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Daniel Kodsi and John Maier in The Philosophers’ Magazine:

Philosophers tend to tolerate a high degree of personal strangeness in one another. More specifically, they tend not to worry – at least explicitly or on the record – about whether the weird philosophical beliefs and the weird non-philosophical actions of a colleague might have a common source. The methodological norm rather is that ideas must stand or fall on their intrinsic merits; apart from anything else, this is probably good politics. Making the obvious psychological peculiarities of an author too operative a consideration within academic life might risk implicating an impractically large number of people. (And in that case, one probably wouldn’t trust most of them to apply the relevant criteria accurately anyway.) But this does make philosophy different from other areas of life, where we readily make informative connections, in both directions, between the strangeness of the person and the strangeness of his beliefs, often with a view to discrediting one or the other.

Even in academic philosophy, however, individual eccentricity sometimes becomes too overwhelming to escape remark. In the case of Derek Parfit, one of the first things either a critic or admirer will acknowledge is just how odd a man he was.

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Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

The complicated, multi-figure compositions evolved through studies of groups, individual figures, and through more general drawings of limbs, moving bodies or muscles in action. Among the most beautiful of Leonardo’s preparatory drawings are those showing horses. One red chalk and ink study from the Royal Collection summarises in extraordinary beauty both his powers of observation and his quest for the most telling pictorial moment: the horse is shown rearing but both head and legs are sketched in several positions as he sought the perfect arrangement. They transmit both equine energy and movement, as though he were condensing a flick-book of images into one drawing.

Michelangelo focused on twisting male bodies, treating the musculature with great care but rarely spending time on the faces of his warriors. In one rapid pen and ink sketch he did imagine a melee of mounted combatants similar to Leonardo’s, but perhaps for that very reason he took the idea no further.

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Alan C. Love in Nature:

Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has devoted his career to examining how animal minds evolved. He blends formidable analytical skills with a deep curiosity about the natural world, mostly experienced at first hand in his native Australia. While writing his latest book, Living on Earth, he spent many hours scrutinizing noisy parrots and cockatoos in his back garden, weeks observing gobies building underwater towers made of shells and seaweed and years closely watching how octopuses behave (P. Godfrey-Smith et al. PLoS ONE 17, e0276482; 2022). The result is an inclusive perspective on Earth’s many distinct minds and agents that urges readers to consider humans’ collective choices and their diverse consequences.

Living on Earth offers an extended philosophical meditation on life, mind, the world and our place in it, completing a trilogy of works on the nexus of agency, sensation and felt experience. His 2016 book Other Minds explored octopus cognition and evolution. And Metazoa (2020) appraised the subjective experiences of animals, concluding that there exists an “animal way of being” that arises from the integration of sensory information in nervous systems. This implies that sentience and subjectivity — life-shaping combinations of perception, goals and values — are widespread across the tree of life.

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Quico Toro at Persuasion:

The political spasm that gripped South Korea last night has been widely seen as a portent of doom, but it need not be. Taking a page from Peru’s political playbook, Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s unpopular, thin-skinned, ineffective president attempted an autogolpe, or self-coup—a power-play against the institutions of the country he was elected to lead.

Following a series of deadlocked budget negotiations with the opposition-run legislature, Yoon stunned the nation with a late-night speech declaring martial law on the flimsy pretext that the state was under threat. The move would formally put the country under military rule, suspending guarantees of free speech and assembly. Yoon sent soldiers into parliament to try to intimidate opposition lawmakers.

The power grab fell apart after a night full of drama when parliament voted to reverse the martial law decree, forcing Yoon to backtrack a scant six hours after his initial move. The near-instant collapse of this power-grab made for dramatic news footage that seemed to show a democracy spiraling into crisis. And yet, if deftly handled, the whole episode could well leave South Korea’s democracy stronger.

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The Association of Man and Woman

Whatever badness there was
sometimes
was not of us,
but between us.

Because there was goodness,
which felt like a sure base.
While badness felt only
like incidents upon it.

The badness was only
the way you and I needed to behave,
sometimes.
Not what we were.

The badness was only
a small,
transient,
insignificant
pain,
Like the tiny, instant
pain
from the prick of a rose’s thorn,
taking joy,
for a second,
away from the fragrance of the rose.

by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems From the Pond

—The title is from a poem called “East Coker” by T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets.

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Jada Yuan in The Washington Post:

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Edd Genet in Singularity Hub:

AI has become uncannily good at aping human conversational capabilities. New research suggests its powers of mimicry go a lot further, making it possible to replicate specific people’s personalities. Humans are complicated. Our beliefs, character traits, and the way we approach decisions are products of both nature and nurture, built up over decades and shaped by our distinctive life experiences.

But it appears we might not be as unique as we think. A study led by researchers at Stanford University has discovered that all it takes is a two-hour interview for an AI model to predict people’s responses to a battery of questionnaires, personality tests, and thought experiments with an accuracy of 85 percent. While the idea of cloning people’s personalities might seem creepy, the researchers say the approach could become a powerful tool for social scientists and politicians looking to simulate responses to different policy choices.

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Miranda Sawyer in The Guardian:

Vivien Goldman, the “punk professor” from London who teaches at New York University, has been involved in music from the 1970s onwards – whether writing about it, publicising it, directing pop videos, making it herself (the 1981 single Launderette) or commemorating its heroes in screenplays and musicals.

She’s best known for her punk and reggae connections: she hung out with the Sex Pistols and was Bob Marley’s PR and preferred journalist. At one point in this wide-ranging collection of her music writing, she plays Marley the Clash’s cover of Police & Thieves and, a week later, writes that she’s in a listening room at Basing Street Studios “and Bob’s voice is rolling in magical command out of the huge speakers: ‘It’s a punky reggae party…’” A movement is started, though Marley comments to Goldman that he likes “them safety pins and t’ing”, just not enough to wear them himself.

Rebel Musix is packed full of interesting encounters and memorable details, and begins in the late 1970s, when the London music scene was small enough for friendship and work to completely overlap. Goldman moved between hanging out with musicians and going home and writing about them.

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Max Roser at Our World in Data:

How far have US airlines carried passengers since February 2009? According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, US airline customers traveled 13.3 trillion passenger miles since then. “Passenger miles” are a straightforward way to account for both the number of passengers and the distance they travel. A single passenger mile represents one person traveling one mile. So, five people traveling ten miles would sum to 50 passenger miles.

13.3 trillion miles is a lot! It’s equivalent to 535 million trips around the Earth or 28 million visits to the moon and back.²

It is such a long distance that it is not unreasonable to measure it in light-years. One light-year is the distance light travels over one year — 5.9 trillion miles. So, the total distance traveled without a crash equals 2.3 light-years.³

It is hard to visualize this vast distance. In the chart, I’ve compared it with Earth’s distance from the sun.

More here.

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Alexander Durie at Literary Hub:

The Question of Palestine was published in 1979, one year after Said’s pivotal book Orientalism and two before Covering Islam—a trilogy that helped found post-colonial theory and develop a framework to critique the West’s stereotypical and often racist lens of the Arab and Muslim world. The Question of Palestine was particularly noteworthy for being the first English-language book to narrate the Palestinian experience and deconstruct Zionism as a settler-colonial project.

It remains an essential read from arguably the most influential Palestinian-American scholar to have lived. Reading it today brings reflections on how everything and nothing has changed, as Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, its bombing of Lebanon, and annexation of the West Bank continue. That is why a new re-issue of this book is so timely.

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From Time Magazine:

Toi Labs TrueLoo

Every bowel movement contains clues about your health, which is why doctors often ask patients for stool samples. Now imagine if your bodily waste could be constantly monitored, tracked, and analyzed, creating a more holistic look at your health? Enter Toi Labs’ TrueLoo, an AI-powered toilet seat that optically scans your stool and urine for concerning changes. It looks like a normal toilet seat, it fits on your existing toilet, and it’s currently used in more than 50 senior living facilities. Alerts and data are currently delivered directly to care personnel in such facilities, the company has plans to release a user-facing app. “I liken it to a team of doctors that can peer into your toilet bowl every day,” says device inventor Vik Kashyap, founder and CEO of Toi Labs.

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Iglasias and Freeman in Science:

Cecilia hadn’t expected the video to resonate so deeply. She often watched online talks about her field of research. But this one didn’t just present pioneering scientific ideas; it put into words the uncomfortable reality she had been grappling with. She was nearly 30 years old and single, and she had recently interviewed for a postdoc position that would require her to uproot her life yet again. She couldn’t ignore a growing question: whether and how she would be able to have children. The talk, by anthropologist Marcia Inhorn, explored the silent struggles many highly educated women face in balancing their careers not just with motherhood, but with what comes before: relationships and planning for a family. It was an “aha!” moment. Cecilia sent it to her friend and fellow academic Erika, who responded immediately: “Why haven’t we talked about this before?”

We’d often discussed how motherhood seemed like a career roadblock. But Inhorn’s talk illuminated something else: Many women in academia weren’t delaying parenthood by choice. Rather, they found themselves unable to reconcile their biological clocks with the unpredictable, demanding pace of an academic career.

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Tiny Garden

In the early morning light,
there is a certain majesty
to my tiny garden
………
The plants within their pots
have grown with abandon
beyond their framework of ceramic
and half-bourbon barrels
………
Tendrils reach in all directions
some hanging,
floating on the air
………
Others twisting round each other
in loving embrace
Each stem and vine and leaf
offers a gesture of kindness
and hopefulness

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Sheon Han in Asterisk:

The origin of rationalist writing is commonly traced back to the comments section of Overcoming Bias, a group blog about cognitive biases and related topics that is now the personal blog of economist Robin Hanson. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a prominent contributor, spun off an online forum called LessWrong in 2009, dedicated to the practice of “applied rationality.” Within a few years, its top writers — for example, Scott Alexander, Katja Grace, Luke Muehlhauser — had launched their own blogs, forming what became the rationalist blogosphere.

The internet of the early aughts was a warm petri dish for blogging. Compared to its contemporaries, early rationalist writings were like Crooked Timber but more left-brained, Marginal Revolution but more subcultural, and 3 Quarks Daily but weirder. Topically, there was a resemblance to Aaron Swartz’s blog archive Raw Thought — select a random article and you might find anything from a diary entry to a policy memo, a technical specification, or a manifesto.

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Robert Rosenberger in Psyche:

While behind the wheel of a car, a significant level of distraction can accompany one action in particular: phone usage. For some, this can result in severe driving impairment. It represents a serious danger hidden within the connective rhythms of our everyday lives.

Some countries have made it illegal to hold a phone while driving, effectively outlawing handheld calls behind the wheel. So have several states in the US.

Safety advocates go further and argue that even hands-free versions of calling, texting and internet usage while driving can be dangerous. And yet, it is possible to infer the opposite from the world around us. For example, those laws that ban handheld phones simultaneously allow for hands-free phone usage behind the wheel, perhaps implying that this is a safe thing to do. What’s more, the dashboards of contemporary cars are built with the expectation that drivers will be using their phones.

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Ismar Volić at The Conversation:

Americans say they are angry at the political dysfunction, disgusted with the divisive rhetoric, weary from the lack of options, and feel unheard and unrepresented. I am a mathematician who studies quantitative aspects of democracy, and in my view, the reason for this widespread dissatisfaction is evident: The mechanisms of American democracy are broken at a fundamental level.

Research shows that there are clear mathematical fixes for these malfunctions that would implement sound democratic practices supported by evidence. They won’t solve every ailment of American democracy: For example, Altering Supreme Court rulings or expanding voting access are more political or administrative than they are based in math. Nevertheless, each of these changes – especially in combination with one another – could make American democracy more responsive to its citizens.

More here.

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