To Travel

—after the Finnish of Gosta Agren

If you should go to Samarkand
you might find Scheherazade
reproduced a thousand times,
tinsel-clad, in gift shops,
and Al-al-Din’s gold-plated domes
slung with Soviet tourist signs
and tarnished, on a brassy sky.

But staying is a kind of leaving.
From here, the fields of Oxfordshire
stretch almost sovereign-golden.
And when the wheat is rolled in bales
like wheels, and black tractor rills
run to the bare horizon, there shall be,
in the wordless autumn air, Samarkand,

the idea of Samarkand.

by Kate Clanchy
from The National Poetry Library

Via Adam Tooze, David Bowen at his site:

This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real-time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete. In this way, the movements of the machete are determined based on input from the plant. Essentially the plant is the brain of the robot controlling the machete determining how it swings, jabs, slices and interacts in space.

Cihan Tugal in Sidecar:

During a war in which most countries have either taken sides or remained silent, Turkey has positioned itself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine – seeking to negotiate with both Putin and Zelensky, and playing an important role in the semi-restitution of grain trade last summer. It has opposed Western sanctions on Russia, yet it has also limited Russian warships in the Black Sea. Such geopolitical manoeuvring – treading a fine line between Great Powers – is not confined to the current crisis, nor to Turkey’s bilateral relations with the two warring states. Rather, it is a reflection of Erdoğan’s broader foreign policy direction.

Ever since the Arab Spring, Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been reimagining the country as an independent actor: not simply a ‘bridge’ between the West and the rest, but a force that both the declining American empire and its emergent competitors must reckon with. This, however, is more an expression of fantasy than fact. As we shall see, the material basis for an autonomous Turkish foreign policy is weak, and domestic class dynamics are unfavourable. No matter how much Islamist media outlets try to promote their thin and mostly antisemitic version of ‘anti-imperialism’, it does not amount to a coherent overseas strategy. In the absence of such material and social anchors, the AKP’s search for independence ultimately amounts to a haphazard series of short-termist adventures.

This is in marked contrast to the country’s experience during the mid- to late-twentieth century. The Republic of Turkey’s first two decades were an early harbinger of Third Worldism, with all its merits and demerits.

More here.

Samir Sonti and JW Mason in Phenomenal World:

SAMIR SONTI: For a long time, I have been preoccupied by the way the politics of inflation affect working people. There is hardly anyone I’ve learned more from about this subject than Josh Mason. To kick us off, it might be helpful to get some basic definitions on the table. Headlines tell us that inflation is at a forty-year high, but for working people, a rising cost of living is nothing new: house prices, for instance, have been climbing for years. Could you explain what precisely we mean by the term inflation? What distinguishes the recent inflation we’ve experienced from some of these other trends?

JW MASON: The definition of inflation that people are most familiar with is a period of rising prices. But as you pointed out, that immediately invites the question: which prices? There are many prices in the economy, and they do not all move in lockstep. When we look at inflation, we’re measuring the average price of things that a representative household buys. But this, again, invites a question: Which household? Different people buy different things, and the average prices of some goods are difficult to calculate. There is no such thing as “the price level” out there in the world, just various ways of constructing it.

In general, when we measure inflation we look at goods and services that people use. We’re not including stocks, cryptocurrency, interest payments, and other financial assets. But we’re also including some things that aren’t goods and services. For instance, the biggest single item in the consumer price index is what’s called “owners equivalent rent.” This is not a price that anyone pays—it is an estimate by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of how much it would cost a homeowner to rent their home, and computing it is a fairly complicated process.

More here.

Ingrid Robeyns in Crooked Timber:

In his book How to Blog Up A Pipeline, Andreas Malm writes about the need for the climate movement to have a more radical wing (which would do things like blowing up pipelines, or other forms of property destruction). His view is that the climate movement is making a mistake by subscribing to radical forms of non-violence, since the climate crisis is getting worse year by year, while the tactics of the climate movement remain the same – and, in his view, have proven to be ineffective (or at least, insufficiently effective).

One of Malm’s targets is Extinction Rebellion (XR), one of the most visible groups within the climate movement. Local groups of XR are staging various forms of protest, but always non-violent; they do not destroy property. Malm argues that XR has a flawed understanding of how in the past movements operated who were fighting to abolish slavery or abolish apartheid in South Africa, or fighting for women’s political rights or equal civil rights in the US. They all first tried to reach their goals in a peaceful way, but at some point resorted to violence (against property, thereby doing their best to avoid hurting people). And that paid off, since it had the effect of making the claims of the non-violent part of the movement more acceptable to mainstream politics. Malm believes that what XR and other groups in the climate activist movement should learn from the history of the social justice movements, is to have a fraction or a wing in the movement that doesn’t shy away from destroying property. Hence the metaphor of blowing up a pipeline (in case anyone was wondering, Malm doesn’t tell his readers how to actually go about blowing up a pipeline).

More here.

Bob Dylan at the NYT:

This is a song that does no favors for anyone, and casts doubt on everything.

In this song, people are trying to slap you around, slap you in the face, vilify you. They’re rude and they slam you down, take cheap shots. They don’t like you because you pull out all the stops and go for broke. You put your heart and soul into everything and shoot the works, because you got energy and strength and purpose. Because you’re so inspired they put the whammy on, they’re allergic to you, and they have hard feelings. Just your very presence repels them. They give you frosty looks and they’ve had enough of you, and there’s a million others just like you, multiplying every day.

You’re in an exclusive club, and you’re advertising yourself. You’re blabbing about your age group, of which you’re a high-ranking member. You can’t conceal your conceit, and you’re snobbish and snooty about it.

more here.

Fiona Sampson at The Guardian:

In June 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited Oxford, and was introduced to a student poet, Robert Southey. A restless if brilliant Cambridge undergraduate, Coleridge was passing through on a summer walking tour to Wales, then in fashion for its rugged good looks. After a brief stay in Oxford, he pressed on to Snowdonia, returning through the Cambrian mountains. He turned out to be no great evoker of the picturesque: “Gloucester is a nothing-to-be-said-about town. The women have almost all of them sharp noses.”

But this hardly mattered, because his trip had become instead a chance to proselytise for a scheme the new friends had dreamed up. In a Montgomeryshire pub, for example, Coleridge claimed that “two great huge fellows of butcher-like appearance danced about the room [shouting] ‘God save the King! And may he be the last!” Their republican outburst was a response to Coleridge regaling the pub with his idea for a radical community in which everything would be held in common, partly inspired by William Godwin’s recent Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

more here.

Fugitive Beauty

The term “fugitive beauty” came
to me in a letter. A friend’s wife
had used it in conversation. My friend
is a painter who studied in Paris.
I sought his opinion on poetry.

Fugitive beauty, evanescent, fleeting,
as if it implied a criminality
I did not understand.
Did all art start that way —
alone, furtive, so coiled
in its incubation that it feared
possible success or failure?

Fugitive, running away,
not standing with the norm, the herd,
not strong enough
to be judged?

Or did it mean beauty as Keats meant it?
“Truth is beauty, beauty truth” —
a raw truth, or a new dimension of beauty,
a new adjective
to describe eagles soaring.
no parameters,
like prisoners breaking out.

Out there by itself,
not great, not mediocre,
but flying in its own space
against all normalcy, blasting off
to its own truthfulness,
its own freedom.

by George De Gregorio
from Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Anthology, 2008

Helena de Bres in Point:

Analytic philosophers avoided the subject of meaning in life till relatively recently. The standard explanation is that they associated it with the meaning of life question they considered bankrupt. But it’s surely also because the subject conflicts with some of the core tendencies of the analytic tradition. “What gives point to life?” is a sweeping question that invites the synoptic approach associated with continental philosophy, not the divide-and-conquer method favored by Anglo-Americans. The question also wears its angst on its sleeve, making it an awkward fit with the dispassionate mode employed in the mainstream academy.

But over the past couple of decades we analytics have turned to the question, with the result that we now have a sharply laid-out set of takes on the matter. The standard way to approach the topic is via a distinction between subjective, objective and hybrid views of meaning. Roughly, subjectivism says your life is meaningful if you have the right kind of attitude to it, objectivism says you need to be engaged with objects of attitude-independent value and the hybrid view says you need both.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

In Alysson Muotri’s laboratory, hundreds of miniature human brains, the size of sesame seeds, float in Petri dishes, sparking with electrical activity.

These tiny structures, known as brain organoids, are grown from human stem cells and have become a familiar fixture in many labs that study the properties of the brain. Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has found some unusual ways to deploy his. He has connected organoids to walking robots, modified their genomes with Neanderthal genes, launched them into orbit aboard the International Space Station, and used them as models to develop more human-like artificial-intelligence systems. Like many scientists, Muotri has temporarily pivoted to studying COVID-19, using brain organoids to test how drugs perform against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. But one experiment has drawn more scrutiny than the others. In August 2019, Muotri’s group published a paper in Cell Stem Cell reporting the creation of human brain organoids that produced coordinated waves of activity, resembling those seen in premature babies¹. The waves continued for months before the team shut the experiment down.

This type of brain-wide, coordinated electrical activity is one of the properties of a conscious brain. The team’s finding led ethicists and scientists to raise a host of moral and philosophical questions about whether organoids should be allowed to reach this level of advanced development, whether ‘conscious’ organoids might be entitled to special treatment and rights not afforded to other clumps of cells and the possibility that consciousness could be created from scratch.

More here.

Geoff Anders in Palladium:

In November of 1660, at Gresham College in London, an invisible college of learned men held their first meeting after 20 years of informal collaboration. They chose their coat of arms: the royal crown’s three lions of England set against a white backdrop. Their motto: “Nullius in verba,” or “take no one’s word for it.” Three years later, they received a charter from King Charles II and became what was and remains the world’s preeminent scientific institution: the Royal Society.

Three and a half centuries later, in July of 2021, even respected publications began to grow weary of a different, now constant refrain: “Trust the science.” It was a mantra everyone was supposed to accept, repeated again and again, ad nauseum.

This new motto was the latest culmination of a series of transformations science has undergone since the founding of the Royal Society, reflecting the changing nature of science on one hand, and its expanding social role on the other.

More here.

K. Holt in Engadget:

Researchers who grew a brain cell culture in a lab claim that they taught the cells to play a version of Pong. Scientists from a biotech startup called Cortical Labs say it’s the first demonstrated example of a so-called “mini-brain” being taught to carry out goal-directed tasks. ”It is able to take in information from an external source, process it and then respond to it in real time,” Dr. Brett Kagan, lead author of a paper on the research that was published in Neuron, told the BBC.

The culture of 800,000 brain cells is known as DishBrain. The scientists placed mouse cells (derived from embryonic brains) and human cells taken from stem cells on top of an electrode array that was hooked up to Pong, as The Age notes. Electrical pulses sent to the neurons indicated the position of the ball in the game. The array then moved the paddle up and down based on signals from the neurons. DishBrain received a strong and consistent feedback signal (a form of stimulus) when the paddle hit the ball and a short, random pulse when it missed.

More here.

Clemens Fuest and Axel Ockenfels in Project Syndicate:

The energy crisis incited by Russia’s war in Ukraine has triggered intense debates in many countries about whether the windfall profits that energy companies are now making should be taxed. While this question concerns all companies that produce coal, gas, or oil, the focus currently is on electricity producers. Since a high gas price is driving up electricity prices across the board, suppliers with power plants that use other fuels or renewables can reap extremely high profits. And the immense burden of rising electricity prices on consumers has ratcheted up political pressure to tax “unjustified” profits.

Of course, windfall taxes face fundamental objections relating to tax symmetry and trust in applicable taxation rules. But, given the extent of recent energy-price increases, politicians want to skim energy companies’ profits nonetheless, just as they also want to protect other companies from unjustified losses associated with the crisis.

That is understandable. But if policymakers insist on taking this path, they will need to be mindful of the considerable implementation problems they will encounter along the way. Unless managed properly, any windfall profits tax that is imposed could make today’s energy shortages even worse.

More here.

Alex Kitnick at Artforum:

WOLFGANG TILLMANS HAS CREATED an image of contemporary Europe that a lot of people carry around in their heads. Not the Colosseum or the Arc de Triomphe or even the Eiffel Tower, but easyJet, English, Berghain. These keywords are both the technologies and the coordinates of Tillmans’s practice, the atmosphere and infrastructure that support his work, though they are not necessarily visible in his pictures. And yet he has created images—indeed, icons—that are somehow correlates for them, that use these things as scaffolding. I know this is a big claim to make about an artist, given that the profession today no longer has much to do with the way things look. The task of imaging has largely been left to the stylist, the executive, and the influencer. But by leveraging photography’s many lives (as art, as document, as fashion editorial, as reportage, and as publicity), Tillmans has been able to thread the needle through an increasingly vast network of image production, and its sites of display, in order to create a new kind of image—a moving image not simply in the affective sense, but in the circulatory one, too. His images get around, change shape. They are promiscuous. We can call them images in motion.

more here.

Ava Kofman at n+1:

ONE MAN ALONE can do very little. This was a precept held by Bruno Latour, among the most inventive and influential philosophers of postwar Europe. Latour did for science something similar to what Tolstoy, one of his heroes, did for history—namely, reveal that its landmark theories and discoveries, like epochal wars and revolutions, far from being the work of a few great men, were actually the product of careful coordination between an abundance of human and non-human actors. “A crowd may move a mountain; a single man cannot,” Latour wrote in The Pasteurization of France (1984), his unconventional study of Louis Pasteur. “If, therefore, we say of a man that he has moved a mountain, it is because he has been credited with (or has appropriated) the work of the crowd that he claimed to command but that he also followed.”

It was not lost on Latour, a generous, inveterate collaborator, that his own success could be partially explained by his ability to put his philosophy into practice.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYfwkTgEpmE&ab_channel=ARTE.tvDocumentary

Jocelyn Timperley in BBC:

“You know you’re a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge.”

At her home in Paris, Dina Zielinski, a senior scientist in human genomics at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, holds up a tiny vial to her laptop camera for me to see on our video call. It’s hard to make out, but she tells me that I should be able to see a mostly clear, light film on the bottom of the vial – this is the DNA. But this DNA is special. It does not store the code from a human genome, nor does it come from any animal or virus. Instead, it stores a digital representation of a museum. “That will last easily tens of years, maybe hundreds,” says Zielinski.

Research into how we could store digital data inside strands of DNA has exploded over the past decade, in the wake of efforts to sequence the human genome, synthesise DNA and develop gene therapies.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Tom Brennen)

From The Scientist:

The world may be at greater risk of infectious diseases that originate in wildlife because people are increasingly encroaching on natural habitats in the tropics to graze livestock and hunt wild animals. Devastating pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and COVID-19, all of which likely originated in wildlife, are reminders of how environmental destruction and infectious disease are intertwined. Tropical deforestation and overhunting are also at the root of global warming and mass species extinction.

All of these phenomena suggest that what we choose to eat has a fundamental impact on our health and that of the planet. We recently conducted a review of the scientific literature to explore how wildlife-origin diseases, global warming, and mass species extinction are linked to the global food system. Our second objective was to explore reparative actions that governments, NGOs, and each one of us can undertake. From the perspective of individual consumers, the global population needs to shift to diets low in livestock-sourced foods to stem human encroachment on tropical areas of wilderness. Second, there is a need to curb wildmeat demand in tropical cities.

More here.