Camping in the Desert with Cats

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Poopster ca. 2003

In early August of 2000, I made my way from Lincoln, Nebraska to Tempe, Arizona. I had recently completed my Ph.D. and was hustling off to begin work as a post-doc at Arizona State University. Everything I owned, including two cats, was jam packed into a red Ford Escort station wagon. As I zig-zagged my way from the Great Plains to the Southwest, I allowed the felines to roam free through its cramped quarters.

That was my first mistake.

Poopster, the sweet gray and white female with tons of charm but not a whole lot upstairs, settled in nicely, nestling on the floor board near my feet. But Shango, the tiger with white socks who was the brains of their operation, freaked out. Somehow he managed to wedge himself underneath the driver’s seat.

My second mistake was letting him stay there.

He’s scared, I thought to myself. If he feels safe, just let him hunker down there. What harm could it do?

Never once did it occur to me that, at some point during this cross-country trip, he would have to relieve himself.

I had that car another three years, but despite my best efforts at detailing and perfuming, the smell never really went away. More than a year later, it was still bad enough that my girlfriend refused to drive with me from Philadelphia to Detroit to attend a wedding.

Funny though. The Colorado state trooper who pulled me over for speeding, when that urine was really fresh and pungent, didn’t seem to notice at all while he was writing me up. Read more »

On the Road: The Maneater of Mfuwe

Posted on by Bill Murray

by Bill Murray

Just about everyone who visits the famous South Luangwa wildlife park drives through Mfuwe, Zambia. A mere wide spot in the road, a trifle to tourists, Mfuwe holds a fearsome, searing memory. It will forever be known for the Man-Eater of Mfuwe, a lion that killed six people over two months in 1991.

There are more famous man-eating tigers than lions in the literature. Tigers and people live in closer proximity in India than lions and people in Africa. I’ve seen an estimate of as many as 10,000 people killed by tigers in India in the nineteenth century.

The Champawat Tigress, the most infamous Panthera tigris, was said to have killed 436 people before she was killed in Nepal, then part of British colonial India, in 1911. After a spree of terror, hunters having failed to kill her, the authorities ultimately called in the Nepalese army. In Kenya’s Tsavo Park two lions killed perhaps two dozen Indian railroad construction workers in 1898, halting the colonizing Brits’ project to connect the port of Mombasa with the interior of British East Africa.

But the Mfuwe man-eater was no colonial-era killer. Its attacks occurred less than thirty years ago, thoroughly terrorizing an overgrown village of scarcely a thousand a spare 60 miles west of the border with Malawi, oriented toward the Malawian capital, Lilongwe. Lusaka, the Zambian capital, is 300 miles away. Read more »

Glenn Gould and My Longing for Cups and Saucers

Posted on by Robert Fay

by Robert Fay

Glenn Gould at work.

Lake Simcoe, Canada. The sound of the Chickering piano. Bach.

He is lazing down a wooded foot path, teasing his collie Banquo with a stick. He wears gloves, a wool Donegal cap, muffler and long coat despite the July temperatures. He is not being self-consciously eccentric; he simply fears getting a chill, and therefore sick. The film is black-and-white, giving the imagination ample room to conjure up the verdant rapacity of the brief northern growing season. He is then pictured inside the cottage seated before the Chickering, swaying and rocking as he alternately taps and presses the keys, his hands occasionally leaping back from the instrument as if caught in flagrante delicto.

The regal pianissimo of the Italian Concerto.

He is humming. He will always hum when he’s secluded within the architecture of the immortal scores. Recording engineers will despair of this harmonizing, but the microphones must be present, and he will sing as he plays, because the two expressions are a hypostatic union, an indivisible entity offering themselves to the music. He hums because the composition is only a series of notations until it becomes a part of his body, a force within, causing him to sway and vocalize the rapturous melody.

The cottage is the perfect bourgeois expression of respectable 1950s Toronto. It is not to be confused with a cabin. It is the weekend retreat of prosperous fir merchant, not a sportsman. And the Toronto of the 1950s is Victorian, hardworking and Protestant, and Glenn Gould will decide he can live nowhere else, despite his fame and financial success. Read more »

In God and AI we trust?

Posted on by Sarah Firisen

by Sarah Firisen

My seventy-something year old uncle, who still uses a flip phone, was talking to me a while ago about self-driving cars. He was adamant that he didn’t want to put his fate in the hands of a computer, he didn’t trust them. My question to him was “but you trust other people in cars?” Because self-driving cars don’t have to be 100% accurate, they just have to be better than people, and they already are. People get drunk, they get tired, they’re distracted, they’re looking down at their phones. Computers won’t do any of those things. And yet my uncle couldn’t be persuaded. He fundamentally doesn’t trust computers. And of course, he’s not alone. More and more of our lives have highly automated elements to them, “Autopilot technology already does most of the work once a plane is aloft, and has no trouble landing an airliner even in rough weather and limited visibility.” But the average person either doesn’t realize that, or they console themselves with the knowledge that humans are in the cockpit and could take over. Though perhaps the more rational thought would be to console themselves that if something happens to the pilot, the computer could take over. Maybe it’s the more rational thought, but most of us aren’t perfectly rational beings.

Society is predicated on a level of trust, we couldn’t function as communities, as towns, as countries, if it wasn’t. We trust that the food we buy in the store isn’t contaminated, we trust that the water coming out of our taps won’t make us sick, we trust that law enforcement will protect us, we trust that we pay our taxes and that money isn’t embezzled. Sometimes, this trust turns out to be misplaced, just ask the people of Flint, but even when that happens and we’re all appalled, we mostly go back to a state of trust. Because it’s hard to function in society if you don’t. Read more »

Are There Life Lessons In Fiction?

Posted on by Anitra Pavlico

by Anitra Pavlico

The Anna Karenina Fix, by Viv Groskop, is subtitled “Life Lessons from Russian Literature.” It is an entertaining book, part memoir, part cultural criticism. Each chapter takes on a different work from Russian literature–mostly novels, although it also features Anna Akhmatova’s poetry. Interwoven with plot synopses are biographical details about the authors, many of which are arguably tangential to their work, such as Tolstoy’s love for eggs prepared in a multitude of different ways. Groskop is keen to humanize these writers, so this is part of the process. Layered on top of the works themselves and trivia about the people who wrote them are autobiographical snippets from Groskop, mainly drawn from time she spent in Russia during her university years. Finally, true to the book’s subtitle, there are the “lessons” that she has purportedly learned, or perhaps that we could all learn, from these works.

Groskop’s research was impressive. For each literary work featured in one of her chapters she also incorporated background material to flesh out the narrative–for example, Pavel Basinsky’s Tolstoy biography Flight from Paradise or Pasternak’s mistress’s account of their time together. Alex Beam’s The Feud, describing a protracted and heated spat between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson about translations of Pushkin, is now on my reading list. There weren’t more than one or two outside sources per chapter, so the book was not cluttered with references.

There is something funny about the phrase “life lessons.” You don’t know if someone is being ironic or not. Even after having read the book, I don’t quite know if Groskop has meant it in earnest. Read more »

When is a drone not a drone?

Posted on by Dave Maier

by Dave Maier

In the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche levels a powerful attack on the modern Platonistic conception of mind and nature, urging us to reject such “contradictory concepts” as “knowledge in itself,” or the idea of “an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking.” More recently, Donald Davidson’s attack on the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content, and thus of belief and meaning, requires us to see inquiry into how things are as essentially interpretative.

This idea can seem to conflict with our natural conception of the world as objective, fundamentally independent of what we say or think. In a similar context, Wittgenstein has his imaginary interlocutor challenge him (Philosophical Investigations §241): “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true or false?” The implication is clear: if your position requires that what we say makes things true, rather than simply mirrors it, then that is an unacceptably irrealist result; how the world is cannot depend on what we say about it.

The suspicion can also arise – especially when the relevant reflections about language come from those steeped in literary theory – that “interpretivists” have mistakenly extrapolated from what may very well be true in the specific case of artistic interpretation and its objects to any discourse about the world at all. Similarly, defenders of the traditional view of objectivity such as John Searle (following John Austin here) have suggested that it is the specific cases of “illocutionary acts” such as “I hereby pronounce you man and wife,” which do indeed cause their objects to be thus truly described, that have unwittingly led to the interpretivist heresy. Read more »

First Man and a sense of the sacred

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by Bill Benzon

I don’t know what Damien Chazelle was thinking as he was crafting First Man, a film about Neil Armstrong and his moon landing in Apollo 11, but to create the film we saw he had to “cleanse” it of four decades of space-adventure films. “But why,” you might ask, “would he want to do that? What’s wrong with adventures in space?” Nothing, if that’s your cup of tea. But, on the evidence of the film itself, he had something else in mind.

“What, pray tell, was that?” you ask. Let’s take a look.


The film opens on Neil Armstrong in a test flight of an airplane. While we do have some shots of the plane from the outside and at a distance, most of the shots are of the plane’s cockpit, either from Armstrong’s point-of-view has he looks about the cockpit, often at his hands activating controls, or through the window at the sky. There’s trouble, the image vibrates, a reflection of the plane’s motions. We hear voices (I think). We know Armstrong’s going to pull out of it because, well, after all, he did go to the moon and that’s not yet happened. There’s a strong sense of being enclosed, being trapped, of being at the edge of desperation.

No sense of wide open spaces, no wild blue yonder. Just white knuckles holding on and deliberate self-mastery. Keep it together. Pull through. And then it’s over. Armstrong lands the plane and gets out.

The aerial adventure trope has been held at bay. We’ve been told, “this is not that kind of film.” And the film makes a quick shift to a different register. Read more »

A conversation between Andrea Scrima and Myriam Naumann on “The Ethnic Chinese Millionaire,” an exhibition by Scrima in Manière Noire, Berlin

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

Andrea Scrima’s “The Ethnic Chinese Millionaire” at Manière Noire consists of a two-part, large-scale text installation, a small sculpture, and a news photo printed on the invitation card. These three elements interlock in an intricate manner, while the exhibition stands in relation to the novel A Lesser Day, which has recently come out in German translation [Wie viele Tage, Literaturverlag Droschl, 2018]. I spoke to the artist and author about the connections between literature and art, image and reproduction, description of image and text turned into space—in other words, about the multimodal signification processes of this complex work. The following conversation took place via email over a period of several weeks for the most part in August and September, 2018. –Myriam Naumann

Myriam Naumann: “Kent Avenue; how I hadn’t done anything I’d set out to do in New York, how I’d called off the exhibition and worked on the book instead…” In A Lesser Day, processes of emergence and coalescing, for instance of perception or materiality, are always present. At one point, the actual writing of a book becomes the subject matter of the text. How did A Lesser Day and its German translation come about?

Andrea Scrima: As a visual artist, I worked in the area of text installation for many years, in other words, I filled entire rooms with lines of text that carried across walls and corners and wrapped around windows and doors. In the beginning, for the exhibitions Through the Bullethole (Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha), I walk along a narrow path (American Academy in Rome) and it’s as though, you see, it’s as though I no longer knew… (Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin in cooperation with the Galerie Mittelstrasse, Potsdam), I painted the letters by hand, not in the form of handwriting, but in Times Italic. Over time, as the texts grew longer and the setup periods shorter, I began using adhesive letters, for instance at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Kunsthaus Dresden, the museumsakademie berlin, and the Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg. Many of the texts were site-specific, that is, written for existing spaces, and often in conjunction with objects or photographs. Sometimes it was important that a certain sentence end at a light switch on a wall, that the knob itself concluded the sentence, like a kind of period. I was interested in the architecture of a space and in choreographing the viewer’s movements within it: what happens when a wall of text is too long and the letters too pale to read the entire text block from the distance it would require to encompass it as a whole—what if the viewer had to stride up and down the wall? And if this back and forth, this pacing found its thematic equivalent in the text? Read more »

Monday, February 25, 2019

Darwin does devolve. Sometimes. So what?

Posted on by Paul Braterman

by Paul Braterman

“[T]here is in fact nothing that can alleviate that fatal flaw in Darwinism” says Professor Behe, stating the book’s central claim in the mendaciously mislabelled creationist web journal Evolution News.

The claim is clickbait, the book title misleading, and the argument long since rebutted. The historical roots of the argument show the close links between what now calls itself Intelligent Design, and biblically inspired “creation science”. The issues are important because the Intelligent Design movement gives a veneer of intellectual respectability to the denial of scientific reality. Behe is a founder member and senior fellow of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute (DI), which hails him as a revolutionary. The DI promotes Intelligent Design, and his colleagues there have greeted his book with rapture, claiming that “Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves Topples Foundational Claim of Evolutionary Theory” and that “Anyone interested in knowing the truth about the design/evolution debate will find Darwin Devolves a must read.”

I would much rather have been able to ignore this book. Unfortunately, I cannot do so because I know that it will receive massive publicity from the “Darwin was wrong” industry, providing as it does a figleaf of intellectual respectability to the anti-scientific creationism espoused by millions of people worldwide, including the Vice President of the United States.

I wonder whether Behe’s most vociferous supporters actually understand his position. Unlike them, he accepts the plain facts of evolution, including the mutability of species, the evolution of humans from non-human primates, the common ancestry of different kinds of living thing, and evolution in progress all around us. However, his repeated references to Darwin and Darwinism may help conceal these facts from the casual observer. Read more »

Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

New Vinyl

…..—elegy

to take an album in your hands
to feel its slight heft
to free it from its clear synthetic skin
to slip it from its cardboard cover
to scan its art, to flip it over, read,
then slide it from its paper inner sleeve
with care (platter’s rim to palm just so)
so as not to grease and soil
its lyric grooves with finger oil
which might later cause
a lead-riff smother

to hold in hands —but only by its rim
between two palms— to catch the lightglaze
caroming from its onyx spiral, cast
like hairs in onyx vinyl

to drop its center hole upon a hub
and, as it spins, to lift the diamond arm
above the disk and set its carbon tip
to spinning rifts
……………………..… (with steady
surgeon’s chance)
………………………… to do its
oscillating dance,
……………………….. its ricocheting ride
off microcliffs

to send vibrations out
as turning table shifts
and shadows scatter

ah— in that sweet tick of space & time
music’s all that matters

Jim
2/15/18

Epicureans on Squandering Life

Posted on by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Epicureans famously held that we should not fear death. Epicurus argued that because we simply do not exist once we are dead, there is no subject to suffer pains. And since pain is the only truly bad thing, there is nothing bad for us to fear in being dead. In this way, they saw philosophical argument as part of the therapy for overcoming fear. Lucretius followed Epicurus’ argument with the observation that the time before we were born is relevantly similar to the time after we die – both are periods in which we are not. He reasoned that, as we do not feel dread with respect to the time before our birth, there is no reason to dread the time after our death. These two arguments, which may be called the no subject of harm argument and the symmetry argument, have attracted a good deal of scholarly attention, and for good reason. (We have even weighed in on the symmetry argument, elsewhere.) But there is a third Epicurean about death and our coordinate attitudes about life, and it has been generally neglected. We’ll call it the squandering argument.

The squandering argument is an exercise of dialectical reasoning, in that it is not a stand-alone argument to be presented out of the blue to a person. The more commonly discussed no subject of harm and symmetry arguments are of that form. Instead, dialectical arguments arise in the midst of a series of back-and-forth exchanges between interlocutors. They are developmental pieces of reasoning that are presented in the thick of an exchange between particular discussants, and so their form (and even their conclusions) can be difficult to discern, especially once the dust settles on a dispute. But, ironically, dialectical arguments hold great promise as devices for philosophical therapy. Read more »

Perceptions

Posted on by Sughra Raza

Angela Davis Johnson. Remember, 2015. From the series Ashes on The Fruit Trees.

Ms. Davis said of this series:
“I decided to approach this body of work with a question: If ashes spoke about the history of American lynching (both of the distant past and present) what would they say? Through twenty-six paintings I explore the trauma, and ultimately the dignity of a survived people. The work comprises of eight un-stretched canvases anchored onto wood with rope. Eighteen small monotypes with the words of sorrow songs/contemporary lyrics act as connector between the larger work. This piece [above] is titled “remember.” It is an Ash Spirit. Hanging nooses in her tree hair are calling us to remember the lives of lost and understand the pain of the present.”

More here, here, and here.

I prefer pi

Posted on by Jonathan Kujawa

by Jonathan Kujawa

If you believe Sheldon Cooper, physicists have a working knowledge of the universe. Mathematicians aren’t so humble. We like to think we aren’t constrained by reality. As is usually the case, xkcd put it well:


Mathematicians like to think they are able to transcend time and space at will with a stick of chalk as their only weapon. Of course, the truth is we are all limited in what we can grasp. As John von Neumann famously said: “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” von Neumann was being deliberately provocative but he was also telling the truth.

Even when we think we are on solid mathematical ground our footing can easily be shaken by a small shift in point of view. Whether we make a deliberate decision or not, how we choose to observe and record determines what we can see and understand. There is an important distinction to be drawn in math and in life between things which depend on our viewpoint and those which don’t.

We saw a hint last time here at 3QD. We discovered the humble real numbers which we know and love from our school days are a vast and ultimately unknowable universe. The overwhelming majority of them will be forever out of reach. Even so we find real numbers comfortingly familiar. Even if we don’t understand them, we’ve gotten used to them. Read more »

A Poem About Mr Cogito

Posted on by Amanda Beth Peery

by Amanda Beth Peery

Mr Cogito is trying to make his soul more porous
like the screen door of a house in the country
letting all the air in.

Mr Cogito wants a soul like a net
catching colors & conversations, catching visions:
the singing through the door of a cathedral
on a crooked street, reaching for angels,
where he and the beggars outside understand
for the first time how to admire God
the crunch of ice in countless machines
the slush moving under boots in the street
& the thickness or click or throat-roll of consonants
in a dozen languages on the rush-hour subway
& the roar of fast traffic like the ocean
& the ocean itself breaking its rolled fists
on rocks and the deep
groaning of the earth — he heard the earth
is firmer here, it helps to hold
the skyscraper’s foundations
over its molten roll — he wants to scoop
the sounds, slick & meat-thick
out of the net of his soul
& feel the life of them in his fingers.

What makes chemistry different?

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A well known physicist turned venture capitalist asked on Twitter the other day why people seem to have a harder time understanding chemistry rather than physics or biology. Chemistry is by no means harder to understand than physics or biology, but it occupies a tricky middle ground between rigor and intuition, between deduction and creation, between creativity and understanding. Understanding it can bring great dividends: Robert Oppenheimer once said that “If you want to get someone interested in science teach them a course on elementary chemistry…unlike physics it gets very quickly to the heart of things.”

Chemistry’s path was partly driven by an impulse to understand the physical world, much like the path of physics and astronomy, but somewhat differently from physics and astronomy, to consciously improve the material conditions of life. What passed for medicine, art, architecture, agriculture and commerce in the ancient world was suffused with chemistry. Whether it was indigo dye for royal textiles, mercury or arsenic for medicine, lime for protecting crops or plaster for holding together stones of medieval stone buildings, the world looked to chemistry, whether consciously or not, to feed, transport, clothe and sustain itself. But this foundational practical role that chemistry played also obscured its philosophy.

The philosophy of chemistry developed in the 18th and 19th centuries through the work of Dalton, Lavoisier, Liebig, Kekule, Mendeleev and other thinkers. They systematized the vast body of observations that natural philosophers had documented and assimilated over the years. But key questions still remained: Why did water freeze at 4 degrees Celsius? Why were gallium and mercury liquids? Why was lithium relatively stable while its cousin sodium a fiery, unstable beast? Even Mendeleev’s famed periodic table, after answering the how, did not answer the why. Read more »

SuperWorld

Posted on by Tim Sommers

by Tim Sommers

I was lugging several superheavy boxes of dishes up the concrete stairs from the sidewalk to the front door when a guy in a silver suit materialized in front of me. The first rule of moving is that when you pick something up, you don’t put it down until you have it where it goes. This is because picking it up and putting it down are half the battle. So, I tried to go around him.

“What year is it!? What year!?” he shouted at me. I told him as I pushed past. “Oh, my god, I can do it!” I was almost inside when he grabbed my shoulder. “I come from fifty years in your past.”

“Okay.”

“Aren’t you amazed?”

I sighed and put the boxes down. This was going to take a minute. “Not really.”

“You’re not amazed? Don’t you understand? I have discovered that I have the ability to leap forward in time by sheer force of will. Do you not see?”

“Nice outfit,” I told him.

“I made it.” He seemed a little embarrassed. “Just in case.”

“You know you can’t go back, right?”

“What do you mean? I can leap through time at will.”

“Forward in time. Not back.”

“Wait. What? How can you know that?”

“You can’t go back in time. It’s like physics or something.”

He clenched his fists and looked strained – like he was trying to go back in time, I guess. He started to sweat. Then he appeared to give up for the moment. “How can you possibly know anything about my abilities?” Read more »