by Misha Lepetic

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

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

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

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

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by Jonathan Kujawa

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

Turing Statue at Bletchley Park [1].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Jalees Rehman

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

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

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

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

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

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

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

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by Kathleen Goodwin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

for time is short
by last report

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

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

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

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

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

by Jim Culleny
12/21/14

CARPE DIEM

For Agha Ashraf Ali

You light a candle
Carp the darkness

With your usual flourish
Debone a carp

Add a pinch of salt
In your carpeted kitchen

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

Gaadkalley: Honorific.
You offer a scrap of history

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

We seize the head
Before the diem carpe us

And raise our glass
To the disappeared carpenters

Of Kashmir
A parched paradise

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

by Charlie Huenemann

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

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

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

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

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.
—from a TED Talk

Idea

what is the space of
creativity?

lightning flash

…. stroke

…….. epiphany

………… eureka!

……………..something new?

………………….no

an idea's a network
a liquid network

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

by Jim Culleny
12/18/14

by Brooks Riley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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by Carl Pierer

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

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

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

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

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

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by Lisa Lieberman

“Get ready for a torrid tropical holiday!” That's how the announcer on the trailer for Weekend in Havana (1941) introduced this film. Torrid: full of passionate or highly charged emotions arising from sexual love. Now there's an adjective to get your heart rate up! The list of synonyms in my thesaurus includes lustful, steamy, sultry, sizzling, hot, and here's Carmen Miranda, promising all that and more. I dare you to sit still through the opening number.

Granted, the Hays Code strictly limited how much steamy sex you could show explicitly in a 1941 movie, but directors were free to use innuendo. Here's handsome leading man John Payne working out the details of his (ahem) business relationship with Ms. Miranda. Meanwhile, Alice Fay is finding romance in the arms of a Latin lover, played by the Cuban-American actor Cesar Romero, a.k.a. “the Latin from Manhattan.” Rumba, anyone?

The archetypical Latin lover was Italian heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, of course. Back in the 1920s, he drove women mad with desire in his breakthrough role as a gaucho in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, stealing another man's partner and whisking her off in a tango faster than you can say, “Shall we dance?” Before his untimely death at the age of 31, he'd play a sheik (twice), a Spanish bullfighter, a Cossack, a maharaja, and a French aristocrat. The Latin bit had more to do with machismo style than nationality, it would appear. The gaucho's imperiousness on the dance floor was matched by the sheik's in ordering women about; in a famous scene from the sequel, Son of the Sheik, Valentino even initiates nonconsensual sex with the dancing girl whom he believes has betrayed him. (Valentino's films were all made before the Hays Code.)

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

The traffic jam has become a peculiar construction in relation to the Global South. As I began writing, I wasn't sure what to focus on when looking at the traffic jam. Where does one go to find it? To the city of course. Can one touch it, taste it, smell it? Yes to all of the above. In methodology, should one speak about the everyday possibilities of tiny jams? Or should one traffic in images of the big thing as it were, such as the one in Beijing that lasted more than ten days and was endlessly tweeted, facebooked, and hyperlinked? An article in the Wall Street Journal dated August 2010 reports on this modern-day wonder:

“A 60-mile traffic jam near the Chinese capital could last until mid-September, officials say. Traffic has been snarled along the outskirts of Beijing and is stretching toward the border of Inner Mongolia ever since roadwork on the Beijing-Tibet Highway started Aug. 13. As the jam on the highway, also known as National Highway 110, passed the 10-day mark Tuesday, vehicles were inching along little more than a third of a mile a day….Other cities around the world face similar congestion headaches. The worst are in developing countries where the sudden rise of a car-buying middle class outpaces highway construction. Unlike in the U.S., which had decades to develop transportation infrastructure to keep up with auto buyers. Still, Beijing beat out Mexico City, Johannesburg, Moscow and New Delhi to take top spot in the International Business Machines Corp. survey of “commuter pain,” which is based on a measure of the economic and emotional toll of commuting.”

Of course, this is not a new “developing country” story. Too many cars, and too little road, which then naturally extends into the argument, too much government, and too little capital. The story of the traffic jam becomes an oft-told tale. And the kind of great traffic jam that I refer to performs a very interesting function. It is a spectacle that obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present. But of course, as anybody who has been in any kind of traffic jam will tell you, it does feel like a never-ending present.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

Do you want to be a good person but find yourself always falling short?

It may not be your fault. These days it is difficult to feel like good person. In fact the more you try, the more you may feel like a failure. Thanks to egalitarianism, globalisation, activist NGOs, the internet and over-active moral philosophers the calls on our moral attention are multiplying at an absurd rate.

Everywhere we turn there are people demanding that we take moral responsibility for ever more features of our lives and the implications of our actions. Almost everything we do turns out to be involve a moral choice, or more than one, in which our deepest principles are at stake. If you're an egalitarian, how come you help your kids with their homework? If you're against child-slavery, how come you still eat chocolate? If you're against racism, how come you enjoy ‘white privileges' like not being afraid when the police pull you over? And so on. Want to put milk on your breakfast cereal? There's a moral philosopher out there who wants you to read about murdered baby cows first.

Enough! These demands would challenge the forbearance and commitment of a saint. Trying to satsify them all would leave no room for getting on with your own life.

But it gets worse. Although they are presented as moral challenges, as tests of your principles, many of these demands are actually moral puzzles with no right answer. Flying to England to visit your sick grandmother, perhaps for the last time, is absolutely the right thing to do, but it's also absolutely the wrong thing to do if you care about the environment and justice for future generations.

You just can't win no matter how hard you try!

The rising tide of moralisation has been rather more successful in making us feel constantly guilty about everything we do than in inspiring us to live morally better lives. And this is not surprising since it demands that we take on the burden of extended moral responsibility – for the well-being of children in Cote d'Ivoire, for future generations, for the survival of rare species, and so on – without giving us the tools we need to manage that responsibility. Unfortunately feeling guilty all the time is morally debilitating. It undermines our ability and motivation to make good moral decisions in the first place.

If everything we do is wrong, why bother to even try to do the right thing?

Fortunately the solution is at hand. Here at Moral Tranquillity plc we believe that good people should be able to live a life free from guilt. That's why we have developed a range of Moral Offsetting™ products that make meeting your moral responsibilities simple and affordable.

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by Randolyn Zinn

Is travel a cure or a placebo? Maybe just a place to be.

Sometimes when I close my eyes, the towers of the Alhambra stand gleaming beyond our hotel garden where we picked a lime from a low-hanging bough. Other times, the noisy crush of Bodega Castenada comes back, how its neighborhood crowd parted slightly to let us squeeze through its front doors for a taste of salty tapas and a swallow of sherry.

Best, though, is the indelible image we found in Arcos de la Frontera. After climbing up and around its narrow streets, intermittently glimpsing through open doors or windows, women sizzling sofrito or kids playing video games, the cathedral San Pedro looms over the town at its highest point. Cold enough inside to preserve the moldering body of Saint Fructoso (3rd century) and statues of saints — including the beautifully clothed marble Virgin who holds her heart in one hand pierced by seven swords — the church is hammered with half an acre of Aztec gold for a dazzling refuge of superstition and repository of prayers.

In one of the cathedral's recessed chapels, aptly named Our Lady of Loneliness, we lit a votive before a glass case where a rosy porcelain infant Jesus rests his downy head on a human skull. I lost my breath for a second while contemplating this image of innocence at peace with death for it embodied the consolation I hadn’t known I was seeking.

Feliz Navidad.

photo by R. Zinn