by Anitra Pavlico

In a recent study, data scientists based in Japan found that classical music over the past several centuries has followed laws of evolution. How can non-living cultural expression adhere to these rules?

Evolution is an “algorithmic process applied to populations of individuals.” [1] Individuals vary, and certain individuals’ traits are passed on while others are culled. These steps are repeated many times. In biology, scientists can study the gene as a “unit of inheritance,” but an analogous unit of inheritance has to be selected in a study of a cultural practice. Eita Nakamura at Kyoto University and Kunihiko Kaneko at the University of Tokyo decided to look at unique musical features such as the tritone–a dissonant interval of three whole notes–and measure the number of occurrences in Western musical compositions over the centuries.

According to Nakamura and Kaneko, “The mean and standard deviation of the frequency (probability) of tritones steadily increased during the years 1500-1900.” Because this might have been just a function of individual composers’ preferences or “social communities” and not necessarily governed by statistical evolutionary laws, they developed a mathematical model of evolution to tell the difference. The tritone is a relatively rare musical event, but its use has spread over the centuries in a way that the study’s authors say follow precise statistical rules. [2] Read more »

by Bill Murray

The crocodiles know. They form pincers on either side of the crossing point. Richard says they feel the vibration of all those hooves along the riverbank above them.

Waves of animals surge toward the river then fall away. If they all go we’ll witness a frightful, deadly crush of beasts in motion, mad energy, herd hysteria, dust and confusion, the cries of mortally wounded beasts rising to the heavens, birds of prey gaggling and swooping and squawking, kinetic intensity unbound.

We have come to see the sprawling, real life spectacle of wildebeests crossing the Mara River. It is the largest overland migration in the world. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

“We’re in one of those great historic periods…when people don’t understand the world anymore…when the past is not sufficient to explain the future.”
–Peter Drucker

Fasten your seatbelts, we’re going for a ride. We start over 300 million years ago and arrive at the present in a mere six paragraphs. We remain here for the rest of the tour, looking at pictures and talking about a strange urban paradise situated in the middle of one of the most densely populated areas on the planet.

From Pangea to Hurricane Sandy

Roughly 335 million years ago, during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras, the Earth’s existing continental masses formed themselves into the supercontinent Pangea. Pangea began to breakup roughly 175 million years ago giving rise to the Palisades Sill, most visible as a series of cliffs running 50 miles along the west bank of the Hudson River in New York and New Jersey. The Palisades tapers down to sea level in what is now Jersey City.

Roughly 14,000 years ago the first humans settled in North America, spreading quickly across the continent and south through Central to South America. In 1609 the Lenape greeted Henry Hudson when he set foot in that area on his search for a Northwest Passage to China. Two centuries later railroads began emerging in North America. In the second quarter of the 19th Century and Camden and Amboy Railroad became the first in New Jersey, completing its first line in 1834. In the middle of the century the Erie and the Delaware-Lackawanna railroads completed the Long Dock Tunnel in 1861. It conveyed freight trains from the Meadowlands through the Palisades Sill to freight terminals on the Hudson River. By the early 20th century Jersey City had become a bustling port.

In 1906 the Erie Railroad began blasting a cut through the Palisades less than a football field’s width south of the Long Dock Tunnel. The Erie Cut was completed in 1910. It is between, say, 50 and 80 feet deep and 70 to 100 feet wide at the bottom. In four places the cut becomes short tunnels so that roads and buildings could go atop it; short bridges cross the cut at three other points. Collectively these are the Bergen Arches, the name by which this feature is known today. Read more »

by Dave Maier

No, it’s not that time of year just yet! However, since my yearly lists aren’t always exactly best-of-year lists anyway, I thought I might get the jump on everyone else, before we’re all best-of-year’ed out. (I should do sets more often anyway …) About half of these tracks are from 2018, and the rest are recent-ish, so that’s something.

Ethernet – Birds of Paradise (From Here to Tranquility Vol. 7 [Silent])

I don’t know a whole lot about Ethernet (I didn’t bother googling, because I bet you get a bazillion hits for, you know, Ethernet), but this track is a gloriously bubbly spacy ambient number of the sort Silent does very well (although there are all kinds of things on their samplers, of which they are up to Vol. 10 now, I see).

Fastus – Dream Within a Dream (Terra Incognito)

Fastus is a guy named Ian from Jersey City, NJ in the USA. He does great demos for particular synth modules, which is how I know about him. Most if not all of this track was done on a Eurorack modular system, perhaps the very one pictured in blue above. It can be difficult to make modular synths sound musical, so hats off to Ian for this compelling track. Check out the Bandcamp link for a sweet deal on all three of Ian’s records.

Erik Wollo – Traverse (Threshold Point [Projekt])

This is Erik’s 23rd album, some of which, he tells us, was composed “under special and tragic circumstances,” which he says make it “more ethereal and humble” than some of his other music. I haven’t heard all 22 of his other records, so I can’t really say, but this one sounds to me pretty much like the ones I know from his early days (classics like Traces and Images of Light). This particular track may also be an homage to fellow Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal, as the chord progression sounds a whole lot like that from the track “Avskjed” from Rypdal’s 1980 album Descendre. If I ever meet Erik again, I will ask him. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

By chance, I chose as holiday reading (awaiting my attention since student days) The Epic of Gilgamesh, a Penguin Classics bestseller, part of the great library of Ashur-bani-pal that was buried in the wreckage of Nineveh when that city was sacked by the Babylonians and their allies in 612 BCE. Gilgamesh is a surprisingly modern hero. As King, he accomplishes mighty deeds, including gaining access to the timber required for his building plans by overcoming the guardian of the forest. But this victory comes at a cost; his beloved friend Enkidu opens by hand the gate to the forest when he should have smashed his way in with his axe. This seemingly minor lapse, like Moses’ minor lapse in striking the rock when he should have spoken to it, proves fatal. Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh, unable to accept this fact, sets out in search of the secret of immortality, only to learn that there is no such thing. He does bring back from his journey a youth-restoring herb, but at the last moment even this is stolen from him by a snake when he turns aside to bathe. In due course, he dies, mourned by his subjects and surrounded by a grieving family, but despite his many successes, what remains with us is his deep disappointment. He has not managed to accomplish what he set out to do.

On his journey, Gilgamesh meets the one man who has achieved immortality, Utnapishtim, survivor of a flood remarkably similar, even in its details, to the Flood in the Bible. Reading of this sent me back to Genesis, and hence to two other books, The Bible [actually, just the Pentateuch] with Sources Revealed,   by Friedman, and The Ark Before Noah,  by Finkel. Friedman is Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia, while Finkel is curator of the British Museum’s collection of cuneiform tablets. Most of what follows derives from these two sources.

Comparing Hebrew with Cuneiform may seem like a suitable gentlemanly occupation for students of ancient literature, but of no practical importance. On the contrary, I maintain that what emerges is of major contemporary relevance.

As Lakatos pointed out, scientists will not abandon a position, despite difficulties, absurdities, and anomalies, until a more satisfactory one is offered. Why should the creationist be any different? He is led to embrace the absurdities of Young Earth “Flood Geology” because he regards the text of Genesis as the direct revealed word of God. If you want to change his mind, you must offer an alternative that is better on his terms, emotionally and spiritually. Such an alternative, I argue, is what emerges from textual and historical analysis. And in the Americas both North and South today, weaning the Evangelical voting bloc away from reality-denying simplicities is a matter of the greatest urgency. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

With the end of daylight savings time, the long, dark nights of winter slump over the land. It is the season for cold nights, warm blankets, and reading good books with a nice cup of tea (or a dram of scotch, if you prefer). Unless, of course, you live in Hawaii or the southern hemisphere, in which case you’ll have to content yourself with reading in a convenient hammock.

Popular math books are a sub-sub-sub-genre of nonfiction, found at a local bookstore in the Nonfiction-Science-Math-“Math? For fun? Really? Ok, if you say so.” section. Even within that narrow span of the bookshelf, you’ll find there are a wide variety of popular math books. Some ambitiously try to give you a sense of deep, modern topics of research like the geometric Langlands program or statistical mechanics. Although I suspect those mainly succeed in giving Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and Piketty’s “Capital” a run in the category of many sold but few actually read. Other authors lean towards biography. While interesting and enjoyable reads, they are not often about math, per se. I’m looking forward to someday getting to Siobhan Roberts’ well-reviewed biographies of Coxeter and Conway. Both sound great! But such books necessarily can only hint at the amazing math their subjects have done.

Perhaps unavoidably, too many popular math books end up missing the mark. Trying to talk math without the technicalities, the authors are left leaning on old standbys like the irrationality of √ 2, Hilbert’s Hotel and the marvels of infinity, and picture friendly topics like fractals. It’s a bit like eating a big bowl of oatmeal: a whole lot of familiar filling with the occasional pleasant surprise mixed in. Not that I’m throwing stones! My house here at 3QD is built from its share of tired metaphors, mathematical and otherwise. Every person who writes about math knows the truism: every equation you include cuts your readership in half. But talking about math without, you know, writing down any math is darn hard. It’s like writing about music or poetry in strict essay form. Read more »

by Lexi Lerner

“They all go the same way. Look up, then down and to the left,” the EMT said. “Always.”

Why?

“I don’t know,” he said. “Well – I think they know. When they look up, they’re just… waiting.”

And the next part – why to the left? Because of the heart?

“I don’t know. Maybe something with blood pressure differences. Maybe something else. I really don’t know.”

I’m not living, I’m just killing time.[1]

It’s absurdly easy to take this life for granted. It’s so easy that I want to, so badly, all the time. The pitfall was built into its coding. So was the challenge: if I let life matter more, I choke.

What’s the worth of sitting in the grass, watching geese, or perhaps fireflies, for days or decades on end? Is it worthy of a lifetime? Where were the geese in my college classrooms? Where were the fireflies at my jobs? What’s the role of ambition? Ambition to do what?

We sat on a bench in Soho, watching a pickup kickball game.

“Is this fragile?” I asked her.

She looked through the chain link fence. The rubber ball sailed across the field; all heads followed its enormous arc. Both teams cheered heartily.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is it sacred?” I asked.

The bruised shadows of trees, the emperor sun behind them, the pigeons.

“Yes,” she said.

On a sun-spotted afternoon in a forest, I asked my dad if he missed his dad, who passed a few years ago.

Sometimes, it doesn’t really feel like he’s gone. More like, I haven’t seen him in a while, and we haven’t spoken in a while, but he’s just a phone call away. I find myself thinking, where’s Pa? Where is he? Read more »

by Nickolas Calabrese

Is art “a right or a privilege”? This question was addressed by a who’s who of artworld elites in a New York Times feature earlier this year with regards to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s revised policy to charge out-of-towners the full $25.00 admission fee rather than their standard pay-what-you-wish policy. Predictably, this group (many of them known for their overt political or moral activism, like Ai Weiwei) overwhelmingly endorsed its status as a right (there was one dissenter, but even that came with caveats). Perhaps one of the most prominent defenders of this view, because of her station and her institutional influence, is Aggie Gund, President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She frequently states that “art is a right, not a privilege” (as she discusses in the beginning of this interview).

As framed here, it is unclear precisely what their statement is declaring. I understand it to mean one of two things: (1) Access to art is a moral right; that is, the belief that our ability to freely appreciate and produce art objects is, generally speaking, good and ought to be defended. This looks prima facie true to me. One would be hard-pressed to deny the moral good of the freedom to produce and appreciate art, barring extreme cases like hateful art, or propaganda attributed to and distributed by despotic regimes, such as the arts that Hitler or Mussolini championed in their lifetimes. This account would also be protective of art as a facet of free speech, which also seems like a mostly good thing. There is a more rigid account of art as a right, one which makes a more serious claim: (2) Access to art ought to be a legal right; that free access to museums and other institutions housing cultural artifacts should be legally guaranteed to citizens. I believe that this second usage is what is being suggested by Gund and the respondents in the NYT article, because the first claim is nearly unanimous, and anyone who would disagree with it is probably some kind of monster. But it is this second account that I am going to dispute. Read more »

by Craig Blinderman

On a recent windy morning, walking past the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on West 89^th Street in New York City, seeing the flag at half mast, just days before the midterm elections, and a week after the deadly shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, on my way to take my daughter to her dance class at Ballet Hispánico, I couldn’t help but reflect on the offensive and false rhetoric about the caravan of men, women, and children fleeing Honduras and other Central American countries, and the horrific outcomes when one takes such ideas seriously.

As a palliative care physician who also teaches in medicine, I have been trained—and train others—to understand pain and suffering, to understand its taxonomy, its causes, and how to reduce it when it occurs in individuals with chronic pain, a serious illness, or at the end of life.

I have also spent the past five years volunteering with Columbia Physicians and Surgeons’ Asylum Clinic, a student-run human rights initiative, working with Columbia medical faculty, to offer free medical and psychiatric evaluations to individuals seeking asylum in the United States.

My palliative care skills of listening to and understanding how individuals suffer with a serious or life-threatening illness has helped me to identify and document the ways in which individuals seeking asylum have suffered in their home countries; the impact their physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual traumas continue to have on their lives; and the risk to their physical and mental well-being should they be forced to return.

Aside from the physical and emotional pain, the suffering that asylum seekers, as well as seriously ill patients, are most tormented by is existential in nature. It is the fear of their own deaths. As Søren Kierkegaard famously wrote, “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” Unlike the patient with a terminal illness, the existential threat can be attenuated (at least temporarily) for the individual seeking asylum by simply not being sent back to their home country. Read more »