Ben Chu at Aeon Magazine:

Yet it’s futile to deny that the impulse to self-sufficiency – to economic unsociability – also reaches very deep into our psyches and our history. What’s most striking about autarky is its adaptability as a programme and an ideology. It can appeal impressively across seemingly opposing political, social and ideological lines. It’s been adopted, at various times, by political movements on the Left and the Right, by believers and atheists, by nationalists and cosmopolitans, by fascists and communists, by rich states and poor states, by imperial powers and the colonised, by environmentalists and industrialists. It can be justified by the objective of peace or the demands of war. Any unit – from the individual, to the household, to the village, to the city, to the nation – can apparently aspire to self-sufficiency. It can be borne of a backward-looking nostalgia – a desire to turn the clock back or preserve the status quo – or of a belief that it’s a progressive and necessary programme to build the future. Like a historical El Niño weather pattern, the drive for self-sufficiency keeps returning, unpredictably but, also, seemingly inevitably.

more here.

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Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

NEW POSTS BELOW

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grace

flit
of shadows –
geese passing above

squirrel
looks up
from a bite
of fallen apple

light comes
all that
long way
to bring
this day.

by Nils Peterson

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Luis Prada in Vice:

The scientific world has known for some time now that bats are impossible. They can live up to 25 years (some, way, way longer) and they rarely develop cancer. That is especially impressive considering how cancer is something that is almost guaranteed to happen to anything that makes it to the farthest reaches of old age. Why, though, is something we’ve never fully understood. But, according to new research from scientists at the University of Rochester, we might finally be gaining a clearer understanding of a bat’s long life and cancer resistance.

The team, led by biologists Vera Gorbunova and Andrei Seluanov, found that bats are operating with beefed-up versions of a gene we humans also have, called p53. This tumor-suppressor gene regulates apoptosis, aka cell death. The bat version of it is one tough bastard, able to swat away cancer like it was a bothersome fly. Little brown bats even have two copies of it, making them natural-born cancer killers.

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Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris.

His wife, Mette, was an independent-minded woman from Denmark. Gauguin spent his free time making art, drawing obsessively and learning how to paint and sculpt. He could afford to be “carelessly rich, gleefully opulent,” Prideaux writes, noting that his possessions included 12 paintings by Cézanne and 14 pairs of pants. “Art was his mistress. Mette was his wife. He was content.”

More here.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

This is a reported phenomenon where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the system card:

More here.

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Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

The outcome of quantum experiments is intrinsically unpredictable. Now physicists have combined that feature with blockchain techniques to generate random numbers in a fully transparent process for the first time¹.

Public sources of random numbers are used for various applications, such as lotteries, jury-duty selection and the assignment of placebos in clinical trials. A process that not only produces numbers that are truly random, but also does so in a trackable, verifiable way, can add an extra layer of trustworthiness, say the researchers who developed the new system.

Their approach builds on a quantum-physics-based technique for generating random numbers that was first demonstrated in 2018 by physicists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. It uses a device that produces pairs of photons that are entangled with each other, meaning that they share a common quantum state. The photons in each pair are sent to two measuring stations around 100 metres apart, where their polarizations are detected to produce a string of digital bits (0s and 1s).

More here.

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In March 1988, the late Israeli historian Yehuda Elkana, an Auschwitz survivor, published an explosive op-ed in Haaretz on “the need to forget.” He wrote that although he often spoke of the Holocaust to his four children and freely shared his personal recollections of it with them, he had refused to accompany them on visits to Yad Vashem. He had been reluctant to follow the Eichmann trial and he opposed the trial of John Demjanjuk, who had been a guard at the Sobibor death camp and was awaiting sentencing then. Elkana was convinced that the memory of the Holocaust had been co-opted for destructive ends, that it had been maliciously harnessed to fuel hatred and violence against the Palestinian people.

He published his piece when he did—in the midst of the first intifada, not long after footage emerged of Israeli soldiers beating bound and blindfolded Palestinians—perhaps hoping there was still time to reverse course. He explicitly argued that “had the Holocaust not penetrated so deeply into the national consciousness,” the conflict between Jews and Palestinians would not have produced acts of terrorism and abject violence; he even conjectured that the peace process might not have stalled. For Elkana, the time had finally come for the Jewish people to abandon the belief “that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim.” While the wider world could very well continue to remember the Holocaust, Israelis now had to forget: “Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoccupied, morning to night, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust.” Democracy, Elkana warned, was at risk when “the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic process”—when politics becomes a pathway for unending revenge.

The essay was an attempt to prevent his nation from continuing down a catastrophic path of inexcusable violence fueled by existential pain and panic.

More here.

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Beautiful Silence Endless Talking

If your name is Omar nobody in the town of Kash
will sell you a loaf of bread, at any price.

You go to a bakery shop and say, “Hello, my name is Omar.
I’d like some bread.” The baker will reply, “Try the shop
down the street. One loaf of his bread is better than fifty of mine.”

But if you have healed your eyesight of all duality,
You can answer, “There is no other bakery!”
The illumination of that would blind the baker
and change your name.

As it is, the bakers a Kash nod, and with tones of voice
they know, send you on wild-goose chase around town.

Once you have said your name is “Omar” in one shop,
you may as well quit trying to buy bread in Kash.
You’re not only seeing double. You’re seeing ten-fold!
And you’ll never get fed.

You move from nook to nook in the ruins of a monastery,
thinking, The next prayer-place is the place I’m looking for.

Let your eyes see God everywhere. Give up fears
and expectations. The friend, the Beloved, your soul,
is a river with the trees and buds of the world
reflected in it. And it’s no illusion!

The reflections are real, real images, through which
God is made real to you. The River Water
is an orchard that fills your basket.

But not all flowings are the same. Different donkeys
take different loads and different persuasive sticks.
One principle does not apply to all rivers.

For example, inside this river there is a moon
which is not a reflection!

From the riverbottom the Moon speaks,
………………………………………………………….“I travel
in continuous conversation with the river as it goes.
whatever is above and seemingly outside this river
is actually in it. It all belongs to the Friend.”

Merge with it, in here or out there, as you please,
because this is the river of rivers
and the beautiful silence of Endless Talking.

by Rumi
from We Are Three
Coleman Barks, 1987

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Vivien Walt in Time Magazine:

At this week’s U.N. Oceans Conference in the south of France, delegates need only glance outside the conference hall at the glittering Mediterranean for a stark reminder of the problem they are trying to solve. Scientists estimate there are now about 400 ocean “dead zones” in the world, where no sea life can survive—more than double the number 20 years ago. The oceans, which cover 70% of Earth and are crucial to mitigating global warming, will likely contain more tonnage of plastic junk than fish by 2050. And by 2100, about 90% of marine species could be extinct.

More here.

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Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist:

The cellular biology of reproduction is often depicted as an epic journey, in which millions of intrepid sperm fight to be the first to claim the ultimate prize: the chance to fertilize the egg, which has been passively waiting for the sperm to arrive. But is this an accurate picture? In a 1991 paper, New York University anthropologist Emily Martin argued that this notion was, in fact, “a scientific fairy tale.”¹ Instead of representing absolute unbiased truths, she asserted that, “The picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female.”

More here.

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Huw Green at The Guardian:

The process of perception feels quite passive. We open our eyes and light floods in; the world is just there, waiting to be seen. But in reality there is an active element that we don’t notice. Our brains are always “filling in” our perceptual experience, supplementing incoming information with existing knowledge. For example, each of us has a spot at the back of our eye where there are no light receptors. We don’t see the resulting hole in our field of vision because our brains ignore it. The phenomenon we call “seeing” is the result of a continuously updated model in your mind, made up partly of incoming sensory information, but partly of pre-existing expectations. This is what is meant by the counter­intuitive slogan of contemporary cognitive science: “perception is a controlled hallucination”.

A century ago, someone with an interest in psychology might have turned to the work of Freud for an overarching vision of how the mind works. To the extent there is a psychological theory even remotely as significant today, it is the “predictive processing” hypothesis.

more here.

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Jennifer Szalai at the NY Times:

For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris.

His wife, Mette, was an independent-minded woman from Denmark. Gauguin spent his free time making art, drawing obsessively and learning how to paint and sculpt. He could afford to be “carelessly rich, gleefully opulent,” Prideaux writes, noting that his possessions included 12 paintings by Cézanne and 14 pairs of pants. “Art was his mistress. Mette was his wife. He was content.” A stock market crash in 1882 upended all that. Gauguin lost his job and had to scramble to find a way to support his family, which soon included five children. They all moved to Denmark, where he sold tarpaulins. He found life there to be stuffy to the point of stultifying. He realized he had to leave. “I only want to paint,” he wrote to a friend. “Everybody hates me because I paint but it is the only thing I can do.”

more here.

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Dean Rader in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I begin with some questions. What is the difference between writing and drawing? What distinguishes seeing from reading? Can a painting be illegible? Can you write a drawing? In what ways can writing resist erasure and yet also be a mode of erasure? These are the dilemmas that haunt me when I think of the work of Cy Twombly, one of the United States’ most enigmatic artists.

Twombly (1928–2011) has been a polarizing figure. He is best known for his large scrawly works in grayscale, sometimes called “blackboard paintings,” that resemble the marks of a second grader trying to learn cursive and failing. The artist has drawn (ha!) admiration from some of the greatest writers and critics of our era, from Roland Barthes and Robert Motherwell to Octavio Paz and Anne Carson. Yet few artists have also been on the end of more ridicule. Donald Judd called an early exhibit of Twombly’s “a fiasco.” Jackson Arn described a Twombly series from 2003 as “too repetitively cheery to be engaging, like a bad series of children’s books.” In 1994, when the Museum of Modern Art hosted a Twombly retrospective, Artforum ran competing takes on Twombly’s oeuvre titled “Cy’s Up” and “Size Down,” in which the venerable scholar Rosalind E. Krauss and Peter Schjeldahl (who would go on to be the art critic at The New Yorker) squared off.

More here.

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Ryan Whitwam at Ars Technica:

Google wasn’t around for the advent of the World Wide Web, but it successfully remade the web on its own terms. Today, any website that wants to be findable has to play by Google’s rules, and after years of search dominance, the company has lost a major antitrust case that could reshape both it and the web.

The closing arguments in the case just wrapped up last week, and Google could be facing serious consequences when the ruling comes down in August. Losing Chrome would certainly change things for Google, but the Department of Justice is pursuing other remedies that could have even more lasting impacts. During his testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai seemed genuinely alarmed at the prospect of being forced to license Google’s search index and algorithm, the so-called data remedies in the case. He claimed this would be no better than a spinoff of Google Search. The company’s statements have sometimes derisively referred to this process as “white labeling” Google Search.

But does a white label Google Search sound so bad? Google has built an unrivaled index of the web, but the way it shows results has become increasingly frustrating. A handful of smaller players in search have tried to offer alternatives to Google’s search tools. They all have different approaches to retrieving information for you, but they agree that spinning off Google Search could change the web again. Whether or not those changes are positive depends on who you ask.

More here.

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