by Charlie Huenemann

The Fermi Paradox

The story is that sometime in the early 1950s, four physicists were walking to lunch and discussing flying saucers. The place was Los Alamos, and the lunch group included Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York. None of them believed in flying saucers, of course, but – and this is just the way such conversations go – the discussion turned to the possibility of faster-than-light space travel and the probability of life cropping up elsewhere in the galaxy. Fermi had a hunch that life shouldn’t be all that rare – it should be common, really – and that there was at least a ten percent “miracle chance” that supraluminal travel should prove possible. This led him to raise an exasperated question that drew laughter from the others: “Where is everybody?”

Thus the Fermi paradox: in all this space, and all this time, there should be plenty of advanced alien civilizations – but we haven’t heard from any of them. How come?

The most conservative resolution of the paradox is to claim that the universe is in fact SO very big and SO very old that not only has intelligent life evolved all over the place, but the spaces and times separating them from one another are SO very vast that they can never be crossed. It would be like two children in Cuba and China releasing their balloons at the same time and expecting them to bump into each other.

But there are other possible and more tantalizing resolutions to the paradox. Maybe the aliens have checked us out already and decided to put us in galactic time-out; maybe they already walk among us; maybe tomorrow we will indeed make contact; maybe alien governments always decide to cut funding for alien NASA programs; maybe in fact we live in an alien-created virtual reality – and so on, down the long line of fantastic sci-fi literature. But I would like to focus on one resolution that, whether likely or not, raises in my mind some interesting philosophical questions. Maybe, by the time any civilization reaches the point at which they can reach out to other planets, they also have developed super-intelligent machines, and that is when all hell breaks lose.

Read more »

by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Some myths seep so deep into popular culture, that even those who are not aware of the origins of a legend, know the story. Few of us have read Ovid's original account of the Cypriot sculptor, Pygmalion, who carved a beautiful woman out of ivory, and proceeded to fall so deeply in love with Galatea, as he called her, that the goddess Aphrodite took pity on him and breathed life into the statue. But, even in our ignorance of Greek classics, the basic motifs of this story are familiar from countless retellings through the ages. Whether it is a fairy tale like Pinnochio, or – in a more contemporary twist – a play by George Bernard Shaw, the theme remains the same: can you fall so completely in love with your own creation, that you blur the boundaries of reality? Can you make something come alive, just by wanting it badly enough?

After a two year pause, the LHC is turning on again. Once more, beams of protons will run circles around the giant ring, miles under Geneva, speeding up with each lap, until they are made to collide head-on, unleashing energies to rival those that prevailed seconds after the Big Bang. In the earlier run, when the Higgs boson was discovered, the LHC attained collision energies in the 7 – 8 TeV range. This time, the goal is to reach the 13 – 14 TeV range, and explore realms that have never before been accessible. Couched within the excitement of probing the unknown, are our desires for what we want to see emerge from the data. There are several theories we would like to see proved, but if I had to choose a single contender, I'd vote for supersymmetry (SUSY; pronounced Susie) – as would many others. There are, of course some dissenting voices in the crowd; those who say we have already hung on to the hope of supersymmetry for too long, that some experimental evidence of it should have turned up by now, if the theory was correct. These critics level the allegation that supersymmetry is in fact just a theoretical construction, but that some of us are so enamored of its beauty, and so keen to see this mathematical model ‘come to life', that we have lost touch with reality.

The fact that most physicists do tend to wax lyrical about this theory, is indisputable. “I love supersymmetry. It is a very canonical theory”, says Fabiola Gianotti, the soon to be Director General of CERN. Peter Higgs, after whom the famous boson was named, has declared himself “a fan” and Stephen Hawking, one of the most recognizable icons of our time, says we might see traces of supersymmetry at the LHC, if we're lucky, and that “the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles revolutionize our understanding of the universe.” In short, so many physicists want so desperately to see this theory realized, that one could perhaps be excused for wondering if we are contemporary Pygmalions, and SUSY our Galatea. Are we trying to bring it into being by sheer force of will?

Read more »

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

I

As I grow older and worldlier, and as the world itself grows more worldly, an increasingly wide range of ingredients and techniques and flavors take up residence in my kitchen. The flavors of my childhood were primarily those of the subcontinent, dominated by the Indian Ocean cities of Calcutta, Colombo and Bombay, and by European food mediated through England, Calcutta and the colonial mixing. And it is sobering to contemplate that there was a point when soy sauce didn’t consistently inhabit my kitchen (a few years in a vegetarian co-op in Massachusetts and a semester in Japan changed that), or to remember that fish sauce and various vinegars didn’t always occupy prominent roles in my culinary imagination. I’ve always known about chilies, of course; I imagine that growing up in another culinary tradition and discovering chilies must be like discovering some fundamental metaphysical truth about the world, perhaps one that you’d always known must exist, perhaps one that must exist in all possible worlds.

Some will lament the loss of local particularity that goes with such increasing cosmopolitanism, and that is indeed worth a mournful moment of silence. But, inevitably, these world-traveling ingredients strike up conversations and more in the pantry (I discovered the herring passionately intertwined with the curry leaves one long lazy afternoon), and spark improbable but delightful culinary revelations.

The combination of fermented soy beans and butter is a revelation. It is not traditional and, depending on the vividness of your imagination, might seem transgressive. At the least, the cultures that love them are separate, with soy sauce, miso and the fermented bean pastes concentrated in East Asia, and butter spread through the rest of the world with a special concentration in parts of Europe and India[1]. They are also distinctive and easily identifiable as foundational elements of their associated cuisines: “butter” and “soy” are almost caricatures of how one might describe, say, the opposition between French and Chinese food.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

An elderly couple embark on a quest. Wandering the countryside in which a mysterious mist has robbed everyone of their memories, the two are unable to recall exactly what they are doing at any given moment. This makes for a challenge since they know they are on a quest– but it is never completely clear where they are going and what exactly happened in the first place.

And what is made even worse than being on a quest where you can't keep the facts straight is that each wonders whether their loss of memory will not mark the end of their marriage–for without shared memories, what will be left to bind them together? The elderly wife wonders. But at the same time, she also cannot help but worry whether in reality they are not better off not remembering?

In the early pages of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, I assumed it would be a very different story. Like this reviewer here, at first I was sure the book would be about the sadness of a life ending in memory loss; about dementia in the elderly and love falling apart. But then (also just like the reviewer) I wondered if the novel wasn't actually some kind of exploration about the myth-making we do collectively –for indeed, it is not just the elderly couple but all the characters in the book who are suffering from memory loss as they struggle to recall what it means, for example, to be a Christian Briton or pagan Saxon, in the wake of the Roman withdrawal.

Is it glorious King Arthur or Arthur the mass murderer?

It all depends on how you remember things, right?

A coincidence (or maybe he is reading the same book) but a friend on Facebook (deliciously literary Mikhail Iossel) today wrote this:

We all know, or at least suspect, that many of the memories dearest to our hearts have never happened. To a considerable degree, our lives are the products of our own imagination — for that's what memory is, by and large: an introspective, inward-bound imagination.

It's true, but then what to do in the face of trauma? Ishiguro in several interviews wrote of wanting to write about Rwanda or Yugoslavia. He wondered how it was possible that groups of people, who up till then had been living in relative harmony, turn so savagely upon each other? What kinds of repressed hatred had to be cultivated over the years (or generations) within them, he asks. And likewise, what of our personal traumas?

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the sixteenth century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break,” before the odd invention of matter.

—Bruno Latour, An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”

This essay starts with an experience I had some years ago in a basement in Troy, New York, while rehearsing with three colleagues: Ade (who had toured with Gil Scott-Heron in his youth), Druis, and Fonda. We were each of us playing bells when at some point we heard high-pitched twittering sounds that none of us were playing. Where did they come from? What were they?

I can easily imagine how someone might think they were hearing a spirit or spirits. The Western scientific impulse is quite different. We know that spirits do not exist and therefore there must be some other, some physically plausible, account of those twittering sounds. My purpose here is not to reject the physical account. On the contrary, I believe it to be foundational. But I also believe that, carefully considered, it points to a way of making sense of the idea of spirit.

Instrument and Player

It is well known that B.B. King’s guitar is named Lucille. Why is it named at all? Perhaps it’s a gesture of affection. The guitar, after all, is very close to him. It is one of his voices; it is, in some sense, part of him.

It may be more than that. The name may well reflect the subtle intricacy of King’s relationship to his guitar, his instrument. To play an instrument well, one must learn to yield to its physicality, to blend with it. You cannot dominate it. Well, you can try, and you CAN succeed. But you pay a cost. Your musicianship suffers.

As I’m not a guitar player, however, I can’t tell you what it means to yield to a guitar. I suppose I could talk about the trumpet—I’ve been playing one for half a century—but that’s just a little complex. And my point really isn’t about complexity. It’s about subtlety.

Let us begin by talking about playing a very simple instrument, the claves.

Read more »

by Matt McKenna

Nobody walks into Get Hard expecting to see a good movie. Likewise, nobody turns to Indiana expecting to find examples of progressive legislation. Still, it's disappointing that Get Hard manages to be so bereft of humor, and it is disappointing that Indiana Governor Mike Pence would sign a bill so bereft of sense as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The similarities between Get Hard and Pence's signing of Indiana's RFRA don't simply end with their being sad wastes of time, however. The plot of Get Hard, as thin as it is, mirrors the buffoonery that has marked Pence's time in office during the run-up to the 2016 election, and the weakness of Get Hard's comedy mirrors the weakness in Pence's political positions.

Get Hard stars Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart in a movie of which producers thought so little, they named it after the film's worst joke: a cheap double entendre that refers to both becoming emotionally tough and forming an erection. One good litmus test for whether or not you'll like this film is if you think it might be amusing to watch Ferrell and Hart repeatedly say “get hard” as if they're unaware of the sexual half of the phrase's meaning. I did not find it amusing.

The film's plot is simple: Will Ferrell's character whose name I can't remember is a Wall Street genius and a moron. Lest you think there is social commentary implied here, rest assured that there is not. Ferrell is accused of embezzling money from his clients and is subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison, a place where multiple characters in the film promise he will be raped. Of course, Ferrell didn't commit the crime of which he's accused, but instead of trying to prove his innocence during the thirty days of freedom he's afforded to put his affairs in order, he enlists Kevin Hart's character whose name I also can't remember to train him to not get raped in jail. In a twist that has implications later in the film, it so happens that Hart's character has never been to jail, but since he's black, Ferrell's character assumes he has. Another good litmus test for whether or not you'll like the movie is if you think it might be fun to watch Ferrell say racist things as if he's unaware they're racist. I did not find it fun.

Read more »

by Eric Byrd

Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign is the graspable handle New York Review of Books Classics has given David Townsend’s translation-abridgement of General Philippe-Paul de Ségur’s Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande-Armée pendant l’année 1812, published in 1824. In his original two volumes, Ségur interleaved tedious statistics and technical disquisitions in archaic military French with a vivid memoir of Napoleon and the Russian campaign. The book incensed cultic Bonapartists. A few years after the book’s publication, Ségur fought and was wounded in a duel with another of the emperor’s former aides. No contemporary reader can read Defeat as a scandalous takedown or tell-all. While Ségur did not think Napoleon a faultless demigod – as the opposing duelist must have – he did class him among the Great Men, with exceptional (if fallible) powers of concentration and self-mastery, a majestic (though volatile) pride, and (usually) decisive timing; the hubristic human genius, in short; the hero fated to fall. And Ségur’s view of the Russian campaign as a clash of higher and lower civilizations is really quite chauvinist. Whatever Napoleon’s political overreach and blunders in the field, Russia is a barbarous domain of superstition and slavery. Its greedy lords scorched the earth to keep Enlightenment from the priest-ridden, icon-bludgeoned serfs, and its generals resorted to guerilla tactics because cowed by the hyperpuissance of the Grande Armée. Ségur goes so far as to call the Russians the spectators, not the authors, of the army’s woe.

Read more »

by Josh Yarden

The ‘four questions’ are among the most memorable readings in the traditional Passover Haggadah. The answers are not particularly interesting, however, especially if we let them suffice as our children transition to adulthood. Unless we dig deep below the surface of why we ask these questions, and unless we search for new ways to answer them, the exercise of reading the Haggadah is merely about providing predetermined correct answers to standardized questions. Our children may well leave them behind as they search for meaning in their lives.

The Haggadah is a book of answers for a night of questions. It tells a rather limited version of the emancipation of the Hebrew slaves, one that is quite different from the Book of Exodus. It tells a certain story about oppression, miracles and memory, but the rituals prescribed in the traditional Haggadah do not raise—let alone answer—the most meaningful questions we might ask concerning our liberation. In fact, it rather blatantly avoids asking any questions about securing our liberty or grappling with oppression in the future. Those questions may not have answers, which is precisely why we need to ask them.

We can re-interpret the annual ritual of retelling the Exodus narrative so that it can be a recurring act of learning to ask meaningful questions and searching together for liberating answers. Not all questions or answers can serve that purpose. There are basically three kinds of questions: 1) Simple questions are about requesting information. They are the questions we ask when we want assistance or permission. 2) There are more involved questions, which require more detailed explanations. They are the questions we ask when we are curious, confused or unsatisfied with what we know. 3) Then there are truly liberating questions, the type we pose when we have come to understand that the answers we have are the cause of our discontent, and we demand legitimate answers. These are the questions which investigate why things are as they are, how they got that way, and whose interests are being served. They are the questions we ask on a quest for the meaning of liberty and justice.

Let’s ask some difficult questions that don’t have clear answers. The environment, for example, is one topic that reveals our dire need for constructive answers to increasingly challenging questions. Let's take a moment to consider how deeply the theme of sustainability is embedded in the holiday of Passover and really in all of human history.

According to the Book of Genesis, drought and then famine in the region brought Joseph to prominence as an economic planner who anticipated a climate crisis and prepared the nation to withstand it. His brothers later went down to Egypt where food was more plentiful, and their descendants ending up enslaved there in later generations. (Beware of the law of unintended consequences!)

After the emancipation from slavery, experiencing freedom meant enduring life in the desert. The Exodus narrative has several references to the problems of finding sufficient food and clean water, and the return to Canaan was described as going not only to the “Promised Land,” but also to a land of plenty.

Fast forward a couple of millennia, and so many of our parents and grandparents left the countries of their homes escaping anti-semitism and also searching for a more comfortable life in the “Golden Medina,” America – where the streets were supposedly “paved with gold.” The Exodus doesn’t quite repeat itself, but much of our history is about the waves of immigrants looking for safe places where they can be free of oppression, and places where they will find sustenance.

Here are three simple sustainability questions about our people and our planet.

1) What might a leader like Joseph ask in our day?

He might begin by wondering what crises we should be planning for in the foreseeable future so that we can sustain our society in the face of drought, famine, scarcity and conflicts over resources.

2) What might a leader like Miriam ask in our day?

She might begin by asking how we can sustain our resources to ensure that everyone in the world will have enough water to drink.

3) What might a leader like Moses ask in our day?

He might begin by asking how one individual can resist injustice in the world, but he'll have to ask and answer many more questions if he is to bring about any sustainable change. In each case, we can dig deeper to reveal more probing questions and meaningful answers. Whose interests are being served by the current state of affairs? How do we engage the people responsible for the problems in generating the solutions? What is the right combination of freedom and responsibility we need to establish and to sustain a just society in the face of the threats we face?

Remember teenage Joseph, sitting in the bottom of a water cistern, imprisoned by his own brothers. He had no idea that future Joseph would end up in Egypt, where he would discover that he was prepared to lead in a time of crisis. And Miriam had no idea as a young girl that she would be the one to save Moses' life and work with her baby brother to lead their people. And Moses the fugitive had no idea that he would return to Egypt to lead the emancipation of the People of Israel. Until each of them came face to face with the dilemmas that pushed them to make difficult decisions, they were unaware of their own potential to become transformational leaders.

A set of the most important questions cannot be complete if it looks only to the past or examines only the actions of others. The stories of these biblical archetypes and others suggest that anyone might come face to face with a momentous decision in a moment of critical awakening. While most of us fade anonymously into the crowd most of the time, there are countless instances when the actions of individuals shape the futures of families, communities and entire societies. When such a moment arrives, will you be prepared to ask the fourth and most important question?

4) How will I change the world?

Begin by asking yourself, “What will I question?” And demand an answer.

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

We've noticed a strange phenomenon in contemporary political discourse. As our politics at almost every level become increasingly tribal — devoted to circle-the-wagons campaigns and on-point messaging of carefully curated party-lines — the dominant images of our politics are all the more dressed in the rhetoric of reason, debate, evidence, and truth. Hence a puzzle: political communication is almost exclusively conducted by means of purported debate among people with different views, yet citizens seem increasingly unable to grasp of the perspectives of those with whom they politically disagree. Indeed, that there could be reasoned disagreement about politics among well-informed, rational, and sincere people is a though that looks increasingly alien to democratic citizens. Consequently, despite all of the rhetoric, citizens show very little interest in actually talking to those with whom they disagree. In short, as appeals to reason, argument, and evidence become more common in political communication, our capacity to actually disagree — to respond to criticisms and objections, to address considerations that countervail our views, and to identify precisely where we think our opponents have erred — has significantly deteriorated. That's an odd combination of phenomena. Let's call it the puzzle of political debate.

To be sure, the images that dominate the landscape of political communication are mere images. Popular tropes such as “the no spin zone,” “fair and balanced” reporting, “straight talk,” “real clear politics,” and so on are merely slogans. And, similarly, the dominant “debate” format of television news is mostly political theater. However, these images and practices prevail. And they prevail because they are effective as marketing tools. So one must ask why citizens should demand that political views come packaged in this way. Here's an answer: an unavoidable fact about us is that we need to see ourselves as reasoners, debaters, and thinkers; and we need to see our own views regarding pressing social and political matters are the products of epistemically proper practice.

Consequently, any vision of democracy that prizes public discourse and civic debate must be supplemented by a properly social epistemology, an account of the ways in which people should go about forming, maintaining, and revising their political views, and a corresponding view of how democratic political institutions can aid or obstruct these processes. In providing a normative account of such matters, a social epistemology can also serve as a critical tool for assessing our present conditions.

Read more »

by Alexander Bastidas Fry

The most commonly used noun in the English language is time. Yet time is nothing more than an idea. It is an intangible concept invoked to make sense of the world such that, ‘everything doesn't happen at once,' as Einstein said. The actual most common thing in the universe is dark matter. Dark matter purports to be more than an idea. It has some kind of elusive tangible existence, yet it has never been held in anyone's hands.

The nearly invisible components of nature such as cells or atoms can only be seen with the aid of tools. If you see a cell with a microscope there exists a physical and philosophical stratification between your perception, your eye, the optics of the microscope, and the observed cell. If you see an atom on a computer monitor rendered from data from an atomic microscope then the layers of complex stratification between you and the atom are monumental. What can we truly know about the nature of things which can only be observed through tools? I would argue quite a lot. Dark matter will always remain isolated from basic human perception, but we can know it through tools or imagination.

Imagine a sea of particles gliding through you unnoticed; this is dark matter. Imagine anything, and dark matter doesn't stop for it. Dark matter doesn't interact strongly with earth, fire, wind or water. There are many particles that have elusive existences similar to dark matter like photons or neutrinos. Unfamiliarity with these known particles doesn't hinder your ability to imagine dark matter: even these particles were not discovered without stratification between human perception and the thing itself. Imagine bits of dark matter passing through you brain at this moment, every moment, because it probably is. And if it is, but it never interacts with you in any way, does it matter?

Read more »

Any Street

On a street
any street
pick one
odds are
a taste
a scent
a touch
are enough
to make one
pray
..

On a street
any street
pick one
odds are
an unknown
god’s
absent taste
& scent
& touch
are
enough
to kill
one
.

On a street
any street
pick one
odds are
the love
you know
is
touch-me-enough
to-make-me-pray
.

On a street
any street
pick one
odds are
whys
whats
whens
&
therefores
are pointless
in love
.

by Jim Culleny
3/23/12

by Jalees Rehman

All obsessions can be dangerous. When I read the title “Why America's obsession with STEM education is dangerous” of Fareed Zakaria's article in the Washington Post, I assumed that he would call for more balance in education. An exclusive focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is unhealthy because students miss out on the valuable knowledge that the arts and humanities teach us. I would wholeheartedly agree with such a call for balance because I believe that a comprehensive education makes us better human beings. This is the reason why I encourage discussions about literature and philosophy in my scientific laboratory. To my surprise and dismay, Zakaria did not analyze the respective strengths of liberal arts education and STEM education. Instead, his article is laced with odd clichés and misrepresentations of STEM.

Misrepresentation #1: STEM teaches technical skills instead of critical thinking and creativity

Zakaria writes:

If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country's education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills. Every month, it seems, we hear about our children's bad test scores in math and science — and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities.

and

“The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity.”

Zakaria is correct when he states that a broad education fosters creativity and critical thinking but his article portrays STEM as being primarily focused on technical skills whereas liberal education focuses on critical thinking and creativity. Zakaria's view is at odds with the goals of STEM education. As a scientist who mentors Ph.D students in the life sciences and in engineering, my goal is to help our students become critical and creative thinkers.

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Human beings are tightly bound by the limits of our intuition and imagination. Even if we grasp an idea on an intellectual level, we often struggle to internalize it to the point where it becomes a native part of our thinking. Rather like the difference between being able to comfortably converse in a foreign language by translating on the fly and being fluent enough to think in the language like a native. Or, as the philosopher Stephen Colbert explained, it's the distinction between truth and truthiness.

We struggle to imagine things much different from what we see around us. This failure leads one in four Americans to believe the Sun goes around the Earth. It means we can't truly grasp the staggering, mind-boggling length of a billion years and this fuels skepticism about evolution. And for science fiction readers it leads to raging internet arguments about whether the authors have any imagination at all.

When it comes to geometry our everyday intuition tells us that we live in the planer geometry of good old Euclid. The angles of triangle add up to 180 degrees, parallel lines will never meet, and the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But intellectually we know we live on the sphere called Earth, and that the geometry of the sphere leads to triangles whose angles sum to 230 degrees, parallel lines which meet, and flight paths between cities which follow “Great Circles”.

Spherical Geometry (from Wikipedia).

Media portrayals to the contrary, mathematicians are human, too. From Euclid until the first half of the 19th century, everyone was on board with Euclidean geometry. After all, that was what their gut told them geometry should be. But then Bolyai and Lobachevsky showed us that there are more things in heaven and earth than Euclid could dream of. In two dimensions there are also hyperbolic and spherical (elliptic) geometry. In higher dimensions the possible geometries multiply like rabbits and Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that the geometry of our universe isn't Euclidean [0].

How can we free our feeble minds from their Euclidean prison and develop an intuition for these new geometries?

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

“And if he insists on being killed … then at the end, by the authority of the ruling body, it's done.”

Sheikh Kamal El Mekki, who expounds with apparent approval the law on beheading ex-Muslims, spoke this February at Trinity College Dublin. Maryam Namazie, equal law campaigner, ex-Muslim and prominent critic of political Islam, was, after agreeing to speak in March, presented with conditions impossible to accept. We know that El Mekki's talk went ahead without restrictions despite concerns expressed by the President of the Students Union. We know that Maryam's talk was cancelled, and by the College, not by her.

El Mekki is on video (embedded here; see also here), at an event organised by the AlMaghrib Institute (of which more below) in July 2011, describing how he explained to a Christian missionary the law about apostasy. The missionary was complaining because of his lack of success in Morocco, which he attributed to the law [1] against apostasy. In reply, El Mekki, visibly amused at the missionary's predicament, draws an analogy between apostasy and treason (a justification that when examined makes matters worse), and goes on to explain

It's not like somewhere you heard someone leaves Islam and you just go get him and stuff like that. First of all it's done by the authorities, there are procedures and steps involved. First of all they talk to him, yeah, about, yanni, the scholars refute any doubt that he has on the issue, they spend days with him refuting and arguing with him, trying to convince him. Then they might even, yanni, threaten him with the sword and tell him ‘You need to repent from this because if you don't you repent you will be killed.' And if he insists on being killed that means really, really believing in that. And then, after the procedures take their toll, and then at the end, by the authority of the ruling body, it's done.

“Yanni,” a common interection in Arabic, means “kind of.” I wonder how one “kind of” threatens someone with the sword. However, we are left with the impression that El Mekki would be opposed to recent well-publicised Jihadist beheadings, not out of any objection to beheading as such, but because of failure to conform to the proper procedures.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“I would like to understand things better,
but I don't want to understand them perfectly.”
~ Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas

A few weeks ago I went to an evening of presentations by startups working in the artificial intelligence field. By far the most interesting was a group that for several years had been quietly working on using AI to create a new compression algorithm for video. While this may seem to be a niche application, their work in fact responds to a pressing need. As demand for video streaming, first in high definition and increasingly in formats such as 4K, hopelessly outruns the buildout of new infrastructure, there is a commensurate need for ever-greater ratios of compression of video data. It is the only viable way to keep up with the reqirements of video streaming, and companies such as Netflix are willing to pay boatloads of cash for the best technologies. But the presentation also crystallized some interesting and important aspects of AI that go well beyond not just niche applications, but the alarmist predictions of people like Steven Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. What are we really creating here?

This startup, bankrolled by a former currency trader who, as founder and CEO, was the one giving the talk, has engaged in a three-step development program. The first step involved feeding their AI – charmingly named Rita – with every single video compression algorithm already in use, and having it (her?) cherry-pick the best aspects of each. The ensuing Franken-algorithm has already been tested and confirmed to provide lossless compression at a rate of 75%, which is already best in its class. The second step in their program, which is currently in development, charges Rita with the taking the results of everything learned in the first step, and creating its own algorithm. The expectation is that they will reach up to 90% compression, which is really rather extraordinary.

So far, so good. The final step of the program – one which expects to yield a mind-boggling 99% compression ratio – is where things get really interesting. For Rita's creators are now ‘entrusting her' (I know, the more you talk about AI, the more hopeless it is to attempt avoiding anthropomorphization) with the task of creating her own programming language that will be solely dedicated to video compression. There was an appreciative gasp in the room when the CEO outlined this brave next step, and during the Q&A I wanted him to explain more about what this meant.

Read more »

by Kathleen Goodwin

At the end of February, Laura Kipnis, a professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, authored a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” which explores the ban some schools have placed on sexual relationships between students and professors and how it relates to the current atmosphere regarding sexual assault on college campuses. Kipnis is funny and perceptive, and I find her essay troubling precisely because I agree with many of her points at the same time that I find some aspects of her argument to be problematic because she fails to acknowledge overarching problems with gender dynamics among college students. I admire Kipnis for writing about a topic that, as she points out, most professors are too terrified to comment on. However Kipnis does not seem to recognize that female students today continue to feel disenfranchised in comparison to their male peers and that sexual assault is just one tangible way the unequal power dynamic plays out. Ridiculing her students and university administrators as paranoid is counter-productive to a dialogue on college sexual assault that has only been given the beginning of its due in the public consciousness.

I don't feel, as some Northwestern students do, that it is the responsibility of the University to condemn Kipnis's article. I respect the students' right to disagree with Kipnis and respond to her opinions; however, as Michelle Goldberg points out in The Nation, “Kipnis could hardly have invented a response that so neatly proved her argument…the demands for official censure, the claims of emotional injury—demonstrated how correct she is about the broader climate.” One of Kipnis's central points is that conflating sexual assault between students with sexual relationships between professors and students reveals how misguided college administrators have become when it comes to handling sexual issues on campus. While many administrators used to try to sweep cases of sexual assault under the proverbial rug, the pendulum has swung so far that they now seek to regulate relationships between consenting adults.

Which leads to another one of Kipnis's points— it appears that both administrators and students themselves believe that undergraduates are not adults capable of engaging with the realities of the world. Kipnis brings up the example of the relationship of a 21 year old Stanford student, Ellie Clougherty and a 29 year old Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Joe Lonsdale, as reported in the New York Times Magazine in February. The two dated for a year and after they broke up Clougherty accused Lonsdale of “psychological kidnapping” and asked that Stanford launch an investigation into her allegations of his sexual misconduct. It is undeniable that there were a number of problematic aspects of the relationship— Lonsdale was both significantly older and wealthier than Clougherty and had been assigned as her mentor in a Stanford class before they began dating. However, as Kipnis observes, in Clougherty's narrative of the events, “She seems to regard herself as a helpless child in a woman's body…No doubt some 21-year-olds are fragile and emotionally immature (helicopter parenting probably plays a role), but is this now to be our normative conception of personhood? A 21-year-old incapable of consent?”

Read more »