Huw Price and Ken Wharton in Aeon:

Almost a century ago, physics produced a problem child, astonishingly successful yet profoundly puzzling. Now, just in time for its 100th birthday, we think we’ve found a simple diagnosis of its central eccentricity.

This weird wunderkind was ‘quantum mechanics’ (QM), a new theory of how matter and light behave at the submicroscopic level. Through the 1920s, QM’s components were assembled by physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Alongside Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, it became one of the two great pillars of modern physics.

The pioneers of QM realised that the new world they had discovered was very strange indeed, compared with the classical (pre-quantum) physics they had all learned at school. These days, this strangeness is familiar to physicists, and increasingly useful for technologies such as quantum computing.

The strangeness has a name – it’s called entanglement – but it is still poorly understood. Why does the quantum world behave this strange way? We think we’ve solved a central piece of this puzzle.

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

A lot of people — at least, a lot of people who read this blog — know of Matt Yglesias’ book One Billion Americans. It’s good, you should read it. But not as many seem to know that it’s actually a riff on a book that came out three years earlier called Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough, by Doug Saunders. In fact, the books are pretty different; Saunders spends most of his time justifying the idea of a bigger Canada with appeals to the country’s history, culture, and politics, where Yglesias mostly discusses the practical details of how we’d fit the newcomers into the country.

But what these two books share is that they’re both advocating a certain type of nation-building strategy — the idea of deliberately promoting large-scale immigration in order to expand a country’s population toward a numerical target. This isn’t something the U.S. has really done in the past.

More here.

Todd Cronan at nonsite:

According to Kenner, the Hollow Men provides the first expression of the “structural principle” of Eliot’s later work and, I would suggest, of Kenner’s work as well. What is that principle? Eliot’s aim is to articulate “moral states which to an external observer are indistinguishable from one another” (IP, 163). So that we can “judge a man’s action,” Kenner says, but “we cannot judge the man by his actions.” What Kenner calls “distinct actions,” occlude from the observer the nature of a man’s true actions. And since what we are asked to judge are “moral states,” it naturally follows that we are not meant to judge works of art, which is exactly what Kenner says (IP, 163). “In art,” Kenner writes, “actions are determined by their objects.” In morals, by contrast, actions are “determined by their motives, which are hidden: hidden, often, from the actor” (IP, 163). The art that Kenner admires is anti-art in the sense that conventional artworks are construed as the expression of distinct actions, a kind of action we sometimes define as intentional tout court.

more here.

Natalia Mesa in The Scientist:

Tasmanian devil populations have dwindled in recent decades due to two contagious facial cancers that cause debilitating growths. Now, alongside an international group of scientists and organizations, researchers from University of Cambridge conducted a large genetic sequencing study published in Science, and found that one of those cancers is evolving at an alarming pace and may pose a grave threat to Tasmania’s top carnivore.¹ This study is the first to track the evolution of the two cancers, creating a detailed account of when the cancers arose, how they spread across the landscape, and importantly, which mutations helped them spread over time.

Carolyn Hogg, a biologist at the University of Sydney who was not involved in the study, said that the research team has generated useful tools to study the devils. “You can make massive headway into understanding how the species [and] disease move through the landscape, and how the disease mutates and changes,” with genomic data, she said.

Devilish diseases

Tasmanian devils are the world’s largest carnivorous marsupials, native to only Tasmania, an island off the coast of southeast Australia. For more than 30 years, these marsupials have been battling two deadly facial cancers, devil facial tumor 1 (DFT1) and devil facial tumor 2 (DFT2). A unique feature of these cancers is that they primarily spread through biting, a common occurrence in devils during fights over mates and food. Transmissible tumors are exceedingly rare in nature, making the devils important models for studying cancer evolution.

More here.

Karen Bakker at Noema:

For millennia, the movements of the celestial bodies in the heavens above, from shining planets to the faintest of stars, have provided practical guidance to navigators and spiritual direction to oracles. But some signals created by the stars are invisible to the naked human eye.

Astrophysicists have developed techniques to convert data from light signals into digital audio, using pitch, duration and other properties of sound. Wanda Díaz-Merced, a blind astronomer, sonifies plasma patterns in the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere and invented new methods to detect subtle signals in the presence of visual noise. But the conversion of data into acoustic signals — called sonification — is now being used by scientists who are not vision-impaired because listening to the stars helps detect patterns that may be missed by visual representations.

more here.

August 15

Today Jeremy turns 16. We were living in England when
he was born, and we gave him three names — Jeremy for a
liberal politician we admired, David for his father, and Owen
for Wilfred Owen, a World War 1 poet who died Battle. The
first two names would have been enough.
…… For the past few weeks we’ve been practicing his driving
over at the cemetery, where to roads are quiet. Mr. Tanzi has
a natural bolder for a gravestone. I told Jeremy I’d like
something along that line, and he shifted gears. It’s strange
having a child in the driver’s seat, but I don’t get as nervous as
I thought I would. Jeremy’s careful. The other day he passed
through the cemetery gate and onto a living road.

by Nancy Lagomarsino
from The Secretary Parables
Alice James Books, 1991

Ross Benjamin in Aeon:

On 9 October 1911, Franz Kafka, then 28 years old, wrote in his diary that he didn’t expect to reach the age of 40. At the time of this entry, he was not yet stricken with the tuberculosis that would lead to his death in 1924, shortly before his 41st birthday. What afflicted him at that time, making him doubt his longevity, was harder to pin down. Perhaps due to this very indefiniteness, it provided raw material for his aesthetic imagination:

I’ll hardly live to be forty years old, against that prospect speaks, for example, the tension that often lies over the left half of my skull, which feels like an inner leprosy and which, when I disregard the unpleasantness and try only to contemplate it, makes the same impression on me as the sight of the skull cross sections in textbooks or as an almost painless dissection while alive, where the knife a little bit cooling, careful, often stopping and turning back, sometimes lying at rest slices paper-thin coverings into even finer divisions very close to working brain parts.
– from The Diaries by Franz Kafka. This and subsequent translations by Ross Benjamin (2022).

The literary intensity with which Kafka portrayed his sense of physical malady is characteristic of his writing in his diaries, which he kept between 1909 and 1923; they offer an intimate glimpse into the transformative process by which he made even his most probing self-examination and his most agonising ordeals into a fertile source of invention.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Last year’s Nobel Prize for experimental tests of Bell’s Theorem was the first Nobel in the foundations of quantum mechanics since Max Born in 1954. Quantum foundations is enjoying a bit of a resurgence, inspired in part by improving quantum technology but also by a realization that understanding quantum mechanics might help with other problems in physics (and be important in its own right). Tim Maudlin is a leading philosopher of physics and also a skeptic of the Everett interpretation. We discuss the logic behind hidden-variable approaches such as Bohmian mechanics, and also the broader question of the importance of the foundations of physics.

More here.

Kelsey Piper in Asterisk:

It’d be a mistake to characterize the risk of human extinction from artificial intelligence as a “fringe” concern now hitting the mainstream, or a decoy to distract from current harms caused by AI systems. Alan Turing, one of the fathers of modern computing, famously wrote in 1951 that “once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. … At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.” His colleague I. J. Good agreed; more recently, so did Stephen Hawking. When today’s luminaries warn of “extinction risk” from artificial intelligence, they are in good company, restating a worry that has been around as long as computers. These concerns predate the founding of any of the current labs building frontier AI, and the historical trajectory of these concerns is important to making sense of our present-day situation. To the extent that frontier labs do focus on safety, it is in large part due to advocacy by researchers who do not hold any financial stake in AI. Indeed, some of them would prefer AI didn’t exist at all.

But while the risk of human extinction from powerful AI systems is a long-standing concern and not a fringe one, the field of trying to figure out how to solve that problem was until very recently a fringe field, and that fact is profoundly important to understanding the landscape of AI safety work today.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Gravitational waves are back, and they’re bigger than ever.

After the historic first detection of the space-time rattles in 2015 using ground-based detectors, researchers could have now rediscovered Albert Einstein’s waves with an entirely different technique. The approach tracks changes in the distances between Earth and beacon stars in its Galactic neighbourhood called pulsars, which reveal how the space in between is stretched and squeezed by the passage of gravitational waves.

Whereas the original discovery spotted waves originating from the collision and merger of two star-sized black holes, the most likely source of the latest finding is the combined signal from many pairs of much larger black holes — millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun — slowly orbiting each other in the hearts of distant galaxies. These waves are thousands of times stronger and longer than those found in 2015, with wavelengths of up to tens of light years. By contrast, the ripples detected since 2015 using a technique called interferometry are just tens or hundreds of kilometres long.

More here.

Andrew Zolli & Ann Marie Healy in Delancey Place:

The internet was created by the U.S. military as a way to preserve communications to missile silos in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack:

“From its inception as a U.S. military funded project in the 1960s, the Internet was designed to solve a particular problem above all else: to ensure the continuity of communications in the face of disaster. Military leaders at the time were concerned that a preemp­tive nuclear attack by the Soviets on U.S. telecommunications hubs could disrupt the chain of command — and that their own counterstrike orders might never make it from their command bunkers to their in­tended recipients in the missile silos of North Dakota. So they asked the Internet’s original engineers to design a system that could sense and automatically divert traffic around the inevitable equipment failures that would accompany any such attack.

“The Internet achieves this feat in a simple yet ingenious way: It breaks up every email, web page, and video we transmit into packets of information and forwards them through a labyrinthine network of routers — specialized network computers that are typically redundantly connected to more than one other node on the network. Each router contains a regularly updated routing table, similar to a local train sched­ule. When a packet of data arrives at a router, this table is consulted and the packet is forwarded in the general direction of its destination. If the best pathway is blocked, congested, or damaged, the routing table is updated accordingly and the packet is diverted along an alternative path­way, where it will meet the next router in its journey, and the process will repeat. A packet containing a typical web search may traverse dozens of Internet routers and links — and be diverted away from multiple conges­tion points or offline computers — on the seemingly instantaneous trip between your computer and your favorite website.

More here.

Prem Krishnamurthy at The Third Rail:

350 pages into Vikram Chandra’s epic novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain, a particular story within a story within a story caught my attention the first time I read it in the mid-aughts. Perhaps one day I’ll pen a lecture on the image of printers within contemporary literature. This one involves the wily Calcutta printer Sorkar, working on commission to an aloof Englishman named Markline. Sorkar wanders his shopfloor, occasionally handing out special letters to his Bengali typesetters to substitute for their fonts. What do these letters spell? It turns out that they are a cipher, a means of encoding secret linguistic jabs against the printer’s British master. They range from political statements such as “The Company makes widows and famines, and calls it peace” to the simple and effective, “Fuck you.”

more here.

A Bargain at Any Price

Daily I go to the carpet warehouse.
The men think I can’t make up my mind.
But the truth is, I’ve fallen in love
with the young ex-football player
who lights the dingy room with his hair.
Even machines can’t help him add,
so we spend hours figuring and refiguring
costs—pad and labor, stairs and tax,
his patient golden head bent over the numbers,
the muscles in his arms reflecting shadows
like water under summer clouds.
Each time he starts the motor on the forklift,
slowly pushing that long steel rod
into the center of a roll, then
lifting it out for me to see, Oh—
it’s as if an inner sky were opening,
and all the hazy calculations
fall like stars into my heart.

by Susan Ludvigson
from Northern Lights
Louisiana State University Press, 1981

Phillip M. Carter in The Conversation:

“We got down from the car and went inside.”

“I made the line to pay for groceries.”

“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”

These phrases might sound off to the ears of most English-speaking Americans.

In Miami, however, they’ve become part of the local parlance.

According to my recently published research, these expressions – along with a host of others – form part of a new dialect taking shape in South Florida.

This language variety came about through sustained contact between Spanish and English speakers, particularly when speakers translated directly from Spanish.

More here.

Tim Smedley in The Guardian:

During the summer months in the Oxfordshire town where I live, I go swimming in the nearby 50-metre lido. With my inelegantly slow breaststroke, from time to time I accidentally gulp some of the pool’s opulent, chlorine-clean 5.9m litres of water. Sometimes, I swim while it’s raining, when fewer people brave it, alone in my lane with the strangely comforting feeling of having water above and below me. I stand a bottle of water at the end of the lane, to drink from halfway through my swim. I normally have a shower afterwards, even if I’ve showered that morning. I live a wet, drenched, quenched existence. But, as I discovered, this won’t last. I am living on borrowed time and borrowed water.

Water stolen from nature, drained from rivers and lakes and returned polluted, allows me to live this way. It will have to stop – not through some altruistic hand-wringing desire to do better, but because even in England this amount of water will soon be unavailable.

More here.