Nicholas Fox Weber at Literary Hub:

Approaching the age of twenty, Mondrian painted his most impressive painting to date. It was a still life of a dead hare. The animal hanging from its right hind leg is a feat of verisimilitude. The setting—the space above a wooden plank that recedes into a black background—is a triumph of austere elegance. The contrast between the luminous subject and the rich black presages Mondrian’s later abstractions.

The canvas belongs above all to the tradition of Dutch still lifes as well as to pictures of freshly killed game by the French eighteenth-century painter Jean Siméon Chardin, but it is not a mere pastiche. It has a zing that goes far beyond the slavishness of a copy.

The sharp focus with which Mondrian renders the hare, and the elegance of the matte black background, have assurance without arrogance. With his renewed determination to be a painter, Mondrian had become his own man and developed his capacity to paint with a punch that energizes the viewer.

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Passant Rabie at Gizmodo:

The dawn of annoyingly massive satellites is upon us, shielding our views of the shimmering cosmos. Five of the largest communication satellites just unfolded in Earth orbit, and this is only the beginning of a Texas startup’s constellation of cellphone towers in space.

AST SpaceMobile announced today that its first five satellites, BlueBirds 1 to 5, unfolded to their full size in space. Each satellite unfurled the largest ever commercial communications array to be deployed in low Earth orbit, stretching across 693 square feet (64 square meters) when unfolded. That’s bad news for astronomers as the massive arrays outshine most objects in the night sky, obstructing observations of the universe around us.

Things are just getting started for AST SpaceMobile, however, as the company seeks to create the first space-based cellular broadband network directly accessible by cell phones.

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Erica Getto and Charles Atlas at Bomb Magazine:

Sketch out Charles Atlas’s career, and the result might look like one of his multi-stream videos: disparate projections that, taken together, create a coherent portrait. To some, the artist and filmmaker is best known for these video collages and installations, featuring digitized numbers, people in motion, and abstract or geometric figures. Others might recognize him as a public broadcasting renegade whose TV specials bucked conventions of on-air programming with propulsive dancing, drag queens, chroma key, and startling audio. Since 2003, he’s drawn attention for his experiments with live multimedia performance. As a dance writer and film and television producer, I’ve long wanted to speak with Atlas about his pioneering work in “media-dance,” or dance on camera.

For nearly fifty years, Atlas has collaborated with choreographers and dancers to create vibrant, technically rigorous dance films. He first picked up a Super 8 camera in the early 1970s while stage-managing for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and, soon after, became the company’s resident filmmaker. His early works with Cunningham involved technical challenges like filming in a mirrored studio without revealing the camera, or interspersing video monitors across a dance space.

more here.

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Maggie Hennefeld in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

You can predict the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election by tracking the laughter in the room. Laughter glides on the edge of the unspeakable. It flirts with taboo obscenity and unbearable trauma while toeing the line and somehow lightening the tone. When Donald Trump absurdly accused Haitian migrants in Ohio of eating people’s pets, silly videos of armed feline militias vied for viral visibility with TikTok loops of dogs and cats reacting to debate footage off-screen. Meanwhile, the endlessly memeable specter of ALF—everyone’s favorite cat-eating TV sitcom alien from the planet Melmac—evoked the mock cannibalism of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729), a Juvenalian pamphlet that offered to solve the Irish overpopulation and starvation crisis by serving up newborn infants “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.”

Like Swift’s furious satire, the viral meme culture of the 2024 election showdown between fragile democracy and resurgent fascism is responding to the apocalyptic political conjuncture with grotesque absurdity. As reality unravels, the jokes will only get weirder.

Intergenerational cannibalism has become more than a metaphor: the rich eating the poor’s offspring, Protestants gobbling up the papacy, Satanists pan-frying Christian progeny, outlandish conspiracy theories that human remains were found in Oprah Winfrey’s L.A. home.

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I’ve Been

trying all day
to remember that feeling
when you first meet someone

how a match
gets struck
on a rock

how you carry that fire
through each little task
and all day

the people you pass
notice the lights on
notice someone is home.

by Kay Cosgrove
from Echo Theo Review

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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