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 »

Editor’s Note: This essay once mentions a well-known racial slur. Indeed, much of the essay is about the usefulness of maintaining a distinction between using a word and merely mentioning it, and argues that mentions of even taboo words should be allowed, so it would be self-defeating to resort to euphemism in this case.

by Gerald Dworkin

For the past year or so there have been a considerable number of cases of teachers or authors or journalists who have been threatened with sanctions, had sanctions imposed, or lost their positions, because of articles they wrote or statements they made as part of their occupations. Many of these cases involved the appearance of the N-word in their speech or written work. Here are some of them.

1. In a course at the Rutgers Law School last Fall, a student was curious about why a defendant in a case was charged with conspiracy to murder, when he had not been directly involved in the shooting. So he looked up the case and found that the defendant had shouted that he was going to  return to the scene where the shots were fired, but first, “I’m going back to Trenton to get my niggers.”  This clarified for the student why the defendant might be charged with conspiracy to murder.

The professor of the course has asserted that she did not hear the word spoken during a videoconference session, which three students had attended after the criminal law class.

As the NY Times reported: “In early April, in response to the incident, a group of Black first-year students at Rutgers Law began circulating a petition calling for the creation of a policy on racial slurs and formal, public apologies from the student and the professor.”

At the height of a ‘racial reckoning,’ a responsible adult should know not to use a racial slur regardless of its use in a 1993 opinion,” states the petition, which was signed by law school students and campus organizations across the country.

“We vehemently condemn the use of the N-word by the student and the acquiescence to its usage,” the petition says.

To date the Professor has not apologized for her conduct and has not been sanctioned. Read more »

Please, See My Innocence

I am small and innocent
I’ve not yet had time to be
misshapen by adults,
but I know what they can do

so, at the sound of boots
I take refuge in this corner.
I hide my eyes believing
if I can’t see you, you can’t see me

but if you can, please, see also
my innocence

Jim Culleny
5/17/21

by Adele A Wilby

Marine biologist Helen Scales’ book, The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed is a triumph. The four major sections in the book, ‘Explore’, ‘Depend’, ‘Exploit’ and ‘Preserve’ are indicators of the breadth of issues addressed in the book: the variety of  life forms in the different levels of the oceans; the significance of the oceans to life on the planet; the various ways in which human activity exploits the oceans resources, and concludes with her ideas about how to prevent the ocean from becoming just another area of resources of the planet for exploitation by human beings.

Most of us would have, at some point, looked out across an ocean enthralled by the natural beauty that it projects. However, anybody who has travelled on the ocean would also be aware of the vagaries of the moods that the oceans are capable of and wondered at their awesome power and potential, making them worthy of respect and caution when entering their watery domains. But it is quite extra-ordinary to realise that the beautiful vista of a mirror glass reflection on an utterly calm ocean or the wild raging of it waters is only a fraction of the oceans’ breadth and depth.  As Scales tells us, the oceans take up seven tenths of the surface of the earth. The diverse topological structures and life on land are interesting enough, but the ‘expanses of the deep seabed, the abyssal plains and seamounts, canyons and trenches, plus all the water above them, constitute the single biggest living space on the planet’, a vast reserve of life being and waiting to be discovered and understood. Read more »