by Jonathan Kujawa

John Conway invented the Game of Life in 1970, and it remains an active area of research and play fifty-six years later.

John Conway was a deeply original mathematician who made important contributions to multiple areas of mathematics. Indeed, when Dr. Conway passed away in 2020, I wrote an entire 3QD essay about his work and, as interesting as it is, the Game of Life (or GoL) didn’t make the cut.

The rules of GoL are deceptively simple. It is a zero-player game. This means that once the game starts, it runs on its own with no further player intervention. It is played on a very, very large grid of one-by-one squares that we will call “cells”[1]. Each cell can be “alive” or “dead”. In each turn of the game, an alive cell can remain alive, or die, and a dead cell can remain dead, or spring to life. In each turn of the game, whether a cell lives or dies depends solely on the state of its eight neighbors:

• a living cell with 2 or 3 living neighbors remains alive, and otherwise it dies [2];
• a dead cell with exactly 3 living neighbors springs to life, and otherwise it remains dead [3].

That’s it.

To play the game, in the zeroth turn you, as the creator deity, decide which cells are alive and which are dead. Thereafter, the game plays itself, turn-by-turn, and you watch your universe unfold:

Conway discussed the origins of GoL in an interview with the Numberphile folks. He described how he was originally motivated by John von Neumann’s work on self-replicating machines. However, von Neumann’s machines had 19 different possible states. No doubt with the aphorism “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler” in mind, Conway spent months tinkering with the GoL rules until he was down to two states and two rules.  Despite the simplicity, the game remained interesting.

By “interesting”, Conway meant unpredictable. This was Conway’s deep philosophical insight: saying GoL is unpredictable is to say that it is capable of anything, and if GoL is capable of anything, then it should be capable of everything [5]. That is, despite its simple algorithmic rules, GoL should be capable of arbitrary complexity. And indeed, in 1982, Conway proved that GoL is Turing-complete. Something is Turing-complete if it can simulate any Turing machine and, hence, can simulate any computer and perform any computation. Read more »

A vehicle drove by while dripping something just before I happened to be crossing the road. That is all.

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by Jim Hanas

Almost thirty years ago, in what would now be called a quarter-life crisis, I felt called to Greenville, Mississippi. It’s not too far from Memphis, beyond the casinos, which were new then and also called to me from time to time. I had been introduced to Walker Percy at the used bookstore where I worked. The Moviegoer, with its moody twenty-nine-year-old protagonist, hit me at the right time in life and set me on the Southern Route of mid-century male ennui. (As opposed to the Northern Route through Roth, Bellow, and Updike, of whom I remain woefully innocent, despite living in New York for more than twenty-five years.) I devoured all of Percy’s works. Like Binx—the protagonist of The Moviegoer—I realized a search was possible, the first step of which was a pilgrimage to Greenville, where Percy grew up. “The search,” as Binx tells us early in the novel, “is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

According to Percy’s taxonomy of “existential modes”—borrowed liberally from Kierkegaard and articulated in his 1956 essay “The Man on the Train”—I had moved from alienation to rotation, from the immersive grayness of modern life (what Kierkegaard would call despair) to the pursuit of the new. Through friends, introductions were made. I wrote a letter to Shelby Foote—who grew up with Percy in Greenville—and he left me a voicemail, telling me (in that drawl Ken Burns made famous) that “the whole town had whittled away to nothing and the young people don’t have much fun anymore.”

I had breakfast with Percy’s nephew, who was pleasant but as confused as I was about what I was after. I also saw the aftermath of a fatal car crash and nearly fell in love with my local guide, a twice-divorced mother of two with thick ankles and a sweet singing voice. (Actually, depending on how familiar he was with his uncle’s work, his nephew—who was probably the age I am now—might have understood what I was after better than I did.) 

This all now seems incredibly apt as I move on to Percy’s third “mode,” repetition, three decades later. You can’t go home again, but you will inevitably try, just to sneak up on the strangeness of life. Read more »

by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

There is a ghost in Bo Wang’s 2023 short film An Asian Ghost Story 九龍東往事.[1] “It was a strange time,” the narrator laments, “with strange things and strange people.”

She is the spirit of a Japanese woman who died in northern China; after her death, her hair was cut and sold, woven into a wig, and carried westward through the trade networks of Cold War Hong Kong. She drifts through Kowloon City, through factory floors, karaoke bars, the thoroughfares of a city built to mediate other people’s transactions, and narrates her displacement: “Commodities are always transformed to conceal their past. But the past never dissipates.”

The commodity in question was embargoed by the US Treasury in 1965 under the category “Asiatic hair.” The ban targeted Communist China specifically, part of a wider embargo enacted under the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, since Chinese hair exports were funding a government the United States refused to trade with. Hong Kong itself was not the target, but its wig industry ran almost entirely on Chinese raw hair, and customs officials, unable to distinguish communist from non-communist Asian hair by sight, cut off the supply regardless. It was a decision that restructured the global wig industry without consulting the women whose bodies had supplied it.[2]

*

The film was originally commissioned as a single-channel video installation by the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT) in Hong Kong before entering the festival circuit. At 37 minutes, it operates as hybrid docufiction, combining archival newsreel footage, acted sequences, and oral histories, including factory testimonies, a therapy session, and karaoke performances. It also introduces a pseudo-scientific apparatus called the EVPL (Electronic Voice Phenomena with Linguistics),[3] a device invented for the film that purports to decode communications from the dead through severed hair. The lo-fi VHS aesthetic and 4:3 frame lend it the appearance of the news footage it incorporates, while the image and voice-over often deliberately refuse to correspond, a formal choice that gives the narration a haunting quality. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Marianne Janack

Visiting a grocery store forces you to face irrationality.  Should I buy the Jax, which I love?  Or should I refrain?  The store doesn’t carry my cat’s favorite brand of food anymore.  Should I buy something that’s sort of like it?  Go to another store a short drive away that carries it?   Why do I torture myself with these questions?

Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist, ran a series of experiments in the early 1980s in which he tried to determine whether the decision to perform an action preceded the brain activity that signified decision. This brain activity is called “readiness potential”.  Libet measured readiness potential by recording electrical charges on the scalp, which are triggered by brain activity that precedes voluntary motions, like raising your arm, reaching for your keys, or buying things at the grocery store.

Libet asked volunteers to flex their wrists; they could do this any time they wanted to. They were told to report the clock position at which they decided to flex their wrist, and their reports were correlated with both the electrical charge readings indicating readiness potential and with the muscle movement that was involved in the subjects’ wrist flexions. In general, readiness potential preceded the reported will to act, even when the subjects claimed that they had acted spontaneously. From this, Libet concluded that the brain initiates voluntary action unconsciously: our conscious sense that we have decided to act is actually the result of this brain activity.

If we had free will, and were in control of our decisions, Libet argues, the conscious will to act would be reported prior to the electrical charge that signals readiness-potential. In Libet’s words: “the initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!” Jax or no Jax?  That decision was made by my brain before I was conscious of making it. Or maybe not. Read more »

by Carlota Figueroa

Very recently, on June 10th of this year, Eva Andrei, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Allan H. MacDonald were awarded the 2026 Kavli Prize in the category of Nanoscience for their foundational work establishing the field of Twistronics. I know that sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, but it is one of the most pivotal (and real) discoveries that is transforming Materials Science as we know it. Let this column serve as a short (and very qualitative, as the intention is that the article is readable and enjoyable, not dense and technical) introduction to the world of quantum 2D materials. I hope that by the time you finish reading, you are as excited about the potential of this field as I am – even if this is your first time ever hearing about bilayer graphene.

Let us start at the beginning: we must first understand what a crystalline solid is. Many of our day-to-day solids are crystalline structures: table salt, sugar, diamond and copper, just to name a few. What this means is that the atoms that make up these structures are arranged in a highly ordered microscopic structure. Imagine you could zoom into a grain of salt until you see each individual sodium and chlorine atom: you’d see they are very neatly organised in a periodic manner, so that no matter what part you zoom into, you’d see the exact same repeating pattern of sodium and chlorine atoms over and over. This periodicity and order is what characterises crystalline solids. These structures can be one-dimensional (meaning you have a chain of atoms that extends in just one dimension of space, like the x-axis), two-dimensional (so you have a sheet of atoms that extends throughout two dimensions of space, like the x- and y- axes) or three-dimensional (which is what many of us think of when we imagine a solid: some arrangement of atoms that extends along the x- y- and z- axes). We will focus on the second type: 2D crystalline structures – or solids made up of a single layer of atoms. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Waking Up In Butaro, November 2023.

Digital photograph.

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by Ken MacVey

Now that Americans are celebrating the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth visiting its metaphysical foundations. Many don’t talk about “the metaphysics of the Declaration of Independence.”  But the story about where this metaphysics has taken America and where  it could take it can be  both inspiring  and surprisingly alarming.

What is meant by “metaphysics”? A  Merriam-Webster dictionary definition is as good as any: “the philosophical study of the ultimate causes and nature of things.” That the Declaration of Independence is steeped in metaphysics is evident from its opening paragraphs. The first paragraph opens by invoking the authority of  “the Laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God.”

The second paragraph famously continues: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, andt  of happiness–That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving  their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to  abolish it . . .”

The Declaration then proceeds to  submit “ facts  . . . to a candid world”  that document  27 alleged breaches and wrongs committed  by King George III  against the American colonies and their inhabitants.

The Declaration closes by asserting it is “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World”  for a declaration that the political connections between [the American colonies] and the State of Great Britain . . . ought to be totally dissolved” and that the colonies were now “free and independent states.”

Thomas Jefferson authored the first draft of the Declaration. Although revised with input from Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and others, the structure and themes of Jefferson’s initial draft remained largely intact. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

With the Strait of Hormuz in a state of constipation, we’re forced to think about things we’d rather not think about, or, rather, things that until now seemed beneath thought because they are so ubiquitous as to be effectively invisible, like air. I can’t think of an adequate analogy for our predicament, except to imagine an organism that has managed to swap out, molecule for molecule, its native substrate constitution for a freshly discovered, new and improved substrate that allows the organism to perform at levels it never before dreamed possible.

Suddenly, the organism can fly, live comfortably just about anywhere on the planet it pleases, grow more food than it needs rather than scrounging for it, extend its lifespan beyond its natural limits, and chat freely with others of its kind all around the globe. One thing these organisms discuss with one another (fruitlessly, it seems) is that this new molecular substrate has two catastrophic drawbacks: It is both highly toxic and ephemeral. The organism’s progress has an expiration date, it seems, beyond which its substrate poisons the organism and the environment, then it vanishes.

Our new substrate (by “new” I mean merely about 250 years old, approximately since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, a mere blink for a genus that has walked the globe for close to two million years) is fossil carbon, which has shouldered aside living carbon and set up house even within our very bodies and culture. Coal gives us heat, smelting of metals, and electricity generation. Oil gives us liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks. Natural gas (methane) adds to that mix the ability to synthesize nitrogenous fertilizers from mere air, which compounds are then incorporated into our very bodies. Energy expert Vaclav Smil has famously pointed out that this fossil carbon allows us to prop up modern civilization on four mighty pillars: Concrete, steel, ammonia, and plastics. Given that even wind turbines and solar photovoltaic cells depend utterly upon the products and processes of this fossil carbon substrate, it should be apparent that “green” technologies really aren’t so green after all. They’re just the latest users of fossil carbon. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

The director of the National Science Foundation, appointed by newly elected President Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., just announced a number of heretofore largely secret findings. At a hastily organized press conference, Ed Cayce, the rather pugnacious man at the helm of the agency, stated that his staff had convincingly verified a number of controversial claims regarding UFOs, psychics, and other hot button issues.

The first involves a strange piece of metal found in Roswell, N.M., where many believe an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947. Cayce declared that the fragment has quite an amazing property. “Sensitive measurements have revealed that it exerts a faint physical attraction on every information‑processing instrument so far tested. Moreover, this attraction is nine times as strong one foot away from the metal as it is one yard away.”

What to make of the fragment’s effect is open to differing interpretations, Cayce admitted, but he maintained it can no longer be denied. He pointed out that “perhaps this strange attraction is related to new evidence for the sentience of animals, plants, and perhaps even of metals and rocks.

Continuing in this vein, Cayce also cited developments involving psychic readings. Specifically, he referred to an AI analysis of extensive data mining from labs all over the globe that demonstrated psychics are indeed commonly correct in their perceptions of others. Moreover, there are countless cases where psychics have accurately described the characteristics and life experiences of dead relatives of subjects. Read more »

by Herbert Lui

1. The most reliable way to find a good idea is to write down a bunch of bad ones

The team at product studio Good Enough, which has made software like blogging platform Pika, has a channel in their instant messaging dedicated to bad ideas. Bad ideas are useful because it helps lower inhibitions. The spirit of this idea reminds me of Tina Fey’s rules for improv comedy, and is why I think being prolific is generally useful advice.

The next time you feel stuck or blocked, just try writing down 10 bad ideas. You’ll feel recharged in minutes.

2. Bad ideas free you up to be more honest

The indirect path to finding good ideas—by finding many bad ones first—is more useful than attempting a direct path to finding a good idea. When Vin Verma started blogging again, he noticed he stopped in the first place because, “I started to only want to publish the best things, so I didn’t publish at all. I stopped writing to just riff on things, or to explore things in a way that was honest to where I’m actually at.” Sasha Chapin says this another way, “Stop lying about who you are, and write the things that are actually inside you.”

“Good” and “bad” ideas are just labels. Writing all your ideas down, and being honest, is useful because it allows you to access your subconscious mind. When you feel psychologically safe enough to express any idea honestly, including bad ones, the good ones will also flow out. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

Daniil Kharms was a strange man. Born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, he was the son of Ivan Yuvachev, who was persecuted for his involvement with the revolutionary group People’s Will (Наро́дная во́ля). He adopted the surname “Kharms” while still in school as a fusion of the English words “charm” and “harm.” His literary output would follow the avant-garde, particularly absurdism—first as a founder of the collective “Union of Real Art” (ОБЭРИУ), then as a playwright, and later as a children’s writer due to Soviet censors. He gained a reputation for being eccentric. His work was non-rational and non-linear, and he lived as an oddity among his peers.

Kharms found the absurd to be the closest thing to reality: a collision between “this” and “that,” one normal and the other on the margins. Absurdism was for him effectively realism. In his work, outcome takes on an independent existence. Logic is easily suspended, violence lacks motive, and mere chance often seeks revenge on structure.

Sometimes, what’s revealed in his work is nothing at all: an empty void of nonsense. As he wrote in his diary in 1937:

I am interested only in nonsense; only in that which has no practical meaning. Life interests me only in its most absurd manifestations.

Kharms’s short stories circle this nonsense theme. In one, a freak string of deaths leads the narrative to conclude that these were “all good people but they don’t know how to hold their ground.” In another, two individuals fight and one knocks the other in the head with a large cucumber, killing him: “What big cucumbers they sell in stores nowadays!” Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

In a previous post I tried to explain most of quantum physics using the analogy of a spinning wheel. The blur of the spinning as a wave function, the stopped spoke as a particle. Now I want to see if the same wheel can explain quantum computing. To understand what makes a quantum computer different, it helps to start with the classical one.

A classical computer runs on bits, each one either 1 or 0, on or off. In wheel terms bits are levers, either up or down, fully committed to a single state. These levers are arranged into logical gates. AND only rises if both inputs are up. OR rises if either is up. NOT flips whatever it receives. String enough gates together in clever ways and you can compute almost anything.

Your processor contains billions of transistors doing the flipping for you, each one a tiny electrically controlled lever. Computing speed is limited by how fast a switch can be flipped, which is gated by how fast an electron can travel across the transistor. Smaller transistors mean shorter distances and faster switching, which is why chip manufacturers spent decades shrinking them down to a few nanometers.

A quantum bit, a qubit, is more like our wheel than a lever. While spinning it holds all positions in superposition, not restricted to 0 or 1 but everything in between simultaneously. When stopped it resolves to one answer. Define the upper half of the wheel as 1 and the lower as 0, and an even spin gives you 50/50 odds. You can bias those odds by adjusting what portion of the 360 degrees counts as 1 and which counts as 0. If you ever read about quantum gates, this is what they do, they set the qubit’s wave function in a controlled way before measurement. Get the wheel spinning if you will.

A quantum computer does not compute by flipping switches sequentially since all switch states are true at the same time. The infinitely fast wheel is both 0 and 1 all the time. So, the steps in quantum computing are not computation steps in the classical sense. They are steps necessary to stop the wheel on the correct solution. The difference becomes clearer with a specific example. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

I recently visited Dublin Ireland with my family. As you might imagine, it was a great vacation. We stayed near the river Liffy which divides the city center. We mostly walked around town (Dublin is compact compared the sprawling ATL) but we took public transit a couple of times—the DART out to Howth and the street car to the national museum housed at Collins Barracks. We visited the Kildare street National museum (archaeology), the Chester Beatty library / museum including a meal at the Silk Road cafe, and the fun Little Museum of Dublin (a true home for Dublin theater kids). We shopped for souvenirs on the Grafton street, including the crowded Aran Sweater Market, one touristy knick-knack shop, and a second hand book and record shop squirreled away down a hallway.

We also took part in one organized tour up to the Hill of Tara and the UNESCO protected site Newgrange. That trip and the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence has put me in mind of the importance of history in creating and reifying our modern political structures and national identities. Nation-states employ history to naturalize itself for its citizens and the world. As such, what is and isn’t preserved for the public is a highly political act, not a neutral one. Ireland provides one such case and an interesting one, as unlike much of Western Europe, it is a post-colonial state.

Ireland’s tourist industry excels at teaching Ireland’s troubled history to citizens and visitors alike. Read more »

Elderflower tree growing out of a small drainage hole in a massive concrete wall in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Steve Szilagyi

Few topics in American history are treated with more solemnity than the Civil War. You could (as some men do) spend your entire adult life reading nothing but Civil War histories, arguing about tactics, and visiting battlefields, and never crack a smile.

Our scorchingly irreverent satirists don’t find anything funny about the Civil War; it hasn’t inspired absurdist comedy as the First and Second World Wars have, or spun off sitcoms like Hogan’s Heroes or M*A*S*H. Even the gruesome Indian Wars generated a sitcom – F Troop – and dozens of insensitive movie satires.

Major Civil War films like Gettysburg and Gods and Generals tend to be as reverent as old-fashioned religious epics, or sad as hell, like Glory.

What most critics agree is the finest film about the Civil War, Buster Keaton’s The General, is nothing if not a comedy – but it’s a peculiar kind of comedy: as dark as a daguerreotype, with a star who never smiles, culminating in that massive train wreck, whose budget-breaking expense derailed Keaton’s real-life career.

“It is altogether fitting and proper,” as Abraham Lincoln might say, that the Civil War gets this kind of hats-over-heart respect. The gravity of the stakes, the awfulness of slavery, the complexity of the constitutional crisis, and most surely, the number of dead (620,000 at least), have combined, in the case of the Civil War, to temper the national tendency to jeer and make fun of anything anyone takes seriously.

So we might conclude that there is nothing to laugh at about the Civil War. But that would be wrong. Read more »

by TJ Price

In last month’s column, as in the month’s before, I began telling a story that has its beginnings in a therapeutic modality called “narrative reprocessing.” Essentially, this is the act of re-authoring one’s trauma(s) in order to defragment painful memories, which in turn allows for a type of spiritually retroactive agency over events that caused distress in the past. I would advise reading the prior segment first before reading this one, and the one which preceded that as well. (I apologize for the falsehood in the first post that there would only be two parts; the story rather took on a life of its own, and went to some surprising places—this is the third, and final instalment.) To those of you who have followed along with me to this point, thank you. For those of you who have read the thing in various states of its composition—and, in some cases, urged me to press through to the end—thank you isn’t enough.

Please be advised that—in this instalment, as in the first and second—there will be a number of sensitive topics involved, including mentions of sexual assault, suicidal ideation, threats of physical violence, and general injustice.

5.
I did go back to school in the fall, as planned. My old roommate, Eddie, even stuck with me, and we were granted a spacious room to share on one of the top floors of the building, looking down over the entrance into the dorm itself. The summer had done things to us both, and in different ways. He came out to me fairly early on, and saved the grand reveal for a few months later, expecting it to be a huge surprise. Instead, it was met with a lot of amusement and laughter—what, you thought we didn’t know?—and nothing changed except for how he spoke in mixed company regarding his feelings for other men. I didn’t envy him. He did seem happier after he came out, though it was tempered with a bit of brittle arrogance, as if he had attained this fragile apotheosis of identity, and now had no time for those of us who still mucked around in the quagmire of confusion. His way forward was clear to him, and he had ever been goal-minded. From that moment on, it seemed he was making up for lost time. He became driven, and focused—I probably could have learned a lot from his hustle, if I’d been in the right place to understand it. Eventually, he and another musical theater major took up with one another, a guy that my roommate had apparently been completely enamored of for some time, but who had also felt uncomfortable with announcing his sexual preference (and who also, when he finally came out, was greeted by the same response we gave Eddie.) They seemed happy. They spent a lot of their time together. I think they eventually broke up, but for a long time they lived together, in an apartment off-campus. I even visited them once or twice, before we all faded away from each other, as photographs and friendships are liable to do.

I didn’t get to find out what happened to Ricky. The last time I saw him was that fall, in the top-floor room I shared with Eddie, busy with my own creative endeavors. I was writing a full-length play, a fictionalization (loosely) of my own awakenings as a college student, as a man who desired the company of other men but was repulsed by the urge, someone who couldn’t abide being touched. The play is interspersed with scenes held at a local coffee shop, during open mic sessions, in which the protagonist and his cohort of various artists take turns reading poetry, or speaking monologues. Read more »