From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Beginning in 1949 and spanning a period of 40 years, the Soviet Union carried out more than 450 nuclear tests in the isolated steppes of eastern Kazakhstan. In 1989, when the socialist state collapsed, the Russians pulled out and left the Kazakhs to their own devices—literally. Enough fissile material for a dozen or more nuclear weapons was left behind in mountain tunnels and bore holes, virtually unguarded and vulnerable to scavengers, rogue states, or potential terrorists.

In a remarkable and highly secretive feat of collaboration among the United States, Russia, and Kazakhstan, engineers and nuclear scientists from the three countries spent 15 years and $150 million to secure many of the tunnels and test areas at the sprawling Semipalatinsk Test Site. Siegfried S. Hecker, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, launched the project while director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He used his personal ties with Russian scientists to prod them into working with the Americans and Kazakhs after a visit to the test site in 1998 left him stunned by the lack of security and the presence of scavengers.

More here. [Photo from Wikipedia shows Siegfried S. Hecker.]

From The Talks:

Mr. Smith, I’ve heard that you play music in your office every morning from 6 until 8 before everyone else shows up. What did you listen to today?

This morning I was listening to a little English singer called Jake Bugg, who sounds a bit like a young Bob Dylan. He’s actually from my hometown Nottingham, so I know him and he’s a very nice lad. I love my two hours of peace in the morning. It’s heaven.

How do you pick what music to listen to?

It completely depends on my mood and how late I got to bed or what type of day I’ve got ahead of me.

What would you listen to if you have a hangover?

Something very gentle, like Dave Brubeck. Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of jazz, which I haven’t done for years. I still quite like Van Morrison as well. The album Astral Weeks has helped me get around the world so many times. It’s very easy to listen to. In general it’s really varied. It’s music from 30 years ago to a brand new band. Luckily I get sent a lot of music from a lot of the record companies because they know I like music and also because we dress a lot of the bands.

When you listen to music do you listen to CDs or to vinyl?

I’ve got both at my office.

More here.

Eschaton is “an atavistic global-nuclear-conflict game,” but one renowned among the students who play it for its theoretical purity. It takes place on four contiguous tennis courts, which, as one of my own students put it in his mid-term paper, “represent a concrete war territory but are themselves only theoretical in nature.” This fragile distinction between theory and reality – an opposition that, owing to the representational quality of the Eschaton game itself, does not fold neatly onto map vs. territory – comes under pressure when snow begins to fall during the game. In response to the young participant JJ Penn’s suggestion that the snow should alter the calculations that constitute the game’s action, Michael Pemulis, an older student and “sort of eminence grise of Eschaton,” is apoplectic: “It’s snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!” Pemulis might well be clear in his own mind on the rules, and on the necessary axioms that allow for the rules to apply – “Players aren’t inside the goddamn game. Players are part of the apparatus of the game” – but all this “metatheoretical fuss” is both negated and sublated when Evan Ingersoll attacks Ann Kittenplan with a direct hit that he also claims is a strike against the world superpower she represents.

more from Adam Kelly at The Millions here.

If you haven’t read an Elmore Leonard novel, now would be a good time to do that. I normally tell people to start with The Hot Kid, which merges the two genres he owned: westerns and crime. But it’s not “vintage” Elmore Leonard, in that it takes place over a few years instead of a much more compressed few days or weeks, and it isn’t strictly about a few people in a hard situation making mostly bad choices. Vintage Elmore Leonard is that: some characters and a problem that only gets bigger, and it’s all powered by some of the best dialogue you’ll ever read. Really. Here’s a line from a random page in Mr. Paradise, where a bad dude is setting up a job with some other bad dudes:

“What we’ll be doing isn’t exactly show business. You walk in where I tell you the guy will be, shoot him or throw him out a window and collect the balance, your twenty grand each. What I have to do for half that much is find you the job. I can’t advertise, can I? Like I’m one of those personal injury fuckheads. I can’t appeal to the little housewife whose husband beats her up every time he gets drunk. And she can’t run an ad in the Help Wanted. So I have to deal with people who shoot each other.”

more from Jonathan Segura at Paris Review here.

“I have something left in reserve”, Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1996) wrote in the “Introduction” to the first volume of his famous intellectual achievement, Diary – “but what remains is rather intimate, I would prefer not to present it here. I don’t want to cause myself trouble. Maybe someday […] Later.” Trouble? Gombrowicz had never seemed particularly averse to causing trouble for himself through his previous literary provocations: the revaluation of Polishness; exposing the lack of intellect among various hommes de lettres; ridiculing worshippers of form and enemies of individuality. Today we know the source of Gombrowicz’s fears. That “something left in reserve”, closely guarded and carefully annotated by the author until his death, was recently published in Poland for the first time as Kronos. Gombrowicz’s private diary is a notebook, a chronicle, a dry record of the facts of Gombrowicz’s life. This is not a literary creation. Gombrowicz presents himself to us, as well as to himself, completely naked and performs a brutal auto-vivisection with surgical precision. We get to know about his illnesses (eczema, ulcers, syphilis, crumbling teeth, liver pains, sciatica, asthma), his casual hetero- and homosexual partners (as he noted in 1956, “Eroticism: great calming down, 11” – where “11” refers to the number of sexual partners that day), financial accounts (“I have about 16,000 dollars, oh the irony!”) or his own evaluation of his literary career (“Growing prestige in Poland and Germany”). Finally, we see him ageing and struggling with his own body.

more from Piotr Kiezun and Jaroslaw Kuisz at Eurozine here.

From HimalSouthAsian:

The internet as we know it today is largely an American phenomenon. Our daily online needs are served almost exclusively by US internet giants based in the Silicon Valley: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Dropbox, Amazon, Ebay and more. As a result, the internet’s design and evolution has been shaped by Western democratic values. We’d likely not have the internet in its relatively unstructured and decentralised current form had it come out of Soviet Russia. But with those values also came the language – English. The American Standards Association’s original ASCII code, the dominant encoding scheme of the web until a few years ago, uses only 128 characters to represent all textual information necessary for a computer, to the exclusion of characters alien to English. A German equivalent, if Germans had got the lead, for instance, would certainly have accommodated accented characters. Still, regardless of which Western culture computing advances might have come from, for Southasia and other regions with non-Latin alphabets computing would still have had to be done in a foreign language and alphabet, or in unintuitive versions of their own languages. The UTF-8 (more commonly known as Unicode), popularised in the last decade, has transcended the limitations of ASCII to represent thousands of characters with a single encoding scheme. This has made it possible to represent many different writing systems using one encoding scheme, instead of having to use separate ones for each. Today, this is the most popular standard of character encoding on the web.

David Rock quoted in DelanceyPlace:

In today's selection — you can't do two things that require concentration at once — or at least you can't do them very well. And doing too much, even if not all at once, has a debilitating effect: “The idea that conscious processes need to be done one at a time has been studied in hundreds of experiments since the 1980s. For example, the scientist Harold Pashler showed that when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. It's a phenomenon called dual-task interference. In one experiment, Pashler had volunteers press one of two keys on a pad in response to whether a light flashed on the left or right side of a window. One group only did this task over and over. Another group had to define the color of an object at the same time, choosing from among three colors. These are simple variables: left or right, and only three colors. Yet doing two tasks took twice as long, leading to no time saving. This finding held up whether the experiment involved sight or sound, and no matter how much participants practiced. If it didn't matter whether they got the answers right, they could go faster. The lesson is clear: if accuracy is important, don't divide your attention.

…”A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night's sleep. For men, it's around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it's really not that amusing that one of the most common 'productivity tools' can make one as dumb as a stoner. (Apologies to technology manufacturers: there are good ways to use this technology, specifically being able to 'switch off' for hours at a time.) 'Always on' may not be the most productive way to work. One of the reasons for this will become clearer in the chapter on staying cool under pressure; however, in summary, the brain is being forced to be on 'alert' far too much. This increases what is known as your allostatic load, which is a reading of stress hormones and other factors relating to a sense of threat. The wear and tear from this has an impact. As Stone says, 'This always on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis. What happens to mammals in a state of constant crisis is the adrenalized fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. It's great when tigers are chasing us. How many of those five hundred emails a day is a tiger?' “

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

In the responses to his book, much has been made of the fact that a lot of Nagel’s reasoning is not very good. He repeatedly invokes “common sense,” and puts forward the Argument From Personal Incredulity in an especially unapologetic manner:

[F]or a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works… This is just the opinion of a layman who reads widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist.

Given that he is admittedly not an expert in the scientific fields he is willing to label as “almost certainly false,” there must be a deep-seated reason underlying Nagel’s conviction. That reason seems to be the enormous importance he places on the “intelligibility” of nature. This is something like the Principle of Sufficient Reason (which he mentions). Nagel believes that the specific laws of nature, or even the fact that there are such laws at all, and that we can understand them, are all things that require an explanation. They cannot simply be (as others among us are happy to accept). And the only way he can see that happening is if “mind” and its appearance in the universe are taken as fundamental features of reality, not simply byproducts of physical evolution.

Try as I might, I cannot quite appreciate the appeal of this program. I could imagine that, after much effort were expended experimentally and theoretically, we might ultimately come to believe that the best explanatory framework for the appearance of consciousness in the universe involves positing mind as a separate category. What I don’t understand is the a priori-sounding argument that this would necessarily be a better explanation. If Nagel can demand an explanation for why the world is intelligible, why can’t I demand an explanation for why mind is a separate category, or why the universe has teleological tendencies?

Carl Zimmer in the NYT:

Evolutionary biologists have come to recognize humans as a tremendous evolutionary force. In hospitals, we drive the evolution of resistant bacteria by giving patients antibiotics. In the oceans, we drive the evolution of small-bodied fish by catching the big ones.

In a new study, a University of Minnesota biologist, Emilie C. Snell-Rood, offers evidence suggesting we may be driving evolution in a more surprising way. As we alter the places where animals live, we may be fueling the evolution of bigger brains.

Dr. Snell-Rood bases her conclusion on a collection of mammal skulls kept at the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Snell-Rood picked out 10 species to study, including mice, shrews, bats and gophers. She selected dozens of individual skulls that were collected as far back as a century ago. An undergraduate student named Naomi Wick measured the dimensions of the skulls, making it possible to estimate the size of their brains.

Two important results emerged from their research. In two species — the white-footed mouse and the meadow vole — the brains of animals from cities or suburbs were about 6 percent bigger than the brains of animals collected from farms or other rural areas. Dr. Snell-Rood concludes that when these species moved to cities and towns, their brains became significantly bigger.

Freeman Dyson reviews Ray Monk's in Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center in the NYRB:

Why another book about Robert Oppenheimer? Many books have been written and widely read, ranging from the impressionistic Lawrence and Oppenheimer of Nuel Pharr Davis to the scholarly American Prometheus of Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Ray Monk says he wrote his book because the others gave too much weight to Oppenheimer’s politics and too little weight to his science. Monk restores the balance by describing in detail the activities that occupied most of Oppenheimer’s life: learning and exploring and teaching science.

The subtitle, “A Life Inside the Center,” calls attention to a rarer skill in which Oppenheimer excelled. He had a unique ability to put himself at the places and times at which important things were happening. Four times in his life, he was at the center of important events. In 1926 he was at Göttingen, where his teacher Max Born was one of the leaders of the quantum revolution that transformed our view of the subatomic world. In 1929 he was at Berkeley, where his friend Ernest Lawrence was building the first cyclotron, and with Lawrence he created in Berkeley an American school of sub-atomic physics that took the leadership away from Europe. In 1943 he was at Los Alamos building the first nuclear weapons. In 1947 he was in Washington as chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, giving advice to political and military leaders at the highest levels of government. He was driven by an irresistible ambition to play a leading part in historic events. In each case, when he was present at the center of action, he rose to the occasion and took charge of the situation with unexpected competence.

It is often helpful to have several books covering the same territory. Since different writers have different viewpoints, each book will do better in some areas and worse in others. The most valuable contribution of Monk’s book is to give a detailed picture of two groups of people who played an important role in Oppenheimer’s life: the tightly knit society of wealthy German New York Jews to which his parents belonged, and the small army of security officers who monitored his social and political activities when he was engaged in secret work in Berkeley and Los Alamos.

Changes during the early nineteenth century revolutionized responses to fat. A new focus on statistics brought with it the concept of weight norms, and advances in chemistry suggested that sugar intake and fat were closely related. Fat was now considered unburned fuel, whereas before it was thought of in very different terms, related to an early understanding of the body as rooted in liquids and humours. And as technology slowly moved into the domestic sphere, people weighed themselves more. One consequence: “There is an intensified will to thinness in the second half of the nineteenth century”, and it is a consequence that falls differentially on women. Indeed, an enduring response to fatness, a response that stands impervious to change with the century, society, or culture is the double standard “between”, Vigarello explains, “the male case where relatively big sizes are tolerated” and “the female case where thinness is obligatory”. The gendered aspect of fatness, a phenomenon which results in “two adipose cultures”, is a star point in Vigarello’s book; his discussion of the “disparities of alimentation” at work within France’s class structure is another. By 1920, Georges Vigarello tells us, obesity was viewed in much the same terms as it is today: “The fat person is both an aesthetic threat and a health risk”. As he readily admits, what is new is what is emphasized by Lustig and Moss: the runaway nature of it, the global nature of the problem.

more from Barbara J. King at the TLS here.

It should not be necessary to argue at any length that the slogan “Make It New” is the most durably useful of all modernist expressions of the value of novelty. In certain accounts, such as Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, these three words are assumed to sum up most of what modernism stands for: “In short, modernists considered Ezra Pound’s famous injunction, ‘Make It New!,’ a professional, almost a sacred obligation.” Scholars as eminent and yet as utterly different from one another as Richard Rorty, Frank Lentricchia, Jackson Lears, Fredric Jameson, and David Damrosch have used this phrase to make various points about modern life, art, or literature. Some of these citations are vague and atmospheric, even anonymous, as the slogan is often used without specific reference to Pound. But this is perhaps an additional tribute to his influence, as the slogan has become so ubiquitous as to have lost its trademark status, like Kleenex or the Xerox copy. The actual genealogy of the phrase “Make It New” has been established by Pound scholars and is well known to those among them who specialize in Pound’s relation to China, but it is so often misdated and for that matter misquoted (tagged with a spurious exclamation mark) that its genesis is worth recounting in some detail. The crucial fact to begin with is that the phrase is not originally Pound’s at all.

more from Michael North at Guernica here.

In a lovely 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his ‘discreet, elliptical’ subject: Davis was one of those 20th-century artists who had found ‘a simple way of saying very complicated things’. Jump to 1966 and the meatier, beatier sound of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring. One arrow points in, the other out. But somewhere in the journey from one to the other, from cool, cruel blue to Townshend’s three-minute psychodrama – ‘I look all white/but my dad was black’ – was the brief, paradoxical flare of Mod: the story of how a small cabal of British jazz obsessives conducting a besotted affair with the style arcana of Europe and America somehow became an army of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad.

more from Ian Penman at the LRB here.

Doing Without

…………… it's an interesting
custom, involving such in-
visible items as the food
that's not on the table, the clothes
that are not on the back
the radio whose music
is silence. Doing without
is a great protector of reputations
since all places one cannot go
are fabulous, and only the rare and
enlightened plowman in his field
or on his mountain does not overrate
what he does not or cannot have.
Saluting through their windows
of cathedral glass those restaurants
we must not enter (unless like
burglars we become subject to
arrest) we greet with our twinkling
eyes the faces of others who do
without, the lady with the
fishing pole, and the man who looks
amused to have discovered on a walk
another piece of firewood.

by David Ray
from Gathering Firewood, 1974
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT

From Harvard Magazine:

Self-fashioning is part of the age-old purpose of higher education, particularly in the liberal arts and sciences. The key point is to be aware, sometimes, that this is happening—to deliberately engage in fashioning—not just let events and experiences sweep you along without your conscious participation. Richard Brodhead expressed this well in his speech to the entering class as dean of Yale College in 1995: “You’ve come to one of the great fresh starts in your life, one of the few chances your life will offer to step away from the person you’ve been taken for and decide anew what you would like to become.” In this mood, students typically see college as a place where a new stage of life’s journey begins. “Incipit Vita Nova” was one motto of my alma mater, Wellesley, and it surely seemed appropriate at the time.

You now have this incredible opportunity to shape who you are as a person, what you are like, and what you seek for the future. You have both the time and the materials to do this. You may think you’ve never been busier in your life, and that’s probably true; but most of you have “time” in the sense of no other duties that require your attention and energy. Shaping your character is what you are supposed to do with your education; it’s not competing with something else. You won’t have many other periods in your life that will be this way until you retire when, if you are fortunate, you’ll have another chance; but then you will be more set in your ways, and may find it harder to change. You now also have the materials to shape your character and your purposes: the rich context, resources, incomparable opportunities that Harvard provides. And the combination of time and materials is truly an opportunity to treasure. My purpose in this essay is to think with you about how you might use this time and these materials wisely, with full awareness that this experience will be unique for each of you, but also the conviction that since countless other men and women have set out on the same journey, they can offer some perspectives that will be helpful to you now.

More here.

From ColumbiaNews:

Obesity is a lot more deadly than previously thought. Across recent decades, obesity accounted for 18 percent of deaths among Black and White Americans between the ages of 40 and 85, according to scientists. This finding challenges the prevailing wisdom among scientists, which puts that portion at around 5%.

…This study is the first to account for differences in age, birth cohort, sex, and race in analyzing Americans’ risk for death from obesity. “Past research in this area lumped together all Americans, but obesity prevalence and its effect on mortality differ substantially based on your race or ethnicity, how old you are, and when you were born,” says Dr. Masters. “It’s important for policy-makers to understand that different groups experience obesity in different ways.” The researchers analyzed 19 waves of the National Health Interview Survey linked to individual mortality records in the National Death Index for the years 1986 to 2006, when the most recent data are available. They focused on ages 40 to 85 in order to exclude accidental deaths, homicides, and congenital conditions that are the leading causes of death for younger people.

…In the groups studied, Black women had the highest risk of dying from obesity or being overweight at 27 percent, followed by White women at 21 percent. Obesity in Black women is nearly twice that of White women. White men fared better at 15%, and the lowest risk for dying from being obese was 5%, for Black men. While White men and Black men have similar rates of obesity, the effect of obesity on mortality is lower in Black men because it is “crowded out” by other risk factors, from high rates of cigarette smoking to challenging socioeconomic conditions. There were insufficient data to make estimates for Asians, Hispanics, and other groups due to the highly stratified nature of the methodology.

More here.

Michael Graziano in Aeon Magazine:

Lately, the problem of consciousness has begun to catch on in neuroscience. How does a brain generate consciousness? In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that ‘I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,’ and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? The philosopher David Chalmers has claimed that the first question, how a brain computes information about itself and the surrounding world, is the ‘easy’ problem of consciousness. The second question, how a brain becomes aware of all that computed stuff, is the ‘hard’ problem.

I believe that the easy and the hard problems have gotten switched around. The sheer scale and complexity of the brain’s vast computations makes the easy problem monumentally hard to figure out. How the brain attributes the property of awareness to itself is, by contrast, much easier. If nothing else, it would appear to be a more limited set of computations. In my laboratory at Princeton University, we are working on a specific theory of awareness and its basis in the brain. Our theory explains both the apparent awareness that we can attribute to Kevin and the direct, first-person perspective that we have on our own experience. And the easiest way to introduce it is to travel about half a billion years back in time.