Are we more than molecules?

Posted on by Azra Raza

Mark Haddon in The Telegraph:

Altered-states_1-xlarge_trans++_oqvr5xv1DI8J4mbtuVdXULDf84Rje06YPeY-hsRtRwMy son’s nine-year-old friend Yahya said it most succinctly. Why is life in the first person? We think. We feel. We are aware of ourselves and the world around us. We have consciousness. We are made of the same raw materials as bacteria, as earth, as rock, as the great dark nebulae of dust that swim between the stars, as the stars themselves. But somehow, a vanishingly small fraction of that brute stuff (you, me, chimpanzees maybe, chickens possibly, worms probably not) has been cunningly arranged into objects which experience what the American philosopher William James calls “subjective life”. How is that possible? Why do most of us feel that we are something more than molecules? Why are even ardent materialists haunted by the sense of being something insubstantial inhabiting a physical vessel? The ancient Egyptians had a sophisticated model of a five-part soul attached to an earthly body. Doubtless simpler models go back much, much further. It is a puzzle which, in its manifold cognate forms, has fascinated, divided and defined human culture for at least as long as we have been able to write about these things. What do we mean by the soul? Does it live on after death? Can we be reincarnated in the body of someone not yet born? When does consciousness begin and when does it end?

When I was nine years old I was obsessed by a question similar to Yahya’s. Why am I me? It seemed extraordinary that of all possible times and places I was born in England in 1962. It gave me a thrilling shiver to think that I had narrowly escaped one of the terrifying lives I knew children lived in other centuries and in other parts of the world. I knew, even then, that there was something wrong with the question. It wasn’t possible for me to be anyone else. I was this body. I wasn’t a blob of spiritual jam which had been squirted into a material doughnut when I entered the world. It was this life which had made me. But that knowledge didn’t drive out the conviction that I was on the inside looking out. Turning this paradox over and over in my mind I felt as if I’d stumbled on a missed stitch in the fabric of the universe and that if I tugged and worried at it for long enough I might be able to tease out a loose strand and discover what the world was made of.

More here.



The living dead: microscopic bacteria that bloom after we die unlock surprising mysteries

Posted on by Azra Raza

Peter Andrey Smith in The New York Times:

AliveNo problem in forensic science has been investigated more, and understood less, than the post-mortem interval. Medical investigators calculate the interval between death and the discovery of a body using three cardinal measurements: temperature (algor mortis), stiffness (rigor mortis) and the settling of blood (livor mortis). These factors vary depending on a person’s distribution of visceral fat, as well as their clothing, the ambient air temperature and other factors. After two days or so, though, these observations are no longer trustworthy. Schmidt keeps a copy of a statistical opus on post-mortem intervals, in which Claus Henssge and his co-authors warn against extrapolating much beyond 48 hours, but he takes an even more pessimistic view. “Post-mortem interval is one of the most pseudoscientific bits of information out there that, and I hate to use this, will never die.”

…Biologists now suspect that opportunistic micro-organisms that feed on corpses persist in trace quantities everywhere on earth. But when a person dies, the body begins to digest itself, and these mysterious organisms rapidly emerge and assemble on decomposing mammal flesh. (The microbiologist Jack Gilbert compares them to shore-bound pirates, lying in wait for the next shipwreck.) This hypothesis draws largely from a detailed study led by Jessica Metcalf, a biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who late last year confirmed that communities of the same bacteria, fungi and other eukaryotes bloomed at regular intervals after death, like a microbial clock. In dead mice and in donated human remains, under varying soil conditions and across a range of temperature fluctuations, the model predicted time of death accurately across experiments.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Minimum Wage

My mother and I are on the front porch lighting
each other’s cigarettes
as if we were on a ten-minute break from our jobs
at being a mother and son,
just ten minutes to steal a moment
of freedom before clocking back in,
before putting the aprons back on, the paper hats,
washing our hands twice and then standing
behind the counter again,
hoping for tips, hoping the customers
will be nice, will say some kind word, the cool
front yard before us and the dog
sin the back yard shitting on everything.
We are hunched over, two extras
on the set of “The Night of the Hunter.” I am pulling
a second cigarette out of the pack,
a swimmer rising from a pool of other swimmers.
Soon we will go back inside and sit
in the yellow kitchen and drink the rest of the coffee
and what is coming to kill us will pour milk into mine
and sugar into hers. Some kitchens
are full of mothers and sons with no mouths, no eyes,
and no hands, but our mouths are like the mouths of fire-
eaters and our eyes are like the million
yes of flies. Our hands are like the hands of the living.
.

by Matthew Dickman
from The New Yorker
Oct. 12, 2015
.
.

Monday, January 18, 2016

David Bowie: An Appreciation Of A Life Of Dazzling Multiplicity

Posted on by Evert Cilliers

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

I once met David Bowie in London in 1972. He was wearing a pastel-pink, wide-brimmed, floppy, very girly hat. His face was lightly dusted with powder, his lips shone with a touch of gloss, his eyes sported pale blue eyeliner.

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He was beautiful, ethereal, and otherworldly. Also friendly: an amused smile on his face, probably amused at my stuttering admiration. He seemed a creature from another dimension, a sprite, a ghost, an elf, a race unto himself. A presence more than a person. I felt I needed an unknown language to communicate with him. English would not be enough.

His smile appeared to appreciate me from a distance. He neither indulged nor disdained my admiration, simply took it. A gracious fellow. A gentleman. In fact, he was grace personified. Elegance emblemized.

Let's face it, the man had style. Like no other. He looked great, whether he was glammed out as Ziggy Stardust, or suited as the Thin White Duke.

I've related to Bowie — more than to Dylan and Lennon, my other pop heroes — because he kept changing. He showed us there is more than one way to be in the world. He made being an outsider OK. He made art out of alienation. Gender, music, identity — all was very fluid to him. I found him more congenial as a fellow creature than other stars, because he was so different, so original, and so various.

And his songwriting was pretty weird on top of being utterly wonderful — think of straight pop songs like Starman and Let's Dance, and then of really weird songs like Is There Life On Mars? and Space Oddity and Cygnet Committee.

Bowie was a freak. Who else was as freakily different and original as Bowie? And who has had such an influence on his fellow practitioners? One could not imagine Madonna without him, or Lady Gaga.

Read more »

Is there too much competition in sport?

Posted on by Thomas Wells

by Thomas R. Wells

Sports are mere games, “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” as Bernard Suits, the founder of the philosophy of games, puts it. So why do we care about them? The pleasure of sport has three distinct sources – competition, drama, and craft. Although each has their own logic and appeal, the defining characteristic of a flourishing sport is the harmonious balance it achieves between all three. In this light, the increasing dominance of competition across all sports is distinctly worrying. In the long run it may squeeze the very life out of them. The thin zero-sum perspective on sports that it embodies is already the source of the pernicious doping scandals, nationalism, and sexism in modern sports.

I

Ali-v-Inoki-001The pleasure of competition consists in the resolution of uncertainty combined with the validation of status rankings. There is a special thrill in the resolution of a sustained uncertainty about an outcome, and this is also behind the appeal of gambling. But in sport the resolution of this uncertainty is also meant to reflect merit: sporting competition provides an answer to the question of Who deserves to win? In the past, the Greeks saw the winners of sporting competitions as selected by the Gods and modern celebrations of gold medallists still echo of that. Hence the emphasis on fairness – level playing fields and anti-doping rules – to ensure the results reflect only the authentic natural merit of the contestants. The centrality of numbers – records, rankings, and numerous other statistics – also follows from this emphasis on outcomes. Competition is what makes sport exciting. It is also extremely accessible to those who know nothing about a sport (the familiar question of the noob 'Who's side are we on?') and can be repurposed as a relatively harmless expression of interregional or international rivalry, as when people identify with their national team in the soccer World Cup and go around talking about how 'we' beat 'Brazil'.

Competition – the chancing of fate and divine favour – is important but it is not the only kind of pleasure that sport can and should afford. The others though tend to make more demands on the spectator.

Read more »

Biedermeier Sunset

Posted on by Carl Pierer

by Carl Pierer

Published in 1932, Sunset Song is famed as one of the most important Scottish novels of the 20th century. As the first part in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Trilogy A Sunset-song_converted Scots Quair, it tells the story of Chris Guthrie coming of age in a rural community in Aberdeenshire. Set at the turn of the century, the novel depicts life in this traditional Scottish setting and explores how this age-old structure is transformed by the unfolding of World War I.

As a classic text, it has received much attention and suffered many an interpretation, ranging from Marxist and Feminist to humanist and nationalist. But despite many doubtful attempts at classification, the work has defied reduction and remains a vivid testimony of rural life.

Perhaps the most striking of the novel's virtues is its language. Written in a distinctive style, it infuses Standard English with the rhythm and words of Scots dialect, giving the prose a unique lyrical flavour. Gibbon skilfully and consistently uses dialectal terms to be true to his motive, without rendering the text unintelligible to a non-Scots speaker. That the melody of the text is deeply rooted in the highlands has provoked remarks of the following sort:

The non-Scot can get a great deal out of Mitchell [i.e. Lewis Grassic Gibbon], but one can sympathize with Donald Carswell when he says that he did not appreciate the prose of Sunset Song until he heard a north-east girl reading it.[i]

Comments of this kind aptly illustrate the difficulty of appreciating the literary value of the novel without sliding into dubious political territory, against the author's intent.

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A note on peppers

Posted on by Hari Balasubramanian

by Hari Balasubramanian

Black_Pepper_(Piper_nigrum)_fruitsThe Indian subcontinent is well known for its spices, and one of its stellar contributions is the ubiquitous black pepper. Native to South India and Southeast Asia (see unripe green fruits in picture), it’s been around for thousands of years, making its way very early to Europe and other parts of Asia by trade. Black pepper and the related long pepper may have been the most prevalent hot spices east of the Atlantic. That was until Columbus blundered onto the Americas in 1492, inadvertently connecting the Americas – which at the time had a unique ecological and cultivation history because of its isolation – to Europe, Africa and Asia.

In the newly globalized world since 1492, American ‘peppers’, better known as chilies, began to make their way to the rest of the world and took hold quickly. Indeed, all the chili peppers that the world uses today, without exception – from the mild bell peppers used primarily for their deep flavors to the hot ones that Indian, Thai, Chinese, Korean and other cuisines take for granted – all are descended from the varieties cultivated for millennia by pre-Hispanic farmers in southern North America (Mexico primarily) and northern South America (Peru and Bolivia have many varieties). The fiery habanero, which scores high on the Scoville Heat Scale, is originally from the Amazon from where it reached Mexico.

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On Sepulchral Culture

Posted on by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

11121225_10152734494012267_1399827233345441239_oMany months ago, I wandered along with a bunch of enthusiastic companions, into a museum for sepulchral culture. Nestled in the charming, modernist city of Kassel, Germany, we were part of a conference group discussing reproductive loss, and I suppose our hosts considered it fitting that we make communion with death culture writ large. As we flitted curiously around, and up and down, seeking shelter from the sleet and wind outside, we noted little skeletal figurines, gravestones, tombs, tombstones, and ritualistic instruments meant to ease passage to other worlds. For a museum devoted to the seemingly morbid phenomenon of death, it left us surprisingly sanguine.

The dictionary tells me that a sepulchre is “a small room or monument, cut in rock or built of stone, in which a dead person is laid or buried”. I worry at the oxymoronic, “dead person”. Other romanticized words like “crypt”, “catacomb”, and “sarcophagus” serve as synonyms for those who do not quite like the cadence of “sepulchre”. Together, in medieval-esque glory, they capture for us the stories of death, memory, and memorialization, and cultures of dying. For this we share with all humankind, in that people die. The sorrow of their loss is mitigated by cultural processes that allow us to believe that their lives meant something.

There are no sepulchral museums in India. But memorialization is seen across the length of the country, from the sepulchral urns excavated at Adichanallur in South India, to the stone circles of Junapani in Nagpur, to the evidence of pit burials in Burzahoma, Kashmir. The Iron Age in these regions marks the beginning of the creation of separate areas for the dead.

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The Insulated Lifestyle

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

by Emrys Westacott

Earlier this month I visited Florida for the first time in my life, staying for a few days with relatives who own a house in Vero Beach on the Atlantic coast. The good company, mild January weather, enjoyable outings and excellent grilled fish dinners made for a pleasant trip. My brief glimpse of this bit of the country was also most thought-provoking. Images

The house we stayed in is situated in a gated community, an extensive complex of large detached houses, each one different, but all built in a similar style surrounded by similar, highly kempt, low-maintenance landscaping–palm trees, shrubs, spiky green grass, brown bark mulch. Nearby are tennis courts for use by community residents. The gates to the complex are set back from a busy main road. Residents open them by punching a pass code into a machine at the entrance. Across the road is another set of gates leading to a private beach, also for the exclusive use of the community's residents.

One afternoon we took a walk along this beach, which was long, narrow, straight, and largely deserted. Big handsome waves came churning in, but no-one was to be seen swimming, or paddling. Nor were there any children playing on the sand. Not a bucket or spade in sight.

On another occasion I strolled all around the complex, exploring every cul-de-sac that branched off from the principal street. It was certainly peaceful. The speed limit throughout is 15 mph, and the few cars that passed me were sticking to that. There were hardly any other people on foot: in the course of an hour I encountered only one or two. And strangely, given the number of trees, I neither saw nor heard any birds. Not far away is the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge which we visited one morning to observe pelicans, herons, egrets, and cormorants. But here among the houses there seemed to be no birdlife at all. Perhaps it was the time of day, or the time of year. Perhaps the birds didn't have the pass code needed to enter the complex. Or perhaps it was connected to the pesticide warning signs that dotted the lawns throughout.

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Experiencing the moment

Posted on by Charlie Huenemann

by Charlie Huenemann

7312619_f496David Hume, that most sly student of human experience, declared he couldn’t find himself anywhere. As he gazed inward, he came across sensations, feelings, passions, and moods, but he had never come across a self in the way one might come across a vivid shade of turquoise or a lampshade or a heartbeat. He could find no “simple and continued” thing underlying his perceptions, as a bed of stone lies beneath an ever-changing stream. And so he haplessly concluded that he was nothing more than a stream, a bundle of impressions, a shifting mass of predicates without a subject. And if someone else has come to a different conclusion – if he stumbles across himself in his own experience –

“I must confess I can no longer reason with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

It wasn’t long before alarm bells went off. In an appendix to his treatise, Hume admitted he was in deep trouble. The basis of his entire philosophy was the view that distinct events are, well, distinct: it is only our thinking that combines distinct events into ideas of enduring things, into stable causal regularities, into expectations of uniformity in nature, and so on. Our minds create the universe out of the diverse. But if we ourselves are diverse – if there is no unity even in us – then how we ever be able to pull off such a trick? Without a simple and continued thing to assemble all the broken fragments into a whole, how is the appearance of a whole ever to come about? “All my hopes vanish,” he wrote, as he entered into this deepest of all labyrinths. He provided no solution, not ever, and he never wrote on this subject again.

Read more »

Sunday, January 17, 2016

How MSG Got A Bad Rap: Flawed Science And Xenophobia

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Anna Maria Barry-Jester in FiveThirtyEight:

ScreenHunter_1633 Jan. 18 11.02As a college student in New York City, I marveled that the city let me eat poached eggs with halloumi cheese and Moroccan spiced pita for breakfast, a spicy-sweet minced meat salad from northern Thailand for lunch, and Singaporean nasi lemak for dinner. My requisites were pretty straightforward: delicious, cheap and served in bulk. But if I was eating Chinese, I added one more: no MSG.

Like many people, I thought MSG — monosodium glutamate, a chemical compound used to enhance the flavor of food — was bad for me, and I was sure I felt terrible every time I ate it. After all, I was sluggish and had headaches and achy limbs whenever I ate a big meal in Chinatown. Now I know that the recurring headaches that plague me have little to do with what I eat. But at the time, avoiding those three letters brought me comfort and let me think I’d be eating some sort of sacredly pure meal made with food, not chemicals. Oh, how young and foolish I was.

That MSG isn’t the poison we’ve made it out to be has been well-established. News stories are written regularly about the lack of evidence tying MSG to negative health effects. (Read here and here, for example. Or here, here, here, here and here.) Still, Yelp reviews of Chinese restaurants tell tales of racing hearts, sleepless nights and tingling limbs from dishes “laden with MSG.” Even when the science is clear, it takes a lot to overwrite a stigma, especially when that stigma is about more than just food.

More here.

The Presidential Candidates Ranked By Their Usefulness In A Bar Fight

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Ali Davis in Bitter Empire:

ScreenHunter_1632 Jan. 17 20.4414. Ted Cruz

Let’s be clear here: Ted Cruz is not just the worst presidential candidate to have on your side in a bar fight. He is the worst possible human being to have on your side in a bar fight. And it’s not only because when he speaks he sounds like Eddie Murphy doing his nerd character. It’s that everyone hates Ted Cruz, and they hate him for a reason. Not just Democrats, everyone. Ted Cruz is famously and vigorously loathed by everyone in his own party. Fellow Republican Bob Dole has been out of politics for like 20 years and even he takes the time to hate Ted Cruz.

That is because Ted Cruz is on nobody’s side in any fight but that of Ted Cruz, and he’s more than happy to tank the side he’s supposed to be on if it will win him even the tiniest personal gain. Elderly moneyed relatives of Cruz must get distinctly jumpy when he comes to visit.

This isn’t just a warning about having Cruz on your side in a bar fight; don’t even enter the same bar as Cruz. As Cruz’s government shutdown stunt illustrates, he’s the guy who will goad, insult, and posture until you’re suddenly in a brawl you never wanted or needed to have. Once the fists start flying, he scoops the tips off the tables and weasels out the back.

Do not have Ted Cruz on your side in a bar fight.

More here. [Thanks to Kaitlin Solomine.]

The Outcome of My Clinical Trial Is a Mystery

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

As a kid, I enrolled in a study whose results were never published—meaning I'll live the rest of my life with a heart implant, but may never know how well it actually works.

Emma Yasinski in The Atlantic:

ScreenHunter_1631 Jan. 17 18.51I was 7 years old when my doctor told my parents that watching and waiting was no longer an option.

I’d been diagnosed in the first year of my life with an atrial-septal defect, a hole in the heart that sends blood flowing the wrong way, forcing the right side of the heart to work harder than it should. In some cases the hole closes on its own during early childhood, but mine hadn’t shown any change, and now my heart was beginning to grow unevenly. Without surgery, I would face an adulthood characterized by fatigue, shortness of breath, and possibly heart failure. To prevent these things, a surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia would have to slice open my chest, crack my sternum, and stitch the hole in my heart together.

But there was another option, the doctor explained: He’d heard of a clinical trial that was recruiting pediatric patients with my condition. If I were placed in the experimental group, a cardiologist would insert a catheter into my upper thigh and direct it toward the hole in my heart. The catheter would deliver a tiny, metal mesh umbrella, which would cover the hole in my heart until my cells grew over it, making the umbrella a permanent part of my body. I would be in the hospital for just a weekend, with no broken ribs, no cardio-bypass machine, and no huge scar on my chest.

More here.

String Theory Might Merge With the Other Theory of Everything

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Sabine Hossenfelder in Quanta:

ScreenHunter_1630 Jan. 17 18.46Eight decades have passed since physicists realized that the theories of quantum mechanics and gravity don’t fit together, and the puzzle of how to combine the two remains unsolved. In the last few decades, researchers have pursued the problem in two separate programs—string theory and loop quantum gravity—that are widely considered incompatible by their practitioners. But now some scientists argue that joining forces is the way forward.

Among the attempts to unify quantum theory and gravity, string theory has attracted the most attention. Its premise is simple: Everything is made of tiny strings. The strings may be closed unto themselves or have loose ends; they can vibrate, stretch, join or split. And in these manifold appearances lie the explanations for all phenomena we observe, both matter and space-time included.

Loop quantum gravity, by contrast, is concerned less with the matter that inhabits space-time than with the quantum properties of space-time itself. In loop quantum gravity, or LQG, space-time is a network. The smooth background of Einstein’s theory of gravity is replaced by nodes and links to which quantum properties are assigned. In this way, space is built up of discrete chunks. LQG is in large part a study of these chunks.

This approach has long been thought incompatible with string theory.

More here.

Scientists Pat and Peter Shaw died in a suicide pact in October. Here, their daughters reflect on their parents’ plan – and their remarkable lives

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Julia Medew in The Age:

ScreenHunter_1629 Jan. 17 18.39For as long as the blue-eyed Shaw sisters can remember, they knew that their parents planned to one day take their own lives.

It was often a topic of conversation. Patricia and Peter Shaw would discuss with their three daughters their determination to avoid hospitals, nursing homes, palliative care units – any institution that would threaten their independence in old age.

Having watched siblings and elderly friends decline, Pat and Peter spoke of their desire to choose the time and manner of their deaths.

To this end, the Brighton couple became members of Exit International, the pro-euthanasia group run by Philip Nitschke that teaches people peaceful methods to end their own lives.

The family had a good line in black humour. The three sisters recall telephone conversations with their mother in which she would joke about the equipment their father had bought after attending Exit workshops. “He’s in the bedroom testing it,” Pat would quip.

More here.