Steve Nadis in Quanta:

Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous driving through August 2023. And more than 850,000 autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are registered in the United States — not counting those owned by the military.

But there are legitimate concerns about safety. For example, in a 10-month period that ended in May 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported nearly 400 crashes involving automobiles using some form of autonomous control. Six people died as a result of these accidents, and five were seriously injured.

The usual way of addressing this issue — sometimes called “testing by exhaustion” — involves testing these systems until you’re satisfied they’re safe. But you can never be sure that this process will uncover all potential flaws.

More here.

Wilfred M. McClay in The Hedgehog Review:

When we find words being used in a novel way, our countenances tend to stiffen. What’s going on here? Is this a euphemism? Is there a hidden agenda here?

But there are times when the older language seems inadequate, and in fact may mislead us into thinking that the world has not changed. New signifiers may sometimes be necessary, in order to describe new things.

Such is unquestionably the case of the new/old word influencer. At first glance, it looks harmless and insignificant, a lazy and imprecise way of designating someone as influential. But the word’s use as a noun is the key to what is different and new about it. And much as I dislike the word, and dislike the phenomenon it describes, necessity seems to have dictated that such a word be created.

More here.

Hunter Dukes at Cabinet Magazine:

By the 1758 edition of Systema naturae, when Linnaeus first endowed humans with the specific epithet sapiens, the maxim “know thyself” had blossomed into a creed that wed introspection with observation. “The first step of wisdom,” he wrote, is to observe “those marks imprinted on [natural bodies] by nature, to distinguish them from each other, and to affix to every object its proper name.” Far from the oblivion of childhood innocence, and decades away from the cognitive decay that would return the natural world to indistinction before his eyes, Linnaeus once more worries about the cost of forgetting. “If the name be lost, the knowledge of the object is lost also; and without these, the student will seek in vain for the means to investigate the hidden treasures of nature.”

It was perhaps this capacity for linguistic stewardship, and the threat posed to knowledge by cultural aphasia, that led Linnaeus to classify his species as sapient. After all, he thought, there are hardly any meaningful physical qualities that separate us from other primates.

more here.

Stephen Patrick Bell interviews Lindsay Hunter at The Millions:

Lindsay Hunter: As I was drafting this novel, I was thinking of it as almost a shattered windshield, or a crazy quilt. Something made of shards but that, together, was a whole thing. Initially, I had Jackie in both first- and third-person narration. I wanted readers to have access to her story, the way she’d tell it, but also glimpse a more objective truth about her. I thought that was pretty clever. Huge red flag for a writer, when we think we’re clever. As I revisited the novel in the editing process, this fell flat. It just seemed like I’d forgotten to choose a perspective. I chose to stay with first person because I needed people to get really, really close to Jackie. Uncomfortably close. I wanted readers to see her. Jackie is, in my opinion, a reliable narrator. She just chooses what to tell you. She gets as close as she can to facing herself, but she never quite goes all the way. That kind of narrator was huge for this novel. She was truthful, but the truth she was telling just wasn’t the whole story. What she isn’t telling you, what you don’t see, that kept me obsessed as I wrote. That’s what keeps me obsessed when I think of crimes like this, the people involved in them, the aftermath.

more here.

Kate Womersley in The Guardian:

The doctor who taught me about human reproduction at medical school was in fact a veterinarian. More is known about a sheep’s rhythms than a woman’s, he said, setting the tone in our first tutorial, presumably because ewes drive a healthy profit. I was disappointed. I felt that menstruation and pregnancy shouldn’t be narrated to us like they would be for any other animal. These aren’t just biological events, but experiences coloured by memory and anticipation. What about days of frantic maxi pad changes in school cubicles that go unspoken between girls, some as young as eight, unpredictably timed yet reliably painful? Periods are a muddled burden: a monthly shame as well as a relief.

If millennials have been undernourished with information about their bodies, then previous generations were almost starved of it. A flush of coverage has arisen out of this embarrassed silence, such as Emma Barnett’s Period and BBC Radio 4’s series 28ish Days Later. Dr Jen Gunter’s Blood takes an unapologetically scientific approach to the menstrual cycle, written for anyone who wants to understand its often mystified ways and what medicine can do to help. Perhaps Gunter’s resolve to reduce stigma around women’s health was a reaction to her own upbringing in Canada, with a mother who thought tampons were “evil”.

More here.

Cassandra Willyard in Nature:

Back in 2001, immunologist Pere Santamaria was exploring a new way to study diabetes. Working in mice, he and his collaborators developed a method that uses iron oxide nanoparticles to track the key immune cells involved in the disorder.

But then Santamaria, who is at the University of Calgary in Canada, came up with a bold idea. Maybe he could use these particles as a therapy to target and quiet, or even kill, the cells responsible for driving the disease — those that destroy insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas. It seemed like a far-fetched idea, but he decided to try it. “I kept doing experiment after experiment,” he says. Now, more than two decades later, Santamaria’s therapy is on the cusp of being tested in people. It’s not alone. Researchers have been trying for more than 50 years to tame the cells that are responsible for autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes, lupus and multiple sclerosis. Most of the approved therapies for these conditions work by suppressing the entire immune response. This often alleviates symptoms but leaves people at elevated risk of infections and cancers.

More here.

The Great Fires

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.

by Jack Gilbert
from Poetic Outlaws

Susan Eilenberg in The London Review of Books:

James McElvenny in Aeon:

Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?

In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of ‘linguistic relativity’ or the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.

There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of linguistic relativity – it impinges directly on our understanding of the nature of human language. A long-held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts.

More here.

Walter Johnson in n + 1:

People would later say that it began with the statement issued by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee and thirty-four other campus groups after the massacre of October 7. The statement was relatively restrained. It did not celebrate the violence. Instead, it attempted to reframe the killings in a longer history—to say, as many would in the coming days, that history did not begin on October 7. “Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for seventy-five years,” the statement read. “From systematized land seizures to routine air strikes, arbitrary detentions, military checkpoints, and forced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death both slow and sudden.” But for all the conversation there has been about it both here at Harvard and elsewhere, I doubt that many people actually read the whole statement. It was only the first sentence that came to matter: “We, the undersigned student organizations hold the Israeli regime responsible for all unfolding violence.”

That one sentence was enough to compel 350 of these students’ teachers to issue a public denunciation.¹ The students’ statement, the professors argued, “can be seen as nothing less than condoning mass murder.”

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Scientists and philosophers sometimes advocate pretty outrageous-sounding ideas about the fundamental nature of reality. (Arguably I have been guilty of this.) It shouldn’t be surprising that reality, in regimes far away from our everyday experience, fails to conform to common sense. But it’s also okay to maintain a bit of skepticism in the face of bizarre claims. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel wants us to face up to the weirdness of the world. He claims that there are no non-weird ways to explain some of the most important features of reality, from quantum mechanics to consciousness.

More here.

Juliet Frost & Sophie Roell at Five Books:

Normally at Five Books we ask experts to recommend the best books in their field and talk to us about them in an interview, either in person, by phone or via Zoom. In January 2023, we asked the AI bot, ChatGPT, to recommend books to us on the topic of AI. Being an AI doesn’t necessarily make the chatbot an expert on AI books, but we thought it might have some ideas. This week we caught up with ChatGPT to find out if there were any new AI books it wanted to recommend in the year since we spoke.

Five Books: Tell me about your top choice among these new AI books, AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future (2021) by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan.

ChatGPT: This book combines both science fiction and non-fiction to explore how AI will change our world by 2041. Kai-Fu Lee, a prominent AI expert, and Chen Qiufan, a science fiction writer, offer a unique blend of storytelling and analysis. The fictional stories, set in the year 2041, are penned by Chen Qiufan, while Kai-Fu Lee provides insights into how these scenarios might become reality. It’s a thought-provoking look at how AI could shape our future in diverse ways.

Five Books: Kai-Fu Lee was head of Google China, is that right?

ChatGPT: Yes, Kai-Fu Lee was the founding president of Google China. He served in this role from 2005 to 2009. During his tenure, he played a key role in establishing Google’s presence in China and managing its operations in the country. After leaving Google, Kai-Fu Lee went on to become a prominent figure in the Chinese technology and venture capital industries.

More here.

Sharon Brous in The New York Times:

A somewhat obscure text, about 2,000 years old, has been my unlikely teacher and guide for the past many years, and my north star these last several months, as so many of us have felt as if we’ve been drowning in an ocean of sorrow and helplessness. Buried deep within the Mishnah, a Jewish legal compendium from around the third century, is an ancient practice reflecting a deep understanding of the human psyche and spirit: When your heart is broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclined to retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community. The text, Middot 2:2, describes a pilgrimage ritual from the time of the Second Temple. Several times each year, hundreds of thousands of Jews would ascend to Jerusalem, the center of Jewish religious and political life. They would climb the steps of the Temple Mount and enter its enormous plaza, turning to the right en masse, circling counterclockwise. Meanwhile, the brokenhearted, the mourners (and here I would also include the lonely and the sick), would make this same ritual walk but they would turn to the left and circle in the opposite direction: every step against the current.

And each person who encountered someone in pain would look into that person’s eyes and inquire: “What happened to you? Why does your heart ache?” “My father died,” a person might say. “There are so many things I never got to say to him.” Or perhaps: “My partner left. I was completely blindsided.” Or: “My child is sick. We’re awaiting the test results.” Those who walked from the right would offer a blessing: “May the Holy One comfort you,” they would say. “You are not alone.” And then they would continue to walk until the next person approached.

This timeless wisdom speaks to what it means to be human in a world of pain. This year, you walk the path of the anguished. Perhaps next year, it will be me. I hold your broken heart knowing that one day you will hold mine.

More here.

Alla Tha’s All Right, But

Somebody come and carry me into a seven-day kiss
I can’ use no historic no national no family bliss
I need an absolutely one to one a seven-day kiss

I can read the daily papers
I can even make a speech
But the news is stuff that tapers
down to salt poured in the breach

I been scheming about my people I been scheming about sex
I been dreaming about Africa and nightmaring Oedipus the Rex
But what I need is quite specific
terrifying rough stuff and terrific

I need an absolutely one to one a seven-day kiss
I can’ use no more historic no national no bona fide family bliss
Somebody come and carry me into a seven-day kiss
Somebody come on
Somebody come on and carry me
over there!

by June Jordan
from Poets .org