Madrigal

More transparent
then this water dropping
through the vine’s twined fingers
my thought stretches a bridge
from yourself to yourself
……………………………………Look at you
more real than the body you inhabit
fixed at the center of my mind

You were born to live on an island.

by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems 1957-1987
Cacanet Press Limited,1988

Madrigal -original; Spanish

Más transparente
que esa gota de agua
entre los dedos de la enredadera
mí pensamiento tiende un puente
de ti misma a ti misma
……………………………….. Mírate
más real que el cuerpo que habitas
fija en el centro de mi frente

Naciste para vivir en un isla

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Jenny Odell at Longreads:

A few months ago, I was on a hike with my friend Tom, who is in his 70s and has lived in the same small town in the Santa Cruz Mountains for 50 years. Tom and I walked single-file down a narrow set of switchbacks through a canyon carved by the creek that was also our destination. Our view was hemmed in by the steep, forested walls around us. It was one of those times when you’re much more in the mountains than on a mountain, and also one of those times where someone like me could very easily lose their orientation. But Tom knew at all times where we were.

Tom told me about a way of looking that he had learned while doing horseback trail maintenance in the area. In order to prevent an accident, like the horse slipping and falling off the side of a trail, you had to look in a similar manner to the way that, he claimed, a horse looked—keeping some focus about 10 feet in front of you, but also aware of everything in your peripheral vision. He called this “soft eyes.”

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Mariana Lenharo & Edward Chen in Nature:

The tally of people with suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola in central Africa is rocketing upwards with shocking speed — from 256 cases on 16 May to roughly 1,000 as of 27 May. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), some 240 people have died — and the outbreak shows no signs of slowing down (see ‘Ebola’s surge continues’).

But specialists say that they have tools to help to control the outbreak, which is for now confined to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda, thanks to hard-won expertise gained during previous Ebola epidemics.

The DRC, which is the epicentre of the current outbreak, has contended with several outbreaks of Ebola over the years, notes Chima Ohuabunwo, an epidemiologist at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. As a result, the DRC is one of the world’s most experienced countries in handling the virus species that cause the disease. “We should be in a better position to respond” than during previous outbreaks, Ohuabunwo says.

One challenge is that there is neither a vaccine nor a targeted treatment for the specific virus causing this outbreak, the Bundibugyo species of ebolavirus.

More here.

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Scott Barry Kaufman at Skeptic:

I’m a humanistic weirdo, and as such I’m not sure where I belong in this modern culture war. I love truth and reason — I’ve built a career on them — but I belong to a humanistic tradition that refuses to stop at the head and leave the heart out of it. And these days there aren’t many of us. So when I look at the people we’ve come to call “anti-woke intellectuals”—many of whom have written for Skeptic or appeared as guests on The Michael Shermer Show podcast—I don’t see them the way either side wants me to.

I see two very different people wearing the same coat. One wants to make the world more reasonable. The other is settling a score. As a humanistic psychologist who studies narcissism, I’ve come to think the difference between them is stark, and that telling them apart matters more than almost anything else in our culture war.

How did this come about?

More here.

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Paul Seabright at the Dublin Review of Books:

The year 1776, whose quarter-millennium we mark this year, was a good vintage for documents that would last. Almost four months before the publication on July 4th of The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (sic), the publishers William Strahan and Thomas Cadell in the Strand published, on March 9th, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. A few weeks before that (sources disagree about the exact date), the same publishers launched the first volume of a projected six-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It’s surprising that subsequent historiography has drawn few explicit comparisons between the second and third of these documents, almost as if the chronological coincidence were an embarrassment for serious scholars, like a form of astrology. The disciplinary separation between history and political economy is doubtless part of the story. One of the rare books to treat both works together, Harold James’s The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton) is by a scholar unusually at home in both traditions.

more here.

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Geoff Shullenberger in The Hedgehog Review:

Ever since physicist Alan Sokal published a hoax paper in the journal Social Text in 1996 to skewer the “fashionable sectors of the American academic left,” a mini-industry of polemicists has dedicated itself to exposing the ideological excesses and intellectual bizarreries of humanities scholarship. In 2018, the provocateurs James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose performed Sokal’s stunt on a larger scale, to considerable fanfare.¹ A host of pundits have since built careers assailing critical race theory and “gender ideology.” The Trump administration is now bringing these efforts into policymaking, canceling grants based on keyword searches for terms that seem to betray a woke orientation, such as “Latinx” and “systemic,” and pressuring universities to rein in what it claims are the anti-white and antisemitic views of some faculty.

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C. Brandon Ogbunu in Undark Magazine:

Last month, I was fortunate to participate in an event hosted by Open to Debate, a one-hour weekly program broadcast on National Public Radio stations across the country, and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The participants considered the question: “Is the scientific enterprise too risk-averse?”

The preparation I did for the event was nerve-wracking, mostly because it was my first time ever participating in a debate. But I enjoyed the experience. The debate functioned like an extended conversation between me and three others from varied backgrounds who had thought about the issues. We each had our area of focus, which led to a wide-ranging discussion. But the resonant aspect of the event was in how it forced me to carefully consider big questions about the health of science, which now operates in what I and others describe as wartime. In light of that, I reflected on why science feels so culturally intransigent, and why this frustrates me to the extent that it does. The exercise prompted me to think about whether scientific risk aversion is a problem at all, why that is so, and how we can address it.

More here.

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Nicholas Low at The Point:

In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen released a document called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which he proclaimed himself a de facto spokesman of the “effective accelerationist” movement. E/acc, as it is known in online spheres, is billed as a rejoinder to effective altruism and has gained traction in recent years among Silicon Valley technologists and the new right. The fundamental idea of e/acc is that accelerating technological development is the best way to resolve most of our cultural problems. The policy corollary is that we should therefore deregulate the tech industry, especially with respect to AI, nuclear power and nanotechnology.

But Andreessen’s manifesto is not focused on policy. Rather, it is an expression of what we might call “superhumanist” discourse. By this I mean that his proclamations largely revolve around the idea that humankind already possesses the power to become superhuman, if only we could get around a thoroughly nihilistic establishment. In a section headed “The Enemy,” he writes, “Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation—the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.”

more here.

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Best Society

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired – though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it’s just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbors need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on – in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

by Philip Larkin
from Poetic Outlaws

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Mario Vittone at his own website:

The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know – from fifty feet away – what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television.

More here.

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Adam Iscoe at the New York Times:

The joke among young men these days is that everybody’s got a little money riding on something: football games, foreign elections, the odds of a U.S. military strike. Except it’s not really a joke. I recently made $3.79 guessing when the United States would attack Tehran. I pocketed $0.85 when To Lam was re-elected general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. I took home $83.64 after the rock climber Alex Honnold successfully climbed the skyscraper Taipei 101 without a rope.

My wagers were all placed on a prediction market site called Polymarket. Polymarket is sort of like the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange, except instead of buying and selling shares of publicly traded companies like Apple or Microsoft, the platform allows you to trade on what will happen in the future. Who will win the midterms? How much will the Fed cut rates next month? Will the government shut down? Well, it did — and I lost an entire month’s rent. That one really hurt.

More here.

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Lori Trahan at the Commonwealth Beacon:

Earlier this year, Anthropic unveiled Mythos, an AI model capable of identifying thousands of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser. It was deemed too dangerous for public release, but that has not stopped competitors from racing to catch up, or our adversaries from trying to access it. The speed of AI development means Mythos represents a floor on what these systems can do. The models will only get more powerful, and the risks to America’s workers, national security, and cyber infrastructure will only grow.

Despite these flashing warning lights, there is no federal law on the books governing how the most powerful AI systems in the world are built, tested, or deployed. No independent auditors verify the safety claims of the largest AI companies, commonly referred to as “frontier” labs. No federal agency has clear authority to step in when something goes wrong. While some have argued there is still plenty of time for Congress to act, I would say, look around.

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Sana Goyal in The Guardian:

Three twentysomethings “drive and dream of an impossible night on an endless street. moving as a massive through mad sticky traffic, destination: where else? manchester, wilmslow road, the curry mile, yo!” Thus opens Sufiyaan Salam’s high-octane debut novel, written largely in gen Z lowercase – and you’re in for a ride.

The Boyz are British Pakistani friends in their early 20s. Immy is “something of a bad-boy muslim slut who don’t never text back”; Khan is “the mogul mowgli himself … the type to recite Warren Buffett epigrams like they’re hadiths”; and Haris has “a mind that never switches off, philosophy subreddits doing bares”. Each is looking for an escape – from their past, present, someone else, or themselves – and they come together for one night “cruising and bruising in a hire car towards what might just be the natural elastic endpoint of a friendship beginning to fray”.

More here.

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The Physics of Angels

I suspect the world remembers everything—
time and bone and words flung together
and me in it, suspecting. If we can believe
in photons—entities that possess movement
but not mass, and if the spirit, too
is made of light—then who am I to say
I haven’t lived before—or you,
and thus this tenderness?
Who am I to doubt that grace
is elemental, like fire—or that souls
have no need of us, finally?

by Trish Crapo
from Walk Though Paradise Backward
Slate Roof Publishing Collective, 2004
Northfield, MA.

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John McWhorter at the New York Times:

If you are of a certain age, notice how you are likely using exclamation points more lately. It has become a mark of agreeability in a way that would mystify a time traveler from as recently as a couple decades ago. “See you in a bit!” “I looked for you yesterday but you weren’t there!” I now email like that.

This is part of a long story Florence Hazrat tells in “On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World,” due out in August. Hazrat takes us from when writing had no punctuation at all, through when it was invented largely as a guide to reading out loud, to today’s proliferation of marks like hashtags and emojis.

It’s a roller coaster of a story. Ancient Greek had no spaces between words, Hazrat writes, and Aristophanes of Byzantium, a librarian in Alexandria, found it cumbersome. He came up with a three-dot system to indicate how long one was to pause in reciting the text: a dot at bottom, middle and top. Top was a full stop, what we know as a period. Bottom was a brief pause, as in “comma.” Middle was if you wanted something in between, a kind of “I’m OK but just wait a sec” — kind of a semicolon. I’d like it if we could go back to that.

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Chenoe Hart at Noema:

Human-only interfaces are already increasingly being used by both people and computers. But today’s interfaces are generally designed to assume a user in analog physical space is operating them. Skeuomorphic design reinforces this by representing a computer’s internal functions via physical metaphors. We access files via folders located on a desktop. Skeuomorphic graphics often proliferate during moments of technological change; embedding references to the past within the interfaces of new products can help with “easing the transition from the old to the new,” in the words of UX pioneer Don Norman. But skeuomorphism can also conceal a technology’s true nature: As the writer Clive Thompson advocated in a 2012 Wired article critiquing the early iPhone’s imitation paper and leather-stitched graphics, lingering on outdated metaphors could mean that “we’ll fail to produce digital tools that harness what computers do best.”

As today’s computers transition into being able to perceive our world, they appear to be seeing it through their own reverse skeuomorphic analogies. AI systems comprehend physical phenomena via existing computational metaphors.

More here.

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