by Joseph Shieber

One of the tropes of the Covid-19 era is to revisit predictions made earlier in the pandemic, either to issue a mea culpa or to issue a self-congratulatory reminder to oneself or one’s readers about a successful prediction.

The past week or so has witnessed a flood of those sorts of posts centered around the question of whether Covid-19 might have escaped from a laboratory rather than from a “local seafood market” in Wuhan, China.

Given the fact that this was only the most recent example in which some prominent scientific figures seemed to retract what had previously been treated as consensus, I nervously revisited my 3QD post from May 4, 2020, “Let’s Not Allow Our Renewing Trust in Science to Become the Latest Victim of Covid 19”.

In particular, I was concerned that my pushback against appeals to “Trust the Science” would not fit well with this additional evidence of the way in which scientists sometimes arrive at tentative results that are later called into question.

For example, I was critical of the worry that appeals to “Trust the Science” might

… set the stage for shifting blame onto scientific experts should the political decisions lead to poor outcomes. For example, [an article in The Guardian quotes] University of Edinburgh political scientist Prof Christina Boswell as worrying that, “If things go wrong … it will be [painted as being] the scientific advice that is to blame.”

Having reread that May 4 post, however, I have to admit that I think it has aged pretty well. In order to say why, though, I’ll have to dig a bit deeper into the current “Lab-Leak Controversy”. Read more »

Helen Marden. Raja Ampat, 2018.

Resin, acrylic, powered paint, and abalone shells on linen.

More here and here.

by Raji Jayaraman

I know someone—I’ll call him by his initials, KR—who is a Modi supporter. I have known KR for as long as I can remember. He is an intelligent, well-educated, well-travelled man. Now retired, he has a successful career behind him. He is Hindu, but he actively participated in the traditions and practices of other religions. Personally, I have great affection for him. Politically, we are now like oil and water. I usually avoid discussing politics with him because it inevitably ends in an argument: his view of Prime Minister Modi couldn’t be further from mine. In order to understand why people like him continue to support Modi—even now, as India is ravaged by the pandemic—I did something that I hadn’t done before. I asked him, and I listened without arguing.

I have struggled to organize our hours-long conversation, but I think it can be distilled into three broad themes. The first is extraordinary reverence for Modi, which results in almost unconditional support for his policies. The second is visceral contempt for the opposition Congress party. The third is a suspicion of Muslims in today’s India. Although I mention this third theme, I will not discuss it in this essay because its perplexity warrants a separate treatment. Here, I focus on the first two themes.

First, the man himself: “People support Modi because of his honesty, integrity, and nationalism. Modi is not corrupt. He is not interested in personal wealth. He is a man of integrity and he expects that of the people around him. Modi is a shrewd politician too. He has extraordinary oratory capacity and his level of absorption of facts is amazing. When I say he is a nationalist, I mean that he is interested in the nation as a whole. He is interested in India’s welfare. He has powerful ideas. His policies [such as providing latrines and bank accounts] are aimed at development for the whole nation. Everything he has done, he has done for all Indians.” Even Modi’s fiercest critics would probably agree that he is not interested in amassing personal riches, and is a gifted politician and orator. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Robyn Repko Waller

In April, many watched in awe as Elon Musk’s Neuralink demonstrated how Pager the rhesus monkey can play the video game Pong using only the power of thought. No bodily movements required. That is, he can control the virtual paddle with his mind. How? The researchers at Neuralink have fitted Pager with a brain-computer interface (BCI) — in this case, around 1000 fine-wire electrodes have been fitted onto Pager’s motor cortex via surgery. A decoding algorithm trains on neural activity data from Pager’s playing Pong the good old fashioned way, with a joystick. Later, the joystick is disconnected, and when Pager merely thinks about moving the paddle via the joystick in response to the virtual bouncing ball, the technology uses his decoded motor intentions to issue in digital commands to move the virtual paddle. (His reward for playing? A delicious smoothie.) He’s really good at Pong. So good that he’s been challenged to a game of Mind Pong by a human with a BCI. 

Notably, such technology has been around in experimental and clinical settings for some time. To take another recent success, BCI has been used to produce text at a comparable speed to smartphone texting. A man who is paralyzed from the neck down was fitted with micro electrodes in his motor cortex. A recurrent neural network trained on neural activity data from the hand region of his premotor cortex while he imagined grasping a pencil and writing letters, a form of motor imagery. Using this method, the participant was able to “write” with minimal lag by imaging letters at the rate of ninety characters per minute with greater than 99% accuracy with autocorrect, a significant improvement over previous BCI feats of 40 characters per minute using point and click typing.  Read more »

The supermoon of 25 May rises above Plose in the South Tyrol.

by Jackson Arn

It was my husband’s idea to steal the boxes—he’s the daring half of our compound brain. He spends most of the day drafting letters to committees worldwide, never emails. Education has always been important to him. His parents saw to it that he learned something about everything. Now he sits in bed, surrounded by crumbs and gray paper. His hands are straight as they accept food. His eyes contract with gratitude. After meals he tells me things he remembers from his education, mostly architecture. Between these facts he gives advice for making extra money or saving it.

He used to work at the Target-on-the-hill, which is how he knew I could get away with box theft. It took him months to confess his place of work, and even after that it took me months to understand that he was a workman, not a manager. When he admits to something embarrassing, he adds a few facts to numb the sting. In this case, he said things about the structural integrity of the building. At least a dozen extra floors could be added safely, floors of shopping and storage, thousands of tons of concrete, flesh, cardboard. Middle management would have to hire at least a hundred new independent contractors, at 35 hours a week with no benefits. His pupils swelled with the thought of so much growth bought so cheap, and I assumed he was upper-middle management or middle management, or at least owned stock.

A few days after we moved in together, my husband told me about the secret plan to grow the Target-on-the-hill higher. There would be three new floors, not twelve, but that was just for now. Targets evolve slowly. There would be a grand reopening, and another grand reopening a year or two from now, and so on until some limit was struck. Three days later, the drilling commenced. The foundations had to be pressed deeper, more concrete had to be poured. Read more »

by R. Passov

Over the course of the Apollo missions, two criteria governed the role of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC): 1) A program built into the AGC had to be absolutely necessary to the mission and; 2) it had to be without doubt that the computer bested humans in performing the task. One person stood at the center of every tradeoff.

On October 17th, 1966, Bill Tindall, Deputy Chief, Mission Planning and Analysis, released the delivery dates for the “manufacturing of the computer programs” that would guide the Apollo spacecrafts to the moon.

Described in a 1965 NYT article as an “Unassuming 40-year-old engineer on the ground,” Tindall’s job was to arbitrate between Mission Control’s evolving list of program objectives, the demands of the astronauts, the capabilities of a lab at MIT, and the fixed capacity of the Apollo Guidance Computer. When he felt the best tradeoffs had been reached, the pattern of bits representing the output of negotiations was sent to a factory.

Inside the factory, women sat in front of rectangular grids containing thousands of magnetic rings, an eighth of an inch in diameter. Copper wires were passed either between or around each ring. Each wire represented a ‘bit’ – an instance of a ‘1’ or a ‘0’ – and each bundle of sixteen wires, or Rope, a ‘word’ in permanent memory. Read more »

by Michael Liss

My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me. —Benjamin Disraeli

John Adams was not the kind of man who easily agreed, and it showed. Nor was he the kind of man who found others agreeable. Few have accomplished so much in life while gaining so little satisfaction from it. When you think about the Four Horsemen of Independence, it’s Washington in the lead, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and, last in the hearts of his countrymen, John Adams. You could add to that mix James Madison and even the intensely controversial Alexander Hamilton, and, once again, if you were counting fervent supporters, Adams would still bring up the rear.

He was an exceptionally talented man, willing to take up unpopular causes, to assume enormous personal risks. He was also dedicated, patriotic, and just a royal (in the “democratic” sense of the word) pain. Of Adams, Franklin once said, “I am persuaded however that he means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”

Adams knew it as well. He understood both his flaws and his place in the firmament. He wrote to his friend Benjamin Rush: “The Essence of the whole will be that Dr Franklins electrical Rod, Smote the Earth and out Spring General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his Rod—and thence forward these two conducted all the Policy Negotiations Legislation and War.”

Nevertheless, after eight years of being George Washington’s loyal (but largely unheeded) Vice President, he had just enough support to be elected to succeed him in 1796. As much as he wrestled with his own ego and even his insecurities, he (and Abigail) thought he had earned it, and he had. Read more »

On Dystopian Ships of State

I’m on a big boat
(which the nautically savvy
call ship)

if this ship’s a cocooned
load of light atmosphere
its steel will float, but it will tip
if its load’s unbalanced—
if its equilibrium is off
it’ll start to list—
if not adjusted
it’ll end a sacrificial goat,
sucked to bottom by
sodden politics
as History and Neptune’s
universal laws will have
directed and
insist
.
Jim Culleny
1/13/15, rev 5/23/21

by Jurczok 1001

The article below was published in German on Mother’s Day in Republik, in a year that marks the 50^th anniversary of Swiss women’s right to vote. The text appears here in English translation by Rafaël Newman. 

I had heard many of the stories before, but today, on Mother’s Day, they took on an added dimension. Suddenly it wasn’t just my mother I saw before me, standing there in the kitchen, her apron knotted behind her back, her torso framed by the kitchen window, in her right hand her paring knife, the one whose grip is held together with tape, the one she wouldn’t replace for anything in the world, because it sits in her hand like no other knife, which is to say: just right – suddenly what I beheld in her stories was Switzerland in the sixties and seventies.

Perhaps because Mama has just uttered a sentence I have never heard from her before. She pronounced it casually, somewhat absent-mindedly, while meticulously sliding the plastic spatula under the filet of flounder, to prevent its delicate skin sticking to the pan when she turned it – cooking was Mama’s top priority.

That’s right, Mama is cooking on Mother’s Day. Filet of flounder with wild rice, a medley of green and white asparagus on the side. And no, I’m not helping her, Mama has never let anyone help her when she cooks, not even on Mother’s Day. That isn’t going to change now. Her movements are so choreographed that the slightest deviation would only create unnecessary bother. And that is to be avoided, above all on Mother’s Day. So the best way for me to help her is to stay in my corner and read. Read more »

Shada Safadi. Promises. 2014.

Engraving on plexiglass.

“That spirit could have flown without being seen by anyone. But the horror of what happened, and it’s struggling out of fear, made it leave an impact that demands of us, we the ones how are alive, to give promises. We forget the promises we give to our dead, we keep them for some few days and then forget. We did not see things ourselves when they happened… We saw it after it happened, and the scene etched itself in our memory. How can we apologize for that spirit that took us out of darkness? You still exist and we were meant to stay alive but our freedom is still incomplete, you are dead and we are the dead too.”

More here and here.

by Eric J. Weiner

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

“The Second Coming” William Butler Yeats

The overwhelming majority of pre-service and in-service teachers I have worked with over the past two decades believe that they should, first and foremost, love, care, and nurture their students. Everything else associated with what is euphemistically called “best practice,” they believe, will follow. When pushed to describe what loving, caring and nurturing their students actually looks like within and beyond the classroom and school—in theory and practice—many of them have trouble getting beyond superficial appeals to “multiple intelligences,” “diversity,” “safe spaces,” and “culturally responsive pedagogy.” Focused primarily on making their students feel safe and emotionally supported, they’ve reduced their pedagogical responsibilities to a metaphorical big hug. Stir in a tablespoon of standardized ideological content, blend with a half cup of research-based strategies, add a pinch of job training/college prep, stir in a few high-stakes tests and, voilà, the neoliberal agenda for public education is rationalized and set.

This perspective on teaching and learning, however good-intentioned it might be, does a great disservice to children in need of more than a pedagogical big hug and the promises of opportunity that it implies. Extending my discussion from last month about the struggle for moral clarity at the southern border, educating other people’s children—whether they are refugees languishing on the border, impoverished children of color concentrated in violent and barren (ex)urban wastelands, or generationally poor white children of the rural interior lost in the din of 21^st century identity politics—demands that teachers reject the neoliberal agenda and address the real injustices that these children suffer on a daily basis. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Just the shadow of a plant on the sidewalk in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, which I liked. Photo taken in early May of 2021.

by Bill Murray

Aye Chan Zin, a 22 year old competitive cyclist, once raced from Yangon to Mandalay and back. He fell and lost both incisors to gold teeth.

“Road very bad out there,” he grinned, goldly.

Aye Chan was a child of privilege, a third-year vet school student with parents with government jobs. His dad was Chinese, a doctor working on a leprosy project, his mom a philosophy teacher at Yangon University. A family album they kept in the family car was chock full of smiling brothers and sisters.

He had his dad’s tan Toyota with tinted windows. He would be our guide and driver, and on Tuesday the seventh of February or, as The New Light of Myanmar newspaper called it, the eighth waxing of Tabodwe, 1356 ME, we set out from Yangon for a drive into the country. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” – so began James Joyce’s (infamous) Finnegans Wake. That line is but the completion of the book’s last sentence, “A lone a last a loved a long the”, You can, of course, stitch the two halves together in order simply by reading first this string and then that one.

Joyce was a notorious jokester. One of the jokes embedded in that first and final sentence is a pun on the name of a scholar who straddled the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Giambattista Vico. “Vicus” puns on the Latin for village, street, or quarter of a city and Giambattista’s last name. Just why Joyce did that has prompted endless learned commentary, none of which is within the compass of this essay, though, be forewarned, we’ll return to the Wake at the end.

Neither, for that matter, is Vico, not exactly. He had an epistemological principle: “Verum esse ipsum factum,” often abbreviated as verum factum. It meant, “What is true is precisely what is made.” In this he opposed Descartes, who believed that truth is verified through observation. Descartes, which his cogito ergo sum and his mind/matter dualism, is at the headwaters of the main tradition in Western thinking while Vico went underground but never disappeared, as Finnegans Wake bears witness.

Perhaps this century will see our Viconian legacy eclipse the Cartesian in the study of the mind. With that in mind, let’s consider Grace Lindsay’s excellent Models of the Mind.

What, you might ask, what kind of book is it? It could be a highly technical mid-career summary and synthesis, which would certainly be welcome. But no, it’s not that. It could be a text book for an advanced undergraduate or a graduate level course in neuroscience. It’s not that either. There are few footnotes, but each chapter has a reasonable bibliography at the back of the book. No, Models of the Mind is intended for the sophisticated and educated reader who is interested in how physics, engineering, and mathematics have shaped our understanding of the brain, to reprise the book’s subtitle. And that’s just the right audience if we want to pull off a paradigm change, from Cartesian to Viconian, in how we understand the mind.

It is intended for you, gentle reader. Read more »