Lewis Dartnell in The Telegraph:

There have been many accounts of the historical progression of our understanding of the world around us, especially focusing on the transformative developments that began in the 17th century, but few have had the unique selling point of Steven Weinberg’s To Explain the World. Weinberg is a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, known for his research on elementary particles and the interactions between them, as well as on cosmology. In this sense, then, Weinberg’s chronicle of the long development of physics leading up to the role he has personally played in it is akin to Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. To Explain the World is a sweeping narrative of the progression of ideas, from the geometrical proofs and beliefs on the nature of the cosmos proposed by ancient Greek philosophers, through the Golden Age of Islamic science in ninth-century Baghdad, to Copernicus’s heliocentric architecture of our solar system, Galileo’s discoveries through his spyglass, and Newton’s work on optics and the laws of motion. But Weinberg strives to show not just how our understanding of the cosmos has developed through history – a straightforward chronology of deductions and discoveries – but also to explore how humanity “came to learn how to learn about the world”. He masterfully explains how the emergence of the modern scientific method, the mechanism by which we interrogate the world and devise well-supported explanations we can be confident in, is itself a discovery.

For me, the highlight of the book is the discussion of Nicolaus Copernicus and the transformative shift in our world-view in the mid-16th century. The Copernican Revolution is a well-known story: the classical heritage of the Ptolemaic Earth-centred cosmos with its complex geometrical system of epicycles and deferents for the paths of the planets was replaced by Copernicus’s sun-centric architecture for the solar system. Where Weinberg excels is in his explanation of why the Copernican model became preferred, despite having no observational support and not providing improved predictions.

More here.

The Men of My Country

the men of my country
give up their seats on the subway
to the handicapped the aged
and to the passengers with children
but mostly they go on sitting
since these categories of citizens
have a pronounced tendency to die out
or travel by subway less and less often

the men of my country
they are saints under a heel
with trained insect jaws
with which they gnaw their way
to deserved fatherhood
and later having untied their hands
savor children’s flesh
using proscribed methods
of raising the younger generation

the men of my country
are not mutants or perverts
they are products of secondary processing
of amino acids
this is all that remains of the nation
which loves and honors its heroes
youths so roly-poly or with pit bull jaws
their love for motherhood
has outgrown all discernible limits
and became a signature style

Read more »

Erica Armstrong Dunbar in The New York Times:

When he was 11 years old, Washington inherited 10 slaves from his father’s estate. He continued to acquire slaves — some through the death of family members and others through direct purchase. Washington’s cache of enslaved people peaked in 1759 when he married the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis. His new wife brought more than 80 slaves to the estate at Mount Vernon. On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly 150 souls were counted as part of the property there. In 1789, Washington became the first president of the United States, a planter president who used and sanctioned black slavery. Washington needed slave labor to maintain his wealth, his lifestyle and his reputation. As he aged, Washington flirted with attempts to extricate himself from the murderous institution — “to get quit of Negroes,” as he famously wrote in 1778. But he never did.

During the president’s two terms in office, the Washingtons relocated first to New York and then to Philadelphia. Although slavery had steadily declined in the North, the Washingtons decided that they could not live without it. Once settled in Philadelphia, Washington encountered his first roadblock to slave ownership in the region — Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. The act began dismantling slavery, eventually releasing people from bondage after their 28th birthdays. Under the law, any slave who entered Pennsylvania with an owner and lived in the state for longer than six months would be set free automatically. This presented a problem for the new president. Washington developed a canny strategy that would protect his property and allow him to avoid public scrutiny. Every six months, the president’s slaves would travel back to Mount Vernon or would journey with Mrs. Washington outside the boundaries of the state. In essence, the Washingtons reset the clock. The president was secretive when writing to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”

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

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways.

More here.

Yichuan Wang in Medium:

Suppose that there are two groups of people on the market: “crazy” undateables and “good” people who are hot stuff. The reader, if willing to read such a piece, is of course in the second category.

In each month, all the people mingle and can transition into/from one of five states: crazy-single, good-single, crazy-crazy-couple, crazy-good-couple, and good-good-couple. Single people transition into a couple state if they meet a person and hit it off, and couples spontaneous transition into the single state if they break up.

The key mechanism behind the model is that good couples stay together for longer periods of time. In my baseline calibration, I calibrate the model so that the expected relationship length of a crazy-crazy couple is 2 months, while the respective times for crazy-good and good-good couples are 6 and 24 months respectively.

The transition probabilities change with the number of people in each state. I defer mathematical details to an unwritten appendix, and instead show that under the baseline parameterization there is indeed convergence within 50 months.

We are now ready to answer basic questions about the equilibrium properties of dating markets.

Most Single People are Crazy

Even if only 50% of the population is crazy, in equilibrium around 63% of single people are crazy.

More here.

Joyce J. Scott. No Mommy Me II. 1991.

Leather and beads.

More here, here, and here.

Her Rodney King piece is currently in Philadelphia Museum of Art's show “Represent: 200 years of African American Art”, January 10, 2015 – April 5, 2015.

Jack Hitt in the Washington Post:

Back when NASA ruled the Earth, Alan Lightman was a 13-year-old kid, and in his Memphis back yard he built the coolest rocket. He concocted his own fuel mixture and ignited the thing with a flashbulb from a Brownie camera. There was a tiny astronaut’s capsule, of course, which held a garden lizard. He’d need to get the lizard back down to Earth, NASA-style, so he packed in a parachute and devised a way to separate the capsule from the rocket at its peak.

A small explosive was connected by a vial of mercury which, upright, offered no contact. When the rocket hit its apogee and naturally shifted into a horizontal position, the mercury flowed across the vial and connected the wires. The capsule blew free and clear, as planned, and floated successfully back down — except that the final discharge burned off the lizard’s tail.

Ingenious, really, but the way Lightman tells it in his insightful memoir, “Screening Room,” it was like that old Scottish joke: “Do they call me MacGregor the shipbuilder? Nay!” Instead, the boy with the sly workarounds is still hounded by friends to tell the one about the “friggin’ lizard.”

In any other memoir, this story might be presented as some crucial life turn that drove Lightman into the world where he wound up: theoretical physics. But “Screening Room” — the latest book from the author of “Einstein’s Dreams”— violates most of the tedious conventions of the memoir genre.

More here.

Elias Esquith in AlterNet:

As devoted readers of Paul Krugman know well, there’s plenty of evidence from the last six years indicating that austerity, the idea that the government can best boost the economy by engaging in significant tax cuts as well as spending cuts, simply doesn’t work — at least not in today’s economic conditions. With the U.S. going through a period of significant GDP growth, a decrease in the unemployment rate and a falling deficit, it’s a lesson that holds less salience today than it did in years past. But in the eurozone economy, the application of “expansionary austerity” has been vigorous — and rather unsuccessful.

But with the victory of the anti-austerity party Syriza in Greece’s recent election, the state-of-play in Europe has changed dramatically. After years of economic pain and dislocation, Greek citizens now have a reason — however small — to hope that political pressure may force the leaders of the eurozone (German Chancellor Angela Merkel, first and foremost) to reevaluate their approach. Still, years of failure have not loosened austerity’s grip on much of the West; the appeal of the economic philosophy to its proponents seems to operate beyond the level of simple reason.

And this is why Brown University professor Mark Blyth’s book “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea,” released in paperback last month, remains such necessary reading. Simultaneously functioning as an economics explainer, a merciless polemic, and a penetrating history, Blyth’s book offers a clear insight into austerity’s lineage, its theories, its champions and its failures.

More here.

A Conversation with Neil Gershenfeld at Edge.org:

Digital is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. In computing there's a notion of a sign bit error, where you calculate something and you get one bit wrong, so the sign is the opposite of what it should be, which means everything you calculate is the opposite of what it's supposed to be. There's a sense in which that's happening right now in maybe three different areas.

Claude Shannon wrote the best master's thesis ever when he was at MIT, inventing digital. He went on to Bell Labs and did two core things. The one that's most interesting for me is he proved the first threshold theorem. What that means is I could send my voice to you today as a wave, or I could send it to you as a symbol. What he showed is if I send it to you as a symbol, for a linear increase in the resource used to represent the symbol, there is an exponential reduction in the error of you getting the symbol correctly as long as the noise is below a threshold. If the noise is above the threshold, you're doomed. If it's below a threshold, a linear increase in the symbol gives you an exponential reduction in error. There are very few exponentials in engineering. That's the big one

What he showed is you can communicate reliably even though the communication medium is unreliable; that's what digital means. That's the essence of digital. It wasn't obvious, Claude Shannon got that. When I was at Bell Labs, Bob Lucky was still around there and could tell me stories. Claude Shannon had this idea that we should communicate digitally. There was a real battle between analog communication and digital communication.

The sobering lesson from Bob Lucky is the resolution of the battle was death. The analog managers died and a new generation of digital managers took over. Then we had digital communication, and now the Internet. But the meaning of digital is this threshold property, this exponential scaling.

More here.

J. Hoberman in The New York Review of Books blog (image Warner Bros. Pictures):

While American Sniper has drawn a large and diverse audience there is no consensus as to what the movie means. Rush Limbaugh hailed it as “an extension of the November elections” in which the Republicans captured the Senate, although the war in Iraq was hardly an issue. Jane Fonda saw it as a movie about the psychic cost of war and compared it to her 1978 film Coming Home, in which she embarked upon a therapeutic love affair with Jon Voight’s seriously wounded Vietnam veteran. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has reported a spike in anti-Arab threats. A French journalist contacted me in early January to see if I thought the movie’s unexpected popularity was a response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. (I told him that, on the contrary, the success struck me as symptomatic of American self-absorption.) Eastwood, who, not surprisingly, has described American Sniper as an anti-war movie, has acknowledged the influence of Sgt. York, which he saw as an eleven-year-old in the company of his father.

Sgt. York was criticized in Congress and elsewhere as pro-war and didn’t win the 1941 Oscar for Best Picture (the award, given in late February 1942, went to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). American Sniper, a far better movie, is unlikely to win either—no more than Ava DuVernay’s Selma, the film that, as a myth about a different kind of American heroism and a meditation on another aspect of the national past, has naturally been seen as American Sniper’s political antipode, celebrating non-violence from the inherently underdog perspective of a disenfranchised minority. Both movies are docudramas, a term first used to describe the televised historical fictions of the mid-1970s, and both have been criticized for their historical inaccuracies.

While these distortions are hardly without interest, holding films to rigorous standards of truth is itself highly unrealistic. With origins in photography, the motion picture medium encourages us to expect that, unlike plays or novels, films depicting historical episodes should be truthful. But even for documentaries, fictionalizing elements—including editing, camera placement, and imposed chronology—are almost inescapable.

More here.

How to Catch a Baby Elephant

You will need:

1 Jungle
1 Family of elephants, with calf
4-8 Men
Guns
Spears

Pay off the local officials. Enter the jungle like a prowl of cats. Circle the elephants at their favorite mud hole, where the calf will roll in the ocher water with a turtle-lipped smile, and his mother and aunties will brush, with their trunks, his face and chin in affection. Taking care not to harm the calf, shoot the mother. Shoot the aunties. Take the calf to a camp and enclose him in a cage slightly smaller than his body. Ignore his bleating mourning cries. Begin training. Jab his young skin with spears. Do this while he is in his cage, and he will think he is small and weak. If you are successful, he will believe this forever. Like any animal, any child. If you are not successful, he will eventually break his chains, eat the crops of a nearby farm and be shot. When this occurs, reenter the jungle and capture
.

by Jen Ashburn
from Anomalous 13
Anomalous Press

Alex Preston in The Guardian:

In Britain, where every two-horse village has a book festival and authors have become stumbling, portly simulacrums of their rock-star cousins, forever touring their greatest hits, we’ve grown to take our literary get-togethers for granted. It’s hard to imagine that a festival might be revolutionary, politically divisive, that attending could be a matter of taking your life in your hands. The Karachi literature festival (KLF) is now in its sixth year, and welcomed more than 100,000 people through its security scanners last weekend. The festival ended with a lavish British Council-hosted dinner, where the only clue that we were anywhere out of the ordinary was the throb of police boats circling the dark waters of Chinna Creek nearby.

…In my talk the next morning, alongside the writer Mohammed Hanif and Malayalam author Benyamin (whose excellent Goat Days is translated into English), I speak about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s idea of the danger of a single story, the way that humans tend to form a single, exclusive narrative to capture their experience of the world. My idea of Karachi, of Pakistan as a whole, has been fed to me by media reports of bomb blasts and terror attacks, of a country where a significant proportion of the population was illiterate, where those that did read turned to journalism rather than novels to inform their view of the world. Yet here I am in a hall where there is standing room only, speaking to a crowd of enthusiastic, urbane readers, rather to my surprise, very safe amid so many kindred spirits.

More here.

From BlackHistory:

She was born, Jane Matilda Bolin on April 11, 1908. She was the youngest of four children. Her father was Gaius Charles Bolin.

…Jane’s decision about the discipline of law, in which she would later engage, was shaped by her exposure to the plight of black people in America during those times. Having led a previously sheltered lifestyle, that exposure came through her father’s committed involvement in the NAACP. Jane faithfully read every edition of The Crisis, the NAACP’s bi-monthly magazine (founded in 1910 by W.E.B. Du Bois), from cover to cover. It was within those pages, which regularly published photos of lynching victims from across the country, that Jane’s sheltered life was shaken. The violent racism and hatred directed at black people was a world away from the microcosm that she grew up in, where her father was respected and admired by both black and white, and she was generally protected from the prejudice that divided the country. She dedicated herself, and her passion for law, to helping others. After graduation from Poughkeepsie High school in 1924, at only 15 years of age, the brilliant Jane would follow in her father’s footsteps. She enrolled in a prestigious Massachusetts undergraduate college, with the intent to major in law. She attended Wellesley College, a liberal arts college for women near Boston, and was one of only two black students there. Both immediately ostracized and ridiculed by the entire student body, they decided right away to live off campus, and become roommates. This was Jane’s first taste of blatant racism. Jane later recalled that the majority of her days at Wellesley were “sad and lonely.” “There were a few sincere friendships developed in that beautiful, idyllic setting of the college,” Jane remembered, “but on the whole, I was ignored outside the classroom.“

Despite a lack of encouragement and respect from most of her professors, Jane graduated as one of the top 20 students of her class in 1928, and was officially designated a “Wellesley Scholar.” Jane knew that the treatment she had received from faculty throughout her matriculation, would only continue during the obligatory meeting with Wellesley’s career advisor for graduating seniors. As expected, the advisor told Jane that she should not pursue a legal career, as there would be no work for a black woman as an attorney. When she made it clear that she would not only pursue a career in law, but intended to apply to Yale Law School to continue her studies, she was mocked and told that she should aim lower… as she would never be accepted at such a prestigious institution. Even Jane’s father tried to dissuade her from applying to Yale, only seeking to shield her from further prejudice, as he had once been able to do when she was a child. He made the case that the law profession revealed the worst in human nature. He preferred that Jane instead become a teacher- where she could help instruct, encourage, and inspire black students to pursue an advanced education and make great advances for the black community. Jane felt that she would be an even greater inspiration, by doing those things herself, as a pioneer in her chosen field. Little did G. Charles know at the time that he was making his case, that Jane had already been accepted at Yale. When her father learned this, he relented, and gave Jane his full support.

Emboldened and unintimidated through her experience at Wellesley, Jane enrolled at Yale Law School that same year- as the only black woman, and only one of three women in total, matriculating there.

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

Claudia Rankine at The New York Times:

Amiri Baraka eulogized James Baldwin on Dec. 8, 1987, by saying: “He was all the way live, all the way conscious, turned all the way up, receiving and broadcasting. . . . He always made us know we were dangerously intelligent and as courageous as the will to be free.”

This eulogy can aptly be turned back on Baraka himself, as “S O S: Poems 1961-2013” arrives a year after his own death. The sweeping collection, selected by Paul Vangelisti, begins with poems from Baraka’s first collection, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” (1961), and ends with unpublished work written up to 2013.

Baraka began his career in the company of the Black Mountain School (Charles Olson, Robert Duncan), the Beats (Allen Ginsberg) and the New York School (Frank O’Hara), among others. He published “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” as LeRoi Jones, a downtown hipster dad of two daughters, married to the white and Jewish Hettie Jones. Many of his early poems are meditative lyrics in conversation with Ginsberg, Duncan, Gary Snyder and Olson, to name a few. The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 brought Jones’s life as he knew it to a sudden close. He would leave his wife, children and poetic community; move uptown to Harlem; and eventually across the Hudson River back home to Newark, where he was born in 1934.

more here.