by Eric Byrd

Fitzroy Maclean, over Yugoslavia, in Eastern Approaches:

“With a jerk my parachute opened and I found myself dangling, as it were at the end of a string, high above a silent mountain valley, greenish-grey and misty in the light of the moon. It looked, I thought, invitingly cool and refreshing after the sand and glare of North Africa. Somewhere above me the aircraft, having completed its mission, was headed for home. The noise of its engines grew gradually fainter in the distance. A long way below me and some distance away I could see a number of fires burning. I hoped they were the right ones, for the Germans also lit fires at night at different points in the Balkans in the hope of diverting supplies and parachutists from their proper destinations. As I swung lower, I could hear a faint noise of shouting coming from the direction of the fires. I could still not see the ground immediately beneath me. We must, I reflected, have been dropped from a considerable height to take so long coming down. Then, without further warning, there was a jolt and I was lying in a field of wet grass. There was no one in sight.”

Patrick Leigh Fermor, over Crete, in Abducting a General:

“The sierras of occupied Crete, familiar from nearly two years of clandestine sojourn and hundreds of exacting marches, looked quite different through the aperture in the converted bomber's floor and the gaps in the clouds below: a chaos of snow-covered, aloof and enormous spikes glittering as white as a glacier in the February moonlight. Then, suddenly, on a tiny plateau among the peaks, were the three signal fires twinkling. A few moments later they began expanding fast: freed at last from the noise inside the Liberator the parachute sailed gently down towards the heart of the triangle. Small figures were running in the firelight and in another few moments, snow muffled the impact of landing. There was a scrum of whiskery embracing, a score of Cretan voices, one English one. A perfect landing!”

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

This essay argues that Western culture is an ideological fiction. There is no such thing as Western culture if by that you mean a coherent and internally unified cultural entity that started back in ancient Greece and the Jewish Levant, took hold in and flourished in Europe, from which it eventually set sail for the Americas and there took root, almost completely destroying the societies of native peoples and their cultures with them. That thing, whatever it is, is not a single entity, internally coherent and different from all other such entities. The idea that it is such an entity is an ideological fiction, as are the entities to which Western culture is often said to be opposed, Eastern culture, Oriental culture, African culture, non-Western culture, and the like. Ideological fictions, all of them.

Some Say African-American Music is Western

The notion of Western culture began to unravel for me I decided to write about the impact of African-American musical cultures on American music. That work forced me to think hard and long about just what we mean when we talk use such phrases as “X culture” where X can be “Western”, “American”, “French”, “European”, “Muslim”, “Japanese”, “Eastern”, and so forth. With this is mind, let’s use music as a test case and see where it leads.

It is clear that African-American music owes a substantial debt to Africa. It is also clear that African-American music has had a strong influence on American music in general. By applying a familiar syllogistic mechanism to those propositions one can see that American music must therefore be indebted to Africa. That it American music is in some measure African. So far so good.

Now let’s look at a passage from Music of the Common Tongue (1987) where Christopher Small (p. 4) asserts that

…the Afro-American tradition is the major music of the west in the twentieth century, of far greater significance than those remnants of the great European classical tradition that are to be heard today in the concert halls and opera houses of the industrial world, east and west.

Small will go on to argue that African-American music carries values which are at odds with the dehumanizing industrial cast of European and American society and that those values are good and important. More recently, and from a more conservative location in the political universe, Marsha Bayles has also claimed Afro-American music for the West (Hole in Our Soul, 1994 p.22):

I realize that a great many musicians and writers will reject the proposition that Afro-American music is an idiom of Western music, on the grounds that it is, root and branch, totally “black,” meaning African. This attitude is usually called “cultural nationalism,” but I prefer to call it “cultural separatism,” because, instead of affirming Afro-American music by sharing it with the world, it takes a jealously proprietary stance.

Bayles will go on to argue that the virtues which African-American music has brought to the world are being threatened by decadence which began at the turn of the 20th century and has become frightfully pervasive in our own time. Both recognize that African-American music is quite different from classical music and European folk musics in its devices and emotional tenor. But neither of them sees this as a reason for thinking the music is not Western.

I Say It’s Not

I find this situation most curious. For it seems to me that if Western music is defined in such a way that it is home to both Ludwig van Beethoven (19th C. European classical) and Charlie Parker (African-American, bebop jazz), to J. S. Bach (18th C. European classical) and Bessie Smith (African-American, blues), then it is not entirely clear to me whether or not Western music should not also encompass the sitar playing of Ravi Shankar (North Indian classical) and the singing of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Sufi devotional song from Pakistan) as well. And if we admit them into the fold, can any music reasonably be excluded? But what purpose (beyond that old devil, cultural imperialism) could possibly be served by a conceptual scheme which sees much, perhaps most, possibly even all, of the world's music as Western?

Read more »

by Josh Yarden

The Bible in all its poetic minimalism and rich ambiguity has given rise to seemingly endless meditations and diverse interpretations. There are times when I imagine the narrative as a prism of words, as though etched into cut glass, reflecting and refracting the light shining on the surface of the text from myriad angles. How might these words have landed on the ears of listeners thousands of years ago? We don't really know how the heard the symbols and the metaphors, but we are forever assuming and inserting our understandings of the contexts of our own lives in order to understand what the biblical authors had to say about theirs. We ask questions and provide our own answers… some better than others, some brilliant, some foolish.

Depending upon the angle from which we perceive it, the prism of Torah sends forth seemingly infinite reflections. They are all reflections of ourselves projected agains the text and reflections of the words on the scroll in our eyes, beams of light bouncing off the walls in the room and off the far recesses of our minds. As long as we accept that the text is open to interpretation, we can continue to shed light and to enlighten one another. But the book goes dark when it is closed. People stop reading, stop listening, stop thinking, and sometimes they take to fighting over their beliefs. A closed book is a blunt instrument.

Different people read different books. Sometimes they read the same books differently. Sometimes they argue beyond reason, stop reading, stop listening, grow increasingly impatient for any number of legitimate and illegitimate reasons in which they believe, sometimes with all their might. As long as we keep asking questions, illuminating the texts and the contexts of our lives, we can maintain dialogue and a mutual commitment to exploring and finding solutions to our differences. If not, the power of an angry thought can be divisive, even irrevocably destructive.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“Data made flesh in the mazes of the black market.”
~ William Gibson, Neuromancer

Sometime last September, to add to what was already a fairly stressful month, I received a text message from my bank inquiring about some charges that had been made to my credit card. Once I got on the phone with a representative, I was asked if I had spent a few thousand dollars the previous evening at a nightclub in Sofia, Bulgaria. I told them that I hadn't, and that I was furthermore upset that I hadn't even been invited. Two large dropped in a dump like Sofia – it must have been quite the party. The bank made me whole again, but I was left to wonder, like so many other people these days, about the inscrutable question of how my card had been procured and deployed with all the instantaneity allowed by today's global flow of money and data – concepts that are becoming increasingly interchangeable or even undifferentiated. In all likelihood, neither I nor the bank will ever know what happened, and the event was written off simply as a cost of doing business.

This event reproduced itself more recently on a much larger scale. What has become known as the “Sony Hack” is continuing to reverberate across several worlds: computer security, entertainment and even foreign policy, to name a few. Much of the conversation seems to be concerned with the whodunit aspect of things: Who could possibly have had the skills and chutzpah required to not only spirit away approximately 100 terabytes of information of every stripe from underneath the multinational's nose, but then also proceeded to wipe much of the data from the network itself? Even though the breach was noticed on November 24^th, it's a good bet that Sony itself still hasn't assessed the full extent of the damage. While things are nowhere near to shaking out, let's consider some of the consequences that have so far followed the smashing of this particular piñata.

Fast forward about, umm, fifteen minutes after November 24^th, and we already had our culprit, which could be no one other than North Korea (I guess Iran got a bye because we need them right now in order to fight Islamic State). I find it challenging to believe North Korea was involved. Eleven years ago, Kim père didn't seem quite so phased the last time a Hollywood satire “took him out” – is it possible that Kim fils is such a thin-skinned grasshopper?

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In The Imitation Game Benedict Cumberbatch plays the amazing, fascinating, and ultimately tragic Alan Turing. I haven't seen it yet, but the reviews are good and it is bound to be up for a bunch of awards. It certainly does a thorough job of covering the Oscar checklist: Historical setting? Public and personal drama? English accents? Beating the Nazis? Check 'em all!

Turing Statue at Bletchley Park [1].

The basic storyline should be well known to all. Turing was an instrumental part of the UK's successful efforts to break the “unbreakable” German Enigma code. The work of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park is widely acknowledged to have shortened World War II by several years and, consequently, to have saved many thousands of lives. The tragedy of the story is that Turing was convicted in 1952 of “gross indecency” for having a relationship with another man (Arnold Murray). Turing was given the option of either prison or hormone treatments (i.e., chemical castration). He chose the latter. In 1954 Turing died of cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 in what was ruled a suicide [2].

Appallingly, it wasn't until 2009 that the UK government apologized for its treatment of Turing. And it wasn't until public pressure during the 2012 centennial of Turing's birth that they considered a pardon. He was finally pardoned on December 24, 2013.

If there was ever a place where one's sexual preferences, gender, race, economic status, religious beliefs, what-have-you should be irrelevant, it should be mathematics. After all, the Pythagorean Theorem doesn't give a hoot about such things. But mathematics is a human endeavor and humans can't seem to help but care about these things. I recently read a quote by Chimamanda Ngozi Adihie which put this nicely:

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognizing how we are.

Things continue to improve [3]. It's heartening to note that Turing's treatment by the UK government is absolutely shocking now. And ten years ago I couldn't imagine that gay marriage would now be widespread in the US and on the verge of becoming universal [4].

For mathematicians Turing's place in history was guaranteed long before he helped beat the Nazis. At the age of 24 Turing answered Hilbert's famous “Entscheidungsproblem” (Decision Problem). More importantly, he did it by inventing theoretical computer science; and did it before there were computers!

Hilbert asked the following the following rather innocuous question: Is there a step-by-step procedure which can decisively determine if any given mathematical statement is true or false? More precisely, is there an algorithm which can decide if a given statement can be proven using the rules of first order logic?

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats – from “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven“

Have you ever wondered how the content of your dreams differs from that of your friends? How about the dreams of people raised in different countries and cultures? It is not always easy to compare dreams of distinct individuals because the content of dreams depends on our personal experiences. This is why dream researchers have developed standardized dream questionnaires in which common thematic elements are grouped together. These questionnaires can be translated into various languages and used to survey and scientifically analyze the content of dreams. Open-ended questions about dreams might elicit free-form, subjective answers which are difficult to categorize and analyze. Therefore, standardized dream questionnaires ask study subjects “Have you ever dreamed of . . .” and provide research subjects with a list of defined dream themes such as being chased, flying or falling.

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

When home comes back to you as a calamity, its name appearing with death tolls and gut-wrenching photos of its youngest population, it feels as if the place itself, its memory, is lodged inside you like a bullet. The wound, inflicted by the War-terrorism binary, is a complicated wound, worsening with time. Peshawar, my hometown, has been in its throes for more than three decades. But who cares to remember?

On my way from my son's piano class to the farmer's market, I walk, carrying in my mind images of children in bloodstained green school uniforms, coffins, and the excruciating pain on the faces of the mourners of the Peshawar Attacks. I'm in a daze; grief-struck, isolated from what is around me. I walk bearing voices. In the cacophony of eyewitness accounts, sirens, prayers and news media, I hear the ghosts of my own past with heartbreaking clarity. The voice of a teacher, a sacred thing in my culture, recalled on so many occasions in my life as a migrant, comes back now with an instruction to hide under the desk. I know this voice, not this instruction; it is a different time. Eyewitness accounts are chilling. Pretend to be dead. The child who whispered this to his classmate, hiding under a desk, as bullets were fired, was killed, while his classmate, the eyewitness who followed his advice, survived. He survived, we survived but we only pretend to be alive, weighed down as we are by despair.

The despair of Pakistanis against the tyranny of Taliban on one hand and the tyranny of the US sponsored wars on the other, is countered by faint glimmers of hope, of the people finally protesting institutions, organizing themselves to rally against those who use religion to bully, blackmail and butcher innocents: a movement against the silencing of the ordinary Muslim, the ordinary Pakistani, Muslim or not. The focus of this movement is to restore social justice, to dismantle abusive religious rhetoric and to strengthen the country against international pressure.

Read more »

by Kathleen Goodwin

Exaggerated concern about what one eats is predominantly an obsession of the privileged—usually the white, wealthy, and educated. Having the luxury of time to contemplate the calories in your food or the distance it traveled from field to supermarket aisle; and the money to purchase costlier foods that were produced without the aid of pesticides is one of many intractable barriers separating the rich, or at least middle class, from the poor in the United States. In this country many low-income families live in neighborhoods characterized by the USDA as “food deserts” meaning there is a shortage of proximate grocery stores—making it necessary for residents in urban areas to purchase significantly marked-up food at bodegas and generally preventing access to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. The obesity epidemic's correlation to income level is a tangible effect of this phenomenon, but even more than the connection between being poor and eating foods high in sugar, fat, and calories is the way attitudes towards food provide a rift along lines of class and race.

This meditation comes from a quick yet pointed scene in Ben Lerner's new “autobiographical novel”, entitled “10:04“. The book considers a few months in the life of a Brooklyn dwelling writer who has written one novel to critical acclaim and now is under pressure to produce another— precisely the situation Lerner found himself in until 10:04's unveiling at the end of this past summer. The narrator is a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, the nation's oldest cooperative grocery store which serves approximately 16,000 people. Presumably Lerner, like myself, is a member of the Coop, because he describes the claustrophobic aisles and the love-hate relationship all members seems to have with it with uncanny accuracy. The narrator of 10:04 is fulfilling one of the work shifts that all members are required to complete every 4 weeks in order to gain access to foods and goods that are predominantly locally grown or produced, organic, non-animal tested, non-genetically engineered, and minimally packaged; and not marked up at the same rates as for-profit commercial grocery stores. The protagonist describes a conversation he overhears while sorting dried mango: Another Coop member is explaining why she pulled her son, Lucas, out of a public school first-grade to attend a private one because the “junk food and soda” his fellow classmates consumed caused unruly behavior that detracted from Lucas's education. The narrator reflects:

“It was the kind of exchange…with which I'd grown familiar, a new biopolitical vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were—for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren't really their fault—compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside …This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism—ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc.—in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality”

This small scene, most likely based on actuality, brings up many of the complicated factors that permeate America's unequal society.

Read more »

Winter Solstice With J. Kepler
.
we're deeply in—

in as deeply as we get
before we spin again
round an ellipse's rim
to a more congenial spot
for blood and breath

what the astronomical
survival odds (our
outer limits) are
who knows?

for time is short
by last report

listening now to ersatz jazz
I change Pandora's voice,
I move on, linking
new music to my thinking
by simply clicking
(because of what our
technos know

which is obviously permanent
and, like serious snow,
is sticking)

in this marvelous,
magnetic, angular hour
when sun and earth
seek a new relation,
and we anticipate
the max benefits
that will be here
in half a year

(as they will not be
for globe-mates in the
southern hemisphere)

I think there will be foxglove
and hydrangea when
Kepler''s laws begin to whirl us
back again
.

by Jim Culleny
12/21/14

CARPE DIEM

For Agha Ashraf Ali

You light a candle
Carp the darkness

With your usual flourish
Debone a carp

Add a pinch of salt
In your carpeted kitchen

Discourse on the next course
To scrape or not the fish head,

Gaadkalley: Honorific.
You offer a scrap of history

Bestowed once by the people
On the Big Crap who betrayed them

We seize the head
Before the diem carpe us

And raise our glass
To the disappeared carpenters

Of Kashmir
A parched paradise

By Rafiq Kathwari, whose first book of poems is forthcoming in April 2015 from Doire Press, Ireland. More work here.

by Charlie Huenemann

An experiment on a bird in an air pump (Joseph Wright, 1768)

Sometime in the late 1650s, Robert Boyle built an apparatus that removed the air from within a glass dome. The members of the newly-formed Royal Society promptly set about devising all manner of experiments to perform with the newfangled device. They placed candles, mercury barometers, and then – just as one might expect of unsupervised boys – living mice within the dome and watched what happened as a piston systematically drained the air away. (It is probably a good thing for the local fauna that the experimenters did not have a bigger air pump at their disposal.)

The effects of these experiments were easily seen, but controversies raged nonetheless over what was really going on. Did the device truly empty everything from the dome? Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, and others insisted that a pure vacuum is impossible, and that some sort of rarified matter must remain in the dome. Their reasons for asserting this so confidently are various. Some found the suggestion of a specific volume attached to no material thing unintelligible. Others found it ridiculous to believe that as Boyle expelled the air out of the dome, and nothing took its place, the volume of the universe would necessarily inflate by just that amount.

In his “Physical Dialogue on the Nature of Air,” Thomas Hobbes offered his own view of what the air pump was doing. Hobbes and Boyle both denied that there is any real qualitative difference between fluids and piles of particles: the differences in their behaviors were the result of the sizes and shapes of their constituent particles. Fluids consist of slippery, eel-like particles that easily slide past one another in a liquid way, and piles consist of blockier particles whose shapes prevent such easy motion. From this fact, Hobbes went on to explain that when the piston of a so-called “vacuum” pump withdraws from the chamber, the piston pushes upon the sea of particles outside the chamber, with the result that very, very tiny eel-like particles forcibly squirm their way back into the chamber (for they are the only ones that can slither through the very, very tiny pores of the chamber's glass walls). The pond of particles inside the chamber is thus made increasingly pure and light – and this is what these fellows meant by the aether. This aether is a real, material thing, they said, but is not sufficiently rich to sustain the life of a flame or a mouse. Furthermore, Hobbes's theory explained why a very great force would be required to withdraw the piston, since there ends up being a particle traffic jam around the chamber's tiny pores.

Read more »

.
—from a TED Talk

Idea

what is the space of
creativity?

lightning flash

…. stroke

…….. epiphany

………… eureka!

……………..something new?

………………….no

an idea's a network
a liquid network

a new configuration
a slow hunch
hatched from the minds of many thinkers
gaining capacity
which for decades flickers and finally
surges into view
.

by Jim Culleny
12/18/14

by Brooks Riley

I had an uneasy feeling on the day of the Challenger launch in January 1986. My memory tells me that I didn’t even watch it live, although I had, growing up, watched early shots into space: Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, and later, the first manned flight to the moon. I was excited by the idea of a civilian, Christa McAuliffe, flying up there with the pros of the space program. But the weather bothered me, even if I didn’t yet know about the serious technical problems with O-rings at much milder temperatures.

It was bitterly cold in Florida on the night before the launch, with record-breaking temperatures well below freezing. Although the weather was clear, there was ice everywhere, probably the result of high humidity in the air. My worry stemmed from first-hand knowledge of the destructive power of ice.

Anyone who’s ever grown up in a drafty old house knows that when winter comes, the water should be turned off and the pipes drained in those parts of the house that are unheated. If not, sub-freezing temperatures will freeze the water, the ice expanding and ultimately bursting the thickest of metal pipes. The damage comes later, after the thaw, when water starts pouring from the hole in the pipe. I know this from experience.

Wikipedia describes it this way: The effect of expansion during freezing can be dramatic, and ice expansion is a basic cause of freeze-thaw weathering of rock in nature and damage to building foundations and roadways from frost heaving. It is also a common cause of the flooding of houses when water pipes burst due to the pressure of expanding water when it freezes.

How much condensation had seeped into the rockets’ seams and frozen there, the ice expanding and putting pressure on the joints? Does it matter that the O-rings were blamed, they too having been damaged by the cold temperatures? Might there have been other damage inside the rockets as well? We’ll never know.

The fact that the O-rings held as long as they did during take-off surprised even the engineers who had tried to stop the launch. If the mysterious puff of grey smoke before lift-off (before or after ignition?) truly heralded the failure of the O-rings, how could the Challenger have managed to go 73 long seconds before it began to break apart? Could the destruction of the Challenger have been caused by ice damage?

Read more »

by Carl Pierer

Andy Clark and David Chalmers present a thesis of extended cognition and extended mind in their seminal 1998 paper: “The extended mind”. In it, they attack the idea that cognition and mind should be confined to the boundaries of our skull. Instead, they suggest, that the tools and instruments used in cognitive processes are part of the cognitive process. Clark and Chalmers support this claim by the following consideration. Suppose, Wolfram is seated before a computer screen and asked to play Tetris. He has to decide whether certain shapes that keep appearing on the top of the screen will fit into slots at the bottom of the screen. There are three scenarios:

1) Wolfram rotates the shapes mentally to decide whether they fit or not.

2) Wolfram presses a button to rotate the shape on the screen and then compares the shape to the slot.

3) Wolfram lives in the not-so-far future and has a neural implant which allows him to rotate the shape physically in his head. He can either use the neural implant to decide whether the shape will fit or use the initial method in 1). (See Clark & Chalmers 1998)

Clark and Chalmers think that in 3) it does not matter whether Wolfram uses the implant or the mental rotation, either way deciding whether the shape will fit counts as a cognitive process. To meet obvious objections, it can be supposed that the neural implant works exactly like the computer in 2). But if it is the case that the neural implant in 3) is functionally just like the computer in 2), there is no difference between 3) and 2). Neither is there a difference between 1) and 3). But then, if 1) is like 3) and 3) is like 2), 1) must be like 2). Therefore, since 1) is a cognitive process, 2) is a cognitive process as well and cognition extends.

Read more »