by Jonathan Kujawa

On “Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension” by Matt Parker.

I came dangerously close to not becoming a mathematician. Like many people my experiences with math in school left me irritated and bored. I have a poor memory and I'm not a detail oriented person [1]. The arbitrary rules to be memorized and the fiddly and unforgiving nature of calculations made each homework a minefield of point-losing opportunities. And the problems! To “motivate” us with “applications” the problems were meant to be real-world, yet always seemed to involve the patently ridiculous: rectangular pastures, conical barns, spherical cows. I don't know how anyone can refer to such obviously contrived problems as “real-world” with a straight face.

Or, worse, problems were completely devoid of any motivation whatsoever. I have strong memory of having to learn how to multiply together matrices. The rules were clearly designed to maximize the number of calculations required and, hence, the chances of making a mistake. I can't imagine who thought this was a good topic for fifteen year olds. Not a word was said about why we should learn such a thing, or why anyone, anywhere should care. Oh to have known something about how matrices are used in geometry and computer graphics, or to store and manipulate data, or to compute probabilities in Markov processes. Heck, just to point out that it is an example of a “multiplication” where AB and BA are not equal would have been great start!

Of course my experience is the rule, not the exception. Paul Lockhart wrote a fantastic essay in 2002 entitled “A Mathematician's Lament” which captures the situation perfectly. It's requiring everyone to be able to read music and never letting them hear a tune, only saying it will be needed in some unspecified way as a working adult. Or teaching reading using only tax forms and TV repair manuals. Everyone with an interest in math or education should read it. You can read it here. As Lockhart writes,

…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.

So how was my soul saved?

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

When it comes to political questions, reasonable people disagree. Reasonable disagreement persists also in philosophy, religion, and a broad array of interpersonal matters. That's life. And, indeed, we must live; we must make decisions, set plans, and adopt policies that affect, interest, and impact others. Our decisions have drawbacks, actions have consequences, and plans impose costs on others. We cannot always just go our own way; we have to consult others in trying to figure out how to go on. Hence disagreements arise.

Any view important enough to stimulate disagreement is a view that will look to some reasonable others as prohibitively costly, suboptimal, incorrect, or foolhardy. Thus assessing the drawbacks of one's view is where the argument concerning its overall merit begins, not where it ends. Thoughtful people are aware that their views will strike some reasonable others as manifestly rejectable, and consequently, thoughtful people take reasonable criticism not always as an attack on their proposals, but rather as an occasion for thinking and saying more about them. In some instances, the case can be made that the drawbacks of one's view must be borne (because, perhaps, the viable alternatives are yet even worse); in other cases, it might be arguable that the costs of adopting one's view are merely apparent or on the whole insignificant. The point is that it's plainly insipid to proceed as if the fact that an opponent's view is imperfect were a decisive reason to reject it. Showing that an interlocutor's proposal is thoroughly criticizable is never the end of the matter. What must also be shown is that the interlocutor's criticizable proposal is inferior to the other (criticizable) proposals worth considering. And that comparative task requires us to allow our interlocutors to respond to our criticisms.

The trouble is that so much popular political debate seems to presuppose that the only political view worth accepting would be one that could not be reasonably criticized.

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by Jalees Rehman

Nearly half a million applications for asylum submitted by refugees were processed by German authorities in 2015, according to the German Federal Office for Refugees and Migration. The number of people who were officially registered in Germany as potential asylum seekers was even far higher-roughly one million in 2015 – which suggests that Germany anticipates an even higher number of official asylum applications for 2016. Chancellor Angela Merkel has defied many critics even in her own party and cabinet by emphasizing that Germany can and will take on more refugees, most of whom are coming from war-torn countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. “We can do it!” (“Wir schaffen das!”) was the phrase she used in September of 2015 to convey her optimism and determination in the face of ever-growing numbers of refugees and the gradual rise of support for far right extremist demonstrations and violent attacks by far right extremists on refugees centers in Germany.

The German media and right wing populists are currently obsessing about statistics such as the fact that the far right and libertarian party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland – Alternative for Germany) will garner 10% of the popular vote or that the vast majority of the refugees are male and could lead to a demographic gender shift if they remain in Germany. While such statistics serve as an important barometer of the political climate in the German electorate or to prepare for the challenges faced by the refugees and German society in the next years, they do not address the fundamental philosophical questions raised by this refugee crisis. In the latest issue of the popular German philosophy periodical “Philosophie Magazin“, the editors asked philosophers and other academic scholars to weigh in on some of the key issues and challenges in the face of this crisis.

Should we be motivated by a sense of global responsibility when we are confronted with the terrible suffering experienced by refugees whose homes have been destroyed? The sociologist Hartmut Rosa at the University of Jena responds to this question by suggesting that we should focus on Verbundenheit (“connectedness”) instead of Verantwortung (“responsibility”). Demanding that those of us who lead privileged lives of safety and reasonable material comfort should feel individually responsible for the suffering of others can lead to a sense of moral exhaustion. Are we responsible for the suffering of millions of people in Syria and East Africa? Are we responsible for the extinction of species as a consequence of climate change? Instead of atomizing – and thus perhaps even rendering irrelevant – the abstract concept of individual responsibility, we should become aware of how we are all connected.

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by Tamuira Reid

I.

I stopped caring about him sometime between January and May, when the weather changed and the leaves came back. He went on that big white pill and couldn't have aged cheese or avocado and I sat at the table in the kitchen, watching him watch me.

The yelling wouldn't stop until he'd had enough, when his eyes no longer felt right in his head and he'd rather lay down than stand there, fist in mouth, cat rubbing against both legs.

He once told me that depression comes in waves but that makes it sound too beautiful. There was nothing good about the bad.

Sometimes we'd try to fight it before it hit. I'd take a shower. He'd shave his face. Vacuum the hallway rug. But it never worked and the top would blow off and it would be hands to throats again, just like that.

Teacups shook in their skin, books fell over on themselves and I wanted to see how it would all play out. Does he get the girl in the end? Or does she leave during a quiet moment, smiling as she turns away. His hand pressed against her like an ear.

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by Misha Lepetic

“No sooner does man discover intelligence
than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.”
~ Jacques Yves Cousteau

Over the course of my last few posts I have been groping towards some kind of meeting point between, on the one hand, the current wave of information technologies, as represented by artificial intelligence (AI), social media and robotics; and on the other, what might be termed, for the sake of brevity, the social condition. The thought experiment is hardly virtual, and is in fact unfolding before us in real time, but as I have been considering the issues at stake, there are significant blind spots that will demand elaboration by many commentators in the years and decades to come. Assuming that, as Marc Andreessen put it, software (and the physical objects in which it is increasingly becoming embodied) will continue to “eat the world“, how can we expect these technological goods to be distributed across society?

It's actually kind of difficult to envision this as even being a problem in the first place. It's true that, up until in the first years of this century, there was some discussion of the so-called ‘digital divide', where certain segments of the population would not be able to get onto the ‘Internet superhighway' (another term that has fallen into disuse, perhaps because it feels like we never get out of our cars anymore). These were the segments of society that were already disadvantaged in some respect, where circumstances of poverty and/or geography prevented the delivery of physical and therefore digital services. Less so, those on the wrong side of the divide may have also landed there because of language proficiency or age.

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A great man and one of the most significant figures in the history of Pakistan has just died. I consider it my great fortune that I came to know him and the idea of a world without him in it is quite unbearable. Here is what I wrote about him more than 10 years ago on 3QD:

Sahabzada Yaqub Khan is the father of one of my closest friends, Samad Khan. He is also probably the most remarkable man I have ever met. All Pakistanis know who he is, as do many others, especially world leaders and diplomats, but to those of you for whom his name is new, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce him.

The first time that I met Sahabzada Yaqub Khan about six years ago, he was in Washington and New York as part of a tour of four or five countries (America, Russia, China, Japan, etc.) relations with which are especially important to Pakistan. He had come as President Musharraf's special envoy to reassure these governments in the wake of the fall of the kleptocratic shambles that was Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's so-called democratic government. Samad Khan, or Sammy K as he is affectionately known to friends, invited me over to his apartment to meet his Dad. I had heard and read much about Sahabzada Yaqub and knew his reputation for fierce intellect and even more intimidating, had heard reports of his impatience with and inability to suffer fools, so I was nervous when I walked in. Over the next couple of hours I was blown away: Sahabzada Yaqub was not much interested in talking about politics, and instead, asked about my doctoral studies in philosophy. It was soon apparent that he had read widely and deeply in the subject, and knew quite a bit about the Anglo-American analytic philosophy I had spent the previous five years reading. He even asked some pointed questions about aspects of philosophy which even some graduate students in the field might not know about, much less laymen. Though we were interrupted by a series of phone calls from the likes of Henry Kissinger wanting to pay their respects while Sahabzada Yaqub was in town, we managed to talk not just about philosophy, but also physics (he wanted to know more about string theory), Goethe (SYK explained some of his little-known scientific work, in addition to quoting and then explicating some difficult passages from Faust), the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and Urdu literature, of which Sahabzada Yaqub has been a lifelong devotee.

More here.

by Brooks Riley

I recently googled an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. Within seconds his image appeared before me, as compelling and alluring as it had once been for me so long ago. It wasn’t a living friend that I googled, never had been. It was a dead one, in more ways than one, the first painting that ever impressed me: L’homme mort, by Édouard Manet, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, there known as The Dead Toreador. [Click photo to enlarge.]

It may seem insulting to my living friends that I find myself revisiting the inanimate ones to try to understand their place in my personal pantheon. Friendship may even be the wrong word for the acquaintance one makes with a work of art. But the attraction is there, just as we are attracted to the singular mix of attributes of a person whom one knows will become a friend. The first time I saw my best friend, it was not in person, but in a thumbnail photograph of her among hundreds, of incoming freshmen at college. There was nothing unusual about that face, but there was a quality I noticed, something ineffable. When I later met that freshman, I recognized her immediately.

I was probably 14 or 15 years old when I first saw the Manet painting. Walking into the gallery where it hung, I was immediately drawn to it. From a distance, it was the dynamism within the frame, the chiaroscuro 20-degree angle slashed across the wide canvas from upper left to lower right, that made me want to move closer. It was also the proto-cinematic framing, heralding the 1.85:1 aspect ratio of modern cinema. The angle was formed by the body of a dead bullfighter, the only event in an otherwise nearly blank, dark canvas with little context. His head, upside down, is closest to us. His feet lie at the other end of the perspective.

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.
.
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Solar Filaments

the sun's intense but placid
teasing this morning’s fog from the river,
at least from this vantage, sitting as we are
at a perfect distance from its orange firebox
safe from its arcing solar filaments,
the eruptions which suddenly uncoil like snakes
and would reduce me to cinders
with their dragon breath if not for
certain equations like those that render orbits
and the change of state that gives
this river its gray vapor coat
in which it rides its way to the sea
under the cool red blast furnace blaze
of clouds caught in the cup of two slopes
behind the phone pole’s tangle of wires
to the sound of water over the dam
speaking familiar alien tongues,
and footsteps curiously synced to my pace,
and the rhythmic exhalation
of my fog-spilling lungs
.

by Jim Culleny
1/19/15

by Claire Chambers

I recently wrote an essay for Dawn on general postcolonial rewritings of Shakespeare's Othello. For the present column, I turn to what Ania Loomba has called 'the made-in-India Othello fellows'. In other words, I am interested in those Indian writers who, from Henry Louis Vivian Derozio onwards, have looked to this play about love, jealousy, and race for inspiration and critique.

In her essay '”Filmi” Shakespeare', Poonam Trivedi defies accusations of 'bardolatry' and colonial cultural cringe to trace the history of Shakespeare on the Indian big screen. She shows that this history goes back to 1935 and Sohrab Modi's Khoon-ka Khoon, a cinematic rendering of an Indian stage version of Hamlet. Because the British colonizers laid emphasis on an English literary education for the Indians over whom they ruled, there were many filmic adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. Hamlet's blend of politics and metaphysical mystery seems to have proven the most popular of the Bard's plays for Indian auteurs. These directors, according to Trivedi, in the early days of Indian cinema found themselves between the rock of leaving Shakespeare 'pure and pristine' or the hard place of making him entirely 'bowdlerized and indigenized'. By the mid-twentieth century, the most successful adaptations relocated the plays to India in their entirety. Directors 'used' rather than 'abused' the Shakespearean originals, taking ideas from their plots and themes rather than critically writing back to the plays.

The Bengali film Saptapadhi was in 1961 probably the first to namecheck Othello. In it, a pair of starcrossed lovers − a Brahmin boy and an Anglo-Indian Christian girl − fall in love during a performance of that other text about a relationship transgressing social and racial fault-lines. Then came Jayaraaj Rajasekharan Nair's Kaliyattam (1997), a 1997 Malayalam remake of Othello. It is set against the backdrop of Kaliyattam or Kathakali, a devotional Keralan form of folk-theatre and dance also evoked in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. In Kaliyattam Jayaraaj transplants Shakespeare's racial concerns onto caste, since the plot revolves around a romantic pairing between a low-caste Theyyam performer and a Brahmin girl. Jayaraaj also changes Shakespeare's somewhat trivial, somatic device of a handkerchief that fuels Othello's jealousy into an opulent cloth that also served as a consummation sheet for the two protagonists.

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by Yohan J. John

[Warning: This essay will feature major spoilers for the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens.]

I had two reasons to watch the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, as soon as I was able. Firstly, I knew that despite all the talk of spoiler warnings and respect for “the fans”, I would have to basically avoid the internet until I managed to see it. (There's always some kill-joy on your facebook feed who gets a kick out of giving it all away, or an oaf who does not know what a spoiler is.) Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to join in the conversation. One of the great things about a pop cultural juggernaut (such as Star Wars, Pope Francis, or the FIFA World Cup) is that a lot of people —friends, family, strangers in bars, members of the chatterati — will be talking about it. Pop cultural mega-events are like Rorschach tests: whether we enjoy them or not, we feel the urge to project onto them our emotions, our theories, our politics, our ideals. By virtue of their popularity, these events bring us together and draw our attention to a common focal point, at which point we can share our projections with each other.

In his book Finite and Infinite Games, James P Carse defines finite games as those that are played for the purpose of bringing play to an end. Infinite games, by contrast, are played “for the purpose of continuing the play”. When we think about games we typically think about the finite sort: their end goal is some victory or end state, at which point the game is over. Wars take the form of a finite game — they aim to bring an end to the adversary's 'play'. Debates takes this form too; their goal is to silence the opponent. A scathing critical review is meant to remove a work of art from the field of aesthetic play. But real conversations, by contrast, are infinite games. Their goal is to enlighten and entertain all the participants. A conversation is an occasion not only to look at a topic, but also to look through a topic, treating it as a prism that can be pointed at self, other, and world. A good conversation never comes to a definitive end; it is simply held in abeyance for a time, to be revisited later or carried on by new participants. The road goes ever on.

What follows are some impressions gleaned from the Star Wars Conversation, and some ideas for how we might carry on the infinite play and entice more people to join in. I'm not sure this will add up to a coherent essay, so feel free to skim, as you would a listicle or an annotated reading list. And by all means, contribute to the conversation in the comments section.

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Childhood

A Version after Iqbal

Earth & sky were new realms for me
My mother’s embrace the world

If anyone made me weep, I found
Comfort in rattling the door chain

O to gaze for hours at the moon
Journeying silently amidst clouds

Above mountains & deserts
Astonished at the blend of truth & lies

I trained my eyes to see, lips to move
My heart yearned

Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari whose collection ‘In Another Country’ is available here.

by Gail Pellett

On October 7, last year, Gui Minhai went missing from his Thai resort house, his daily medications that he was sorting left on the table. That month, three of his colleagues —Lu Bo, Zhang Zhiping and Lui Rongyi— disappeared from Hong Kong. Lu Bo and Gui Minhai are co-owners and the others are employees of the Hong Kong based Mighty Current Publishing House notorious for producing salacious books about China's top leadership—books long on lusty rumors and stories of corruption although short on sources. At the time of his disappearance, Mr. Gui was planning for a new book, The Pimps of the Chinese Communist Party.

The books published by Mighty Current had survived in the lively Hong Kong book market for two decades while being banned in China. They were particularly popular with mainland day tourists visiting Hong Kong. Now their popular bookstore is closed and the press is shut. Like any troubling story there are complexities and mysteries.

On Dec. 30, Lee Bo, one of Gui's business partners in the publishing company, suddenly disappeared as well. Lee and his wife owned the bookstore that sold their publications. Soon after disappearing Lee made a strange communication to his wife from Shenzhen that he was “working on an investigation.” His wife noted that he had left his passport at home. A passport he would need to enter Mainland China from Hong Kong. Lee Bo is a British citizen.

Last weekend, Sunday, Jan. 17, Gui, who is a naturalized Swedish citizen, suddenly showed up on CCTV —China's official TV network—confessing tearfully that he had violated his probation back in China for a drunken driving accident in 2003 that had ended in a fatality. Hong Kong based China watchers were quick to point out the edits in the video as revealed by the fact that Gui‘s t-shirt changed color mid-way.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Sports are mere games, “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” as Bernard Suits, the founder of the philosophy of games, puts it. So why do we care about them? The pleasure of sport has three distinct sources – competition, drama, and craft. Although each has their own logic and appeal, the defining characteristic of a flourishing sport is the harmonious balance it achieves between all three. In this light, the increasing dominance of competition across all sports is distinctly worrying. In the long run it may squeeze the very life out of them. The thin zero-sum perspective on sports that it embodies is already the source of the pernicious doping scandals, nationalism, and sexism in modern sports.

I

The pleasure of competition consists in the resolution of uncertainty combined with the validation of status rankings. There is a special thrill in the resolution of a sustained uncertainty about an outcome, and this is also behind the appeal of gambling. But in sport the resolution of this uncertainty is also meant to reflect merit: sporting competition provides an answer to the question of Who deserves to win? In the past, the Greeks saw the winners of sporting competitions as selected by the Gods and modern celebrations of gold medallists still echo of that. Hence the emphasis on fairness – level playing fields and anti-doping rules – to ensure the results reflect only the authentic natural merit of the contestants. The centrality of numbers – records, rankings, and numerous other statistics – also follows from this emphasis on outcomes. Competition is what makes sport exciting. It is also extremely accessible to those who know nothing about a sport (the familiar question of the noob 'Who's side are we on?') and can be repurposed as a relatively harmless expression of interregional or international rivalry, as when people identify with their national team in the soccer World Cup and go around talking about how 'we' beat 'Brazil'.

Competition – the chancing of fate and divine favour – is important but it is not the only kind of pleasure that sport can and should afford. The others though tend to make more demands on the spectator.

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by Carl Pierer

Published in 1932, Sunset Song is famed as one of the most important Scottish novels of the 20^th century. As the first part in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Trilogy A Scots Quair, it tells the story of Chris Guthrie coming of age in a rural community in Aberdeenshire. Set at the turn of the century, the novel depicts life in this traditional Scottish setting and explores how this age-old structure is transformed by the unfolding of World War I.

As a classic text, it has received much attention and suffered many an interpretation, ranging from Marxist and Feminist to humanist and nationalist. But despite many doubtful attempts at classification, the work has defied reduction and remains a vivid testimony of rural life.

Perhaps the most striking of the novel's virtues is its language. Written in a distinctive style, it infuses Standard English with the rhythm and words of Scots dialect, giving the prose a unique lyrical flavour. Gibbon skilfully and consistently uses dialectal terms to be true to his motive, without rendering the text unintelligible to a non-Scots speaker. That the melody of the text is deeply rooted in the highlands has provoked remarks of the following sort:

The non-Scot can get a great deal out of Mitchell [i.e. Lewis Grassic Gibbon], but one can sympathize with Donald Carswell when he says that he did not appreciate the prose of Sunset Song until he heard a north-east girl reading it.[i]

Comments of this kind aptly illustrate the difficulty of appreciating the literary value of the novel without sliding into dubious political territory, against the author's intent.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

The Indian subcontinent is well known for its spices, and one of its stellar contributions is the ubiquitous black pepper. Native to South India and Southeast Asia (see unripe green fruits in picture), it’s been around for thousands of years, making its way very early to Europe and other parts of Asia by trade. Black pepper and the related long pepper may have been the most prevalent hot spices east of the Atlantic. That was until Columbus blundered onto the Americas in 1492, inadvertently connecting the Americas – which at the time had a unique ecological and cultivation history because of its isolation – to Europe, Africa and Asia.

In the newly globalized world since 1492, American ‘peppers’, better known as chilies, began to make their way to the rest of the world and took hold quickly. Indeed, all the chili peppers that the world uses today, without exception – from the mild bell peppers used primarily for their deep flavors to the hot ones that Indian, Thai, Chinese, Korean and other cuisines take for granted – all are descended from the varieties cultivated for millennia by pre-Hispanic farmers in southern North America (Mexico primarily) and northern South America (Peru and Bolivia have many varieties). The fiery habanero, which scores high on the Scoville Heat Scale, is originally from the Amazon from where it reached Mexico.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Many months ago, I wandered along with a bunch of enthusiastic companions, into a museum for sepulchral culture. Nestled in the charming, modernist city of Kassel, Germany, we were part of a conference group discussing reproductive loss, and I suppose our hosts considered it fitting that we make communion with death culture writ large. As we flitted curiously around, and up and down, seeking shelter from the sleet and wind outside, we noted little skeletal figurines, gravestones, tombs, tombstones, and ritualistic instruments meant to ease passage to other worlds. For a museum devoted to the seemingly morbid phenomenon of death, it left us surprisingly sanguine.

The dictionary tells me that a sepulchre is “a small room or monument, cut in rock or built of stone, in which a dead person is laid or buried”. I worry at the oxymoronic, “dead person”. Other romanticized words like “crypt”, “catacomb”, and “sarcophagus” serve as synonyms for those who do not quite like the cadence of “sepulchre”. Together, in medieval-esque glory, they capture for us the stories of death, memory, and memorialization, and cultures of dying. For this we share with all humankind, in that people die. The sorrow of their loss is mitigated by cultural processes that allow us to believe that their lives meant something.

There are no sepulchral museums in India. But memorialization is seen across the length of the country, from the sepulchral urns excavated at Adichanallur in South India, to the stone circles of Junapani in Nagpur, to the evidence of pit burials in Burzahoma, Kashmir. The Iron Age in these regions marks the beginning of the creation of separate areas for the dead.

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