Alex Wilkins in New Scientist:

Quantum computers have long promised to solve certain problems faster than any ordinary, or classical, computer can. In fact, Google delivered on this promise in 2019, when it declared that its quantum computer had achieved quantum supremacy, performing a calculation impossible for the best classical computers of the day. As New Scientist said at the time, Google had “secured yet another place in the history books”.

Yet the next chapter of the quantum revolution is struggling to be written. Since Google’s breakthrough in 2019, other groups have made similar claims, but in each case improved algorithms for classical computers have reasserted dominance over quantum machines, or at least threatened to. With this back and forth ongoing, will quantum computers ever pull ahead?

More here.

Anu Bradford at Project Syndicate:

In November, the United Kingdom will host a high-profile international summit on the governance of artificial intelligence. With the agenda and list of invitees still being finalized, the biggest decision facing UK officials is whether to invite China or host a more exclusive gathering for the G7 and other countries that want to safeguard liberal democracy as the foundation for a digital society.

The tradeoff is obvious. Any global approach to AI governance that excludes China is likely to have only a limited impact; but China’s presence would inevitably change the agenda. No longer would the summit be able to address the problem of AI being used by governments for domestic surveillance – or any other controversial issue that is of concern to democratic governments.

Whatever the agenda, the summit is a prudent response to rapid and dramatic advances in AI that present both unprecedented opportunities and challenges for governments.

More here.

Bilingual Blues

Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones.
I have mixed feelings about everything.
Name your tema, I’ll hedge;
name your cerca, I’ll straddle it
like a Cubano.

I have mixed feeling about everything.
So un ajiaco de contradicciones.
Vexed, hexed, complexed,
hyphenated, oxygenated, illegally alienated,
psycho soy, cantando voy:
You sat tomato,
I say tu madre;
You say potato,
I say Pototo,
Let’s call the hole
un hueco, the thing
a cosa, and if the cosa goes into the hueco,
consider yourself en casa,
consider yourself part of the family.

Soy un de contradicciones,
un pure de impurezas:
a little square from Rubik’s Cuba
que nadie nunca acoplara.
(Cha-cha-cha.)

by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
from Paper Dance- 55 Latino Poets
Persea Books

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7MUq2cp800&t=12s&ab_channel=PhilosophyOverdose

Barbara Purcell at Salmagundi:

On a 95-degree evening in Austin last fall, I ran into a curator from the University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art at a gallery reception across town. We briefly chatted about the Blanton’s then recently opened “Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards” exhibition, which had been organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. I mentioned I was covering the show for Salmagundi and that I was very much looking forward to seeing the presentation—a departure from the artist’s much larger monochromatic works—up close and personal, and possibly with a pair of reading glasses.
“I wish someone would write about Kelly, the closet Dadaist,” the curator sighed with a little wink. Is it such a secret, I wondered? A half a century’s worth of repurposed postcards—micro collages, really—that playfully combine elements of chance, humor, and appropriation? Sounds rather Dada to me. The term even appears once or twice in the exhibition catalog, and the postcards themselves are effectively mass-produced readymades—a cornerstone of an art movement that was always hard to pin down, even in its heyday.

more here.

Dominic Green at Literary Review:

Not so long ago, India’s greatest export to the West, people aside, was spirituality. Mick Brown’s The Nirvana Express is an engaging history of India’s spiritual influence on the West between 1893, when Swami Vivekananda was the surprise star at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, and 1990, when the multimillionaire cult leader and tax dodger Bhagwan Rajneesh popped his sandals. The economic reforms that began the transformation of India’s economy started a year after Rajneesh’s death. The subsequent changes make the history described in Nirvana Express feel almost ancient.

I should mention that my most recent book, The Religious Revolution, feels even more ancient, because it is the Victorian prequel to The Nirvana Express. Brown has written the kind of book that I would write, should my publisher ever speak to me again. Brown, whose previous books include The Spiritual Tourist: A Personal Odyssey Through the Outer Reaches of Belief, has synthesised a small Himalaya of material into a clear and well-told narrative. His subject is not so much India as the uses and abuses of subcontinental religions in the West in the 20th century.

more here.

Charlie Tyson at Bookforum:

FRANZ KAFKA’S LAST STORYwas a fable about art and labor. “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” is a tale told by a mouse who, with marked erudition and fair-mindedness, reflects on an extraordinary community member, the singer Josephine. At times of danger or emergency, the news will spread that she plans to sing. The community assembles, and Josephine, delicate and frail, stands before them in song, her arms spread wide, her throat stretched high. The tones emanating from that delicate throat are, according to some, not singing at all but rather ordinary piping—if anything, weaker and thinner than the sounds all mice make. It is peculiar, the narrator considers, that “here is someone making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing.” But her art has a strange hold on all who listen. It turns the ordinary materials of speech into something transcendent.

More here.

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

“Literal Banana” on Carcinization writes Against Automaticity, which they describe as:

An explanation of why tricks like priming, nudge, the placebo effect, social contagion, the “emotional inception” model of advertising, most “cognitive biases,” and any field with “behavioral” in its name are not real.

My summary (as always, read the real thing to keep me honest): for a lot of the ‘90s and ‘00s, social scientists were engaged in the project of proving “automaticity”, the claim that most human decisions are unconscious/unreasoned/automatic and therefore bad. Cognitive biases, social priming, advertising science, social contagion research, “nudges”, etc, were all part of this grand agenda.

For example, consider John Bargh’s famous (and now debunked) social priming studies: an experimenter would make subjects solve word games related to elderly people (eg WRINKLE, OLD, CANE). These subjects would then walk out of the laboratory more slowly than control subjects, because they’d been “primed” with the thought of old people, who move slowly. Again, this has since been debunked.

More here.

Shehryar Fazli at Al Jazeera:

Pakistan has introduced measures against modern slavery with mixed success. Climate change, however, is reinforcing the most egregious abuses due to mounting personal debt, and the economic relationship between sharecroppers and small farmers on the one hand, and landlords and local merchants on the other.

While sharecropping has declined significantly in Pakistan’s largest and wealthiest province, Punjab, it continues in more rural Sindh and Balochistan. Tenant farmers borrow to cover the expenses of a crop cycle. Since loans from microfinance banks require collateral and identity documentation, farmers prefer less formal arrangements with a landlord or local moneylender.

More here.

David Platzker at Artforum:

Ruscha’s avant-garde proclivities surfaced in his first pagework as a member of the group Students Five, a collective of friends—Joe Good, Jerry McMillan (both high-school classmates of Ruscha’s), Patrick Blackwell, Don Moore, and later Wall Batterton. Their mailer/bulletin, Orb,⁹ published in seven issues between 1959 and 1960 by Chouinard’s Society of Graphic Designers, contained an amalgam of cartoons, collages, graphic experiments, texts, and exhibition announcements. Ruscha edited and laid out the issues on a single seventeen-by-twenty-two-inch sheet, printing it recto-verso in an elaborate overlapping two-color system and folding it six times down for dissemination through the mail. Commenting on the genesis of Orb’s design, Ruscha would say, “I pasted the thing up and I maybe was thinking in the back of my head, Dada, ’cause they kind of echo a lot of the things that the Dadaists were doing. Things can be upside down, they don’t have to be orderly, you don’t have to have a proper well-behaved page line.”

more here.

Jackson Davidow at The Baffler:

What distinguished the relationship between Gefter and Marks—other than the fact that it had lasted an eternity in gay years—was the photography. Inspired by the breathtaking tenderness of Alfred Stieglitz’s portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, and Emmet Gowin’s of Edith Morris, Gefter, who had recently completed a BFA in photography and painting at the Pratt Institute, set out to document his romance with Marks, who, in turn, always insisted on reciprocating the photographic act. An archive of portraits, spontaneously taken by one another in moments of affection, lust, anxiety, jealousy, and fury, is the point of departure for their dialogues with Denneny. In his 2023 book On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death after Stonewall, Denneny, who died this past April, described his aspiration to “make something like a literary or intellectual version of a Joseph Cornell box, using Philip and Neil’s photographs, the live interviews, and the written self-portraits to capture something—love, passion, and its loss—that I was obsessed with.”

more here.

Radio

I think I forgot to turn
off the radio when
I left my mother’s
womb

In Hasidic Judaism
it is said that before we
are born an angel
enters the womb,
strikes us on the
mouth
and we forget all
that we knew of
previous lives—
all that we know
of heaven

I think that I forgot
to forget.
I was born into two
places at once—

In one, it was chilly
lonely physical &
uncomfortable

in the other, I stayed
in the dimension of
Spirit. What I knew,
I knew.
I did not forget
Voices

The world of spirit
held me in its arms.

by Diane di Prima
from Poetic Outlaws

—Diane di Prima, the Beat Generation icon, who died in 2020, was the author of
“Revolutionary Letters,” “Spring and Autumn Annals,” among many other books
of poetry and prose.

Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

The cells of all living organisms are powered by the same chemical fuel: adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Now, researchers have found a way to generate ATP directly from electricity, which could turbocharge biotechnology processes that grow everything from food to fuel to pharmaceuticals. Interfacing modern electronics-based technology with biology is notoriously difficult. One major stumbling block is that the way they are powered is very different. While most of our gadgets run on electrons, nature relies on the energy released when the chemical bonds of ATP are broken. Finding ways to convert between these two very different currencies of energy could be useful for a host of biotechnologies. Genetically engineered microbes are already being used to produce various high-value chemicals and therapeutically useful proteins, and there are hopes they could soon help generate greener jet fuel, break down plastic waste, and even grow new foods in giant bioreactors. But at the minute, these processes are powered through an inefficient process of growing biomass, converting it to sugar, and feeding it to the microbes.

Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Germany have devised a much more direct way to power biological processes. They have created an artificial metabolic pathway that can directly convert electricity into ATP using a cocktail of enzymes. And crucially, the process works in vitro and doesn’t rely on the native machinery of cells. “Feeding electricity directly into chemical and biochemical reactions is a real breakthrough,” Tobias Erb, who led the research, said in a press release. “This will enable synthesis of energy-rich valuable resources such as starch, biofuels, or proteins from simple cellular building blocks—in the future even from carbon dioxide. It may even be possible to use biological molecules to store electrical energy.”

More here.

From Phys.Org:

A research team headed by Prof. Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science has created complete models of human embryos from stem cells cultured in the lab—and managed to grow them outside the womb up to day 14. As reported today in Nature, these synthetic embryo models had all the structures and compartments characteristic of this stage, including the placenta, yolk sac, chorionic sac and other external tissues that ensure the models’ dynamic and adequate growth.

Cellular aggregates derived from human stem cells in previous studies could not be considered genuinely accurate human embryo models, because they lacked nearly all the defining hallmarks of a post-implantation embryo. In particular, they failed to contain several cell types that are essential to the embryo’s development, such as those that form the placenta and the chorionic sac. In addition, they did not have the structural organization characteristic of the embryo and revealed no dynamic ability to progress to the next developmental stage.

More here.

Thomas Harding at Literary Hub:

Lolita was originally published as a limited edition in France in September 1955. The book was released by Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, a company known for specializing in pornography, but which had also built a reputation for publishing challenging literary titles. The first print run had been 5,000 copies and the book received little attention.

Over the next few months, a handful of copies of Lolita were smuggled into England. A single copy made its way into the hands of Graham Greene, who reviewed it favorably in the Sunday Times. This was followed soon after by a scathing article in the Sunday Express, which denounced the book as “sheer unrestrained pornography.” Shortly after, the British Home Office ordered that all copies entering the country should be seized.

More here.

Jay Owens in The Guardian:

Since modernity began, people have complained about airborne dust – but the measures required to control it have come decades or centuries after, if at all. The coalmines and factories that powered Britain’s Industrial Revolution made a capitalist class very rich, while the cost was borne by their workers in their bodies, lungs and blood. The Ethics of Dust was, for me, about human presence made present – about the building rewritten as not only limestone and glass and a wood-beamed roof, or as big abstract nouns like history and tradition and power, but the material traces of millions of bodies, their labours and their livelihoods. It brings the polis, the people, right into the heart of parliament – and it brings a reckoning with the source of Britain’s historical prosperity, too.

Nobody normally thinks about dust, what it might be doing or where it should go: it is so tiny, so totally, absolutely, mundane, that it slips beneath the limits of vision. But if we pay attention, we can see the world within it.

More here.

Shoaib Daniyal at Scroll.in:

In one of India’s most chilling hate crimes, a Railway Protection Force jawan named Chetansinh Chaudhary shot four train passengers dead on July 31. Three of those people were Muslim. Chaudhary had roamed through the train he had been entrusted to protect, hunting for people who looked Muslim, asked for their names and then pumped bullets into them. In the middle of this terror rampage, Chaudhary also accosted a Muslim woman in a burqa and forced her to chant “Jai mata di”, a popular invocation to the Hindu goddess Durga.

What drove this mass killing? The answer was provided by Chaudhary himself. As a Muslim man lay writhing on the floor, having just been shot, Chaudhary delivered a speech – which he forced other passengers to record. In his rant, Chaudhary spoke of a shadowy theory of people operating from Pakistan. “Inke aqa hai wahan,” he said. Their leaders are there in Pakistan.

His source for this unhinged information, he declared, was the Indian media.

More here.