Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In which direction would the wheel turn then, or would it even turn at all? That’s the essence of the “reverse sprinkler” problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, have grappled with since the 1940s. Now, applied mathematicians at New York University think they’ve cracked the conundrum, per a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters—and the answer challenges conventional wisdom on the matter.

More here.

Dan Gardner at PastPresentFuture:

Good news for Joe Biden this week. Job gains beat forecasts and the phrase “surprisingly strong economy” once again appeared in headlines. Voters mostly refused to acknowledge the good news through 2023 but the latest consumer sentiment surveys suggest the sunshine is finally penetrating the gloom. Optimism is rising. If the economy maintains course through 2024, Biden, for all his faults and weaknesses, will be the heavy favourite for re-election.

That’s the standard sort of analysis political pundits churn out. It’s true, as far as it goes. But let’s push it a little further so we can make plain something that is seldom explicitly discussed — although it is far more important than what pundits usually yammer on about.

Why does a strong economy favour an incumbent president? Because voters generally credit the president for economy. This is so common, so baked into our thinking, that we seldom ask if it makes any sense.

Which is a shame because it mostly doesn’t.

More here.

The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings

I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.

by Donika Kelly
from Academy of American Poets, 11/20/17

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

A preventative anti-aging therapy seems like wishful thinking. Yet a new study led by Dr. Corina Amor Vegas at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory describes a treatment that brings the dream to life—at least for mice. Given a single injection in young adulthood, they aged more slowly compared to their peers. By the equivalent of roughly 65 years of age in humans, the mice were slimmer, could better regulate blood sugar and insulin levels, and had lower inflammation and a more youthful metabolic profile. They even kept up their love for running, whereas untreated seniors turned into couch potatoes. The shot is made up of CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T cells. These cells are genetically engineered from the body’s T cells—a type of immune cell adept at hunting down particular targets in the body.

CAR T cells first shot to fame as a revolutionary therapy for previously untreatable blood cancers. They’re now close to tackling other medical problems, such as autoimmune disorders, asthma, liver and kidney diseases, and even HIV.

The new study took a page out of CAR T’s cancer-fighting playbook. But instead of targeting cancer cells, they engineered them to hunt down and destroy senescent cells, a type of cell linked to age-related health problems. Often dubbed “zombie cells,” they accumulate with age and pump out a toxic chemical brew that damages surrounding tissues. Zombie cells have been in the crosshairs of longevity researchers and investors alike. Drugs that destroy the cells called senolytics are now a multi-billion-dollar industry. The new treatment, called senolytic CAR T, also turned back the clock when given to elderly mice.

More here.

From Ticketmaster DISCOVER:

There is no genre of music unaffected by the impact of Black artists. There is no music history without them. Western music owes a huge debt to the Black musicians who pioneered, reinvented and trailblazed – often without due credit, often despite systems designed to hold them back. Cataloguing the entire history of Black music would take years, but in honour of Black History Month, we’ve compiled a record of just 30 key moments when Black artists changed the future of music. They’re 30 of many.

1983: The ‘Billie Jean’ music video airs on MTV

Whilst music fans could see videos by many of their favourite artists on MTV in the early 80s, Black artists were noticeably absent from the channel. MTV execs justified that Black music largely did not fit the requirements to appear on the rock-focused channel, but Michael Jackson was not so easily dismissible. His 1982 album Thriller had solidified him as pop force to be reckoned with.

After Walter Yetnikoff, president of CBS Records Group, threatened to pull all other CBS videos from MTV, the network agreed to air the music video for ‘Billie Jean’. It became the first video by a Black artist to receive heavy rotation on the network, opening the door for other Black artists such as Prince and Whitney Houston. Later, in 1988, Jackson became the first artist to receive the Video Vanguard award, two years before his sister Janet also received the special honour. When Britney Spears was presented the award in 2011, it had been renamed the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award in honour of the artist.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

Yascha Mounk and Martha Nussbaum in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: Before we get properly into the different subjects we’ll explore today, what actually is a moral philosophy? And what is the strange enterprise of ethics, and of trying to think about how one should act in the world?

Martha Nussbaum: I’ll first say what most people think it is (I have a rather different view). The general idea started with Socrates, who thought most people don’t pause to think and they don’t summon their beliefs into explicitness and therefore are guided by custom, convention, and authority, and have never stopped to sort out what they really think. So what most people who teach moral philosophy do is just try to conduct that kind of Socratic inquiry, get people to be more critical, more conscious, and, therefore, to discuss with others more in that spirit of critical awareness, rather than just saying, “Oh, I think this.”

But I also think that in a pluralistic culture, where people get their ethical views from many different sources, some religious and some secular, we have to be very careful about not pronouncing and not steering in one direction rather than another. And, therefore, I think ethics has got quite narrow constraints. But political philosophy has to try to get to principles that could guide the whole society…

More here.

Asher Elbein in Quanta:

Since ancient times, plants’ ability to orient their eyeless bodies toward the nearest, brightest source of light — known today as phototropism — has fascinated scholars and generated countless scientific and philosophical debates. And over the past 150 years, botanists have successfully unraveled many of the key molecular pathways that underpin how plants sense light and act on that information.

Yet a critical mystery has endured. Animals use eyes — a complex organ of lenses and photoreceptors — to gain a detailed picture of the world around them, including the direction of light. Plants, biologists have established, possess a powerful suite of molecular tools for measuring illumination. But in the absence of obvious physical sensing organs like lenses, how do plants work out the precise direction from which light is coming?

Now, a team of European researchers has hit upon an answer.

More here.

Costica Bradatan in the TLS:

On July 4, 1845, a man from Concord, Massachusetts, declared his own independence and went into the woods nearby. On the shore of a pond there, Henry David Thoreau built a small wooden cabin, which he would call home for two years, two months and two days. From this base he began a philosophical project of “deliberate” living, intending to “earn [a] living by the labor of my hands only”. Though an ostensibly radical undertaking, this experiment was not a break with his past, but the logical culmination of years of searching and groping. Since graduating from Harvard in 1837 Thoreau had tried out many ways of earning his keep, and fortunately proved competent in almost everything he set his mind to. Asked once to describe his professional situation, he responded: “I don’t know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not … I am a schoolmaster, a private tutor, a surveyor, a gardener, a farmer, a painter (I mean a house-painter), a carpenter, a mason, a day-laborer, a pencil-maker, a glass-paper-maker, a writer, and sometimes a poetaster”.

From this position, with any number of routes before him, yet none decided on, Thoreau was particularly well placed to consider questions about the nature, purpose and fundamental meaning of work.

More here.

Jeremy W. Peters in the New York Times:

For many progressives, it was a big moment. In 2019, Congress was holding its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery.

To support the idea, Democrats invited the influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had revived the reparations issue in an article in The Atlantic, and the actor and activist Danny Glover.

Republicans turned to a virtual unknown: a 23-year-old philosophy major at Columbia University, Coleman Hughes.

In the hearing, Mr. Hughes, looking very much his age, testified to the House subcommittee that not paying reparations after the Civil War was “one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated.”

But, he continued, they should not be paid now. “There’s a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today,” he said, pointing to endemic problems that affect Black Americans, such as poor schools, dangerous neighborhoods and a punitive criminal justice system.

More here.

David Quammen in Anthropocene Magazine:

Since the late 1970s, there have come three big surprises about what we humans are and about how life on our planet has evolved.

The first of those three surprises involves a whole category of life, previously unsuspected and now known as the archaea. (They look like bacteria through a microscope, but their DNA reveals they are shockingly different.) Another is a mode of hereditary change that was also unsuspected, now called horizontal gene transfer. (Heredity was supposed to move only vertically, from parents to offspring.) The third is a revelation, or anyway a strong likelihood, about our own deepest ancestry. (It seems now that our lineage traces to the archaea.) So we ourselves probably come from creatures that, as recently as forty years ago, were unknown to exist.

One of the most disorienting results of these developments is a new challenge to the concept of “species.” Biologists have long recognized that the boundaries of one species may blur into another—by the process of hybridism, for instance. And the notion of species is especially insecure in the realm of bacteria and archaea.  But the discovery that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has occurred naturally, many times, even in the lineages of animals and plants, has brought the categorical reality of a species into greater question than ever. That’s even true for us humans—we are composite individuals, mosaics.

More here.

Mychal Denzel Smith in Harper’s Magazine:

Toward the end of the Obama presidency, the work of James Baldwin began to enjoy a renaissance that was both much overdue and comfortless. Baldwin stands as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, and any celebration of his work is more than welcome. But it was less a reveling than a panic. The eight years of the first black president were giving way to some of the most blatant and vitriolic displays of racism in decades, while the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and others too numerous to list sparked a movement in defense of black lives. In Baldwin, people found a voice from the past so relevant that he seemed prophetic.

More than any other writer, Baldwin has become the model for black public-intellectual work. The role of the public intellectual is to proffer new ideas, encourage deep thinking, challenge norms, and model forms of debate that enrich our discourse. For black intellectuals, that work has revolved around the persistence of white supremacy. Black abolitionists, ministers, and poets theorized freedom and exposed the hypocrisy of American democracy throughout the period of slavery. After emancipation, black colleges began training generations of scholars, writers, and artists who broadened black intellectual life. They helped build movements toward racial justice during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether through pathbreaking journalism, research, or activism.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

Your Music

—for my brother, Tom

Graveside at each family burial you play
the requiems, your French horn raised
by your fist inside it, chest and shoulders
in an arc toward the sky, your breath controlled
enough for music stronger than grief.

How the bell of the horn reflects our faces,
our imagined permanence shimmering in the brass.
How the music rises through our still figures,
hauling forward the nets of memory,
gathering speed over these marked fields.

Music needs no rest, no shelter.
In concert I have heard yours move
like wind lifting up the sides of an hour,
like spring heat off snow.

Carol Varner, 1998
from Poet’s Seat Poetry, 2017

Bas van Fraassen makes the case in iai News:

When physicists present to each other at conferences they are all about mathematical models.  The participants are deeply immersed in the abstract mathematical modelling.  When on the other hand they present to the public it sounds all very understandable, about particles, waves, fields, and strings, quantum leaps and gravity.  That is very helpful for mobilizing the imagination and an intuitive grasp on how phenomena or experiments look through theory-tinted glasses.  But typically, it is also told as the one true story of the universe, its furniture and its workings.  Is that how we should take it?

When physicists evaluate new models, hypotheses, or theories they are also immersed in theory.  It goes like this: the theory says “I’ve designed a test you can do, a test based on how I represent the phenomena, and what I count as measurement procedures. Take me up on it, see if I pass!  Put me to the question, bring it on!”  And it is great news when the measurement results come in and the theory is borne out.  That is empirical support for the theory.  What precisely should we take away from this, seeing here the scientists’ own criteria of success in practice?

During the past hundred years or so philosophers of science have become more and more compartmentalized and specialized, but when it comes to general issues of science philosophers still divide roughly into empiricists and realists.

More here.

Rob Lucas in Sidecar:

There is no denying the technological marvels that have resulted from the application of transformers in machine learning. They represent a step-change in a line of technical research that has spent most of its history looking positively deluded, at least to its more sober initiates. On the left, the critical reflex to see this as yet another turn of the neoliberal screw, or to point out the labour and resource extraction that underpin it, falls somewhat flat in the face of a machine that can, at last, interpret natural-language instructions fairly accurately, and fluently turn out text and images in response. Not long ago, such things seemed impossible. The appropriate response to these wonders is not dismissal but dread, and it is perhaps there that we should start, for this magic is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few often idiosyncratic people at the social apex of an unstable world power. It would obviously be foolhardy to entrust such people with the reified intelligence of humanity at large, but that is where we are.

Here in the UK, tech-addled university managers are currently advocating for overstretched teaching staff to turn to generative AI for the production of teaching materials. More than half of undergraduates are already using the same technology to help them write essays, and various AI platforms are being trialled for the automation of marking. Followed through to their logical conclusion, these developments would amount to a repurposing of the education system as a training process for privately owned machine learning models: students, teachers, lecturers all converted into a kind of outsourced administrator or technician, tending to the learning of a black-boxed ‘intelligence’ that does not belong to them.

More here.

Tim Sahay interviews Ravinder Kaur, author of Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in 21st Century India, in Polycrisis:

TIM SAHAY: Your book, Brand New Nation, looks at how countries were plugging into the liberal global economy of the 1990s to attract investment capital, and far from diminishing the importance of nation-states, rejuvenated ethno-nationalism. You’ve argued that in the Indian case, the “liberal” economy and “illiberal” hypernationalism of Modi’s BJP are not separate phenomena, but two strands of Hindutva’s vision. How would you characterize these connections?

RAVINDER KAUR: I begin my book in the 1990s, arguing that the last three decades of economic reforms basically transformed the nation into a commodity. I traced the ways in which India, the post colony, turned itself into an “emerging market.” Contrary to the understanding of globalization as a process imposed from the outside and resisted by local groups, I argue that economic “LPG” reforms—liberalization, privatization, globalization—were embraced by the policy elite in India. Initially, there was some political pushback against it, both within the BJP and Congress, but by the turn of the century, any resistance to them had disappeared.

This great transformation activated a seemingly unlikely alliance between global capitalism and hypernationalism, a foundation on which twenty-first century Hindu nationalism would begin taking shape.

More here.

Over at Ones and Tooze:

The attacks by Houthi militants on cargo ships in and around the Red Sea is posing a serious threat to global trade—serious enough to prompt American-led air strikes on the group in Yemen. Thirty percent of all global containers pass through the Red Sea Strait. Adam and Cameron discuss the economic implications.