by Grace Boey

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Internet trolls. I’d always been vaguely aware of their presence, and had read some articles here and there about the threats they pose to constructive debate—but I never truly realized the full nature of their pestilence until I had to deal with them myself. Since I started publicly writing and commenting online, I’ve encountered abusive, non-constructive comments and emails on an increasingly frequent basis. I also co-manage an atheist social media page; I’m not the direct target of the trolls that lurk here, thankfully, but I do have to trawl through their vile comments, where they often abusively attack (or embarrass) causes I care about deeply.

Naturally, none of this has been good for my blood pressure. Last month, I became irritated enough to start work on a long exposition of online trolling—in the process, targeting specific trolls I’d personally encountered. Yes, hell hath no fury like a woman trolled, and I spent more time than I’d care to admit compiling comprehensive records of at least three of these individuals’ online activities. I even uncovered the physical, non-virtual identity of one of them.

You’d think I’d be happy for striking troll-hunter’s gold. Yet, the more I wrote and uncovered, the less I wanted to publish a piece bashing trolldom in general, let alone one that put specific individuals on the spot. Though I was pleased with the quality of the article, I refrained from running it. And very fortunately so—a couple of weeks after the piece would have been published, the Brenda Leyland troll-exposing controversy erupted.

Here’s what I've come to think: there’s very strong reason to believe that many compulsive Internet trolls need our active help. The impersonality of the internet makes it easy for them to dehumanize others, but for this same reason, it’s also easy for us to completely dehumanize them. But we must resist this temptation. Who are the people behind these monikers and computer screens, really? Why do they thrive on trolling, and why on earth don't they have anything better to do? How did they become this way? When we really stop to think about these questions, a disturbing social and psychological picture emerges. Virtual trolls may be a problem as much to their human selves as they are to their human victims.

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Lauren Davis extemporizes about how astronauts became known as gods:

The stories told of ancient beings so powerful that they could fling themselves into space and explore the points of light in the heavens. When Lady Adelaide moved into one of their unused crafts, many called it blasphemy. She called it research.

**

by Leanne Ogasawara

That's what I wanted to tell him about. But the evening when I finally had my chance to chat with a former astronaut and now NASA leader, I had lost my voice.

He was standing there holding court about the state of science education in the country. He was also discussing the lack of political vision, and I thought how the level of this decline came with an astounding –and perhaps corresponding– level of malaise. Looking back, other than World War II and perhaps the country's early days of Revolutionary politics, has anything truly excited and united people here more than scientific innovation and the space program? Apropos of this, not so long ago a friend, who had just turned 50, listed in a Facebook post several of what he considered to be the highlights of his half century on earth– and of eight great achievements, three were space related (and of the other five, only one, the eradication smallpox, was even serious).

Yes, space is exciting. It also generates wonder in people–especially children.

So, how could we let it decline?

Manned missions to Mars is the next big dream it seems. Not surprisingly, when the Dutch non-profit outfit Mars One held open applications for new astronauts, the largest group by far to apply were Americans–and this was for a one-way mission!

(Muslim applicants beware of UAE Fattwa Committee/ 'Haram' decree).

One could argue that discovery is something that is inherently part of the human condition and that space is just in our blood. So, also not surprisingly, the former astronaut mentioned above spoke excitedly about Mars. “A human astronaut can do what it took the robotic rover to do in a long day in under twenty minutes,” he said. “And, let's face it, Mars is the only place humans could possibly live,” he continued.

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by Josh Yarden

Here We Go A-Gain

I just finished reading the end of the Five Books of Moses, again, and even though I did not read the entire five books this year, or any other year for that matter, I have already started over from the beginning. This past week was the festival of Simchat Torah, dedicated to celebrating our connection to the text we have come to know as the first five books of the Bible. It marks the end of the cycle of weekly readings, and the beginning of the renewed cycle. We went strait from the account of Moses' passing (at the end of the Book of Deuteronomy) to the meditation on the creation of the world (at the beginning of the Book of Genesis), as though that is the natural order of the verses in a Torah scroll.

Each year is a new beginning in the cycle of Torah reading, but even if you were to read the 79,847 words of a complete Torah scroll, even if that is all you did all year, you would still have skipped over much of what there is to find there. There is always more there than previously met the eye, because the nearly eighty thousand words are presented in prose poems. Scratch the surface, and even the seemingly mundane legalistic sections are bursting with metaphor, wordplay, and oblique references to other parts of the text.

Revisiting the text is never quite returning to the same text. The words remain the same, but since a year has passed, or perhaps many, the reader is never quite the same as during a previous read. The old text now exists within a new context. As we approach familiar stories with additional sensibilities, we can gain something new each time we read it again. Many passages of Torah can be understood more deeply over time. Here is one illustration of how a story that will be coming around again soon is given to multiple interpretation.

Isaac Unbound

A young person reading the story of the binding of Isaac might imagine being tied down on an altar and prepared for sacrifice by a parent. Reading the same words as the parent of a young child makes it quite a different story. What could possess a person to even consider the possibility of sacrificing a child? Abraham was somehow stopped from committing the act of ritual slaughter, but that moment is nonetheless the last time that Abraham and Isaac speak or meet face to face in the biblical narrative. Indeed, later rabbinic writings retell the story as though Abraham had actually sacrificed his son.

Studying the biblical text anew provides some insight as to how the story could be understood that way. There are things we sacrifice, metaphorically speaking. People are at times among the ‘sacrifices' we make. Even though we do not physically cut them down, we do at times give up on people for various reasons, perhaps regrettably so. The parent of a young adult might come to wonder if in some sense, he had not in effect 'sacrificed' a relationship with a son or daughter on the 'altar' of something previously held with a blindly driven commitment… a career, or something even more frivolous. After sufficient damage is done, it may be too late to repair the relationship.

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by Matt McKenna

There was a time when American football was played without helmets, and there was a time when Dracula's best trick involved opening doors with his mind. Since those early days, however, both American football and the Dracula films have taken a turn for the extreme, and their body counts have increased as a result. That's not to say the days of yore were without death: football killed nineteen college athletes in 1905 and the Dracula character murdered a literal boatload of people in 1922's Nosferatu. But both the NFL and the Dracula films have clearly dialed up their intensity in the past decade to the detriment of both players' health and horror audiences' entertainment. It is therefore no surprise that these two institutions have become reflections of each other, entangled particles reacting in tandem to the pressure of consumerism that demands more/bigger/louder of everything upon that which it fixates. Indeed, the latest Dracula film, Dracula Untold, is a clear metaphor for the modern day NFL, an undead sports league that stalks the entertainment landscape leaving not two puncture wounds on the necks of its victims but rather chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the rattled brains of its players. Though the league currently has over a hundred million viewers in the United States, one has to wonder if football's dire health risks and the NFL's byzantine rules designed to protect players will eventually lead to the sport's eventual irrelevance in the same way that Dracula Untold's absurd death toll and convoluted mythology makes the film unwatchable.

The first on-screen appearance of Dracula in the 1922 silent German film Nosferatu technically wasn't an appearance by Dracula at all–the vampire was renamed Count Orlok in an attempt to avoid copyright infringement after the producers were unable to secure the rights to Bram Stoker's novel. But whatever. Dracula's/Count Orlok's powers are few and mainly limited to telekinetically opening and shutting things like doors and coffin lids–a cool trick for sure, but nothing compared to titular Transylvanian's abilities in Dracula Untold. Not satisfied with merely controlling doorways or converting the innocent living into the vile undead, the latest iteration of Dracula can summon the entirety of the planet's bats and hurl them at invading armies like an ICBM from an aircraft carrier. He also possesses a set of powers similar to Superman's including incredible strength, speed, endurance, flight, and so forth. That said, there are a few downsides to being a vampire in the Dracula Untold universe, mainly having to do with the fiending for human blood and the inability to go outside on a sunny day. Tradeoffs.

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by Eric Byrd

A few years ago Slate's culture editor David Haglund posted a piece called “Marilynne Robinson, the Terrence Malick of the Literary World.” Malick and Robinson, he said, are kindred artists. They share a pattern of striking debuts, mid-career hiatus, and late fertility; also, an unfashionable theological seriousness, and a deep attention to the connectedness of all life, a view of nature as a “shining garment in which God is concealed and revealed.” After happening upon Robinson's 1989 polemic Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution at a time when I was obsessed with Malick's latest film (and his first set in the present of filming) To the Wonder, I would add that their similar preoccupation with wholeness means a similar horror at environmental pollution, and a desire to remind their audiences that, all being connected, those who exploit the environment exploit their fellow man; and that the immediate toxic aftermath, and the red-handed schemes of disposal, first harm the poor and powerless.

In Mother Country Robinson situates the blithe disposal of nuclear waste in the Irish sea and the contamination of Cumbria within Britain's tradition of “expropriation and immiseration” of its poor, from the Poor Laws, to the displacements of industrialization, to the contemptuous coercions of the welfare state. To the Wonder was filmed in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, a town in which Malick lived part of his childhood, a town on the edge of a contaminated zone that embraces northeastern Oklahoma, and parts of Kansas and Missouri. A century of unrestricted lead and zinc mining (privileged war industries, supplying lead shot for the Civil War and shell casings for the World Wars) resulted in generations of intellectually delayed or disabled schoolchildren, cancer-ridden adults, and a landscape undermined by excavations and dotted with “chat piles,” hillocks of granular lead-laced waste on which miner's families used to picnic. Ben Affleck's character, Neil, an environmental scientist, is shown climbing one. Within the zone, Picher, Oklahoma, was in 2009 entirely abandoned – its 1,600 residents paid to leave – and now stands as a ghost town. Robinson was born and raised in Sandpoint, Idaho, near the Coeur d'Alene Basin, another condemned zone of lead-zinc mines.

To the Wonder is so exciting a development because it is a masterful integration of the autobiographical past and the social present. On first viewing I thought it was about hydraulic fracturing, “fracking” – which it is. Past pollutions inform ours. In the United States, for the sake of “energy independence” state governments, with the tacit approval of the Federal, are knowingly poisoning hundreds of rural communities. One of the most striking sequences of To the Wonder is Neil's survey of an endangered neighborhood. His presence, and the invasive intimacy of his work – locks are snipped from young hair, and bagged as specimens; excavators claw the properties – draws a crowd, fearful, agitated, almost hostile. They are sick and want to know why. A priest played by Javier Bardem despairs before the diseased and immiserated flock.

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by Sabeen Mahmud

Twenty-four years ago, I fell in love for the first time—with a Macintosh Plus computer which profoundly altered the course of my life and was significant in shaping my anti-establishment, anti-war, pro-freedom worldview. It became an invaluable portal into myriad subcultures, from beat poetry to the Yippies, fuelled by the dark meanderings of Pink Floyd.

After college, I spent the next several years developing multimedia products, exploring the intersection between technology, art, literature, and music. But, by the mid-2000s, I was getting increasingly restless. Karachi was a cesspool of chaos. People were leaving in droves, our politicians continued to make promises they had no intention of fulfilling, and the country lurched from one military dictatorship to another. It was a depressing time and my first moment of existential crisis. Disillusioned, I agreed to an offer to move to Delhi.

Beginning to dream

Whilst waiting for my visa to come through, I started fantasizing. What would it take to create a space that espoused liberal, secular values through its programming and projects?

The next day, the conversation moved out of my head and onto a whiteboard. I sketched out a fantasy space: a large open courtyard for theatre, dance, spoken word and improv performances, readings, talks, and film screenings. All around the courtyard would be smaller rooms for workshops and events, a bookshop, a coffeehouse, studios for artists and designers, shops for artisans to showcase their work, and a bed-and-breakfast that would pull in some income to subsidize operations. With Rs. 12,000 (about US $113) in my bank account, I ran a check on the cost of land through my estate agent who gave a ridiculous, astronomical figure which paralyzed me into inaction for months.

Toward the end of 2006, I was walking up the stairs to my office and the penny dropped. I realized that the grownups were right: I should start small, test, and iterate. So, trained by those key people in my life – my mother Mahenaz and my mentor Zak, I took a leap of faith and relinquished my Dehli plan to cater to my lofty ambitions settling on an 1800 square feet office, with an open(ish) on the second floor of a building.

Finding some money

I had decided that this little social enterprise in the making was to be a not-for-profit venture and with that model, raising capital from investors or getting a bank loan approved was not an option. We had Rs. 1,000,000 (about US $9,400) stashed for my grandmother's health fund. With her consent, I used the money to get things going.

In January 2007, we christened The Second Floor (T2F). After some quick consultations and brainstorming, PeaceNiche was born and T2F became its first project.

The target launch date for T2F was set for May 2007.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

This spring I attended the annual meeting of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. While there I heard a fantastic talk by Dr. Holly Krieger about which I'd like to tell you. If you'd like to hear Dr. Krieger tell you herself, I highly recommend the Numberphile video she hosted. You can see it here.

Dr. Krieger works in the area of dynamic systems. Faithful 3QD readers will remember that we ran into this topic a few months ago when we talked about the Collatz conjecture and the mathematics of billiards (see here). Dynamical systems is the field which studies systems (the weather, the stock market, the hands on a clock, a ball ricocheting around a billiard table) which changes over time according to some rule.

A seemingly simple example of this is the Fibonacci sequence. You probably saw it as kid:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, 196418, 317811, 514229, 832040, 1346269,….

This is the sequence of numbers which starts with a 0 and 1, and then each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two: 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, etc. To a mathematician this is a dynamical system. We can think of the nth number in the sequence as the state of the system after n seconds and the addition rule tells us how the system changes from one second to the next.

Last time we talked about dynamical systems we were interested in the question of whether such a system ever returns to its starting state. A properly working clock always ends up back where it was twenty-four hours ago. At the other extreme, the stock market will never end up back in the exact same state. Somewhere in the middle we have the billiard ball. It may or may not return, depending on the shape of the table and where you start the ball.

From this point of view the Fibonacci sequence is boring as all get out. It just gets bigger and bigger forever. But Dr. Krieger is the sort who isn't satisfied with such an answer. She asks questions like: You get a new number every time, but is it really “new” or “mostly old” [1]?

What do I mean? Well, we first need to recall the prime numbers. These are numbers like 2, 3, 5, and 7 which can't be evenly divided by another number (except 1 and itself, of course). On the other hand, 4, 6, 8, and 9 are not prime as they can be divided by 2's and 3's. That is, a non-prime can be written as a product of other numbers (like 24=4×6). If you keep subdividing you can eventually write any number as product of primes (like 24=2x2x2x3).

You should think of the prime numbers as the atoms of numbers: every number can be broken down into primes and you can't go any further. To stretch the analogy a little further, most folks are more excited when you discover a new atomic element than if you “just” discover a new combination of old elements. In the same spirit, you might think to ask if the Fibonacci sequence is made up of a few primes used over and over (like using 2 and 3 to make 6, 9, 12, 18, and 864), or if new primes are used as you go along.

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by Misha Lepetic

“A New Yorker is someone who longs for New York.”
~Anonymous

These days, when the inevitable question of “What do you do?” pops up at a cocktail party or some such, I now simply answer, “I live in New York.” A credulous follow-up might wish to clarify whether that is, in fact, how I make my living, at which point I try to steer the conversation to kinder, gentler topics. But after living in New York for 15 years, I feel my response is both perfunctory and justified. Anyone as deeply immersed in the city knows that living here really is its own, full-time occupation, since the city demands constant observation and reflection. And New York is especially amenable to this, given the breadth, density and accessibility of the city's neighborhoods, as well as New Yorkers' guileless embrace of real estate as a primary subject of conversation. It is perhaps the only city that I know of, where a stranger can walk into your apartment and ask, within the first 15 minutes, how much you rent pay for the privilege, and expect an answer.

In this vein, there has always been much talk about gentrification: where it is happening right now and where it will happen next, whether the desirability of the outcomes outweighs the costs, and, especially, who is being ousted. This last is not so much about the residents themselves, but rather the ongoing disappearance of beloved restaurants, bars and retail establishments, for example as documented by Jeremiah Moss's Vanishing New York. So what can be said about gentrification that has not already been said? Honestly, not a whole lot. There are still no good answers or responses, especially as New York reassesses its post-Bloomberg future.

However, gentrification has increasingly been treated as a monolithic concept, when in fact it is an umbrella term describing a continuum of variegated and uneven urban processes. The ‘improvement' of any neighborhood is the result of a bevy of actors, operating within a legal and social context that is unique to that neighborhood, and that itself sits within the larger context of the city and the state. Finally, even global financial circumstances play a role, for example, artificially low interest rates and the ease with which capital may travel. When gentrification is seen as a monolithic process, it is difficult to think about it as anything other than inevitable. But if we consider the different processes that are obscured into this single rubric, or more accurately, the different scales and velocities at which gentrification occurs, then we will be better equipped to engage the phenomenon itself, and not merely the label.

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The Simplicity of Objects or, How I learned to Love Kipple

by Tom Jacobs

They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him guilty.

~ Richard Wright, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942)

Sometimes when I step from one room in my apartment into another room, I have the distinct sense that there is somehow more stuff than there was before. It’s as if a bunch of stuff has just magically appeared while I was gone for a few moments. Here is another book. There is another trinket or fossil or object of some small interest to me. Where did it all come from? I must have bought it. I suppose I did. Why? Hard to say. Loneliness? Personal fascination? What am I going to do with it? Not at all sure.

I will try to get around to reading the book but most of it is, in a purely technical sense, useless. It’s just stuff that I buy because I like to look at it and hold and feel the weight of it or because it gives me some small pleasure to be able to say I “own” it.

***

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

~ Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Back in the day when Don DeLillo was somewhat reclusive and not very public, I saw somewhere that he was going to give a talk about his new book, “Falling Man.” From the time I read “White Noise” in college, I realized this was a guy who got it. Or maybe it was just that I sensed that he was talking directly to me and that we shared a private sort of fraternity. I assume everyone has had this experience when an artist or a poet or a novelist seems to be speaking directly to you and without mediation. Even if they themselves weren’t aware of it, they are speaking directly and, slightly more dangerously for, you.

So I got to his speaking engagement about two hours early. In case you think ill of me, there was a dude who had gotten there even earlier than me, which I thought was crazy (who shows up two and a half hours early just to hear a dumb talk?). So we stood there, awkwardly together and alone. I don’t know why I didn’t engage him in conversation. I vaguely remember getting a strange vibe from him, though, and thinking, “how can DeLillo be speaking directly to both him and me both?” Then I noticed he had a paper bag full of first editions and realized that this guy was not someone who had read a passage of DeLillo’s and who had stared off the page with his mind boggling in recognition and admiration. This guy was a collector. Maybe that is why we didn’t speak to each other, although I am a kind of collector too.

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by Tamuira Reid

It is not important that you don't know why you cry anymore. That you just do. It is not important or monumental; just a part of your day like anything else. Like driving to the bank or picking up the dry cleaning.

It doesn't help to talk about it. To hear words slip out of your mouth like slow-running water. The geography of your body not a puzzle to solve.

It is not necessary to name names, to name the man that did it, to give first and last, age, occupation. To say he has blue eyes that can charm and pierce, soothe and destroy, make you shout out in anger, make you shrink and fold into yourself.

It is not necessary to pull it to the surface again, once more, all over. To sift through the memories like hands moving through soil.

It doesn't matter that you hurt then or you hurt now. That it started on a Tuesday. That he bought you a turtle. That he wasn't always bad. That the bedroom door was still open.

It doesn't matter what was on TV (was it the news?). That he was a drunk. That the sky was full of holes where birds should have been. That your hands were still child-like.

It is not necessary to point fingers. To wonder why you were the only one. It is not necessary to count the glow in the dark stars on your bedroom ceiling because they are gone now and you have your own apartment and there are no stars there.

The past is the past. It will stay there and you are here. You are moving forward in time. Those clothes don't fit you anymore. Your hair is longer. You had braces then and you don't now.

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by Jalees Rehman

Does morality depend on the time of the day? The study “The Morning Morality Effect: The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior” published in October of 2013 by Maryam Kouchaki and Isaac Smith suggested that people are more honest in the mornings, and that their ability to resist the temptation of lying and cheating wears off as the day progresses. In a series of experiments, Kouchaki and Smith found that moral awareness and self-control in their study subjects decreased in the late afternoon or early evening. The researchers also assessed the degree of “moral disengagement”, i.e. the willingness to lie or cheat without feeling much personal remorse or responsibility, by asking the study subjects to respond to questions such as “Considering the ways people grossly misrepresent themselves, it's hardly a sin to inflate your own credentials a bit” or “People shouldn't be held accountable for doing questionable things when they were just doing what an authority figure told them to do” on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Interestingly, the subjects who strongly disagreed with such statements were the most susceptible to the morning morality effect. They were quite honest in the mornings but significantly more likely to cheat in the afternoons. On the other hand, moral disengagers, i.e. subjects who did not think that inflating credentials or following questionable orders was a big deal, were just as likely to cheat in the morning as they were in the afternoons.

Understandably, the study caused quite a bit of ruckus and became one of the most widely discussed psychology research studies in 2013, covered widely by blogs and newspapers such as the Guardian “Keep the mornings honest, the afternoons for lying and cheating” or the German Süddeutsche Zeitung “Lügen erst nach 17 Uhr” (Lying starts at 5 pm). And the findings of the study also raised important questions: Should organizations and businesses take the time of day into account when assigning tasks to employees which require high levels of moral awareness? How can one prevent the “moral exhaustion” in the late afternoon and the concomitant rise in the willingness to cheat? Should the time of the day be factored into punishments for unethical behavior?

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by Sue Hubbard

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by Yohan J. John

“Mine is a dizzying country in which the Lottery is a major element of reality; until this day, I have thought as little about it as about the conduct of the indecipherable gods or of my heart.”

–The Lottery in Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges

In his classic short story The Lottery in Babylon, Borges invites us to imagine a culture that valorizes randomness, institutionalizing it in an official lottery that entangles itself with every aspect of life, and even non-life. By situating this culture in Babylon, Borges frees himself to conjure up an alien way of life. And yet, as with all great speculative fiction, Borges also seems to be holding a mirror up to nature — a funhouse mirror that warps and amplifies features that we can discern even in our own culture. In his evocative and succinct way, Borges is perhaps hinting that we continue to live in that dizzying country in which randomness is a major component of reality.

The Indecipherable Gods

How long has randomness been an element in the periodic table of ideas? For ancient people, chance was wrapped up with the concepts of fate and divine will. “Divination” comes from the Latin for “to be inspired by a god”. For the Romans, chance or luck was personified by the goddess Fortuna. To tell a person's fortune was to determine the hidden intentions of Lady Luck. The ancient Chinese used yarrow stalks, coins, and dice when consulting the 4000-year-old I Ching, or Book of Changes. Divination either led to, or co-evolved with, games of chance. The earliest known board game is Senet, which was played by ancient Egyptians as early in the 30th century BCE. The game seems to have involved casting two-sided tokens. A 5000 year old backgammon set,complete with dice, was excavated at a site in Iran. Dice from 2000 BCE have also been found at sites that were part of the Indus Valley civilization [1].

Ancient peoples seem to have attached great meaning to chance events — even in the context of games. Confronted with the sheer unpredictability of nature, ancient people populated their pantheons with gods and demons who were capricious in the extreme. They seem to have believed that participating in chance events of their own invention could give them a glimpse into the otherwise inscrutable ways of divine beings [1]. Or perhaps they reasoned that they could become like gods through imitation of their ludicrous whims. The word “ludicrous”, incidentally, derives from the Latin root ludus,which means “game” or “play”. At some point in the past few hundred years,the word came to mean “ridiculous” — perhaps the Enlightenment made Europeans look unfavorably upon frivolity and play. There are streams within Hinduism, however, that preserve an echo of the ancient worldview — in some scriptures the universe is described as as lila, or divine play. The gods, according to this view, engage in creation and destruction for fun or sport. In India the term lila did not pick up any connotations of ridiculousness: it is a well-known theological concept, as well as a popular name given to girls.

In the modern world randomness typically connotes the very opposite of divine will — outside the world of gambling and gaming, a random event is often described as meaningless, and therefore only a source of inconvenience or tragedy. The ancients may have confronted chance with a more cheery attitude than is common today, but there is no suggestion that they were able to translate any intuitions derived from gambling (or fortune-telling) into a mathematical theory of chance. This hole in ancient knowledge is striking, because much of the mathematics required to begin the study randomness — simple arithmetic — was known to ancient cultures all over the world [2].

Order out of Chaos

The seeds of a mathematical approach to randomness were planted in the 16th century, when Europeans thinkers realized that chance events and processes were not completely devoid of order. This realization contributed to the emergence of two related but complementary mathematical approaches: probability and statistics. The theory of probability allowed people to uncover patterns in controlled settings, such as games of chance. Statistics allowed people to uncover patterns in more natural, uncontrolled settings, such as mortality tables compiled for insurance purposes.

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FIRE TREE

Tips of his mustache whip braided,
a turbaned invader four centuries ago
carried Persian saplings in a caravan
across the Himalayas to Kashmir.

“Our chinar will last a thousand years,”
my grandfather said as rustling boughs
reigned above the tin roof of the house
where I was born a Scorpio at midnight.

Every fall each leaf burst into a flower.
We gathered the remains of dyes
to create our rustic fuel for winter,
sprinkling water on burning leaves,

palms brushing light ashes together.
I packed fragile coal in a clay pot
matted in painted wicker, my kangri,
cloaking it between my knees

under a loose mantle, my pharun.
The ashes warmed my bag of bones.
I flew to the future of other worlds,
returning years later to see my father,

sun-withered, sipping his morning tea
alone beside an amputated trunk.
Last night I dreamt I went to Kashmir again.
I was being rowed in an embroidered shikara

to the Garden of Rajas who had vanished,
and the garden was a sea of hell; the tin roof
collapsed, our fire tree submerged, and
barrenness had become a thousand things.

by Rafiq Kathwari, Winner of the 2013 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award