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Jonathan Simone at Psyche:

When it comes to caffeine, we often speak about ‘needing our fix’ but I’ve yet to hear of an intervention staged for the friend who drinks three double espressos before noon. In fact, when it comes to caffeine, we rarely worry about things like tolerance, dosage or long-term effects in the same way we do for other substances. We don’t speak in terms of use, misuse and psychoactivity. But caffeine, like other drugs, directly alters neurochemistry and functionality. Like other drugs, it affects mood and cognition and can lead to behaviours that are akin to chronic use and dependence. And, like other drugs, abstinence can lead to symptoms of withdrawal (albeit to a lesser extent than its illicit counterparts). By all scientific standards, caffeine is a psychoactive drug. So why do we struggle to accept this fact? Why do we treat caffeine like nothing more than a productivity hack? And what would happen if we treated caffeine the way we treat other drugs?

More here.

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Katie Kavanagh in Nature:

AI models have already been used to generate DNA sequences, single proteins and multi-component complexes². But designing a whole genome is much more challenging owing to complex interactions between genes and gene replication and regulation processes. These AI systems are now capable of helping scientists to manipulate highly intricate biological systems, such as whole genomes, says Hie. “There are many important biological functions that you can only access if you’re able to design complete genomes.”

To design the viral genomes, the researchers used Evo 1 and Evo 2, AI models that analyse and generate DNA, RNA and protein sequences. First, they needed a design template, which is a starting sequence that guides the AI model to generate a genome with the desired characteristics. They chose ΦX174, a simple single-stranded DNA virus that contains 5,386 nucleotides in 11 genes, and all the genetic elements required to infect hosts and replicate inside them.

More here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

The other day I gave a talk at a conference in Canada about industrial policy. When we came to the inevitable question of which specific industries Canada should target, I had an answer ready: “the Electric Tech Stack”.

The fact that I had an answer ready surprised some people in the audience. The traditional criticism of industrial policy is that it’s all about “picking winners”, and that winners are very hard for even the smartest person to pick. But in some cases it’s actually very easy to pick winners. In the 19th century, every country knew they needed railroads, both for national defense and for transporting goods. In the 20th century, many countries knew they needed an auto industry, because those same assembly lines and supply chains could be quickly repurposed to make tanks and other military vehicles in case of a war. In the early 20th century, countries knew that having a steel industry was crucial for creating most of the important military equipment, while in the later century, the U.S. correctly guessed that having a powerful semiconductor industry was crucial for dominance in precision weaponry.

In all four of these cases, there were arguments about the economic benefits of promoting the industries in question, but in the end it was military necessity that tipped the balance decisively in favor of industrial policy. As I told the folks in Canada, a similar thing is true in the 2020s.

More here.

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Yuk Hui speaks with Daniel Birnbaum at Artforum:

DANIEL BIRNBAUM: Many people I know are reading your recent book Post-Europe [2024] right now. It challenges us to participate in the creation of a new, globally conscious mode of thinking—an approach that is responsive to the complexities of our interconnected world. You draw upon a rich tapestry of philosophical influences, including thinkers like Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Jan Patočka as well as Kitarō Nishida, to support a vision of a post-European philosophical landscape.

YUK HUI: It is not my main aim to fight Eurocentrism, not only because many people have been doing this for a long time, but also I think now we have to ask: What happens afterward? Does it mean a Sinocentrism, a Russocentrism, or American imperialism? What has concerned me from the outset, as you can see in all my books, is what it means to do philosophy today. Post-Europe starts with a meditation on the relation between Europe and philosophy as interpreted by various philosophers in the twentieth century, from Edmund Husserl to Jan Patočka, Jacques Derrida, and others. I was particularly drawn to the idea of the Heimat [Homeland]—Europe as the Heimat for philosophy.

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My Native Costume

When you come to visit,
said a teacher
from the suburban school,
don’t forget to wear
your native costume.

But I’m a lawyer.
I said.
My native costume
is a pinstriped suit.

You know, the teacher said,
a Puerto Rican costume.

Like a guayabera?
The shirt? I said.
But it’s February.

The children want to see
a native costume,
the teacher said.

So I went
to the suburban school,
embroidered guayabera
short sleaved shirt
over a turtleneck,
and said, Look kids,
cultural adaptation.

by Martín Espada
From Touching the Fire
Anchor Books 1998

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Steven French at Aeon Magazine:

This question forms the basis of what came to be known as the ‘measurement problem’. One influential answer emerged from the mind of one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, János (or ‘John’) von Neumann, who was responsible for many important advances, not only in pure mathematics and physics but also in computer design and game theory. He pointed out that when our spin detector interacts with the electron, the state of that combined system of the detector + electron will also be described by quantum theory as a superposition of possible states. And so will the state of the even larger combined system of the observer’s eye and brain + the detector + electron. However far we extend this chain, anything physical that interacts with the system will be described by the theory as a superposition of all the possible states that combined system could occupy, and so the crucial question above will remain unanswered. Hence, von Neumann concluded, it had to be something non-physical that somehow generates the transition from a superposition to the definite state as recorded on the device and noted by the observer – namely, the observer’s consciousness. (It is this argument that is the source of much of the so-called New Age commentary on quantum mechanics about how reality must somehow be observer-dependent, and so on.)

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Rachel Pearson in Harper’s Magazine:

Snow fell all day while a baby was dying. I cannot remember if it was a boy or a girl, so imagine a girl. This was years ago now. The baby had pneumonia. A few weeks into a tenuous life, her lungs were so clogged that they could hardly move oxygen into the blood or carbon dioxide out. The baby’s little heart, trying desperately to pump blood through those lungs, began to fail.

The neonatology unit was on an upper floor, with tall windows and glass doors. You could see clear across the unit and then out through the high windows to the world, where a storm was coming in from over the ocean. In the baby’s room, machines accumulated, along with all the attendants who cared for the machines. There were chairs so the baby’s parents could rest a moment, and as things progressed, a couch was brought in, then more chairs, where the doctors could sit to share serious news.

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From The Washington Post:

Gary Patti leaned in to study the rows of plastic tanks, where dozens of translucent zebrafish flickered through chemically treated water. Each tank contained a different substance — some notorious, others less well understood — all known or suspected carcinogens. Patti’s team is watching them closely, tracking which fish develop tumors, to try to find clues to one of the most unsettling medical puzzles of our time: Why are so many young people getting cancer?

The trend began with younger members of Generation X but is now most visible among millennials, who are being diagnosed in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s — decades earlier than past generations. Medications taken during pregnancy, the spread of ultra-processed foods, disruptions to circadian rhythms — caused by late-night work, global travel and omnipresent screens — and the proliferation of synthetic chemicals are all under scrutiny. Older Americans are still more likely to be diagnosed than younger ones. But cancer rates among those aged 15 to 49 have increased by 10 percent since 2000 even as they have fallen among older people, according to a Washington Post examination of federal data.

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Kevin Power in The Guardian:

The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just McEwan’s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes – to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England’s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.

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Blaise Agüera y Arcas at The MIT Press Reader:

In 1994, a strange, pixelated machine came to life on a computer screen. It read a string of instructions, copied them, and built a clone of itself — just as the Hungarian-American Polymath John von Neumann had predicted half a century earlier. It was a striking demonstration of a profound idea: that life, at its core, might be computational.

Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the first to establish a deep link between life and computation. Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by machines following coded instructions. In his model, based on Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, self-replicating systems read and execute instructions much like DNA does: “if the next instruction is the codon CGA, then add an arginine to the protein under construction.” It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.

Of course, there are meaningful differences between biological computing and the kind of digital computing done by a personal computer or your smartphone.

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Steven Pinker at Persuasion:

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” dramatizes two features of common knowledge that make it not just a mind-blowing logical concept but a key to understanding human social life. One is that common knowledge need not be deduced from an infinite chain of musings about other people’s mental states (“I know that you know that I know that you know…”), which no mortal could ever think. It can be instantly imparted by a conspicuous event, like a plain sentence uttered in public.

The other is that the difference between private knowledge, even when widely shared, and common knowledge is not a mere logical nicety. It can unify knowers in coordinated action and sometimes explode a social status quo.

One of the best jokes from the vein of subversive humor in the Soviet Union has a man standing in the Moscow train station handing out leaflets to passersby. Soon enough the KGB arrest him, only to discover that the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. “What is the meaning of this?” they demand. The man replies, “What is there to write? It’s so obvious!” The point of the joke is that the pamphleteer was generating common knowledge.

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Armour, Mai-Duc, Maxmen, and Allen in Undark Magazine:

States and medical societies that long worked in concert with the CDC are breaking with federal recommendations, saying they no longer have faith in them amid the turmoil and Kennedy’s criticism of vaccines. Roughly seven months after Kennedy’s nomination was confirmed, they’re rushing to draft or release their own vaccine recommendations, while new groups are forming to issue immunization guidance and advice.

How the new system will work is still being hammered out. Vaccine recommendations from states, medical societies, and other groups are likely to diverge, creating dueling guidance and requirements. Schoolchildren in New York may still generally need immunizations, for example, while others in places such as Florida may not need many vaccines.

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Laura Spinney in Nature:

When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519, he found monarchs, cities, roads, markets, schools, astronomers, law courts and much else that also existed in his native Spain. Put another way, two cultural experiments had been running in parallel for 15,000 years, and when they came into contact, each recognized the other’s institutions.

It wasn’t just the civilizations of the Americas and Europe that resembled each other by that time. As biologist-turned-historian Peter Turchin observes in his tenth book, The Great Holocene Transformation, more than half of the world’s population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lived in five or six large societies with political systems that were remarkably structurally similar. His argument is that this was not a coincidence; although every society is unique, they have features in common that make them comparable.

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Manic Screaming

 We should make all spiritual talk
………….. Simple today:

God is trying to sell you something,
…… But you don’t want to buy.

….That is what your suffering is:

………Your fantastic haggling,
Your manic screaming over the price!

by Hafiz
rendered by Daniel Ladinsky
from I Heard God Laughing

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Sam Kriss at The Point:

On the 30th of March, 1981, John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 “Devastator” round into the chest of the president of the United States.

At the time, people didn’t fully understand what had happened. Two hours after the shooting, there was a press conference in the White House briefing room. It was led by a junior official, since Press Secretary James Brady had a bullet lodged in his skull at the time. The questions were on conventional topics, like Ronald Reagan’s health, and the chain of command. The reporters wanted to know if the president was conscious. Had he been sedated? Who was with him in the hospital? While the bullet was being extracted from his chest, who was currently running the United States of America? Vice President George Bush was somewhere in Texas, apparently aware of the situation, but not in Washington yet. The deputy press secretary said he couldn’t answer that one. Moments later, he was yanked offstage, and Secretary of State Alexander Haig took over the podium. “As of now,” he told the media, “I am in control here in the White House.”

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