In The Loop

I heard from people after the shootings. People
I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely
the same message: how horrible it was, how little
there was to say about how horrible it was.
People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed
because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,
to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually
I answered these messages: there’s nothing
to say back except of course there’s nothing
to say, thank you for your willingness
to say it. Because this was about nothing.
A boy who felt that he was nothing,
who erased and entered that erasure, and guns
that are good for nothing, and talk of guns
that is good for nothing, and spring
that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,
and scotch for others, and “and” for me
in this poem, “and” that is good
for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise
go about going away, bereft of us and us
of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing
like a scarf left on a train. As if the train,
empty of everything but a scarf, still opens
its doors at every stop, because this
is what a train does, this is what a man does
with his hand on a lever, because otherwise,
why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over,
and then it had just begun.
.

From The Telegraph:

From Harvard Magazine:

For patients with high blood pressure, doctors are likely to prescribe antihypertensive medication and provide detailed instructions about how much to take, and when. They have been less able to provide detailed dosage recommendations for exercise. Research shows that a regular walking, swimming, or tennis habit reduces chronic disease risk, but it’s been unclear just how much different levels of exercise might extend our lives. Now, a study coauthored by epidemiologist I-Min Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, offers specific exercise prescriptions. Lee and her colleagues pooled data from six large studies that included information on the leisure activities and body mass index of more than 650,000 people older than 40, each of whom was followed for an average of 10 years. The researchers’ analysis revealed that subjects who completed the equivalent of 75 minutes of brisk walking each week—roughly 11 minutes a day—lived 1.8 years longer than those who didn’t exercise at all. Those who got the federally recommended minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a week—22 minutes every day, or 30 minutes a day, five days a week—gained 3.4 years.

Lee was somewhat surprised that even small amounts of movement made such a difference. “What we found is really encouraging,” she says. “If you do a little, you get a fairly good gain in years.”

More here.

Sam Anderson in The New York Times Magazine:

Anne Carson was uncomfortable with the idea of a traditional profile: a journalist following her around for a few days, like a private detective, noting her outfits and mannerisms, shadowing her on errands, making lists of furniture and wall decorations and pets, quizzing her students, standing behind her holding his breath while she tried to write in her journal. Carson is a private person. She prefers to be alone. (When her husband is traveling, Carson will call and tell him, “I miss you, but I’m having a great time.”) Her book jackets have no author photo. Her back-flap biography — “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living” — is so minimalist that it sounds like a parody of a back-flap biography. Carson told me that, years ago, she had a bad experience with the private-detective model of journalism and would prefer never to do it again. It took her publisher a couple of weeks to wear her down to the point that she would agree, even in a limited way, to participate in a profile. Carson later described those weeks as akin to water torture.

In the end, she agreed to exchange some e-mails. This felt like a significant victory.

Carson is usually referred to as a poet, but just about no one finds that label satisfying: her fans (for whom she does something more than poetry), her critics (for whom she does something less than poetry) or herself. She often labels her work in conspicuously nonpoetic terms. Her book “The Beauty of the Husband” is subtitled “A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.” Her book “Decreation” is subtitled “Poetry, Essays, Opera.” Carson gives the impression — on the page, at readings — of someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient, for whom our modern earthly categories are too artificial and simplistic to contain anything like the real truth she is determined to communicate. For two decades her work has moved — phrase by phrase, line by line, project by improbable project — in directions that a human brain would never naturally move. The approach has won her awards (MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan) and accolades and an electric reputation in the literary world.

In her day job, Carson, who is 62, is a professor of erratic subjects (ancient Greek, attention, artistic collaboration) at various universities around North America, where she appears for a semester at a time as — as she often puts it — “a visiting [whatever].” (Even when she says this out loud, she makes the bracket sign with her hands.) This, I think, is the best catchall description of Carson. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, she is always a “visiting [whatever].”

Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution is True:

This episode smacks a bit of internet drama, which I try to avoid, but it also bears on scientific discourse, censorship, and civility, and I wanted to say a few words.

According to the “Arts Beat” site of the New York Times, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who organized a prestigious debate on the origins of the universe at The American Museum of Natural History, subsequently withdrew an invitation to one participant: the physicist/philosopher David Albert. Last April I wrote about how Albert had given a pretty negative review to Lawrence Krauss’s new book, A Universe from Nothing: Why there is Something Rather Than Nothing (a book that I wasn’t too keen on, either, but for different reasons). And, sure enough, Albert and others—including Krauss—had been invited to debate the topic of how something comes from nothing at the Museum. Then came the rude gesture:

The annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate is the American Museum of Natural History’s biggest public event, drawing sold-out crowds for an evening billed as bringing together “the finest minds in the world” to debate “pressing questions on the frontiers of scientific discovery.”

But this year’s installment, to be held March 20 under the heading “The Existence of Nothing,” may also be notable for the panelist who disappeared.

Among the speakers will be several leading physicists, including Lawrence M. Krauss, whose book “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing” became a cause célèbre in the scientific blogosphere last spring after a scathing review in the New York Times Book Review by the philosopher David Z. Albert.

But Mr. Albert will not be onstage, having been abruptly disinvited by the museum several months after he agreed to take part.

Via Jennifer Ouellette, Melanie B. Tannenbaum over at Nature's SpotOn NYC:

When writing about anything pertaining to psychology or human nature, people love nothing more than a brain image lit up like a Christmas tree. These omnipresent images have been mockingly termed “brain porn”, defined by journalist Alissa Quart as a “willingness to accept seemingly neuroscientific explanations for nearly everything.” According to a team of British scientists led by Cliodhna O’Connor, many popular science articles will include “logically irrelevant neuroscience information” intended to “imbue an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility” (McCabe & Castel, 2008; O’Connor et al., 2012). You might see scientists or science writers displaying neuroimaging data as proof that their claims are objective or real.

Neuroscience is frequently used to discuss psychopathology in particular, with 36% of “neuroscience” mentions in mainstream articles referring to it (O’Connor et al., 2012). Psychopathology can include anything from dementia, ADHD, and schizophrenia to eating disorders, personality disorders, addiction, depression, and anxiety. Every time you see an article mentioning a study about how “neural correlates,” “brain structures” or “neurological functioning” can explain the above conditions, you should be on high alert for brain porn in action.

On one hand, attributing things like addiction or depression to the brain imbues these disorders with legitimacy. It’s not a choice, it’s not a shortcoming – it’s a disease. Yet this very blessing can also become a sufferer’s curse. Portraying certain brains as homogeneously “different” implies something about what those brains are not: normal. As O’Connor and colleagues note, searching for group-level brain differences implies that there is some sort of fundamentally unalterable contrast between “those” brains and “normal” brains. Although no one ever actually explains what a normal, healthy brain should look like, we do get a very clear picture from these articles of what the people possessing these brains are not – “criminal, overweight, homosexual, or mentally ill” (O’Connor et al., 2012). By drawing a line between “normal” and “abnormal” and pinning any individual differences on presumably unalterable brain structures, this logic reinforces social group divisions and perpetuates essentialist stereotypes.

Describing something like alcoholism as a disease can be a helpful practice in some regards. It legitimizes the need for beneficial social services and attempts to convince non-alcoholics that the disorder does not simply result from some kind of personal failure. However, it can also cause a great deal of harm by reinforcing the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with alcoholics’ brains, and that they are somehow biologically different from “normal people.”

This idea that things only seem “legitimate” once they have a biological correlate raises another point about the worrisome nature of neuroscience portrayals in the media.

Since today is the 134th anniversary of the birth of Albert Einstein, as a tribute to my greatest hero I am posting an essay I wrote almost eight years ago over a weekend in Shrewsbury, Massachussettes, at my sister Azra's house in which I attempted to present a very short explanation of Einstein's remarkable theory of Special Relativity. Don't let the straighforward math scare you, if you work your way slowly through it, I hope that you will be rewarded by a feeling of satisfaction and understanding.

A century ago, this was the situation: Galilean and Newtonian physics said that any descriptions of motion by any two inertial observers (for such observers, bodies acted on by no forces move in straight lines) in uniform (not accelerating) relative motion are equally valid, and the laws of physics must be exactly the same for both of them. Bear with me here: what this means is, for example, if you see me coming toward you at a speed of 100 mph, then we could both be moving toward each other at 50 mph, or I could be still and you could be moving toward me at 100 mph, or I could be moving toward you at 30 mph while you are coming at me at 70 mph, and so on. All these descriptions are equivalent, and it is always impossible to tell whether one of us is “really” moving or not; all we can speak about is our motion relative to each other. In other words, all motion is relative to something else (which is then the inertial frame of reference). So for convenience, we can always just insist that any one observer is still (she is then the “frame of reference”) and all others are in motion relative to her. This is known as the Principle of Relativity. Another way to think about this is to imagine that there are only two objects in the universe, and they are moving relative to one another: in this situation it is more clearly impossible to say which object is moving. (Think about this paragraph, reread it, until you are pretty sure you get it. Just stay with me, it gets easier from here.)

At the same time, James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electricity and magnetism implied that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is absolute. The only way that this could be true is if Maxwell's equations refer to a special frame (see previous paragraph) of reference (that in which the speed of light is c) which can truly be said to be at rest. If this is the case, then an observer moving relative to that special frame would measure a different value for c. But in 1887, Michelson and Morley proved that there is no such special frame. Another way of saying this (and this is the way Einstein put it in 1905) is that the speed of light is fixed, and is independent of the speed of the body emitting it. (The details of the Michelson-Morley experiment are beyond the scope of this essay, so you'll have to take my word for this.)

Now we have a problem. We have two irreconcilable laws: 1) The Principle of Relativity, and 2) The absoluteness of the speed of light for all observers. They cannot both be true. It would be another eighteen years before a young clerk in the Swiss patent office would pose and then resolve this problem. Here's how he did it: he asked what would happen if they were both true.

Next, I will show how the various aspects of SR fall straight out of the assumption that both of these laws are true. I will focus in greater detail on the slowing down (dilation) of time, and then speak more briefly about length contraction, and the intertwining of space and time.

More here. Some months later I also wrote an short explanation of some aspects of General Relativity which you can read here.

What distinguished the Hohe Carlsschule from other European military academies was its founder’s deep fascination with the progressive pedagogical ideas of the French Enlightenment. From a young age, the students learned Greek, Latin, French, philosophy, and were set on a professional path as doctors, lawyers, or civil servants—all extremely enviable positions. They studied rhetoric and contemporary literature and learned, through style exercises, to write poetry. The teachers were scarcely older than the students, and instead of lecturing held informal chats in which the students were invited to participate. The Carlsschulers were encouraged to look on them as their friends and confidants, to whom closely guarded secrets could be trusted. Schiller enjoyed a particularly close relationship with Jakob Friedrich Abel, a philosophy teacher only seven years his senior. He credited Abel with the deep moral and aesthetic convictions that would run through his plays and his poetry, even as Abel reported on Schiller to the duke.

more from Michael Lipkin at Paris Review here.

“I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously. I haven’t been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn’t doing very well on Earth. I’ve been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.” The repetitions and played-up quaintness here give the sense of a consciousness that has been lulled into congeniality. But as the story unfolds, and the imprecisions come into focus, the narrator comes to see that depression is not “just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies, or when Bambi’s mother gets killed in Bambi”. Rather, it’s a kind of auto-immune deficiency of the self…

more from Thomas Meaney at the TLS here.

The current level of interest in Bowie reflects a larger theme in pop-music culture. While the long view of musical history suggests the obvious—that the greats remain great while a few fade out—in the near term, some acts seize the imagination of the moment. The Beatles have a flawless catalogue, but their aesthetic has left them on the outside for now: cartoons, granny glasses, and French horns don’t fit into 2013. Conversely, the ennui of present versions of punk and disco and rap—rooted in a young adult’s curt dismissal rather than a child’s open acceptance—has reinforced a common taste for darker acts such as Bowie. We no longer believe that all you need is love (or embroidered bell-bottoms), but we do believe in androgyny and world-weary dance parties buoyed by cocaine and artificially sour exchanges that mask a deep romantic streak. Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke of “Station to Station,” one of Bowie’s best albums, were always coming on aloof and imperious, then begging you to stay. His catalogue, though not as fault-free as that of the Beatles, or even that of Led Zeppelin, provides grist for today’s music-making cohort. Bowie has lasted, and he has found a place in the twenty-first century as an idea and a musician and a series of haircuts.

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

Richard Marshall interviews Colin McGinn in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You are a famous exponent of mysterianism, ‘a philosophy proposing that certain problems will never be explained or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage. The problem most often referred to is the hard problem of consciousness.’ I remember reading your book The Mysterious Flame when it was published in 1999 and being impressed by a really smart philosopher ‘fessing up to the futilitarian idea that something was just too hard to solve. But I wonder whether you still think that we’ll never understand the nature of consciousness. Do you think there’ll never be a time when we get machines smarter than us? So I gues my general question is about philosophers changing their minds. Is there anything that could make you change your mind?

CM: I think we know the nature of consciousness better than anything else. What we don’t know is how it springs bright-eyed from the heaving of matter. Many machines are already smarter than us—at dumb things. My mind could easily be changed: by seeing consciousness leaking from the atomic nucleus, say. I also think physics is a hotbed of mystery (see my book Basic Structures of Reality).

3:AM: One of the cool things in your autobiography was the detail about you playing endless games of pushball. Your approach to philosophy seems very enamored with an American, hip sense of style. Philosophy in the UK seemed drab by contrast. Is that right?

CM: I don’t know what pushball is and have never knowingly played it. I have played quite a good deal of pinball, as well as old video games like Galaga and Defender. My sense of style is not American-inspired: it is a combination of Steve Marriott and Vladimir Nabokov. I never found philosophy in the UK drab, just underpaid.

Hospital Parking Lot, April

Once there was a woman who laughed for years uncontrollably after a stroke.

Rashid Khalidi in The New York Times:

WHAT should Barack Obama, who is to visit Israel next Wednesday for the first time in his presidency, do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? First, he must abandon the stale conventional wisdom offered by the New York-Washington foreign-policy establishment, which clings to the crumbling remnants of a so-called peace process that, in the 34 years since the Camp David accords, has actually helped make peace less attainable than ever.

When the most recent iteration of this process began with high hopes at the Madrid peace conference in 1991, which led to the Oslo accords two years later, there were 200,000 Israelis illegally settled in the occupied Palestinian territories: today, there are more than twice as many. During this time, under four successive presidents, the United States, purportedly acting as an honest broker, did nothing to prevent Israel from gradually gobbling up the very land the two-state solution was to be based on. Until 1991 most Palestinians, although under Israeli military occupation, could nonetheless travel freely. Today, an entire generation of Palestinians has never been allowed to visit Jerusalem, enter Israel or cross between the West Bank and Gaza. This ghettoization of the Palestinians, along with the unrest of the second intifada of 2000-5 and the construction of seemingly permanent settlements and of an apartheid-style wall, are the tragic fruits of the so-called peace process the United States has led. The “peace process” has consisted of indulging Israeli intransigence over Palestine in exchange for foreign-policy goals unrelated to the advancement of peace and Palestinian freedom. In the late 1970s this involved the strategic cold war prize of moving Egypt from the Soviet column to the American column.

More here.

From Scientific American:

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found what it went to Mars to look for: evidence of an environment that could have once supported life. Chemical analyses show that a greyish powder taken from the rover’s first drilled rock sample contains clay minerals formed in water that was slightly salty, and neither too acidic nor too alkaline for life.

“If this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,” says Curiosity project scientist John Grotzinger, a planetary geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He and other NASA researchers announced the findings today at a news briefing in Washington DC. Previous missions to Mars have spotted clay minerals. And Curiosity itself had already found signs that liquid water once flowed across the surface. But the pinch of powder tested by Curiosity, from a rock nicknamed John Klein, is the first hard evidence of water-borne clays in a benign pH environment. “This is the only definitive habitable environment that we’ve described and recorded,” says David Blake, principal investigator for the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. An X-ray analysis by CheMin showed that the ground-up rock comprised mostly igneous minerals such as feldspar, pyroxene, olivine and magnetite. But at least 20% of the rock was made up of clay minerals, such as smectite, that form in the presence of water. The salts in the rock, such as halite, are of the sort that life tolerates, Blake says, unlike the iron salts found elsewhere on Mars by the rover Opportunity, which indicate an acidic environment. A second instrument on Curiosity, known as the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), heated a fraction of a gram of powder and analyzed the gases released. Water was released from the sample at relatively high temperatures, which is characteristic of clay minerals and a good confirmation of CheMin’s findings, says Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator for SAM at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

More here.

Scott Lemieux reviews my old advisor Ira Katznelson's new book Fear Itself, in The American Prospect:

In 1942, Congress passed legislation attempting to facilitate voting by soldiers stationed overseas. Passed too close to the date of the general election (and after the primary election season) and creating a cumbersome process, the bill was ineffective. As the number of American soliders overseas continued to increase, the lack of practical access to the ballot was intolerable to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He sent a bill to Congress in 1944 that would have created a simple federal ballot made it much easier for soldiers to make their voices heard. Despite having the authority of a wartime president, however, the bill failed. Congress instead passed a much weaker version, more similar to the 1942 statute, that did not send out a uniform federal ballot and left administration in the hands of the states. Fewer than 33 percent of eligible soldiers were able to vote in the 1944 elections. How, during the height of wartime, could such a basic democratic right be denied many soldiers risking their lives for their country?

The answer, as Ira Katznelson details in his brilliant new book Fear Itself, is that a coalition of Republicans (who believed that soldiers largely represented a pro-FDR demographic) and Southern Democrats (who feared that even this limited form of federal intervention would threaten Jim Crow) wanted to limit ballot access for soldiers. The clash between the imperatives of war and the constraints of congressional politics makes the failure of FDR's 1944 bill a paradigmatic New Deal story. Eighty years ago yesterday, FDR famously said during his First Inaugural Address that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The New Deal—which Katznelson argues should be seen as encompassing the period between the election of FDR in 1932 and the election of Eisenhower 20 years later—was, according to Fear Itself, conducted in the shadow of three major fears. First, there was the fear about whether democracy could survive the Great Depression as countries such as Germany, Italy, and Japan turned to authoritarian responses. Second, there was the fear protecting national security respresented, first by World War II and then by the Cold War and the atomic age. And third, and crucially, was the Southern fear that its system of white supremacy would not survive. The first two fears created an impetus for unprecedented federal action, but this federal action was, throughout the New Deal, shaped and constrained by the third fear.

One of the many strengths of Fear Itself is that it brings Congress back to center stage in the New Deal era.

You can go vote over at The Prospect:

Who is on the list?

As a starting point, we have drawn up a list of 65 people, based on recommendations from our ten-strong panel. Candidates have to be alive and still active in public life. They must be distinguished in their field and have influence on international debate. We gave credit for the currency of the candidates’ work—their influence over the past 12 months and their continuing significance to this year’s biggest questions.

The panel: Anne Applebaum, Philip Campbell, Amy Chua, James Fallows, Stephanie Flanders, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Bronwen Maddox, David Miliband, Anna Maria-Misra and Strobe Talbott. Judges were not permitted to vote for themselves.

Paul Voosen in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Let's make one thing clear: Jim Collins won't grow you a house any time soon.

More than a decade ago, Collins, a decorated scientist at Boston University, helped give birth to synthetic biology, which soon grew into arguably the world's hottest and most poorly defined scientific discipline. Its practitioners made big promises: that by harnessing the ideas of engineering and applying them to genetics, they would create cheap, abundant biofuels, customized medicine, even self-growing houses, as one scientist predicted.

The potential for mastering life was so exciting that scientists ­talked about applications decades away as if they were around the bend. Scholars from the Bay Area and Boston issued forth into industry, promising to reinvent life from the inside out, evolution be damned. Drawing inspiration from electrical circuits and computing, they'd create standardized biological parts. The notion drew easy comparisons to Legos: Snap them together, and soon enough you'd have control of life.

Since 2004 investors have poured at least $1.84-billion into synthetic-biology start-ups; the government has added many more millions in research dollars. But more recently, the hype has died down. Most of those companies have made grinding progress, not breakthroughs. Much potential remains to reinvent manufacturing and medicine, but the road is far longer than some imagined.

There's a simple reason for this problem: The tools have outpaced the knowledge. The cost of genetic sequencing and synthesis continues to plunge, but the functions of many genes in even the simplest forms of life, like bacteria and yeast, stubbornly hold on to their secrets. Genetic networks interact in complex, mysterious ways. Engineered parts take wild, unexpected turns when inserted into genomes. And then evolution, a system that would drive any electrical engineer mad, tiptoes in.

As synthetic biology passes from precocious youth toward maturity, it is returning home to academe. Collins sees an upside to that retrenchment: The science, once a domain of biological amateurs and outsiders, can now inform basic research into life's unending complexity.

Steven Shapin reviews Eating the Enlightenment : Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760, in the LA Review of Books:

AFTER SAN FRANCISCO POLITICIANS Harvey Milk and George Moscone were gunned down in City Hall by their colleague Dan White in 1978, the murder trial launched a pre-Internet meme about moral accountability. White’s lawyers claimed that his capacity for judgment was diminished at the time of the killings. A sign of White’s mental impairment was his abnormal diet, especially an increased consumption of Coca-Cola and the sickly sweet, cream-filled cakes known as Twinkies: an American edible icon, concocted of not much more than sugar, calories and commercial ingenuity. The precise legal claims were, first, that Twinkie-eating was an indication of the defendant’s pathological mental state, not its cause, and second, that “there is a minority opinion in psychiatric fields that sugar-rich diets might exacerbate existing mood-swings.” But excitable journalists preferred a simpler version: Twinkies were the snack that drove men mad. “The Twinkie defense” entered American pop culture — and eventually the Oxford English Dictionary — as a tag for any number of obviously ridiculous but expert-endorsed claims about dietary causes of disturbed psychic states.

The Twinkie defense is just tenable enough to be offered up as an accountability waiver — a seriously pathological version of its more benign kin, the “sugar rush” or “sugar high” — but also ludicrous enough to be officially disallowed. It’s a modern absurdity, but one that has a long and sinuous cultural history. Go back several hundred years and one finds that the general form of the Twinkie defense was central to medical thought and practice. The idea that diet might shape mental states was commonly accepted; the open question concerned what foods had what effects on the mind.