To the Young Who Want To Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.
Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

by Gwendolyn Brooks
from Poetic Outlaws

Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

Many people view forgetting as an inconvenience, and if it occurs extensively, they associate it with neurodegenerative diseases. However, some evidence suggests that nonpathological forgetting is an adaptive and active part of learning and memory maintenance.¹ “The environment is changing, and to adapt to an environment that is constantly changing, we need to update our memories; and updating our memories also means forgetting,” said Livia Autore, a neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Tomás Ryan at the Trinity College Dublin and author of a study published in Cell Reports.² The findings indicate that forgetting is an active process that is important for the ability to remember and that it serves as a basis for understanding altered memory capacity.

The physical component of a memory consists of activated neurons and synapses formed during an event, collectively called an engram.³ To study changes in engram cells during forgetting, Autore’s team labeled neurons in the hippocampus with an adeno-associated virus cocktail that marked engrams formed during training experiences as well as all activated neurons during the testing phase.  Autore’s group then set up an object context training experiment in which mice explored one set of objects, for instance, a pair of small water bottles, in a chamber with a pattern of triangles on the wall to provide contextual information. An hour later, the researchers exposed the mice to a different pair of objects, like small statues, in a different chamber with striped walls as interference.

More here.

Rachel Syme at The New Yorker:

There are plenty of distinguished bloodlines in the history of Hollywood—the Selznicks and the Mayers, the Warners, the Hustons, the Bergman-Rossellinis, the Fondas—but very few, like the Coppolas, in which one famous director has spawned another. After an early life spent in front of the camera, Sofia Coppola made a career behind it, becoming one of the most influential and visually distinctive filmmakers of her generation, with eight features to her name. Her second, “Lost in Translation,” from 2003, earned her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and a nomination for Best Director, making her the first American woman recognized in that category. Her career, of course, has been bolstered by an unusual wealth of resources. Francis’s company, American Zoetrope, has been a producer on all her movies. When she made her début, “The Virgin Suicides,” in 1999, she was able to cast an established star, Kathleen Turner, with whom she’d appeared as a teen-ager in her father’s movie “Peggy Sue Got Married.” She got permission to shoot “Somewhere,” her fourth film, inside the clubby Hollywood hotel the Chateau Marmont because in her youth she was a regular there, and even had a private key to the hotel pool. Still, no director can get a project green-lighted at a snap of the fingers, especially in today’s franchise-glutted Hollywood, and especially as a female director in an industry that remains dominated by men. Coppola is self-aware enough to know that it would be bad manners for someone in her position to complain. But she told me, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”

more here.

Beatrice Loayza at The Current:

In the 1996 television documentary Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, the Belgian filmmaker describes the life of her maternal grandmother, Sidonie Ehrenberg, an aspiring artist. As a wife and mother living in Poland, Ehrenberg painted despite the gendered restrictions imposed upon her by her Orthodox Jewish milieu. After the Nazis invaded the country, Ehrenberg was sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed in 1942 along with her husband. Her daughter Natalia survived; she was still a teenager when the camps were liberated. Ehrenberg’s artworks were never found after the war, yet Natalia, Akerman’s mother, preserved something of them in her memories of childhood. Ehrenberg used enormous canvases, and her subjects were straightforward: women’s faces gazing outward, “and that’s all,” Akerman explained in the documentary.

The genius and audacity of Akerman’s work lies in its recognition that such seemingly unremarkable images contain bounties, and that marginalized lives like Ehrenberg’s, decimated by time and silenced by tragedy, possess spectral qualities that, until Akerman began making films, had yet to be evoked in any art form.

more here.

Thinking Thought

“Oh, soul,” I sometimes—often—still say when I’m trying to convince
………. my inner self of something.
“Oh, soul,” I say still, “there’s so much to be done, don’t want to stop
………. to rest now, not already.
“Oh, soul,” I say, “the implications of the task are clear, why procras-
……….. tinate, why whine?”
All the while I know my struggle has to do with mind being only some-
……….. times subject to the will,
that other portion of itself which manages to stay so recalcitrantly, ob-
……….. stinately impotent.
“Oh, soul, come into my field of want, my realm of act, be attentive to
………. my computations and predictions.”
But as usual soul resists, as usual soul retires, as usual soul’s old act of
………. dissipation and removal.
Oh, the furious elusive unities of want, the frail, false fusions and dis-
………. cursive chains of hope.

C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994

Cassandra Willyard in Nature:

Back in 2001, immunologist Pere Santamaria was exploring a new way to study diabetes. Working in mice, he and his collaborators developed a method that uses iron oxide nanoparticles to track the key immune cells involved in the disorder.

But then Santamaria, who is at the University of Calgary in Canada, came up with a bold idea. Maybe he could use these particles as a therapy to target and quiet, or even kill, the cells responsible for driving the disease — those that destroy insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas. It seemed like a far-fetched idea, but he decided to try it. “I kept doing experiment after experiment,” he says. Now, more than two decades later, Santamaria’s therapy is on the cusp of being tested in people.

It’s not alone. Researchers have been trying for more than 50 years to tame the cells that are responsible for autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes, lupus and multiple sclerosis. Most of the approved therapies for these conditions work by suppressing the entire immune response. This often alleviates symptoms but leaves people at elevated risk of infections and cancers.

More here.

Edgar Dubourg, Valentin Thouzeau, Thomas Beuchot, Constant Bonard, Pascal Boyer, et al, in a new paper:

We hypothesize that fictional stories are highly successful in human cultures partly because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a comprehensive framework to study fiction through this evolutionary lens.The primary goal of this framework is to carve fictional stories at their cognitive joints using an evolutionary framework. Reviewing a wide range of adaptive variations in human psychology–in personality and developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines –, this framework also addresses the question of interindividual differences in preferences for different features in fictional stories. It generates a wide range of predictions about the patterns of combinations of such features, according to the patterns of variations in the mechanisms triggered by fictional stories. As a result of a highly collaborative effort, we present a comprehensive review of evolved cognitive mechanisms that fictional stories activate.To generate this review, we (1) listed more than 70 adaptive challenges humans faced in the course of their evolution, (2) identified the adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to such challenges, (3) specified four sources of adaptive variability for the sensitivity of each mechanism(i.e., personality traits, sex, age, and ecological conditions), and (4) linked these mechanisms to the story features that trigger them. This comprehensive framework lays the ground for a theory-driven research program for the study of fictional stories, their content, distribution, structure, and cultural evolution.

More here.

Jeremiah Johnson at Asterisk:

Some of the largest and most notable prediction markets to date have been around elections. The only problem? Prediction markets simply aren’t very good at political predictions. Markets for major U.S. elections are some of the deepest prediction markets anywhere: billions of dollars bet, millions of daily trades, and huge amounts of press. In theory, the larger the market, the more accurate the predictions. But in the markets with the biggest spotlight, we see a lot of strange stuff. Predictions that don’t line up with common sense. Odds that seem to defy reality. Obviously noncredible market movements. To figure out why, we’ll have to explore the underlying mechanisms that make markets work, and why the typical user of political prediction markets may not behave in the ways we expect.

More here.  Scott Alexander’s comments on this article here.

Adrian Searle at The Guardian:

Coming upon an Andre as you turn a corner in a gallery can be a lovely surprise. But for all the smaller controversies it has generated, it has become almost impossible to look down at Andre’s bricks, to tread his floors of metal plates, or gaze at his constructions of cut ash and cedar timbers, without thinking of the death of the young Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, Andre’s third wife, who died in a fall from Andre’s 34th floor apartment in lower Manhattan, one night in September 1985.

The two had been drinking, and were alone. Neighbours had heard them arguing. Mendieta was 36, and they had been married eight months. Two days later Andre was charged over her death. He was never found guilty. After Mendieta’s death, Andre’s career faltered. He was called “the OJ of the art world”, in reference to OJ Simpson, and his shows were picketed. At one New York opening, more than 500 protesters showed up with placards reading “Where is Ana Mendieta?”

more here.

Joseph Horowitz at The American Scholar:

The biggest recent find in classical music was the discovery that in 1940, Sergei Rachmaninoff was privately recorded by the conductor Eugene Ormandy. Seated at Ormandy’s piano, he played through his new Symphonic Dances, which Ormandy would soon premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Singularly, Rachmaninoff never permitted his public performances to be broadcast—so this surreptitious home recording is the best evidence we have of what Rachmaninoff’s legendary pianism sounded like outside the confines of recording studios sucked clean of the oxygen a body of listeners can activate.

Rachmaninoff’s RCA recordings are justly famous. They document his imperious, interpretive mastery, embellished with miracles of color and texture. But they are also emotionally controlled. When we eavesdrop on Rachmaninoff playing privately for Ormandy, the cork is out of the bottle: his keyboard presence surges with cataracts of feeling and sound. (It’s all documented in a three-CD set, Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances, issued in 2018 on the Marston label.)

more here.

Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

Forbidden Desire, Noel Malcolm’s sober and footnote-heavy history of male homosexuality between 1400 and 1750, has some friskier bedfellows: on Amazon it shares its title with a slew of hairy chested bromances, one or two Sapphic romps, and a sulphurous tale about a witch’s affair with a tormented demon. Against such competition, Malcolm fields a cast that includes lustful Turkish potentates, predatory Catholic priests, corruptible scullions and smooth-cheeked choristers, together with two English kings who allegedly fooled around with virile young favourites. But mostly the sodomites, as Malcolm grimly insists on calling them, are left to satisfy their desires in private; the historian’s concern is the forbidding religious commandments that the same-sex couples flouted and the crazily brutal penalties imposed by laws that purported to uphold the divine order of the universe.

Sex here seems to be followed, almost automatically, by excruciating death. In the 15th century, sodomy in Venice was punished by decapitation, after which the corpses of the malefactors were burned to ensure that no trace of them remained. Because it was unlawful to kill an ordained man, a lecherous cleric was locked in a cage in the Piazza San Marco and left to starve in full view of a gloating populace. In Florence a boy aged 15 was castrated on the scaffold, then fatally sodomised with a hot iron poker. A Dutch youth placed in the pillory was pelted with filth and bombarded with stones, which finally finished him off. Others were sentenced to row themselves to death as galley slaves; the lucky ones, in a bizarre act of mercy, had their noses, not their heads or penises, chopped off.

More here.

From Nature:

For the past decade, Collinge and his team have studied people in the United Kingdom who in childhood received growth hormone derived from the pituitary glands of cadavers to treat medical conditions including short stature. The latest study finds that, decades later, some of these people developed signs of early-onset dementia. The dementia symptoms, such as memory and language problems, were diagnosed clinically and in some patients appeared alongside plaques of the sticky protein amyloid-beta in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. The authors suggest that this amyloid protein, which was present in the hormone preparations, was ‘seeded’ in the brains and caused the damage.

The work builds on the team’s previous studies of people who received cadaver-derived growth hormone, a practice that Britain stopped in 1985. In 2015, Collinge’s team described² the discovery of amyloid-beta deposits in the post-mortem brains of four people who had been treated with the growth hormone. These people had died in middle-age of the deadly neurological condition Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is caused by infectious, misfolded proteins called prions. The prions were present in batches of the growth hormone. The four people analysed in that study died before clinical signs related to the amyloid build-up might have been observed. But the presence of these amyloid plaques in blood vessels in their brain suggested they would have developed a condition called cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) — which causes bleeding in the brain and is often a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease.

More here.

by Terese Svoboda

The first video portapacks arrived in the 1970s, cameras that skipped the lab and allowed the cameraman to be mobile, but they were so expensive only those who had connections with a TV station could experiment with them. Or if you had a rich aunt who needed to document a wedding, sometimes exorbitant rentals were available. Those with the ties to TV stations became the pioneers of art video. The rest of us painfully wove our laurels out of what could be cadged or granted. The tech, always changing, improved year by year, as did access and the imagery. We were offered new ways to think about color, resolution, and the translation of experience to video. Seeing invention at work as each new video tool appeared – sometimes developed by the artists themselves – was thrilling.

I’m reminded of that thrill every time I read the rather pedestrian-sounding Green Car Reports, a daily survey of the wildly innovative engineering teams who are pushing the market to accept what’s going to save the planet. Not that experimental video had quite that lofty aim, not even the neighborhood verite cable programs were that high-minded, but early video did require persuasive skill and constant tech fooling around in order to share the fruits of our clumsy innovations.

I don’t own a car. Never have I taken the slightest bit of interest in cars. I couldn’t tell a Chrysler from a GTO. Whoops! Are they the same? But about a decade after I weaned myself off video tech – tiring, at last, of always having to learn new skills  – I became fascinated with the Jetson-future-feeling surrounding electric cars. Once again I could see invention unfolding with a capital I, creation in battle with capitalism trying to outrace the death of the planet. Like Nikola Tesla vs. Edison quarreling over AC vs. DC power, only we’re all going over Niagara Falls.^[1] Read more »

Paul Bloom at Small Potatoes:

Why do we enjoy showing and sharing?

Showing first. A certain sort of evolutionary psychologist (like me, on some days) would point out that, when properly done, showing impresses others. It’s similar to making people laugh or surprising them with a sharp observation. Maybe we enjoy showing, then, because it raises our status. It makes us more desirable as a friend, partner, or lover.

A different, but compatible, explanation applies to both showing and sharing. It involves empathy, and like many clever thoughts about empathy, it comes from Adam Smith.

More here.

Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. The authors argue that as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, they improve on individual language-related abilities and also develop new ones by combining skills in a manner that hints at understanding — combinations that were unlikely to exist in the training data.

This theoretical approach, which provides a mathematically provable argument for how and why an LLM can develop so many abilities, has convinced experts like Hinton, and others. And when Arora and his team tested some of its predictions, they found that these models behaved almost exactly as expected. From all accounts, they’ve made a strong case that the largest LLMs are not just parroting what they’ve seen before.

More here.

Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

One unfortunate feature of American politics is that both Republicans and Democrats tend to work themselves into a frenzy over the other party’s presidential candidate, no matter who it is. To put it bluntly, both sides cry wolf all the time. Yes, I am a Democrat, but Democrats do this too — I’m old enough to remember when people I knew went crazy over poor old Mitt Romney saying that he had “binders full of women”, denouncing him as a sexist when all he meant to say was that he personally knew lots of highly skilled women in the business world.

Anyway, because we cry wolf all the time in American politics, it’s easy to dismiss criticisms of Trump as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. And indeed there are some people out there who see everything Trump does and says as a harbinger of imminent fascism and atrocity. I know some of them. In 2017 a Google engineer bet me $1000 that Trump would commit genocide by 2020; when I won the bet, I had him send the $1000 to a rabbit rescue. (I just wish I had bet him more.)

But I do not have Trump Derangement Syndrome. As proof, let me list a few important things that Trump got right.

More here.