by Paul North

We're used to thinking of the past as something that already happened. We say it's over, finished. We've moved on. Some go further and say that the past itself has moved…out of reach. It is over and done with, it holds no claim on us, it has not only stopped happening but also no longer has effects. As naïve as this seems, there are reasons to take this view. What do Napoleon or the Warring States period in China have to do with shopping malls and the global poverty level? Which parts of the past influence us and which are truly out of date? A good example of the "over and done with" theory of the past is old technology. Is that a clay tablet for sale in my office supply store? This evidence can be used to argue for a strong discontinuity with the past.

The same evidence, the reed stylus for making wedge-shaped impressions in a clay tablet, can be used to show a strong continuity with the past. Some would point out the obvious similarities between 300-year old stylus and ballpoint pen, for instance, and perhaps a little more surprisingly, but not much, some will note the screen-like nature of the clay tablet. Those who see this think that the past, though completed, nevertheless has influence on our present. Some believe that the US Constitution fixed the standards for high-level political issues, and these very standards—freedom of assembly, the right to bear arms, freedom of speech, among others—persist, despite multiple problems of interpretation, and despite the way language changes and forms of living and frames of reference change. The past happened. It is done and closed for business. Our present reenacts—in perpetuity—matters settled long ago.

In perpetuity—this is just the point. Many also think the past, though fixed and formed and unchanging, influences not only the present but also the future. This view is shared by evangelicals and tech junkies alike. The belief that in the deepest past God fixed a date for salvation is close cousin to the belief that in the recent past the invention of the computer fixed the course of progress. These beliefs, despite the obvious differences, have a similar view of the past. Past events, finished, final, and certain as they are, nonetheless shaped future events.

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by Grace Boey

How should we listen to others? The social act of listening necessarily involves two parties: the listener, and the speaker. In many situations, the answer to the question depends on the comparative standing between the two.

Consider, for instance, how I should listen to my doctor. I ought to place more stock in his medical judgments than my own, since he is a medical expert and I am not. Suppose my doctor tells me that my sore throat has been caused by a virus, which will not be cured by a course of antibiotics. I should trust what he says, even though there may be a slim chance that he is wrong. And I ought to do this even if I suspect that antibiotics might help me, since they have cured a painful case of strep throat in the past.

Yet it is not the case that everyone ought to defer to my doctor’s medical judgments. Consider a senior medical specialist who has much more experience diagnosing painful throats than my doctor. If she concludes that my sore throat is bacterial, and not viral, then she ought to place more stock in her own judgment than his, and advise him to prescribe me a course of antibiotics. So whether or not one ought to defer to my doctor’s medical judgments depends on who they are. In this situation and others like it, the question now becomes: given who we are, how should we listen to others?

The medical case above is uncontroversial, as are similar cases involving other types of expertise like engineering, science, math, and so on. We have no problems recognising that we should listen to experts in these fields, since they have important skills and information that we lack. But there is one type of listening which is, although socially and morally salient, much less often conceived in these terms: listening to others about oppression. So: given who we are, how should we listen to others about oppression?

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by Leanne Ogasawara

It is every astronomer's dream.

To be granted your own island, you are then given practically unlimited funds so to be able to design, build and run your own observatory. Who could have such luck, you are probably wondering? Well, Tycho Brahe, who stands as one of the most fascinating and quirky characters in the history of astronomy, found himself in just this ideal position.

It was the mid 16th century. And the island he set his sights on was located in the middle of the Danish sound, not far from the Elsinore, the stage of Hamlet's tragedy. A quiet island, Tycho was not only given the island of Hven in its entirity, but he was put in charge of the people living there as well. Conscripted like Russian serfs, the villagers of Hven woke up one day to learn that a new boss was in town, and they owed him two days work a week–no wages to be paid.

And so with their labor, Tycho's great building project commenced "for the contemplation of philosophy, especially of the stars."

John Robert Christianson, in his delightfully well-written book, On Tycho's Island, describes the project in detail. "A Platonic philosopher, Paracelsian chemist, and Ovidian poet, Tycho Brahe was the last Renaissance man," says Christianson.

The last Renaissance man was also the "first great organizer of modern science."

A high ranking aristocrat from a powerful family, Tycho had the full backing of the Danish crown. The king hoped that Tycho would bring fame to his country in the form of great scientific discoveries. And everyone at court looked forward to seeing the new observatory take shape. Tycho planned Uraniborg ("Castle of Urania") to be both elegant AND cutting edge. Trying to create something like "the past glories of Castiglione's Urbino and Ficino's Platonic Academy in Florence," Uraniborg was probably really modeled on Palladio's Villa Rotunda, near Vicenza, which Tycho might have seen when he visited Venice 1575. Tycho was perhaps drawn to Palladio's architecture because of its strict use of purely geometric forms.

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by Bill Benzon

The word “robot” is Czech and entered 20th Century discourse in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), a play by Karel Čapek that premiered in Prague in 1921. It was staged in London in 1923 in English, and in Tokyo in 1924 in Japanese. A Japanese ten-year-old named Osamu Tezuka read the play in 1938 and thirteen years later he created the most famous robot in Japanese culture, Tetsuwan Atomu, Mighty Atom, aka Astro Boy in English. Čapek’s play was a response to industrialization; Tezuka’s manga was a response to the Allied Occupation of Japan. Čapek’s robots were not electro-mechanical devices; they were organic, but constructed, like Frankenstein. They were created to serve humans as workers, but they rebel and, in time, kill all humans save one. Tezuka’s conception is quite different; his robots are electro-mechanical, but many of his stories center on social tension between humans and robots.

Though Tezuka hated WWII, he was a patriotic Japanese and expected Japan to win the war. Near the end of the war he created an unpublished comic in which Japanese and American comic strip characters fought one another (Frederik Schodt, The Astro Boy Essays, 2007, p. 27). After the war he continued his medical training while beginning to publish manga, publishing New Treasure Island in 1947, which is reputed to have sold 400,000 copies. He experimented with science fiction in Lost World, Metropolis, and Next World. He introduced Mighty Atom as a secondary character in 1951, and then gave him his own title in 1952.

Chris Galdis, Astro Boy Outside Kyoto Station

While he had some misgivings about whether or not his primary audience, Japanese boys, would be able to identify with a robot, those misgivings were groundless. Mighty Atom was a success. He published Mighty Atom stories continuously from 1952 through 1968, and a few thereafter. In the 1960s he created an animated TV series that was almost immediately exported to the United States as Astro Boy. During the 1980s he created fifty-two anime episodes in color, most of them based on stories in the earlier anime series or in the manga.

Tezuka set Mighty Atom in a future world with advanced technology. Space travel was routine, as was undersea and deep earth exploration. Mighty Atom was the size of a ten-year-old boy, more or less, but had a 100,000 horsepower atomic energy heart, an electronic brain, search light eyes, super-sensitive hearing, rockets in his legs, ray guns in his fingers, and a pair of machine guns in his posterior. He attended primary school, where he was often teased for being a robot, and lived with robot parents and a robot sister. He was particularly close, however, to two middle-aged men. Dr. Elefun was head of the Ministry of Science and created Atom’s parents and sister; he also repaired Atom. Mr. Mustachio was Atom’s teacher in school. Both men worked closely with Atom on his various missions and adventures and offered him sage advice.

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by Dave Maier

If you’re a philosophical pragmatist, you spend a lot of your time checking out various philosophical tools. You’re also not so keen on (or: kind of obsessed about overcoming) the modern/Cartesian philosophical consensus concerning the conceptual dualism of subject and object. Taken together, this means that you are looking in particular at 1) tools to help you 2) combat the Cartesians. Nowadays that means trying to decide what we can take from various, equally anti-Cartesian (or at least so advertised) but not-explicitly-pragmatist traditions, like phenomenology, hermeneutics, German idealism, and post-analytic philosophy. Even if we manage to avoid reducing the alternate tradition to one big argument for the truth of pragmatism, the trick then is to find the sweet spot between appropriating clever and well-intended but ultimately not very useful gadgets, on the one hand, and simply abandoning pragmatism entirely (even if on pragmatist grounds) and signing up for the whole rival package.

And then there’s Wittgenstein, whose thought is particularly difficult to coordinate with anything else, due to his abnormally strong (and peculiar) philosophical personality, as well as the obscurity and multiple reasonably valid interpretations of his various mostly incomplete writings. We certainly don’t simply want to say: oh look, Wittgenstein is a pragmatist; but on the other hand it is difficult to see how his thought can be used for pragmatist ends outside the explicitly Wittgensteinian context. Most pragmatists don’t want to bother, and most Wittgensteinians tend to resent the effort.

Richard Rorty is one famous exception; but his views on the matter are all over the place and we will have to leave that interpretive project for another time. Today I want to deal with one particular area of seeming coincidence: the apparent flirtation with pragmatist epistemology to be found in Wittgenstein’s final notebooks, published in book form as On Certainty. In fact if you go looking in the literature for pragmatism in Wittgenstein, this is most likely what you will find most of, from the entry on “Wittgenstein and Pragmatism” in the recently published Companion to Wittgenstein (ed. H-J. Glock and John Hyman; article authors Gregory Bakhurst and Cheryl Misak), to entire books, e.g. Wittgenstein and Pragmatism: On Certainty in the Light of Peirce and James by Anna Boncompagni. In fact both have been so recently published that I have only had a chance to glance at them, so my apologies to all authors in advance. In any case I only have a few quick remarks for now.

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by Michael Liss

That was quite close. But for a handful of votes, and some hubristic miscalculations, virtually all of the ACA would have gone down in a whirlpool of tax cuts and denials of coverage.

And yet, the monster lives. The temptation is to fill volumes with the how and the why, all the inside baseball, who disliked whom. But, being the sort of person who is naturally attracted to dull, I am going to talk about AHCA and ACA without ever mentioning Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and the Freedom Caucus. Spoiler alert—read further and you enter a sea of boiling wonkiness.

Let's state what the last few weeks should have made obvious: For all the bloviating the overwhelming majority of Congressmen and Senators really don't know what they are doing when it comes to healthcare. They don't understand population health or public health issues or patient needs. They don't understand insurance. And they don't understand economics.

No one should be surprised by this. Politicians rarely have granular knowledge in any field other than politics. Rather, governing is basically the mechanism through which the expertise of other, more informed people (in industry, academia, and inside government itself) is filtered through a political philosophy, debated, transmitted (or sold) to the public, and enacted.

Most of the time this process works—crudely, without attention to fine detail, without being perfectly engineered. Americans have been blessed with great assets. We can usually afford the inefficiencies that have ideology (or just garden variety spoils) triumphing over technocratic precision. Besides, there is always another election coming.

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by Paul Bloomfield

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Okay, poets, we get it: things are like other things
…… —A. R. & M. G.

Ah, But Math is Like That Too

When poets are so dissed
by engineers and physicists
they really should consider this:

(4+2) is just like 6
and keeping that in mind
81’s like the square of 9
and in case you think these
are a poet's tricks,
√36 is too like 6
(in this, poetry’s like
arithmetic).

In fact, when quantities and things align
like is like an equal sign
and, what’s more,
(4×4) is 16’s metafour
.

Jim Culleny
10/28/16

by Misha Lepetic

"In economics, the majority is always wrong."
~ JK Galbraith

One of the unfortunate gifts of the current, star-crossed administration is that there's something for everyone that will get their knickers in a twist. If immigration or climate change isn't your thing, just wait a few days, and some administration official will come out with a statement that lands somewhere in the space between spectacularly ignorant or merely deeply ill-considered. My latest opportunity to double-take arrived a few days ago, when Secretary of the Treasury (and Goldman Sachs alum) Steven Mnuchin opined that the threat of artificial intelligence to employment is "not even on my radar screen".

To be fair, the clip is brief enough that it is difficult to conclude whether or not Mnuchin knows what he is talking about. Too often when we talk about technology we fixate on one aspect of it, and intend (although not always) that this aspect stands in for the entirety of the technological phenomenon. These days, favored metonymies are ‘AI', along with ‘robots' and ‘algorithms'. Keeping this in mind while listening to the Mnuchin clip, it's unclear what he actually means when referring to AI. Although I suspect he's talking about the holy grail of AI, which is artificial general intelligence, or an AI that is indistinguishable from human intelligence.

If that is the case, then he did a disservice to the question, which was about the impact of AI on employment. Or, if you'll allow me to pluck out the metaphor, the impact of technology on employment, which is much more amorphous. Mnuchin's dodge was to say that, since we won't have human-equivalent AI for the foreseeable future, it's something that's not worth thinking about, at least until it happens. Come to think of it, I've heard this dodge before, mostly from the mouths of climate change skeptics and deniers. In both cases, the purpose is to obfuscate and delay until the truly catastrophic comes to pass, then innocently maintain that "no one could have seen this coming" or some such nonsense.

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by Tamuira Reid

The day Luna went mad her mother thought, finally. The signs had been there, hanging around at the dinner table, in the bathroom where she ironed her hair.

It had waited patiently in the corner of a room, under a chair, in the oven with the bread. Now they wouldn't need to wonder when it would all fall apart because it just had.

The day Luna went mad she was wearing pink lipstick. Her legs were waxed and smoothed down with cocoa butter because she was religious about that kind of thing. Never know who you're gonna see, she'd say, sliding a gold hoop through each ear.

It happened slowly and over a period of time. Shop closed. Her mind just closed-up on her. Went out of business.

Luna sang to the plants as she watered them. Would be normal except she thought she heard them sing back. Her mother turned up the radio and hung wet nylons from the fire escape.

It's hard to talk about it, when it's your daughter.

The emptiness in her eyes scared her mother. The empty blackness of her eyes. They held nothing but crazy and she knew that. And somewhere deep inside, her daughter knew what was happening too but she couldn't stop it.

The police said they had found her in the fetal position, on a sidewalk in Times Square. She was licking her arms like a cat. Her clothes sat next to her in a pile, perfectly folded. She wanted to go home if that was okay.

Sit. Eat.

My hair.

Your hair is perfect. Sit.

Her mother sat her down at the table and did what she did best. Fed her. A hot plate of arroz con pollo, a Malta, tostones with the heat still rising off them.

Something is happening to me, she said and stared out the window. A plastic bag floated by, white and ripped on one side.

Eat.

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by Daniel Ranard

In the twentieth century, two important ideas arose with a nominal similarity: Einstein's theory of relativity on the one hand, and the idea of cultural or moral relativism on the other. It's probably fruitless to draw parallels between concepts that arose at distant ends of the intellectual spectrum—the hard sciences versus the humanistic disciplines—but sometimes you can't help yourself: "relativity" is right there in the name. In 1905, Einstein declared that certain facts about space and time are only true relative to a particular person or reference frame. In subsequent decades, philosophical "relativists" argued that questions of what is moral, what is true, or even what exists can only be answered relative to individuals or groups. Of course, Einstein's theory proved to be right, while the philosophical strand of relativism has evolved into a variety of contentious ideas.

First I will focus on Einstein's relativity, before touching on relativism in philosophy. To me, the story begins with two opposing accounts of what physics is. According to one account, physics provides an objective description of the world itself, like an encyclopedia entry on "The Universe." The encyclopedia tells you what stuff the world is made of and how that stuff behaves. This approach might be called the realist approach: physics presents objective facts about the real world.

Others prefer an "operationalist" account that focuses on the individual. By this account, physics is simply a collection of rules telling the individual what to expect in various circumstances. It's like a personal guidebook for experience: it predicts what you will observe when you follow various experimental procedures, like following a recipe in a laboratory. Unlike the realist's encyclopedia entry, the operationalist's guidebook does not attempt to describe the real world objectively. Instead, it prescribes how your experience should lead you to predict future experiences, using your own observations. Operationalists avoid referring to fundamental aspects of nature, like mass or length. To the operationalist, the length of an object is not some fundamental property – it's just a number you observe when you measure the object with a ruler, and any notion of length must be accompanied by well-specified procedure for how to measure it.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

There seems to be no end to biology’s explosive progress. Genomes can now be read, edited and rewritten with unprecedented scope, individual neurons can now be studied in both space and time, the dynamics of the spread of viruses and ecological populations can be studied using mathematical models, and vaccines for deadly diseases like HIV and Ebola seem to hold more promise than ever. They say that the twentieth century belonged to physics and the twenty first belongs to biology, and everything we see in biology seems to confirm this idea.

There have been roughly six revolutions in biology during the last five hundred years or so that brought us to this stage. The first one was the classification of organisms into binomial nomenclature by Linnaeus. The second was the invention of the microscope by Hooke, Leeuwenhoek and others. The third was the discovery of the composition of cells, in health and disease, by Schwann and Schleiden, a direct beneficiary of the use of the microscope. The fourth was the formulation of evolution by natural selection by Darwin. The fifth was the discovery of the laws of heredity by Mendel. And the sixth was the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson, Crick and others. The sixth, ongoing revolution could be said to be the mapping of genomes and its implications for disease and ecology. Two other minor revolutions should be added to this list; one was the weaving of statistics into modern genetics, and the second was the development of new imaging techniques like MRI and CT scans.

These six revolutions in biology resulted from a combination of new ideas and new tools. This picture is consistent with the general two-pronged picture of scientific revolutions that has emerged through the ages: a picture consisting in equal parts of revolutions of ideas and revolutions of technology. The first kind was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. The second was popularized by Peter Galison and Freeman Dyson; Galison in his book “Image and Logic”, and Dyson in his “The Sun, the Genome and the Internet”. Generally speaking, many people are aware of Kuhn but few people are aware of Galison or Dyson. That is because ideas are often considered loftier than tools; the scientist who gazes at the sky and divines formulas for the universe through armchair calculations is considered more brilliant than the one who gets down on her hands and knees and makes new discoveries by gazing into the innards of machines.

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Having Coffee

i’m having coffee
i’m dreaming I’m having coffee with Whistler’s mother
i’m scratching a knuckle with my nose
i’m not listening to my wife while gazing out a window
i’m imagining our small distant sun rising over the horizon of Neptune
i’m having coffee, paper cup with a heat sleeve
i’m playing with two small stones, twiddling them in my palm like Queeg
i’m remembering throwing stones through a neighbor’s bias
i’m sitting, but you don’t want to know where
i’m wondering if death is simply the mirror parenthesis of birth
i’m lying in bed staring at the ceiling slightly chilled. I need another blanket
i’m fooled again
i’m not fooled again
i’m having coffee, dark roast, the only kind
i’m wrong about a lot of things, too many
i’m dumber than a stump but smarter than a breadbox
i’m still wondering what it’s all about Alfie
i don’t care what it’s all about, I’m picking asparagus
i’m inside a cosmic question bouncing off its walls
i’m having coffee, Colombian this time, but dark, as I said…
i’m puffed as a peacock but simultaneously beside the point
i’m over the hill but still climbing
i’m loose as a goose and tight as a fundamentalist’s ass
i’m unknown, thank god, remembering Elvis
i’m anonymous as a red leaf in the Berkshires in Fall
i’m having coffee gazing over the rim of a mountain watching a small cloud glide
i’m as unbelievable as your average Mohammed or Mike
i’m at least as believable as your average Mohammed or Mike
i’m beating my head against the wall again painlessly
i’m taking an aspirin just in case
i’m having tea , green, trying to take coffee’s edge off
i’m under the gun, but still over the clover
i’m not sure
i’m cock sure
i’m as fraught with anticipation as I was when I was twenty, just not as often
i’m remembering something, but quickly change channels
i’m thinking again of a Dylan line, so many good ones blowin in the wind

time out of mind

I am having coffee
I am not having
I am not not

yet
.

Jim Culleny
May 2009

by Elise Hempel

Sometime during college, back home in the Chicago area for the summer, I found a job as a secretary for a successful real estate agent who kept two offices in his condo – his own out of sight in a bedroom, and the other, for his secretary, right there as you walked in, the large, dark wrap-around desk commanding a good portion of the living room. I don't recall my exact secretarial duties, except for answering the phone, but I remember my boss's name and his face, as well as my overall discomfort with having no fellow employees, with being in an office that was also someone's home – just the two of us there together all day long.

And I remember what he asked me to do for him on my last day of work before I returned to school for the fall semester: Would I let him take my picture? Would I get down on the shag carpet on all fours and stick my butt up in the air while he sat on the sofa with his camera and snapped a permanent image of his favorite part of me?…

What did I say at that moment, and how long did I pause before I complied? Why didn't I shout no or spit in his face? Why didn't I grab my purse and my final paycheck and storm out of that condo, resolutely slamming the door behind me? How many more suggestive comments had there been before then, inappropriate remarks I'd tried to ignore, laughed off because I had no idea what to say?

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