by Daniel Ranard

Sometimes it's easier to understand abstract math with a story. W­hen I explain bits of math to unsuspecting friends, I'm always happy by how quickly they follow. Even precise definitions and proofs are easy to learn with a little work. But for the uninitiated, eventually the words and symbols start to slip from the mind, the thread of logic lost in a haze.

That's where a story can help. You don't need plot or character development, just a loose narrative frame. Our brain is a logical powerhouse, but it's used to dealing with people, not abstractions. By casting mathematical notions within a narrative about people with intentions, we're more likely to remember them.

Storytelling is not just a crutch for novices. Some imagine mathematicians are a weird breed, better equipped to deal with symbols than with people. But in my anecdotal experience, experts use stories all the time. It becomes automatic, and the stories shrink to scraps of human narrative: anthropomorphized symbols, definitions imbued with intentionality, proofs framed as struggles. Sometimes a student is lost in the fog of abstraction, only to seize at these imagined human elements and successfully finish an argument. It's a skill to be learned, like so much of mathematical "talent." Eventually, the abstractions may become familiar like friends, no longer requiring the imposition of human costume.

I'll share a story about infinity, dreamed up by the mathematician David Hilbert in a 1924 lecture. It's called the Paradox of the Grand Hotel, or Hilbert's Hotel. Although it's more story-like and less precise than the "stories" I mentioned above, it's a nice introduction to the notion of infinity.

Read more »

by Brooks Riley

First, the jungle out there:

Sound familiar? Hint: It’s not the clatter of journalists in a feeding frenzy over the latest insanity to emerge from the White House. Just an ur-Twitter storm here in Mitteleuropa at 4 in the morning, recorded from my balcony.

Ever since November 9, 2016 I’ve been looking for distractions. On that fateful day after, wading through the tsunami of reactions to the US election results, I found what I was looking for: Alex Ross’s absorbing New Yorker article on Death Valley (no irony intended), a bone-dry place to get lost in and never come back. This was my oasis manqué–a desert so quiet, so neutral, so pure, so inviting, so nearly absent of humanity with its messy societal occlusions and noisy fallacies, so mesmerizing in its own right, with a breathtaking geological exegesis that shut out all the flak flying through the airwaves.

I’m not the only one looking for distractions. In an essay on this site last week, Elise Hempel described munching on a coriander leaf, while ‘thinking of everything not Trump’.

I wanted more than that: a parallel universe that could be explored without any reference points to a reality I know all too well. Something immersive, challenging, ongoing, but above all distracting. And presto, the genie of nature answered my wish. On the morning of March 15, I was awakened by birdsong outside my bedroom window–not just any old chirp-chirp, but the loud crystal-clear melody of a turdus merula or European blackbird. The concert season officially began that day, and will last until mid-July. Curtains up on a parallel civilization right outside my door.

Read more »

by Genese Sodikoff

The story of kuru is a classic one in anthropology and medicine. Called the "laughing death" in the Australian newspapers, the disease swept over the Fore population of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands over the course of the 20^th century, peaking in the late '50s and early '60s.

Victims experienced body aches and instability at first. They'd become emotionally labile, trembling and laughing involuntarily. Gradually, they lost control of bodily functions and the ability to swallow or stand. Their bodies wasted away, immobile until death, which could occur anytime between six months to a year after the onset of symptoms.

For decades, scientists were stumped as to how it spread. The usual signs of an infectious agent were not apparent, yet people were dying by the hundreds every year. The disease struck mostly adult women and young children. Women died of kuru at approximately three times the rate of men, leaving hamlets bereft of mothers and wives. It was a "demographic emergency," explains anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, who began research among the South Fore people at the height of the kuru epidemic in the early 1960s. As she describes in her 1979 book, Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, the Fore blamed the deaths on malevolent sorcery. They believed sorcerers were pushing them toward the brink of extinction.

I have been writing here about the anthropology of zoonosis, disease that spills over from animal to human. Zoonotic diseases interest me in part because they trouble our sense of species boundaries, or reproductive and even immunological divides. The lines of class difference (Mammalia, I mean) sometimes seem thinly sketched.

Kuru was not zoonotic–-quite the opposite. It was a disease borne of cannibalism.

Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

Wine and science writer Jamie Goode's post What is Greatness in a Wine? is insightful because it moves greatness out of the realm of subjectivity and personal preference:

"Greatness is conferred on wine by a community of judgement. When we, as the wine community, taste wines together, we recognize the great wines. It's an aesthetic system, where we form a judgement together, by tasting together, discussing, listing, buying, consuming."

This is indeed how a consensus forms about which wines are great. But ultimately this kind of answer is unsatisfying. When the wine community confers greatness on a wine presumably there is something about the wine that warrants such a judgment. Without an account of what that is, the judgment is threatened with arbitrariness. The job of a critic is not merely to announce greatness but to explain it by giving reasons. A genuine understanding of "greatness" would include those reasons not just the fact of widespread agreement.

Such an account, of course, is hard to provide. As Jamie writes, "There's no definition that we can apply to determine whether a wine is great or not." Each great wine will be great for different reasons and general rules that mention complexity, harmony or finesse will not capture the individuality of great wines. The best we can do is use metaphor or some other rhetorical device to call attention to those features that seem salient but are difficult to articulate.

Yet, perhaps Jamie's idea is in the right direction. A great wine is great because it appeals to a wide range of people in the wine world who agree it's a benchmark but often for vastly different reasons. Each person's account of why the wine is great will differ due to biological differences, differences in descriptive powers, aesthetic preferences, and the fact that we all have different tasting histories. Thus, perhaps what makes a wine great is its ability to generate a verdictive consensus despite those differences. Greatness in a wine lies in a wine's capacity to be appreciated from many different perspectives, a multi-dimensional potential that invites a common verdict despite vastly different ways of arriving at it.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

"These are the guys that were
too tough for the chain gang."
~ Bomber

Back in the mists of time, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, the promise of an open, decentralized, disaggregated network seemed to stretch limitlessly past the horizons of doubt and cynicism. Most iconically, John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace began with the stirring, uh, rejection: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Suffice to say, this stern invocation has not aged well. For one thing, Barlow's declaration is merely concerned with governments, and doesn't mention corporations. Perhaps this was because Barlow delivered these remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1996, and the matter required a certain deference. Perhaps he was under the sway of the idea – fashionable at the time – that history had indeed ended, with democracy and neoliberalism the unquestioned victors. Perhaps corporations, and capital generally, were not such a matter of concern twenty years ago as they are today. Nevertheless, in only a few years, the Wild West promise of the Web led to the giant pile-on of capital that would fuel the first dotcom bubble and its subsequent collapse, around 2001.

The resurrection of internet entrepreneurship following that first, intemperate bender resulted in a different model, with a somewhat subtler promise. ‘Web 2.0', as it was popularized circa 2004, was premised on the idea that information was no longer static, and that participants could interact with content, and that content could be assembled, on the fly, for a specific viewer. A bit further behind the scenes, Web 2.0 benevolently assumed a rich ecosystem of application programming interfaces that would allow for seamless communication of data requests between platforms that were burgeoning with information. You can think of an API as recipe book for how to interact with a given site's data, or a membrane that allows certain requests and not others.

So our notion of the Web was abstracted upwards, from scrappy libertarians doing whatever they wanted in some curiously disembodied space, to one that was more about to giving platforms the freedom they needed to interact with one another. This had several consequences (and I realize that I am being very simplistic here, but bear with me for the sake of the subsequent argument). On the one hand, the stage was set for the evolution of social media networks, which are more or less the ne plus ultra of Web 2.0. On the other, and inseparable from the first, was the growth of the vast and unregulated infrastructure that tracked users' online behavior.

Read more »

by Katrin Trüstedt

Our way of life is based on externalizing its costs and living at the expense of others. Hard and cheap labor, the consequences of climate change, the diverse forms of trash our lives produce – we cannot just not know that we put all these burdens on those in the global south who cannot afford the very way of life they make possible for us. And ultimately, we seem to outsource even our acknowledgement of this outsourcing. People coming from the global south into the northern developed countries seem to appear as a consequence of our outsourcing and as a threat to our way of living – "they are coming to take what is actually rightfully theirs". In a strange dynamic, this perceived threat does not seem to lead to recognition of its cause, however, but rather to its avoidance. Because migrants from the global south appear as the embodied threat to our way of living and externalizing, we seem to block the acknowledgement of our part in this system, and instead turn it against them: It is those fleeing the crisis we have produced in their countries that actually are the parasites, living off of our work, taking, or seeking to take, what is rightfully ours (our jobs, our welfare, created by our hard work).

For the meat that Westerners eat, vast areas of Latin America (and other parts of the world) have been turned into rapidly eroding agricultural monocultures to produce the soy used to feed our animal industry complex. The ubiquitous use of agrochemicals in these monocultures severely affect the environment and the inhabitants in these countries, with higher cancer and infant mortality rates. People who used to live from the lands have to move, and they migrate to ever growing slums around the cities. In his book Around us, the deluge: The externalization society and its cost ("Neben uns die Sintflut: Die Externalisierungsgesellschaft und ihr Preis"), the German sociologist Stephan Lessenich traced such developments under the term externalization as an organizing principle of our world order. What is externalization? Economically, it means that "external costs" – as e.g. the pollution caused by a factory and the costs of its consequences – are not included in the calculation of the actual price of the product. The modern capitalist work structure based on the bourgeois household serves Lessenich as a paradigm for externalization insofar as the costs of housework and childcare that enable the male worker and make it possible for him to devote all the time to his work remain hidden and unaccounted for. In contemporary societies in which more and more women work, the costs are now externalized to underpaid care worker in the global care chains who often have to leave their own home and take care of a foreign family at the expense of their own. Externalization means that most of our products are only as affordable or as profitable because certain costs are unaccounted for and covertly shifted to others. The cotton industry in Asia that produces cheap clothes for the world exploits workers, destroys and consumes the local environments and lets others pay the actual price of the product we design, market and wear. The smartphones we use depend on cobalt that is extracted from children working in mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo under life-threatening conditions. And the leftovers of all the unnecessary and underpriced products we consume pile up in the waters and lands of the global south. It is not that we have achieved a standard of living that most people around the world unfortunately have not achieved yet. It's that we have this particular standard of living because most other people don't.

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

"Our MPs will be the kingmakers, playing a huge role"
(From victory speech of Gregory Campbell, on right, 1 a.m. Friday 9th June, 2017)

Overview: I am assuming as I write this that the Conservative Party will remain in power in the UK for the immediate future. As a matter of arithmetic, this will require the cooperation of the Democratic Unionist Party. All this may, however, change at any time.

Update on the Orange Walk issue: it's already happening: "Supporters of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) are demanding Theresa May allow a banned loyalist march as part of an agreement by the Northern Irish party to prop up a minority Conservative government." Independent, Monday 12 June

Kingmakers. There is no doubt that this is how the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) see themselves. And there is no doubt that they aim to exploit this role to the full. Not by formal coalition, the trap into which Nick Clegg so disastrously led his party in 2010, but "confidence and supply", which will leave them free to make new demands and to threaten to withdraw support at any time. I will not attempt to unravel the complex affairs of Northern Ireland, but with the settlement there more fragile than it has been for some years, the strengthening of one partisan faction must be a matter of concern. Anyone requiring evidence of the DUP's ruthless political infighting, inflammatory rhetoric, and skill at reopening old wounds is invited to visit their web site at http://www.mydup.com/.

L: Saint John's College, Cambridge, where Nigel Dodds studied law

Nor should we fall into the trap of underestimating the DUP intellectually because of the crudeness of their dogmas. Nigel Dodds, of whom much more below, has a first-class honours degree in law from Cambridge University, while Ian Paisley Jr., MP for North Antrim and son of the charismatic Reverend Ian Paisley who founded the party, holds BA (hons) and MSSc degrees from Queen's University Belfast in History and Irish Politics.

Sectarianism and links to violence: The DUP is a sectarian party, founded by former members of the UUP (United Unionist Party) who considered that party's leadership too conciliatory towards the large Republican (i.e. Catholic) minority. In the late 1980s and 1990s, there were strong links between the DUP and Protestant paramilitary groups involved in arms smuggling and assassinations. The DUP now renounces violence, but there are strong family connections between the current contingency of DUP MPs, and the former leadership, and one of these MPs, Sammy Wilson, is on record as saying that if politically ignored, the people (i.e. Protestant people) of Northern Ireland may need to resort to violence.

Welfare: On welfare policy, the DUP is to the left of the Conservatives. They are opposed to the bedroom tax and means testing the winter fuel allowance, and wish to keep the "triple lock" on pensions.[1]

Read more »

by Christopher Bacas

In 1980, a college music student, I took a job at a Bar-B-Que joint. It was a mile walk from my place. I went in once or twice a week for a closing shift. A full size covered wagon sat on a pedestal in the parking lot. It looked shabby, but functional. I watched it survive North Texas weather over the two years I worked there. The restaurant had two sides, a burger counter and cafeteria-style BBQ. I worked with the pit crew; cutting and trimming brisket, ribs and chicken and serving our BBQ customers. Jim Lake managed the location for Mr Henry Lasalle, the millionaire owner. With his thick mustache, high cheekbones and cleft chin, Jim looked like a composite of Dudley-do-Right and Snively Whiplash. He wore cowboy boots and immaculate denim. I never saw him take off his ten-gallon hat. The day I showed up for training, he was busy out back in the BBQ pit. A guy named Mike trained me. He had an easy way with clientele:

"Whut kin ah git fer ye?"

"Yessir. Slice beef. Ye want plate er sammich?

" Po' Boy er regler?

"Ye want sauce on that?"

"I kin give ye some in one o these sauce deals."

"Yep. Now, the rib sauce IS sweeter. Yessir"

The step up to the cutting board passed through a pair of louvered saloon doors. They swung tightly on noisy springs. Mike showed me how to remove the top of the brisket with a smooth sideway cut. That left a juicy, stringy slab ready for against-the-grain slicing and a fatty top pushed aside on the white plastic block. Mike swept scraps into a removable steel drawer recessed under the block. The knife had to be sharp. Mike showed me how to sharpen it with a butcher steel. He told me Mr Lasalle had come behind the counter a few weeks before and grabbed a knife away from an employee and "chewed their ass rill good"

"Ya'll are RUININ' these knives!" He shouted.

Mike mentioned the owner was drunk, a description I'd hear often.

The BBQ pit was a shed attached to the building. A zigzag black pipe vented smoke. The meat rotated through the heat on a set of swinging ledges propelled by a variable-speed motor. Manager-on-duty had to monitor the pit temperature and cooking cycles. In Texas summer, the area around the pit, buffeted by wood smoke, was this heathen's idea of Hell on earth.

Read more »

On Women’s Liberation

After Iqbal

Is a necklace of emeralds more liberating?

Translated, from the original Urdu, by Rafiq Kathwari: @brownpundit / www.rafiqkathwari.com

by Maniza Naqvi

Why does this President lie in the White House? Because they all did. And because they all will. But this one lies because the last few didn't do it with the finesse that has normally been typical of the White House. The last few didn't do it with the sophistication of those before them. The last few were unvarnished, bumbling liars, blatant, impertinent, cloying, open, transparent liars. So they lied and each and every one of them took us to war, like every one of them, before them had done. And even though the lies were called out and everyone knew they lied, yet these men continued to lie and because of their lies millions of people died, uncounted, unaccounted for, as if they never mattered, as if they never existed. As if they simply were vaporized.

Now we have the newest liar. So what is the problem? And those who claim to call him out, claim they have caught him out, they are exactly those who have known the lies all along, the lies of all the others, and have tolerated them. Till now. Why? Because this liar's lies, bite into theirs. These catchers of lies, they lie too, oh yes they do, clear as day those lies lie in their quaint expressions claiming integrity with a few hokey hee-haws of lordy, lordy, lordy me. Liars. I wish there were tapes. How I wish I could tape all their mouths shut. Perhaps then the wars and its machinery of opiates, micro breweries, cannabis,TV and weapons would end.

by Elise Hempel

Sometime back in the late '80s or early '90s, at an African restaurant somewhere in Chicago, there it was again, in whatever dish I'd ordered – that taste, just a hint of it (what was it?), in this bite and now in that one, that fresh, intriguing taste I'd tasted before in both Indian and Mexican food. I had to find out what it was, knowing that it wasn't the obvious fish or chicken or lamb, or the okra or carrot or eggplant. No Google yet, no smartphone then (or now, I must admit) to do a quick internet search, I may have asked the waiter what it was in my dish that was so … fantastic. Or I may have asked my friend Liz, my dining partner that night, a real Chicagoan who lived in the city proper (I was only from the northwest suburbs) and was slightly more savvy about international cuisine, frequenting the ethnic restaurants in her northside neighborhood. Whatever the case, Liz was suddenly my culinary opposite: She hated that taste. And she didn't just hate it; she hated it with eye-squinting, nose-scrunching disgust.

I'm remembering that particular night many years ago as I stand here chopping cilantro for the pico de gallo that will top our pulled-chicken tacos tonight, as I breathe it in – that fresh, indefinable green. Cilantro. Can there really be a time when I didn't know what cilantro was? When I was a part-time cilantro-sleuth, tracking its scent in every restaurant, trying to make connections between this dish and that, always whispering to myself, There it is again, trying to match a taste to a name, a thing I could see?

Read more »

by Richard King

It's the first week of winter here in Australia. Time to move the herbs to a sunnier spot; to fetch the heater up from the shed; to throw an extra blanket on the bed … And, of course, to dig out the jackets and jumpers from the walk-in robe, and stow the colourful summer gear: the sarongs, the short-sleeved shirts, the shorts, the beachwear, the Political Lace …

Sorry? You've not heard of Political Lace? Oh but it's the latest thing, and very, very beautiful! It's what's known in the fashion world as "a wearable" – part art, part garment, part technology. And it's lace, you see, but political. Hence the name: "Political Lace".

But perhaps I'm not explaining this well. I'll let the cool-hunters at PSFK expand:

A wearable can do more than just catch your eye – it can start an important conversation.

Wearables continue to make their way into conversations about innovative fashion. Just recently, they made appearances at both New York Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week. But beyond their aesthetic appeal, wearables can serve as a way to discuss important issues. Curator, artist and creative technologist Melissa Coleman wanted to find "the most minimal way to represent data" related to women's rights.

Using data from a UNICEF report, Coleman found that the number of "girls dying in childbirth every year due to preventable circumstances" meant one woman was dying every 7.5 minutes. The result: Political Lace, a fashion piece that lights up every 7.5 minutes to symbolize another death.

Coleman explained more about the thought process behind the piece in an email:

"I thought: if you only have one LED, what can you say? I realized the most powerful thing you could do with it is count lives, which was perfect for representing a political cause. I am passionate about women's rights, so the piece became about the sad intersection of poverty, youth and education that results in teenagers dying in childbirth all around the world."

Political Lace starts a discussion through its visual nature – the wearer would stand out in virtually any situation or location with the piece. When strangers ask about the nature of the piece, it creates a way for the wearer to discuss an ethical and political issue in an unexpected way.

So, there you go. Want to look like a million bucks and "start an important conversation" about women and girls who die in childbirth? Then treat yourself to some Political Lace, "a fashion piece that lights up every 7.5 minutes to symbolize another death". Classy!

No, I didn't make this up. And yes, it is self-satirising – such that it puts itself beyond real controversy. (It's highly unlikely we'll ever see anyone actually wearing this ludicrous garment, save for the agonised adolescent on PSFK's "creative intelligence platform".) But as with Kendall Jenner and that Pepsi commercial, I find myself asking how on earth it was that this thing came to exist at all. How is it that Political Lace found its way into a designer's head, let alone into an uncritical article in The Guardian? From what combination of cultural brassicas did such a brainfart emerge? And what political atmospherics permitted it to linger long enough to be noticed?

Read more »

by Carl Pierer

Arthur Miller's famous dissection of the American Dream in his Death of a Salesman still stands as a hallmark of American literature that has not lost any of its appeal. Its striking and damning socio-politico commentary continues to be of relevance. There is, however, a second, more intimate and personal drama that takes place between the two main characters, Willy and Linda Loman. The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, well-known for his calm and minimalist depiction of domestic drama in such films as A Separation and The Past, transposes the play to an Iranian setting and thereby allows for a new perspective on Miller's play. Farhadi's unexcited narrative style gives much room to the interior life of his characters, creating a suspense that entirely draws from the psychological development of the protagonists. With his new film The Salesman, Farhadi continues to explore the subtle mechanics of a fractured relationship.

The film opens with for Farhadi unusually blunt symbolism: At night, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) and Emad (Shahab Hosseini) have to rush to evacuate their Teheran apartment, for an immediate collapse of the building is feared. In this opening scene already, the dynamic of the couple's relationship is manifest. Emad is shown as caring and sympathetic, carrying their bedridden neighbour to safety and making sure that everyone gets out of the building all right. Rana, in the meantime, is not shown to participate actively in the hubbub.

Although the building eventually does not crumble, it is clear that the main couple's home has become unsafe to live in, the cracks in the wall standing for the cracks in their relationship. Emad and Rana are actors, and their group is rehearsing Miller's Death of a Salesman. When another actor offers to let them stay at one of his apartments, the couple is only too glad to accept. But the new place does not provide the fresh start they were hoping for. Something already seems to be odd when the previous tenant, despite multiple calls from the landlord, refuses to pick up her remaining boxes. Nonetheless, Emad and Rana make an effort to make their new home. Soon, however, the events take a turn for the darker. One evening, Rana, home alone, buzzes open the door unsuspectingly thinking it is Emad.

Read more »

By Grace Boey

Imagine the following scenario. Bob doesn’t have any opinion on whether abortions are okay. Although he could think through the issue for himself, Bob takes another route: he asks his friend Sally what she thinks. Because Bob trusts Sally, he doesn’t hesitate to believe her when she says that abortions are fine. From then on, Bob doesn’t give the question any more thought, and goes about acting as if what Sally says is true.

What, if anything, is weird about Bob? There might not be much of a problem if Bob already has some strong moral views about the permissibility of ending life more generally, and trusts that Sally—who happens to be an expert obstetrician— knows some intricate scientific facts about abortions and foetal development that he isn’t in a position to know or understand. But what if, instead, Bob knows all the scientific information there is to know about abortions, lacks any moral views on the matter, and proceeds to outsource his moral beliefs to Sally? Even more provocatively: what if this scenario is set far in the future, and Bob uses the widely-available and completely reliable ‘Google Morals’ app to look up whether abortions are morally permissible?

There is something off-putting about Bob in the last two scenarios, that isn’t in the first. This has been framed as the ‘puzzle of pure moral deference’ in academic philosophical discussions. The puzzle, in short, concerns the asymmetry in our willingness to defer to others about empirical matters on the one hand, and purely moral matters on the other. Most of us would have no problems with Bob believing what Sally says about the science behind abortions. But the idea of him outsourcing his ethical beliefs to someone else, and the notion of anything like ‘Google Morals’, makes us balk.

Contemporary philosophers have offered solutions to two parts of this puzzle. First, what makes us balk at the prospects of practicing pure moral deference to others? And second, even if something is amiss about the practice, is it still alright for us to do it? In other words, should we be hopeful or doubtful about outsourcing our moral beliefs to others?

Read more »