Rachelle Bergstein at Literary Hub:

Like many adolescents, Deenie has a secret.

Or maybe “secret” isn’t the right word. Deenie has a private ritual, something she does when she can’t sleep. She doesn’t know why, but it makes her feel better. Touching her “special place” helps stave off her worries. Or, as she puts it, “I have this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling.”

Let’s be clear—until Judy Blume’s 1973 novel Deenie, girls didn’t masturbate in children’s literature. Inventive, now classic characters like Pippi Longstocking and Ramona Quimby were zany and unpredictable, but they certainly never told us where their hands wandered when they were alone. Even now, the mention of self-pleasure in a young adult book is enough to get it yanked from school libraries.

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Dean W. Ball in The New Atlantis:

This notion — that LLMs are “just” next-word predictors based on statistical models of text — is so common now as to be almost a trope. It is used, both correctly and incorrectly, to explain the flaws, biases, and other limitations of LLMs. Most importantly, it is used by AI skeptics like [Gary] Marcus to argue that there will soon be diminishing returns from further LLM development: We will get better and better statistical approximations of existing human knowledge, but we are not likely to see another qualitative leap toward “general intelligence.”

There are two problems with this deflationary view of LLMs. The first is that next-word prediction, at sufficient scale, can lead models to capabilities that no human designed or even necessarily intended — what some call “emergent” capabilities. The second problem is that increasingly — and, ironically, starting with ChatGPT — language models employ techniques that combust the notion of pure next-word prediction of Internet text.

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Arvind Dilawar in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Qamar-ul Huda opens the first chapter of his new book Reenvisioning Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution in Islam with the differing American and Norwegian approaches to Afghanistan, illustrating how international efforts to end wars and support peace in Muslim countries can be successful, especially when conducted on Islamic terms.

To orient readers with the realities of peacebuilding and conflict resolution, Huda, a professor of international affairs at the United States Naval Academy, first identifies the religious character of international organizations. As he writes, “one of the key problems with the field of religious peacebuilding, a subset in conflict resolution, is that it is dominated by Catholic, Mennonite, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, and other Christian scholars,” whose approaches have been “streamlined, systematized, and normalized […] while occasionally including Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, Sikh, and other traditions to appear inclusive.”

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Bradford Nordeen at Artforum:

As a musician, Charli XCX was born online. Her first album circulated via CD-Rs and MySpace when the artist was just fourteen. Journalists love to drop this detail, but seldom do they follow up on how this ever-shifting www. vernacular inflects her songwriting style. Her compositions often hinge on the repetition of single words or phrases, like “focus,” “airport,” or “number one.” Syncopation spins the familiar into an earworm, disarticulating the very meaning of a lyric into a melodic vibe. After a couple of major-label albums failed to connect, Charli saw promise in how this approach might marry with the emergent underground PC Music movement. Spearheaded by the late SOPHIE and A. G. Cook, these sound sculptors used vocal modulation to transform any bedroom singer into a K-pop star—displaced within a synthetic landscape that was critically unreal, pixelated and vast. The Vroom Vroom EP (2016) was Charli’s first stab at this sound and the recipient of great vitriol from her label and critics alike. Eight years on, that sound has become the genre of music called Hyperpop.

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Byron Spikes in Tech Explore:

Yuichi Hirose has a dream—a dream that someday everyone will have access to a machine capable of knitting furniture.

This machine wouldn’t just knit the furniture’s exterior fabric, but would use knitting to fashion solid three-dimensional chairs, tables and other objects. Tired of that love seat? Just unravel it and reuse the yarn to knit yourself an ottoman. This new fabrication technique—first envisioned by Hirose, a robotics Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science—is called solid knitting. The idea captured his imagination more than a decade ago. And now, working with a research team headed by James McCann, an associate professor in the Robotics Institute, he’s made it a reality.

“My dream is to have these solid knitting machines everywhere in the world,” Hirose said.

While he was still building the machine, Hirose saw a report on the internet about a software project by McCann that made it easier to reprogram commercial knitting machines. This method provided a practical way to use the machines to make customized 3D knitted pieces. These were hollow shapes, such as bunny rabbits that could be stuffed, not solid knitted pieces, but Hirose and McCann began talking about a possible collaboration.

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Joel Kotkin at The New Atlantis:

Simply put, downtowns matter less and less. In Austin and elsewhere, we are witnessing an epochal shift away from the highly concentrated urban center first described by Jean Gottmann in 1983 as the “transactional city.” Gottman spoke of a future dominated by massive high-rise office buildings filled with professionals who commuted largely from the periphery. Yet in reality, jobs have been dispersing throughout metro areas since the 1950s. Bumsoo Lee and Peter Gordon showed that downtowns for cities with the largest populations had dropped to 7 percent of metropolitan employment by 2000, while 78 percent of jobs were located in dispersed areas. Office occupancy and construction of new space have both seen a net decline since the turn of the century. The same goes for businesses, as investment in corporate real estate moves away from dense urban areas.

Remote work, rising before the pandemic but greatly expanded since, allows professionals to work ever further away from their place of employment. According to a 2023 paper at Stanford, work-from-home constituted about 7 percent of workdays before the pandemic and over 60 percent at its peak.

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Lab Notebook

Phil Christman in The Hedgehog Review:

Every so often someone writes an essay with a title like “Against Travel,” “The Case for Staying on One’s Couch,” or “Germans in Sweatpants: Why Going Places Was a Mistake.” Such pieces usually go viral, since they appeal to the two itches few readers seem able to resist scratching—the itch to be agreed with and the itch to be mad at a stranger. I always root for the writers of these pieces. I want them to win the impossible fight they’ve picked.

Why should I feel this way about travel? What has it ever done to me? Travel is one of those things one generally doesn’t attack in polite company, the world of letters excepted. Its wholesomeness is assumed. It broadens the mind. It makes us empathetic and, by rewarding our curiosity, encourages it to develop further. It teaches people the just-right amount of relativism —the amount that makes them easygoing in company, perhaps usefully pliable in exigencies, but not nihilistic. Only a fool or a misanthrope would criticize travel.

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Raiany Romanni in Bioethics Today:

If there’s one phrase the June 2024 U.S. presidential debate may entirely eliminate from the English vocabulary it’s that age is a meaningless number. Often attributed to boxer Muhammad Ali, who grudgingly retired at age 39, this centuries-old idea has had far-reaching consequences in global politics, as life expectancy more than doubled since the start of the 20th century, and presidents’ ages shifted upwards. We say “age is what we make of it” to ourselves and to policymakers, and think it’s a harmless way to dignify the aged. But how true is it? And if it isn’t true, why would we lie?

For centuries, we have confused our narrative of what aging should be with what its ruthless biology is. Yet pretending that biological age does not matter is at best myopic, and at worst, it’s a dangerous story to our governments, families, and economies. In just 11 years — between 2018 and 2029 — U.S. spending on Social Security and Medicare will more than double, from $1.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion per year. As we age, our odds of getting sick and dying by basically anything go up exponentially.

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Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian:

In 2016, a historically unprecedented incident took place. And yet, barely anyone even noticed. Even years later, we’ve failed to acknowledge it or to have begun the process of understanding it. Because we still can’t even see it.

And that’s because this incident involved a woman. And she was asking for it.

The woman was Hillary Clinton. What she was asking for was votes. And what she got was the single biggest outpouring of misogyny in human history.

We can now say that. Although no one ever does. But this was an unprecedented previously unimaginable event. Because 2016 was when the world’s first global instant mass communication technology – social media – crashed up against the most ancient of prejudices – misogyny.

And the result was an earthquake: Donald Trump.

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Mats Bigert at Cabinet Magazine:

When Tintin is captured by an ancient Inca tribe in his fourteenth adventure, Prisoners of the Sun, he finds an article on his cell floor that forecasts a coming solar eclipse. This will prove to be significant since he, Captain Haddock, and Professor Calculus are to be burned at the stake. Tintin manages to see to it that the execution is staged at the right moment. When the Inca Prince of the Sun orders the pyre to be lit, Tintin invokes the Sun God: “O God of the Sun, sublime Pachacamac, display thy power, I implore thee! … If this sacrifice is not thy will, hide thy shining face from us!” In this patronizing Occidental fable of mathematical calculation triumphing over traditional belief, the weather god gives way to the scientist, whose knowledge gives Tintin the power to produce an apparent miracle.

The scientist who made such exact prognostications possible was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. In 1600, he was hired as an assistant by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and was given the painstaking task of analyzing observations of Mars made by Tycho and compiling them into a new set of astronomical tables.

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From Edge:

JOHN TOOBY (July 26, 1952-November 9, 2023) was the founder of the field of Evolutionary Psychology, co-director (with his wife, Leda Cosmides) of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, and professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in biological anthropology from Harvard University in 1989 and was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Tooby and Cosmides also co-founded and co-directed the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology and jointly received the 2020 Jean Nicod Prize.

Tooby was known for his work with his collaborators to integrate cognitive science, cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and hunter-gatherer studies to create the new field of evolutionary psychology, toward the goal of the progressive mapping of the universal evolved cognitive and neural architecture that constitutes human nature and provides the basis of the learning mechanisms responsible for culture. This involves using knowledge of specific adaptive problems our hunter-gatherer ancestors encountered to experimentally map the design of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that evolved among our hominid ancestors to solve them.

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Kamal Nahas in The Scientist:

Cancers typically arise when cells accumulate mutations in their DNA that prevent them from keeping cell division in check.¹ However, for some tumor types, researchers have struggled to find mutations, leading scientists to question their causes.² Now, in a study published in Nature, researchers found that short-lived epigenetic changes can permanently alter gene expression and trigger cancer.³ While most cancers develop following mutations, their findings suggest that a few tumor types might deviate from this rule. For years, Giacomo Cavalli, a geneticist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and his colleagues have studied the role that epigenetic factors called Polycomb proteins play in cancer.⁴ These proteins form complexes that wind up chromatin and switch off genes that promote cell division. The team previously found that mutations in Polycomb factors cause chromatin unraveling, which cascades into cell proliferation and cancer initation.⁵ They wondered whether they could achieve the same effect by temporarily switching Polycomb genes off.

To test their hypothesis, they turned to the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster; the species has only one copy of each gene involved in the Polycomb machinery, making it easier to disrupt the system. Polycomb proteins play key roles during development by influencing the timing of cell differentiation. Cavalli and his team studied the impact of losing this epigenetic control on early, larval structures called imaginal discs. Using a temperature-sensitive RNA interference system, they exposed the discs to warmer temperatures for 24 hours, which temporarily turned off the Polycomb genes for two days.  “They very nicely showed that with this transitory system they could switch off this development gene briefly, switch it back on, and that was enough to trigger tumorigenesis,” said Douglas Hanahan, a cancer biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne who was not involved with the work.

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Richard Carwardine at Literary Review:

A mountain of historical studies testifies to enduring interest in the American Civil War, a conflict still politically relevant in a nation riven over how to remember it. Those doubting that there is anything fresh to say about the bloodiest event in the republic’s history should read Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor’s brilliant, panoramic account of the conflict. Applying a wide continental lens, he explores this crux of United States history and how it shook neighbouring Mexico and Canada. In all three settings, liberals and social and political conservatives were involved in parallel struggles to build a modern nation. After a French invasion, the creation of a short-lived monarchy and a devastating civil war, the Liberal Party leader Benito Juárez returned to power in Mexico. Fearing the growing power and rapacity of the United States, meanwhile, Canadians navigated internal divisions to create a continental confederation. And in the United States, the pulsing heart and geographical centre of events, Abraham Lincoln’s Union forces subdued the reactionary and rebel slave power to achieve emancipation and the constitutional basis for a more liberal and democratic nation.

Taylor’s lively account of the conflict in the United States follows mostly familiar lines. Insisting that enslavement was a positive good for the people of African origin and that slavery had to grow to survive, Southerners demanded the right to settle the vast western territories beyond the Mississippi.

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Namir Khaliq at Psyche:

The day I met Daniel Kahneman, he had asked me to join him for lunch at the Bowery Road restaurant in Lower Manhattan. Danny proposed this venue because it has comfortable booths and ‘is mostly deserted’. I arrived 15 minutes early, palms sweaty with the anticipation of meeting the world’s most famous psychologist. He had agreed to discuss making a film of his life’s work. I’d been preparing my pitch all week, and had brought a stack of notes with me to the restaurant. Half an hour passed, and he hadn’t arrived. I sent his secretary an email. Another 45 minutes ticked by before I abandoned hope. I headed back uptown, expectations shot.

As I walked through the apartment door, my phone buzzed. Danny’s name shone on the caller ID. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said as soon as I answered. ‘Please tell me where to find you.’ I told him I could head back downtown in a few minutes. Before hanging up, he apologised once more: ‘I’m very sorry. This doesn’t usually happen. But I sometimes make mistakes.’

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Alex Wilkins in New Scientist:

The IMO is considered the world’s most prestigious competition for young mathematicians. Correctly answering its test questions requires mathematical ability that AI systems typically lack.

In January, Google DeepMind demonstrated AlphaGeometry, an AI system that could answer some IMO geometry questions as well as humans. However, this was not from a live competition, and it couldn’t answer questions from other mathematical disciplines, such as number theory, algebra and combinatorics, which is necessary to win an IMO medal.

Google DeepMind has now released a new AI, called AlphaProof, which can solve a wider range of mathematical problems, and an improved version of AlphaGeometry, which can solve more geometry questions.

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