Meenakshi Prabhune in The Scientist:

Once upon a time, circa 2700 BC in China, empress Xi Ling Shi was enjoying her afternoon tea under a mulberry tree, when a silkworm cocoon fell from the tree into her tea. She noticed that on contact with the hot beverage, the cocoon unraveled into a long silky thread. This happy accident inspired her to acquire these threads in abundance and fashion them into an elegant fabric.

So goes the legend, according to the writings of Confucius, about the discovery of silk and the development of sericulture in ancient China. Although archaeological evidence from Chinese ruins dates the presence of silk to 8500 years ago, hinting that the royal discovery story was spun just like the silk fabric, one part of the legend rings true.¹ The Chinese royals played a pivotal role in popularizing silk as a symbol of status and wealth. By 130 BC, emperors in the Ancient Civilizations across the world desired to be clad in silken garments, paving the Silk Road that opened trade routes from China to the West. While silk maintained its high-society status over the next thousands of years, the demand for easy-to-use materials grew among mass consumers. In the early 20^th century, textile developers applied their new-found technological prowess to make synthetic materials: petrochemical-based polymer blended textiles with improved durability, strength, and convenience. Today, the textile industry is witnessing a new kind of synthetic revolution, one that paradoxically advocates bringing back natural materials. Synthetic biologists are using natural systems to produce materials with enhanced features to usher in an era of sustainable fashion.

More here.

It’s the little things

It’s the Little Things
the sparrow’s tender head
the dead possum on the road
the pungent smell of the fresh creek
in the summer when heat rises
to the bridge that spans its width
and if you should come to me
wondering and daring
I would not show you a good time
we would sit and watch
our breaths, silence, death approaching
so slowly, it would feel
like the ecstasy of making love

John Self in The Guardian:

Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” opens Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel, irresistibly. Sure we do! She is, after all, the laureate of upended lives, as her smash-hit 2019 debut Fleishman Is in Trouble showed.

There follows a 30-page account – inspired by real events but twisted into fictional counterparts – of the abduction in 1980 of the “kidnappably rich” Carl Fletcher, patriarch of one of the wealthiest families on Long Island. (The family’s money comes from a packaging factory they own in the prosperous town of Middle Rock.) A kidnapping is a story that comes with inbuilt tension (“We have your Zionist scum husband”) and colour, as the locals are rendered “speechless” by the news – though “none of them could stop talking about it”.

Carl survives his ordeal, so where’s the terrible ending? Like revenge, some things are best served cold, and the bulk of this chunky book goes down a generation to the children of Carl and his wife, Ruth.

More here.

Tracy Northup in Physics Magazine:

For centuries, physicists have exploited momentum conservation as a powerful means to analyze dynamical processes, from billiard-ball collisions to galaxy formation to subatomic particle creation in accelerators. David Moore and his research team at Yale University have now put this approach to work in a new setting: they used momentum conservation to determine when a radioactive atom emitted a single helium nucleus, known as an alpha particle (Fig. 1) [1]. The demonstration suggests that—with further improvements—researchers might be able to use this technique to detect other nuclear-decay products, such as neutrinos and hypothetical dark-matter particles (see also Special Feature: Sensing a Nuclear Kick on a Speck of Dust).

The basic idea is simple: if the radioactive atom is embedded in a larger object, then an outgoing decay product will exert a backreaction on that object, causing it to recoil in the opposite direction. But is it really possible to detect the recoil kick from a particle as small as a helium nucleus?

More here.

Interview with Mia Bird at Asterisk:

Asterisk: You’re responsible for managing one of the most comprehensive data sets of criminal outcomes for various criminal justice systems in California. It includes 12 counties and 60% of the state population. How did you put this resource together, and what kinds of outcomes you are tracking with it?

Mia: So we need to go back a bit. For decades, California was increasing its prison population and building new prisons to accommodate this growth. In 2006, the state reached a peak prison population of 173,000 inmates, which meant prisons were operating at over 170% of their design capacity. As a result, the state began to face lawsuits focused on its inability to provide adequate health care under such crowded conditions. One of the first steps the state took was to address revocations to prison through legislation that rewarded counties for reducing the number of people who fail probation and are sent to prison.

More here.

Calvin Po at The Spectator:

In 1916 the Bank of England committed what Nikolaus Pevsner was to call the greatest architectural crime to befall London in the 20th century. It decided to demolish much of its own building, designed by the great Georgian neoclassical architect John Soane.

Soane’s lost masterpiece is the subject of the latest series from the essential architecture podcast About Buildings and Cities. The podcast, started in 2016 by presenters Luke Jones and George Gingell as a hobby, has slowly become a fan-funded staple for architects, offering a re-evaluation of the received wisdoms about the canon and some affable banter along the way.

Soane worked on the Bank of England for almost 50 years. And the job provides the keystone to a sweeping look at the arc of his career. Even while still in training Soane had a thirst to prove himself with ‘banger megalomaniac student projects’, namely his over-elaborate ‘Triumphal Bridge’, which showed off his mastery of the classical idiom. Then there’s the familiar hustling: as a bricklayer’s son he juggled scholarships, jobs and opportunistic freelance commissions to fund his education and Grand Tour.

more here.

Going Home

He came Home. Said nothing.
It was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.
He lay down fully dressed.
Pulled the blanket over his head.
Tucked up his knees.
He’s nearly forty, but not at the moment.
He exists just as he did inside his mother’s womb,
clad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.
Tomorrow he’ll give a lecture
on homeostasis in megagalactic cosmonautics.
For now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from View Within a Grain of Sand
Harcourt Brace, 1993

Alex Hern in The Guardian:

What if AI isn’t that great? What if we’ve been overstating its potential to a frankly dangerous degree? That’s the concern of leading cancer experts in the NHS, who warn that the health service is obsessing over new tech to the point that it’s putting patient safety at risk. From our story yesterday:

In a sharply worded warning, the cancer experts say that ‘novel solutions’ such as new diagnostic tests have been wrongly hyped as ‘magic bullets’ for the cancer crisis, but ‘none address the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem’.

A ‘common fallacy’ of NHS leaders is the assumption that new technologies can reverse inequalities, the authors add. The reality is that tools such as AI can create ‘additional barriers for those with poor digital or health literacy’.

‘We caution against technocentric approaches without robust evaluation from an equity perspective,’ the paper concludes.

Published in the Lancet Oncology journal, the paper instead argues for a back to basics approach to cancer care. Its proposals focus on solutions like getting more staff, redirecting research to less trendy areas including surgery and radiotherapy, and creating a dedicated unit for technology transfer, ensuring that treatments that have already been proven to work are actually made a part of routine care.

More here.

Bradley and Luskin in Evolution News:

In recent years, MIT physicist Jeremy England (pictured above) has gained media attention for proposing a thermodynamic energy-dissipation model of the origin of life. England’s view was summarized when he famously said that the origin and evolution of life “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.” He continued, “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.”¹Another physicist, ID theorist Brian Miller, has responded to England’s research.

Miller points out that the kind of energy that dissipates as a result of the sun shining on the Earth or other natural processes cannot explain how living systems have both low entropy (disorder) and high energy. As Miller puts it: “These are unnatural circumstances. Natural systems never both decrease in entropy and increase in energy — not at the same time.” Living cells do this “by employing complex molecular machinery and finely tuned chemical networks to convert one form of energy from the environment into high-energy molecules” — things that cannot be present prior to the origin of life because they must be explained by the origin of life. Without this cellular machinery to harness energy from the environment and drive down entropy, England’s energy-dissipation models cannot do the task they’ve been handed. As Miller said, England’s model cannot account for the origin of biological information, which “is essential for constructing and maintaining the cell’s structures and processes.”

More here.

Sarah Jaffe at The Baffler:

Raising Expectations is as much tell-all as organizing manual, but it was Jane’s second book, published in 2016—by an academic press, no less—that turned her into as much of a household name as any labor organizer can be in what she called “the new Gilded Age.” No Shortcuts, based on her dissertation, is a distillation of her argument for organizing rather than what she called “shallow mobilizing”; for high-participation, democratic unions; for the value of training and sharing skills; and, though this is less often remarked upon, for the importance and power of care workers’ unions in a world that still too often thinks “real” workers are men in hard hats.

The decline of deep organizing, she argued, is the real cause of the decline of progressive, or left, power. By organizing, once again, she meant building “a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mess of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all.”

more here.

Dearest Reader,

Thanks to your support, in a few weeks, on July 31st to be exact, it will have been exactly 20 years since I started 3QD with a poem by Constantine Cavafy. Not many small websites last this long, especially in the increasingly difficult media landscape and the onslaught of information begging for our attention from multiple channels: social media, WhatsApp, email, etc., etc. But you have trusted and appreciated our efforts to bring you only what is interesting and important. We couldn’t have kept going without you and we’ve had fun doing the work that we do. So on behalf of all of us, thank you!

We are going to be making some significant improvements to the site over the next few weeks. I will write to you again to explain more when we are ready to go live with the changes. I am excited about this. For more on the history of 3QD, read this excellent profile by Thomas Manuel, “Why the Web Needs the Little Miracle of 3 Quarks Daily” in The Wire.

Now help us keep going for another 20 years, and please click here now. We’ve always kept 3QD free but the donations and subscriptions from people like you are what have kept us going (and always allowed those who can’t afford a subscription, like students, to access all of 3QD free of charge). We really do need your help more than ever to keep human-curation alive in this AI- and algorithm-dominated digital age.

Yours ever,

Abbas

NEW POSTS BELOW

The following writers each picked 10 books for the New York Times:

Stephen King, Min Jin Lee, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Bonnie Garmus, Nana Kwame Adjei‑Brenyah, Junot Díaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, James Patterson, Elin Hilderbrand, Annette Gordon‑Reed, Rebecca Roanhorse, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Jonathan Lethem, Sarah MacLean, Ed Yong, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Paul Tremblay, Nick Hornby, Scott Turow, Daniel Alarcón, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Lucy Sante, Gary Shteyngart, Anand Giridharadas, Jessamine Chan, Michael Robbins, Alma Katsu, Megan Abbott, Joshua Ferris, Ann Napolitano, John Irving, Tiya Miles, Jami Attenberg, Stephen L. Carter, Sarah Schulman, Elizabeth Hand, Dion Graham, Jeremy Denk, Morgan Jerkins, Michael Roth & Ryan Holiday.

See the books they picked here.

Åsmund Folkestad at Extra Medium Please:

Over several years now, a single question has refused to leave me: what is beauty? Triggering it was a series of aesthetic experiences so intense that I count them among the most significant moments of my life. They felt supercharged with meaning, yet what they meant I could not tell. After a couple years of scratching my head, I still cannot claim to understand them. Nevertheless, I believe I have taken a step towards understanding what beauty is.

Many a great tome has been written by philosophers on beauty. I wish I had read them. However, all I’ve read is one of these Oxford University Press booklets: “[Subject]: A Very Short Introduction”. Why then should you bother to listen to me? I will give you three reasons.

First, while certainly interesting, I am not most compelled by the philosophical route to this question. Instead, I find the evolutionary perspective most illuminating. This shifts the question, however. I’m a theoretical physicist thinking about black holes for a living, so again, why should you bother listen to me? This leads me to my second reason…

More here.

Quico Toro in Persuasion:

For weeks, pundits have been speculating that France’s snap legislative election could blow up in President Emmanuel Macron’s face—and boy did it. Only it’s blown up in a way nobody expected. Instead of the much-feared far right victory, the election will probably force the centrist president into an awkward coalition with the left, an exercise likely to leave both sides badly bruised.

Macron had called the snap poll long before he was legally mandated to, following the far right’s surprise win in last month’s European election. Then, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Rally had stunned Paris by coming first in France, with 31% of the vote. Macron reacted by dissolving the legislature three years ahead of schedule and calling a snap poll, seemingly to shock French voters into rethinking.

More here.

Pranay Sanklecha at Aeon Magazine:

‘Why did you decide to study philosophy?’ asked the Harvard professor, sitting in the park in his cream linen suit.

‘Because I want to find out how to live,’ I said. ‘I want to find out what matters and I want to live my life accordingly.’

He smiled affectionately, leaning forward in his deck chair.

‘If you want to find meaning, Pranay, don’t study philosophy. Go fish, become a carpenter, do anything. But don’t expect to find it by studying philosophy.’

If by ‘philosophy’ we refer to the played-out game of academic analytic philosophy, he was right. But if by philosophy we refer to the mysterious human activity of searching for truth, to processes of thought and perception, to communal seeking, to genuine dialogue and true encounter, to the moment when our minds open and something true rushes in – if we refer to any of these things, then the professor from Harvard was about as wrong as one could be.

more here.

Arianne Shahvisi at the LRB:

Anyone who’d like to look a Nazi in the eye is working against the clock. An eighteen-year-old member of the Nazi Party in 1945 would now be coming up to a hundred. Soon there will be none left. When the film director Luke Holland was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2015, he was interviewing the last surviving Nazis to build an archive of their first-hand accounts of complicity. He kept going as his health declined. One of my colleagues was Holland’s haematologist, and a few of us were invited to watch some unedited footage of German nonagenarians in dowdy sitting-rooms recounting, with nostalgia, unease or insouciance, their involvement in the operation of the Nazi state. Afterwards, another colleague broke our stunned silence with the remark: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ At first I thought she meant we were lucky to have not been Jewish, disabled, Romani or gay in Germany in the 1930s, but she meant we were lucky not to have been Nazis.

The phrase ‘there but for the grace of God’ is generally attributed to the 16th-century Protestant martyr John Bradford, on seeing convicts being led to execution. He wasn’t referring to the misfortune of their being murdered by the state, but to their having been weak-willed enough to commit capital sins.

more here.