by Josh Yarden

There is nothing new under the sun
an age passes an age arrives
the earth forever endures

Nothing is ever quite as it was
adaptation the only constant
sustained in a dynamic universe

The eastern sun aspires
toward the western sky
the place where it will rise again

What does a person gain
endeavoring under the sun:
time for everything under the skies

So goes the wisdom of a Kohelet
recollecting evanescent moments
before memories scatter to the breeze

Vapor of vapors, all is vapor
according to the convener in Jerusalem
assembler of knowledge, gatherer of insight

The very essence of evanescence:
all human endeavor is fleeting
as a wisp of misty breath

All streams lead to the sea, yet the sea does not fill up
vapor rises, clouds condense, the rains come down
streams lead to their origins to well up again, and again

Rivers teem with life
and whatever else we pour in
not grasping what we wash away

Generation and re-generation
evolution offers opportunity
to rework and reshape

Wealth and power will eventually vanish
but a deed done, as an uttered word
cannot be withdrawn

Crooked cannot be justified
that which is missing cannot be taken into account
with knowledge comes pain that pleasure can assuage but not erase

Streams swirl with our every act
our deeds whirl in the winds
passing and arriving again and again

Toward the south then shifting north
blows the winding wind
catch a gust and travel against the stream

Explore—encounter—discover
the eye is never satisfied
the ear is never full

Experiment—create—examine
change is the way of time
nothing new under the sun

Tread lightly in the world
listen closely, instead of offering fools' prayers
… speaking as if they know no evil

* The Prophet (1974) Scultpted by Jacob Lipkin. On the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia.

Photo credit: Barbara (Petrick) Johnson

by Sarah Firisen

Odds are you’re on Facebook. After all, 1 in 6 people on the planet are on it, why should you be the exception? I think in my immediate circle of friends and family I know one person who isn’t on it at all. I know, I know, we overshare these days; we have no privacy; we allow ourselves to be marketing pawns for Facebook and their minions; we’ve welcomed Big Brother into our lives with open arms. But nevertheless, for most of us, it seems to be the case that if a fabulous meal is eaten and no photos of it are posted on Facebook for our friends and family to salivate over, then the meal never really happened.

So I’m going to go ahead with the assumption that almost everyone reading this, except my one friend, has been exposed to a huge number of their Facebook “friends” posting “Here’s my Facebook movie. Find yours at…” I have to admit that when I first started seeing these pop up in my newsfeed I was skeptical and resisted for a day or so. Then I watched a couple and they were cute and short. Even some of my more intellectually serious friends, including a certain 3QD editor, couldn’t resist. Finally I gave into temptation and had Facebook create mine. I was pleasantly surprised; it did a good job of choosing the highlights that I might have selected. There were a lot of photos of my kids, a few of the dog and one of me showing off a new haircut. And it ended with my New Year’s greeting to friends and family making a vague reference to the hard year I’d had because of my divorce and thanking people for their support. Seemed like a fitting end point.

For hundreds of years people kept diaries and they wrote letters. In these ways, they narrated their own lives and allowed others to follow them, in the case of letters, as their correspondents and in both cases as a record of the stories of their lives for future generations. Most of us don’t write diaries, if anything we write blogs and certainly, if the slow death of the US Postal Service is anything to go by, we don’t write letters. Increasingly, we don’t even send personal emails. These days, I don’t even keep in regular contact with many people via non Facebook email. Some people I text with. A few I used BBM or Whatsapp. Instead, the story of my life is documented on Facebook and for other people on Twitter, Instagram et al.

Read more »

by Grace Boey

Last year, I decided to stop eating animal products and meat, apart from some seafood. I’d felt uncomfortable about the facts of factory farming for quite some time, and finally resolved to take the plunge. Having enjoyed meat, eggs and dairy for all my life, it was initially a challenge adjusting to my new diet – while cutting meat was surprisingly easy, I mourned the loss of scrambled eggs for breakfast for at least a month. I still sometimes find it hard to resist certain desserts made with made with eggs, butter and milk. It helps, though, that I carry pictures like these around with me on my phone. The bright yellow hue of a lemon tart that comes from egg yolks doesn’t seem so appealing anymore after I call up pictures of filthy hens squished together in cages. I slip up sometimes, but on the whole, I’ve been pretty good about sticking to my diet.

The tougher challenge for me was, and still is, talking to others about my abstention. Ideally, I’d proudly announce my decision, and freely share my reasons for making it. But in reality, I avoid talking about it as much as possible. I almost never proactively tell anyone about my diet, and I don’t mention it unless circumstances make it necessary. There are few things that make me more physically uncomfortable than having my personal business suddenly put on the spot. I’m also hopeless at expressing myself verbally. And bringing up animal abstention tends to open up a conversational can of worms of the most squirmish kind. Okay, so I’m making my abstention public here – but it’s not too often I get to kick off a conversation by explaining myself in a couple thousand words, in my medium of choice, before the other party gets to respond.

Before I began abstaining from animals, I’d heard about the legendary amount of snark and hostility experienced by others who did. I’ve since gotten my fair share of this ugliness, which usually goes like this: someone will wrangle information about my diet out of me, and then proceed, entirely unsolicited, to say something f!#@ing rude about it. I’ve gradually learned to let idiotic comments like – for every steak you don’t eat, I’m going to eat three – slide. I’m still wondering how to respond to those who make a show of delightedly biting into chicken wings, right after I sincerely express my sadness over animals being tortured in factory farms.

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Tiger Woods is only the most recent in a long line of fine black golfers. In saying that I refer to players other than the moderns such as Charles Sifford, Jim Thorpe, Jim Dent, Lee Elder, Calvin Peete, and Renee Powell. Truth be told, the tradition of sepia swing masters started in ancient Nubia, where the game was invented. In that company Woods would be no more than a middling player.

By today's standards Tiger is ferociously talented, though his game has lost a bit of its luster of late. But those Kushite drivers of ancient Nubia were giants the like of which haven't been seen in thousands of years.

Their stories, like so many stories, have been suppressed by the Europeans. Fortunately many of those stories have been collected by The Order of Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary. The Jewels are dedicated to preserving the ancient stories and to intervening in history in ways variously clever and indirect. They are the chief source of that version of Afrocentric thinking known as Jivometric Drummology:

Jivometric Drummology: A philosophical system grounded in African and African-American musical practice. “Drummology” indicates that the governing logos is that of the drum, of rhythm, of hands and sticks coaxing sound from skin, of people joining together, each playing a simple rhythm, with the many simple rhythms melting into a single stream of infinite diversity. “Jivometric” characterizes the way language rolls off the tongue and tickles the ear; its meaning is secondary to its sound. Jivometrics is thus a principle of grace. A treatise may have drummological ideas, but if the language lacks grace, then the treatise is not jivometric — jiveturkey is all too often the appropriate term. In the most profound works of this school jivometrics and drummology are joined through agape.

The following story is based on information from the recently discovered papers of Cassius Photon Gaillard, aka Slim. He was a Mystic Jewel who had studied Jivometrics with the masters.

Read more »

by Liam Heneghan

Walking is a foundational practice, amounting in natural history to methodology. Charles Darwin in his Journal and remarks 1832–1836 more commonly known as The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) used the verb “walk”, or variants thereof, almost twice as frequently as the verb “sail” (walk, 94; sail 50). Darwin’s was more a journey on foot than a voyage by ocean. In fact “walking” is more prevalent in Darwin’s Voyages than it is in Walden, written by Thoreau that most legendary walker. Thoreau, however, has more to say about walking qua walking than Darwin. In his essay Walking (1862) Thoreau proclaimed that “I cannot preserve health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

Thoreau’s walking is not, of course, mere exercise, nor is the essay Walking an instructional treatise though it does tell us something of the where (”the West”) and the how (“…shake off the village…”) of walking. The chiefest value of walking is that it carries the walker “to as strange a country as [he] ever expected to see.” Walking surprises us! Though half our walking time is taken up with the return to “the old hearth-side from which we set out”, nonetheless, the true spirit of walking consists of “the spirit of undying adventure”, from which we might never return.

For all of his talk of permanent leave-taking there is Thoreau claimed, a “harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape and a circle of ten miles radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life.” Thus there exists for Thoreau a non-trivial relationship between walking, our personal finitude, and finding our place in this world.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“What would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?”
~ Thoreau, Walking

The inimitable Liam Heneghan, fellow 3QD-ista, recently posted the following idea for a sit-com:

It is true that Thoreau had great misgivings about the railroad coming to Concord, and he correctly surmised that the train would make his beloved town a suburb of Boston. Somewhat inevitably, this has lead to the following sketches for a series, most likely to be submitted to the History Channel for immediate development into that esteemed channel's next surefire hit. (Note to my agent: While some of these may not seem funny, I can assure you that they are. Humor in the nineteenth century was just a bit different from ours, is all.)

Henry David Thoreau, philosopher, naturalist and iconoclast, is bored and restless. He starts farming beans in his front yard but is soon issued a citation by the homeowners' association. At the next association meeting, with his case on the agenda, he stands up and, in his defense, gives a rousing speech about self-reliance. This is not especially well received. Thinking they can salvage the situation, Thoreau's children persuade their science teacher to make the bean plot their submission to the science fair. However, in order for it to be a legitimate science experiment, the teacher insists that half the plot be planted with GMO beans.

*

Thoreau goes for a walk in the woods and gets lost. He is found and saved by a troop of Boy Scouts. In gratitude, he teaches them to forage for food. However, one of the scouts has a nut allergy. After a lengthy and anxious detour at a hospital, Thoreau returns home with a lawsuit on his hands. (Production note: Scoutmaster to be played by William H. Macy).

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

Summer grass:
That's all that remains
Of warriors' dreams.

–Basho

My favorite scientific experiments are those which resemble a haiku: simple and beautiful with a revelatory twist. This is why the haiku is very well suited for expressing scientific ideas in a poetic form. Contemporary haiku poets do not necessarily abide by the rules of traditional Japanese haiku, such as including a word which implies the season of the poem or the 17 (5-7-5) syllable structure of three verses. Especially when writing in a language other than Japanese, one can easily argue that the original 5-7-5 structure was based on Japanese equivalents of syllables and that there is no need to apply this syllable count to English-language haiku. Even the reference to seasons and nature may not apply to a modern-day English haiku about urban life or, as in my case, science.

Does this mean that contemporary haiku are not subject to any rules? In the introductory essay to an excellent anthology of English-language haiku, “Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years“, the poet Billy Collins describes the benefit of retaining some degree of structure while writing a haiku:

Many poets, myself included, stick to the basic form of seventeen syllables, typically arranged in three lines in a 5-7-5 order. This light harness is put on like any formal constraint in poetry so the poet can feel the comfort of its embrace while being pushed by those same limits into unexpected discoveries. Asked where he got his inspiration, Yeats answered, “in looking for the next rhyme word.” To follow such rules, whether received as is the case with the sonnet or concocted on the spot, is to feel the form pushing back against one's self-expressive impulses. For the poet, this palpable resistance can be a vital part of the compositional experience. I count syllables not out of any allegiance to tradition but because I want the indifference and inflexibility of a seventeen-syllable limit to balance my self-expressive yearnings. With the form in place, the act of composition becomes a negotiation between one's subjective urges and the rules of order, which in this case could not be simpler or firmer.

The seventeen syllable limit – like any other limit or rule in poetic forms – provides the necessary constraints that channel our boundless creativity to create a finite poem. It is a daunting task to sit down with a pen and paper, and try to write a poem about a certain topic. Our minds and souls are flooded with a paralyzing plethora of images and ideas. But, as Collins suggests, if we are already aware of certain rules, it becomes much easier to start the process of poetic filtering and negotiation.

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Language on the tongue is need and desire and now, but more potently, it is the taste of ancestral memory: the truest flavor of our origins, almost indescribable and yet at the root of the desire for expression itself, like Michelangelo’s Adam reaching for God, permanently in pursuit of exactitude but touching only the energies emanating from it. Language is a wick in the space between their hands, burning with the desire for precision, joining past and present. The words we rummage for most desperately are the ones that were let loose by our forebears to inhabit this space between identification and imagination. It is in the nature of such words to float, like pollen, into the future, and germinate into poetry. If ever there was a language that hangs like pollen, it is Urdu— and a poetic form that allows for those floating, protean, seemingly disharmonious or paradoxical ideas to engage with one another, it is the ghazal.

Urdu, a hybrid, hangs between its many “parent” languages, between the divergent cultures and histories of its speakers— the people of the Indian subcontinent; it hangs between the imperial past of Indian Muslims who ruled India for a millennium, and their unique partitions post-Raj (British rule: 1857-1947), their new identities in our times as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. As the state language of Pakistan, Urdu hangs between the educated and the unlettered, between regional culture and ruling culture, between serving the immediate function as a communication tool for people of different provinces (with their own linguistic traditions and literatures) and the civilizational function of tethering the heritage of a millennium-long imperial culture to Pakistan’s evolving identity. It hangs ready to pollinate new time with old time.

“Urdu,” a variant of the Turkic “Ordu,” meaning “camp” or “army,” evolved due to the mixing of languages by soldiers employed in the extensive military of the Muslim empires of India (711-1857). Native speakers of North Indian languages as well as Persian, Arabic, Turkic Chagatai and others (English among them) were part of the army and the court, as various Muslim dynasties themselves came from different linguistic backgrounds and constantly imported not only soldiers, but scholars, builders and artisans from neighboring regions. A language with many dialects in the early phases of its formation, Urdu developed over centuries and came to find somewhat of a standardized form around the seventeenth century.

Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

Oliver, take your binky out.

Uh-uh.

Now.

Nope.

He wriggles free from my grasp and stands under a small television haphazardly jetting out from the waiting room wall. I hate waiting rooms. You're always waiting for something bad to happen.

A woman appears, says she is The Doctor, and begins to watch television with my two year-old son. He notices her but doesn't acknowledge her, a habit he's picked up.

What are you looking at, Oliver?

He grunts. Shrugs.

I asked, what do you see up there?

Without turning his head, he answers, It Nemo.

Close. It is a show about some burly fishermen in Alaska.

In her office, I'm told to take a seat in the corner and not to participate. I stuff my hands in my coat pockets. Unstuff them. Cross and uncross my legs.

They play cars. Look at books. Count blocks. She scribbles on a legal pad, glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose.

Eventually Oliver takes to a corner, rolls around on the carpet, and disengages except to push a tiny toy motorcycle with his finger. He looks bored.

I have some questions for you, she says, facing me.

Okay.

When did you first notice…

And it happens. I crack. She is so shrink-y and I really need shrink-y. I tell her all of our secrets in rapid-fire sentences, the weird little things that only Oliver and I know about. How he arranges everything into long rows. How he doesn't always answer when I call his name. How he can scream for hours, like he's trying to fight off a piece of himself. But I don't tell her how he pees in the houseplants. That one is mine.

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

A few weeks ago the Numberphile website posted a short video. The video discussed an “astounding” sum and got considerable press (the video has 1,523,719 views so far). It appeared on both Slate and 3QD. The sum? It's:

3QD included links to the firestorm the video created (I know, I know, I too was shocked that the Internet was up in arms over something). But I was surprised by the kerfuffle. The Numberphile videos I had seen featured James Grime giving well thought out discussions of interesting bits of math. I am happy to recommend them to anyone.

This video, however, is complete rubbish [1]. The hosts cram a remarkable number of mathematical outrages into 8 minutes. But they all come from a single anthropological source:

Mathematicians are Sherlocks and physicists are Mycrofts.

Both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes are brilliant, devoted to reason, socially awkward, and sometimes downright unpleasant. But just the same we appreciate and even sometimes like them. Where they differ is in means versus ends.

Sherlock follows his reasoning wherever it leads. He never hesitates along the path of reason no matter the final outcome. As he says, “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'' Sherlock believes that he serves only The Truth. The means justify the ends.

Sherlock's brother, on the other hand, is perfectly willing commit all manner of sins as long as the end result is the desired one. The ends justify the means. In the TV series at least, Mycroft serves Queen and Country. He has the luxury of an ultimate authority to judge what is right and what is wrong.

Just so, physicists have Mother Nature. They are free to commit all manner of (mathematical) abuses because they know at the end of the day Mother Nature will judge their work as right or wrong. All sins are forgiven if they give an answer which matches experimental data. Indeed, less than a minute into the Numberphile video the hosts show our seemingly ridiculous sum on page 24 of a standard reference on string theory. And indeed it's true that this sum is used in string theory, quantum physics, etc.

It is entirely reasonable for physicists to take this view. By playing fast and loose they travel farther and see more. They can do this safe in the knowledge that Mother Nature will eventually catch them if they go too far. And it should certainly be said that physics has always been a rich source of new ideas and insights for mathematics.

Read more »

by Dwight Furrow

An advertising poster of “AKADAMA Port Wine” for Suntory Limited. Creative Commons License

Valentine's Day is fast approaching; it's time to think about which wine will precisely calibrate the proper mood. But why wine? Why not a nice craft beer or a glass of orange juice? Why is wine the beverage that signals romance?

I would imagine wine and romance have been linked since our ancestors first discovered the benefits of moderate inebriation. The loss of inhibition and gain in confidence make wine a natural ally in games of seduction. But the relaxing of inhibitions is not the only benefit that wine confers on the amorous. Romance requires illusion. We fall in love with an idealized version of the beloved, believing he/she has all the virtues we admire and none of the negative traits we shun. Evolution has designed us to drop the skepticism when presented with the promise of procreation.

The Roman poet Ovid, in his 17 A.D. work “The Art of Love” says of wine that, “It warms the blood, adds luster to the eyes, and wine and love have ever been allies”. Given the paltry proportion of “beautiful people” to ordinary shlubs, adding “luster to the eyes” may be the most significant contribution wine has made to human existence. But, in fact, scientists have demonstrated this effect with beer as well—it has come to be known as “beer goggles”. Inebriation cannot explain the connection between wine and romance since any alcohol would suffice—yet, a can of “bud” just doesn't have the same meaning as a bottle of Dom Perignon. There must be something else about wine that connects it to romance.

Is there something inherently and uniquely amorous about fermented grape juice? In fact the history of wine as an aphrodisiac is as lengthy as that of food. It gets a less-than-enthusiastic mention in the Talmud and a much more enthusiastic discussion in the Roman historian Pliny's 1st Century Natural History, where he recommends wine be mixed with the muzzle and feet of a lizard or the right testicle of a donkey to cure a reluctant libido. Are you feeling the romance yet?

Read more »

by Kathleen Goodwin

It goes without saying, yet, we keep saying it anyways, that the United States government has had its share of problems in recent months. From the federal shutdown to the Affordable Care Act fiasco, it hasn't been a period to build confidence or pride in the American government. Still, many Americans would find it preposterous if someone were to suggest that the U.S. should turn its gaze eastward in order to learn a thing or two about how a democracy should work. Specifically, to the only other democracy on the planet with more citizens than the U.S. itself. While India and the U.S. may be the world's largest democracies, the similarities may just about end there. The U.S. approaches nearly 250 years as a democracy, and almost a century as a global superpower, while India has yet to achieve seven decades of democratic independence and is unanimously labeled the next world power or the next abysmal failure, depending on the prevailing sentiment any given week. Yes, we in the U.S. may be floundering when it comes to democratic legitimacy and trust in the government, but in India the situation must be infinitely more corrupt, more complicated and just, overall, worse. What could the older, wealthier and more socially progressive United States possibly learn from India? As 2014 gets underway, the two countries are preoccupied with very different political debates and controversies…or so it may appear.

As the momentum builds towards a national election in India this spring, it is clear that Indian politics is facing a turning point where the established co-dominance of the incumbent Congress and its long time right-wing rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), faces a challenge not just from regional parties, as in the past, but from a new national party that plans to contest the national election.

Read more »

by Ahmed Humayun

(This is the second post on Pakistan's struggle against militancy. Part I is here).

To prevail against an insurrection, a state must fight on many fronts. It must construct a comprehensive military and political strategy, strengthen its institutional capacity to fight an internal war, and mobilize public support for a protracted struggle. Above all, an insurgency is a contest between the state and its challengers over legitimacy and credibility. In this clash of narratives, the state must persuade the population that its actions are those of a representative, duly constituted government attempting to restore its control even as the rebels repudiate the fundamental legitimacy of the state.

So far in Pakistan the militant groups are winning the war of narrative. As I wrote last time, the Pakistani Taliban is by no means a monolith but its different factions do come together around a clear strategic story. Insurgent propaganda states that the rebellion's goal is to replace an illegitimate, un-Islamic government subservient to Washington with an Islamic state. Their war is defensive—for Islam and against America. The state, on the other hand, speaks in contradictory voices. Some say that the state must fight until the rebels lay down their arms, forswear the use of violence, and respect the rule of law, while others insist on immediate, unconditional negotiations. The truth is that ending the turmoil within Pakistan requires some adroit combination of fighting and talking—but only if they are aspects of an integrated strategy that has as its aim the restoration of state control and that realistically accounts for the ambitions of the rebels, which are revolutionary, and which they have pursued from the mountains in the tribal areas to major urban centers across the heartland.

Yet advocates of negotiation —including leading politicians, retired generals, and influential pundits—blame the state and its alliance with Washington rather than the militants for fomenting the violence. As a result it is widely believed in Pakistan that the war against militancy has been foisted on the country by the United States; that insurgent violence is merely retaliation for Pakistani military aggression and American drone strikes in the tribal areas; and that conflict will cease when these operations end. The result is that formula recited by many: ‘This is not our war.' This dominant narrative has had a negative effect on the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the public, created demoralization in the country's army and police forces, and emboldened the insurgents.

Read more »

What God Says

I place before you a bowl of evidence
but will never make you eat

Chance is what you’re up against,
and the only is of me you’ll meet

You can pray until your tongue expires
and never know my heart’s desire

I roll the future out mysteriously,
you trace my trail of crumbs through mires

You profusely write of who I am
as if I were like you a man

You cannot know the I of me
unless you crack the I of thee

In the light and in the gloom
I beat a drum and hum your tune
.

by Jim Culleny
1/24/14

by Paul Braterman

Lord Kelvin (Smithsoinian Instituion Libraries collection)

Kelvin calculated that the Earth was probably around 24 million years old, from how fast it is cooling. Rutherford believed that Kelvin’s calculation was wrong because of the heat generated by radioactivity. Kelvin was wrong, but so was Rutherford. The Earth is indeed many times older than Kelvin had calculated, but for completely different reasons, and the heat generated by radioactive decay has nothing to do with it.

Disclosure: in my introduction to the Scientific American Classic, Determining the Age of the Earth, and elsewhere, I have like many other authors repeated Rutherford’s argument with approval, without paying attention to Rutherford’s own warning that qualitative is but poor quantitative, and without bothering to check whether the amount of heat generated by radioactivity is enough to do the job. He thought it was but we now know it isn’t. It was only when chatting online (about one of the few claims in the creationist literature that is even worth discussing) that I discovered the error of my ways.

On the face of it, things could not be plainer. Kelvin had calculated the age of the Earth from how fast heat was flowing through its surface layers. An initially red hot body would have started losing heat very quickly, but over geological time the process would have slowed, as a relatively cool outer crust formed. His latest and most confident answer, reached in 1897 after more than 50 years of study, was in the range of around 24 million years.[1]

Read more »