Nathan Gardels and Craig Venter at Noema:

Nathan Gardels: Generative AI has been heralded lately as one of the great game-changing innovations of our time. I remember in one of our conversations years ago when you said already then that biology was becoming a computational science, opening a path to the “dawn of digital life.”  What is the impact of the ever-more empowered big data processing of AI, particularly generative AI, on genomics and the potential of synthetic biology?

Craig Venter: So far, one of the greatest impacts of the use of generative AI has been in improving protein structure predictions, or 3D modeling of gene sequences. That is a big deal because it allows us to understand many of the genes with unknown functions that provide the various chemical signals that determine the growth, differentiation, and development of cells. As far as anybody can tell, the predictions coming out of generative AI seem to be a big improvement over existing algorithms. In 2016 we announced the first synthetic “minimal cell,” a self-replicating organism, a bacterial genome that encoded only the minimal set of genes necessary for the cell to survive. But even at that quite minimal level we still did not know the functions of up to 25% of those genes.

more here.

James Purdon at Literary Review:

Having appeared last year as a standalone novel in a Spanish translation by Mariana Dimópoulos, ‘The Pole’ continues Coetzee’s recent preference for publishing first in languages other than English, as do three more of the six stories collected here (the two exceptions are the Elizabeth Costello story ‘As a Woman Grows Older’ and the brief concluding tale ‘The Dog’, a minimalist piece that amplifies a theme from 1999’s Disgrace). Late in life, Coetzee has emerged as a self-consciously global novelist, whose disquiet at the dominance of the English language in which he writes has profoundly affected the ethical as well as the aesthetic dimensions of his fiction. Appropriately, then, ‘The Pole’ is a story about the difficulties of communicating across the barriers between languages, sexes, generations – and across the hard gap that divides the dead from the living. It’s also a story about legacies, both personal and literary, and Coetzee alludes liberally to his own earlier work as well as that of other writers. The elegant, self-regarding Beatriz seems a distant relation not only of her namesake in Dante (another banker’s wife), but also of those society women who, in T S Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’, flock ‘to hear the latest Pole/Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips’.

more here.

Our Own Blood

The generals deliberate on the climate of war,
insulted that some harebrained foreigners
might beat them at seizing the capital.

The generals read barometers of insiders,
tally missiles and unmanned drones.
Their temperatures escalate as the budget deficit
dives and the foreigners move forward.

The Supreme Commanders would like nothing better
than to turn the tide, reduce the expense of casualties
to zero, risk only what’s necessary,
leave nothing to accident.

Fingers like rolls of million-dollar bills
toying with the buttons of boom,
the generals reckon lives,
plot exact targets via satellite surveillance.

The security of our native land hovers
like Apache helicopters
on a do-or-die sortie.

The generals know it has always been
us or the enemy, the battle between
alien blood and our own.

by Bruce Lader
from The New York Quarterly

Vybarr Cregan-Reid in Anthropocene:

Why are there no chairs in the King James Bible, or in all 30,000 lines of Homer? Neither are there any in Shakespeare’s Hamlet—written in 1599. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, it is a completely different story. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House suddenly has 187 of them. What changed? With sitting being called “the new smoking,” we all know that spending too much time in chairs is bad for us. Not only are they unhealthy, but like air pollution, they are becoming almost impossible for modern humans to avoid.

When I started researching my book about how the world we have made is changing our bodies, I was surprised to discover just how rare chairs used to be. Now they’re everywhere: offices, trains, cafés, restaurants, pubs, cars, trains, concert halls, cinemas, doctors’ surgeries, hospitals, theaters, schools, university lecture halls, and all over our houses. (I guarantee you have more than you think.)

More here.

Kozlov and Biever in Nature:

Scientists have created a neural network with the human-like ability to make generalizations about language¹. The artificial intelligence (AI) system performs about as well as humans at folding newly learned words into an existing vocabulary and using them in fresh contexts, which is a key aspect of human cognition known as systematic generalization. The researchers gave the same task to the AI model that underlies the chatbot ChatGPT, and found that it performs much worse on such a test than either the new neural net or people, despite the chatbot’s uncanny ability to converse in a human-like manner.

The work, published on 25 October in Nature, could lead to machines that interact with people more naturally than do even the best AI systems today. Although systems based on large language models, such as ChatGPT, are adept at conversation in many contexts, they display glaring gaps and inconsistencies in others. The neural network’s human-like performance suggests there has been a “breakthrough in the ability to train networks to be systematic”, says Paul Smolensky, a cognitive scientist who specializes in language at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

More here.

Claire Dederer in The Guardian:

Werner Herzog plays a certain role in the public imagination. At least I think it’s the public imagination and not just my own. The German film-maker has become meme-ified and satirised – not his work, but his person, his wild-haired, Bavarian-accented, sad-eyed, difficult-truth-intoning person. As I read Herzog’s new book, I found myself thinking of the bears at my local zoo. Two young grizzlies were introduced last year; I became fascinated by them and went to see them almost every week. As I watched the bears play and swim and sleep, I was occasionally visited by strange, glinting moments of dark understanding: that they were predators, that if I met them in the wild, they might very well consign me to the void.

Of course, bears are Herzogian (if I may turn man into adjective) – after all, he made the documentary Grizzly Man, about one conservationist’s obsession with the creatures. And the void, too, is ineluctably Herzogian – it hovers at the centre of his work, from Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Fitzcarraldo to the great and largely unloved Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But really I was thinking about the gap between the way the bears are perceived – adorable! – and the reality of their being: they will eat you. Herzog himself has undergone some kind of similar schism in the popular consciousness. He has become, personally, a zoo animal, and this autobiography reminds us once again that he is a fearsome and strange force.

More here.

A conversation with Louis Brus at The Conversation:

When you were working at Bell Labs in the 1980s and discovered quantum dots, it was something of an accident. You were studying solutions of semiconductor particles. And when you aimed lasers at these solutions, called colloids, you noticed that the colors they emitted were not constant.

On the first day we made the colloid, sometimes the spectrum was different. Second and third day, it was normal. There certainly was a surprise when I first saw this change in the spectrum. And so, I began to try to figure out what the heck was going on with that.

I noticed that the property of the particle itself began to change at a very small size.

More here.

Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: I admire you as a writer, but there’s one book of yours that I sort of stumbled across again recently which I found to be deeply insightful and also personally meaningful, and that is The Happiness Curve.

How did you come to write this book? And how did you come to think about the kind of shape that people’s trajectories of life satisfaction and happiness tend to have over the course of our lives?

Jonathan Rauch: This is a very personal book. I am someone who’s had an incredibly fortunate life, just incredibly fortunate. Yet, around the time I turned 40, I began noticing a kind of persistent sense of disappointment and discontent. And I didn’t know why. I assumed it would go away, because it didn’t match with the objective circumstances of my life. But it only got worse. And then it magnified because I began feeling ungrateful, which is a terrible way to feel if you’re the luckiest person on the planet.

More here.

David Mason at The Hudson Review:

Franz Kafka was a champion of defeat, but he was also critically alive in the struggle to become himself. A prolific writer, he is thought to have burned or otherwise destroyed much of his own production. When he knew he was dying of tuberculosis, he asked his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to burn the rest, excluding only the short stories that had already been published and had established his growing reputation. We can be grateful that Brod disobeyed his friend and saw to the publication of the unfinished novels, The Missing Person (as Amerika), The Trial, and The Castle. These books and assorted stories and fragments established Kafka posthumously as a singular genius, not only a great modernist, but a writer who transcended his time, dramatizing psychic battles between individuals and the savage powers of family, law, and the state. These are the very nets that Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus had wanted to fly past, and found he could not. Kafka’s fictions are not allegories, but dreams. Their absurdist logic is absolute and insane, sometimes hilarious, more often nightmarish. Yet they seem true to the world. Only a breathtakingly original artist could have devised them.

more here.

Julien Crockett interviews Robert Sapolsky at the LARB:

JULIEN CROCKETT: Most of the discoveries you reference in Determined are from the last 50 years, and half are from the last five, pointing towards a recent shift in biology and related fields. How has the answer to the fundamental question in biology—what is life?—changed during your career?

ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY: The main trend I’ve noticed is people arguing about whether viruses are alive or not. Which gets to the mechanistic point: they’re made of the same stuff as the organisms they infect, the same building blocks, all working by the same principles. So there is some sort of continuum with life. At the other end is deciding when something is dead—when does life end? And what does it mean? We have been able to get EEG waves out of a pig’s brain hours after it has been removed. There is also research suggesting that being in a coma is a heterogeneous experience. So brain death is not quite as straightforward as we used to think.

more here.

Tanvir Khan in The Scientist:

Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer and contributes to 15 percent of all cancer-related deaths in women worldwide. Though 20–30 percent of patients with early-stage breast cancers eventually develop metastatic cancer, few effective treatments for preventing rapid metastatic progression exist.¹

Tumor cell motility and invasion are essential drivers of metastasis, as tumor cells must migrate away from the primary tumor and invade new sites. Tumor cells at the primary cancer site promote metastasis by recruiting immunosuppressive inflammatory cells, such as activated macrophages, neutrophils, and myeloid-derived suppressor cells, which facilitate tumor cell migration and survival.

More here.

Geoffrey Bear in Time:

The Osage elders’ teachings about life and death were about both the seen and unseen. “We follow the drum,” they said. “This little drum helps make the big drum go,” they said. My generation knew the big drum as where we dressed in our finest traditional clothes and enjoyed the intimacy of our families. Across four-day long ceremonies, each of us carried into the day and night our own beliefs, as formed around the order of the dance. Our parents’ generation grew up during WWII and the Korea Conflict.

They ventured out into the world to seek the American Dream of a fine house, two cars to park in the garage, a large yard, good jobs, good schools for their children, and the freedom to dream and build on those thoughts, which in turn became hopes. When able, they traveled back to the dances to the sound of the big drum, and often, one of their parents rode along. My grandma, for example, would sit quietly in the back seat with my brother and me as she looked out the car window teaching us to count in Osage. She would say the names of things we could see and touch. She left it to her brothers to teach us the ways of the sweat lodge and much about what we could not see. None of them spoke of the “Osage Reign of Terror”—a time before my parents were born—a time in the 1920s and 30s when Grandma and her brothers were young and just starting to build their own lives.

More here.

Coffee Shop in the late Afternoon

The beautiful woman gone
leaving the shop to young men making
their way in the January world
with cell phones and computers –

and me.

Outside, a sunny day.
too warm for the season.

A phone rings – a barista calls out
“Tall vanilla soy latte.”
Strange talk to one who grew up
with a nickel cup of joe.

There are fewer and fewer
native speakers of one’s born language.

You learn to live with translations.

by Nils Peterson

Adam Tooze in his Substack newsletter:

Whoever governs America, dysfunctionally or not, speculating about a post-American world, is a waste of time. And there a few key areas of global affairs in which American institutions today play a crucial organizational role. I have written often in this newsletter about the dollar system and its resilience. The dollar continues to be the basis for global finance. Though it dare not speak its name, the Fed acts as a global central bank.

It is also true that American leadership and military spending does hold structures like NATO together. But that is not “the world”. It is an exclusive military alliance.

More here.

Editorial in Nature:

Early in 1993, a manuscript landed in the Nature offices announcing the results of an unusual — even audacious — experiment. The investigators, led by planetary scientist and broadcaster Carl Sagan, had searched for evidence of life on Earth that could be detected from space. The results, published 30 years ago this week, were “strongly suggestive” that the planet did indeed host life. “These observations constitute a control experiment for the search for extraterrestrial life by modern interplanetary spacecraft,” the team wrote.

The experiment was a master stroke. In 1989, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had launched on a mission to orbit Jupiter, where it was scheduled to arrive in 1995. Sagan and his colleagues wondered whether Galileo would find definitive evidence of life back home if its instruments could be trained on Earth. They persuaded NASA to do just that as the craft flew past the home planet in 1990.

More here.

Daniel Callcut in Aeon:

The acclaimed British philosopher Bernard Williams, writing in the 1970s, showed that a common way of arguing for moral relativism is confused and contradictory. Nonetheless, he went on to defend a philosophical worldview that incorporated some of relativism’s underlying ideas. There is much to learn, when we think about the ongoing culture wars over moral values, from the encounters with relativism that recur throughout Williams’s work. First, however, it’s useful to understand why a prevalent feature of the culture wars, arguing over which words to use, itself quickly leads to arguments over relativism.

More here.