Subway

I knew he was not in the house, my Autistic son
whose presence is a heat, a warm breath blown
backwards through my mouth into me. I could feel
my breath in the empty air and disappearing and
I couldn’t feel him.

At the stops I am lost
the doors clanging open
I feel larger than I am
and wild and their eyes
take me in and I want
to be in my room where
the subway is a map
on my wall I see even
in my sleep. But when
the doors close I feel
the movement and
release. I am small.
I am part of the engine.
I am part of the man’s
eye looking into the
dark tunnel. I am
just a brightness.
I am made of sound
and blur.

After a week the police worried about finding him
a man in every train and still it was like he had
disappeared, and I knew he could. He could drift,
forget to be human and I would have to call him
back from indifferent eyes.

When I saw him again he was playing a video game
and I hugged him and he didn’t look at me or the men
who had saved his life. He stared at the screen like
it was a future. And I knew we were not enough.
We cannot carry him fast through the darkness, fast
so his mind unravels, fast so he forgets he is grounded
in the house that is green and fifth from the corner,
third street down from the Avenue, 26 miles from
the river, thousands of miles from the true sky,
the sky that lifts us up, the sky that makes us birds.

by Joseph Humphrey
from The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Poets, 2010

Doug Stowe in The Hedgehog Review:

A few years ago, when my daughter was a freshman at Columbia University, one of only a few from Arkansas, I had the audacity to propose to then-president Lee Bollinger that the university add a hands-on component to its core curriculum. The core curriculum is intended to build a common framework of understanding as a baseline for academic life and what proceeds from it. Even though my academic credentials might not have caught Bollinger’s attention, I believed that I had something to offer as a craftsman and woodworker, and a father.

Of course, the classics of literature and philosophy are important, but if you look just a bit earlier in Greek philosophy than Plato and Socrates, you find Anaxagoras, who had said that man is the wisest of all animals because he has hands. Much later, Rousseau suggested that if you put young people in a workshop, their hands and brains will be equally engaged, and they will become philosophers while thinking themselves only craftsmen. There’s a certain element of beauty in that. Imagine philosophers invested concurrently with thoughts of highest ideals and with a sense of humility concerning themselves and their place in the whole operation of life. We might find an important lesson there.

More here.

Charles Jackson Paul in The Texas Orator:

Dr. Scott Aaronson is the David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at UT Austin. He is known for his work as a computer scientist and research into complexity theory and quantum computing, and more recently for his work at OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, on AI alignment. I sat down with Dr. Aaronson to talk about the nature of quantum computing, why we should care, and his thoughts on the recent developments in artificial intelligence.

Jackson: Good afternoon, Professor, thank you for joining us. Can you start by introducing yourself?

Dr. Aaronson: Thanks for having me. I’m Scott Aronson. I am a computer science professor here at UT. I’ve spent 20 years working on the theory of quantum computation. But I’m actually on leave for a couple of years now to work at OpenAI, on the theoretical foundations of AI safety.

Jackson: Can you summarize your area of research?

Dr. Aaronson: I’m a theoretical computer scientist. My training is mostly in computational complexity theory, which is the field that studies the inherent capabilities and limitations of computers, under constraints on resources. So, you know, what can you do with limited time and limited memory? What is the inherent scaling that is required to solve problems? Is it polynomial? Or is it exponential with the size of the problem that you’re trying to solve?

More here.

Steven Shaviro in his own blog:

Bérubé’s new book, The Ex-Human, is about science fiction. Bérubé offers thoughtful close readings of a number of classic science fiction texts: Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? (with some reference to its film adaptation as Blade Runner), Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 (with some reference to its better-known film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick), and Octavia Butler’s Parable series and Lilith’s Brood series.

Bérubé’s discussions of all these texts are subtle and insightful. But close reading in its own right is not the point of the book. Bérubé includes autobiographical personal reflections, and discusses writing the book in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which deeply changed the dynamics of his own personal and family life, together with everyone else’s. Above all, though, the book is concerned with how science fiction allows us to entertain non-human perspectives upon human life and existence, and specifically to imagine the end of humanity — or rather (and better) its transformation in radical ways that exceed our capacity for imaginative projection and continued empathy.

More here.

Laura Miller in Slate:

“I’m a writer; I tell stories,” reads the first line of Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, a novel based on her own family’s past. Admittedly, that’s not the most promising opener, since everyone from ad executives to life coaches goes around calling themself a “storyteller” these days. “Of course, really,” Messud’s narrator continues, “I want to save lives. Or simply: I want to save life.”

That’s more like it. That’s a meaningful assertion of this novel’s purpose: to preserve and cherish the beauty and sorrow of a way of life since passed from this earth and in danger of being lost to memory. This Strange Eventful History is very much a midlife novel, a work reflecting the sudden knowledge of how swiftly one reality cedes to another. Messud’s family—pied-noir French, colonials born and raised in Algeria—knew this truth with a particularly deep pain. Algeria regained its independence in 1962, and for the clan in This Strange Eventful History, the Cassars, it became a lost homeland, one that they could never return to because it no longer existed.

More here.

Teddy Amenabar in The Washington Post:

In a Station

Once I walked through the halls of a station
Someone called your name
In the streets, I heard children laughing
They all sound the same

Wonder, could you ever know me?
Know the reason why I live?
Is there nothing you can show me?
Life seems so little to give

Once I climbed up the face of a mountain
And ate the wild fruit there
Fell asleep until the moonlight woke me
And I could taste your hair

Isn’t everybody dreaming?
Then the voice I hear is real
Out of all the idle scheming
Can’t we have something to feel?

“Once upon a time” leaves me empty
Tomorrow never came
I could sing the sound of your laughter
Still, I don’t know your name

Must be some way to repay you
Out of all the good you gave
If a rumor should delay you
love seems so little to save

by Richard Manuel
from Music From Big Pink
The Band

Melissa Heikkilä in the MIT Technology Review:

I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity?

This makes it sound like I’m dying, but it’s the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today it launches a new generation, its first to take advantage of the latest advancements in generative AI, and they are more realistic and expressive than anything I’ve ever seen. While today’s release means almost anyone will now be able to make a digital double, on this early April afternoon, before the technology goes public, they’ve agreed to make one of me.

More here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Proteins are biological workhorses. They build our bodies and orchestrate the molecular processes in cells that keep them healthy. They also present a wealth of targets for new medications. From everyday pain relievers to sophisticated cancer immunotherapies, most current drugs interact with a protein. Deciphering protein architectures could lead to new treatments. That was the promise of AlphaFold 2, an AI model from Google DeepMind that predicted how proteins gain their distinctive shapes based on the sequences of their constituent molecules alone. Released in 2020, the tool was a breakthrough half a decade in the making. But proteins don’t work alone. They inhabit an entire cellular universe and often collaborate with other molecular inhabitants like, for example, DNA, the body’s genetic blueprint.

This week, DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs released a big new update that allows the algorithm to predict how proteins work inside cells. Instead of only modeling their structures, the new version—dubbed AlphaFold 3—can also map a protein’s interactions with other molecules. For example, could a protein bind to a disease-causing gene and shut it down? Can adding new genes to crops make them resilient to viruses? Can the algorithm help us rapidly engineer new vaccines to tackle existing diseases—or whatever new ones nature throws at us? “Biology is a dynamic system…you have to understand how properties of biology emerge due to the interactions between different molecules in the cell,” said Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, in a press conference. AlphaFold 3 helps explain “not only how proteins talk to themselves, but also how they talk to other parts of the body,” said lead author Dr. John Jumper.

More here.

Lucas Chancel in Nature:

As radical as they might seem, calls for limits on wealth are as old as civilization itself. The Hebrew Bible and Torah recognized years during which debts should be cancelled, slaves set free and property redistributed from rich to poor. In classical Greece, Aristotle praised cities that kept wealth inequality in check to enhance political stability. And in 1942, then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that annual incomes should be capped at the current equivalent of US$480,000.

In Limitarianism, Dutch and Belgian economist and philosopher Ingrid Robeyns argues that it’s time for twenty-first-century governments to do the same. She explores what setting limits on wealth ownership might mean, and why our societies should want to do so. It is a fresh take on a much-needed discussion at a time when, for example, the richest 1% of the US population owns about as much wealth as the bottom 90%.

More here.

Jonathan Kandell in the New York Times:

Mr. Simons equipped his colleagues with advanced computers to process torrents of data filtered through mathematical models, and turned the four investment funds in his new firm, Renaissance Technologies, into virtual money printing machines.

Medallion, the largest of these funds, earned more than $100 billion in trading profits in the 30 years following its inception in 1988. It generated an unheard-of 66 percent average annual return during that period.

That was a far better long-term performance than famed investors like Warren Buffett and George Soros achieved.

More here.  Also see this, “RIP to the man who beat the efficient market hypothesis” by Eric Hoel.

Dominion

God separated the light from the darkness,
but I have a light switch.
Once there was morning and evening,
but now someone has torn the heart out of a mountain,
and they’re burning it for me.

God gave every green and growing thing,
every seed and every fruiting tree,
to all the beasts and birds for food,
but my desire sets the market price.
The patents are in my name.

If Noah had known what I know
about ventilated barns and gestation crates
he could have fit more than two of every animal in that ark.
He could have made them forget
they were animals at all.

I surveyed creation. I saw that it was profitable.
My ads fall from satellites like doves.
You’d be surprised what I can turn into a weapon.
You’d be surprised how many people
will wave my flag as they die.

God divided the light from the darkness,
but I have a light switch, a patent, a nation, a bomb,
I have mountains to burn and rivers to dye red and gray.
The old world has passed away. This is my new heaven and new earth.
Let all the people say “Amen.”

by Claire Hermann
from Split This Rock

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

It’s a baby lying on the floor. The eyes and squishy forehead are particularly impressive. There’s a gooey-ness and rawness to the flesh that is particular to newborn babies. I happen to like knobby knees and this baby’s knees are nice and knobby. The new skin on baby knees looks  like it could also be old skin. It is startling, the way that tiny infants can resemble elderly people. There is a shared vulnerability to bodies just coming into the world and bodies soon to make their way back out again.

The sculpture, A Girl, is also quite large. Much larger than an adult human being. The scale is affecting, though it is hard to put one’s finger on exactly why. Maybe it’s that the giant size actually increases the viewer’s experience of fragility. Everything that makes a newborn baby new is magnified.

More here.

Rachel Brazil in Nature:

Editor-in-chief Sarahanne Field describes herself and her team at the Journal of Trial & Error as wanting to highlight the “ugly side of science — the parts of the process that have gone wrong”.

She clarifies that the editorial board of the journal, which launched in 2020, isn’t interested in papers in which “you did a shitty study and you found nothing. We’re interested in stuff that was done methodologically soundly, but still yielded a result that was unexpected.” These types of result — which do not prove a hypothesis or could yield unexplained outcomes — often simply go unpublished, explains Field, who is also an open-science researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Along with Stefan Gaillard, one of the journal’s founders, she hopes to change that.

Calls for researchers to publish failed studies are not new. The ‘file-drawer problem’ — the stacks of unpublished, negative results that most researchers accumulate — was first described in 1979 by psychologist Robert Rosenthal. He argued that this leads to publication bias in the scientific record: the gap of missing unsuccessful results leads to overemphasis on the positive results that do get published.

More here.

S’bu Zikode and Richard Pithouse in the Boston Review:

Richard Pithouse: Mandela was released from prison on February 11, 1990, suddenly opening up the field of political possibility after a long and exhausting stalemate between the progressive forces, which were largely organized in two groups: the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the trade unions, and the apartheid state. What did Mandela’s release mean to you?

S’bu Zikode: I was fourteen years old, and in school. At that time, we were divided. It was the time of the war between [the right-wing Zulu nationalist organization] Inkatha and the UDF. People could easily draw the line between the two sides along a river or a road. Everyone on one side was Inkatha; everyone on the other side was UDF. A lot of people were killed or had their homes burnt down just because they were living on this or that side of the line.

Some people had guns; we young people had sticks. If you turned back from a battle you would be shot. You had to face bullets from the front and the back. Terrible things happened, very painful things. We don’t talk about it.

More here.

Katrina Gulliver in JSTOR Daily:

In the years following American independence, many questions would be asked, in different spheres, of what it meant to be a citizen, and what it meant to be an American. New England schoolmaster John Jenkins focused on penmanship as the key to building a strong American middle class, creating his own book of instruction for handwriting.

“Writing in the shadow of the American Revolution, Jenkins recognized that subtle changes in everyday cultural practices like handwriting could have significant effects on the character of the new nation,” explains historian Richard S. Christen.

Literacy on both sides of the Atlantic had increased during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but a fine hand tended to be the mark of the well born and well educated.

More here.

Roy Datanielson in Medium:

Longevity and eternal youth have frequently been sought after down through the ages, and efforts to keep from dying and fight off age have a long and interesting history.

“Six days and seven nights I mourned over him, and I would not allow him to be buried until a maggot fell out of his nose. I was terrified. I began to fear death, and so roam the wilderness.”
-Gilgamesh

Written in Stone
History is the story of humanity’s quest for immortality. And anyone who examine it closely enough in a serious attempt to find the cultural roots and philosophical antecedents of modern immortalism, shall discover that mankind’s seemingly endless quest to conquer death has been expressed several times down through the ages. In fact, the earliest attested record of a mortal man’s pursuit of immortality can actually be found in what is considered to be the first great work of literature ever made: ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, an Akkadian poem about Gilgamesh, or Bilgamesh, a Sumerian king who reigned in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, somewhere between 2800 and 2500 BC. The epic most likely existed in oral form long before it was written down on stone tablets around 2200 BC, and the main character of the story, Gilgamesh, is widely considered by scholars to be the historical 5th king of Uruk.

More here.