Of all the many disappointments of 1977, the ITV series Man from Atlantis has to be one of the greatest. The title suggested a programme that would have something to do with the lost underwater kingdom described in great detail by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an evil-looking beard and an evil-sounding German name: Schubert.

Even my enormous teenage appetite for the fantastical and men in swimming trunks was sated quite quickly; there was too much oceanology and not nearly enough Atlantis. So now, thirty years later, I am amazed to discover that there really is a Lost City of Atlantis. It was found in 2000 by a team of Swiss and American scientists investigating the Atlantis Massif along the mid-Atlantic ridge. When it appeared in the frame of their remotely controlled camera – named Argo – there was, by all accounts, a certain degree of excitement. The Lost City consisted of a field of white towers: hydrothermal vents, populated by tiny see-through creatures. So did this mean that Plato had been on to something? Was this yet another example of a myth becoming reality, or at least a myth with a core, a kernel, a germ, a grain of truth?

Let’s not get carried away.

more from the LRB here.

Robert Chalmers talks to Vidal on his life and fights, in the Independent.

There can be no modern writer who has disregarded so enthusiastically George Orwell’s egalitarian advice to use an English word unless no alternative is available. Vidal is the only non-restaurateur I’ve ever heard employ the noun amuse-gueule, and the only person in any profession I’ve known who uses “cher confrère” as a verb. When he paces a room at midnight, he doesn’t do so like any run of the mill phantom, but “like Wilde’s Canterville Ghost”.

Gore Vidal gets away with this because of his brilliance, and because unashamed elitism, in matters of class as well as of intellect, has become part of his act. It’s no accident that he gets on so well with Melvyn Bragg, another man of extreme intelligence who for some reason feels compelled to wear his learning, if I can plagiarise Vidal just once, “like a plume”. I ask the American why this might be. “Well,” he says, “I believe Melvyn’s grandmother came from Bury.”

There is no doubting the courage with which Vidal has opposed certain individuals and causes, such as Richard Nixon, Martin Amis and Zionist expansionism. He spoke out against his distant relative Al Gore, when family loyalty might have prevailed, and was one of the very few Americans to understand – if not empathise with – the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. The two exchanged correspondence, and Vidal failed to attend McVeigh’s execution in Indiana, in 2001, only because he was given inadequate notice of its rescheduled date. For all that, Vidal is instinctively orthodox in outlook. He may once have declared “I am a political activist”, but in his lexicon this means exercising influence at the highest level of traditional US politics. This explains how, at the height of the acrimonious attacks launched by Hillary Clinton (who has known Vidal for years) against Barack Obama, he continued to support the former, regardless of her tactics. “I feel,” he says, “somewhat paternalistic towards the Clintons.”

To his devotees, Polanyi showed the free market to be the enemy of humanity in “The Great Transformation.” It was an alien form of social organization, he argued, created in 18th-century England only by state action propelled by ideologues. By displacing the natural social state — an idyllic system of mutual obligations that bound and protected individuals — the free market brought inequality, war, oppression, and social turmoil to just and peaceful societies.

“The Great Transformation” has attained the status of a classic in branches of sociology, political science, and anthropology. Stacks of it await undergraduate initiates each year in college bookstores. Citations to the work continue to accumulate in scholarly articles. Yet in economics the work is unknown — or, when discussed, derided. Thus the cruel irony of the term “social sciences.”

more from the NY Sun here.

Over at the Heyman Center, a video of the discussion between Walter Benn Michaels, Charles Altieri, and Amanda Anderson on the issue.

Via The Valve, the IEEE has a special issue on The Singularity.   Ray Kurzweil and Neil Gershenfeld discuss “Two Paths to the Singularity” can be found here. The views of some prominent computer scientists, biologists and all-around smart people such as T.J Rogers, Gordon Moore and Steven Pinker can be found here. Pinker:

WHO HE IS  Professor of psychology at Harvard; previously taught in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, with much of his research addressing language development. Writes best sellers about the way the brain works, like The Blank Slate (2002) and The Stuff of Thought (2007).

SINGULARITY WILL OCCUR Never, ever

MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS WILL OCCUR “In one sense—information routing—they already have. In the other sense—first-person experience—we’ll never know.”

MOORE’S LAW WILL CONTINUE FOR 10 more years

THOUGHTS “There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity. The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems.”

Over at the Wired blog, a synopsis of the World Science Festival panel:

Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer: We do something other species can’t: We remember. We have cultures, ways of transmitting information.

Daniel Dennett, cognitive scientist: We are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other. “The planet has grown a nervous system,” he said.

Renee Reijo Pera, embryologist: We’re uniquely human from the moment that egg and sperm fuse. A “human program” begins before the brain even begins to form.

Patricia Churchland, neuroethicist: The structure of how the human brain is arranged intrigues me. Are there unique brain structures? As far as we can understand, it’s our size that is unique. What we don’t find are other unique structures. There may be certain types of human-specific cells — but as for what that means, we don’t know. It’s important not only to focus on us, to compare our biology and behavior to other animals.

///
The Outcome
Kit Robinson

When I was a musician’s musician
I used to be a poet’s poet
then a black box

Turned off the alarm system
according to the script
at this time the outcome

Is unknown
and I
am a professor of indeterminacy

In collaboration
with my trusted business partners
the birds

Who inhabit this hillside platform
enduring the confused status
of a forklift upgrade

They sing and I
merely stare at apples
and occasional other fruit

Citrus combine of this belated orchard
in Little Romania
next to where water

Cascades down steps that lead
to something not immediately
identifiable as such

A febrile dog
ripping the hell out of
an inflatable wading pool

Such are the pleasures
of Little Romania
the sky

An unvariegated deadpan blue
the mild undertone of desolation
dusted with erotic chimes

It would be foolish to think
and I have no intention
in keeping with this interoperable crepuscule

We are open
the advent of standards is a boon
hail to the salt in our wounds

We hold these truths
faster than speed
it never entered my mind

Here in midsummer
the day is long
the train sound recoils in the hills

Every bit of mental ice
is used up
in the emotional juice we drink

And words mean nothing
and the movies suck
less than our heart’s desire

More than you ever know

///

From The Washington Post:

Sit. Stay. Read. The dog days of summer are nigh, and here is a big-hearted novel you can fall into, get lost in and finally emerge from reluctantly, a little surprised that the real world went on spinning while you were absorbed.

You haven’t heard of the author. David Wroblewski is a 48-year-old software developer in Colorado, and this is his first novel. It’s being released with the kind of hoopla once reserved for the publishing world’s most established authors. No wonder: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is an enormous but effortless read, trimmed down to the elements of a captivating story about a mute boy and his dogs. That sets off alarm bells, I know:

Handicapped kids and pets can make a toxic mix of sentimentality. But Wroblewski writes with such grace and energy that Edgar Sawtelle never succumbs to that danger. Inspired improbably by the plot of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” this Midwestern tale manages to be both tender and suspenseful.

The story takes place in a small Wisconsin town where Gar and Trudy Sawtelle happily raise and train their own unusual breed of dogs. The time is the early 1970s, but Wroblewski casts the setting in the sepia tones of an earlier period, as though cut off from the modern age. Their only child is an endearing boy named Edgar, who arrived 14 years ago after a string of miscarriages that almost crushed his mother’s spirit. Edgar cannot speak or make any sounds, but he’s otherwise healthy. To his grateful parents, “it didn’t matter what in him was special and what ordinary. He was alive. . . . Compared to that, silence was nothing.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

In an attempt to duplicate an early cell, scientists put fatty acids (that were likely membrane candidates) and a strip of DNA into a test tube of water. While in there, the fatty acids formed into a ring, or membrane, around the genetic segment. The researchers then added nucleotides—units of genetic material—to the test tube to determine whether they would penetrate the membrane and copy the DNA inside it. Their findings: the nucleotides did enter the cell, latch onto and replicate the DNA over 24 hours.

What scientists now must figure out, Szostak says, is how the original and copycat DNA strands separated and this early cell divided or reproduced.

“We’re trying to solve a whole series of problems, step by step,” he says, “and build up to replicating an evolving system.”

More here.

In the Turkish Daily News:

Today, secularism is often based on “hard” naturalism, i.e., one based on scientistic assumptions. Unlike the case of cultural relativism, this time I need not comment on the philosophical background. For what interests me in the present context is the question whether a secularist devaluation of religion, if it were one day to be shared by the vast majority of secular citizens, is at all compatible with that post-secular balance between shared citizenship and cultural difference I have outlined. Or would the secularistic mindset of a relevant portion of the citizenry be just as appetizing for the normative self-understanding of a post-secular society as the fundamentalism of a mass of religious citizens in fact is? This question touches on deeper roots of the present unease than the “multiculturalist drama”. Which kind of problem do we face?

It is to the credit of the secularists that they, too, insist on the indispensability of including all citizens as equals in civil society. Because a democratic order cannot simply be imposed on those who are its authors, the constitutional state confronts its citizens with the demanding expectations of an ethics of citizenship that reaches beyond mere obedience to the law. Religious citizens and communities must not only superficially adjust to the constitutional order. They are expected to appropriate the secular legitimation of constitutional principles under the very premises of their own faith. It is a well-known fact that the Catholic Church first pinned its colors to the mast of liberalism and democracy with the Second Vaticanum in 1965. And in Germany, the Protestant churches did not act differently. Many Muslim communities still have this painful learning process before them. Certainly, the insight is also growing in the Islamic world that today an historical-hermeneutic approach to the Koran’s doctrine is required. But the discussion on a desired Euro-Islam makes us once more aware of the fact that it is the religious communities that will themselves decide whether they can recognize in a reformed faith their “true faith”.

As the drinking commenced one cold January evening in the Bosnian countryside, President Vinko Vukoja, of the Hajdučka Republika of Mijat Tomić, or Rebel’s Republic, burst into a passionate ganga, a guttural, throbbing yodel sung in rural Croatia and Herzegovina. On the final note, his ministers joined their ruddy leader in a reverberating wail. This is the anthem of their young nation: “Sveti Ante platiti ću ti misu / samo reci koji naši nisu.” (“I will pay for your mass at Sveti Ante Church / just say who is not one of us.”)

I asked what this song meant. The men explained that with ganga, the lyrics aren’t too important—sometimes the words even change; it’s the spirit and communal reverie that matter most. But the lyrics sung by the President that night are printed on this diminutive breakaway state’s currency, called the kubura. The money appears quite official, bearing three authentications: the signatures of the President, Minister of Defense, and Governor, as well as the national seal—a bust of Mijat Tomić, a seventeenth-century Croat folk hero who fought Ottoman rule, with two kubura guns (the currency’s namesake antique pistols) crossed beneath him, a red and white checkerboard above his right shoulder. The flip side of each bill shows a dozen cars parked haphazardly in front of a rendering of the pyramidal hotel that doubles as the government seat and is owned by President Vukoja.

more from Triple Canopy here.

In The Brooklyn Rail, Rachel Bialik reviews Night Wraps the Sky and accuses Mayakovsky of being a hipster!

The book is a forceful tribute to the die-hard communist and incendiary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who unfalteringly believed that artistic performance was the medium that would open the gates for an ideological revolution. Not only did he believe it, but he had the entire country and party convinced as well. Mayakovsky was something of a superstar in his time, but editor Michael Almereyda makes a strong case in this long overdue anthology (in English translation) that the Russian Revolution’s representative poet was motivated entirely by political sincerity and socialist ambition. Though the deliberately selected primary sources and poems occasionally hint that Mayakovsky was compelled by a tormented Russian temperament, Almereyda successfully portrays a country and an ideology so raw that only a poetic persona of epic proportions could bring it to the people.

Despite the editor’s deliberate angle, multiple aspects of Mayakovsky as a writer and a person emerge from the collection. In his introduction, Almereyda explains that the writer displays, “a kind of proto-punk ferocity, a still burning aura of tough guy tenderness, soulful defiance.” In other words, Mayakovsky was a hipster.

Tom Chatfield in Prospect (UK):

The complexity of games like Warcraft and Eve is not the only aspect of modern gaming to defy stereotype. Consider demographics: where once gaming was the preserve of adolescent males, players increasingly come from all age groups and both sexes. According to the Entertainment Software Association of America, the world’s largest gaming association, the average American video game player is now 35 years old and has been playing games for 12 years, while the average frequent buyer of games is 40. Moreover, 40 per cent of all players are women, with women over 18 representing a far greater portion of the game-playing population (33 per cent) than boys aged 17 or younger (18 per cent). Much of the recent growth in the value of the gaming industry has been driven by the increased diversity and affluence of its consumer base; the hard core of adolescent males are no longer central. In Britain, Ofcom’s annual Communications Market report for 2007 noted that, despite the electronic games market continuing to grow in value, significantly fewer children were playing console and computer games than two years previously (61 per cent of children aged 5-15 did so regularly in 2005, compared to 53 per cent in 2007).

Perhaps most intriguingly, the video games industry is now growing in ways that have more in common with the old-fashioned world of charades and Monopoly than with a cyber-future of sedentary, isolated sociopaths. GTA IV itself has a superb collaborative mode for online gamers, while the games that have been shifting most units in the last two years belong to a burgeoning new genre known as “social-casual”: games in which friends and relations gather round a console to compete at activities that range from playing notes on a fake electric guitar (Guitar Hero) to singing karaoke and swapping videos of their performances, X-Factor style (SingStar), or playing tennis with motion-sensitive controllers (Wii Sports). The agenda is increasingly being set by the concerns of mainstream consumers—what they consider acceptable for their children, what they want to play at parties and across generations.

From the Plenty blog, Cutting Edge:

Sunrgi, a Hollywood-based start-up, came out of stealth mode this week claiming it can collect twice as much sunlight as other photovoltaic designs and convert it to electricity for 5 cents a kilowatt-hour, on par with fossil fuels.

The company’s core technology is concentrating solar power, which uses lenses to focus sunlight onto small strips of photovoltaic cells. The advantage is that more photons are collected by smaller quantities of solar cells, meaning that the systems require much less of the expensive semiconductor materials that go into making ordinary solar panels. But the cells are also fragile and easily damaged in extreme heat, as I wrote about here.

Sunrgi’s solution involves “goop–or at least that’s what GreenTechMedia quotes Paul Sidlo, a co-founder and partner at Sunrgi, as saying. It sounds like a nanotech slurry that’s mounted on the back of a fairly ordinary solar cell to conduct heat away from the cell.

SOME SCIENTISTS SEE their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the “butterfly effect,” the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz’s suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly’s wings. more stories like this

Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

First there was Watergate, then the nuclear family faded, cigars were extinguished, and now interest in cigarettes is waning. Martinis can only be next. Soon, mixed drinks will be fond recollection, a fable shared with an inattentive child.

If we don’t cultivate the demand for complex drinks—cocktails that require a commitment to acquiring certain tastes—we must prepare to relinquish gambling, prostitution, and perhaps even sex.

When we cast aside even our vices, how can we hope to preserve the very fiber of our society? Without morals, we are still a decadent and exuberant people. Without vices, we are troglogdytic hunches, scraping at the earth and mewling at the sky. For the good of mankind, we must stop ordering stupid drinks.

more from The Morning News here.

In the NYRB, Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff review several new books on neuroscience and implications of the research for memory, meaning, representation and reality:

Both [Jean-Pierre] Changeux and [Gerald] Edelman propose that during memory formation, our interactions with the world cause a Darwinian selection of neural circuits, much as the body, when invaded by a virus, “selects” the most potent antibodies from the enormous repertoire of antibodies made available by the body’s immune system. However, the resulting memory is not, Edelman says, a representation of the outside world, any more than the antibody that has protected the body against an infecting virus is a representation of that virus. Yet the antibody can protect the body against a future attack by the virus, just as the neural circuits can contribute to memory recall. Instead, Edelman writes, memory is the ability to

repeat a mental or physical act after some time despite a changing context…. We stress repetition after some time in this definition because it is the ability to re-create an act separated by a certain duration from the original signal set that is characteristic of memory. And in mentioning a changing context, we pay heed to a key property of memory in the brain: that it is, in some sense, a form of constructive recategorization during ongoing experience, rather than a precise replication of a previous sequence of events.

For Edelman, then, memory is not a “small scale model of external reality,” but a dynamic process that enables us to repeat a mental or physical act…

From The New York Review of Books:

Alexander defeated the Persian armies in three great pitched battles, and the unfortunate Persian king was murdered by his own people. Alexander married an exotic Eastern princess, became King of Kings, and died, not quite thirty-three years old, in Babylon (323 BCE). Some said he died of a particularly violent drinking bout: heavy drinking seems to have been a tradition among the upper class of Macedon, a society by no means famous for its cultural or scholarly interests. News of his death percolated back to Greece. Some refused to believe it. If he were really dead, said one, the whole world would reek of his corpse. But dead he was, and the struggle was on for the succession to his vast realm and fabulous wealth. His generals fought it out, each aiming to keep as much as he could. Alexander’s young son was promptly murdered, and most of his family wiped out. The whole story is a cruel lesson — almost, one might feel, overemphatic in conception — on the vanity of ambition and the nothingness of power.

After a generation of warfare, things settled down. No king had been able to hold on to the whole of Alexander’s empire. Four more or less stable monarchies emerged, among them the Egypt of Ptolemy, a level-headed general, which would last for three hundred years; its last queen was the famous Cleopatra (a Macedonian name). One by one, those kingdoms fell to the rising and irresistible power of Rome. But Alexander lived on, as a figure of fantasy and romance. Sometimes he was a focus for hatred of the Roman conquerors and oppressors. If only Alexander had lived, said many Greeks, he would have conquered these horrible Romans. But Roman writers disagreed: Alexander would have met his match in the sturdy Roman legions!

There is nothing like an early death for creating legends, and Richard Stoneman gives a great many of them learned but lively treatment in his new book.

More here.

///
SWEET APPLES
Albinas Žukauskas

Well, maybe now, towards autumn,
In the dusk, when in my father’s orchard
A giant moon hangs on above the fence,
When from the boughs Newtonian apples plop into the grass –
Maybe you’ll come and ask me,
While I keep watch over the place for apple thieves,
To shake into your lap
Some of the very best sweet apples?
Maybe you’ll come now after all?
I only want to see whether you’re still as stupid
As that time, many years ago,
Whether you still can stay so long behind the orchard fence
Holding a lapful of sweet apples?
I want to see
Whether I am as stupid as I was
So many years ago.
Will I, like then, benumbed and lost in wonder,
Keep staring at you from behind the fence,
Both motionless and speechless,
Pervaded by the blazing giant moon
And by the scent of the sweet apples in your lap?
I want to see
Whether we both will, like two fools,
Stare at each other until midnight,
When you at last come to yourself, stir up
And, lowering your eyes, breathe out:
“My goodness, it is late,
I must be off now… It’s already dark.
And Mummy – God forbid! – will wake to look for me.”
Yet do come, anyway!
I only want to see
Whether we both are still as stupid
As that time, many years ago,
Whether, like then, beside the fence
Under the big full moon
We’ll stare benumbed and speechless
Until the very midnight,
Until the first night cockcrow!

Oh, hang it all!
I’m sorry, dear, I’ve clean forgotten
That the old fence has long since fallen down,
And it’s a long time since you are no more.
All that is left here is the giant moon,
An indistinct scent of sweet apples,
And me, of course,
That’s all.

Translated by Lionginas Pažūsis

//

From The New York Times:

Evolution’s recipe for making a brain more complex has long seemed simple enough. Just increase the number of nerve cells, or neurons, and the interconnections between them. A human brain, for instance, is three times the volume of a chimpanzee’s. A whole new dimension of evolutionary complexity has now emerged from a cross-species study led by Dr. Seth Grant at the Sanger Institute in England. Dr. Grant looked at the interconnections between neurons, known as synapses, which until now have been regarded as a standard feature of neurons.

But in fact the synapses get considerably more complex going up the evolutionary scale, Dr. Grant and colleagues reported online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. In worms and flies, the synapses mediate simple forms of learning, but in higher animals they are built from a much richer array of protein components and conduct complex learning and pattern recognition, Dr. Grant said. The finding may open a new window into how the brain operates. “One of the biggest questions in neuroscience is to answer what are the design principles by which the human brain is constructed, and this is one of those principles,” Dr. Grant said.

More here.