by Bill Benzon

Frank Wilczek, theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate at MIT, has recently published his speculation on what physics will yield over the next 100 years [1]. It’s an interesting and provocative read, if a bit obscure to me (I never studied physics beyond a mediocre high school program). And, of course, I had little choice but to wonder:

What about the human sciences in the next 100 years?

My initial reaction to that one (with a nod to Buster Keaton): Damfino!

But then I actually began to think about it and things got interesting, in part because some of Wilczek’s speculations about physics have implications for the human sciences.

I begin with a failed prognostication of my own from four decades ago. Then I move on to Wilczek’s central theme, unification, and conclude with some observations about memory and quantum computing.

Computing, the Prospero Project, and Cultural Singularity

Back in 1976 David Hays and I published a review of the then current computational linguistics literature for Computers and the Humanities [2]. At the time Hays was a senior scholar in the Linguistics Department with a distinguished career going back to his early days at the RAND Corporation, where he led their work in machine translation. I was a graduate student in English literature and a member of Hays’s research group.

Once we’d finished with the research roundups standard in such papers we indulged in a fantasy we called Prospero (p. 271): “a system with a semantics so rich that it can read all of Shakespeare and help in investigating the processes and structures that comprise poetic knowledge. We desire, in short, to reconstruct Shakespeare the poet in a computer.” We then went to specify, in a schematic way, what would go into Prospero and what one might do with Prospero as a research tool.

We did not offer a delivery date for this marvel, specifying only a “remote future” (p. 273). That, I’m sure, ways Hays’s doing; he was too experienced in such matters to speculate on due dates and told me so on more than one occasion. I’m quite sure that, in my own mind, I figured that Prospero might be ready for use in 20 years, certainly within my lifetime. Twenty years from 1976 would have been 1996, but nothing like Prospero existed at that time, nor was it on the visible horizon. Now, almost two decades after that we still have no Prospero-like computational systems nor any likely prospects for building one.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

In Oslo on May 19 John Nash and Louis Nirenberg received the 2015 Abel Prize “for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis”. The Abel Prize is barely a decade old but has quickly became one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. To learn more about this year's winners, visit the Abel Prize webpage here. For an insight into the personalities of the two winners, I especially recommend these short videos.

This year's prize comes with sad news. On their way home from the award ceremony, John and Alicia Nash were killed in an auto accident. You can read the New York Times obituary here.

Last year at 3QD we talked about Yakov Sinai's work in dynamical systems. By coincidence this year's winners' work is closely related to the “exotic” non-Euclidean geometries we discussed at 3QD in March. It's a good chance to dig a little deeper into these topics and get the flavor of Nash and Nuremberg's work. Like last year I should say straight off that I'm not an expert, but I'm happy to talk about some cool mathematics.

John Nash, of course, is one of the most widely known mathematicians of the twentieth century. His life story was told by Sylvia Nasar in “A Beautiful Mind”. The book was made into an award-winning film of the same name starring Russell Crowe. It tells of Nash's brilliant work as a young man and his subsequent difficulties with mental health issues. It's a dramatic story and well worth watching the film. It should go without saying, but the movie turns the drama knob up to eleven and shouldn't be taken as an accurate depiction of Nash's life. For a more nuanced version of events I recommend Nasar's book.

The movie closes with John Nash winning the Nobel prize in Economics for his work in game theory. In game theory we use mathematics to study potential strategies, outcomes, etc., when two or more players are in competition. If you only think about tic-tac-toe, chess, and other such games it first it sounds like a mathematical trifle. But once you begin to look around you see players in competition everywhere: people and corporations in the marketplace, countries in geopolitics, species in evolutionary competition, etc. Game theory is serious business!

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right here

put down the guitar and
puddled a cord at the base of the microphone stand
just after there’d been music right here at hand
.

is it always here at hand?
.

just yesterday
in a field behind my house
the sun hove into view again
as if it would never burn out

Jim Culleny
5/20/15

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

I was first inspired to write a Qasida in English when I came across Lorca’s “Casida de la Rosa” while researching the history of Al Andalus for my book-length series of poems on Muslim Spain. I also knew of Qasida poems in Urdu. For Lorca, who was a native of Granada, Andalucia, and had fallen under the spell of Andalusi history, writing a “casida” was a way to enter an erased, haunting, vivifying past whose mystique and poetic sensibility he identified with and felt the urgency to express. Lorca’s work was produced at a time, when, according to a contemporary of Lorca’s, Europe was “suffering from a withering of the ability to desire.” A recurrent word in Lorca’s poetry is “quiero” or “I desire,” and in Bly’s words, Lorca “adopted old Arab forms to help entangle that union of desire and darkness, which the ancient Arabs loved so much.”

The qasida can certainly be seen as a poetic tradition with desire as its central theme. The classical Arabic qasida has fifty to a hundred lines with a fixed rhyming pattern. It is divided into three main thematic components and further divided into smaller units of certain fixed metaphors, which find nuances in the hands of the particular poet using the form. The primary metaphor that constitutes the qasida is that of being in sojourn, lost in the desert, in the pursuit of the loved one whose caravan always eludes the speaker. The journey, a figurative and literal subject of the qasida, may stand for desire. The different movements in the poem signify specific places along the journey that co-relate to the poet’s emotional journey: the origins of his desire, nostalgia for past campsites, intense passion for the absent beloved, the larger map of life, the pride he takes in his tribe/caravan, how he relates to the tribe of the beloved, so on. The tone of the subsections could be laudatory, melancholic or romantic, allowing even humor and light-hearted derision of other tribes in one of the sub-sections. The imagery often tends to be abstract or symbolic, relying on the traditional, complex network of metaphors. As the ancient form of qasida developed through the centuries and across cultures, poets adapted it to suit concerns relevant to them, as in the case of the Andalusi Arabic poets that Lorca emulates.

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by Misha Lepetic

“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I'm frightened of the old ones.”
~ John Cage

Not long after moving to New York around 2000, I picked up an odd little side gig, as a gallery sitter at a space called Engine 27. Taking its name from the decommissioned TriBeCa firehouse which housed it, Engine 27 wasn't your usual art gallery, but rather one that focused exclusively on sound art. It achieved this by meticulously renovating the ground floor of the firehouse into a nearly perfect acoustic environment. Floors, walls and ceilings were treated with rugs and acoustic paneling. Speakers were strategically situated throughout the roughly 2000 square feet; they could be found lurking in corners, or hanging from the ceiling. If you weren't careful you might stub your toe against a subwoofer squatting on a seemingly random patch of floor. Pretty much anything that wasn't already black was painted so, and the lights were kept low. Feeding all the speakers was a basement full of amplifiers, computers and other hardware. It was, to put it mildly, a sound nerd's paradise.

Engine 27 was the brainchild of Jack Weisberg, a self-taught sound engineer who earned his nut innovating approaches to both arena-scale sound and smaller, more high-brow projects. As an example of the latter, he worked with artist-composer Max Neuhaus on the 1978 MoMA iteration of his “Underground” project, which projected sound into the Sculpture Garden from beneath a ventilation shaft. (Neuhaus' Times Square version, sponsored by the Dia Foundation, ran from 1977 to 1992, then was reincarnated ten years later, but, befitting the fragility of sound, is currently ‘temporarily unavailable due to construction'.) Jack was a curmudgeonly fellow and used to getting things done his way. This is perhaps why Engine 27 became an extraordinary space for practicing what some people call “deep listening”, which for me is just a tacit admission that we don't listen very closely to much of anything anymore.

Part of what makes good sound art so fascinating is exactly this prerequisite. Perhaps I am being overly optimistic here, though, since our culture, and especially what we consider to be ‘art', is so biased towards the visual. And for the purposes of the current argument – ie, I am sidestepping the question of what differentiates sound from music – the visual bias provides us with the dispensation of a quick scan. The people who speed-walk their way through an art museum will later on assert how great the museum was. They may even have the selfie to prove it. In some minimal way, they would be correct to say that they saw the art, but this is no different from saying that you “saw the grass” while driving down the freeway at 80mph. In this manner a viewer is entirely justified in dismissing an Ad Reinhardt painting as ‘just black' (although ‘none more black' might be more accurate). What else could he or she do, without spending the time needed to let the painting actually unfold before one's eyes, as was Reinhardt's intention?

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by Jalees Rehman

“The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize. What matters here is the framework— or the procedure— rather than the outcome or the substance. Limits and constraints, in other words, can be productive— even if the entire conceit of “the Internet” suggests otherwise.

Evgeny Morozov in “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism“

We cherish privacy in health matters because our health has such a profound impact on how we interact with other humans. If you are diagnosed with an illness, it should be your right to decide when and with whom you share this piece of information. Perhaps you want to hold off on telling your loved ones because you are worried about how it might affect them. Maybe you do not want your employer to know about your diagnosis because it could get you fired. And if your bank finds out, they could deny you a mortgage loan. These and many other reasons have resulted in laws and regulations that protect our personal health information. Family members, employers and insurances have no access to your health data unless you specifically authorize it. Even healthcare providers from two different medical institutions cannot share your medical information unless they can document your consent.

The recent study “Privacy Implications of Health Information Seeking on the Web” conducted by Tim Libert at the Annenberg School for Communication (University of Pennsylvania) shows that we have a for more nonchalant attitude regarding health privacy when it comes to personal health information on the internet. Libert analyzed 80,142 health-related webpages that users might come across while performing online searches for common diseases. For example, if a user uses Google to search for information on HIV, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) webpage on HIV/AIDS (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/) is one of the top hits and users will likely click on it. The information provided by the CDC will likely provide solid advice based on scientific results but Libert was more interested in investigating whether visits to the CDC website were being tracked. He found that by visiting the CDC website, information of the visit is relayed to third-party corporate entities such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. The webpage contains “Share” or “Like” buttons which is why the URL of the visited webpage (which contains the word “HIV”) is passed on to them – even if the user does not explicitly click on the buttons.

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To Tariq, Younger Brother
7 November 1952 – 7 November 2014

Lines written at Raj Bagh Cemetery and at Jewel House

The root of our life, the life below the life
Richard Howard

At Raj Bagh Cemetery

Aha! There you are buried at Father’s feet,
next to uncle Rasool. Are you still
not talking to him? Why did you steer clear

of him all your adult life? Grudges?

We lived our childhood with his children, after
all. Say, “Hello! Uncle Rasool,” or your
typical “Howdy!” Believe me, talking cures.

“I don’t want to see your face again,”

you wrote me once I sold you my share in
Jewel House for a brotherly sum.
Net one-eighty. In no time, you seeded

Mia’s young mind with poison talk: Don’t

trust our family, you told her. Have faith in
only the peerless Mister Peer, best
friend—who, by the way, was not at your burial.

Everyone is Corruptible,

his creed, you told me once. No money for your
school, you wrote Mia. She spread the news:
I had taken all. Tsk! Tsk! I know no dad,

except in fiction, who would disgrace

his sole heir, not even the tuk tuk driver
who dodges rogue traffic to wheel me
to the lively veggie bazaar at Dal Gate.

Such malice! Matched only by your ex-

wife’s mediocrity, turning up her fatuous
nose as if her kind had all the world’s
culture, Kashmiris only agriculture.

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by Yohan J. John

We are routinely told that we live in a brave new Information Age. Every aspect of human life — commerce, entertainment, education, and perhaps even the shape of consciousness itself — seems to be undergoing an information-driven revolution. The tools for storing and sharing information are becoming faster, more ubiquitous, and less visible. Meanwhile, we are increasingly employing information as an explanation of phenomena outside the world of culture and technology — as the central metaphor with which to talk about the nature of life and mind. Molecular biology, for instance, tells us how genetic information is transferred from one generation to the next, and from one cell to the next. And neuroscience is trying to tell us how information from the external world and the body percolates through the brain, influencing behavior and giving rise to conscious experience.

But do we really know what information is in the first place? And is it really a helpful way to think about biological phenomena? I'd like to argue that explanations of natural phenomena that involve information make inappropriate use of our latent, unexamined intuitions about inter-personal communication, blurring the line between what we understand and what we don't quite have a grip on yet.

People who use information technologies presumably have a working definition of information. We often see it as synonymous with data: whatever can be stored on a hard drive, or downloaded from the internet. This covers text, images, sound, and video — anything that can be represented in bits and bytes. Vision and hearing are the senses we seem to rely on most often for communication, so it's easy to forget that there are still experiences that we cannot really communicate yet, like textures, odors or tastes. (Smellevision still seems a long way off.)

The data-centric conception of information is little over half a century old, and sits alongside an older sense of information. The word 'information' comes from the verb 'inform', which is from the Old French word informer, which means 'instruct' or 'teach'. This word in turn derives from Latin informare, which means 'to shape, form'. The concept of form is closely linked to this sense of information. When something is informative, it creates a specific form or structure in the mind of the receiver — one that is presumably useful.

But there is a tension between seeing information as a unit of communication, and seeing it as something that allows a sender to create a desired result in the mind of a receiver. And this tension goes back to the origins of information theory. Claude Shannon introduced the modern technical notion of information in 1948, in a paper called A Mathematical Theory of Communication. He framed his theory in terms of a transmitter, a channel, and a receiver. The mathematical results he derived showed how any signal could be coded as a series of discrete symbols, and transmitted with perfect fidelity between sender and receiver, even if the channel is noisy. But for the purposes of the theory, the meaning or content of the information was irrelevant. The theory explained how to efficiently send symbols between point A and point B, but had nothing to say about what was actually done with these symbols. All that mattered was that the sender and receiver agree on a system of encoding and decoding. Information theory, and all the technologies that emerged in its wake, allows us to communicate more and communicate faster, but it doesn't really tell us everything we would like to know about communication.

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by Brooks Riley

In the beginning was the story. It was a manuscript deeply embedded in the genes and it was all about survival, when instinct was the sole purveyor of instructions. It may be hard to conceive of a biological primer as an example of narrative, but getting by was, until then, the greatest story ever told, especially for the ones who got by. And if the story itself was somewhat schematic, didactic, too utilitarian, that too was necessary to the plan.

Then along came ‘show and tell’, as cleverer animals and Homo sapiens showed their young how things are done. With digital dexterity came ‘draw and tell’: Cave drawings were the first examples of what we now recognize as narrative—no longer so concerned with ‘how it’s done’, but more with ‘what he did’, what he encountered, what actually happened—history, his story, her story. And finally, when words were uttered, ‘speak and tell’. From then on, the story blossomed, thanks to the most astonishing technology ever achieved by a species: language (which eventually extended storytelling into ‘write and tell’ and last but not least ‘film and tell.’)

We know all this. What we may not know, is whether the need for narrative is still imbedded in our genes. It’s important to our conscious minds as distraction, as entertainment, but is it also a basic need that must be attended to, like eating, sleeping, dreaming?

The first thing a child wants after it learns to speak is to be told a story. If it’s truth or fantasy hardly matters, as long as it is outside the child’s range of experience. If the child is not told a story, it will eventually invent one on its own (a biological necessity?). Fairy tales have certain imbedded markers specifically aimed at children–an underlying morality, or recognizable patterns of living. For a child, fairy tales are the welcome mat to the human race with its complicated procedures and arrangements. But at the same time, fairy tales address the impossible, the improbable, and the ideal. They can reduce time itself to a plaything, a toy to be manipulated at will, whether it is the instantaneous transformation of a frog to a prince, the 100 years of Sleeping Beauty, the 900 years of Methuselah, or the creation of the world in six days.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

Imagine that the French chapter of some international organization decided to give a prize of some sort to the New Yorker. Imagine a dissident faction of this French chapter, plus some Québécois, some Belgians, some Malians, protested this decision, pointing to New Yorker covers such as the one below, and claiming that this American magazine perpetuates racial stereotypes and political slurs. Suppose some Americans then tried to explain that the cover is not intended to perpetuate these stereotypes and slurs, but to comment on them, and to compel Americans to reflect on them, by exaggerating them and distilling them into a single image. Imagine, next, that in response the same French dissenters let that clarifying point fly right past them, and insisted that Americans should really not be fanning the flames of racial discord, given, e.g., the grave problem of police brutality, the current conflict in Baltimore, etc.

At this point, Americans would be right to say to those French dissenters: You ignorant fools, why don't you actually *learn* something about what this cover means, about who it is targeting and why? This is, mutatis mutandis, just what we are seeing now with the American PEN dissenters and their refusal to absorb any new information about Charlie Hebdo. We hear over and over again variations on the non-sequitur claim that PEN is honoring the “cultural arrogance of the French nation” (Peter Carey's words). How? By extending honors to a magazine whose primary function, as is clear to anyone who actually knows how to read and interpret it, is to satirize that nation's cultural arrogance? Again, this makes no more sense than to take the New Yorker cover as a symptom of, rather than a comment on, injustice and inequality in American society.

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by Thomas R. Wells

The persistence of monarchy in modern Europe, even in weakened form, is astonishing and disappointing. How can it be that in the 21st century Dutch, British, even Canadian citizens must still describe ourselves as mere subjects? What does that medieval term even mean anyway, and who gets to decide? When are we going to get around to finishing the republican project and making a final separation of state and royal bodies?

I

The citizens of constitutional monarchies like Britain and other Western European countries are in an equivocal position, at once politically and legally equal members of the sovereign body and its feudal vassal. Functionally, most of the time we live in a democracy, but symbolically we still live in Saudi Arabia. We are so used to this that it feels normal.

But there are some moments when the contradiction is particularly hard to avoid.

Such as when an anti-racism protestor in the Netherlands – not Thailand – is arrested and hauled off a podium for shouting “Fuck the king, fuck the queen, fuck the monarchy”. He is still facing charges for Lèse-majesté. (Coverage, in Dutch.)

Or when new British citizens are charged £80 to swear an absurd oath of allegiance, originating in the Magna Carta, and updated in 1868, promising to be both subject and citizen:

“I (name) do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors, according to law.”

Who could promise such a thing? What could it even mean?

Apparently the British government recognises the absurdity too. In the very same ceremony new citizens are also required to swear a more conventional republican pledge of citizenship.

“I will give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and respect its rights and freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen.”

But this hardly solves the problem. Which Britain are they promising loyalty to? Autocratic dynasty or democracy? How can someone who believes in ‘democratic values' also believe in hereditary monarchy? Obviously they can't, without corrupting the meaning of one or both. All we can say for sure is that anyone who swears to two such contradictory statements within 5 minutes must be lying and that this particular lie is imposed on them by Britain's naturalisation law. It seems to me that forcing new citizens to begin their official membership of your society by lying solemnly in public is a particularly repulsive and stupid thing to do.

Of course most British people – aside from police, priests, judges, MPs, and soldiers – are never confronted with the oath of allegiance in this way. But I suspect that many citizens who say they love their royals would nevertheless object to having to swear solemn allegiance to them. Then they would have to admit that officially the royals don't belong to us but we to them.

This puts the lie to the ‘democratic' argument for constitutional monarchy – that by being outside the domain of grubby political competition the monarchy is somehow above it, able to represent everyone by representing no one. You can't claim democratic support if you aren't willing to accept the sovereignty of the people by letting them choose. The monarchy is not a democratic institution but a popular one. Like a celebrity franchise it is sustained by the equivalent of Facebook likes – people who like it can express that, but people who don't like it have no opportunity to vote against it. The fact that the monarchy never takes a stand on anything is a sign of its democratic weakness not its strength – its public support is wider but also much shallower than that of the grubby politicians. The monarchy's only popular mandate is to look pretty and reproduce.

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The height of the curve is an indicator of where the greatest probability densities are. Most arrivals happen in quick succession (the curve is tall when t is small), but there will be occasions when a long time elapses before the next arrival happens. At t=0, when the last customer just left, if you calculated the probability of the next customer arriving within 5 minutes (0 < t < 5) you would get the value 0.283. Equivalently you could say that the probability you will wait 5 minutes or more is (1 - 0.283) = 0.717.

Now here's the interesting part. Suppose twenty minutes have now passed and the next customer still hasn't arrived. You are starting to get a little impatient; after all you don't want your productive time to be idle. So at t=20, you again calculate the probability of a customer arriving in the next 5 minutes (20 < t < 25), given that no one has come so far. You would think this new probability, based on how much time has elapsed, should be higher than 0.283. But, surprisingly, the probability that a customer will arrive in the next 5 minutes, given that twenty idle minutes have passed, is still 0.283! And the probability that you will wait 5 minutes or more is still 0.717.

This is precisely the Memoryless property of the Exponential: the past has been forgotten; the probability of when the next event will happen remains unconditioned by when the last event happened. Fast forward even more: let's say you've waited for half an hour. No one has shown up so far. Frustrated, you recalculate the probability of someone arriving in the next 5 minutes (30 < t < 35). Still 0.283!

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by Charlie Huenemann

“Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” – Daniel 12:4

London in the early 1640s

London was an exciting place to be in 1641. The political uncertainty was both thrilling and terrifying: many Puritans, convinced that their suspected crypto-catholic king, Charles I, was in league with the Anti-Christ, were pushing back against his high-handed policies. Their frustration was to lead to civil war within a year. A small circle of London intellectuals, led by Samuel Hartlib, seized the uncertainty of the time to push for what they hoped would be a middle way: a tolerant and enlightened Protestantism that could serve as a foundation for a pan-European utopia.

Hartlib had come to London in 1628 as a refugee from war-torn Poland. He was inspired by Francis Bacon’s vision of an enlightened society built around the pursuit of knowledge, and he saw that such a society could emerge only if education was completely reformed. He maintained an extensive correspondence with savants across Europe, introducing intellectuals with one another and promoting new works of scholarship. He eventually fell into company with John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, who shared his ideals and moreover had access to both money and Parliament. They hatched a plan.

The plan was to invite to London two intellectuals Hartlib knew from his days in Poland: John Dury and John Amos Comenius. Both men shared Hartlib’s zeal for reforming education and for uniting Protestants into common cause against the Catholics. With their energizing presence in London, it was thought that a new vision forward would spread throughout the land, and Parliament would seize upon a model that was more Calvinist than the king would like but less severe than the Puritanism of the would-be rebels: a just compromise.

There was more at stake than mere political stability. Many in Hartlib’s circle believed that the thousand-year rule of the Roman Anti-Christ (aka the Pope) was finally coming to an end, and the new thousand-year rule of Christ was coming into being. Unlike his dour counterparts, Hartlib believed that God rewarded human efforts to come to know the world through natural philosophy, and that piety and natural curiosity could go hand in hand.

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