by Akeel Bilgrami

These lectures present a lifetime of reflection by a scientist of language on the broader implications of his scientific work. The omnibus title of the lectures, “What kind of creatures are we?” conveys just how broad the implications are meant to be. They cover an impressive range of fields: theoretical linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of science, history of science, evolutionary biology, metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of language and mind, moral and political philosophy, and even briefly, the ideal of human education.

Lecture 1 presents with clarity and precision, his own basic ideas in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science (both fields in which he has played an absolutely central founding role) recording the progress achieved over the years but recording much more strenuously how tentatively those claims to progress must be made and how a very large amount of work remains to be done even in the most fundamental areas of study. Changes of mind over these years are also recorded, some of the most striking of which occurred only in the last decade or so.

The lecture begins by motivating the question its title announces, “What is Language?” It behooves us to ask it because without being clear about what language is, not only will we not get the right answers to other questions about various specific aspects of language (perhaps cannot even correctly frame those specific questions), but because we won’t get close to investigating or even plausibly speculating about the biological basis and evolutionary origins of language.

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by Andy Martin

Lee Child and Andy Martin

It was typical Lee Child.

Not long before he had been ranting on about how you really ought to ‘kill off all your relatives' (speaking aesthetically, but with a definite sense that art is murder) and how much he hated all those family trees in the classic novel. He was anti-genealogy. No begats. You can't have an XXL ex-military vigilante drifter roaming about and he has to call up his old mum every couple of weeks.

Now he was saying, ‘What if his mother comes back? Madame Reacher. You know, but young. In the Resistance. A kid. Before she became a Reacher. I love that period. The Nazis marching down the boulevard. Sartre and Camus writing in the Café de Flore. Most of the Resistance fighters achieved nothing, beyond getting themselves tortured. Useless, a lot of them. But the couriers – they were really something. They saved lives.'

We were crossing the street at Columbus Circle, weaving around cars and buses, riffing on the phrase ‘San Fairy Ann' (the Anglicization of Ça ne fait rien), deriving from our Second World War-era franglais-mangling fathers. Neon-lit darkness. Only a hazy idea where we were supposed to be going. We'd just finished the New York Times job in the Starbucks across from Lincoln Center Plaza. Lee was looking particularly disreputable for some reason. Maybe it was the stubble or the jeans-and-t-shirt look. Piratical. Like, if you were sheriff, you'd want to run him out of town before he started anything.

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by Namit Arora

A cloying veneration of army men is yet another pathology of nationalism that’s more pervasive than ever in India today. Army men are now widely seen as paragons of nobility and patriotism. Whether their deaths are due to freak accidents or border skirmishes, they’re eulogized for “making the supreme sacrifice for the nation”. Politicians routinely signal their patriotism by chanting Bhārat Mātā ki Jai, victory to mother India, and fall over each other for photo ops where they’re seen honoring soldiers, dead or alive.

Curiously, this adoration for army men seems most intense in urban middle-class families, including those who don’t desire or nudge their own kids to join their nation’s army. Instead, they want their kids to prepare for more lucrative professions, pursue office jobs in multinationals, live in gated high-rise apartments, and own nice cars. A textbook case of hypocrisy?

These folks may claim that their reverence for army men stems from their appreciation for the sacrifice the jawans (soldiers) make for others by enduring great hardship and risk, even death. And yet these same people certainly don’t glorify other risky jobs that benefit the nation no less, like unclogging the nation’s sewers, mining the nation’s coal, building the nation’s infrastructure, or toiling in the nation’s shipping graveyard—all jobs that apparently have lower pay and benefits combined with higher fatality, injury, and illness rates than Indian army jobs. Clearly, something else animates all that adoration for army men.

And who are the jawans who comprise the majority of the army? Most come from the rural poor and are hired after 10th grade. Some follow in the footsteps of other soldiers in their families, at times going back to British colonial times. As happens in all societies with volunteer armies and a severe lack of equal opportunity, most recruits join to escape poverty, get a stable job and a pension, and pursue a ticket to a higher social class, prestige, and some adventure. Indeed, in recent years, economic distress in parts of rural India has forced army recruiters to lower their physical fitness standards in some centers because the pool of candidates is too undernourished. Though the army does not release demographic data by caste or religion, it is well known that Muslims are severely underrepresented in it—as low as 2-3 percent—raising a host of awkward questions about its commitment to secularism.

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by Sanjukta Paul

As questions of economic justice and fairness have moved toward center stage in recent years, a seemingly technical legal issue that turns out to be a kind of microcosm of many of those questions has also emerged from obscurity. Economic activity that exists in the hazy space where labor regulation and market regulation intersect presents a stark question: when the people engaging in that activity act collectively to better their circumstances, should such collective action be protected by the law (as labor law would suggest), or prosecuted by it (as competition or antitrust law would suggest)? The problem of precarious or contingent work, which is generally on the rise the world over,[i] has brought renewed relevance to that question.

One of the most visible manifestations of precarious work is in the so-called on-demand or gig economy, exemplified by companies such as Uber. Companies in this sector generally argue that their growth is due to technological innovation, while many labor and community advocates argue that is largely due to the avoidance of socially beneficial regulation, which in turn enables them to undercut existing businesses. These companies also take the position that people providing the services in which they deal (such as cab rides) are not employees, but independent businesspeople, and thus that labor regulation does not apply to them. One response has been to argue, in the courts and the legislatures, that such workers are legally employees, and have been misclassified by the companies engaging their services. The City of Seattle recently took a different and more direct approach, enacting an ordinance granting collective bargaining rights to drivers for taxicab, limo, and “transportation network companies” (encompassing Uber, Lyft and other companies in the on-demand sector) who are classified as independent contractors rather than employees. The approach of the policy-makers and advocates who passed the Seattle ordinance is novel in that it guarantees these rights to workers directly, rather than endeavoring to first establish their employee status, whether by legislation or by litigation. As expected, an industry group (the United States Chamber of Commerce, no less) has now filed a lawsuit challenging the ordinance on grounds that it is barred by antitrust law and by the National Labor Relations Act.

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Standing at the East End of a Patio
Seeing a Mountain and a Moon

I have no ears for moons
nor eyes for the snapping of limbs
against each other in the wind
these come to me piecemeal by different senses
to be assembled in a dark place
into a dream of moonlit-windy-night
where all up sides are glazed in silver
while underneath are shadows,
and shadows (forever)
have no tongues
.

by Jim Culleny
3/11/16

.

by Thomas R. Wells

Science is an essential part of modern civilisation. It has cast religious metaphysics out of the natural world. It has supported the development of technologies that allow more people to live better and longer lives than ever before. It provides the empirical foundation on which the ideal of democratic deliberation rests, a division of labour in which specialists pursue facts so that society as a whole can pursue values. Moreover, as an industry science is thriving, with around 7 million professional scientists working with hundreds of billions of dollars of funding from governments, corporations and other institutions.

And yet despite dominating the modern world, the authority of science has declined. The general public are losing faith in its relevance to our lives, and are increasingly distrustful of its specific claims. This attitude is regrettable but not entirely unreasonable. Scientists have long claimed the status of public servants but exhibit little interest in living up to that role, for example by investigating boring but deadly diseases. Furthermore, science as an industry – Big Science – is entwined with power and money. That undermines the credibility of scientific pronouncements on politically contentious issues such as GM crops or climate change.

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by Carl Pierer

***

M.C. Escher: Three Spheres II.

*

If we take an infinite collection of sets, all of which contain at least one element, is there a way to choose exactly one element from each of them? This seems to be just obviously true. After all, there is something in every set, so we can just take any of those things. Certainly, it holds for finite collection of sets. Even if this number is very large, we could just go to each set and pick an element. However, if the collection becomes infinite, this becomes more worrisome. We would need a principled way of choosing one element of each set. Consider, for instance, all non-empty subsets of the natural numbers (the natural numbers being those we use to count: 1, 2, 3, …). By the nature of the natural numbers, such a set will always have a least element. Hence, we could simply pick the least element of each set in our collection. Compare this with an infinite collection of sets of pairs of gloves. As a pair of gloves always consists of a right and a left glove, we can always pick the left glove, say. But this is not so straightforward with other sets. For example, considering all non-empty subsets of the real numbers (containing the natural numbers, but also ¼, e, √π,…) it is far from obvious how we could ensure that we can pick precisely one element from each of those sets. Contrast this with an infinite collection of sets of peas. You know that each set will contain at least 1 pea, but which one are you going to pick if there are more than 1?

The axiom of choice, then, claims that this is always possible. It is, what some may call, somewhat theological, as it asserts the existence of something (a choice function) – even though we might have no idea at all how to construct it, as for instance in the real number example. Yet, it just seems very obvious that this principle should hold. After all, there is something in every set to choose from. The axiom is probably one of the most contentious of the standard axioms of set-theory[i]. On the one hand, it is very powerful and many important proofs in mathematics – explicitly or implicitly – use it. On the other, it leads to some highly counter-intuitive consequences.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

Is probabilistic analysis of any use in analyzing text – sequences of letters or sequences of words? Can a computer generate meaningful sentences by learning statistical properties such as how often certain strings of words or sentences occur in succession? What other uses could there be of such analysis? These were some questions I had this year as I collected material to teach a course on a special class of probability models called Markov chains. The models owe their name to the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov, who first proposed them in a 1906 paper titled “Extension of the law of large numbers to dependent quantities”.

The key phrase, as we shall see, is ‘dependent quantities'. Broadly speaking, Markov models are applications of that basic rule of conditional probability, P(A|B): the probability of Event A happening, given that B occurs. The uses of Markov chains are many and varied – from the transmission of genes through generations, to the analysis of queues in telecommunication networks, to the movements of particles in physics. In 2006 – the 100th anniversary of Markov's paper – Philipp Von Hilgers and Amy Langville summarized the five greatest applications of Markov chains. This includes the one that is unknowingly used by most of us on a daily basis: every time we search on the internet, the ranking of webpages is based on the solution to massive Markov chain.

The focus of this piece, however, is the analysis of letter and word sequences as they appear in text. In what follows, I'll look at four examples where Markov models play a role.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

It just so happened that when the discovery of gravitational waves sent ripples through the world, Valentine's Day was right around the corner. News stories about this victorious verification of ‘Einstein's last remaining prediction' were as ubiquitous as the pink and red cards, making grandiose claims – or extravagant promises – about an undying love. It was an interesting juxtaposition.

With gravitational waves very much on my mind, I was wandering the aisles of a local store, when suddenly I came across a display full of cards dripping saccharine sweetness, and a stray thought wandering into my head almost made me laugh out loud. These cards would be completely appropriate, I thought, if sent from one black hole to another! After all, it would not be out of place for a couple of black holes, spiraling into each other, to exchange ardent promises that they will merge and become one; they would be entirely justified in claiming that the story of their love will reverberate across galaxies and through millennia, and that people far away will delight in discovering their tale. As LIGO proved last month, all these claims are true!

As you have doubtless read many times by now, gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime, caused by accelerating masses. What does that mean? Using the cliched, but still useful, metaphor of spacetime as a rubber sheet, a heuristic description of general relativity is as follows: mass deforms spacetime, much as a heavy ball would a rubber sheet – the heavier the mass, the deeper the ‘dip'. Other, smaller, objects in the vicinity (assuming they are far less massive and the dips they cause are not appreciable in comparison) are then obligated to modify their paths as they approach this mass. So as to avoid falling into the valley created by the larger object, they steer around it, and in effect, end up tracing an arc. This mechanism explains the planetary orbits, as well as all other phenomena encompassed by Newton's theory of gravitation – and it goes much further.

One key difference between Einstein's theory and Newton's, is that of philosophy. Where Newton viewed gravity as a mysterious force of attraction, wielded at a distance, Einstein revealed it to be a natural consequence of the shape of spacetime. This has ramifications. For instance, with our post-Einstein understanding of gravity, we would conclude that if a massive object were to move, the spacetime deformation it causes would propagate as well. In particular, if the mass accelerates, it causes a rhythmic disturbance that ripples outward; which is another way of saying that gravitational waves are predicted by general relativity.

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Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity.
They have observed (gravitational waves) the warping of space-time generated by the
collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth. —BBC, 2/11/16

Gravitational Waves

when I entered your orbit
and you swept into mine
I gave a gravitational wave
which you returned and I received
without the help of lasers

now a billion years have passed
black holes have come and gone
and those waves are rippling
through the universe still
clear and sharp as razors
.

by Jim Culleny
2/12/16

by Leanne Ogasawara

Last week, I finally got to meet one of my heroes, Kip Thorne. I was a real cosmology geek when I was young have been a fan of his since early junior high school. So when my astronomer offered to introduce me during a Caltech event to celebrate the Ligo discovery, I jumped at the chance! And not only did I get to meet Kip Thorne, but really enjoyed the event as well.

Listening to the Ligo scientists playing talk about their role in this forty year idea, I couldn't decide what was more amazing, that they had had detected these waves that so perfectly corresponded to Einstein's magnificent 100 year equations or that the NSF had stayed with the program for such a long time to see it through!

Really, what a project–not just in terms of long-term investment but to have over a thousand scientists working for decades on something that had such a nominal chance of success –or to put a different way, they simply had no idea it was possible until they actually had done it! That is something, isn't it?

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by Matt McKenna

There's a week in a thirteen-year-old boy’s life in which Gods of Egypt might fit somewhere within their top twenty favorite films of all time. At least, it would have been in my top twenty films when I was thirteen–there are certainly enough outrageous battles and sardonic quips to keep teenage me entertained. Strangely, the theatre where I watched Gods of Egypt was absent of teenagers, and instead contained a dozen or so adults who sat quietly through the film’s two hour running time, walked out just as quietly after it was over, and presumably went quietly home to never think about the film again. I wonder what their expectations were for Gods of Egypt, and I wonder if the film met them.

Gods of Egypt is not about the historical Egypt, but rather a fantasy version of Egypt in which the Gods live amongst the mortals. Gods can be killed just like mortals, but they are distinguished from mortals in that they are fifty percent bigger, bleed gold blood, and can occasionally morph into robot animal things that look and sound a lot like Transformers. The silliness of this premise is the best the thing film has going for it.

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by Bill Benzon

There are people who read rags like Star, Globe, The National Enquirer, and so forth to find out what’s really going on in the world of celebrities and people in the news. What’s the scoop with Madonna? Is Kanye really like that? Did Brad and Angela get another kid?

Why do we do this? It’s one thing to gossip about people in your circle of acquaintances, but why trade in gossip about people who you don’t know, likely will never meet, and who play no direct role in our daily lives?

But they DO play a role, do they not, in our imaginative lives?

The one’s I’ve mentioned – I just grabbed their names out of the air, though I suppose I could have gone to the supermarket and checked the current headlines – are entertainers. They act in movies, or on TV, or they sing, or entertain us in some other way. They are important to us for what they pretend to be. They also live lives we imagine to be impossibly and unapproachably glamorous. And so we’re curious about what they’re really like. Just what that means in a world where Coke’s the real thing, that’s another matter.

Do you think they’re curious about one another? It’s not like they all know one another; there are too many celebrities and others “in the news” for that. Do they read the tabloids? I have no idea.

But let me ask a more specific question: Do you think that Barack Obama, for example, is at all curious about Jerry Seinfeld, for example? Seinfeld, of course, is a very well known entertainer with lots of fans, many of whom must be curious about what his life is really like. Barack Obama is not an entertainer, but, as the current President of the United States, he is certainly very well known. And, as Presidents go, he’s more glamorous than most.

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by Eric Byrd

Maybe I’m inclined to what Nietzsche called “impure thought,” that is to say, a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can’t disentangle them. I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called “philosophy,” should lead a sort of clandestine life for a while, just to renew itself. By clandestine I mean concealed in stories, in anecdotes, in numerous forms that are not the form of the treatise. Then thought can biologically renew itself, as it were.

—Roberto Calasso's Paris Review interview

The structure of La Folie Baudelaire, the sixth book of Calasso's project, resembles that of the “brothel-museum” of which Baudelaire dreamt in the early hours of March 13, 1856, a Thursday – a dream interrupted at 5am when his mistress, Jeanne Duval, suddenly shifted a piece of furniture, in another room. In his dream, Baudelaire encountered another poor man of letters and they split a cab; they followed nocturnal versions of their daily routines, calling at editors to submit or solicit reviews, and presenting their books to possible patrons. Baudelaire stopped the cab at a brothel and went in to present his manuscript to the madam (on the surface, the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal was then in preparation).

In a letter to Asselineau, Baudelaire said that the brothel-museum was made of “immense galleries, adjourning, poorly lit” – “like an erotic Piranesi,” Calasso comments – in which girls and clients mingled. Baudelaire was bashful of his bare feet and his penis hanging from his fly, and avoided the crowds to study the pictures on the walls: sketches of Egyptian ruins, ornithological prints with moving, “lively” eyes, and clinical photographs of the deformed children born to prostitutes. He encountered one such “monster born in the house,” “pink and green,” who squatted painfully upon a pedestal, with an elastic, serpentine appendage, starting from his nape and wound around his body. They talked – “he informs about his troubles and pains,” the greatest of which is the humiliation of dining at the same table with the girls, the ropelike coil of his neck-tail at his side. “I awake,” Baudelaire reported, “tired, enfeebled, with aching bones, my back, legs and sides painful. I presume I had been sleeping in the monster's contorted position.”

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