by Charlie Huenemann

The biggest struggle my fellow modern-day cyborgs and I face is to create a virtual reality that connects more wholesomely with the human part of our nature. The artificial reality we currently plug into is a Terry Gilliam nightmare. Too many characters within it are armed, dangerous, and barbaric. The bright spots within it – few and far-between – are either so childish and sugary as to seem like a parody of our hearts’ deepest needs, or so smart and ironic as to mock any nobler aims. It’s Grand Theft Auto, or Sesame Street, or South Park – take your pick.

Other virtual diversions exist for us, of course. One can find meaningful examinations of human experience, sensible and judicious overviews of economic tensions, intelligent and respectful discussions of critical issues, wonderfully rich book reviews, and so on. But one has to seek out such treasures deliberately – they seldom pop up of their own accord out of the collective net consciousness – and one must have the time, patience, and discipline to attend to them. This is a bit like trying to read Moby Dick in a strip club. And, cyborg nature being what it is, not many of us will end up spending much time with brother Ishmael.

Aristotle, a human being from twenty-five centuries ago, did his best to put together a sensible account of what makes human beings happy. By his own estimate, we are social beings who like to enjoy one another’s company, usually with some nice food and drink, some music, and a conversation that stimulates the mind. We like to exercise, and to apply our best ideas to laws and social policies. Through drama and art, we love to explore vicariously the troubles we can get into, and discover for ourselves how we would feel in other people’s tragic circumstances. We are, as one might say, multidimensional beings. The trick then, according to Aristotle, is to manage this multidimensionality with reason and experience. We need to monitor our cultural intake with the fastidiousness of a Weight Watcher, judging for ourselves how much is too much, how much too little, and when more attention needs to be directed here or there.

Read more »

by Hari Balasubramanian

During my middle and high school years, I became fascinated with two generations of stray dogs that lived in my neighborhood. This was in the early 1990s. My family lived in the central Indian city of Nagpur, in a 3rd story flat. The flat had a couple of balconies (decks) which gave me the chance to watch the dogs go about their routines. Instead of studying for exams – which involved the dreary task of memorizing entire sections of textbooks – I would get up in the morning and spend time watching the neighborhood strays. The dogs liked the cool air of early mornings. They played frantically, chasing each other down, trying to wrest torn rags from each other as if the rags were of great value. At 8 am, with the sun up and strong, they would be exhausted. They would lie in the shade, front limbs stretched, their snouts nuzzling in between but their noses still twitching and ears still alert for anything untoward.

Stray dogs (desi kutta in Hindi, theru nai in Tamil) can be found almost everywhere in India. The term ‘stray', in the South Asian context, does not refer to abandoned pets (although some mixing with pet European breeds does happen). From the genetic viewpoint these dogs are actually very ancient and have been around for millennia. They seem to have evolved independently by natural selection (they were not bred commercially) and have adapted well to living in and around human settlements. And they are still around, living on the dirt shoulders of streets, alleyways, the platforms of railway stations, and the ignored nooks and interstices of infrastructure. Residential families and street vendors may occasionally feed them and look after them informally, but the strays largely fend for themselves, scavenging in rubbish dumps or wherever leftover food is available. They mark their territories with their seemingly bottomless bladders, participate heartily in the chaotic and noisy mating season which happens once a year, and work hard to raise their offspring. In this sense, the strays are as wild and independent as, say, the squirrels and crows we find everywhere. They are not always liked due to the risk of rabies, and there is an ongoing debate on how their numbers should be controlled (see this for another perspective).

Read more »

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

The rains visited on the 1^st of December, 2015. This monsoon in Chennai, we had already experienced deluge and mayhem, mid-November. The city's low-lying areas had flooded, and thousands of people had to be evacuated.

When the rains made a dramatic appearance again on the 1^st of December, I wasn't prepared for a repeat of the November events. One spate had already weakened the city, and it had tired me out. One only prepares for one natural disaster a year, though all evidence should have us scurrying otherwise. The waters seeped in through the walls of my ancient building, and I looked on, fervent in my belief that this too would pass. Neither the slowly forming pool in the dining room of my second floor walkup, nor the increasingly bleak weather reports prepared me for anything but a day's worth of indoor activity, and a night of sleeping to the sound of soothing, lashing rains.

Picture © Neetesh Kumar

From the evening of the 1^st of December to the evening of the 5^th of December, large parts of the city went under water and lost power. The rains came at us relentlessly as the sky dissolved into eddies of Mordor-like blackness.

I have experienced the phenomenon known as a natural disaster a few times before; first as a child, and then as an almost adult. Other floods and earthquakes had produced in me a vague sense of preparation. As if this is but another event out of a series of life possibilities, and one is bound to emerge unscathed. When the lights went out that 1^st of December, I retained this sense of possibility. Fumbling around with the help of a few forgotten birthday candles, I wolfed down some leftovers, and went to sleep in the darkness. Before going to bed, I gathered all the dust cloths, old towels, and washcloths in the house and lay them down like a patchy quilt next to the walls, hoping they'd absorb the waters. I slept in the living room, the daybed sticking up against the windows, hoping that I would hear the rains stop.

Read more »

by Tasneem Zehra Husain

It is practically a rite of passage for physics majors. We study Maxwells equations – the illuminating set of relationships that reveal the nature of light; we marvel at the power and grace of this compact quartet, and can't resist a chuckle when – inevitably – we come across the t-shirt that says “God said [Maxwell's Equations] And there was light.” Something about that sticks. We remember the t-shirt years later, even if we can't write down the equations anymore.

But, even though James Clerk Maxwell could boast several outstanding accomplishments – including taking the first ever color photograph, and unleashing a fictional demon that outwits entropy – for far too many of us, our association with this brilliant scientist begins and ends with the famous equations that govern electromagnetic radiation.

There is no cult of genius surrounding Maxwell. Unlike Einstein, Feynman or more recently, Hawking, Maxwell has no groupies; his quotes don't adorn bumper stickers, physics students don't own collections of his lectures or writing, and I don't know of anyone (save Einstein) who put up a poster of Maxwell in their workspace.

Like thousands of other physics students who went to college, studied Maxwell's equations, and bought the t-shirt, I felt no real bond with the man until some years ago, when a writing project (to which I shall forever remain indebted) led me to find out more about him.

I read Maxwell's writings as part of my research, and it was love at first letter. I was completely enchanted by the mind revealed in, and between, the lines; it was an investigative, creative, whimsical creature, with scintillating wit and lyrical expression. Over the months, as I read more, my initial intellectual infatuation developed into a deep fondness and a genuine respect. I found the flow of Maxwell's logic and the dance of his ideas simply beautiful. I read and re-read his words for the pleasure of having them stream through my mind, but also in the hope that if they performed his choreography enough times, my thoughts might learn to move that way on their own.

Casting around today for a piece of writing that might serve as an introduction to Maxwell, I settled upon his 1870 address to the members of the British Association (whom Maxwell teasingly referred to as the British ‘Asses') about scientific metaphor. This is not an idea that is articulated very often, especially not this clearly, but it is precisely the sort of overarching theme that I think should be emphasized in physics classrooms everywhere.

Read more »

You will not be punished for your anger,
you will be punished by your anger.

.

WWBS?

What Would Buddha Say, I thought,
of all that flows from lips of wealthy oafs
who claim to know the shortcuts
on the highway to nirvana?

I’d guess he’d sit in stillness, smile
un-perplexed, knowing discontent and bile
and the willingness by which
we all can be deluded

He’d see impostors on TV
as he sat beneath his favorite tree
counting discontents that lead to rage
and suffering in Saṃsāra

Sid studied long the hearts of oafs
and made his case for noble truths
long before this modern age
had put all beings in this cage
(himself included)
.

by Jim Culleny
12/12/15

by Leanne Ogasawara

Once upon a time, asymmetrical warfare was viewed as a last resort. Only when every other means possible had been exploited and defeat seemed inevitable, only then would people make a stand against an obviously far stronger enemy.

Thermopylae comes to mind.

Between cliffs and the sea, it was here that Leonidas made his legendary last stand.

Μολών λαβέ (molon labe).

It is so famous, I hesitate to bother describing the armies they faced– the myriad of tribes and peoples comprising the Persian army went on for pages and pages in Herodotus. Here is William Golding's depiction:

The numbers alone are exhilarating– the Persian army being said to have been comprised of a million men! Impossible, of course, but Herodotus' famous anecdote about the great Spartan warrior Dienekes is unforgettable when told that the Persian archers were so numerous that, their arrows would block out the sun for undaunted by this prospect, he remarked with a laugh, 'Good. Then we will fight in the shade.'

Every time I read it, it makes me breathless.

It leaves me breathless because they knew they would lose–but in knowing that, they acknowledged that there are some things worth dying for.

Fast forward to today, where asymetrical warfare seems increasingly to be a tactic of choice.

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

The idea has been around since 1793 when Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote an essay “A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States.” Rush was a Philadelphia physician, the founder of Dickinson College, the father of American psychiatry, an abolitionist, he served in the Continental Congress, and he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Banneker published the essay in the 1793 edition of his well-known almanac and then later in a collection of Rush’s essays. It is an interesting and curious document, which I reproduce in full below.

“Benjamin Rush Painting by Peale” by Charles Willson Peale – Unknown. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Rush imagines that the department would be able to transact its business in a single large room “adjoining the federal hall”. The world was much smaller then than it is now and so a larger portion of that world’s business could be encompassed within a single room. Rush is quite particular about the appointments of this room, suggesting that it house “a collection of ploughshares and pruning-hooks made out of swords and spears”.

The allusion is Biblical of course (Isaiah 2:3-4). Rush also directed that each family in the country be provided with a Bible at government expense. We are still in dire need of moral guidance, though it is by no means obvious that the Bible is the best source of it. What would Rush think of the Dalai Lama or of Pope Francis?

Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

The world seems a very depressing, scary place these days. Maybe it always was. I remember being 12 years old and driving with my father and expressing to him how terrified I was by the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He talked to me about mutual assured destruction and the deterrent this was going to provide. Those fears seem almost quaint now; our current enemies don’t seem to play by the same rational rules of self-interest. Another thing that has changed is our exposure to just how much other people in our lives don’t share our values and opinions on these, and other issues. I always knew that I was somewhat at odds with elements of my family about Judaism and Israel’s relationship the Palestinian people. But for the most part, as we probably all do, I lived in a bubble where most of the people around me pretty much shared my political and social views. I’ve always had friends who vote Republican, but they’re all on the fiscal rather than social conservative spectrum; lower taxes but prochoice. I have no problem with people whose views differ from mine in these ways. Yes, we can debate the merits of trickledown economics, but as long as we all are in favor of gay marriage, a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, and the normal laundry list of social items that US liberals care about, the friendship won’t be tarnished by the things we don’t agree on.

But social media has changed all this. The views that our acquaintances hold are often now fully in our faces, good, bad and sometimes very ugly. Reconnecting with your best friend from kindergarten now often brings with it the horrible realization that she’s grown into a narrow minded bigot. Yes, you can unfriend and unfollow, and we often do or have it done to us. But what about when that’s not viable option? And should it be our first reaction?

Read more »

by Eric Byrd

John Keegan and Geoffrey Perret have repackaged the essential arguments of The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, first published in 1929, in more politically palatable prose. But I was interested by the book's datedness, the view it offers of the odd personality and ominous historical situation from which the reevaluation of Grant was launched. Major-General J.F.C. Fuller (1878 – 1966) is a somewhat sinister and repellent figure – a disciple of Aleister Crowley; a mystic whose Futurism graded into Fascism; the maverick mastermind of British tank operations in the Great War (and his skill at drawing elaborate occult symbols came in handy when the Tank Corps needed an insignia) whose theories of mobile armored warfare were ignored in interwar Britain but eagerly studied in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, the rival tyrannies destined to build thousand-tank armies and smash them together on the burning steppes of the East. Fuller attended Hitler's fiftieth birthday party, in April, 1939, a celebration capped by a three-hour parade of tanks and motorized infantry. Afterwards Hitler asked Fuller if he was pleased with his “children.” “Your excellency,” Fuller replied, “they have grown up so quickly that I no longer recognize them.”

Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

At the fourth Republican Presidential Debate, Senator Marco Rubio asserted that the country “needs more welders and less philosophers.” The small corner of the internet where professional philosophers reside promptly was awash with repudiation, criticism, and outrage (for example, here and here). We were, we have to admit, puzzled by it all – both by Rubio's statement and by the philosophers' outrage.

Senator Rubio's remarks were patently silly. First, the rationale Rubio offered, that “welders make more money than philosophers” is false. Moreover, the proposed reason, even were it true, is irrelevant – the social value of a profession is not a matter of the income paid to those who practice it. Surely no one would argue that hedge fund managers and reality TV stars are more socially valuable than nurses and carpenters simply on the basis of the difference between their respective paychecks. Finally, Rubio's reasoning is self-defeating, as there is no better way to decrease the earning power of a welder than by flooding the labor market with more competitors. For sure, Rubio's case was more rhetorical flourish than serious reasoning; he intended to draw a line in the sand between two perspectives on the role of education in society. His welders-versus-philosophers line was just window dressing for his view that education should aim to produce serviceable labor, not people who think.

Now, given these easy criticisms of Rubio's remarks, one might think that we were outraged by his claims. Many of our colleagues certainly were, and our inboxes and social media feeds quickly filled with missives of all shapes and sorts. But, we admit again, we found this phenomenon even more curious than Rubio's statement.

Here is why. There is nary a day that goes by without someone making a joke or remark to us about philosophy's alleged uselessness. Philosophy's oldest story highlights this. Thales of Miletus, who Aristotle counts as the first of the philosophers, apparently was walking one night and gazing up at the stars, contemplating their eternal motion. And then he fell in a well. A Thracian serving woman witnessed the fall, and laughed at him, urging that he should think about where he was putting his feet. Philosophy starts with a pratfall, and everyone, even those who have never taken a philosophy course or read any of the great books, gets the joke: It's not just that somebody fell in a well, it's that it was a philosopher.

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

Habib University via Wikimedia Commons (by Samarhashmi)

Universities and the scientific infrastructures in Muslim-majority countries need to undergo radical reforms if they want to avoid falling by the wayside in a world characterized by major scientific and technological innovations. This is the conclusion reached by Nidhal Guessoum and Athar Osama in their recent commentary “Institutions: Revive universities of the Muslim world“, published in the scientific journal Nature. The physics and astronomy professor Guessoum (American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates) and Osama, who is the founder of the Muslim World Science Initiative, use the commentary to summarize the key findings of the report “Science at Universities of the Muslim World” (PDF), which was released in October 2015 by a task force of policymakers, academic vice-chancellors, deans, professors and science communicators. This report is one of the most comprehensive analyses of the state of scientific education and research in the 57 countries with a Muslim-majority population, which are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Here are some of the key findings:

1. Lower scientific productivity in the Muslim world: The 57 Muslim-majority countries constitute 25% of the world's population, yet they only generate 6% of the world's scientific publications and 1.6% of the world's patents.

2. Lower scientific impact of papers published in the OIC countries: Not only are Muslim-majority countries severely under-represented in terms of the numbers of publications, the papers which do get published are cited far less than the papers stemming from non-Muslim countries. One illustrative example is that of Iran and Switzerland. In the 2014 SCImago ranking of publications by country, Iran was the highest-ranked Muslim-majority country with nearly 40,000 publications, just slightly ahead of Switzerland with 38,000 publications – even though Iran's population of 77 million is nearly ten times larger than that of Switzerland. However, the average Swiss publication was more than twice as likely to garner a citation by scientific colleagues than an Iranian publication, thus indicating that the actual scientific impact of research in Switzerland was far greater than that of Iran.

Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

Recently I was interviewed for a college podcast on the craft of writing. I dread this type of thing, mostly because no matter how hard I try to not sound like a complete asshole, I end-up sounding like one. Write about what you know? I guess. Write everyday? I sure don't, but okay. The truth is this: most writers I know are just trying to survive. Financially, yes. But mentally even more so.

Then there's always that question – when did you know you were a writer?

I was a weird fucking kid. I know everyone says that but it's very true in my case. In every class picture, my hairstyle is a couple years behind. The gap between my front teeth a little wider than it should be. Eyes kind of glazed over. I tap danced in my spare time, made wedding gowns out of paper towels that I'd put on spoons for their weddings to forks, played ice hockey down our long marble-floored hallway with a toilet plunger and a severed doll head. It was all just a tad off: my timing, my style, my eye-hand coordination.

When I discovered in grade school that I hated people, myself included, I decided to become a writer. I needed to leave something concrete for the aliens who would eventually come to take over Earth. If I was dead by then, how would they know the truth about humans? How would they know how much empathy and intellect our species truly lacked?

So it was with an altruistic spirit that I began to write. About my family. About my slutty, teenaged dance teacher with all the hickies on her neck. About the boy across the street who had two fathers and no mom. About the voices in my head that only seemed to go away when I wrote about them.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“Except for a wig of algorithms, and tears and automation.”
~Noah Raford, Silicon Howl

Last month I attempted to set up two conflicting frames. On the one hand, there is the advance of technology in its myriad forms, eg: social media, artificial intelligence, robotics. This may seem like an arbitrary selection. For example, why exclude fields of medicine, or energy production, or infrastructure? Of course, all technologies are intrinsically social, especially given the complexities required to design, develop, disseminate and maintain them on a global scale. But my concern here are those technologies that are explicitly social in nature: those inventions, whether hardware or software, that intervene in our lives to enable or enhance communications, experiences, or that provide services along such lines.

On the other hand, these technologies are laid over a long-established matrix of social differentiations. Categories that have traditionally motivated the investigations of social scientists, such as class, race, culture, religion, education, gender and age, form the inescapable substrate upon which technology is seeded and elaborates itself, or withers and dies. As I showed, and contrary to most writing about technology in the mainstream media, these boundaries are not magically dissolved by technology, and in many cases they may be further exacerbated. They are certainly not elided, which seems to be the most common attitude. Instead, those occupying the more privileged ends of these spectra of difference benefit more greatly from each advance, and the underprivileged are further shunted to the side. It is the technological equivalent of income inequality, except it is subtler, since we lack the pithiness of a single number, such as the Gini coefficient, to use as a signpost. (Incidentally, even this metric has of late become increasingly less useful as global inequality ascends to hyperbolic levels.)

Thus the object of our scrutiny should really be the ways in which technology further complicates a landscape that is already extremely difficult to parse. In this sense, these two frames are not really in conflict, but at least from a critical point of view, are rather insufficiently engaged with one another. Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, the inquiry should not have as its final destination any hope that technology will ultimately dissolve these differences. This is where efforts to bridge the so-called “digital divide” fall short for me: the idea of a level playing field has always been a fiction. Why should we aspire to it? Isn't it more compelling to understand what difference a difference makes? Conversely, if technology really does succeed in eroding all these categories of difference, we will have to scramble for another definition of what it means to be human. Given the difficulty we have with the current state of the definition, I somehow doubt that a tabula rasa approach would be at all helpful.

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

This spring I had the pleasure of spending several months as a visitor at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden. Hanging on the wall above my desk was a copy of this print:

The Mittag-Leffler Institute has two patron saints: Gösta Mittag-Leffler and Sofia Kovalevskaya. The Institute is located in Mittag-Leffler's home just outside Stockholm. He donated his home and its extensive library in 1916 with the goal of establishing a place for mathematicians to visit and collaborate. Both were built using Mittag-Leffler's personal wealth (which he obtained the old fashioned way: he married into it). Nowadays there are a number of such institutes, but at the time it was the first of its kind.

Over my desk, however, was the watchful eye of Kovalevskaya. She was a truly remarkable woman who obtained significant results on differential equations during the second half the nineteenth century. Those being the times, she struggled to find opportunities to study mathematics. When she finally earned her PhD in 1874 she was the first woman in Europe to do so. And even then it was only thanks to rule-bending by the famous Weierstrauss. In 1883 Mittag-Leffler used his considerable influence to procure Kovalevskaya a position at the University of Stockholm. In addition to mathematics, Kovalevskaya wrote several books. Sadly, she died in 1891 at the young age of 41. For a taste of her life, I recommend Alice Munro's short story “Too Much Happiness”.

Whenever I had a bad math day [1], Kovalevskaya's portrait gently and kindly reproached me. At my age she had done all of the remarkable things mentioned above. Almost to the day, when I arrived at the Institute I was the age she was when she passed away. Every day when I arrived it was yet another day more than she had, and as a white, middle-class, American male I couldn't hardly claim any disadvantages to Kovalevskaya! As I'd leave for the day, she would tsk, tsk over all my dead ends and miscalculations.

Read more »