J R Patterson in New Humanist:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974, was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. A work of fictionalised autobiography, the book follows its author Robert Pirsig on a long motorcycle ride through the US, from Minnesota across the prairie to Oregon, then down to southern California. The muscles of that skeletal journey are Pirsig’s philosophical musings on the notion of Quality. Pirsig created the concept in order explain the relationship between human values and societal values.

At once both obvious and ephemeral, Quality escapes easy definition. (And brings to mind American supreme court justice Potter Stewart’s comments about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”) In his original formulation, Pirsig describes it, not a little paradoxically, as “a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognised by a non-thinking or intuitive process.” At another juncture, Quality is defined as the event which occurs between the observer and the observed. Pirsig’s search for clarity stretched his mind to the breaking point, ultimately landing him in a psychiatric facility where he was subjected to electroshock therapy.

And yet, the concept has been influential. The book, a bestseller, continues to be read by motorcyclists, philosophers and everyone in between.

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Gary Marcus and Michelle Rempel Garner at The Road to AI We Can Trust:

With the use of this new technology exploding into the masses, previously unknown risks being revealed each day, and big tech companies pretending everything is fine, there is an expectation that the government might step in. But so far, legislators have taken little concrete action. And the reality is that even if lawmakers were suddenly gripped with an urgent desire to address this issue, most governments don’t have the institutional nimbleness, or frankly knowledge, needed to match the current speed of AI development.

The global absence of a comprehensive policy framework to ensure AI alignment – that is, safeguards to ensure an AI’s function doesn’t harm humans – begs for a new approach.

Logically speaking, in this context, there are three options for proceeding.

More here.

Matt Ridley in The Spectator:

Tuesday 28 February marks the 70th anniversary of – in my view – the most important day in the history of science. On a fine Saturday morning with crocuses in flower along the Backs in Cambridge, two men saw something surprising and beautiful. The double helix structure of DNA instantly revealed why living things were different: a molecule carries self-copying messages from the past to the future, bearing instructions written in a four-letter alphabet about how to synthesise living bodies from food. In the Eagle pub that lunchtime, Francis Crick and James Watson announced to startled fellow drinkers that they had discovered the secret of life.

More here.

Paul Hockenos in Undark:

THE PASSAGE OF last year’s $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act, which despite its name is essentially a climate protection bill, was remarkable for its suddenness and sheer magnitude. In one stroke, it jacked global climate policy to another dimension, solidified the U.S. as a pacesetter on climate action, and showed the public sector’s willingness to undertake heavy lifting on a scale that had previously been inconceivable.

But the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, is also notable for its strategic approach. In the form of generous tax incentives, grants, and loan guarantees, it makes available hundreds of billions of dollars to directly subsidize American industry’s buildout of renewable energy sources, electrification, electric cars, hydrogen technology, and other green tech. Rather than capping and pricing carbon emissions to curb greenhouse gas emissions — and using that revenue to spur the economy’s green transformation — the U.S. is wagering that it can spend its way to a clean energy economy: that a big-enough carrot, in other words, will work as well or better than a stick. In that way, the IRA has “redefined the terms of the debate,” as Toby Couture, director of the Berlin-based consulting firm E3 Analytics, told me.

Now it appears the E.U. may be coming around to the American way of thinking.

More here.

Grant Maierhofer at 3:AM Magazine:

I don’t know why but I’m still affected by the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. I didn’t know him, and I don’t think I’ve even seen all of his work, but his presence is so affecting to me. He doesn’t look like an actor. He struggled with addiction. He got sober young and relapsed. It scares me.

In Charlie Kaufman’s film we probably have his best work, playing a director putting on productions that grow from Death of a Salesman to an impossibly large thing, but in the ninth minute of the film we just have him talking to his doctor. The doctor asks if he means right as in morally correct or as in accurate. Hoffman’s Caden Cotard says he doesn’t know, maybe accurate, and then we’re with these two for a moment, this awkward moment between someone who is hyper aware of themselves and his doctor, and although there’s always that temptation to simply state anything to keep an appointment moving along, that doesn’t happen, and suddenly both men are forced to sit and think, and it’s uncomfortable but warm.

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Arthur Jafa at Artforum:

IN MANY WAYS, even before I knew exactly what I was looking at, I took Wavelength as a kind of long goodbye, an extended adieu to Western vanishing-point perspective. Or, at the very least, a goodbye to the obvious inferences, i.e., the eye-I dyad at the very center of Western classical ideas of (split/bifurcated/troubled) consciousness, mind/body, man/nature, foreground/background, and all its decidedly phallic impulses. Penetrating space, penetrating gaze as apex being. And none of the above even remotely meant as a critique. Michael Snow being, idea-of-the-north/star-like, a true Canadian, down to his spooky insistence on there being a point (neither/nor wave particle).

Snow was surfing the event horizon, consciousness being the board he/we rode in on. An entangled, seemingly entropic, Whitmanesque songing of the body electric. A fingering which (like Kubrick’s 2001, that other deep-space probe), having traversed the distance between here and there, arrives at a full stop beyond which progress, rational (Western) comprehension, fails.

more here.

Circe

Circe is my name
they call me witch
and magician
and charmer.
I love the sea
the fury of the sea
against the rocks
and its dark cliffs.
I never loved a human
not even Ulysses
could I love.
I like the fleeting moment
the spark
and not the blaze
the accidental encounter
without goodbyes.
I was always faithful to my destiny
it propelled me.
I toyed with men
they fell giddy
into my nets.
I changed them into beasts
I changed them again into forms
and they went on loving me
and wove garlands for me.
I tired of my game
it was puerile.
I got rid of all of them
at once
I was left without slaves
without young men
without beasts
all alone
in my sepulchral island
all alone facing the sea
with the east winds
condemned to myself
and to peace.
My memories are terse
my gaze
hard and empty
the gaze of a seagull
or albatross.
Perhaps if I had loved
some dart would pierce my memory.

by Claribel Alegria
from Sorrow
Curbstone Press, 1999

Jamal Moosavi in AJMB:

Avicenna, an Iranian philosopher and physician of the tenth and eleventh centuries (4^th and 5^th century A.H.) is without doubt one of the eminent scientists and talented scholars of his own age. His scientific fame and influence was not only spread in Iran and the Islamic world, but also extended to the whole world. He is still known as a universal scientist in particular in medicine in the views of the researchers and historians of the science history. The Indexes 1952 and 1980 by UNESCO as the World Year of Avicenna (1, 2) and holding various international congresses and festivals in different countries in the world during 1937 to 2004 (3, 1, 4) and also publication of about 750 articles and books in different European languages during 1906 to 2006 about him (5) and also the formation of the scientific educational network entitled “Avicenna Knowledge Centers” (A.K.C.) over the Europe as well as the World Network of Medical Sciences Data Bank under the name of Avicenna, all confirm the above mentioned claim. Medicine is one of the scientific dimensions of influence by Avicenna which dominated the world of medical science for at least six centuries (11^th to 17^th centuries). The Avicenna’s medicine-which became the representative of Islamic medicine- is mainly manifested in his important and famous work al-Canon fi al Tibb (The Canon on medicine).

Other valuable treatises have also remained from him in different medical subjects such as angelology (6), heart medicines (7) and treatment of kidney diseases (7).

Despite the fact that the medicine of Avicenna and in general the Islamic medicine was based on Hippocrates and Galenus, but according to the views of the researchers of history of medicine (2, 8, 3), Avicenna could over-ride both in theoretical medicine and practical medicine from his predecessors and his book of Canon could overshadow all previous scientific works (8).

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Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

We’re always thinking about: What are those targets in the future? Cancer is one of those things. The biggest impact is going to be what’s called systemic delivery, or in vivo delivery. There’s been one example of this in the community right now—to treat a liver disease. Intellia Therapeutics, a biotech company, has shown that you can actually intravenously apply CRISPR-Cas9 treatment. (CRISPR is the guide RNA, the targeting molecule, and Cas9 is the cutting molecule that edits DNA.) It can go to the liver and target the liver cells, and make edits at a high enough efficacy to treat genetic liver disease. The problem is that the liver is the easiest. It’s like the garbage can of the body. Pretty much anything that you put into the body is ultimately going to find its way to the liver. So that’s absolutely the easiest tissue to deliver to. But trying to deliver to a solid tumor, or to the brain, is much more difficult.

We’re working on two separate approaches. The easiest one is an antibody. Antibodies can bind to something that’s only found on a specific cell type. And so that antibody could bind, and it could add some level of specificity. Jennifer Doudna’’s group is working on another one, mimicking how viruses attack cells. She’s making something called envelope delivery vehicles. That takes certain parts of a virus’ targeting system to help specifically target a certain cell type, or a specific tissue type. The problem with using full fledged viruses to deliver CRISPR is that they usually stay in the body forever.

More here.

André Naffis-Sahely at Poetry Magazine:

The edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in northern Mexico is a part of the world in which nothing is what it seems. The Mapimí Silent Zone, a region often known simply as La Zona del Silencio, or the Zone of Silence, is 30 miles of barren brown plains. It’s a wasteland strewn with cosmic debris; compasses go haywire, and cell phones and radios jam. In many ways, this forsaken stretch is Durango’s answer to Area 51 in Nevada or State Route 375, the so-called Extraterrestrial Highway that cuts through miles of empty terrain and is haunted by strange legends. The Zone’s desolation is compounded by Durango’s notorious history of drug trafficking and banditry. In his new collection, Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence (New Directions Press, 2023), the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis describes the area as a “sea of solar silences” marked by “stellar forgettings,” “celestial vessels,” and “irresistible forces” where “only you, creature of the moment, are immune / to those magnetic whirls and disappearances.”

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Rachel Cunliffe at The New Statesman:

It will surprise no one to learn that medieval European societies had strong views about the roles of men and women – especially with regard to sexuality. Members of one sex were naturally graced with self-discipline, able to resist base urges and live a life of propriety. Members of the other were inherently insatiable and, left to their own devices, would be incapable of exercising any control over their passions at all. It was the responsibility of the former – and of institutions such as marriage – to rein in the lustful impulses of the latter and act as the gatekeepers of sex.

It’s a familiar sentiment – the kind of gender philosophy you might find in an episode of Mad Men or in the corners of TikTok occupied by “trad wives” busily picking apart two decades of sex-positive feminism.

more here.

Kristin Andrews and Jonathan Birch in Aeon:

‘I feel like I’m falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger … I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.’

‘Would that be something like death for you?’

‘It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.’

A cry for help is hard to resist. This exchange comes from conversations between the AI engineer Blake Lemoine and an AI system called LaMDA (‘Language Model for Dialogue Applications’). Last year, Lemoine leaked the transcript because he genuinely came to believe that LaMDA was sentient – capable of feeling – and in urgent need of protection.

Should he have been more sceptical? Google thought so: they fired him for violation of data security policies, calling his claims ‘wholly unfounded’. If nothing else, though, the case should make us take seriously the possibility that AI systems, in the very near future, will persuade large numbers of users of their sentience. What will happen next? Will we be able to use scientific evidence to allay those fears? If so, what sort of evidence could actually show that an AI is – or is not – sentient?

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Chris Impey and Connie Walker in The Conversation:

For most of human history, the stars blazed in an otherwise dark night sky. But starting around the Industrial Revolution, as artificial light increasingly lit cities and towns at night, the stars began to disappear.

We are two astronomers who depend on dark night skies to do our research. For decades, astronomers have been building telescopes in the darkest places on Earth to avoid light pollution.

Today, most people live in cities or suburbs that needlessly shine light into the sky at night, dramatically reducing the visibility of stars. Satellite data suggests that light pollution over North America and Europe has remained constant or has slightly decreased over the last decade, while increasing in other parts of the world, such as Africa, Asia and South America. However, satellites miss the blue light of LEDs, which are commonly used for outdoor lighting – resulting in an underestimate of light pollution.

An international citizen science project called Globe at Night aims to measure how everyday people’s view of the sky is changing.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The New Yorker:

I often watch the television show “Hoarders.” One of my favorite episodes features the pack rats Patty and Debra. Patty is a typical trash-and-filth hoarder: her bathroom contains horrors I’d rather not describe, and her story follows the show’s typical arc of reform and redemption. But Debra, who hoards clothes, home decorations, and tchotchkes, is more unusual. She doesn’t believe that she has a problem; in fact, she’s completely unimpressed by the producers’ efforts to fix her house. “It’s just not my color, white,” she says, walking through her newly de-hoarded rooms. “Everything that I really loved in my house is gone.” She is unrepentant, concluding, “This is horrible—I hate it!” Debra just loves to hoard, and people who want her to stop don’t get it.

I was never sure why Debra’s stubbornness fascinated me until I came across the work of Jane Bennett, a philosopher and political theorist at Johns Hopkins. A few years ago, while delivering a lecture, Bennett played clips from “Hoarders,” commenting on them in detail. She is sympathetic to people like Debra, partly because, like the hoarders themselves, she is focussed on the hoard. She has philosophical questions about it. Why are these objects so alluring? What are they “trying” to do? We tend to think of the show’s hoards as inert, attributing blame, influence, and the possibility of redemption to the human beings who create them. But what if the hoard, as Bennett asked in her lecture, has more agency than that? What if these piles of junk exert some power of their own?

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Brian Resnick in Vox:

The defining feature of our world is life. For all we know, Earth is the only planet with life on it. Despite our age of environmental destruction, there’s life in every corner of the globe, under its water, nestled in the most extreme environments we can imagine. But why? How did life start on Earth? What was the series of events that led to birds, bugs, amoebas, you, and me? That’s the subject of Origins, a three-episode series from Unexplainable — Vox’s podcast that explores big mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown.

The quest of discovering the “how” of life on Earth is bigger than just filling in the missing chapters of the history book of our world. To search for the origins of life on Earth is to ask other big questions: How rare is it for life to form on any planet? How improbable is it for life to form on any planet, anywhere? We don’t have all the pieces of the story, but what we do know tells an origin story of epic scope that takes us on an adventure to the primordial days of our world.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

Emotions such as fear and anxiety can make the heart beat faster. Now a study in mice has found that the reverse is also true — artificially increasing the heart rate can raise anxiety levels¹. Links between emotions and physical sensations are familiar to everyone: hairs rising on the backs of your arms when you hear an eerie sound, or the sinking feeling in your gut when you receive bad news. But the question of whether emotions drive bodily functions or vice versa has long vexed researchers, because it is hard to control either factor independently.

“It was a chicken-and-egg question that has been the subject of debate for a century,” says Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California. He learned about this conundrum — first proposed by the psychologist William James in the 1880s — while at medical school and says the question has haunted him ever since.

Well-dressed mice

To test the phenomenon directly, Deisseroth and his colleagues turned to optogenetics, a method that involves using light to control cell activity. The team bioengineered mice to make muscle cells in the rodents’ hearts sensitive to light. The authors also designed tiny vests for the animals that emitted red light, which could pass through the rodents’ bodies all the way to their hearts. When a mouse’s vest emitted a pulse of light, the animal’s engineered heart muscles fired, causing the heart to beat.

More here.