From the MIT Technology Review:

Back in 1996, a quantum physicist at Bell Labs in New Jersey published a new recipe for searching through a database of N entries. Computer scientists have long known that this process takes around N steps because in the worst case, the last item on the list could be the one of interest.

However, this physicist, Lov Grover, showed how the strange rules of quantum mechanics allowed the search to be done in a number of steps equal to the square root of N.

That was a big deal. Searching databases is a foundational task in computer science, used for everything from finding telephone numbers to breaking cryptographic codes. So any speed-up is a significant advance.

Quantum mechanics provided an additional twist.

More here.

Parul Sehgal in the New York Times:

There’s a saying often attributed to the novelist John Gardner that there are really only two stories: A Person Goes on a Journey or A Stranger Comes to Town.

Which is, of course, the same story, just turned inside out. It’s the story of movement; of migration, its trauma or license, its challenge to one’s premises and moral coordinates, life and livelihood. In her Nobel Prize lecture, Toni Morrison recounted a folktale found across many cultures. A group of children visit a wise old woman, a storyteller or griot. “Tell us what it is to have no home in this place,” they ask. “To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”

“The Penguin Book of Migration Literature,” edited by Dohra Ahmad, has the startling distinction of being the first global anthology of migration literature, according to its publisher. Previous such collections have been “origin-specific,” devoted to particular diasporas, Ahmad writes; her book offers the opportunity for global comparison across history and genre. It includes excerpts from classics by Phillis Wheatley, Sam Selvon, Edwidge Danticat (who also contributes the foreword), Salman Rushdie, Marjane Satrapi and Zadie Smith, along with younger writers like the Nigerian novelist Sefi Atta and the Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo.

More here.

Olivia Kan-Sperling at Cabinet Magazine:

Six hours’ drive north of Disneyland, a building in downtown Oakland houses a kind of computer scientist’s version of the storied children’s amusement park. Its digital magic is of a less spectacular flavor, though; while Hollywood dreams of technofuturia in the style of vapory holograms, and Elon Musk promises to launch us skyward in machines of the old-school brushed-steel-and-silver variety, “Dynamicland” is composed of more modest materials. It’s neither VR, nor AR—just R. Like the early computers of the 1940s, Dynamicland is a computer the size of a room, but without the typical trappings of digital hi-tech. Post-its, magic markers, scissors, and staplers are the primary technologies programmers work with here, augmented by projections cast onto paper and tables. The room looks like a typical co-working space: bright couches, Ikea-hued tables, whiteboards. But the computer, here, is the room; its “smart” ceilings are embedded with cameras that process the visual data that constitute Dynamicland’s computer programs.

more here.

Joan Smith at Literary Review:

‘Many who encountered the actual woman were disappointed to discover a reality far short of the glorious myth,’ Moser writes in his introduction. ‘Disappointment with her, indeed, is a prominent theme in memoirs of Sontag, not to mention in her own private writings.’ It is a salutary warning to readers who have bought into the notion of the dazzling, supremely confident intellectual. Eight hundred exhausting pages later, Sontag emerges as one of those irredeemably unhappy people, endlessly lurching between narcissism and self-hatred, who leave a string of uncomprehending friends, relatives and lovers in their wake. She wasn’t even interested in personal hygiene or health, forgetting to wash, wearing the same clothes for days at a time, smoking heavily and gorging herself on food at other people’s expense. A friend once arrived late for dinner with her at Petrossian on 58th Street, only to find that Sontag had already gone home, leaving him with the bill for the ‘sumptuous, multi-course caviar dinner’ she had consumed.

So much for the gossip, but what about the writing? Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition, that it would be easy to forget the fact that Sontag was a writer.

more here.

Gundula Kreuzer at the TLS:

This focus on drama was fostered by Wagner’s upbringing, which included relatively little musical education. A painter and actor, his step-father Ludwig Geyer had taken young Richard to the theatre. Wagner did for a short while study composition in his home town of Leipzig. But he was never a proficient instrumentalist, which narrowed his path to a musical career. With what became his typical mixture of determination and cunning, he made a virtue out of necessity and simply declared the orchestra the grandest of instruments. (Indeed, he later wrote one of the first modern conducting manuals.) Above all, though, he learned on the job. In early 1833, at the age of nineteen, he began a series of seasonal engagements as chorus master and music director at various minor theatres as well as a touring company. These gave him valuable insights into the state of provincial opera performances, introduced him to the actress Minna Planer (soon to become his first wife), and opened the opportunity to mount a first operatic attempt. But he could not support the comfortable, silk-bedecked lifestyle he craved. Escaping his creditors, he spent two poverty-stricken but formative years in Paris, then the centre of the operatic world.

more here.

Elevator Music

A tune with no more substance than the air,
performed on underwater instruments,
is proper to this short lift from the earth.
It hovers as we draw into ourselves
and turn our reverent eyes toward the lights
that count us to our various destinies.
We’re all in this together, the song says,
and later we’ll descend. The melody
is like a name we don’t recall just now
that still keeps on insisting it is there.

by Henry Taylor
from Poetry 180
Random House 2003

Sophie Elmhirst in MIL:

Peter McNaughton, a professor of pharmacology at King’s College London, is a devoted optimist. He acknowledges that his positivity can sometimes seem irrational, but he also knows that without it he wouldn’t have achieved all that he has. And what he’s achieved is quite possibly monumental. After decades of research into the cellular basis of chronic pain, McNaughton believes he has discovered the fundamentals of a drug that might eradicate it. If he’s right, he could transform millions, even billions, of lives. What more could anyone hope for than a world without pain?

McNaughton, nearly 70, is long-limbed, grey-haired and bespectacled. Though he has lived in London for decades, his voice still carries the cheery cadence of his native New Zealand. He wears blue Levis and black Nikes and delights in a late-blooming informality after years of heading university departments and turning up in a suit. Now, running his own lab, he can dress as he likes. On a Friday morning in April he waited for his young team to arrive at the modern, red-brick building in south London where he conducts his research. (McNaughton is always the first to arrive.) Today the team was assembled to hear a presentation by Rafaela Lone, a Brazilian scientist, who had spent the past six months in McNaughton’s lab breeding mice with symptoms that mimic fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes widespread pain and chronic fatigue. Lone explained that her mother had suffered from fibromyalgia for seven years. Her life had been reduced to a misery of symptoms ranging from urinary-tract infections to intense sensitivity to cold. Some days were bear-able; on others she couldn’t get out of bed. “She learns how to hold the pain,” said Lone.

McNaughton looked aggrieved at this (he finds it so hard to tolerate other people’s discomfort that, when his grandchildren come to stay, he lets them sleep in his bed because he can’t bear to disappoint them). But there was hope. Lone’s slides revealed her preliminary findings. Using genetic and pharmacological methods based on McNaughton’s research, she had achieved a consistent eradication of the mice’s pain. McNaughton looked exultant: “It’s really worked spectacularly well, hasn’t it?”

His eureka moment occurred back in 2010.

More here.

Julie Sedivy in Nautilus:

Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone. He simply went to bed one night, yielded his brain to a monstrous blood clot, and was found the next morning lying amidst the sheets like his own stone monument. It was hard for me not to take my father’s abrupt exit as a rebuke. For years, he’d been begging me to visit him in the Czech Republic, where I’d been born and where he’d gone back to live in 1992. Each year, I delayed. I was in that part of my life when the marriage-grad-school-children-career-divorce current was sweeping me along with breath-sucking force, and a leisurely trip to the fatherland seemed as plausible as pausing the flow of time. Now my dad was shrugging at me from beyond— “You see, you’ve run out of time.”

His death underscored another loss, albeit a far more subtle one: that of my native tongue. Czech was the only language I knew until the age of 2, when my family began a migration westward, from what was then Czechoslovakia through Austria, then Italy, settling eventually in Montreal, Canada. Along the way, a clutter of languages introduced themselves into my life: German in preschool, Italian-speaking friends, the francophone streets of East Montreal. Linguistic experience congealed, though, once my siblings and I started school in English. As with many immigrants, this marked the time when English became, unofficially and over the grumbling of my parents (especially my father), our family language—the time when Czech began its slow retreat from my daily life.

Many would applaud the efficiency with which we settled into English—it’s what exemplary immigrants do. But between then and now, research has shown the depth of the relationship all of us have with our native tongues—and how traumatic it can be when that relationship is ruptured. Spurred by my father’s death, I returned to the Czech Republic hoping to reconnect to him. In doing so, I also reconnected with my native tongue, and with parts of my identity that I had long ignored.

More here.

Tanner Greer in The Scholar’s Stage:

In last month’s post on Chinese attitudes towards Hong Kong I had cause to mention Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier’s book The Enigma of Reason. At some point I probably ought to devote an entire post to a review of the book; its ideas are subtler and logic more involved than one paragraph glosses (or even most of its newspaper reviews) can give justice to. A running theme throughout the book, is that in experimental settings and in “real life” human capacity for reason is not optimized for the pursuit of abstract truth. Mercier and Sperber suggest that this is because reason did not evolve for that end. Reasoning’s role is essentially a social one—at the level of the individual it is not about deciding what to do, but about justifying what we do.

What we decide to do is for the most part entirely intuitive. As Mercier and Sperber see it, our decisions are the products of mental subsystems as opaque to us as the mysterious mechanisms that classify what we see as “beautiful” or “ugly,” determine what we are doing as “boring” or “fun,” and judge what others are doing as “admirable” or “disgusting.” Although his brain will supply the child with reasons for why he likes to watch Star Wars, the teenager with reasons for why she favors purple eye-liner, and the lover with reasons for doting upon his beloved, these thoughts are not the actual cause of the behavior in question. They are justifications. They are seized upon and articulated by the brain not to make us aware of why we make our decisions, but to make it possible for us to justify and explain our behavior to others.

Sperber and Mercier confirm this general thesis through dozens of experiments and lots of clever thinking.

More here.

Leila Sloman in Scientific American:

Most people rarely deal with irrational numbers—it would be, well, irrational, as they run on forever, and representing them accurately requires an infinite amount of space. But irrational constants such as  π and √2—numbers that cannot be reduced to a simple fraction—frequently crop up in science and engineering. These unwieldy numbers have plagued mathematicians since the ancient Greeks; indeed, legend has it that Hippasus was drowned for suggesting irrationals existed. Now, though, a nearly 80-year-old quandary about how well they can be approximated has been solved.

Many people conceptualize irrational numbers by rounding them to fractions or decimals: estimating π as 3.14, which is equivalent to 157/50, leads to widespread celebration of Pi Day on March 14th. Yet a different approximation, 22/7, is easier to wrangle and closer to  π. This prompts the question: Is there a limit to how simple and accurate these approximations can ever get? And can we choose a fraction in any form we want?

More here.

Yascha Mounk in Democracy:

Across the world, the right has, for the past decades, celebrated a remarkable string of successes. Far-right populists are now in power in countries from the United States to India, and from Turkey to Brazil. Even most of the democracies in which right-wing extremists remain comparatively weak are ruled by right-of-center, or at most centrist, leaders: Angela Merkel is now in the 14th year of her chancellorship in Germany, Scott Morrison was recently reelected in Australia, and Emmanuel Macron is the President of France.

In politics, one party’s gain is virtually always another party’s loss. While the right is dominant in most countries, the number of democracies ruled by the left now stands near historic lows. Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Mexico have leftist leaders. Canada might be added to the mix, though the incumbent faces an uphill battle to stay in power at upcoming elections. That’s about it.

A lot of ink (some of it my own) has, in the past years, been spilled to explain the remarkable success of the right. This singular focus has made it more difficult to understand the equally significant transformations that have been taking place on the left side of the political spectrum: the ongoing decline and fall of social democracy; the rise and rapid fall of the far left; and the recent rise of green and liberal parties.

More here.

Margaret Atwood at The Paris Review:

The Gift has never been out of print; it moves like an underground current among artists of all kinds, through word of mouth and bestowal. It is the one book I recommend without fail to aspiring writers and painters and musicians, for it is not a how-to book—there are many of these—but a book about the core nature of what it is that artists do, and also about the relation of these activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society. If you want to write, paint, sing, compose, act, or make films, read The Gift. It will help to keep you sane.

I doubt that Lewis Hyde knew while he was writing it that he was composing such an essential work. Perhaps he felt he was merely exploring a subject of interest to him—in its short form, why poets in our society are seldom rich—and enjoying the many tributaries he was uncovering through his exploration without realizing that he had hit on a wellspring. When asked by his original editor who his presumed audience was, he couldn’t really pinpoint it but settled for “poets.” “That’s not what most editors want to hear,” as he says in his preface to the 2007 edition.

more here.

Whitney Curry Wimbish at The Baffler:

Mainstream media outlets tend to skip those details when they talk about privatization, as if a corporation is a sentient monolith and not run by individual human beings like McKesson chief executive officer John H. Hammergren, who in 2011 was paid more money than any other CEO in America. He retired at the end of March and will reportedly receive a $114 million pension, in addition to other benefits worth nearly $25 million. While vets struggle to get competent treatment for depression and service members live in houses with mice and mold, Hammergren’s home, until recently, was a 23,000-square-foot compound in Contra Costa County that included a rock climbing wall; courts for tennis, bocce ball, racquetball, and squash; a car wash; and a yoga center. He sold it last year for three times the $3 million he bought it for in 1996. (He had been hoping to sell it for seven times as much.)

Government enablers of privatization hand contracts to the business class because they want their campaign contributions, and later, once they’re out of office, they want jobs and bloviation gigs. They also want public works that really are falling apart to stop being a problem for their approval ratings.

more here.

Yo Zushi at The New Statesman:

And it’s his music, and his equally affecting artwork, that Johnston should be remembered for. That’s why I’ve resisted till now touching upon what the word “outsider” really means when we speak of him. It’s a euphemism, a somewhat awkward way of acknowledging his schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Since Jeff Feuerzeig’s powerful 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, the singer’s mental health issues have been central to his myth, to the point that the knowledge of them threatens to overshadow his accomplishments. What I mean is that “True Love Will Find You in the End” is a great song – not just “great for a crazy guy”. I think Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy said it best a couple of years ago in an interview with the New York Times: “Daniel has managed to create in spite of his mental illness, not because of it. He’s been honest in his portrayal of what he’s been struggling with without overtly drawing attention to it.”

more here.

self-portrait of the apocalypse as a california sunset

there’s a turritopsis dohrnii in these waters.
locals call it immortal jellyfish b/c it reverts

to a polyp when it’s stressed or sick or old.
it can do that for eternity, living forever.

i hope i can achieve the same endless do-over &
wrap my arms around your tattooed body

when i bob to the surface like a buoy.
there was a 76ers game on one of the television sets

at the electronics store i went to last night. they
were up by five on the raptors. superstar hall of famer

absolute pimp nba center wilt chamberlain slept
with 20,000 women & if you laid all of their bodies

out across the pacific, you would have to do it over
270 times before you could reach asia. on the television set

next to that one, seinfeld was playing. & we were born
the spring before the summer it ended, the summer

everyone gathered to watch that show about nothing.
this a poem about nothing. the number one song in america

was “i don’t wanna miss a thing” because they all knew
there was so much armageddon in the future left to see.

i laugh into the ocean from the lens of the oculus rift
that my memory of you, my once-mansfield-now-japanese

sweetheart, is living in. & i think about the homeless man i
gave my half-smoked joint & leftover in-n-out fries to, &

how that warmth will last him forever. japan has already
started eroding away into the shape of ohio & america is

melting & will do so until it’s nothing. please let these
tides bring me home to you so i can be warm once again.

by Matt Mitchel
from Jam & Sand

Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin in The Atlantic:

Years ago, when she was practicing her closing arguments at the family dinner table, Martha Kavanaugh often returned to her signature line as a state prosecutor. “Use your common sense,” she’d say. “What rings true? What rings false?” Those words made a strong impression on her young son, Brett. They also made a strong impression on us, as we embarked on our 10-month investigation of the Supreme Court justice. We conducted hundreds of interviews with principal players in Kavanaugh’s education, career, and confirmation. We read thousands of documents. We reviewed hours of television interviews, along with reams of newspaper, magazine, and digital coverage. We studied maps of Montgomery Country, Maryland, as well as housing-renovation plans and court records. We watched Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings multiple times. In reviewing our findings, we looked at them in two ways: through the prism of reporting and through the lens of common sense.

As women, we know that many sexual assaults aren’t corroborated. Many happen without witnesses, and many victims avoid reporting them out of shame or fear. But as reporters, we need evidence; we rely on the facts. Without corroboration, the claims of Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez would be hard to accept. As women, we could not help but be moved by the accounts of Ford and Ramirez, and understand why they made such a lasting impact. As reporters, we had a responsibility to test those predilections. We had to offer Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt, venturing to empathize with his suffering if he were falsely accused.

As mothers of daughters, we were prone to believe and support the women who spoke up. As mothers of sons, we had to imagine what it would be like if the men we loved were wrongly charged with these offenses.

As people, our gut reaction was that the allegations of Ford and Ramirez from the past rang true. As reporters, we uncovered nothing to suggest that Kavanaugh has mistreated women in the years since.

More here.

Jay Bennett in Smithsonian:

Exoplanet science has literally opened new worlds to study, with planets populating the galaxy unlike anything in our small solar system. Hot Jupiters whip around their stars in just days, burning at thousands of degrees. Super Earths—rocky planets that are more massive than our own—offer intriguing targets to study for signs of life. One planet, called K2-18b, sits approximately 110 light-years away from Earth. It’s larger than our planet, about 8.6 times the mass, and bigger in size at about 2.7 times the radius. These types of planets are commonly referred to as mini-Neptunes, thought to have rocky or icy cores surrounded by expansive atmospheres, and in recent years, scientists have found that they are extremely common across the galaxy.

K2-18b is enveloped by a large atmosphere of mostly hydrogen, and new research, using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, reveals that K2-18b’s atmosphere also contains water molecules in the form of vapor and possibly clouds that contain liquid droplets of H₂O. The finding is the first detection of water on an exoplanet in the habitable zone, where the water molecules could be liquid, making it an exciting step toward finding a planet that could support life as we know it. “This planet is definitely smaller than any other planet water has been detected in, and it is also colder,” says Laura Schaefer, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford who studies planetary atmospheres and was not involved in the new research.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian:

I went to a school in Pakistan’s Punjab province called government primary school, Chak 2/4-L. Chak means village; 2/4-L is the name of my village, 2/4 the number of the canal feed that irrigates it, and L because it’s on the left side of the canal. Most villages along the canal had named themselves after a local legend or a landmark. We never bothered. I always assumed that our people were so hardworking they forgot to name where we lived.

I don’t mean to romanticise hard labour, but my people were always busy cultivating their land. The land was fertile, but fertile land requires even harder work: you must irrigate it at midnight and pick your vegetables before dawn. And there were rewards. If you owned two acres of land you could send your sons to university and give water buffaloes to your daughter in their dowry; if you had no acres but owned a buffalo you could still send your son to school and your daughter to a Qur’an class.

Whenever my mid-range landlord father got his occasional bout of agricultural ambition, he would use it for our character building; he would drag us out of our beds before dawn and make us pick vegetables – aubergines, okra, courgettes, all things we considered vile – and then, with baskets over our heads, make us walk to the vegetable market in the city.

More here.