Dominic Pettman at Cabinet:

Is it ironic or apt that a man who had dedicated much of his life to the future of wireless communication would fall for the ancient, living technology of a carrier pigeon? And is it ironic or apt that a man whose final years as an inventor were dedicated to a fearful direct-energy “teleforce” weapon (dubbed the “death ray” by the press) fell in love with the key symbol for peace?

We cannot know what thoughts or emotions were coiled inside Tesla’s mind and heart as he feared for the life of his nameless, winged mistress, and then mourned her passing as he would a lover. But we can discern, and appreciate, the creaturely affection that he experienced, and ultimately spoke of matter-of-factly, once the race for absolute human technical mastery had been assumed by others. For the man who invented the rotating magnetic field, “animal attraction” or “animal magnetism” was not simply a figure of speech, but an everyday experience and personal responsibility, and one that did not stop at the border between species. As such, this patron saint of the cybernetic triangle—one linking human, animal, and machine—sends us a message from the age of high industry and scientific discovery concerning love itself as the invisible but overwhelming alternating current that animates existence, and can sometimes be explicitly shared among creatures.

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Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

It was the actions of Jupiter and Saturn that quite inadvertently created life on Earth — not the gods of the Roman pantheon, but the giant planets, which once orbited much closer to the sun. Driven outward, they let loose a cascade of asteroids, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, that blasted the surface of the young Earth and created the deep pockmarks still visible on the face of the moon. In the heat of these impacts, carbon from the meteorites reacted with nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere to form hydrogen cyanide. Though a deadly poison, cyanide is nonetheless the ancient pathway for inert carbon atoms to enter the chemistry of life.

By the time the Late Heavy Bombardment had eased, some 3.8 billion years ago, the cyanide had rained down into pools, reacted with metals, evaporated, been baked and irradiated with ultraviolet light, and dissolved by streams flowing down to a freshwater pool. The chemicals formed from the interactions of cyanide combined there in various ways to generate the precursors of lipids, nucleotides and amino acids. These are the three significant components of a living cell — lipids make the walls of a cell’s various compartments; nucleotides store its information; and amino acids assemble into the proteins that control its metabolism. All of this is a hypothesis, proposed by John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Cambridge in England. But he has tested all the required chemical reactions in a laboratory and developed evidence that they are plausible under the conditions expected of primitive Earth. Having figured out a likely chemistry needed to produce the starting materials of life, Dr. Sutherland then developed this geological scenario because it provides the conditions required by the chemistry. As for the chemistry itself, that springs from Dr. Sutherland’s discovery six years ago of the key to the RNA world.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Untitled. Botswana, March 2015.

Digital photograph.

Gary Gutting talks to Elizabeth Anderson over at The Stone:

GARY GUTTING: Public policy debates, particularly about economic issues, are often about how to treat people fairly. You argue for “democratic equality,” which says that treating people fairly requires treating them as equals. What do you mean by equality?

ELIZABETH ANDERSON: Talk about equality gets off on the wrong foot if we start from the assumption that it expresses an immediate moral demand to treat everyone the same. Of course, there are thousands of legitimate reasons why people may treat different individuals differently. What egalitarianism objects to are social hierarchies that unjustly put different people into superior and inferior positions.

G.G.: Let’s get specific. What do you see as unequal treatments that are unjust?

E.A.: Of course, there are standard cases of discrimination on the basis of antipathy against, or favoritism towards, arbitrary identity groups — such as race, gender and sexual orientation. But I want to stress the many ways in which unjust social hierarchy is manifested in other ways besides direct discrimination or formally differential treatment. The discrimination/differential treatment idea captures only a small part of what counts as unjust inequality.

On this broader view of unjust inequality, we can see three different types of social hierarchy at work. One is inequalities of standing, which weigh the interests of members of some groups more heavily than others. For example, perhaps out of negligence, a courthouse or hotel may lack elevators and ramps for people in wheelchairs. A law firm may promote a culture of off-hours socializing over drinks between partners and associates that excludes women who need to spend time with their children from opportunities for networking and promotion. As Anatole France noted, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

Another type of social hierarchy is inequalities of power: when some groups exercise arbitrary, unaccountable power over subordinates, and can order them around or harass and abuse them, without subordinates’ having a voice in how they are treated. Traditional hierarchies, as of masters over slaves, landlords over serfs, and dictators over subjects, are of this sort.

More here.

Emilie Bickerton in The New Left Review:

Literature on the social impact of the internet has always struggled to keep up with the breakneck pace set by its subject. First-generation thinking about the net took form in the early 1990s, when usage was rapidly expanding with the dissemination of early browsers; it grew out of a pre-existing thread of technology advocacy that ran back to 60s counter-cultural consumerism. Wired magazine, founded in 1993, was its chief vehicle; key figures included tech-enthusiasts Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and Howard Reingold, with their ‘patron saint’ Marshall McLuhan. This euphoric perspective dominated throughout the ‘new economy’ boom: the internet was changing everything, and for the better, heralding a new age of freedom, democracy, self-expression and economic growth. Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, delivered from Davos, set the tone: ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.’ Pitted against this, there had long existed a minor current of critical left writing, also running back to at least the early 70s; this included ‘left McLuhanite’ figures such as The Nation’s Neil Postman. More overtly political, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s classic 1995 essay, ‘The Californian Ideology’, skewered Wired in its early days, while on the ‘Nettime’ listserv and in the pages of Mute magazine, writers such as Geert Lovink attempted to forge a real ‘net criticism’. But these voices were mostly confined to the dissident margins.

With the 2000–01 dot.com crash there came something of a discursive shake-out. It was in the early post-crash years that Nicholas Carr’s Does IT Matter? (2004) was published, puncturing ‘new economy’ hype. But with the Greenspan bubble and massive state-intelligence funding after 9.11, American tech was soon on its feet again. Tim O’Reilly’s coining of the ‘Web 2.0’ buzzword in 2004 captured the returning optimism. The blog craze, Wikipedia and the first wave of social media all came into play during these years, and it was now that the landscape of tech giants was consolidated: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. The technology discourses of this phase echoed the developing shape of the Web: with ‘open source’ (another O’Reilly buzzword) and Wikipedia, it was argued that undefined crowds could be superior producers of content and code than named (or paid) individuals.

When a second, much deeper crisis erupted in 2008, American tech was one of the few sectors to remain relatively unscathed, already moving into new lines of production: smartphones, tablets, e-readers. The uptake of these devices brought a qualitative expansion of internet use, blurring the boundary between everyday life and a ‘cyberspace’ that had hitherto been conceptualized as a separate sphere. Suddenly it was evident that all the talk of the internet’s capacity to instigate far-reaching social change was no mere talk. It was in these years that a set of more pessimistic and critical voices started to come to the fore, worrying about the dangers of the Web’s expanding use[.]

More here.

A conversation between Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman over at Edge:

KAHNEMAN: You seem to be describing this as something that is already happening. Are you referring to developments such as the plans to do away with death? That absolutely would not be a mass project. But could you elaborate on that?

HARARI: Yes, the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems. It is a huge revolution in human thinking. Throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.

Even a few years ago, very few doctors or scientists would seriously say that they are trying to overcome old age and death. They would say no, I am trying to overcome this particular disease, whether it's tuberculosis or cancer or Alzheimers. Defeating disease and death, this is nonsense, this is science fiction.

But, the new attitude is to treat old age and death as technical problems, no different in essence than any other disease. It's like cancer, it's like Alzheimers, it's like tuberculosis. Maybe we still don't know all the mechanisms and all the remedies, but in principle, people always die due to technical reasons, not metaphysical reasons. In the middle ages, you had an image of how does a person die? Suddenly, the Angel of Death appears, and touches you on the shoulder and says, “Come. Your time has come.” And you say, “No, no, no. Give me some more time.” And Death said, “No, you have to come.” And that's it, that is how you die.

We don't think like that today. People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere. These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I'm rich enough, maybe I don't have to die.

More here.

James Reidel in the NYRB:

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh made Franz Werfel (1890-1945) one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial authors after it first appeared in German in 1933. He had worked a miracle for Armenians around the world, taking what might have been a footnote in the history of World War I—the deportation and mass murder of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority—and writing an epic that anticipated the ominous events unfolding in Germany as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power. The erosion of civil rights, the singling out of a minority for the nation’s problems, and the state-sanctioned violence perpetrated against it were becoming a reality for German Jews and this made Musa Dagh seem the work of a prophet.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh began with Werfel’s second journey to the Middle East in the winter of 1930. He had just published his third major novel, The Pure in Heart(1929) and married his lover, Alma Mahler, Vienna’s legendary consort of genius, the widow of Gustav Mahler and the former wife of the architect Walter Gropius. After touring the ruins of Karnak, Alma and Werfel traveled on to Palestine and Jerusalem. In Damascus, Werfel toured a carpet factory with Alma. He saw a number of children working the looms, many of them maimed and crippled. When he asked the factory owner about them, he was told they were Armenian orphans. Their parents had been lost in the massacres, forced deportation marches, and concentration camps of World War I. These events would not have been a surprise to Werfel. In the years following the war, the atrocities committed against the Armenians surfaced in the news stories, some tied to the revenge shootings of Talaat Bey, Jemal Pasha, and other wartime Turkish leaders, victims of an Armenian revolutionary assassination program with the chilling name of “Operation Nemesis.”

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Gavin Francis in The Guardian:

Through my encounters in the clinic, I’m often aware of the ways humanity’s finest stories and greatest art can resonate with, and help inform, modern medical practice. Doctors do their jobs better when they are up to date with the science behind the treatments they prescribe, but also when they acknowledge the importance of culture, metaphor and meaning in the way we make sense of our lives. Sometimes I feel the need to take a step back from the white-tiled walls and jargon of the clinic and see medical practice in a broader context: embedded at the heart of human lives, with all their complications, disappointments and celebrations. The body is a kind of landscape after all – the most intimate one – and a storehouse of almost indescribable marvels.

There was a time when if you wanted a good day out you might go along to see a public dissection – the bodies of criminals would be laid out in a public space and anatomised. The popularity of these events was not just educational, of course – it was partly about voyeurism, but it also spoke to a deep need to glimpse deeper into the mystery of our own humanity. It was considered entertainment to see life and death stripped back to essentials; the physician-anatomist was like a guide exploring inner space. These events became popular in the 16th century but had their roots in public spectacles of the Romans. Public dissections fell out of fashion around the time doctors were growing in power: no longer guides to a mysterious inner kingdom, but autocrats protecting secret knowledge. That paternalistic attitude reached a high point perhaps two or three decades ago, but is increasingly out of fashion. The time might be right to bring back public dissection, but instead of using scalpels and saws, I prefer to cut up the body using stories, literature and art.

More here.

Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee; And live alone in the bee-loud glade.  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.  I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

by W.B. Yeats

Conor Myhrvold in Nautilus:

Some animals evolved to clump together when threatened because it increased their chances of survival. “Predators have the ability to focus and concentrate on individual prey,” says Ralph Tollrian, a professor in Germany who has spent his career studying the predator confusion effect. “When they handle one prey, they can’t hunt the next.” Birds and fish form groups that move chaotically in the presence of a predator, giving it “cognitive overload,” says Randy Olson, who builds computer models of predator and prey behavior at Michigan State University. The predator’s cognitive overload can be so strong that it may give up on its pursuit entirely. “A confused predator can sometimes become frustrated and not hunt at all,” Tollrian says.

Humans, too, developed a tendency to clump together in the face of danger. There are many advantages to that, Tollrian says—from defense (it’s easier for a group to fight off a threat) to safety in numbers (people can hide in a crowd). When humans moved to agrarian and urban lifestyles, our dangers changed—but our responses didn’t, says Randolph Nesse, a professor of psychiatry at Arizona State University who studies the evolutionary reasons behind anxiety. “We continue to be afraid of things that were dangerous to our ancestors,” Nesse says. When we panic, ancient instincts kick in. In a room with six exits, it seems like the most logical course of action would be for the crowd to divide evenly among all six. Instead, we stampede to just one. We disregard logic and get injured. While we may not be able to unlearn our instincts, we might circumvent them if we better understand the nature of escape panic. Since studying panicking humans is difficult, scientists are turning to an unexpected source of inspiration: ants. “Humans and ants are hugely different animals,” says physicist Ernesto Altshuler at the University of Havana, Cuba, who studied how ants escape in emergency situations. “But when you are in panic, humans behave in a very elementary way, and we may look a little bit like ants.”

More here.

Peter Reuell in the Harvard Gazette:

Navigating a cluttered environment at high speed is among the greatest challenges in biology. Yet it’s one virtually all birds achieve with ease.

It’s a feat that David Williams is working to understand. A former postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard lab of Charles P. Lyman Professor of Biology Andrew Biewener, and now a postdoc at the University of Washington, Williams is the lead author of a study that shows birds use two highly stereotyped postures to avoid obstacles in flight.

The study could open the door to new ways to program drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles to avoid similar obstacles. The study is described in a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This was somewhat surprising to us,” Williams said of the results. “In lower-order animals like insects, we think of these very stereotyped motor programs where you stimulate your muscle, and the passive dynamics of your exoskeleton or the tendons attached to that muscle control most of the motion.

“But when you look at higher-order animals, it’s common to expect that those motor programs are going to be more complex, and there’s going to be more subtle gradations in those programs. So it was surprising to see a very high-order animal like a bird using very simple motor programs. Biology is optimized to be just good enough to work, so what that indicates is those are very effective motor programs.”

More here.

William Giraldi in The New Republic:

Not long into George Gissing’s 1903 novel The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, you find a scene that no self-respecting bibliophile can fail to forget. In a small bookshop in London, the eponymous narrator spots an eight-volume first edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “To possess those clean-paged quartos,” Ryecroft says, “I would have sold my coat.” He doesn’t have the money on him, and so he returns across town to his flat to retrieve it. Too broke for a ride on an omnibus, and too impatient to wait, he twice more traverses the city on foot, back and forth between the bookshop and home, toting a ton of Gibbon. “My joy in the purchase I had made drove out every other thought. Except, indeed, of the weight. I had infinite energy but not much muscular strength, and the end of the last journey saw me upon a chair, perspiring, flaccid, aching—exultant!”

A pleasing vista onto the early twentieth-century life of one English writer, Gissing’s autobiographical novel is also an effusive homage to book love. “There were books of which I had passionate need,” says Ryecroft, “books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment. I could see them, of course, at the British Museum, but that was not at all the same thing as having and holding them”—to have and to hold—“my own property, on my own shelf.” In case you don’t quite take Ryecroft’s point, he later repeats “exultant” when recalling that afternoon of finding the Gibbon—“the exultant happiness.”1 Exultation is, after all, exactly what the bibliophile feels most among his many treasures.

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Amanda Giracca in Aeon:

The skin did not come off like a sweater, as I’d been told it would. I’d looked at how to do it in the classic Joy of Cooking, figuring the directions for squirrel couldn’t be much different from rabbit: hook it through the heels, yank the skin down to its paws. I didn’t have a hook, but even the falconer, Chris Davis, who had given me this squirrel, made it seem so simple – use scissors, he’d said, and snip horizontally into each side from the gaping hole where he’d gutted it, grab the corners of the soft fluffy pelt and pull up. Pull down. Voilà.

Sitting out by the fire pit in my back yard on a late November evening, my fingers grew stiff and numb as I pulled at layers of epithelial tissue I could not see so much as sense, subcutaneous membranes of iridescent silver visible only when I shone my headlamp just right. I could see places where the talons of the hawk that had caught the squirrel had punctured into the muscle, bruising it. Little by little, I worked the rich gray pelt down and away from the purple muscles, snipped away the durable membranes, and turned the small mammal from one piece into two.

I snipped off the head and feet with a pair of shears and buried them in my compost pile. Yesterday, when Chris had given me the squirrel, the eyes had been wide-open and filmy white. I was grateful that they’d shrunk to nearly closed overnight. I’d hardly noticed the face as I skinned, but I might have if it still had the demon-ish pale glare. The task was engrossing, a science project, or dinner preparation, a little of each I suppose.

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Amitava Kumar in the Hindustan Times:

I am writing this on a train. It is dark outside, the dark window reflecting the interior of the bright-lit train car, the beige plastic seats, the metal overhead racks. I can see in the dark glass the girl on the seat across from me.

I cannot discern her face but I see her reflection holding an iPod in her hand. Her nails are painted silver. We are on the 5.34 Metro North from Poughkeepsie to New York City.

I’m going to a party at a writer-friend’s house but the real reason I’m on this train is because I wanted to write this column. I wanted the time alone on the journey down to the city and back.

The writer Patricia Highsmith once said that she was rarely short of inspiration; she had ideas, she said, “like rats have orgasms”. I cannot make the same claim. I don’t think writers need ideas so much; what they really need is time.

Or, more accurately, the need is for those conditions of work, the meeting of place and habits, that allow the right words to emerge. I say this because I have beside me on the seat here a book called Daily Rituals.

It offers short accounts of how writers and artists work. The above quote from Highsmith is something I came across in this book. And the detail that, probably to keep distractions to a minimum, she ate the same food every day: American bacon, fried eggs and cereal.

More here.

From Sam Harris's blog:

April 26, 2015

From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky


Noam —

I reached out to you indirectly through Lawrence Krauss and Johann Hari and was planning to leave it at that, but a reader has now sent me a copy of an email exchange in which you were quite dismissive of the prospect of having a “debate” with me. So I just wanted to clarify that, although I think we might disagree substantially about a few things, I am far more interested in exploring these disagreements, and clarifying any misunderstandings, than in having a conventional debate. 



If you’d rather not have a public conversation with me, that’s fine. I can only say that we have many, many readers in common who would like to see us attempt to find some common ground. The fact that you have called me “a religious fanatic” who “worships the religion of the state” makes me think that there are a few misconceptions I could clear up. And many readers insist that I am similarly off-the-mark where your views are concerned.

In any case, my offer stands, if you change your mind.



Best,

Sam

April 26, 2015

From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris

Perhaps I have some misconceptions about you. Most of what I’ve read of yours is material that has been sent to me about my alleged views, which is completely false. I don’t see any point in a public debate about misreadings. If there are things you’d like to explore privately, fine. But with sources.

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