Rodney A. Brooks at Edge:

I’m going to go over a wide range of things that everyone will likely find something to disagree with. I want to start out by saying that I’m a materialist reductionist. As I talk, some people might get a little worried that I’m going off like Chalmers or something, but I’m not. I’m a materialist reductionist.

I’m worried that the crack cocaine of Moore’s law, which has given us more and more computation, has lulled us into thinking that that’s all there is. When you look at Claus Pias’s introduction to the Macy Conferences book, he writes, “The common precondition of the three foundational concepts of cybernetics—switching (Boolean) algebra, information theory and feedback—is digitality.” They go straight into digitality in this conference. He says, “We considered Turing’s universal machine as a ‘model’ for brains, employing Pitts’ and McCulloch’s calculus for activity in neural nets.” Anyone who has looked at the Pitts and McCulloch papers knows it’s a very primitive view of what is happening in neurons. But they adopted Turing’s universal machine.

How did Turing come up with Turing computation? In his 1936 paper, he talks about a human computer. Interestingly, he uses the male pronoun, whereas most of them were women. A human computer had a piece of paper, wrote things down, and followed rules—that was his model of computation, which we have come to accept.

More here.

Randall Kennedy in the New York Times:

I have been a professor at Harvard University for 34 years. In that time, the school has made some mistakes. But it has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did this past weekend. At the center of the controversy is Ronald Sullivan, a law professor who ran afoul of student activists enraged that he was willing to represent Harvey Weinstein.

Mr. Sullivan is my friend and colleague. He is the director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School and the architect of a conviction-review program in Brooklyn that has freed a score of improperly convicted individuals. He is also a sought-after lawyer who has represented plaintiffs (including the family of Michael Brown, whose death at the hands of a police officer fueled the Black Lives Matter movement) as well as defendants (including Rose McGowan, the actress who faced drug charges and is, ironically, one of Mr. Weinstein’s accusers).

More here.

Will Self at Prospect Magazine:

And it is here—at the level of physics—that the fates of the characters in The Secret Agent are truly decided: for they all—the criminal and the legitimate—run things too close, or simply let them fall. Conrad, surely, in his depiction of Verloc’s murder and its aftermath, surpassed all others—contemporary or otherwise—in his evocation of what it might be like to take a life, and the immediate psychic consequences for the killer: the complete and utter loneliness of Winnie Verloc after the murder is foreshadowed by this beautifully exact evocation of a psychic state, seen from within: “Her personality seemed to have been torn into two pieces, whose mental operations did not adjust themselves very well to each other.” A deracinated Polish aristocrat who tried to reinvent himself as a tweedy English country gentleman—the pseudonymous and multilingual Conrad knew all about being torn in pieces.

more here.

Doreen St. Félix at The New Yorker:

The works in “Darkening,” a new exhibit of paintings by the artist Lorna Simpson, at Hauser & Wirth, are monumental panels that drown the viewer in blues—some shades so potent that they are black, purple. Using graduated saturations of ink-wash over gesso, Simpson builds landscapes and seascapes that recall J. M. W. Turner or Chinese shan shui compositions. But within these views of nature she plants artifacts of culture. Thin strips of what look like newspaper text are layered into a mountain in the painting “Blue Turned Temporal,” the meaning disintegrated. The heads and bodies of models from the pages of Ebony magazine are choked in inky waters. One day, not long ago, I lost myself staring into the series’ tallest work, “Specific Notation,” which, at twelve feet, threatens to reach the gallery’s ceiling. The lower two-thirds of the canvas feature circular stains that suggest underwater rock formations. Then, as if bursting from the mineral, the head of a woman appears suspended in the upper third of the frame, her face screwed into an expression of coy glowering. By the style of her hair, and by the manicuring of her eyebrows, we know that she is a figure of recent human history. But, in Simpson’s painting, frozen in the icy blue canvas, she seems eternal, outside of time.

more here.

Jonathan Meades at Literary Review:

If I were a shrink, I’d worry about Robert Macfarlane – his dicing with eschatology, his claustrophilia, his recklessness, some of the company he keeps (sewer punks, cavist ultras, grotto mystics). But I’m not: I’m merely a repeatedly delighted fan of a true original. Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palaeontology, an ambulatory encyclopedia – save that much of the time (a dodgy word in this context) Macfarlane does not ambulate but hauls himself feet first through tunnels the circumference of a child’s bicycle wheel in absolute darkness where day, night, maps and GPS do not exist. That’s when he is not being driven at absurdly high speed through potash mines beneath the North Sea’s shipping lanes by a gung-ho security specialist or lifting a rust-flaked manhole cover to gain admittance to some nether world or trespassing in a government’s subterranean chambers. When this orphic mole comes up for air he relaxes by climbing the transporter bridge high across the Usk at Newport.

more here.

Poet’s Obligation

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying ‘How can I reach the sea?’
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of the sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.
.
by Pablo Neruda
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
Vintage Books, 1996

Colm Toibin in The Guardian:

In the summer of 1892 the poet John Addington Symonds took his lover, a Venetian gondolier called Angelo Fusato, on a tour of Britain, including visits to country houses where Fusato posed as Symonds’s manservant. Symonds’s wife Catherine and his daughter were living safely in Davos at the time. After his first meeting with Fusato, Symonds wrote: “He was tall and wiry, but very slender … he was rarely in repose but moved with singular brusque grace … Great fiery eyes, gazing intensely, with compulsive effluence of electricity … He fixed and fascinated me.” Love, however, did not transform itself automatically into art. Symonds wrote a bad sonnet in Fusato’s honour. (“Till, mother-naked, white as lilies, laid / There on the counterpane, he bade me use / Even as I willed, his body.”) When Symonds died in 1893, Fusato went to work for the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson in Venice. After her suicide the following year, he became Henry James’s gondolier, as James, who had been a close friend of Woolson’s, sought to deal with her papers. While it is not clear if Woolson knew about Fusato and Symonds, James certainly did. He was fascinated by Symonds’s efforts to grapple with his homosexuality and was, in 1896, one of the early readers of Symonds’s privately printed pamphlet A Problem in Modern Ethics.

…Naomi Wolf’s Outrages establishes the context for Symonds’s desperate efforts to justify his own sexual feelings. Since he was born in 1840, he was 15 when the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass appeared, the same year that legislation in Britain streamlined the laws against sodomy and ensured that men found guilty of it served long prison sentences. With intelligence and flair, Wolf uses the various responses to Whitman to show the levels of intense need in the decades after the publication of Leaves of Grass for images and books that would rescue homosexuality from increasing public disapproval.

More here.

Traci Watson in Nature:

Every mythology needs a good trickster, and there are few better than the Norse god Loki. He stirs trouble and insults other gods. He is elusive, anarchic and ambiguous. He is, in other words, the perfect namesake for a group of microbes — the Lokiarchaeota — that is rewriting a fundamental story about life’s early roots. These unruly microbes belong to a category of single-celled organisms called archaea, which resemble bacteria under a microscope but are as distinct from them in some respects as humans are. The Lokis, as they are sometimes known, were discovered by sequencing DNA from sea-floor muck collected near Greenland¹. Together with some related microbes, they are prodding biologists to reconsider one of the greatest events in the history of life on Earth — the appearance of the eukaryotes, the group of organisms that includes all plants, animals, fungi and more.

The discovery of archaea in the late 1970s led scientists to propose that the tree of life diverged long ago into three main trunks, or ‘domains’. One trunk gave rise to modern bacteria; one to archaea. And the third produced eukaryotes. But debates soon erupted over the structure of these trunks. A leading ‘three-domain’ model held that archaea and eukaryotes diverged from a common ancestor. But a two-domain scenario suggested that eukaryotes diverged directly from a subgroup of archaea. The arguments, although heated at times, eventually stagnated, says microbiologist Phil Hugenholtz at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Then the Lokis and their relatives blew in like “a breath of fresh air”, he says, and revived the case for a two-domain tree.

More here.

Philippe Lemoine in Nec Pluribus Impar:

Karl Popper famously defended the view, known as falsificationism, that what distinguishes science from non-science is falsifiability. On this view, a theory is scientific if and only if it’s falsifiable, at least in principle. What this means for a theory to be falsifiable is that one can think of a possible observation that would be inconsistent with the theory. For instance, since Newton’s law of universal gravitation implies that every particle exerts a force of attraction on every other particle, it would be falsified if we observed a particle that repels another particle. Since it’s at least conceivable that we could observe this, Newton’s law of universal gravitation is falsifiable and therefore scientific. Popper wants to contrast this with theories like psychoanalysis, which according to him can be reconciled with any conceivable observation, hence is not scientific.

I have often been struck, when talking to scientists, by the influence that Popper seems to have among them. I would go as far as saying that, in many scientific fields, falsificationism has become the official philosophy of science. It’s drummed into the heads of scientists when they’re in graduate school and, with a few exceptions, they never learn anything else about philosophy of science and spend the rest of their career thinking that Popper’s conception of science is still the gold standard. In fact, however, not only is falsificationism not the gold standard, but it never was.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Most of us have no trouble telling the difference between a robot and a living, feeling organism. Nevertheless, our brains often treat robots as if they were alive. We give them names, imagine that they have emotions and inner mental states, get mad at them when they do the wrong thing or feel bad for them when they seem to be in distress. Kate Darling is a research at the MIT Media Lab who specializes in social robotics, the interactions between humans and machines. We talk about why we cannot help but anthropomorphize even very non-human-appearing robots, and what that means for legal and social issues now and in the future, including robot companions and helpers in various forms.

More here.

Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

Liberalism has become a tricky and even dirty term, which may be why it is banished to the subtitle of Adam Gopnik’s supremely intelligent but tortuous polemical essay. American leftwingers nowadays avoid the adjective and prefer to call themselves “progressive”.

And just what kind of “moral adventure” does Gopnik have in mind? Amoral options abound: liberality sounds spendthrift and libertinism is certainly decadent. Delacroix envisaged Liberty as a bare-breasted free spirit storming the revolutionary barricades; Bartholdi, designing the statue in New York harbour, dressed her in a ballgown, gave her a spiked crown and made her balefully scowl. Is she a permissive mistress or an antiquated matron whose torch looks like a bludgeon?

These are more than semantic queries, because Gopnik alerts us to an emergency. “Gangster-style authoritarianism” threatens the US, Russia, Hungary, Brazil, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, while our own lying Brexiters prate about national grandeur and use “parliamentary proceduralism”, as Gopnik shrewdly says, to “corrupt and co-opt potential resistance”. Can liberal values be revived to save us?

More here.

Lev Facher in The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Barely five months after his son’s death from brain cancer, a bereaved Vice President Joe Biden announced to the nation he would not run for president in 2016 — and immediately pinpointed his deepest regret. “If I could be anything, I would have wanted to be the president that ended cancer,” he said in a Rose Garden address in October 2015. “Because it’s possible.” Biden’s announcement that he will run for president in 2020, however, has resurfaced his dream: a White House that makes cancer a signature issue, backed by a politician whose life was so publicly upended by the disease. With much of the early debate in the Democratic primary centering on health care, Biden’s stint as cancer-advocate-in-chief and orchestrator of the Obama administration’s “cancer moonshot” could give him the opportunity to make the disease, its treatments, and his own grief central to the presidential election.

After leaving office, Biden structured his cancer-fighting efforts in a way that could suit a possible campaign. The Biden Cancer Initiative — the pillar of Biden’s policy work since leaving office — raised $10 million in the year following its incorporation. The nonprofit did not accept contributions from pharmaceutical companies, in an effort both to preserve independence and avoid the political pitfalls associated with an increasingly vilified drug industry. The Bidens have fostered collaboration between stakeholders “at the foundation level, the patient advocacy level, the scientific level, and the government level,” said Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee, a Johns Hopkins researcher who sits on the Biden Cancer Initiative’s board.

More here.

When I arrived in Paris, I was nothing but a raw Caribbean. I am most grateful to that city, with which I have many old grudges, and many even older loves, for having given me a new and resolute perspective on Latin America. The vision of the whole, which we didn’t have in any of our countries, became very clear here around a safe table, and one ended up realizing that, in spite of being from different countries, we were all crew members of the same boat. It was possible to travel all around the continent and meet its writers, its artists, its disgraced or budding politicians, just by making rounds of the crowded cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Some didn’t arrive, as happened to me with Julio Cortázar—whom I already admired for the wonderful stories of Bestiario—and for whom I waited for almost a year in the Old Navy café, where someone had told me he often went. I finally met him fifteen years later, also in Paris, and he was still as I’d imagined him since long ago: the tallest man in the world, who never decided to grow old. The faithful copy of that unforgettable Latin American who, in one of his short stories, liked to walk through the misty dawns to go and watch the guillotine executions.

more here.

Will Stephenson at The Believer:

To President William Howard Taft, the most notable casualty of the Titanic was a person named Archibald Butt. “He was like a member of my family,” Taft said in his eulogy, “and I feel his loss as if he had been a younger brother.” Reading this, I feel a tinge of competitiveness with Taft, because Butt was a member of my family—he was my great-grandfather’s cousin. In the hallway bathroom of my childhood home, we had a framed Butt family crest he’d purchased and mailed home from Europe: a lion holding a broken spear. It always got a laugh, the solemnity of the image relative to the apparent stupidity of the surname: Butt. It seemed obviously ironic, like a poster you’d buy at a gas station.

My great-grandfather was Jeremiah Butt, who ran a Schlitz beer outpost in southern Georgia and died at a Lutheran conference in Nashville when my father was four. A heart attack, while he was eating breakfast. 

more here.

Mary Hannity at the LRB:

Between 1906 and 1914 hundreds of suffragettes were imprisoned and force-fed in Holloway. They turned their resistance to prison rules into a political programme. Suffragette prisoners were held separately and forbidden from communicating, but if one of them smashed a window to protest against poor air quality, for instance, the others would follow suit. They documented their treatment and smuggled out letters and diaries. The WSPU rented a house nearby, and used it as a base to communicate with the prisoners – and to throw bombs and bottles at the prison. Suffragettes were greeted on release by applauding crowds. The governor resigned. ‘If you are not a rebel before going into Holloway, there is no reason to wonder at your being one when you come out,’ wrote Edith Whitworth, secretary of the Sheffield branch of the WSPU. The imprisonment of middle-class women, which was unusual, helped draw public attention to the treatment of incarcerated women in general, and the suffragettes agitated for improved prison conditions. Davies gives ample attention to their use of Holloway as an icon of struggle: a Holloway flag was waved on suffragette marches; Christmas cards were produced with an illustration of the prison (‘Votes and a Happy Year’); there were Holloway diaries, demonstrations, songs and poems (‘Oh, Holloway, grim Holloway/With grey, forbidding towers!/Stern are the walls, but sterner still/Is woman’s free, unconquered will’).

more here.

Shraddah Chakradhar in Stat:

An unusual bit of cargo was aboard the latest Space X mission to restock the International Space Station with essential supplies in the early hours of Saturday morning. Usually, these SpaceX launches carry clothes or equipment that astronauts aboard the ISS may need to fix minor issues. But this latest launch also included tiny structures — about as big as a USB drive — containing human cells and known colloquially known as “organs on chips” were launched into space as part of a new experimental program from the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. These tissue chips are designed, with the help of pumps and other fluidics, to mimic the function of an organ. They’re used to study a wide range of diseases as well as test potential treatments. Most of the experiments with tissue chips have been confined to Earth. But in December, the first of five teams funded by the NCATS program launched an organ chip containing immune cells into space. The chips from the four other teams — roughly 50 chips in total — were packed into shoebox-sized boxes, along with all the material to help keep them going and sent along on a space capsule called Dragon. And if all goes to plan, the ISS will capture the capsule this morning. Over the next few weeks, the teams behind these tissue chips are hoping to learn all about what space — specifically, microgravity in space — does to human cells. I chatted with Lucie Low, the program manager of Tissue Chips in Space, to learn more about the mission. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited.

What types of chips are going into space? And what conditions are they hoping to provide information about?

There’s a kidney kit that’s looking at osteoporosis and the formation of kidney stones. We also have a knee joint kit that will look at osteoarthritis. Then there’s a blood-brain barrier kit to look at neurodegenerative disease. And finally, a lung kit to look at the impact of pathogens on lungs.

More here.

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet,
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Jane Kenyon
from The Academy of American Poems

Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Review of Books:

How enlightened was the Enlightenment? Not a few critics have seen it as profoundly benighted. For some, it was a seedbed for modern racism and imperialism; the light in the Enlightenment, one recent scholar has suggested, essentially meant “white.” Voltaire emphatically believed in the inherent inferiority of les Nègres, who belonged to a separate species, or at least breed, from Europeans—as different from Europeans, he said, as spaniels from greyhounds. Kant remarked, of something a Negro carpenter opined, that “the fact that he was black from head to toe was proof that what he said was stupid.” And David Hume wrote, in a notorious footnote, that he was “apt to suspect” that nonwhites were “naturally inferior to the whites,” devoid of arts and science and “ingenious manufactures.”

The more general critiques take up larger intellectual currents in the eighteenth century. The era’s systematic forays into physical anthropology and human classification laid the foundation for the noxious race science that emerged in the nineteenth century. So did the rise of materialism: it became harder to argue that our varying physical carapaces housed equivalent souls implanted by God. A heedless sense of universalism, in turn, might encourage the thought that the more advanced civilizations were merely lifting up those more backward when they conquered and colonized them.

More here.