Shelley Fan in Singularity Hub:

Seeing is believing. Our perception of the world heavily relies on vision.

What we see depends on cells in the retina, which sit behind the eyes. These delicate cells transform light into electrical pulses that go to the brain for further processing. But because of age, disease, or genetics, retinal cells often break down. For people with geographic atrophy—a disease which gradually destroys retinal cells—their eyes struggle to focus on text, recognize faces, and decipher color or textures in the dark. The disease especially attacks central vision, which lets our eyes focus on specific things. The result is seeing the world through a blurry lens. Walking down the street in dim light becomes a nightmare, each surface looking like a distorted version of itself. Reading a book or watching a movie is more frustrating than relaxing. But the retina is hard to regenerate, and the number of transplant donors can’t meet demand. A small clinical trial may have a solution. Led by Science Corporation, a brain-machine interface company headquartered in Alameda, California, the study implanted a tiny chip that acts like a replacement retina in 38 participants who were legally blind.

Dubbed the PRIMAvera trial, the volunteers wore custom-designed eyewear with a camera acting as a “digital eye.” Captured images were then transmitted to the implanted artificial retina, which translated the information into electrical signals for the brain to decipher. Preliminary results found a boost in the participants’ ability to read the eye exam scale—a common test of random letters, with each line smaller than the last. Some could even read longer texts in a dim environment at home with the camera’s “zoom-and-enhance” function. The trial is ongoing, with final results expected in 2026—three years after the implant. But according to Frank Holz at the University of Bonn Ernst-Abbe-Strasse in Germany, the study’s scientific coordinator, the results are a “milestone” for geographic atrophy resulting from age.

More here.

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Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian:

In this exquisite book novelist Caleb Carr tells the story of the “shared existence” he enjoyed for 17 years with his beloved cat, Masha. At the time of writing she is gone, he is going, and all that remains is to explain how they made each other’s difficult lives bearable. The result is not just a lyrical double biography of man and cat but a wider philosophical inquiry into our moral failures towards a species which, cute internet memes notwithstanding, continues to get a raw deal.

Carr explains how Masha picked him as her person when he first visited the animal rescue centre nearly 20 years ago. She was a Siberian forest cat – huge, nearer to her wild self than most domestic moggies, and utterly delightful, a long-bodied streak of red-gold whose forward-facing eyes gave her the look of a delighted baby. The rescue centre staff are desperate that Carr take her, and equally anxious that he should understand what he is getting into. This cat, apparently, fights, bites and is unbothered about seeming grateful. But then, why should she be? Abandoned by her previous owners, she was locked in an apartment and left to die. It is an obscenity, says Carr, that goes on more often than we can bear to imagine.

Once Carr gets Masha – a name he hopes sounds vaguely Siberian – home to his farmhouse on Misery Mountain in upstate New York, she starts to show her true “wilding” nature.

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Siobhan Roberts in the New York Times:

“Math is power” is the tag line of a new documentary, “Counted Out,” currently making the rounds at festivals and community screenings. (It will have a limited theatrical release next year.) The film explores the intersection of mathematics, civil rights and democracy. And it delves into how an understanding of math, or lack thereof, affects society’s ability to deal with the most pressing challenges and crises — health care, climate, misinformation, elections.

“When we limit access to the power of math to a select few, we limit our progress as a society,” said Vicki Abeles, the film’s director and a former Wall Street lawyer.

Ms. Abeles was spurred to make the film in part in response to an anxiety about math that she had long observed in students, including her middle-school-age daughter. She was also struck by the math anxiety among friends and colleagues, and by the extent to which they tried to avoid math altogether. She wondered: Why are people so afraid of math? What are the consequences?

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Sam Kahn at Persuasion:

The 2024 election will be “decided by podcasts,” Bobby Kennedy predicted in 2023—and that may be the line for which he is best remembered. The election is still a coin toss, but Trump has had momentum recently and may well have sealed a win this weekend with his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast—which, to me, felt like an historical moment. The significance of that appearance wasn’t just for this election. It was the moment where new media decisively replaced old.

Harris has done well in everything related to more traditional mass media. She presided over a successful Democratic National Convention. She out-debated Trump. But, around her, the hold of mass media is rapidly collapsing. Her anodyne 60 Minutes interview did more harm than good—the interview was almost perfectly bland, and all that anybody will remember of it is the revelation that 60 Minutes appeared to give her a mulligan on a muffed answer. Her brave decision to appear on Fox News may well have backfired—with Bret Baier subjecting her to a stinging interview that put Harris constantly on the defensive. And, in a real stab-in-the-back, both The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—or, more specifically, their techie owners—broke with long-held precedent at the worst possible time to refrain from endorsing candidates.

None of this is Harris’ fault, exactly, but she’s fighting today’s war with yesterday’s weapons—or, more precisely, the weapons of several election cycles ago. Trump has consistently been ahead of her on podcasts.

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Josh Rothman at The New Yorker:

In 1990, Gibson and Bruce Sterling wrote “The Difference Engine,” an alternative-history novel, set in the nineteenth century, in which computers are built about a hundred years earlier than in reality, using quirky systems including gears, wheels, and levers. The novel helped popularize the genre of steampunk, in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies are merged. Arguably, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells wrote steampunk avant la lettre, simply by crafting science fiction in the late nineteenth century; the genre’s aesthetic markers—valves, pipes, airships, monocles—have since informed the imaginative worlds of films and television shows like “Snowpiercer,” “Silo,” and much else. Steampunk mounts an imaginative protest against the apparent seamlessness of the high-tech world; it’s an antidote to the ethos of Jony Ive. It’s also fun because it’s counterfactual. It’s fascinating to imagine, implausibly, how ravishing technology could be constructed out of yesterday’s parts.

But what if the world really is constructed that way? In that case, it could be a mistake to put too much faith in digital perfection. We might need to fiddle with our technology more than we think. And we might also want to see it differently—less as an emanation from the future, and more like an inheritance from the past, with all the problems that entails.

more here.

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From PVcase:

Harvard University reports engineering strategies, including solar radiation management, carbon dioxide removal, and ocean fertilization, that can help combat climate change. Many of these solutions are worth considering, especially when you think about the “widespread and rapid” changes in climate that are actively happening each day. These proposed approaches show promise. But they don’t come without risks. Some strategies could have unintended consequences, such as disrupting local weather patterns or ecosystems. There are also concerns about ethical and governance issues with a few of these strategies, like who would be responsible for implementing and regulating these large-scale interventions.

Ambient carbon capture removes carbon dioxide from the air. According to the IEA, once captured, the CO2 can be stored either geologically or biologically. One of the most common methods is called Direct Air Capture (DAC), which uses large machines to suck in air and filter out CO2. Once that’s captured, it can be stored underground or used in other applications.

More here.

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Jeffrey Mervis in Science:

In their bid to become the next U.S. president, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump have staked out fundamentally different positions on such divisive topics as reproductive rights, immigration, the economy, and the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. But they have said almost nothing about science. That’s typical for a presidential campaign. But their silence doesn’t mean the winner of the 5 November election won’t have a significant effect on the U.S. research enterprise. Their views on science-heavy issues such as climate change and public health will get wide attention. But outside the spotlight, the country’s 47th president will need to address other issues that directly affect the research community.

The list includes how the United States responds to China’s status as a rival scientific superpower, how it chooses to attract and retain foreign talent while boosting domestic production of scientists and engineers, and how it ensures artificial intelligence (AI) is a boon rather than a bane to society. For government scientists, the ability to do their jobs without political interference is a major worry after several notorious episodes during former President Trump’s administration. The next president will also propose annual budgets for thousands of research programs across the federal government, although Congress will decide on the actual spending levels.

More here.

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My Son, My Executioner

My son, my executioner,
….. I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir,
….. And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
….. Of immortality,
Your cries and hunger document
….. Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
….. Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
….. And start to die together.

by Donald Hall
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1989
…..
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Brian Klaas at Aeon Magazine:

How can we make sense of social change when consequential shifts often arise from chaos? This is the untameable bane of social science, a field that tries to detect patterns and assert control over the most unruly, chaotic system that exists in the known Universe: 8 billion interacting human brains embedded in a constantly changing world. While we search for order and patterns, we spend less time focused on an obvious but consequential truth. Flukes matter.

Though some scholars in the 19th century, such as the English philosopher John Stuart Mill and his intellectual descendants, believed there were laws governing human behaviour, social science was swiftly disabused of the notion that a straightforward social physics was possible. Instead, most social scientists have aimed toward what the US sociologist Robert K Merton called ‘middle-range theory’, in which researchers hope to identify regularities and patterns in certain smaller realms that can perhaps later be stitched together to derive the broader theoretical underpinnings of human society. Though some social scientists are sceptical that such broader theoretical underpinnings exist, the most common approach to social science is to use empirical data from the past to tease out ordered patterns that point to stable relationships between causes and effects. Which variables best correlate with the onset of civil wars? Which economic indicators offer the most accurate early warning signs of recessions? What causes democracy?

more here.

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Nguyễn Bình at Literary Hub:

By 1964, Vietnam had been bisected for a decade. Fierce fights between the US-backed South and the communist North had marred the country, and with US forces officially entering the war that August, it seemed things were only getting worse. From the West Lake in Hanoi, the poet Chế Lan Viên wrote to decry American war crimes and made sure to specify their perpetrators:

No! It is not Edgar Poe who herded us into strategic fences,
Not Lincoln who dropped thousand-kilogram bombs on the faces of men,
Not Whitman who fired three thousand nights of cannons.

At first glance, the mention of Poe sticks out like a sore thumb. It would make sense to name Lincoln and Whitman, who embody the ideals of America and contrast with its brutal crimes in Vietnam, but why Poe? The answer lies in his surprisingly major role in the early twentieth century, right at the dawn of Vietnam’s modern literature. For a period in Vietnamese history, Poe was “America’s literary giant,” inspiring a generation of authors who would go on to take up arms and raise their voices in support of the struggle against imperialism.

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Stephanie M. Lee in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

At first, it looked like a paradigm of science done right. A group of behavioral scientists had repeated the same experiments over and over in separate labs, following the same rigorous methods, and found that 86 percent of their attempts had the results they expected.

In a field where the seemingly constant collapse of influential discoveries over the past decade has triggered a reproducibility crisis, this finding was welcome news. The study’s authors included heavy hitters in the science-reform movement, and it appeared in a top journal, Nature Human Behaviour, in November.

“The high replication rate justifies confidence in rigour-enhancing methods to increase the replicability of new discoveries,” concluded the paper, which has been cited more than 70 times, according to Google Scholar. “The reforms are working,” a press release declared, and a news story asked: “What reproducibility crisis?”

But now the paper has been retracted, following a monthslong journal investigation into concerns about how it had been designed and written.

More here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

Imagine I went to a Hollywood studio with the following plot: It’s the year 2024. War is breaking out all over the world. Asia is threatened by communists; Europe, by fascists. Only America stands against these totalitarian empires, but its society is divided and its industry is outmatched. But there’s one man could save America — and, by extension, the world. A reclusive genius and peerless industrialist, he has built a fleet of gigantic rockets that can take off and land halfway across the world, blanketed the heavens with satellites, and created futuristic cars that singlehandedly revived America’s auto industry. He’s in the process of creating a colony on Mars. Oh, and he also owns the country’s most important social network, controlling the flow of information between journalists, politicians, and the public. But is this towering figure a superhero, or a supervillain? Between personal troubles (insert complex backstory here) and battles with smug government bureaucrats, he’s grown disillusioned. Agents of freedom’s enemies reach out to him, coveting his technological marvels for themselves. Will he save the day, or go over to the other side?

This proposal would probably get rejected. We already have one Iron Man,1 the studio exec would tell me. And for that matter we also have a Batman, a Dr. Doom, a Green Goblin, and an Adrian Veidt. We don’t need another of these guys. He’d hand me back my spec script and tell me to come back when I have something less derivative.

And yet somehow we find ourselves living in this comic-book reality. Even as American manufacturing (and German manufacturing, and Japanese manufacturing, etc.) has been hollowed out by Chinese competition and our great old companies have stumbled and declined, one single entrepreneur has been able to build and scale gigantic new cutting-edge high-tech world-beating manufacturing companies in the United States of America. That one man is Elon Musk.

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Corey Robin in The New Yorker:

The professor and the politician are a dyad of perpetual myth. In one myth, they are locked in conflict, sparring over the claims of reason and the imperative of power. Think Socrates and Athens, or Noam Chomsky and the American state. In another myth, they are reconciled, even fused. The professor becomes a politician, saving the polity from corruption and ignorance, demagoguery and vice. Think Plato’s philosopher-king, or Aaron Sorkin’s Jed Bartlet. The nobility of ideas is preserved, and transmuted, slowly, into the stuff of action.

The sociologist Max Weber spent much of his life seduced by this second fable. A scholar of hot temper and volcanic energy, Weber longed to be a politician of cold focus and hard reason. Across three decades of a scholarly career, in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, he made repeated and often failed incursions into the public sphere—to give advice, stand for office, form a party, negotiate a treaty, and write a constitution. His “secret love,” he confessed to a friend, was “the political.” Even in the delirium of his final days, he could be heard declaiming on behalf of the German people, jousting with their enemies in several of the many languages he knew. “If one is lucky” in politics, he observed, a “genius appears just once every few hundred years.” That left the door wide open for him.

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Viviane Collier in Nautilus:

Philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith has spent decades considering the mental life of animals. His pioneering work on octopus cognition has helped to frame the discussion about how we might think about intelligences other than our own.

His recent books, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, explore the evolution of animal sentience, felt experience, and intelligence. His new book, Living on Earth: Forests, Consciousness, and the Making of the World, completes this trilogy. It explores not just how minds evolved on Earth, but how minds have shaped the evolution of life on Earth. His bold thesis envisions organisms as causes, rather than as simply a result of millions of years of natural selection and evolution. I recently caught up with Godfrey-Smith, who is a professor at the University of Sydney, over video. Our conversations ranged over the origins of life, how movement might have led to consciousness, and how language is just “kind of a weird thing that happened in our minds.”

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Lynne Feeley at The Nation:

In the afterword to Loving Sylvia Plath, a book detailing the abuse that Plath suffered at the hands of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, the literary scholar Emily Van Duyne recounts that when she started the book, a friend told her that she had to get “everything right” because “everyone is going to come for it.” Van Duyne took this to mean that the book had to be “textual,” not merely “rhetorical.” Getting “everything right” meant being sure to base her claims in verifiable, textual evidence and the documented historical record. There was good reason for the friend’s warning, its roots deep in the unsavory and litigious history of biographical publishing on Plath. Janet Malcolm depicted it as a field ruled by Hughes’s sister, Olwyn, who for decades was Plath’s literary executor, but who considered her a “nasty selfish bitch” (as Plath put it in a 1961 letter) and who granted access to the poet’s archive and permission to quote from her work only on condition of the biographer’s willingness to tell the story that the Hughes family wanted told.

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Sheila Heti at the Paris Review:

I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way. For instance, that we all think “conflict” is the most interesting and gripping part of life, and so we should all make conflict the heart of our fiction. Or that when we think of other people, we all think of what they look like. Or that we all believe things happen due to identifiable causes. Shouldn’t a writer be trained to pay attention to what they notice about life, what they think life is, and come up with ways of highlighting those things? The indifference to the unique relationship between the writer and their story (or between the writer and the reason they are writing), which is necessarily a by-product of any generalized writing advice, is part of what makes the comedy in this book so great. As a teacher, “Sam Shelstad” is so literal, and takes the conventions of how to write successful fiction on such faith, that when he tries to relay these tips to his reader, the advice ends up sounding as absurd as it actually is.

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