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.

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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.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

About five hundred miles north of Saigon lies Vietnam's old imperial capital city of Hue. Famous for its walled palace set along the shimmering Perfume River, it stands as a 19th century Vietnamese emperor's imperial dream of China.

In days past, the beautiful palace moat was filled with tall, fragrant lotus blossoms. In those days, emperors would cross the bridge into their celestial palace ~~as if floating above a sea of pink flowers.

A symbol of spiritual purity and spiritual detachment, the Vietnamese revere the lotus. In addition to the flowers that once filled the palace moat, there were also lotus ponds within the palace walls. My favorite is the small pond that lies behind the old throne room. I spent a lovely afternoon there nearly 20 years ago relaxing on the wooden veranda overlooking the lotus pond, where I was enchanted by a cool breeze that seemed to appear out of nowhere in the torpid Vietnamese summer.

My enchantment with Vietnamese lotus flowers would continue too. For it was there where I learned that the emperor's servants began their mornings every day collecting the dewdrops that had collected overnight on the lotus leaves in the pond.

It sounded like a difficult job. How did they gather the dewdrops? And why? Well, a nearby tour guide was explaining to her group that the servants used the dewdrops to make the emperor's morning cup of tea. Can you imagine? Tea made from the water of dewdrops collected on the leaves of the lotus flowers? Now that is something I would very much like to try someday….

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by Evan Edwards

Part of the reason I enjoy walking so much is because of the opportunities it affords to immerse me entirely in my senses. I have thought for a while now that I feel most like those who say they experience the divine when I feel most immersed in my senses, when I feel “embodied.” Walking affords this route to embodiment most readily because there is so much to see, hear, smell, and feel—the wind, the ground, my muscles and bones moving along.

So, walking when it is very cold always poses a dilemma for me. When it is very cold — and I live in Chicago, so very cold actually means very cold — something happens on my walks. If I am very attentive, as attentive as I normally am on walks, I feel as though the world appears with much more clarity. Surely you’ve experienced this as well. The sounds are clearer, crisper, maybe even louder. It sometimes seems as if a thin veil had just been lifted from around you, and noises were all of a sudden less muted. The same thing happens with vision. As if the subzero cold condenses all the matter in the air so that light travels more freely to the eye, making contours clearer, colors more vibrant. When the cold is accompanied by a heavy snow, it is of course more difficult to see, but the help that the ensuing silence lends to our hearing makes up for it. This clarity in the cold is a revelation of the previous inadequacy of your senses, and you feel that you’d been half-asleep up until this point.

On the other hand, when it is very cold—Chicago cold—you also tend to move much more quickly than if you were sauntering in the temperate weather of early fall or late spring. Just the other day it was so cold that my face began hurting after being outside for just a few minutes. If you have lived in a very cold place, this is no shock to you. If you have only visited, you probably weren’t visiting in the dead of winter, and this probably seems like an exaggeration to you. It is not. An animal part of you is kicked into action when it is that cold. You are overcome with one very simple desire: to not be this cold any more. There is a certain kind of embodiment that you experience when it is this cold, only it isn’t the pleasant kind of embodiment.

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by Sarah Firisen

President-elect Trump, along with so many other gaping holes in his knowledge, seems, for all his evident command of social media, to not really get the modern computer age. On the one hand, this is both astounding and terrifying. It’s one thing to have your 70 year old grandmother not understand or want to use The Email, it’s another thing for the incoming President of the world’s great industrial and economic powerhouse to be skeptical about the value of email and computers. On the other hand, in a rather Chauncey Gardner-like way, he may have inadvertently spoken a great truth, “I think the computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole, you know, age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what's going on.”

We are clearly at the point of a huge paradigm shift in the relationship between humans and machines. While we’ve long depended on them in both our professional and personal lives, it has been a means to exercise our wills more quickly and efficiently, servants of our needs and desires. But artificial intelligence has now reached the point where the servant no longer needs the master; every day the news is full of yet another computer that has performed a task that was previously solely a human capability, and increasingly the computers are performing that task not only as well but better than a human could. Today we drive cars, tomorrow they will drive themselves.

While there are many technologies that will change our lives in the next 20 years in significant ways, there are a few that will have an impact beyond the imaginations of most people who aren’t Gene Roddenberry.

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by Bill Benzon

As many of you know John Brockman is literary agent for a parliament of well-known scientists, science journalists, and others – Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Dan Dennett, George Dyson and a cast of, if not thousands, perhaps hundreds. Each year he poses a question and they answer it. Then the answers are posted to the web at The Edge, Brockman’s website. This years’ question, which elicited 206 responses:

What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?

I’ve been through them, though only quickly, and selected three for comment: prediction error minimization, Bayes’s Theorem, and attractors.

Prediction Error Minimization

Andy Clark: Philosopher and Cognitive Scientist; Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, University of Edinburgh, UK; Author: Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.

Let’s ease into this one.

Once upon a time, back in my undergraduate days during the 1960s, I was invited to a party at an artist’s loft. This was a real honest-to-god un-renovated loft, large, bare walls, a wood stove for heat (it was mid-winter), raw. Someone remarked they were showing a film “over there.” Sure enough, there was a 16mm projector facing a wall, clicking and buzzing rapidly away, and there were blurry gray smudges dancing on the wall opposite (no sound).

I watched the moving mottled grays for some seconds, five, ten, twenty, who knows, I wasn’t counting, and then SHAZAM! It became clear. On the right, a naked woman standing, bent forward, outstretched arms touching a wall. On the left, a naked man behind her, thrusting away. SEX! First porn film I’d ever seen.

But why did it take me awhile to see what was very plainly there in the flickering lights on the wall? Because I didn’t know what I was seeing, that’s why, and that’s what Clark’s prediction error minimization is getting at. If someone had said “hey, dirty movies” or I’d seen a title (say, “Danny Does Debbie”) I’d have known what to look for in the lights. But I didn’t know and it took me awhile to figure it out.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

The philosophical program developed by the ancient Stoics is currently enjoying a renaissance. It recently has been heralded as an exceptionally effective ‘life hack' and refuge for sensitive souls in these dark days. With its emphasis on mastering one's emotions and steeling oneself against adversity, it is understandable that Stoicism's stock regularly rises as a coping mechanism in the midst of troubling times. Indeed, Stoicism originally arose in the dark days of the Hellenistic period, amidst war, violence, and social instability; as Admiral James Stockdale observed, it remains a philosophy aimed at enabling one to survive life's most tragic conditions.

We are philosophy professors, so we generally applaud whenever a traditional philosophical school gains popular appreciation. Moreover, since we are sympathetic with the Stoic program, we think the renewed interest in Stoicism is good news. Yet we bear two pieces of bad news for the Stoicism in Dark Days movement.

First, the Stoic program has its complications. As a theory of the good life, Stoicism is posited on a division between the things that are up to us (such as our beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and inclinations) and the things that are not up to us (such as our status, wealth, health, and so on). The Stoic holds that the key to living well is understanding this distinction. If we strive to control only what is up to us, we won't be frustrated; we will always have success. By contrast, when we try to control the things not up to us, we are doomed to failure, obstruction, and disappointment. According to the Stoic, our moral purpose is to perfect the things we can control – to be good critical thinkers, to want only things that are good, to do our duty for those who depend on us. Everything else is beyond our control and thus must be accepted; so long as we do not think our wellbeing depends on those externals, we are invulnerable to the vicissitudes of fate and thus truly free. This is the reasoning that Cicero presents throughout his Paradoxa Stoicorum and with which Epictetus opens the Enchiridion. Being good is not merely its own reward, but it is also sufficient for a good life. This view, then, offers a kind of liberty and dignity to all.

But this view prompts an obvious and longstanding objection.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

"Reduce your household duties! Women who are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and do jobs previously filled by men should call the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory." In 1935 the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the arm of the US government dedicated to research and development in the new-fangled area of human flight) hired its first cohort of women computers. This was before calculations could be done effectively by machines. If you wanted equations solved and numbers crunched you needed a person who was quick with numbers and deadly accurate. With a talent shortage, and with some reluctance, the those in charge admitted that women might be up to task. When the first women arrived, the male engineers were no doubt reassured by the fact that the women would only have to calculate whatever they were given and wouldn't have to worry their pretty little heads with the actual problem solving and thinking. The women more than held their own.

With the onset of World War II the allies needed every possible advantage. It was clear that winning in the air was key to winning the war. Better, faster, more maneuverable planes were needed without delay. The NACA grew at an exponential rate and needed every clever person it could get its hands on. Word spread and soon black women were also applying for these positions. No surprise since jobs at the NACA paid at least twice the salary of a school teacher, the next best option for well-educated black women.

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by Misha Lepetic

"Wonder was the grace of the country."
~ George W.S. Trow

At a recent cocktail party, the conversation turned to conspiracy theorists and how to engage them. I offered a strategy that has served me fairly well in the past: I like to ask my interlocutor what information they would need to be exposed to in order to change their minds about their initial suspicion. To be clear, I think of this more as a litmus test for understanding whether a person has the capacity to change their minds on a given position, rather than an opening gambit leading to further argument and persuasion. Climate change is a good example: What fact or observation might lead a person to consider that global warming is happening, and that human economic activity is responsible for it? It is actually quite surprising how often people don't really have a standard of truth by which they might independently weigh the validity of their argument. Of course, in today's ‘post-truth' world, I suspect that it is just as likely that I might be told that nothing can change a person's mind, since everything is lies and propaganda anyway.

I was pleased that another person at the party made an even better suggestion. She said that she would ask not only what would change a conspiracy theorist's mind, but from whom they would need to hear it. This vaults the act of interrogation from a context grounded purely in individualism and individuals' appeals to authority, to something distinctly more social. It also specifies the importance of not just facts, but from where those facts emanate. Because as much as we would like to believe ourselves independently reasoning beings, that we come to our conclusions through a rigorous and sacrosanct process of discernment, we are still very subject to having our opinions shaped by others. This may seem somewhat obvious, but in these times, when new ways of sensemaking are in high demand, I believe this provides an important opening.

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by Brooks Riley

If I could hug a tree a day without seeming a complete idiot, I would. Trees matter to me now–how fast they grow, how full their crowns, how tall they are, how odd their leaves, how extraordinary their shapes, how thick their trunks, how nearby they are. This late interest has crept up on me, and taken hold in ways I am trying to understand.

It’s not as if I’ve taken leave of humankind, the animal kingdom—or my senses—to go live among the stately green giants. I haven’t given up all that for something else, far from it. But there are aspects of trees that seem to harmonize with what I need: Silence (I don’t need to communicate with them.); Design (The complexity of a living organism achieving its biological destiny is somehow reassuring.); Color (The range of hues, from green to orange to yellow to purple to pink, is a technicolor packaging triumph); Variety (The aesthetic intricacy of their bare black branches against a grey sky, or the hoarfrost that turns them white overnight like an old crone); Progress (Those bare branches look a lot like dentrites, reminding me that mine are still growing too); Stillness (They don’t have to move to be going somewhere.). The appeal of a tree is almost metaphoric, heralding a time when I too will fall silent, cease to move, and return to the same earth they already occupy. No hooded figure with a scythe will knock on my door. I’ll be knocking at the door of their kingdom when the time comes, a willing Philemon with or without my Baucis.

I don’t anthropomorphize trees the way Peter Wohlleben apparently does in his recent bestselling book. I am happy to learn that trees are just as social as we are, but this news has no bearing on my solitary appreciation of a tree.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

As the election season seemed more and more like being trapped in a carnival where the uncanny is orchestrated to play up primal fears, we witnessed language itself veering off into the realm of the irrational— not only because statements did not reflect facts or reflected only partial facts, or arguments lacked consistency, but because none of this mattered anymore: a sense of panic killed the need to seek the truth. The election machinery, with the media as its engine, successfully exploited anxiety to mute even the most basic assessment of language for truth-telling. If it were not for the few Human Rights groups circulating infographics (that bypass conventional language by presenting facts numerically) on social media, or sharing cell phone videos, or simply asking questions to expose the propaganda, all the cogs involved in manufacturing the “post-truth” age would have been even more opaque. Falling prey to fear-based propaganda isn’t uncommon in history, but when it happens to the populace of a leading superpower that prides itself in being a free-thinking democracy, one needs to ask how the populace has found itself primed for phobia. One of the many places to find the answer is academia, and my personal frame of reference is my alma mater Reed College, which itself happens to be in the throes of political agitation (not unlike many other campuses across the country), and is doubly significant to me because my son is a current student there. How does Reed prepare students to make sense of the world in the post-truth age? How did I fare as a female Muslim international student?

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by Maniza Naqvi

To dance the dance, I did not dance, because at the end of the conference, my accompanying handbag which contained all my documents, passports, credit cards and so forth compelled me to sit frumpily, guarding it, instead of joining the sensuously swaying crowd. When I had the chance, I chose instead to sit tied to my belongings—an accumulation of things. Ah the regret.

Why you? Why You? Why you? I had asked myself earlier, marveling at my good fortune gleefully. I kept repeating the direction I was headed towards the land of a thousand stories: Aracataca, Aracataca, Aracataca. Each syllable slung against the roof of my mouth, crashing against each other on my tongue, creating a rhythm like a tin drum. I wanted to jump and dance. Oh sure. I was going just to a conference—but it was on the shores of Colombia very near Aracataca. And so I went pulled by the magnetic allure of it and the lore of the Sierra Nevada.

But, ah the regret. Nearly there, not really there, close, nearby. I did but glimpse it in that chance brief encounter with its beauty and its possibilities, a moment so very brief it nevertheless left me breathless. And when I left, it left me imagining it, wishing that I would return to travel it by river perhaps at a great age, and in love. Finally. And then, then, without a care in the world, I would dance.

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Kismet

“This can’t be me,” Mother says,
leaning forward in a wheelchair,
“Must be some shriveled woman,”

“with parched skin, frayed hair,”
she adds, “Not me. I’m only 30.”
Mother gives me my Smartphone

with which I clicked her photo
during a commercial break,
watching “Kismet,”

Hollywood film
made in 1955
when Mother was in fact 30

with six children in Kashmir.
Her skin then was pure,
hibiscus bloomed in her hair.

Now, in The Bronx
Hebrew Home at Riverdale,
63 years later

in Mother’s sparse room,
a harem girl on TV, decked
in baubles, bangles, & beads,

starts revolving
in the courtyard of a Caliph
in Old Baghdad,

her pantaloons blooming
her turban glittering:
I’m gritting my teeth, glaring

at a fantasy Orient, thinking
of the grim reality today
in Iraq. Mother is transfixed

as the harem girl twirls
to stage front where her
flawless face fills the full screen.

Suddenly, Mother starts to sigh.
“What happened,” I ask gently
massaging her stiff fingers

with Aspercreme. Mother
nods at the TV, whispers,
“I want my skin like hers.”

by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit / rafiqkathwari.com

by Humera Afridi

Nekbakht Foundation Archive

“Mommy it's Christmas, you have to put away your work!” urged my nine-year old. And so I began clearing the dining table which had turned into an expansive workspace over the early winter weeks. As I gathered up my books, a sheet of paper slid out from a binder. I stared at it absently. A photocopy of an archival newspaper cutting from 1923, with publication title missing. The headline announced: “Indian Mystic Here to Show America Path of Tolerance and Brotherhood.”

I marveled at the headline. Kinship and the “Path of Tolerance”—what better salve for our fraught present? I sensed a confluence of eras and histories, of time collapsing. A ‘Father Christmas' message, if ever there was one, I mused, sitting back down at the table to study the article from 1923. And, indeed, as if conspiring to corroborate my thesis, a striking Christ-like image of Hazrat Inayat Khan floated off the page—commanding features and a magnetic expression; tapering beard; mystical gaze piercing the distance. A strand of beads with a heart-and-wings pendant adorned his neck. The article's sub-headings revealed the contours of the story— “Inaya (sic) Khan, Hindu Poet and Philosopher, Bars Politics from Consideration”; “Humanitarianism is His Study”; “Says Greatest Need of America and of Whole World is Understanding”— a gift-giving message to be sure, emanating a spirt apropos of Christmas; an antidote to the climate of war and divisiveness in which we find ourselves.

I squinted my eyes to decipher the tiny newsprint, faded in parts, and stopped dead after the first half of the sentence. “Inaya Khan, Hindu poet, philosopher and mystic, has entered America after a few days detention at Ellis Island…” A few days detention? I started over and reread the sentence. Yes, a few days' detention at Ellis Island. I'd read it correctly. More alarming than the shock of this initial piece of information is that the article carries on without the slightest reflection on the egregious incident and, undoubtedly, racist attitude that Hazrat Inayat Khan had endured at the hands of immigration at Ellis Island.

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by Elise Hempel

I live in central Illinois, but I've been in Minnesota for over a month now, having fled an urgent situation at home, leaving most of my belongings temporarily behind. I'm a refugee, of sorts, an indefinite guest, sleeping in a guest bedroom of my sister's suburban Minneapolis house, surrounded by my still-not-unpacked suitcases. My “office,” which used to be a whole real room, is now a section of my sister's cluttered basement, my “lamp” a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, my “desk” a dusted-off air-hockey table. Surrounding my confusion and disorientation within the house itself – which includes conforming to a daily routine not my own, a lack of choice about what gets served for dinner and what gets watched on TV, etc. – is the larger loss of home. In place of a discernable town – the familiar cornfields, a university, the quaint town square – are highways and traffic and seemingly endless strip-malls, one nondescript suburb merging into the next.

And surrounding this is an even larger uncertainty of where home is now, with the election of Donald Trump as president. In the first few days after arriving here in Minnesota, I wasn't sure where I was when I woke up in the morning – in Illinois or Minnesota, what house, which bed, whose pillow. It took several moments to figure it out. I had almost the same feeling when I woke the morning after election day, and now, after knowing for sure that Trump will indeed be our next president, that feeling is here again – that feeling of waking to a country I don't recognize. Except that it's not dissipating, not fading as I sit up and wipe my eyes and look around, not giving way to the thought Oh, yeah – I know where I am.

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