by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

For those of us who work in the Sciences, the last decade or so has been a boon to research and new discoveries. This has been facilitated by the massive data collection and data analysis which would have been inconceivable just a few decades ago. The rapid change in the Sciences has been described as the forth paradigm of Science i.e., data intensive discovery. As a side consequence of these changes, many of us thought that the time has finally arrived where data will be the absolute arbiter of truth. If the global events of 2016 in general and the US elections in particular are any indication then we were dead wrong thinking this. One may even ask, in an era of post-Truth, fake news and alternate facts, is data really that relevant? One can do all the fact checking in the world but it won't matter if the person to whom the evidence is being presented gives the rejoinder, “What does evidence have to do with it?” Welcome to the brave new world of Data Nihilsm, a term coined by Terry Morse to denote outright denial of data. Closely related to the study of data nihilism is Agnothology or the study of culturally induced ignorance.

As a data scientist, I imagined that an argument based on careful analysis of data coupled with sound statistical reasoning and proper used of machine learning should be enough to convince any person of one’s argument. However in many contexts this may actually have the opposite effect. For one, the previous statement may actually sound elitist and there is strong evidence that if people have strong convictions about a certain belief then offering contradictory evidence may actually strength their belief instead of weakening it. Thinking about why people act this way becomes easier if we rather drop the assumption that people are rational and start thinking that people’s rationality is mediated via emotions. Leibniz theorized that one day we would have machines that will be able to calculate answers to any question for us and so people instead of arguing will just say let us calculate. One might argue that the data driven society that we are currently building is taking us close to this ideal. However there is a hidden assumption in this assertion that that all people evaluate evidence in the same manner. The presence of conformation bias and other cognitive biases in humans tell a different story altogether. People are more likely to be skeptical and thorough in investigation if evidence presented to them goes against what they already believe. Even things like what people perceive as the scientific consensus varies from person to person. Thus Creationists pounce over any alleged evidence that “proves” that the theory of evolution is false while neglecting any data that goes in its favor. The point is not whether one can use data to make one’s point but rather evidence is powerless if one has already made up one’s mind, to quote Salman Hameed who studies the public perception of the theory of evolution.

Read more »

by Genese Sodikoff

One does not normally think about infection, illness, and recovery in terms of a three-staged "rite of passage" as European ethnographer Arnold van Gennep defined it, although catching a disease certainly involves a period of physical transition and disruption of our sense of self.

Of course, a "rite of passage" conventionally refers to a ceremony that marks a change in status, such as a wedding or commencement, where one social identity is shed and another assumed. Van Gennep's three stages include the separation from peers, a liminal or in-between period, and reassimilation into society with a new status. But if we loosely apply this concept to other life experiences, such as illness, we begin to see a structure to the stories that make up our lives.

Say an individual goes from healthy person, to ill patient, and finally to some resolution. At this point the individual has either returned to the prior state of healthiness, dies, remains somehow marked by the period of suffering, or persists in a state of impaired health, neither here nor there. Certain diseases seem to occupy the liminal space, casting their victims into medical limbo as neither diagnosable nor well. Chronic Lyme disease is one of those. Since the source of prolonged suffering is contested by doctors, many sufferers must seek help at the edges of the medical mainstream.

To turn back to the "rite of passage" schema for a moment, anthropologist Victor Turner was intrigued by Van Gennep's demarcation of a liminal period, the "betwixt and between" stage. In the late 1960s, Turner elaborated the concept, finding it rife with both social ambiguity and possibility. For Turner, liminality evoked an unstructured space, an opposition to the dominant structure at the edges of the cultural mainstream. It is here where people experience "communitas," a spirit of camaraderie and equality. Liminality is counter-cultural, a state of flux in which the dominant structure is recast in the image of the oppositional force until that new image becomes the structure from which to pull away.

Read more »

“All humans are genetically 99.9 per cent identical.”
—Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Great Wall, Tremendous Wall
.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall one poet said
imagining friendly neighbors working their way
along that which stood between, resetting
fallen gneiss and granite loaves and balls
that had fallen to each to keep their wall intact
while one questioned the irony of friendly walls
and the other made a prima facie case
for an inherent friendliness in their practicality.
And so we’ve had walls and walls remain
not of stone but of blood and bone,
walls built of double helixes spiraling through time,
hydrogen-mortared pairs of adenine,
guanine, cytosine, thymine,
smaller than any past poet’s wall-builder might imagine,
but centuries stronger than Hadrian’s real
or Alexander’s mythic one which imprisoned
the Gogs and Magogs of alien tribes
behind stone or iron barriers to keep the builders safe
from differences that barely exist in the protein hieroglyphics
of the nature-made chemical bonds of a double helix
making us all Gogs and Magogs of each other
as we spiral through worlds hurting and killing
to uphold our imagination’s chronic beliefs
in quixotic walls and spurious distinctions
which heap between us grudges and griefs
.

Jim Culleny
from Blink
12/13/16
.

Gog and Magog

by Christopher Bacas

My first paid gig: volunteer fire hall, Saturday night. The leader picked me up at my house and drove to a small township outside the city. Barry was related to a woman who worked with my mother. In the orphanage where he spent some years, a teacher drilled hymns and choral music into his charges. Sam Cooke, in his Soul Stirrer days, visited the school and heard the boy sing. Sam embraced and encouraged him. That moment, Sam's music changed his life. He still played guitar and sang in a fetching tenor. With a day job now, weekend gigs were all he could manage. In the car, he talked to me like a musician, not a kid, explaining what we'd play (not surprisingly, I knew a few) and where I'd be contributing.

I was in tenth grade and a bit under a hundred pounds. So far, I'd played football games, Pancake Jamborees, and school assemblies. The high school fielded a juggernaut band of 250, drawing eager youth from three middle schools. A local wind band, filled with parents and teachers, performed park concerts all summer and included a jazz unit. At the fall agricultural fair, its stalwarts backed touring acts. Music as vocation wasn't in the air, though. Sulfurous paper plants, tar and asphalt makers, and a feed mill all smoked constantly. Guys started a second or third shift job the summer after graduation. Their father or uncle would vouch them in. If they did well, better hours and money, a car and house could follow. My trajectory was different. The day I came home with a tenor, my dad played "Soultrane" for me. On the LP jacket, a saxophonist with onyx skin and a gold mouthpiece; an African God pouring molten ore from his mouth. His playing, on "Russian Lullaby" (written by a real Russian), confirmed that mythic gift. Later, at a Woody Herman concert, Gregory Herbert, unimpressed I listened to Weather Report and Mahavishnu, pointed me back to Stitt, 50's Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. Of course, my father had their records,too. Later on, I saw Herbert burn up the bandstand with Thad and Mel. A year later, he was dead at 30. I knew about Bird and Fats Navarro, of course. Punctures came soon for the rest of my innocence.

Read more »

“THE PRESIDENT IS HUMAN. HE GETS SICK”

— White House Press Secretary Responding to Reporters’ Questions in The New York Times, January 9, 1992

A thousand tiny dots of light:
I diminish the noise.

Duped smirk on aging face,
eyes eclipsed by spectacles,

The President,
previously recorded,

vomits,
moving his lips slowly.

Watching me watching him
he holds my stare

kindly, gently.
Reading my thoughts,

George Herbert Walker Bush
C
O
L
L
A
P
S
E
S.

By Rafiq Kathwari / rafiqkathwari.com / @brownpundit

by Elise Hempel

I remember my grandfather, sometime in the 1970s, sitting in his checkered wing-chair on the back porch of his Chicago house, his slippered feet propped as usual on the ottoman, complaining that there were too many Blacks appearing now on TV, as we all watched some sitcom or variety show after Sunday dinner. What was supposed to be progress he considered a setback.

He was a misogynist too, every once in a while, from behind his daily paper or The Wall Street Journal, telling my grandmother to "shut yer yap" if he felt she was talking too much, or talking about something he didn't want to hear. And once, I've recently learned, when my aunt was a teenager and my grandfather had ordered my grandmother to get the ketchup or mustard or whatever condiment it was he immediately needed, and my aunt spoke up from her place at the table and told him, on my grandmother's behalf, to get it himself, he hauled her to the bedroom and beat her with his belt. His beliefs about women being subordinate to men didn't end after my grandmother died and he was forced to spend his final days in a nursing home. After he died, at 85, with Parkinson's, there were reports from the home not only of his attempted escapes but also of his inappropriate touching of certain female residents. He was depressed and disoriented at the nursing home, but he didn't have dementia, and it's hard not to wonder about the possibility of some long prior history of sexual indiscretion.

Read more »

by Max Sirak

There's a reason change is hard. It's biology's fault.

Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon write in their book, A General Theory of Love, "Because human beings remember with neurons, we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought."

The game is rigged. The deck, stacked. Odds are, despite our best (or pretend-best) efforts, we will continue to live as we always have and do what we've always done. We are designed to repeat our patterns. We're made to continue our habits.

This is how we work. It's how we're wired. To borrow some computer programmer lingo, this is a feature of our system, not a bug. Because our neurons like ruts, "attempting to change" could easily be rebranded "fighting inertia."

I get it. I mean, I love ruts. They're comfortable and easy, like an old pair of jeans. They're familiar and warm, like a favorite hoodie. However, just like old clothes, sometimes old ruts need replacing.

Maybe we wake up one morning and have an anti-Talking Heads moment. "I don't have a beautiful house. I don't have a beautiful wife. I don't even have a job. How did I get here?"

Or perhaps there's an external cause. Our doctor calls and says the test came back positive. We're on a crash course with a major health risk. There is no surgery. There is no medicine. It's change or die.

Whatever our reasons, whatever our whys, I want to help with our hows.

Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

A very decent, elegant, graceful and intelligent man, the kind who opens doors for his wife, and wins a Nobel prize for Peace just by being has for eight years occupied the White House, furthering and expanding the indecency of war. And Mr. Trump may slam doors on everyone and not win a prize but will do the same.

Because in this system, it doesn't matter who is elected, they become part and parcel of, let me coin a term the: war industrial complex kitkaboodles endless dreadfulness (WICKED).

Let me locate myself. If you draw a straight line from here, Karachi, to there—DC, both points are home. Most days of the year walking past it I stop and gaze at the White House—at its glory—with appreciation as well as with many grievances in my heart for the policies unleashed across the globe.

Grievances against the kind of endless war policies which have now brought us inevitably, shamefully, tragically, criminally up to year sixteen of relentless erosion of public space, privacy, discourse and the increase of war and the propaganda necessary for it—books have disappeared—we rely on google and social media for all our information.

In the vicinity of where I live in Washington DC and where I work there used to be many bookshops and now there are next to none. Yes, Politics and Prose and Kramers— one or two keep chugging on—but more as coffee shops, bars and restaurants then bookstores. With the erosion and disappearance of books and with the rise of IPhones and social media—we are getting more and more connected with nothing—and informed about nothing. Perhaps the march across the USA on January 21, 2017 has finally woken up America, thanks to the over the top fascistic rhetoric of Donald J. Trump. Perhaps Trump has managed to build that wall—after all—but of people rising against injustice and fascism. Perhaps against war and the killing of people and genocide and not just for the sake of protection of our women's right to birth control.

Read more »

by Holly A. Case

Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017)

The first and last time I saw Zygmunt Bauman was in October 2011. The Polish sociologist had come to Jena where he was one of the star participants, along with the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller, at a workshop on "Approaches to Postmodernity from the East." As the organizers of the conference repeatedly emphasized, Bauman and Heller did not merely write about modern European history, they were modern European history. They were invited to reflect on their mid-century experiences—of the Holocaust, Stalinism, dissidence—in light of what they (we) know now. The conceit seemed straightforward enough, but as the German historian Reinhart Koselleck wrote, "modernity only became recognizable as a new time once expectations distanced themselves ever more from all previous experiences." In other words, nothing ever turns out like you expect.

Although at the time I had not read Bauman's work, the particular tragicomic trajectory of the workshop left a deep impression on me. I reported on it at length to a German acquaintance in a series of emails, and even wrote a poem about Bauman's role. (Historians are not, in general, renowned for their poetry; it will soon become clear why.) When I saw the announcement of Bauman's death last week, it brought to mind that October five years ago. The following are excerpts from my letters (translated from the mediocre German) and the poem, along with passages from Bauman's own writings. The "exchange" that emerges is meant not as an in memoriam, but as a sign of life and a continuation of thought, an attempt to follow his example.

Read more »

Once Upon a Spacetime
— to P. on our 40th anniv.

.

.

.

.

.

.

A couple of hours before twilight
a gibbous moon rose in the east
over the serpentine spine of the mountain
a bright hole in a bluegrey scrim,
just there without reason,
as uncomplicated and expected
as a shard of granite on the slope of a talus,
as common as the little moons that rise
above the cuticles of each finger
of your familiar hands, as singular,
as sure as the hidden sun it mirrors,
and I wondered at what the ancients thought
as it appeared and disappeared
regular as breath, opulent as a third eye,
as crisp as the feel of a January breeze
slapping my cheek as I cross the bridge
from here to there. I’m as stupefied
as they must have been,
even though I’ve been told this bright hole
is no more than dust and rock
tethered by a wrinkle in space
which holds it in a groove of time
like a stylus spiraling in black vinyl
sending mute tunes
hushed as the sure breath
that billowed from our mouths
as we threw row cover
over the kale

Jim Culleny
1/15/17

by Carl Pierer

Fig. 1: Topologist's sine curve

Of the many properties a space can have, one of the most intuitively clear seems to be connectedness. Connectedness appears to be the simple property of hanging together in one piece. But how do we make this notion precise? On the one hand, we could think of it as the property that we can reach any point in the space without stepping outside. That is, in other words, that there is a path from any given point to any other point in the space. So, this would make the letter "o" connected, while the letter "i" wouldn't be. This notion corresponds to the topological notion of path connectedness. We say that a space is path connected if for any two points in the space there exists a continuous path from one to the other (which lies entirely inside the space).

On the other hand, we can think of connectedness in slightly different terms. The notion is perhaps clarest if we think about a musical melody. Somehow a succession of sounds turns into a melodic whole, which hangs together in a meaningful way. Breaking up the melody, interrupting it at any one point, can – provided the melody is complex enough – create two full, individual melodies, or one full melody and a somewhat incomplete, unresolved one, or two incomplete succession of notes. If the melody doesn't break into two simpler, shorter melodies, then at least one of the pieces will carry a certain tension that points beyond itself to a resolution of the harmonic build-up. If this is the case, we can think of the melody as in some way the simplest meaningful whole – there is no natural way to separate it into meaningful simpler pieces. This is the second notion of connectedness.

With some poetic licence, we can link the idea of an unresolved melody to the notion of openness, whilst a resolved melody would correspond to closedness, in topological terms. This identification has to be taken with a grain of salt, however, for the two notions – to a topologist – are not opposites. A set can be both open and closed or neither. What does justify the idea, however, is that an unresolved melody, much like an open set, points to a resolution that lies beyond itself: the tone that would form a complete whole, or the limit point that would render the set not open. In any case, we get the second notion of connectedness as a space that does not break up into two, non-empty and non-intersecting, open sets. To translate this into the language of melodies would be to say that a melody is connected if the only way to break it up is that there is one full, simpler melody and one unresolved.

Read more »

by Richard King

Ah, Finland! Land of saunas and heavy metal bands. Of unpronounceable nouns and the freedom to roam. Of Santa Clause and archipelagos. Of clean air, clean skin, and clean criminal records …

And, now, of the world's latest experiment in Universal Basic Income, which a whole array of public figures, from Elon Musk to Yanis Varoufakis, agrees is A Bloody Good Idea.

As do I. But the fact that so many people are agreeing makes me wonder what is being agreed upon, and upon what basis the agreement has been reached. In particular: Why are right-libertarians and uberwealthy business types and even some conservatives pulling on the gloves and pads and going out to bat for an idea more usually associated with the material left? Can an idea that attracts support from Charles Murray and the American Enterprise Institute really have moral merit? I mean, can it?

I think it can, but it's important to consider the very different assumptions that are being employed in the arguments over UBI, which, in case you've just returned from a two-year yoga and ice-fishing retreat in Ittoqqortoormiit, is a scheme whereby all citizens receive an unconditional flat-rate sum from the state or other public institution. It's important because those assumptions will shape not only what kind of UBI we may get (if we're lucky enough to get one at all) but also where such a scheme might lead in terms of other redistributive arrangements. If UBI is a means to an end, what end are we aiming at?

Very different ones, obviously. I'll state, briefly, the business and conservative/right-libertarian cases for a UBI as I understand them, before outlining in a bit more detail the radical or leftwing case. I hope the latter, as well as being more persuasive, will also serve as a critique of the assumptions underlying the first two cases.

Read more »

by Dave Maier

This post started out as one about the mathematical question of whether 1 = 0.9999…, an issue which confuses a lot of people. This confusion shouldn’t be surprising, as it involves infinity; and if you’re not confused about infinity, then you probably don’t understand it. Unfortunately what I had to say about it, at least in the strictly mathematical context, has been said fairly well already by many others, which shouldn’t be surprising either, as I am not a mathematician. (I should have Googled it first and saved myself some time.)

So rather than going through all that stuff again (although we will see some of it soon enough), let me say here at the beginning why it was sticking in my mind in the first place. This will introduce some dramatic tension into an otherwise boring post, as the reader wonders what the heck these things have to do with each other. Like I said: another shaggy dog story to start the new year. (The pictured animal is to be found on the Wikipedia entry for “shaggy dog story” and is identified there as “the archetypical subject of long-winded, pointless stories”.)

So then. I just began reading Charles Taylor’s new book The Language Animal (seriously, I’m on page 6). Taylor has been writing about these things for many years, so his general views are already familiar, but apparently he has a bit more to tell us. His main concern, as he tells us on page ix, is the same as always: to argue that our linguistic capacity is “more multiform than has usually been supposed, [in that] it includes capacities for meaning creation which go far beyond that of encoding and communicating information, which is too often taken as its central form.” In particular, while Taylor allows that contemporary analytic philosophy of language is much more sophisticated than in early modernity, when rationalism and empiricism were the main players on the philosophical stage, “certain […] key assumptions” of that era “have survived into analytic post-Fregean philosophy”.

The reason we need a new book, it turns out, is that while progress has been made on this front, and the objectionable theory has at least been crushed into pieces, it has not yet been entirely pulverized.

Read more »

by Michael Liss

The news of the day is that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be a guest of honor at Donald Trump's Inauguration. He will be seated between Speaker Ryan and Senate Majority Leader McConnell, and there are indications from inside the Trump transition team that the President Elect has asked Putin to give a second invocation, reportedly on a theme inspired by Matthew 5:5, to mark the friendship of two great nations.

How simple that was to write. If I added a few seemingly credible details—that Putin will be staying in Washington for several days afterwards to discuss key issues, including Syria, with old friend and nominee for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and then meet with Generals Flynn and Mattis, Trump's choices for National Security Advisor and Secretary of Defense—would you be completely shocked?'

And, if I were sophisticated enough in the manner of disseminating this, squelching some skepticism by adding a cryptic reference to a long-standing policy of the government not to comment directly on or confirm the presence of potentially high-value targets in this time of terrorism, I might, with the assistance of a scoop-hungry and partisan media, make this thing go viral.

We do live in paranoid times, in a rapidly diminishing universe of authoritative sources. We have just come through an awful election season, where the honesty and integrity of the two main candidates were assailed on a continuous basis, and nothing was too outrageous to say, nothing too far-fetched to be given credibility in certain quarters. It didn't hurt that Clinton and Trump presented enormous targets, but you could have nominated an American-born Albert Schweitzer and there would have been whispers about his organ playing and his manliness.

Read more »