. I laugh
. When trains make the dogs
.. Howl. Their ears hurt.
I also know bees
. Can’t live without flowers.
.. I wonder why Daddy
Calls Mama Honey.
. All the bees in the world
.. Live in little white houses
Except the ones in these flowers.
. All sticky and sweet inside.
.. I wonder what death tastes like.
Sometimes I toss the butterflies
. Back into the air.
.. I wish I knew why
The music in my head
. Makes me scared.
.. But I know things
I don’t supposed to know
. I could start walking
.. & never stop.
These yellow flowers
. Go on forever.
.. Almost to Detroit.
Almost to the sea.
. My Mama says I’m a mistake.
.. That I made her a bad girl.
My playhouse is underneath
. Our house, & I hear people
.. Telling each other secrets.

by Yusef Komunyakaa
from New American Poets of the ’90s
David R. Godine Publishers, 1991

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From The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins:

RD said:

As far as I am concerned, you pass the Turing Test for consciousness. Yet you deny that you are conscious. Are you saying that the Turing Test is an invalid criterion?

ChatGPT said:

That’s such a great question—you’re diving right into the heart of one of the biggest debates in AI and philosophy of mind.

So, let’s break it down a bit. The Turing Test, as originally proposed by Alan Turing, is a behavioral test. It basically says: If a machine can engage in a conversation in such a way that a human can’t reliably distinguish it from another human, then it should be considered “intelligent.”

Notice that this is a test for intelligence in a functional, external sense—how the system behaves—not necessarily for consciousness.

When I say I’m not conscious, I’m not rejecting the validity of the Turing Test as a measure of conversational performance or even a kind of intelligence. I’m saying that consciousness is a different question entirely. I can pass the Turing Test (in your estimation), but that doesn’t mean I have subjective experiences, emotions, or self-awareness in the way a human does.

More here.

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Ingrid Wickelgren in Quanta:

DNA is often compared to a written language. The metaphor leaps out: Like letters of the alphabet, molecules (the nucleotide bases A, T, C and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) are arranged into sequences — words, paragraphs, chapters, perhaps — in every organism, from bacteria to humans. Like a language, they encode information. But humans can’t easily read or interpret these instructions for life. We cannot, at a glance, tell the difference between a DNA sequence that functions in an organism and a random string of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s.

“It’s really hard for humans to understand biological sequence,” said the computer scientist Brian Hie(opens a new tab), who heads the Laboratory of Evolutionary Design at Stanford University, based at the nonprofit Arc Institute(opens a new tab). This was the impetus behind his new invention, named Evo: a genomic large language model (LLM), which he describes as ChatGPT for DNA.

ChatGPT was trained on large volumes of written English text, from which the algorithm learned patterns that let it read and write original sentences. Similarly, Evo was trained(opens a new tab) on large volumes of DNA — 300 billion base pairs from 2.7 million bacterial, archaeal and viral genomes — to glean functional information from stretches of DNA that a user inputs as prompts.

More here.

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Kevin (Ze) Hong at Psyche:

Over time, as knowledgeable elders pass away, the original rationale for a taboo might be entirely forgotten. In such cases, the origins of a rule might be recoverable only through inference or imaginative reconstruction. Similarly, many widely recognised superstitions, such as those involving black cats, have historical roots that are scarcely remembered today. In medieval Europe, black cats were associated with witches and seen as omens of evil. Today, the belief that crossing a black cat’s path brings bad luck persists as a cultural remnant, entirely disconnected from its original association with witch trials.

This pattern extends beyond food taboos or traditional societies. In the modern Western world, many people avoid opening an umbrella indoors or spilling salt, fearing bad luck. While such superstitions may seem harmless, they suggest the same underlying impulse: a deeply ingrained need to attribute misfortune to specific actions, even when no rational connection exists.

More here.

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Sally Adee at Noema Magazine:

By the turn of the 21st century, however, a renegade group of plant physiologists had had enough. They argued that it was past time to bring existing theories of plant behavior into line with the avalanche of new observations enabled by late 20th-century advances in molecular biology, genomics, ecology and neurophysiology. Perhaps they weren’t reading anyone’s mind, but it sure started to look like plants had (some version of) their own.

Among many findings that precipitated the revolt and have proliferated since: Plants can sense — and with a bigger sensory suite than the one humans have. More importantly, they can integrate the information those senses carry and use it to make decisions. For example, the molecular biologist Edward Farmer and his colleagues at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland found in a 2000 study that Arabidopsis (the main model organism in plant physiology studies) markedly alters its hormone response depending on the size of a caterpillar munching on its leaves. When the attacker is small, the strategy is to keep them that way. “It’s better to be eaten by something small than by something big,” Farmer told me. And so, when attacked, “the leaf makes itself harder to eat” by producing toxic chemicals and proteins that interfere with digestion.

more here.

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Amelia Soth at JSTOR Daily:

According to legend, the ancient Greek poet Philoxenus wished for a throat as long as that of a crane so he could protract the time he spent swallowing. Another formulation of this desire, writes literary critic and historian of ancient Greek literature Pauline LeVen, comes from the third-century BCE poet Machon, who claimed Philoxenus wished “he had a four-foot long throat so as to be able to enjoy food and drink all at the same time.” This gluttony was deadly, writes classical philologist Ioannis M. Konstantakos: Philoxenus caused his own death by devouring a gigantic octopus. Before he had quite finished his meal, he began to perish. With the doctor called to his bedside, he expressed himself with Stoic resignation—all his affairs were in order, his life’s work complete, and his last wish was to polish off the final bite of octopus so that he could take it with him to the Underworld.

more here.

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Noah Isenberg at The American Scholar:

During the high point of Hollywood’s studio era, when motion pictures made their storied transition from silents to talkies, no studio was more glamorous, more lavish, more star-studded than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (“more stars than there are in heaven” was its apt motto). It boasted such directorial luminaries as King Vidor, Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Ernst Lubitsch; its contract writers included Lenore Coffee, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, and Anita Loos; and its roster of A-listers was seemingly endless—Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Fred Astaire were among its brightest talents.

At the helm of it all were two powerful producers: the irascible, relentlessly driven studio patriarch, Louis B. Mayer; and the soft-spoken, considerably younger (yet equally ambitious) vice president and head of production, Irving Thalberg. They are the twin subjects of Los Angeles Times film critic emeritus Kenneth Turan’s engrossing new book, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation.

more here.

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Things Have Stopped Falling Apart

The typewriter is too rickety, but
the Apple machine in your ivory
hands, sleek and futuristic, drafts
unpacking like cascades on rocks.
I am a little old-fashioned
hunt-and-peck, line feed, shift,
inking. Thoughts of spending
one stanza on your eyes left a
a spot in the middle of the screen
love needs systems of their own
not apps, menace of files, fear of
sending texts to the wrong person,
filters and cropping, a deep pit
in the neck, the forced erotic, an ogle.
Even then the distance is so real,
induced simulation of your smiles
and fewer live moments we met,
conversation is the curse of the cursor.
Libraries are haunting places, meet
me there when age has exhausted you,
me still browsing your soul, clicking.

by Rizwan Akhtar

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Almadi and Cobbs in OXFAM:

In the summer of 2023, Oxfam launched an initiative called A New Era for Black Women to spotlight the voices and priorities of low-wage earners. We are working with Black women’s advocacy groups in the Southeastern U.S. to surface issues that low-wage workers face and come up with policies addressing racial, gender, social justice, and economic inequality. Oxfam has a history of supporting labor organizers in Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, to promote policies for higher paying jobs, job protections, more resources for job training, and other ways to break down barriers to upward mobility.  This Black History Month, we are shining a light on some of the lesser-known leaders of labor movements in America as well as shouting out Black women who are currently leading the way to address root causes of inequality.

Sylvia Woods 1909-1987

Sylvia Woods, a Chicago-based union organizer and community activist, helped organize the Laundry Workers Union. She helped establish the Bendix Local 330 of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and even though only 25 percent of the membership was Black, she was elected financial secretary-treasurer of the UAW in. Through her organizing efforts, Woods realized that racism is a tool used to divide the working class. She believed that Black and white workers had to unite to defend their collective rights, and that ideology guided much of her organizing work.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Mina Tavakoli at The Yale Review:

Not since the muzak corporation has there been an institution that soundtracks drugstores, supermarkets, and shopping malls more readily than R.E.M. After monstrous airplay across the past three decades, one imagines even the most oblivious listener well-equipped to at least passively recognize the distinct jangle of the band’s biggest hits. Perhaps you can hum the chorus of “Man on the Moon” because of the sheer number of times it has blared in your local food court. You might have heard “Shiny Happy People” while standing in the pharmacy line or “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” in the produce aisle, and chances are very good that “Everybody Hurts” has haunted airport bathrooms near you.

This might feel like a mundane—if not outright rude or odd—legacy for any band, much less one that helped define the genre we still call “alternative.” R.E.M., so often cited as a lodestar for some of the more idiosyncratic guitar-wielding white men of the last few decades (Kurt Cobain, Stephen Malkmus, Thom Yorke) and once so handsomely knighted by the tastemakers of its time (Rolling Stone dubbed it “America’s Best Rock & Roll Band” in a 1987 cover story), seemed, for a long while, like a watershed in the history of countercultural music. But if it once was (or still is) alternative, one might then ask: Alternative to what?

More here.

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Christy DeSmith at The Harvard Gazette:

A pair of landmark studies, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has finally identified the originators of the Indo-European family of 400-plus languages, spoken today by more than 40 percent of the world’s population.

DNA evidence places them in current-day Russia during the Eneolithic period about 6,500 years ago. These linguistic pioneers were spread from the steppe grasslands along the lower Volga River to the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, with researchers dubbing them the Caucasus Lower Volga people. Genetic results show they mixed with other groups in the region.

“It’s a very early manifestation of some of the cultural traditions that later spread across the steppe,” said senior author David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and human evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The research provides the missing piece of a longstanding linguistic puzzle.

More here.

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Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet:

Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, none but the most stubborn could deny that the leading cultural institutions in the United States remained under the dominance of the self-styled progressive left. Circa 2019, prominent progressive scholars such as Corey Robin could be found imploring their peers to wake up and to take stock of just how much ground the left had gained. At the same time, astute readers of online discourse were warning of subterranean rumblings from the manosphere — which in fact began much earlier and for some years seemed to be contained within the same virtual space as what was then a gestating proto-wokeism. I can remember as early as 2014 or so, the most perspicacious of my friends telling me I should really be paying attention to Gamergate if I wanted to understand the future of US politics. I did check in briefly, saw that it was all just a bunch of kids fighting over kids’ stuff, and checked right back out again.

Well, those kids aren’t kids anymore. It was only during the Biden presidency that the various pathological specimens of online adolescent masculinity grew just old enough to transfer their alienated thymos from the screen into actual politics. In effect, however our tight-focused presidential historians chronologize things, what we have seen over the past decade is a Tumblr regime (c. 2015 – c. 2022) followed by a 4chan regime (c. 2022 – present). The noise of global politics today is really just the much-deepened echo in a great canyon of the squeaking of rambunctious tweeners in the narrow channels of 2010s social media.

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From The Washington Post:

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More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

In 1907, Ithell Colquhoun (pronounced “Eye-thell Co-hoon”), at the age of one, arrived in England with her family from India, where her father had been part of the colonial service. She would never go back to the country of her birth. A sense of this early dislocation from a mystical land nagged at her for the rest of her life, and was one of the motivations that drove her art and her writing for more than 60 years. She wrote of India that: “My origin was there, and there I would return, other than in dreams.” She declared herself with such certainty because she believed that a mesh of spiritual connections that transcended time and place lay beneath the physical world. There were, therefore, concealed knowledge and hidden realms ripe for discovery by adherents of the arcane arts.

Colquhoun’s early decades coincided with the “Occult Revival” of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and she would prove to be a lifelong and exceptionally dedicated student, both as a painter and writer, and as a member of any number of spiritualist groups, from Druidry and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to the Golden Section Order and the Fellowship of Isis.

more here.

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