From the Physics arXiv Blog:

One of the unsung heroes of 20th century science is the mathematician and electronics engineer, Claude Shannon, who worked at the famous Bell laboratories during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Shannon’s greatest work is the theory of information which he published in 1948 and has since had a profound influence on our world.

This theory is the basis for all digital communication. So mobile phones, digital television and radio, computers and the Internet all depend on Shannon’s theory of information. For that reason, it’s possible to argue that Shannon has had a bigger influence on 21st century technology than anybody in history.

But there’s a problem his theory of information which has stumped physicists and mathematicians in recent years. This is that it only applies to classical information, the kind of 0s and 1s that make up ordinary digital code.

But physicists have become increasingly interested in quantum information and its potential in cryptography and in quantum computing. Quantum information can be both a 1 and 0 at the same time. This among other exotic properties is what allows quantum computers to be so powerful and quantum cryptography to be perfectly secure.

More here.

Miriam Wells in Vice News:

Subjecting a small number of highly sentient beings to a horrible life and death is necessary to reduce the suffering and death of huge numbers of others. Some “survival of the fittest” also comes into it — given that human beings are the most sentient of all, and highest up on the food chain — we experiment on those below us. Over 70,000 non-human primates were used for research in the United States in 2010, according to the US Department of Agriculture. They include macaques, baboons, marmosets, and other monkeys, as well as some chimpanzees. Around 65,000 dogs, 21,000 cats, and 53,000 pigs were used, as well as hundreds of thousands of rabbits, guinea pigs, and hamsters. Around the world, dogs, cats, and primates together account for less than 0.2 percent of research animals, according to scientific lobby group Understanding Animal Research, which also points out the number of animals used for medical testing is miniscule compared to the number of animals bred and slaughtered for meat consumption. Mice, rats, fish, and birds account for the majority, with around 25 million used in US laboratories a year, while estimates for the number of animals used annually around the world vary from 60 to 115 million.

After speaking to people on either side of the debate, it was interesting how much they had in common — everyone agrees that testing on animals is deeply unpleasant, that it would be better if animals were not used, and that phasing out the use of animals in medical research is the ultimate goal. What the animal rights advocates and the scientists disagree on is how much benefit medical animal testing has brought, how fast animals should be phased out, and how they should be treated in the meantime. “People automatically assume that primates are a better model [for medical research] because they're so similar to us,” Kathleen Conlee, vice president of the US-based NGO Humane Society, told VICE News. “But the differences are enormous when you come to their biology. When it comes to the immune system that's where the greatest differences are and that's often what we're studying.” Nearly 90 vaccines that had promising results in primates have failed in clinical trials in humans, said Conlee, adding that very few detailed scientific studies on the scientific value of primate use had ever been conducted. One of the only major US studies, the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council's landmark 2011 report, Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the Necessity, concluded that “chimpanzees are not necessary for most biomedical research,” and that there were very few cases where chimpanzee research offered valuable enough insights to “offset the moral costs” of the experiments. The Humane Society is now pushing for a similar study to be done on research involving other primates. “Animals models are always very crude and aren't giving us the answers we need,” said Conlee. “They are always going to have limitations, whereas non-animal models will only continue to improve. So why do we continue to put such a huge investment in these animal models, and very little in alternatives?”

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Aging cripples the production of new immune cells, decreasing the immune system’s response to vaccines and putting the elderly at risk of infection, but antioxidants in the diet may slow this damaging process. That’s a new finding by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), published in an open-access paper in the journal Cell Reports. The problem is focused on an organ called the thymus, which produces T lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell) — critical immune cells that must be continuously replenished so they can respond to new infections. “The thymus begins to atrophy rapidly in very early adulthood, simultaneously losing its function,” said TSRI Professor Howard Petrie. “This new study shows for the first time a mechanism for the long-suspected connection between normal immune function and antioxidants.”

How antioxidant enzyme deficiency leads to metabolic damage

Scientists have been hampered in their efforts to develop specific immune therapies for the elderly by a lack of knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of this process. To explore these mechanisms, Petrie and his team developed a computational approach for analyzing the activity of genes in two major cell types in the thymus — stromal cells and lymphoid cells — in mouse tissues, which are similar to human tissues in terms of function and age-related atrophy. The team found that stromal cells were specifically deficient in an antioxidant enzyme called catalase. That resulted in elevated levels of the reactive oxygen byproducts of metabolism, which cause accelerated metabolic damage.*

More here.

Late August

cloud shreds
skid across
sandstone cliff face
dimmed red
to red
in an invisible rain
. . .
mosquito
becoming
language
. . .
scratched-off
scratch-off ticket
moldering in
a mound of
whacked
dandelions
. . .
to walk
a word
from one
weather
into another
. . .
on the window screen
a patch of beetles
peristaltic under
porch light
.

by Joseph Massey

Joseph Massey is the author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014) and Illocality (Wave Books, forthcoming in 2015). He lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

John Gray in The New Statesman:

My interest in Hayek, which began in the early 1970s, was as much to do with intellectual life in the Vienna of his youth as with the condition of British politics at the time. One of the first questions I asked after we had met through one of the right-wing think tanks that were proliferating around the end of that decade was whether he had known Karl Kraus, the incomparable Viennese satirist, who in 1909 had written, with some prescience: “Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin.” Hayek replied that he had not talked with Kraus, though he remembered seeing him crossing the road to enter a coffee house some time during the First World War. Hayek had little in common with Kraus. Cool and reserved, he had nothing of Kraus’s wit. Although he was academic in his manner, Hayek’s most striking intellectual trait was one that is uncommon in academic life – independence of mind, which enabled him to swim against some of the most powerful currents of the age.

I was also keen to learn something of Hayek’s connection with Wittgenstein, a relative of his about whom he had written a biographical fragment, “Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein”, published in Encounter in 1977. Hayek met Wittgenstein by chance, on a railway station in August 1918, when they were both in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army. Travelling on together, they talked throughout the journey – a conversation Hayek told me had influenced him deeply, though not because of any philosophical exchange that he could remember. The two would never become close and their paths crossed only occasionally; but there seems to have been a meeting of minds between the two artillery ensigns on their way back to war. At the time both were ardent socialists who attributed the disaster that had befallen Europe to the malign impact of capitalism.

More here.

Federico Winer. Drigge, Pomerania, Germany.

Photograph, part of the series Ultradistancia: Monsters.

“… a sub serie from the acclaimed ULTRADISTANCIA series. From the precise eye of google earth imaginary emerges geographic shapes and geometries that transform cities, peninsulas, neighborhoods and ports into animals and monsters.”

More here, and here.

A transcript of Amy Goodman and Juan González's interview with Edwidge Dandicat, over at truth-out:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the significance of what’s happening right now in the Dominican Republic, the other half of the island, Hispaniola, from where you were born, in Haiti.

EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Well, I think this—we’ve often had deportations from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, but this is the first time that they will be done with a law behind them that actually, since the law—this constitutional court decided to strip citizenship from that large number of people, has really made life much harder for Dominicans of Haitian descent, but also migrants who are on the island. So, this law not only now gives the Dominican government the power to deport mass amounts of people, but also creates an environment, a civil environment, that’s really hard for people, because, you know, others might feel now that we’ve had an increase of violence against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, because it seems like a state-sponsored open season on people who are not only—who are considered Haitians by the way they look, primarily, or by their Haitian-sounding name.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And most people here in the United States are not aware of this long, troubled history between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, occupying the same island. There are ultranationalists and conservatives among the Dominican Republic who still—who talk about, hearken back to what they claim was the Haitian occupation of their country, and they see a line running through historically on this issue. Could you fill us in on some of that history that’s led to what we are facing today?

EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Well, Hispaniola is shared by—the island—by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. And we share a history of colonialism and occupations, and at some point it was split between the French and the Spanish. And after the Haitian independence, there was a shift, where Haiti—and there was a—the whole island was under one rule, post-independence. And then, Dominican Republic, in 1822, there was a separation. But there are all these historical scars, where, you know, we, on the Haitian side, remember the massacre of Haitian cane workers in 1937. And then these things are brought up. But there’s also, for Americans, a common occupation of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic at the turn of the century, and both sides of the island have been marred, really, by the corporate—this other kind of occupation of the sugar industry that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century.

More here.

Mark Dery in The Daily Beast:

“Be clear.” “Omit needless words.” “Do not overwrite.” “Avoid fancy words.” “Use the active voice.” Who can argue with such common sense commandments, especially when they’re delivered with Voice-of-God authority? Certainly not the generations of students, secretaries, working writers, and wannabe Hemingways who’ve feared and revered Strunk and White’s Elements of Style as the Bible of “plain English style,” as E.B. White calls it in his introduction. (Since 1959, when White revised and substantially expanded the brief guide to prose style self-published in 1918 by William Strunk Jr., a professor of English literature at Cornell, Strunk & White, as most of us know it, has sold more than 10 million copies.)

Can it really be coincidence that, smack on the first page, in a note about exceptions to one of his Elementary Rules Of Usage (“Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding ‘s…, whatever the final consonant”), Strunk gives as an example, “Moses’ laws”? The Elements of Style, more than another book, has set in stone American ideas about proper usage and, more profoundly, good style. Professor Strunk wrote his little tract as a stout defense of “the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated,” the red-flag word in that sentence being “violated.”

Usage absolutists are the Scalia-esque Originalists of the language-maven set. Their emphasis on “timeless” grammatical truths, in opposition to most linguists’ view of language as a living, changing thing, is at heart conservative; their fulminations about the grammatical violations perpetrated by the masses mask deeper anxieties about moral relativism and social turbulence.

More here.

Veronique Greenwood in Aeon:

First, there is nothing. From all appearances, the fast ferry, whipping through the water in the early morning sun, is headed out into the cold wastes of the Atlantic. But then a shimmering line appears on the horizon. As minutes and miles pass, it grows no taller but, eventually, the black profile of a row of loblolly pines, tossed by the wind, comes into focus.

There is land out here after all; flat, low land, its highest point only 28 feet above the waves. This fragment of coral shelf is the northernmost of the British Virgin Islands, the last before the open ocean, and it has a completely different character from its gaggle of southern sisters. While they are steep green mountains rising from the sea, this place is so low that its Spanish name, Anegada, means ‘covered in water’ or ‘shipwrecked’. The other islands tend to be home to thousands of people and are serviced by commercial flights and ferries. Anegada has a boat every two days or so, and a scant few hundred inhabitants, most of them in the lone settlement called The Settlement.

Looking around at the other people on the ferry, it seems that some might be headed to jobs on the island, in its scattering of restaurants and businesses. A few are tourists come to stay in the handful of basic guesthouses and eat the sweet lobster that is a local speciality. My husband and I came out here because it was the edge of the map. He suggested it after seeing it way out on the rim of things, and I, not totally sure why we were going, made the plans.

More here.

David Berreby in Nautilus:

Artificial intelligence has been conquering hard problems at a relentless pace lately. In the past few years, an especially effective kind of artificial intelligence known as a neural network has equaled or even surpassed human beings at tasks like discovering new drugs, finding the best candidates for a job, and even driving a car. Neural nets, whose architecture copies that of the human brain, can now—usually—tell good writing from bad, and—usually—tell you with great precision what objects are in a photograph. Such nets are used more and more with each passing month in ubiquitous jobs like Google searches, Amazon recommendations, Facebook news feeds, and spam filtering—and in critical missions like military security, finance, scientific research, and those cars that drive themselves better than a person could.

Neural nets sometimes make mistakes, which people can understand. (Yes, those desks look quite real; it’s hard for me, too, to see they are a reflection.) But some hard problems make neural nets respond in ways that aren’t understandable. Neural nets execute algorithms—a set of instructions for completing a task. Algorithms, of course, are written by human beings. Yet neural nets sometimes come out with answers that are downright weird: not right, but also not wrong in a way that people can grasp. Instead, the answers sound like something an extraterrestrial might come up with.

More here.

Molly Ball in The Atlantic:

ATLANTA—Donald Trump was supposed to be the keynote speaker at the RedState Gathering here, a convocation of the hard-core conservative activists who read the influential blog edited by Erick Erickson. But when Trump said on CNN late Friday that debate moderator and Fox News host Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” Erickson, who is a Fox News contributor, announced he had disinvited Trump from the conference. “There are just real lines of decency a person running for President should not cross,” Erickson wrote.

As the linchpin of a GOP counter-establishment of Tea Party-oriented media and PACs, Erickson may be the most powerful conservative in America. A knowledgeable source confirmed to me last week’s report that he will soon announce his departure from RedState—Erickson’s heart is in his work as a radio host, and he will continue to write commentaries on his personal website. Trump was one of 10 presidential candidates who had accepted the invitation to speak at this year’s RedState Gathering, including Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio,Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Carly Fiorina.

More here.

More here.

Anthony Sattin in The Guardian:

Early 2014 wasn’t so long ago, but it is increasingly difficult to remember a time when the name Isis was not in daily use. Barely a day goes by now without mention of its strategic brilliance or imagination-defying brutality. Yet Daesh, as the terror organisation is commonly known in the Arab world, has only existed for a year under that name. In that time, it has become the poster boy of Islamist terror and the subject of a growing collection of books that includes Abdel Bari Atwan’s Islamic State, Benjamin Hall’s Inside Isis and Patrick Cockburn’s The Rise of Islamic State. Cockburn has also contributed a foreword to Charles Glass’s new book, Syria Burning.

One of the problems of writing about the current situation in the Middle East, as Glass, a veteran journalist, knows only too well, is that today’s certainties are tomorrow’s laughable speculations. Iran may still refer to the US as the “Great Satan”, but the two states now share some strategic interests. Although the US used to insist that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad must step down, it is now considering the very real possibility that he could survive the war and, like America’s lamentable “red line” of chemical weapons, what was unthinkable recently could soon be the acceptable status quo. But if news moves fast, assessments have not, which is one reason why we should all read Syria Burning.

More here.

From Esquire:

If you smoke, 
I can smoke, right?

Be my guest. If you're gonna smoke anything else, we'll bring in 
the incense.

I brought a miniature joint, but I'm not thrusting it upon 
you. I just thought it would be wrong to meet you and not bring a little something.

Well, then, let's get into this thing and see. We might want to take a break.

I don't want to put you in any kind of position.

Absolutely not. I've been in every position possible, and I've always gotten out of it.

How are you holding up on the [Stones] tour?

I can handle the show. In the '60s, it was 20 minutes, in and out. Now it's two hours. I don't come off as exhausted 
as I used to ten years ago, 
because I've learned more about how to pace a show. I don't think about the physical aspects—I just expect it all to work. I'm blessed physically 
with stamina. The frame's still holding. I eat the same as I 
always have. Meat and potatoes, basically, with a nice bit of fish now and again. My wife tries to force more salad down me, but I'd rather take the pill.

More here.

The Association of Man and Woman
.

Whatever badness there was,

sometimes
was not of us
but between us.

Because there was goodness,
which felt like a sure base.
While badness felt only
like incidents upon it.

The badness was only
the way you and I needed to behave,

sometimes.
Not what we were.

The badness was only
the small,
transient,
insignificant
pain,
like the tiny, instant
pain
from the prick of a rose’s thorn,
taking joy,
for a second,
away from the fragrance of the rose.

by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems from a Pond
published by Hybrid Nation
.