Cade Metz and Karen Weise in the New York Times:

As the tech industry spends and spends, turning farmland into data centers and A.I. researchers into some of the most highly paid workers in the country, it has struggled to explain what it is building and why it is spending so much money.

Are they building an A.I. system as smart as humans? A godlike machine that will change the world if it doesn’t destroy humanity first? Are they working on fancier versions of software they have been selling for decades? Is all this money going into a bold plan to create fake online friends and more effective ads? Or are they just afraid of missing out on what everyone else is doing?

Here is a rundown of the visions, from the very plausible to the fantastical and why they’re pursuing those ideas.

More here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

There are two ways to decarbonize: 1) degrowth, and 2) green energy. None of the proponents of degrowth are asking China to stop growing its economy1, and it wouldn’t matter if they did; China has no intention of slowing its growth in order to save the rest of the planet from climate change.

In fact, the same is true of the developing world. India, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America aren’t going to impoverish themselves in order to save the climate. The only way for these countries to grow their economies without roasting the planet is to replace coal and oil with solar and batteries — or to grow rich using solar and batteries in the first place, skipping the fossil fuel stage entirely.

The only way this is ever going to happen is if solar power and batteries (and other green technologies) are really, really cheap. China, India, and the rest will not adopt these technologies because Greta Thunberg tells them to. They will only switch to green energy if it’s cheaper to do so.

So if we want to save the world from climate change, the only really effective way to do this is to make green energy as cheap as possible.

More here.

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Gonzalo M. Pavés at The Current:

Bigas Luna was one of Spanish cinema’s most original directors. Drawing on early experiences in the visual arts, video, and interior design, Luna forged a unique filmography that brought together his interests as a painter, writer, designer, and photographer. His universe was singular and easily recognizable, marked by an easy-flowing Mediterranean eroticism. A sincere appreciation of sensuality runs through it, along with a voyeuristic strain of fascination with the darker sides of human sexuality. He distilled his style through the slow sifting of a broad range of influences: in his output, Andy Warhol rubs elbows with Ignacio F. Iquino, Luis García Berlanga, Luis Buñuel, and Alfred Hitchock. Traces of conceptual art, pop art, surrealism, and postmodernism can be found throughout his oeuvre. His aesthetic boldness wasn’t always welcomed or understood by critics. He took risks and sometimes capsized. But his films never lacked honesty or integrity, gathering up his dreams, obsessions, and anxieties—and a few of his small perversions.

more here.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

It’s easy to take safe drinking water for granted. In most developed countries, access to safe water takes a simple flip of a kitchen tap or a run to the grocery store. But over two billion people worldwide lack easy access to clean water, which can lead to diseases such as cholera. And the problem is getting worse as demand for water in farming and other industries increases.

One blue-sky solution may literally come from the sky. A team from MIT developed a window-sized portable device that pulls water vapor from the atmosphere. The sandwich-like contraption includes an origami-like hydrogel to capture moisture at night. As day breaks, it releases water vapor onto glass panels where the vapor condenses into drinking water. The device, dubbed atmospheric water harvesting window, or AWHW, generated a modest amount of water in different environments—including a humid urban setting in Massachusetts and the desert of Death Valley.

More here.

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Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

The idea of beaming solar power down from space might sound like science fiction, but it’s being taken seriously by a growing number of governments. A new analysis shows it could significantly lower the cost of Europe’s 2050 net zero commitment. Space-based solar power was first conceived in 1968 but largely remained on the fringes of energy policy discussions. However, as countries around the world committed to rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the idea started to gain traction. Space agencies in the US, Europe, Japan, and China are now actively developing and testing space-based solar power concepts. But the technology is still nascent and extremely expensive, which raises serious questions about whether it could truly contribute to net zero goals.

A new analysis in Joule takes a stab at predicting whether the technology could play a role in the energy transition, based on current projections. The researchers found that two designs currently under development at NASA could potentially help. They might, according to the paper, even reduce the cost of achieving a carbon-free grid in Europe by 2050 by 7 to 15 percent.

More here.

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Invocation

Architect of icebergs, snowflakes,
crystals, rainbows, sand grains, dust motes, atoms.

Mason whose tools are glaciers, rain, rivers, ocean.

Chemist who made blood
of seawater, bone of minerals in stone, milk

of love. Whatever

You are, I know this,
Spinner, You are everywhere, in All The Ever-
Changing Above, whirling around us.

Yes, in the loose strands,
in the rough weave of the common

cloth threaded with our DNA on the hubbed, spoked
Spinning Wheel that is this world, solar system, galaxy,

universe.

Help us to see ourselves in all creation,
and all creation in ourselves, ourselves in one another.

Remind those of us who like connections
made with similes, metaphors, symbols
all of us are, everything is
already connected.

Remind us as oceans go, so go we. As the air goes, so go we.
As other life forms on Earth go, so go we.

As our planet goes, so go we. Great Poet,
who inspired In The Beginning was The Word . . . ,

edit our thought so our ethics are our politics,
and our actions the afterlives of our words.

by Everette Hoagland
from Split This Rock

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Marta Figlerowicz at the Paris Review:

Shamanism defines religion as a yin-yang battle between its “shamanic” and “institutional” elements. The chaotic forces of individual prophecy, possession, and inspiration give rise to formal religious rituals and doctrines, which in turn constrict those same forces. Singh argues for an extreme broadening of what “shamanism” refers to. It encompasses not only Siberian and Pan-American Indigenous practices, whose similarities (and potentially shared Asian origins) have long been acknowledged, but also a broad and much more transcultural spectrum of phenomena including charisma, possession, mounting, glossolalia, dream journeying, catching the holy spirit, trance, and other things. These phenomena all involve inducing special states of consciousness in the “shaman,” their audience, or both, in order to communicate with the beyond: to speak with gods and ancestors, to see the future, or to discover one’s spirit animal.

Singh’s broadening of the conceptual sphere of what “shamanism” means is exciting. Hebrew prophets were shamans, he argues; so was Jesus. So were the ancestral early humans who etched drawings of hybrid human-animal beasts into caves secreted in the French countryside; so are the hedge fund managers of Wall Street and the New Age shamanistas of Burning Man.

more here.

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Jan Tumlir at Artforum:

Clever is a term that is sometimes used to describe Thomson by his detractors. In art, it carries a decidedly unflattering tone. Yet the cleverness on offer here opens every “one liner” interpretation to a radiating constellation of lines that is pretty much inexhaustible. One of these has to do with the fact that, as Rosalind Krauss notes in her 1981 essay “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” Rodin was among the first in his field to work perfectly in sync with the regime of technical reproducibility. “Now, nothing in the myth of Rodin as the prodigious form giver,” she writes there, “prepares us for the reality of these arrangements of multiple clones.”⁵ Nevertheless, it is evident that Rodin multiplied his sculptures in edition copies circulated throughout the globe, much like photographs. This analogy is central to Krauss’s argument.⁶ The connection between the dispositifs of these two media—one involving casts and molds, the other negative film and positive prints—deserves much more attention than I am prepared to give it here, but let’s keep it in mind. Another tangential line worth pursuing: Rodin made ample use of photography proper in his figural renderings. In other words, the emphatically hands-on aesthetic for which he is known took shape in the shadows of the hands-off. By the end of his life, this artist had amassed an archive of some seven thousand photographs, many of them featuring nude models, which he employed in his studio process. In addition, Rodin regularly commissioned photographs of his sculptures, thus twisting this intermedial exchange into a feedback loop.⁷

more here.

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Mirza Waheed in The Guardian:

I admired Dur e Aziz Amna’s precise and lyrical first novel, American Fever; the protagonist – an exchange student from Pakistan to rural Oregon – staying with me long after I encountered her. She has now delivered a superb second novel that features another fascinating central character, though in a much darker, more disturbing context.

A Splintering is the story of Tara, one of five siblings from a poor farming family in the hinterlands of Pakistani Punjab. This is the kind of landscape where age-old codes of manhood, with brother or son as provider and adjudicator of women’s lives, still rule. Tara, gazing at the stars from their courtyard at night, wants to get away from the squalor of Mazinagar (literally, past city), where most people live and die unnoticed, and build a life full of money and possessions in the city. She has no romantic notions about the soporific countryside. “I have no nobility. I come from darkness and filth.”

Tara marries an unambitious accountant from the city and quickly absorbs the mores of urban life, but wants more and more every day, for her children and for herself, and finds she is willing to do anything for it.

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David Chaffetz at the Asian Review of Books:

Some myths take longer to die than others. For students of equine history, the passion that these animals inspire in their owners and breeders often act as a veil, impenetrable for scientists and historians trying to get to the facts. In Horses, Ludovic Orlando, who has been gathering the facts jaw bone by jaw bone for two decades, deploying the latest technology, appears to have pierced the veil, finally, though with many a surprising turn to keep the readers on edge, as though enjoying a detective novel.

Many of the stories told here have appeared in scientific magazines since the publication of “The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes” in Nature magazine, in 2021. Orlando enlivens these stories, however, by describing his travels to and from England, to the steppes of Kazakhstan and on to the Siberian tundra, where he has his fruitful encounters with colleagues, including William Taylor, Pablo Librado, Alan Outram and Pavel Kuznetzov.

More here.

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P.E. Moskowitz at Literary Hub:

In Urban Fortunes, their foundational work on the economies of cities, urban theorists John Logan and Harvey Molotch argue that the people running American cities no longer care about affordability, a city’s ability to educate children, or the happiness and health of its residents; rather, they are only interested the amount of money a city is able to generate. This focus is not the result of a philosophical bug that’s somehow spread to the brains of city managers everywhere. People such as Richard Florida make the city-as-business philosophy seem appealing, but there’s something bigger going on. Logan and Molotch argue that the city-as-growth-machine is an inherent feature of late capitalism in the United States. Cities, more than being places for people to live, have become ways to produce, manage, attract, and extract capital.

Under capitalism, there’s an inherent tension between what Marxist academics call “use value” and “exchange value.”

More here.

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Ian Thomson at The New Statesman:

Arvo Pärt, the pre-eminent religious composer of our time, was born in 1935 in Estonia, before its Soviet occupation. His music suggests the contemplative devotion and purity of Gregorian plainchant and Renaissance church chorale, though it could only have been written today, being at once archaic and abstract-modern. With its sense of stasis and light, the music reflects the immensity of the Baltic landscape and Estonia’s own forested plains. Under communism, Pärt fell foul of the Soviet censors as his music defied official atheism. His work is shaped by his Eastern Orthodox faith; it is a form of prayer.

Pärt, who turned 90 on 11 September, has retired from public life and ceased to compose. He can still occasionally be glimpsed at the Arvo Pärt Centre, a beautiful glass-encased building that opened in 2018 on the edge of a pine forest close to Tallinn, Estonia’s capital.

more here.

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Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist:

Life begins with music. The human body provides the basic musical elements for the soundtrack to fetal development. The rhythmic pulsing of mom’s heartbeat, the rise and fall of her footsteps, the steady rush of her breathing and circulation, the pitch and melody of her voice, and the rumbling staccatos of her digestion all prime the developing fetus to recognize and respond to music postnatally.^1,2 Womb sounds shape brain development, form the basis of future language and communication, and program musical dialects into the fleshy enclaves of the body.

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Elie Dolgin in Science:

Mischel’s first curious observation had to do with how quickly glioblastomas adapted to treatment. Within a week or two, tumors that had once bristled with extra copies of the receptor gene, EGFR, shed most of them. That kind of genomic shift should have unfolded gradually, over successive rounds of cell division. Instead, it happened with unsettling speed. Stranger still, cells that had seemingly rid themselves of EGFR retained the uncanny ability to bring it roaring back, spawning new tumors with high gene expression as soon as the drug pressure lifted. It was like watching a doused fire suddenly reignite from cold ash.

“The tumors were changing their genomes way too quickly,” says Mischel, a neuropathologist and cancer biologist now at Stanford Medicine. “It was a colossal scratching of heads.” The mystery deepened when David Nathanson, a trainee in Mischel’s lab, began to examine glioblastoma cells under the microscope. He stained chromosomes blue; EGFR was tagged in red. He expected the red signals—the extra copies of EGFR—to align neatly along the blue chromosomes. What appeared instead was chaos: scattered red dots drifting across the nucleus, unmoored from any chromosomal structure. “It was really crazy to see,” says Nathanson, now a brain cancer biologist at the University of California (UC), Los Angeles.

More here.

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