From KurzweilAI:

Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands

On some standard computer-vision tasks, short programs — less than 50 lines long — written in a probabilistic programming language are competitive with conventional systems with thousands of lines of code, MIT researchers have found. Most recent advances in artificial intelligence — such as mobile apps that convert speech to text — are the result of machine learning, in which computers are turned loose on huge data sets to look for patterns. To make machine-learning applications easier to build, computer scientists have begun developing so-called probabilistic programming languages, which let researchers mix and match machine-learning techniques that have worked well in other contexts. In 2013, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a four-year program to fund probabilistic-programming research. “This is the first time that we’re introducing probabilistic programming in the vision area,” says Tejas Kulkarni, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences and first author on the new paper. “The whole hope is to write very flexible models, both generative and discriminative models, as short probabilistic code, and then not do anything else. General-purpose inference schemes solve the problems.”

By the standards of conventional computer programs, those “models” can seem absurdly vague. One of the tasks that the researchers investigate, for instance, is constructing a 3-D model of a human face from 2-D images. Their program describes the principal features of the face as being two symmetrically distributed objects (eyes) with two more centrally positioned objects beneath them (the nose and mouth). It requires a little work to translate that description into the syntax of the probabilistic programming language, but at that point, the model is complete. Feed the program enough examples of 2D images and their corresponding 3D models, and it will figure out the rest for itself. “When you think about probabilistic programs, you think very intuitively when you’re modeling,” Kulkarni says. “You don’t think mathematically. It’s a very different style of modeling.”

More here.

Erica Klarreich in Quanta [h/t: Jennifer Ouellette] (image Skip Sterling):

Diaconis’ career as a professional magician began more than five decades ago, when he ran away from home at age 14 to go on the road with the sleight-of-hand virtuoso Dai Vernon. But unlike most magicians, Diaconis eventually found his way into academia, lured by an even more powerful siren song: mathematics. At 24, he started taking college classes to try to learn how to calculate the probabilities behind various gambling games. A few years later he was admitted to Harvard University’s graduate statistics program on the strength of a recommendation letter from the famed mathematics writer Martin Gardner that said, more or less, “This kid invented two of the best ten card tricks in the last decade, so you should give him a chance.”

Now a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford University, Diaconis has employed his intuition about cards, which he calls “the poetry of magic,” in a wide range of settings. Once, for example, he helped decode messages passed between inmates at a California state prison by using small random “shuffles” to gradually improve a decryption key. He has also analyzed Bose-Einstein condensation — in which a collection of ultra-cold atoms coalesces into a single “superatom” — by envisioning the atoms as rows of cards moving around. This makes them “friendly,” said Diaconis, whose speech still carries the inflections of his native New York City. “We all have our own basic images that we translate things into, and for me cards were where I started.”

In 1992, Diaconis famously proved — along with the mathematician Dave Bayer of Columbia University — that it takes about seven ordinary riffle shuffles to randomize a deck. Over the years, Diaconis and his students and colleagues have successfully analyzed the effectiveness of almost every type of shuffle people use in ordinary life.

All except one: “smooshing.”

This toddler-level technique involves spreading the cards out on a table, swishing them around with your hands, and then gathering them up. Smooshing is used in poker tournaments and in baccarat games in Monte Carlo, but no one actually knows how long you need to smoosh a deck to randomize it. “Smooshing is a completely different mechanism from the other shuffles, and my usual techniques don’t fit into that,” Diaconis said. The problem has tantalized him for decades.

More here.

Jill Dehnert reviews's Mohsin Hamid's Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London in The Brooklyn Rail:

While I read Discontent and Its Civilizations, one thought occurred to me over and over again: this book is essential. In the introduction, Hamid says, “I wanted the experience of reading this book to be like developing a relationship.” And at this, he is most successful. The structure of the book is such that we get to know the author and his thoughts on life, art, and politics in a way that mimics the development of a friendship; we learn about his life as a child, how he met his wife, his struggles and successes as a novelist, as well as his opinions on global politics. And because we get to know Hamid, we also come to trust him, to trust his opinions, and to value his view of the world. This is especially effective throughout the third section of the book, “Politics,” where Hamid investigates the failed governmental systems in Pakistan, Asia, and throughout the world.

It is exactly because Hamid has “tried to advocate the blurring of boundaries: not just between civilizations or people of different ‘groups,’ but also between writer and reader,” that Discontent and Its Civilizations feels important and urgent. Each essay seems like we are merely having a conversation with a good friend, and, as with any good conversation there is an element of self-reflection that occurs. So, even though Hamid doesn’t spend too much time directly addressing racial tension in America, I found myself reflecting on our contemporary moment in the United States, where recent racial conflict and upheaval, like Ferguson, have highlighted that we, as a nation, have not come as far as we may have thought. “A country should be judged,” Hamid says, “by how it treats its minorities.” Here he is talking about the gross and often deadly discrimination religious minorities face in Pakistan everyday. But it isn’t hard to imagine how the United States would fare under such scrutiny.

More here.

Crispin Sartwell in the New York Times:

When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s, I played on the intramural softball team of the postmodern literary theorist Stanley Fish. I recall his umpiring at a practice once when the batter, my buddy Mike, now a distinguished professor at Yale, argued a call. Fish good-humoredly pointed out that what’s a ball and what’s a strike is not an objective, external, or natural fact, it’s an interpretive practice; and according to that practice, whatever the umpire calls is real: If he calls it a strike, it’s a strike. (So that was a strike, Mike.)

The next day in class he expanded the ball and strike example into a theory of literary interpretation, and finally of reality: what’s true or false in these areas is what authoritative interpretive communities approve. Law is a practice like this, he said. Philosophy is. Science is.

Over his career, Fish had gone from close readings of “Paradise Lost” to an approach to textual interpretation that made use of French post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida. And by developing the view that truth was a matter of linguistic practice rather than referring to a reality outside of language, he had become one of the spearheads of “postmodernism.”

It was in one of Fish’s seminars that I first read Richard Rorty, another arch-postmodernist who was later my dissertation adviser. Rorty convincingly defended himself against the charge of relativism – I know, having spent hours in his office, trying to make it stick — and yet he maintained that it was useless to talk about the world, or truth. It was ridiculous or impossible, he asserted, to try to describe reality outside of our linguistic practices, to describe it as it would be if it were not being described.

More here.

The Editors at n+1:

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of ceaseless generational analysis. Among certain classes, especially business elites, it is considered a sign of profound insight to speak only in terms of youth and its consumer preferences. The jargon once endemic to Ad Age(which coined the term “Generation Y”) now peppers style sections and business books, earnest organizing meetings and talk shows, such that no one of any age can open a newspaper or a website without reading about the “millennials” — people born between 1982 and 2004 — and their doings, interests, and needs.

It seems not to matter to the proliferation of writing about millennials that so much of it has been internally contradictory. In the year 2000, the sinister David Brooks said that stats suggested the boomers were raising friendly, sociable, and altruistic kids. In 2012, Jean Twenge at the Atlantic retaliated with fresh stats that revealed them to be inveterate narcissists profoundly uninterested in social problems. “Politicians: Millennials Won’t Vote Because They Hate You” declaimed Bloomberg, prompting an older Huffington Post correspondent to wonder ruefully, “Millennials: Why Do They Hate Us?” All this despite evidence that millennials vote in the same numbers as young people of previous generations. Millennials, according to Business Insider, are disaffected with workplace authority and value flexibility, but an IBM study written up in the Washington Post suggests that in this respect, too, millennials are indistinguishable from other generations.

more here.

Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

In 1993, seven years before his death, at the age of eighty-two, Jacob Lawrence recast the title and most of the captions of a stunning suite of sixty small paintings that he had made in 1941. The pictures, in milk-based casein tempera on hardboard, detailed the exodus that began during the First World War of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The original title, “The Migration of the Negro,” became “The Migration Series.” The prolix captions were condensed and clarified, with only five of them left unedited, including the last, a swelling coda to the sequence’s rhythmic montage: “And the migrants kept coming.” Art historians quail at alterations of canonical works, even by their creators. But Lawrence wasn’t working for art history, even if he was making it. He wanted to change the world. A profoundly moving show of all sixty paintings in “The Migration Series” at the Museum of Modern Art—the installation, by the curator Leah Dickerman, includes contemporaneous works by other artists, photographers, musicians, and writers—stirs reflection on the character and the relative success of that aim. The work’s originality calls for a term other than “history painting”: sociology painting, perhaps, which defines not only a bygone era but a deeply conditioned and persistent yet quaking ground of common cultural experience and political consequence. The pictures remain the same. The eyes that behold them—ours—both do and don’t.

more here.

Thomas Lin in The New Yorker:

Cédric Villani’s arrival, one afternoon last May, at a small café off the Champs-Élysées drew glances from a good fraction of the late-lunch crowd. His shoulder-length hair was parted almost symmetrically down the middle, and he wore his usual ensemble: a three-piece pin-striped black suit, a silver pocket watch and chain, a peacock-green cravat (purchased at a costume store for actors), an overstuffed backpack, and, pinned to his lapel like a biological specimen, a custom-made spider brooch. Having just wrapped up a national-radio segment at the station next door, he was stopping for a bite on his way back to the Institut Henri Poincaré, where he serves as director.

Villani has been called the Lady Gaga of French mathematicians. After winning the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, in 2010, for what his award citation called “proofs of nonlinear Landau damping and convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation,” he embraced a role that many other medalists have dreaded—that of mathematical ambassador, hopscotching from event to event and continent to continent, evangelizing for the discipline. “We are the most hidden of all fields,” he told me. “We are the ones who typically interact the least with the outer world. We are also the field which is most emblematic of revulsion in school.” The French filmmaker Olivier Peyon, who first met Villani while shooting his 2013 documentary “Comment J’ai Détesté les Maths” (“How I Came to Hate Math”), says that the mathematician struck him immediately as a natural proselytizer. “He was funny, very—in French, we say pédagogique,” Peyon told me. “He knew how to speak about his art, about math.”

More here.

Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian:

“I started out as a writer, fresh out of college, thinking that if I could make my living at it – write for an airline magazine – I’d be happy,” says Brooks over coffee in downtown Washington, DC; at 53, he is ageing into the amiably fogeyish appearance he has cultivated since his youth. “I’ve far exceeded my expectations. But then you learn the elemental truth that every college student should know: career success doesn’t make you happy.” In midlife, it struck him that he’d spent too much time cultivating what he calls “the résumé virtues” – racking up impressive accomplishments – and too little on “the eulogy virtues”, the character strengths for which we’d like to be remembered. Brooks builds a convincing case that this isn’t just his personal problem but a societal one: that our market-driven meritocracy, even when functioning at its fairest, rewards outer success while discouraging the development of the soul. Though this is inevitably a conservative argument – we have lost a “moral vocabulary” we once possessed, he says – many of the exemplary figures around whom Brooks builds the book were leftists: labour activists, civil rights leaders, anti-poverty campaigners. (St Augustine and George Eliot feature prominently, too.) What unites them, in his telling, is the inner confrontation they had to endure, setting aside whatever plans they had for life when it became clear that life had other plans for them.

This may seem like serious stuff to readers who recall Bobos in Paradise, Brooks’s acutely well-observed debut about the new class of “bourgeois bohemians”, the emerging elite who fused the social values of the hippies with the consumerism of the yuppies. Returning to America following a stint in Brussels for the Wall Street Journal, Brooks found that it was “now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker.” (He counted himself a Bobo, as must at least some Guardian readers.) He zeroed in on a new form of conspicuous consumption: a Bobo would never spend thousands on a fancy TV – that would be crass – but would willingly blow cash on “necessities”, such as restaurant-quality kitchen appliances, or a bathroom lined with slate of precisely the right artisanal roughness. For Bobos, he explained, it was “perfectly acceptable to spend lots of money on anything that is of ‘professional quality’, even if it has nothing to do with your profession”: if you’ve ever purchased an “expedition-weight, three-layer Gore-Tex Alpenglow reinforced Marmot Thunderlight jacket” for a country hike, as opposed to an Everest ascent, he meant you.

More here.

Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker:

In 1982, when I was in Hamburg for the publication of the German translation of “Midnight’s Children,” I was asked by my publishers if I would like to meet Günter Grass. Well, obviously I wanted to, and so I was driven out to the village of Wewelsfleth, outside Hamburg, where Grass then lived. He had two houses in the village; he wrote and lived in one and used the other as an art studio. After a certain amount of early fencing—I was expected, as the younger writer, to make my genuflections, which, as it happened, I was happy to perform—he decided, all of a sudden, that I was acceptable, led me to a cabinet in which he stored his collection of antique glasses, and asked me to choose one. Then he got out a bottle of schnapps, and by the bottom of the bottle we were friends. At some later point, we lurched over to the art studio, and I was enchanted by the objects I saw there, all of which I recognized from the novels: bronze eels, terracotta flounders, dry-point etchings of a boy beating a tin drum. I envied him his artistic gift almost more than I admired him for his literary genius. How wonderful, at the end of a day’s writing, to walk down the street and become a different sort of artist! He designed his own book covers, too: dogs, rats, toads moved from his pen onto his dust jackets.

After that meeting, every German journalist I met wanted to ask me what I thought of him, and when I said that I believed him to be one of the two or three greatest living writers in the world some of these journalists looked disappointed, and said, “Well, ‘The Tin Drum,’ yes, but wasn’t that a long time ago?” To which I tried to reply that if Grass had never written that novel, his other books were enough to earn him the accolades I was giving him, and the fact that he had written “The Tin Drum” as well placed him among the immortals. The skeptical journalists looked disappointed. They would have preferred something cattier, but I had nothing catty to say.

More here.

Patrick Berkery in Salon:

Somewhere in the world right now, there’s a drummer in a recording studio or rehearsal room being instructed to “play it like Ringo,” which is to say they’re being tasked with adding to a song the kind of tumbling fills that have a melody of their own (like the tom-tom break in “With a Little Help From My Friends”), give a tune a swinging feel that also rocks (think: “I Saw Her Standing There”), attack a number with psychedelic abandon (“Tomorrow Never Knows”), or perhaps apply all three of those elements to one song (“Rain”).

That parts Ringo Starr played roughly 50 years ago with the Beatles are still being used regularly as rhythmic points of reference and that “play it like Ringo” is a commonly used entry in the musical lexicon speaks to his considerable influence and lasting impact on the art of rock drumming. He was more than just the happy-go-lucky guy that kept steady time for the most important musical group ever, a combo that changed the course of culture in the space of about seven years. Ringo is the most important and influential rock drummer ever.

And now, because of his game-changing contributions to rock drumming, Ringo is getting a plaque of his own in Cleveland. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will honor the Beatles drummer with the Award for Musical Excellence on April 18 during induction ceremonies for the class of 2015.

Mock the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame all you want — from opting to induct Bruce Springsteen without the E Street Band because only Bruce’s name appeared on the album covers, to allowing Sammy Hagar to accept the award for Van Halen when original frontman David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers didn’t show at the band’s induction, to the institution’s murky induction criteria, we could sit here all week finding fault with the Hall — but they’re getting this one right by enshrining Ringo the drummer, not Ringo the solo artist.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

When Stephen Fesik left the pharmaceutical industry to launch an academic drug-discovery laboratory, he drew up a wanted list of five of the most important cancer-causing proteins known to science. These proteins drive tumour growth but have proved to be a nightmare for drug developers: they are too smooth, too floppy or otherwise too finicky for drugs to bind to and block. In the parlance of the field, they are 'undruggable'.

One of the first culprits that Fesik added to his list was a protein family called Ras. For more than 30 years, it has been known that mutations in the genes that encode Ras proteins are among the most powerful cancer drivers. Ras mutations are found in some of the most aggressive and deadly cancers, including up to 25% of lung tumours and about 90% of pancreatic tumours. And for some advanced cancers, tumours with Ras mutations are associated with earlier deaths than tumours without them.Decades of research have yet to yield a drug that can safely curb Ras activity. Past failures have driven researchers from the field and forced pharmaceutical companies to abandon advanced projects. But Fesik's laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and a handful of other teams have set their sights anew on the proteins. They are armed with improved technology and a better understanding of how Ras proteins work. Last year, the US National Cancer Institute launched the Ras Initiative, a US$10-million-a-year effort to find new ways to tackle Ras-driven cancers. And researchers are already uncovering compounds that, with tweaking, could eventually yield the first drugs to target Ras proteins.

More here.

Benjamin Breen in Aeon:

Close your eyes, and envision a glowing crystal suspended in infinite space. Now breathe in slowly, counting backwards from 10. Energy pulses along the interstices of the crystal. Exhale, and imagine a second crystal, precisely like the first – then a dozen, a hundred, 100,000 crystals multiplying into an infinite void. And 100,000 dream catchers. And semiprecious stones inscribed with chakras. And ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers, Alex Grey posters, Tibetan prayer flags, wellness magnets, and ionising Himalayan salt lamps.

Now open your eyes and imagine how much they all cost.

It’s easy to scoff at the totemic kitsch of the New Age movement. But it’s impossible to deny its importance, both as an economic force and as a cultural template, a way of approaching the world. The New Age is a powerful mixture of mass-market mysticism and idealistic yearning. It’s also, arguably, our era’s most popular ex novo spiritual movement, winning adherents with a blend of ancient wisdom traditions, post-Enlightenment mysticism and contemporary globalisation that is as nebulous as it is heady.

It’s worth noting at the outset: New Age is not so much a discrete collection of beliefs as it is a Venn diagram (or a mandala, if you like) of intersecting interests, objectives and motifs. The New Age ‘movement’ is not a single movement at all. The term contains multitudes.

Arguably, the aspect of New Age that is easiest to pin down is also the most superficial: the look. The term conjures visions of chakra charts, indigo auras, psychedelic paintings of bodies radiating energy, crystals, candles, ambient music and dream catchers. One can guess with reasonable certainty that the crowd at a New Age gathering – a solstice ceremony in Golden Gate Park, say – will display a collective taste for dreadlocks, aromatherapy, South Asian or Andean textiles and accoutrements such as utility kilts, gnarled oaken staffs and coin pouches that wouldn’t look out of place at a Renaissance Fair. The aesthetic is one of unabashed pastiche.

More here.

Karen Olsson reviews Rachel Holmes's Eleanor Marx: A Life in Bookforum:

It’s counterintuitive to think of the British Museum as a happening spot, but for a long time its reading room served as a premier gathering place for London’s brainy bohemians. In the 1880s, these included radicals like George Bernard Shaw, Henry Havelock Ellis, and Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. They worked there, and they talked during smoke breaks and visits to Bloomsbury tea shops. They moved fluidly between politics and the arts, deploring factory conditions as fervently as they dissected Ibsen’s plays. The reading room was a vital seedbed for such Victorian-era social-reform causes as women’s rights and trade-union organizing.

It was also a pickup scene. Edward Aveling, a science lecturer, playwright, and political activist—and a notorious flirt—described the reading room as “in equal degrees a menagerie and a lunatic asylum” and made a tongue-in-cheek proposal that it be segregated by sex so as to bring about “less talking and fewer marriages.” Among the liaisons fostered there was Aveling’s with Eleanor, an energetic feminist and socialist who, after her father’s death in 1883, blazed a bright trail of her own. As Rachel Holmes illustrates in her engaging new biography, she emerged as one of the London intellectual Left’s leading thinkers and activists, forcefully insisting that advances for women and advances for workers be fought for in tandem.

And yet even as she strode confidently across the public stage, Eleanor attached herself, for fourteen years, to Aveling, who turned out to be the sort of person we might now call a lying scumbag. This mystified her friends, and it remains something of an enigma today: While she and Aveling were never legally married, she considered herself his wife, and she stood by her disastrous man until the very bitter end.

Then again, a little Marx-family history reminds us what strange arrangements and dark secrets lay behind the scrim of Victorian domesticity.

More here.

Max Fisher in Vox (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images):

Netanyahu's reelection merely reflected trends that have been building in Israel for years: a growing and increasingly extreme political right, a resistance or outright hostility toward peace, a willingness to forgo international acceptance, and even a certain hesitation toward the more difficult aspects of democracy.

“Israel is galloping toward an anti-democratic, bi-national future saturated with hatred and racism,” the Israeli columnist Ravit Hecht wrote in Ha'aretz in March.

And that gets to what makes this all so troubling: even if Israelis oppose this end result, and highly prize their democracy and international acceptance, the choices that they are making as a nation, over and over, point increasingly in that direction.

Israelis cannot say they were not warned, nor that warnings have come only from liberals and peaceniks. The alarm that Ben Gurion sounded in 1967 has gone off many times before and since.

“[Even] after the formation of a Jewish majority, a considerable Arab population will always remain in Palestine,” Jabotinsky, the early Zionist leader whose ideas inform today's Israeli right, wrote in the years before Palestine had become Israel and Palestine. “If things fare badly for this group of inhabitants then things will fare badly for the entire country. The political, economic and cultural welfare of the Arabs will thus always remain one of the main conditions for the well-being of the Land of Israel.”

Yuval Dishkin, the former head of Israel's shadowy internal security service Shin Bet, warned in 2013 that unless Israel could find peace the Palestinians, and soon, “we will certainly cross the point of no return, after which we will be left with one state from the river to the sea for two peoples. The consequences of such a state for our national identity, our security, our ability to maintain a worthy, democratic state, our moral fiber as a society, and our place in the family of nations would be far-reaching.”

Israel's unwillingness or inability to reconcile its Jewish identity with its democratic ideals, or to reconcile its military occupation of Palestinians with its place in the international community, puts the nation as it exists now at real risk.

More here.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig in TNR:

There are, of course, a slew of issues with establishing any state faith, chief among them the First Amendment. Naming state religion would also contravene all Republicans supposedly hold dear when it comes to maintaining a small unobtrusive government. But aside from the illegality and irrationality of it, naming Christianity the United States’ national faith would do damage to the faith and faithful even if it did somehow shore up national morality. This is because national faiths, for better or worse, tend to morph into nationalism with a faith element, rather than a faith that happens to be practiced by a particular nation.

This is already true of right wing rhetoric wherein Christianity is made to stand in for American conflicts or situations. Earlier this month, for example, President Barack Obama faced censorious outcry after noting that Christians of the past carried out the Crusades; with Republicans like Governor Bobby Jindal accusing the president of going hard on Christianity in lieu of ISIS, it’s clear the Crusades were, in this instance, turned into an analogy of a purely modern conflict, with Obama implied to be on the wrong side. By criticizing Christianity instead of Islam he was understood to take the side of foreigners rather than Americans.

With Christianity serving so often as a cheap byword for Americanism, it’s no surprise that 54 percent of Republicans believe the president is an undercover Muslim, and that a handful of their vocal politicians believe he does not love America. These are twin suspicions, both impossible to prove, both based on speculation about the president’s internal states, which trade evidence among them, such as the fact that Obama will not say that America is at war with Islam.

Were Christianity named our national religion, it would only be dubbed such to serve a particular national purpose, that is, to straighten out our morals or boost morale for our confrontation of terrorism abroad. But to do this would be to force Christianity into the servitude of particular national interests, which would only further the degree to which the Christian faith is already wrongly conflated with specific American political aims.

More here.

John Lukacs reviews Roger Moorhouse's The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941, in the NYRB (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images):

What was more important than the Non-Aggression Pact was its addendum, a Secret Protocol, that called for nothing less than a division of Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, part of which was to be taken over by the Soviets. In addition, Germany recognized Russia’s “sphere of interest” in Estonia, Latvia, Finland, some of Lithuania, and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Moscow denied the very existence of this Secret Protocol for a long time, well beyond World War II. But it existed in the German archives; and in 1939 it became a somber and dreadful reality. As late as 1986 the aged Molotov (then over ninety) denied its very existence to a Russian journalist. In fact, many of its conditions survived both the world war and the succeeding conflicts until 1989.

Poland, its army and its people, fought the Germans bravely for a month in 1939 (almost as long as France, with its considerable army, in 1940). But seventeen days after the German invasion Stalin’s armies invaded Poland from the east. A few days later in Brest, a meeting place then just on the Russian side of the new partition of Poland, there was a small joint military parade of Nazi and Soviet soldiers and military vehicles. Just over two months later, less than three months after the outbreak of World War II, the only fighting on land in Europe was between Russians and Finns, who would not accept Russian control of their country. The British were aghast. They (and the French) even considered, briefly, intervening, but this did not come about. Soon Hitler’s armies conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium—and then France. Churchill and Britain stood alone, for more than a year to come.

At the end of September 1939 Ribbentrop flew to Moscow once more to arrange some border deals that would carry out the Secret Protocol. Throughout the war, of all Germany’s high officials, he was the most inclined to seek and keep agreements with the Russians. (His counterpart among the Russians, Molotov, had often reciprocal inclinations.) In this respect we may also notice the reciprocal tendencies of Hitler and Stalin. Hitler thought it necessary to carry out the terms of the alliance with Stalin; Stalin, for his part, was more enthusiastic about it than Hitler. One example is his perhaps unnecessary toast to Hitler after the signing of their pact on August 24, 1939: “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer, I should therefore like to drink to his health.”

More here.

Adam Liptak in the NYTimes:

Representing unpopular clients has a long and proud tradition in American justice, one that experts in legal ethics say is central to the adversarial system. John Adams, the future president, agreed to represent British soldiers accused of murder in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Clarence Darrow defended two union activists who dynamited the Los Angeles Times building in 1910, killing 21 workers. Leading law firms today have lined up to defend detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, some accused of ties to Al Qaeda.

The Supreme Court has said criminal defendants are entitled to a lawyer. There is no right to counsel in civil cases, but most lawyers do not lightly turn away paying clients. Some lawyers, though, have been forced out of their firms for agreeing to take on clients opposed to same-sex marriage.

Whatever the reason, there is a yawning gap between the uniformity of views among legal elites and the more mixed opinions of the American public and the members of the Supreme Court. Polls indicate that while a slim majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, many remain skeptical, and the court’s decision, expected in June, is likely to be closely divided.

In earlier eras, the opposing sides were more evenly matched in landmark civil rights cases. One of the lawyers who argued in favor of segregated public schools in 1953 in Brown v. Board of Education was John W. Davis, a leader of the glittering New York law firm now known as Davis Polk & Wardwell. He was the Democratic nominee for president in 1924, the ambassador to Britain and the solicitor general, and he once held the record for most Supreme Court arguments in the 20th century.

Read the rest here.

James H. Brown, PH.D. and the New Mexico Human Macroecology Group in Nautilus:

The most basic function of a living organism is to take in energy and spend it on survival and reproduction. If humans are unique, then so must our energy use be. What we know today is that our energy use has both deep similarities to, and differences from, that of other animals.

Part of our energy budget is dedicated to biological metabolism, which is the set of processes through which our bodies produce and spend energy derived from the food we eat. This we share in common with all other animals. Unlike all other mammals, however, humans also use extra-biological energy, and a lot of it. The rate of biological energy use (or the metabolic rate) of a human is about 100 watts, equivalent to 2,000 kilocalories per day. But in the most developed countries, our average per capita energy use is on the order of 10,000 watts, or 100 times greater than what we need biologically. The total energy usage of an average person in the U.S., Canada, the Eurozone or Japan is equivalent to the biological metabolic rate of a hypothetical 30-ton primate. About 80 percent of this extra-biological energy consumption comes from burning fossil fuels.

In addition, unlike all other mammals, different communities of humans have vastly different energy consumption patterns. The New Mexico Human Macroecology Group has documented how energy use scales with GDP, a standard measure of economic activity. Across countries today, as per capita GDP increases by about 700 times, per capita energy use increases by about 200 times. This means that in the poorest developing nations of sub-Saharan Africa, the average per capita energy use is barely more than the 100 watts required for basic biological metabolism. Socially derived variations in energy consumption among other species do exist: for example, the alpha male in a wolf pack or a band of gorillas will often have a better diet and spend more energy. But these variations are rarely greater than a factor of two.

More here.