by Paul North

With the previous post I began a new series, cognominated "Reports from an Academy." The reports are pure fiction. Imagine, if you would, a middle-aged professor of literature at an elite institution, call it Nevahwen University. Each month, worrying that it will all be over soon, a slipshod, unsystematic professor still in his good years, or so they tell him, pens a bulletin to the outside, without much hope anybody will receive it. Nevahwen is the school's name as well as its motto. Will the conflict between understanding the world and becoming successful in the world finally be decided in favor of understanding? This is the professor's eternal question. He asks: when? Wen? In a cynical mood, his answer is: Nevah. Nevahwen. Postcards from the front lines of a battle over the future—at the clash site of two generations, two or more economic classes, and in the midst of these conflicts, tiptoeing along a schism between the value of understanding and the value of success—postcards from the schism, these reports portray experiences that may be hard for those at home to fathom. Take them as proof the professor is still alive. Take them as recognitions of failure or declarations of hope. Take them as you will.

Charlatans, Failures, and Frauds

These three undesirables have one thing in common, they don't live up to expectations. What seems full of promise turns out to be empty. The product is different than you anticipated, worse than you wanted; promises turn out to be either fast talk, impotence, or lies. Charlatans, failures, and frauds: we want none of them in this Academy. Or, more precisely, we accept a certain amount of failure, but only if it is limited in scope, and it is really only tolerable if failure points the way to success. We must always learn from our mistakes. We must always learn from our mistakes.

Today I report on a point of indistinction. There is a point, hard to reach, even harder to recognize, when the three—charlatan, failure, fraud—become virtually indistinguishable. At this dicey point, someone presents an experiment, a historical thesis, a speculative proposal and neither you nor anyone else can tell whether the hypothesis is trumped up, whether the scientist or researcher has talked themselves into something they will later repudiate and regret, whether the world is simply not as they say and the thesis is flat wrong, or whether they are lying to themselves and as a consequence to others. It is a moment of high dubiousness. Then again, it is also a moment of possibility, where something unexpected could happen. We are not accusing our colleagues in the profession of anything. In fact, they show the utmost in professionalism, thoroughness of research, methodological rigor, and integrity. Yet there used to be a type…

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by Michael Liss

I don't want to talk about affirmative action. It's a messy, horrible topic.

I just don't want to talk about it. But earlier this month, the New York Times reported on a new Jeff Sessions initiative to hire political appointees for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division for "investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination." By "intentional race-based discrimination," the AG means race-based discrimination against races other than African Americans or Latinos.

And I don't want to go there. Republicans, largely speaking off the record, see this as a win for Sessions personally, as it pleases Trump at a time where Trump-pleasing might be important for Sessions. And it's a win for the GOP, where affirmative action is broadly unpopular not only among party members, but also with more moderate suburban middle and upper middle class voters who approach the college application period with dread.

I'm still not going to going to be sucked in. Sessions' motives and whatever political calculations they reflect are irrelevant. The historical record on the systematic exclusion of minorities is an irrefutable disgrace, but, when it comes to remedies, particularly their legality, reasonable people can disagree. Either affirmative action is Constitutionally permissible, or it isn't, and the Supreme Court gets to make that decision. To be technical, there's no such thing as affirmative action—it's been banned by the Supreme Court since the Regents vs Bakke decision in 1978. What has been permitted, although narrowed by an increasingly conservative Court (see last year's 4-to-3 decision in Fisher v. University of Texas) is that universities can continue using race as one of multiple factors in their admissions decisions. This is what Sessions is targeting. He really isn't talking about pure merit—he's fine with the 21 other herbs and spices that are the alchemy of determining an incoming Freshman—but race will be out, and he's prepared to use the considerable power, and budget, of the DOJ to make sure it stays out.

What's next? It's not hard to predict that a lot of people who are enthusiastic about Sessions' goal will be end up being both disturbed and disappointed. Until the Supreme Court rules, he can't just snap his fingers and erase any and all considerations of race in the process. And, even if he were given an unlimited budget to pursue this, he wouldn't be able to investigate hundreds of colleges. The best he can do in the short term is to mount a few selective prosecutions of those he sees as excessively friendly to minority applications, and, by extension, hope to intimidate/influence the rest into altering their stated policies.

But here's his real problem (and it's the problem of applicants who expect to benefit from the new policy): The existence of a stated "pro-minority" process is easy to prove. Demonstrating the adverse impact of it on an individual basis as means of achieving redress might be much more difficult. To do that, to find out who really benefited and who was "wronged," he's going to need a lot of personal and granular data on every applicant, not just minorities, and then try to reverse engineer the admissions calculus, substituting his own views of who is worthy for the judgment of the school.

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by Sarah Firisen

Watch this video. No, I mean, right now, go and watch this video, I’ll wait. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, even if you think it’s unnecessary scaremongering, you should still find it thought provoking and at least a little scary (most people find it terrifying), and if you don't, then you’re really not paying attention. If you can’t be bothered to watch it, the basic premise is that we are very very quickly, far quicker than most of us realize, moving towards a world with so much automation that “Humans need not apply” for most jobs. That we are moving towards a very near-term future where humans, like horses in the past, aren’t just unemployed, they’re unemployable.

Bill Gates famously wrote, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction." It might be tempting to brush off predictions of a future without human work. And indeed, today, the likelihood of such a future does depends who you ask; the US government says not to worry (and this was before the current science denying administration), the UK government is less convinced.

By some predictions, more than half the human race could be unemployed, and more importantly unemployable, by as early as 2045. Uber recently bought Otto, an autonomous truck company. In October 2016 they made their first delivery, 50,000 beers. In the US alone there are 3.5 million truck drivers. That’s a lot of jobs and a lot of people to find additional employment for, but it’s not half the human race by any standards – even though transportation is the largest employment category in the world. Nevertheless, maybe it’s just, as the UK Science and Technology Committee says, that “Human beings must develop new skills to compete in a world where artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent”. This is hardly a new problem; the 19th century Luddites were a group of English workers who destroyed machinery, particularly in the mills, because they feared it would take their livelihood away from them. They were right, it did, but those weren’t great jobs. Mill work was strenuous, poorly paid labor that often led to chronic, sometimes fatal illnesses. The industrial revolution eventually significantly increased the standard of living for the general population.

The prediction of Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers is that "AI will grow the economy instead of take jobs away. While some jobs may disappear, AI will create new jobs and consumer demand for new products and services”. But while there may be some truth to that, this isn’t like the Victorian industrial revolution, this is different, both in scale and in the kinds of jobs that are already being automated.

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by Dave Maier

Previous installments: pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3

A few months back I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, the first time I had ever done that, and they printed it. A number of legislators in my state had held a news conference announcing their plan to legalize, regulate, and tax the sale and use of marijuana in New Jersey. Unfortunately for them, our state’s governor, Chris Christie, has made it perfectly clear that he would veto any such bill, so that plan is on hold for now. (There is a gubernatorial election this year to replace the term-limited and in any case unprecedentedly unpopular Christie, and the highly favored Democratic candidate, one Phil Murphy, has indicated his support for legalization.) As the reporter noted, the legislators had made a big deal about how much tax revenue this plan would raise, and had suggested that this might be part of a solution to the state’s pension crisis. Governor Christie had of course rejected the idea, citing his belief that marijuana is a “gateway drug”, that supporters of legalization are “just stupid liberals who think that everything is okay” and that, especially during an opioid crisis, such tax revenue would amount to “blood money.”

In my letter (they don’t allow you much space, so I had to be brief) I agreed with the Governor that if marijuana really is as bad as he believes, then we might very well be better off spurning the tax money that legalization would raise; but I also pointed him, and everyone else, to the online resources on the subject available at, for example, the Marijuana Policy Project (the paper doesn’t allow web addresses in their letters, but here I can link) – in particular, the careful refutation available there of the “gateway” theory (a theory which, one might note, even the DEA no longer endorses). I concluded with a plea that, given that this issue will (thanks to Murphy’s endorsement of the idea) be an important one in the fall campaign, we should all do our homework in order to show other states “how we do public policy in the Garden State.”

Alas, my plea has fallen on deaf ears. In the past couple of weeks, there have been in the Bergen Record two op-eds and a number of letters on the issue, none of which (even the sensible ones) show any evidence of a whole lot of homework-doing.

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by Bill Benzon

In 1889 a young Paiute Indian named Wovoka fell ill with a fever and, in his delirium, visited heaven. While there he talked with God and saw that all the Indians who had died were now young and happy doing the things they had done before the White Man had come upon them. News of the new messiah spread rapidly among the remnants of the Indian tribes. If they danced the right dances, sang the right songs, and wore their consecrated Ghost Shirts, not only would they be immune to the White Man’s bullets, but their loved ones would return to them, the White Man would vanish from the face of the earth, and the buffalo would once again be plentiful. Their fervor and belief were not rewarded and the Ghost Dance, as this last wave of revivals came to be known, soon passed into history.

That, however, is not the Ghost Dancing that concerns me. I mention it only to provide some comparative perspective. Anthropologists and historians have told that story hundreds if not thousands of times. It is the story of a people’s last desperate attempt to retain symbolic control over their world. Such revivals occur when a way of life has become impossible, for whatever reason, but the people themselves continue to live. In desperation they resort to magic to remake the world in terms they understand.

The Ghost Dancing that concerns me is not that of Stone Age people displaced and conquered by iron-mongering and coal-burning industrialists. My concern is the Ghost Dancing that has become a major force in contemporary American cultural and political life. Widespread belief in the impending Rapture – when all good Christians will be taken to heaven and all unbelievers consigned to hell – is the most obvious manifestation of the contemporary Ghost Dance. But it is hardly the only manifestation. Refusal to accept evidence of global warning is another symptom, as was the refusal to attend to ground intelligence in conducting the war and reconstruction in Iraq.

For that matter, belief that the so-called Singularity is at hand – when computers will surpass humans in intelligence – is Ghost Dancing as well. This type of Ghost Dancing may seem rather geekish and harmless, for there aren’t all that many of these particular believers. Belief in the Singularity, however, is close kin to continued belief in the feasibility of an effective anti-missile defense systems, in the Pentagon’s desire to develop a highly robotized military where the machines do the riskiest jobs, and in a more general belief that technology will fix everything.

Contemporary American Ghost Dancing has not, of course, been occasioned by colonialism or conquest. The modern American way of life has not been destroyed by external enemies. America has become and still remains the strongest nation on earth. Our vulnerability has subtler sources.

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by Jessica Collins

This is an attempt to recapture a feeling of queasiness I felt in my early teens, when I was already captivated by mathematics, but didn't yet know much about mathematics. It's an attempt to recapture that feeling of queasiness and then to resolve it in a way that it might have found resolution at the time, had I been asked the right questions.

Puzzle

I'm going to proceed somewhat indirectly and begin with a rather cute little geometrical problem. If you've got a few minutes to spare I encourage you to spend that time with pencil and paper trying to solve this puzzle before proceeding to read the rest of this piece, in which I'll describe three different ways of solving it. Here is the problem:

What is the sum of the three angles that the x-axis makes with the lines joining the origin to the points (1,1), (2,1), and (3,1) respectively?

The three angles are those shown in the following diagrams:

The first angle α is obviously 45°. If you know some trigonometry you'll recall that given a right triangle one of whose other angles is θ, the tangent of the angle θ, tan(θ) for short, is the ratio of the length of the side of the triangle opposite the angle θ to the length of the side adjacent to the angle. Thus we can see from the diagram above that β, the angle that the line joining the origin to the point (2,1) makes with the x-axis, is the angle whose tangent is 1/2, and that the angle γ is the angle whose tangent is 1/3.

This means you could use the arctan or inverse tan (tan^-1) function of a scientific calculator to find the answer to the question above. The question was asking in effect:

What is: tan^-1(1) + tan^-1(1/2) + tan^-1(1/3) ?

If you do this on a calculator, you'll find that the three values are:

α = 45°
β = 26.565051177077989 . . . °
γ = 18.434948822922011 . . . °

and that these three angles sum exactly to 90°, which was not immediately obvious, at least for me, from looking at the diagram.

But, without recourse to the calculator, can you explain why this is so? Can you find a simple proof that α + β + γ = 90°? We may restate the problem:

Show that the three angles the x-axis make with the points (1,1), (1,2), and (1,3) respectively sum to a right angle.

This is the point at which you might pause for a few minutes with pencil and paper before proceeding to read what follows.

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Learn That First

I've wondered if dawn is like birth
and dusk like death
and if we're given these metaphors
to pique our curiosity
as if to say nothing in this world
is real. You are so naive,
you think this is a dream?

Yes, these are shadows.
Socrates said as much in the agora
trying to spread some light
but this is always difficult among men.
Men prefer to grasp at shades.

Child, this is not a dream,
that is misapprehension—
what Socrates suggests is that
life shelters in shadows
in this desert
…………… learn that first
.

Jim Culleny
8/11/17.

by Jalees Rehman

The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov is best known for his studies on classical conditioning showing that dogs repeatedly presented with a combination of food and a sound would subsequently salivate upon hearing the sound alone, in anticipation of the meal. The combination of the two stimuli – food and sound – over time "conditioned" the dogs' brains to link these two stimuli. A variation of this experiment was performed on human subjects by Ellson and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1941. In Ellson's study, 40 subjects were "conditioned" over time by hearing a sound and seeing a light. Ellson later on exposed the subjects to only the light, yet 32 of 40 subjects claimed to have also heard the sound. Ellson concluded that such conditioning could lead to hallucinations – the hearing of sounds which, objectively speaking, are not present.

Recently, the Yale University psychiatrist Philip Corlett and his colleagues conducted a very interesting variation on this earlier study by asking whether some people are especially vulnerable to having auditory hallucinations induced by conditioning. The researchers recruited four groups of study subjects: 1) Fifteen patients with severe mental illnesses who also regularly heard voices (an auditory hallucination), 2) fifteen patients with severe mental illnesses who did not hear voices, 3) fifteen individuals without any evidence of mental illnesses who also claimed to hear voices and 4) fourteen healthy individuals who did not hear voices. Group 3 consisted of voice-hearing psychics ("clairaudient psychics") who identified themselves as such via their own websites, at psychic meetings, or referrals from other psychics. Another important innovation in Corlett's study was the inclusion of brain imaging studies on all subjects, thus allowing the researchers to study functional brain responses when exposing them to auditory and visual stimuli. The researchers then repeatedly exposed the study subjects to a checkerboard image and 1 kHz tone while they were lying in the brain scanner. The subjects were asked to press one button to indicate that they heard the tone, and a second button if they did not. They were also instructed to press down the button longer, the more confident they were in having heard the tone.

After conditioning the subjects, the researchers then intermittently began to show them images of the checkerboard without playing the tone. As expected, many subjects indicated having heard the tone even when it had not been played. However, patients with severe mental illness and a history of hearing voices (group 1) as well as healthy psychics with a history of hearing voices (group 3) were significantly more likely to wrongly indicate that they had heard the non-existing tone. Members of these two groups were also more confident that their hallucination was actually real, since they pressed down the button for longer. Healthy subjects and patients with mental illness who did not have a history of hearing voices were comparatively more correct in identifying whether or not the tone was present. Importantly, when the researchers repeatedly showed the image without the tone, voice-hearing, mentally ill patients were unable to "update" their beliefs when compared to the other groups, whereas the psychics gradually recognized that the tone was non-existent.

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by Brooks Riley

According to a biologist who studies the properties of dirt, a single teaspoon of the stuff contains more living organisms than there are people on earth. Not a particularly salient fact, but enough to launch the imagination toward other epic notions and distortions of scale: What if our whole world is just a tiny microcosm in someone else’s teaspoon out there in the ether, no more than a microbiome in the belly of a beast so vast it swallows whole universes from a teaspoon into its black hole of a maw, itself a spoonful in a nest of universes, like Russian nesting dolls, their own spoons poised over a bottomless bowl of Beta borscht along a belt of milky ways that go on forever?

Infinity doesn’t bear thinking. ‘Do I matter’ always leads to ‘do we matter’, and along this precarious train of thought the ‘we’ keeps getting bigger, from our person to our species to our planet to our solar system to our universe and beyond. Where does it all end? That we’ll never know doesn’t diminish the question. If there’s only one universe, what is outside of it? If it has boundaries, can it be a universe? These are secular thoughts leading to the contemplation of unimaginable insignificance, and are best left to astronomers or philosophers to figure out, if we survive that long.

The notion of scale has insinuated itself of late into my sleeping life as unpopulated dreams go in search of miniscule changes in a grid pattern, or the perfect word to correct an imperfect song, or a secret combination of colors out of a staggering number of variants. Sometimes I am scaled down to the size of Thumbelina, ready to crawl up the back of a peregrine falcon before takeoff.

Awake, I feared I was slouching toward early autism, which is how I imagined the early autumn stage of my life, or as Gustav Mahler so sublimely echoed Friedrich Rückert’s words: ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.’ Or ‘I am lost to the world’.

But that’s not entirely true. I’m more interested in the world than I’ve ever been, but from a safe distance. I may be ‘lost to the world’ but it isn’t lost to me.

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by Tamuira Reid

There is something about the light in Tuscany. That is what I will remember the most. Not the pasta and the prosciutto that made my pants split open, the drop-jaw architecture, the art dripping from the walls of the Uffizi. No. It's all about the light. It's golden and strong and covers everything in an otherworldly glow. Makes sense why the Renaissance painters were so inspired. And why my father saved pennies (literally) just to stand in front of the Ponte Vecchio as a young man. These photos don't really do it any justice, he'd tell me, spreading the proof between us.

My son and I just left Italy, where I was teaching for NYU Florence. Our campus was a collection of villas dotting acre after acre of olive trees. Ollie went to Italian Catholic school and learned words like "ciao" and "grazie" and some bad ones that he laugh-whispered to me at night before bed. I spent hours wondering what it was, exactly, that made gelato taste so unbelievably good. Life was rich and simple, even if we were dirty and complicated at heart.

We've now traded the cobbled, crooked streets and statues of naked men for the A train and car alarms. The Duomo for Times Square. Peace for chaos. And the thinking of writing to the doing of writing. Summer.

Professors make fast work of the summer months. It's the time we set aside to build our masterpiece, commit ourselves to making that work, the one piece we've dreamt about our entire lives. The one that potentially defines who and what we are.

Back in my college days, I always imagined professors having these fabulously indulgent summers, shuttling off to some exotic tropical island, barefoot and sipping on margaritas, wearing ugly shorts on a golf course. Old, smart people getting laid. I never thought that they might actually, like, work.

I am a creative nonfiction writer turned screenwriter who is currently writing a novel. (I wrote a screenplay, based on a personal essay, and now I am rewriting it as fiction.)

Writing takes time. Lots of it. Insane amounts of it. Hours upon hours until you have no idea what day it is or what the weather is like or when the last time you ate something other than coffee was. When I became a mother, my world shifted entirely. Days became longer, better, harder. Time wasn't something I took for granted anymore.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

As we know from the Law of Small Numbers, coincidences happen. Indeed, Ramsey's Theorem tells us they are downright unavoidable. Unfortunately, not all can be happy coincidences. In the first two weeks of July we lost three remarkable women of mathematics: Maryam Mirzakhani, Marina Ratner, and Marjorie Rice.

The most famous was Maryam Mirzakhani. She passed away on July 14th. This was reported in the New York Times, the Economist, and across the internet (including, of course, here at 3QD). Her widespread fame was in large part due to the fact that she was both the first woman and the first Iranianian to earn the Fields Medal. As we discussed at the time, Mirzakhani worked in geometry. More specifically, she worked with moduli spaces: these are geometric spaces where each individual point is itself a rich geometric object.

That is, imagine you are interested in studying geometric objects of a certain type (say, circles). Rather than study them one by one, you could study them as a collection. If you say two circles are "close" to each other when their radii are close in size, then you have a way of measuring distances in the space of circles and this lets you unleash 2000 years of geometric tools on the problem of circles. Of course, Mirzakhani studied moduli spaces of much more complicated gadgets than circles, but the principle remains the same.

Loyal 3QD readers saw this approach in action a few months ago. Thanks to the work of Canterella, Needham, Shonkweiler, and Stewart, we know it is possible to match the points on the sphere with triangles in a way where nearby points on the sphere match up to nearby triangles in Triangle Space. If we wanted to be fancy (say, at a geometers' cocktail party), we could have said that they showed that the moduli space of triangles can be identified with the sphere.

Their primary motivation was to give an answer to one of Lewis Carroll's bedtime problems [1]. But thinking geometrically also gives us entirely new insights. A big one is that with geometry we have the ability to talk about the shortest path between two points. But the shortest path depends on the ambient geometry. As we all know, the shortest distance between two points in the plane is given by a straight line. However, on a sphere, the shortest path is given by a "great circle".

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by Claire Chambers

Today is the anniversary of 70 years of Pakistan, and tomorrow it will be Indians' turn to celebrate their nation's Independence Day. I recently wrote about South Asian cultural production that portrays Nehru, the Mountbattens, and the Edwina-Jawaharlal relationship or affair. Today I turn my attention to depictions of the Quaid-i-Azam or founder of the nation of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Many influential historical accounts of the Partition have assigned sole responsibility for the country's division to Jinnah and the Muslim League. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre's journalistic history of Partition, Freedom at Midnight, and even Sumit Sarkar's more scholarly account of the lead-up to Independence, Modern India 1885-1947, are examples of portrayals that to varying extents adhere to the view of Jinnah as a megalomaniac evil genius who masterminded the Partition to gain power. However, this politician was much more complex, as my blog post strives to show.

Like these history books, Richard Attenborough's biopic Gandhi portrays Jinnah as a coldly inhuman monster. Indeed, Akbar S. Ahmed writes of the cinematic portrayal, 'Jinnah conveys one impression: menace'. The Muslim League leader has unshakeable agency and is figured forth as a supercilious and worldly politician, who can often be found standing near to Gandhi making ironic comments. Gandhi, by contrast, is saintly and otherworldly, declaring with admirable pluralism: 'I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew'. In the film, it is Machiavellian Jinnah who says that as a response to the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre Indian violence is only an eye for an eye. To this statement Gandhi replies with the famous and possibly apocryphal line: 'An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind'.

The actor playing Jinnah, Alyque Padamsee, has aquiline features and rather sinister parti-coloured hair. In the screenplay, he is described as 'tall, slender, ascetic looking, but dressed impeccably' and, in a more barbed comment, as '[a] man made for the spotlight, a man loving the spotlight'. When Gandhi first returns to India from South Africa, Jinnah is sceptical about the dimuinutive man's abilities, enquiring whether he is a fool and suggesting that Congress should allow him briefly to vent his frustrations about South African racism before he slips into oblivion. Jinnah appeals to the Prophet Mohammed for patience when Gandhi keeps him waiting because he has travelled to meet him by way of a third class train compartment followed by a long walk. The contrast between the elegant lawyer in Western dress who drives a luxury car and this humble pedestrian clad in homespun cloth could not be clearer.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The ancient bricks of the mosque’s roof slowly loosen and slide apart, letting in a sudden, high torrent of water that nearly drowns me before becoming a mist of green, garden-filtered light: a recurring dream after my first visit to Cordoba, Spain, years ago. I would remain haunted afterwards by the narrow alleys of the Juderia, where, in the upper-story of an old mansion-turned hotel in Cordoba, I sense ghosts striding the rooftops, leaping across the alleys around the mosque-turned-cathedral next to a synagogue. When I write the history of al-Andalus in poems, the book ends up carving a narrative of fire, not water; it begins with the “convivencia” (peaceful coexistence) of the Abrahamic peoples gathering around the Arabic “furn,” the communal oven, baking and breaking bread, or at the kilns together making exquisite tiles out of Iberian dust— it ends with the genocidal fires of the Inquisition. The final destruction notwithstanding, the garden-filtered light of al-Andalus remains and grows in the rich tradition of Andalus-inspired poetry across the Muslim world, and the garden-filtered music of al-Andalus is the music of water reminiscent of the banks of the river Guadalquivir (from the Arabic “al-wadi al-kabir”) where waterwheels turned acres into crop-filled fields, orchards and iconic gardens with fountains and pools, transforming the land and its people for over seven-hundred years.

I praise the scholars, scribes, rulers, poets and builders of al-Andalus in my poems, but also its arabesque-rimmed public wells, irrigations canals, gardens, baths and ablution fountains in citrus-scented patios: an appreciation of water as creative material and a spectacularly-utilized gift to civilization. I recall Mahmoud Darwish’s longing in his line “water, be a string to my guitar” (Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusi Scene”) and Iqbal’s metaphor for the Muslim spirit itself as an ocean “Watch, from that ocean-depth— what comes surging at last” in “The Mosque of Cordoba.”

If the Qasida is a journey-poem of the people of the parched Arabian desert who took the poetic form across three different continents, water may well be a metaphor for the immortal beloved in whose pursuit the endless journeys are made and in whose memory water is channeled, all manner of life supported and beautified— a response in the language of gardens to the Divine promise of elaborate gardens in the life hereafter, an homage to (“al-Hayy/al-Khaliq”), the ever-living-creator who teaches how to create. Al-Andalus quenches the mystic thirst, standing for the ultimate creative output, a robust, self-energizing spirit constantly filling its reservoir of knowledge, a paradise of human cultivation and a treasure of the Muslim legacy; its fragmentation and collapse equally unforgettable as a tragedy.

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by Paul Braterman

Ten minutes difference, and Earth would still be Planet of the Dinosaurs

We have suspected for some decades that the dinosaurs¹ became extinct as the result of a massive meteorite, an asteroid, hitting the Earth. We have known where the impact site was since 1990, if not before. But it is only last year that we successfully drilled into the impact site, and only now, for the first time, do we really understand why the impact was so fatal. And if the meteorite had arrived ten minutes earlier, or ten minutes later, it would still no doubt have inflicted devastation, but the dinosaurs would still be here and you wouldn't.

Too many suspects

L: Ammonites (Haeckel, 1904, via Wikipedia). Click on this and other images to enlarge

66.1 million years ago, dinosaurs covered the Earth. 66 million years ago, there were none. And not only the dinosaurs, but the pterosaurs in the skies, the long necked plesiosaurs and even the ammonites in the oceans, and 75% of all complex animal life. No terrestrial vertebrate heavier than around 25 kg seem s to have survived. What happened?

There was no shortage of theories. Quite a lot was going on, geologically, at the time. There was massive volcanic activity in India, giving rise to what are known as the Deccan Traps, containing over a million cubic kilometres of basalt. Such major volcanic episodes have been connected with other mass extinctions. They are accompanied by the ejection into the stratosphere of sulphur dioxide, which in turn slowly reacts with atmospheric oxygen and water vapour, forming a haze of sulphuric acid far above the Earth's surface. This partly blocks out the Sun, affecting the plant growth on which almost² all life on Earth depends. We saw such an effect on a much smaller scale with the 1991 eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines, which caused a two-year slowdown in global warming and reduced crop yields worldwide, far beyond the reach of the actual dust cloud. Continents were on the move, with the reopening of the North Atlantic, polar icecaps reappeared after prolonged absence and led to lowering of sea levels, affecting ocean productivity, and all these things may have added to ecological stress. But all this hardly seems enough for such a wide-reaching die-back, nor does it account for the suddenness of the process.

Above, Mt Pinatubo, caldera formation phase, USGS

And so, we saw the emergence of the asteroid impact hypothesis. The Solar System still contains fragments of rocky material left over from its formation. This material is mainly concentrated in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, but small fragments continually come our way. Most of these are tiny particles, which burn up in our atmosphere (meteors or shooting stars). Some are large enough to survive, falling to earth as meteorites, and their chemical composition tells us a great deal about the stuff from which Earth was originally formed. Very occasionally, the meteorite is large enough to dig out a crater, such as Meteor Crater in Arizona. During the early years of the Solar System, major impacts were frequent and dramatic, as we can see by looking at the Moon and at the other inner planets, but on a geologically active planet such as Earth the evidence will long since have eroded away. However, there are still plenty of small asteroids whose orbits intersect the Earth's. What if one of these happened to crash into the Earth, and trigger catastrophe?

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