by Jonathan Kujawa

Human beings are tightly bound by the limits of our intuition and imagination. Even if we grasp an idea on an intellectual level, we often struggle to internalize it to the point where it becomes a native part of our thinking. Rather like the difference between being able to comfortably converse in a foreign language by translating on the fly and being fluent enough to think in the language like a native. Or, as the philosopher Stephen Colbert explained, it's the distinction between truth and truthiness.

We struggle to imagine things much different from what we see around us. This failure leads one in four Americans to believe the Sun goes around the Earth. It means we can't truly grasp the staggering, mind-boggling length of a billion years and this fuels skepticism about evolution. And for science fiction readers it leads to raging internet arguments about whether the authors have any imagination at all.

When it comes to geometry our everyday intuition tells us that we live in the planer geometry of good old Euclid. The angles of triangle add up to 180 degrees, parallel lines will never meet, and the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But intellectually we know we live on the sphere called Earth, and that the geometry of the sphere leads to triangles whose angles sum to 230 degrees, parallel lines which meet, and flight paths between cities which follow “Great Circles”.

Spherical Geometry (from Wikipedia).

Media portrayals to the contrary, mathematicians are human, too. From Euclid until the first half of the 19th century, everyone was on board with Euclidean geometry. After all, that was what their gut told them geometry should be. But then Bolyai and Lobachevsky showed us that there are more things in heaven and earth than Euclid could dream of. In two dimensions there are also hyperbolic and spherical (elliptic) geometry. In higher dimensions the possible geometries multiply like rabbits and Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that the geometry of our universe isn't Euclidean [0].

How can we free our feeble minds from their Euclidean prison and develop an intuition for these new geometries?

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

“And if he insists on being killed … then at the end, by the authority of the ruling body, it's done.”

Sheikh Kamal El Mekki, who expounds with apparent approval the law on beheading ex-Muslims, spoke this February at Trinity College Dublin. Maryam Namazie, equal law campaigner, ex-Muslim and prominent critic of political Islam, was, after agreeing to speak in March, presented with conditions impossible to accept. We know that El Mekki's talk went ahead without restrictions despite concerns expressed by the President of the Students Union. We know that Maryam's talk was cancelled, and by the College, not by her.

El Mekki is on video (embedded here; see also here), at an event organised by the AlMaghrib Institute (of which more below) in July 2011, describing how he explained to a Christian missionary the law about apostasy. The missionary was complaining because of his lack of success in Morocco, which he attributed to the law [1] against apostasy. In reply, El Mekki, visibly amused at the missionary's predicament, draws an analogy between apostasy and treason (a justification that when examined makes matters worse), and goes on to explain

It's not like somewhere you heard someone leaves Islam and you just go get him and stuff like that. First of all it's done by the authorities, there are procedures and steps involved. First of all they talk to him, yeah, about, yanni, the scholars refute any doubt that he has on the issue, they spend days with him refuting and arguing with him, trying to convince him. Then they might even, yanni, threaten him with the sword and tell him ‘You need to repent from this because if you don't you repent you will be killed.' And if he insists on being killed that means really, really believing in that. And then, after the procedures take their toll, and then at the end, by the authority of the ruling body, it's done.

“Yanni,” a common interection in Arabic, means “kind of.” I wonder how one “kind of” threatens someone with the sword. However, we are left with the impression that El Mekki would be opposed to recent well-publicised Jihadist beheadings, not out of any objection to beheading as such, but because of failure to conform to the proper procedures.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“I would like to understand things better,
but I don't want to understand them perfectly.”
~ Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas

A few weeks ago I went to an evening of presentations by startups working in the artificial intelligence field. By far the most interesting was a group that for several years had been quietly working on using AI to create a new compression algorithm for video. While this may seem to be a niche application, their work in fact responds to a pressing need. As demand for video streaming, first in high definition and increasingly in formats such as 4K, hopelessly outruns the buildout of new infrastructure, there is a commensurate need for ever-greater ratios of compression of video data. It is the only viable way to keep up with the reqirements of video streaming, and companies such as Netflix are willing to pay boatloads of cash for the best technologies. But the presentation also crystallized some interesting and important aspects of AI that go well beyond not just niche applications, but the alarmist predictions of people like Steven Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. What are we really creating here?

This startup, bankrolled by a former currency trader who, as founder and CEO, was the one giving the talk, has engaged in a three-step development program. The first step involved feeding their AI – charmingly named Rita – with every single video compression algorithm already in use, and having it (her?) cherry-pick the best aspects of each. The ensuing Franken-algorithm has already been tested and confirmed to provide lossless compression at a rate of 75%, which is already best in its class. The second step in their program, which is currently in development, charges Rita with the taking the results of everything learned in the first step, and creating its own algorithm. The expectation is that they will reach up to 90% compression, which is really rather extraordinary.

So far, so good. The final step of the program – one which expects to yield a mind-boggling 99% compression ratio – is where things get really interesting. For Rita's creators are now ‘entrusting her' (I know, the more you talk about AI, the more hopeless it is to attempt avoiding anthropomorphization) with the task of creating her own programming language that will be solely dedicated to video compression. There was an appreciative gasp in the room when the CEO outlined this brave next step, and during the Q&A I wanted him to explain more about what this meant.

Read more »

by Kathleen Goodwin

At the end of February, Laura Kipnis, a professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, authored a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” which explores the ban some schools have placed on sexual relationships between students and professors and how it relates to the current atmosphere regarding sexual assault on college campuses. Kipnis is funny and perceptive, and I find her essay troubling precisely because I agree with many of her points at the same time that I find some aspects of her argument to be problematic because she fails to acknowledge overarching problems with gender dynamics among college students. I admire Kipnis for writing about a topic that, as she points out, most professors are too terrified to comment on. However Kipnis does not seem to recognize that female students today continue to feel disenfranchised in comparison to their male peers and that sexual assault is just one tangible way the unequal power dynamic plays out. Ridiculing her students and university administrators as paranoid is counter-productive to a dialogue on college sexual assault that has only been given the beginning of its due in the public consciousness.

I don't feel, as some Northwestern students do, that it is the responsibility of the University to condemn Kipnis's article. I respect the students' right to disagree with Kipnis and respond to her opinions; however, as Michelle Goldberg points out in The Nation, “Kipnis could hardly have invented a response that so neatly proved her argument…the demands for official censure, the claims of emotional injury—demonstrated how correct she is about the broader climate.” One of Kipnis's central points is that conflating sexual assault between students with sexual relationships between professors and students reveals how misguided college administrators have become when it comes to handling sexual issues on campus. While many administrators used to try to sweep cases of sexual assault under the proverbial rug, the pendulum has swung so far that they now seek to regulate relationships between consenting adults.

Which leads to another one of Kipnis's points— it appears that both administrators and students themselves believe that undergraduates are not adults capable of engaging with the realities of the world. Kipnis brings up the example of the relationship of a 21 year old Stanford student, Ellie Clougherty and a 29 year old Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Joe Lonsdale, as reported in the New York Times Magazine in February. The two dated for a year and after they broke up Clougherty accused Lonsdale of “psychological kidnapping” and asked that Stanford launch an investigation into her allegations of his sexual misconduct. It is undeniable that there were a number of problematic aspects of the relationship— Lonsdale was both significantly older and wealthier than Clougherty and had been assigned as her mentor in a Stanford class before they began dating. However, as Kipnis observes, in Clougherty's narrative of the events, “She seems to regard herself as a helpless child in a woman's body…No doubt some 21-year-olds are fragile and emotionally immature (helicopter parenting probably plays a role), but is this now to be our normative conception of personhood? A 21-year-old incapable of consent?”

Read more »

Fragments from Firefly

after Iqbal

A candle among the roses
In the garden
A shooting star
A loop of the moon's robe
A speck in the sun's hem
In and out of eclipse

Consul of day
In night's kingdom
Unknown at home
Lucid in exile
Unlike the moth
The firefly is light

***

Song is the nightingale's scent
Scent is song of the rose
Rose's scent is the firefly's radiance

by Rafiq Kathwari, whose book of poems, In Another Country, is scheduled for
publication in September 2015 by Doire Press, Ireland. More work here.

by Tamuira Reid

“The world can't just fucking stop. It's ridiculous. We need to move on from this.” It's a week after the Ferguson ruling and Beverley sits across from me, poking ice cubes in her empty cocktail glass with a straw. I don't like her but I'm trying. There's no one else to talk to here. They're all too drunk to care anymore.

“I mean, like, leave art alone. The movies, TV, sports even. Every time anything bad happens in this country it just shuts off. We need dumb stuff, too. I need my Scandal. And my boys need some fucking baseball, yeah? Not CNN all day. ESPN!” She pauses to pull her long red hair into a messy knot on top of her head. Lighting a cigarette, she takes a deep concentrated drag, as if to illustrate the intensity of what she's saying.

“Every magazine, every radio station – all of it. Consumed by racism and hate crimes. I get it, okay? It's not like I don't care about the people that die,” she shakes her head wildly from side to side, striking an uncanny resemblance to a bobblehead doll. “Of course I care about those guys. But, like, why oppress the rest of us, you know? Life needs to go on.”

I begin to wonder how many crap movies, Lifetime specials, 60 Minutes segments will come out of this newest tragedy. What the profit margin will be. It's perfect Hollywood fodder.

“Watch,” Beverley continues. “Every awards show next year will have some fucking tribute to this. Some stupid montage, slow-mo crime scene shit.”

It becomes clear to me that Beverley is more obsessed with the impact of racial injustice on popular culture than anything else. This obsession seems to be fueled by another; chain-smoking some obscene little white cigarette, the skinny kind the trendy girls smoked in the bathroom of my high school.

“Censorship. Denying the public access to culture. That's the true crime here. That's where it's really at. I turn on the TV and it's nothing but old assholes in bad suits talking about this cop and that man and this fucking gun and this fucked-up town. It gets sooo old after a while, you know?” I don't.

Her voice carries to all four corners of the room and someone applauds her sentiment. “Fuck the fucking news!”

I think about my four year-old son back at home. How, without fail, he will approach any cop — on the street, in the train station, at a diner — and smile, say Hi and Good job, guys. He still believes, without absolute faith and certainty, that those in positions of power are helpers. That those in positions of power use all their superhero skills for good.

I'm in a college dive bar with kids light years younger than me. I swapped vodka for fake beer years ago and sip on club soda tonight. Sometimes the loneliness of my occupation, writer, pushes me out of the apartment and into places like this, with people like Beverley. I feel out of place and worried, worried that that humanity is going to Hell in a hand basket, as my grandmother used to say. Worried because my family is on the other side of the country and I am forgetting what they look like, feel like. Worried that an entire police force let a bullet-riddled teenager lay in the middle of a hot Missouri street for four hours before moving him into an SUV. Where's the ambulance, I remember thinking. Where's the fucking ambulance?

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

WRITING IS ALL ABOUT EXTENDING: When I was a child, I heard the story of the scholar jinn disguised as a boy, who once extended his arm all the way to the end of the palace courtyard to reach his ink pot, thus exposing his identity to his human tutor and risking rejection. Was he that absorbed in what he wrote, how he wrote? The tutor forgave his pupil’s deceptive guise on the grounds of his deep attention to the work at hand.

BEFORE LITERATURE, CAME WRITING: Penmanship was a dying art even in my school days, but luckily I learned to use a traditional bamboo pen at home; forming letters of the Nastaliq script of Urdu in jet-black ink. Layering the hand held wooden board with white clay paste, drying it in the sun, and writing with a reed pen that needed to be filled every few minutes, was messy and frustrating. As I fumbled with the materials, I began to acknowledge the muscles that are engaged in the physical work of writing. Forming letters became a fascinating study of lines and curves, symmetry and alignment. Soon I began to have a deeper appreciation for the calligraphic pieces hanging in the house. I noticed how well the artists conformed to rules and how gracefully they deviated, playing with form to create visual effects that influenced the meaning of the words. In learning to see patterns and variations, I was learning to extend myself, to make imprints of my inner life onto the outer reality of the page. Words had created visual fields for me—allowing endless possibilities for expressing meaning.

AND OF COURSE, MUSIC: There were the sonic fields too, the textures of my mother tongue Urdu, as well as the other languages around me, chiefly English, but to varying extents: Arabic, Persian, Pushto, Punjabi. I heard each or a mixture of these languages on the street, in the class room, on TV, on tapes of Shakespeare’s plays, recited or sung on my parents’ LPs. Words collided, chimed, made leaps across different worlds: from the abstract to the concrete, emotional to intellectual, imaginary to the palpably real. Words became a means of extending experience into expression.

I've learnt that poetry picks up from where dreams get interrupted; it extends our inner lives by allowing us entry into mystique, a space we navigate not only through the sound and meaning but also the shape and form of the written word.

by Yohan J. John

In Part I of this series, we looked at how the concept of information brought communication and computation together. Claude Shannon and the other pioneers of information theory showed that discrete symbols could be used to encode and transmit almost any sort of message, and that binary digits were the simplest possible symbols. Meanwhile Alan Turing and the computer scientists demonstrated that strings of symbols could serve as the inputs to simple machines that could transform them into new and useful output strings.

Information theory arose from the question of how best to transmit discrete signals from point A to point B, with little to say about the purpose of the signals. Computability theory was born of a complementary quest: the study of how to transform and manipulate symbols in the service of some purpose. The birth of modern genetics reveals a similar complementary relationship. Two broad research questions arose in the tumult of 19th century biology: the question of how hereditary information was communicated from one generation to the next, and the question of how an organism develops, starting from the moment of conception. The first question gave rise to transmission genetics, while the second gave rise to developmental biology. These questions proved to be intimately related: progress in answering one was often contingent on developments in answering the other. The overlap between the answers to these questions was recognized in the twin roles of the DNA molecule: it has been described as both the vector of hereditary transmission, and the bearer of a developmental program that 'specifies' or even 'computes' the organism. We will now follow the path that led to the DNA molecule, a path that emerged from the confluence of evolutionary theory, cell biology, and biochemistry. [1]

The nature of heredity

An awareness of hereditary inheritance must have arisen very early in human culture. It can't have been very difficult to realize that the properties of an organism — its traits — tend to reappear in its offspring. Children typically share many features with their parents. Ancient peoples clearly recognized inheritance of characteristics in plants and animals too. Humans have been selectively breeding plants and animals since prehistoric times, gradually amplifying useful traits with every generation. The dog is believed to have been domesticated from a wolf-like ancestor between 11 and 16 thousand years ago. And rice and wheat were domesticated between 8 and 13 thousand years ago. The ability to make use of hereditary inheritance precedes the dawn of civilization.

Read more »

by Namit Arora

A review of Odysseus Abroad, a novel by Amit Chaudhuri.

Ananda Sen, the young Bengali protagonist in Amit Chaudhuri’s sixth novel, Odysseus Abroad, is an aspiring poet, singer of ragas, and seeker of the romantic spark in London, 1985. Raised in Bombay but with ancestral roots in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Ananda has been studying English literature for over two years at a university in London—all details that also describe Chaudhuri’s own past. Ananda’s maternal uncle, Radhesh Majumdar—a character based on Chaudhuri’s own uncle—is in London too, in a Belsize Park bedsit for 24 years. Odysseus Abroad is a portrait of Ananda, Radhesh, and their relationship, rendered through their memories, everyday experiences, and responses to contemporary British culture.

Odysseus Abroad is not a traditional novel. It has no plot, no existential crisis, no darkness lurking in any soul; nor does it abound in moral conflicts or messy heartbreaks. In a recent interview, Chaudhuri, professor of contemporary literature at a British university, claimed to have ‘rejected the monumental superstructure of the novel in favour of the everyday rhythms of the day.’ Sadly, in Odysseus Abroad, this feels like the author taking away the cake and not offering any pudding either.

The novel opens with Ananda, 22, who dreams of getting published in Poetry Review, practices singing twice a day, and frets about his noisy Indian neighbors above and below his flat. From the daily rhythm of noises—creaking floorboards, kitchen sounds, a new kind of ‘angry, insistent’ music called ‘rap’—he has figured out the patterns of life of the young Gujaratis upstairs. Though ‘disengaged from Indian politics’, he is ‘dilettantishly addicted to British politicians—the debates; the mock outrage; the amazing menu of accents’ on TV. We learn that his privileged class status in India—marked by a ‘cursory but proud knowledge of Bengali literature’, ‘lettuce sandwiches as a teatime snack’, speaking English at home, ‘a diet of Agatha Christie and Earl Stanley Gardner’ in his early teens—meant that he remained largely oblivious to class until he came to England.

Read more »

I’m still dwelling on how ironic all the feverish proclamations
of capitalism are going to look someday.
…………………… —Justin E.H. Smith

Gabriel’s Mad Ave. Apocalyptic Horn

I’m through with dumpster dinners
at the corner of Wall Street and New

I’m so unsold by the Coke sign’s faded blush
that thrusts from desiccated dollar dunes
—an embarrassment

a crass embellishment
stuffed in the cleavage of a spent whore
who promised lasting bliss but ended a hag
with smeared lips and hellish scent

The cyclone’s gone that slew the sacred cow
when gangs of suited crooks blew through
with milking stools to sit beside her tits of gold
with digits itching to draw her dry
with lips pursed to suck her blood
with that singular sort of lust,
twisted as a rusty screw,
that drills down and down
until nothing’s left to suck or bust

I’m done— we’ve lurched too long through
spoiled earth as Gabriel’s Mad Ave. apocalyptic horn
more croaked than blew
.

by Jim Culleny
9/13/14

by Paul Braterman

In my last post, I said that the right way to undermine creationism is to promote appreciation of the science of evolution, by presenting it in ways that are engaging, enjoyable, and above all personal. In this post, I review two more books that succeed in doing this; Alice Roberts' The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being and Jonathan Tweet's Grandmother Fish.

Grandmother Fish is a book like no other I have seen. It is an introduction to evolution, for adults to read to their pre-school children. It is also much more than that, and comes with well-earned commendations from Stephen Pinker, David Sloan Wilson, and Daniel Dennett.

We start with a delightfully drawn Grandmother Fish, who lived a long, long, long, long, long time ago and could wiggle and swim fast and had jaws to chomp with. At once, this is made personally relevant: “Can you wiggle? … Can you chomp?” We proceed by way of Grandmother Reptile, Grandmother Mammal and Grandmother Ape, to Grandmother Human, who lived a long time ago, could walk on two feet and talk and tell stories, and whose many different grandchildren

could wiggle and chomp and crawl and breathe and squeak and cuddle and grab and hoot and

walk and talk, and I see one of them … right here!

Each stage has its own little phylogenetic tree, with the various descendants of each successive “grandmother” shown as each other's cousins, and there is an overall tree, covering all living things, that anyone (of any age) will find interesting to browse on. Finally, after some 20 pages of simple text and lavish illustration, there are around 4 pages of more detailed information, directed at the adult reading the book, but to which I expect children to return, as they mature, remembering the book with affection, as they surely will, years or even decades later.

Read more »

by Mandy de Waal

A South African literary event called 'The Time of the Writer' was to have been a moment of celebration for local writer Zainub Priya Dala. The author's debut novel, called What About Meera, was due to have been launched at the Durban festival.

Instead Dala was nursing injuries after being attacked at knifepoint with a brick and called [Salman] “Rushdie's Bitch!” The attack – which shocked and outraged SA's literary community – happened one day after Dala had expressed an appreciation of Rushdie's work.

ZP Dala – Photo courtesy of BooksLive

“Dala was followed from the festival hotel and was harassed by three men in a vehicle who pushed her car off the road,” a statement by Dala's publishers read. “When she stopped, two of the men advanced to her car, one holding a knife to her throat and the other hitting her in the face with a brick while calling her ‘Rushdie's bitch'. She has been treated by her doctor for soft-tissue trauma, and has reported the incident to the police.”

The author – who is also a therapist who counsels autistic children – said through her publishers that she believed the attack stemmed from her voicing support for Rushdie's writing style. Dala was at a school's writing forum and was asked which writers she admired. She offered a list of writers including Arundhati Roy, and said that she “liked Salman Rushdie's literary style.” After saying she appreciated Rushdie, a number of teachers and students stood up and walked out in protest. The next day Dala was attacked.

After discovering what happened to Dala, Rushdie Tweeted: “I'm so sorry to hear this. I hope you're recovering well. All good wishes.” Dala's response? “Thank you. I have my family and children around me and am recovering.”

SA literary site, www.bookslive.co.za stated that “the assault counts as an extension of Rushdie's complicated history with South Africa.” BooksLive explained that Rushdie “was famously ‘disinvited' from a literary festival in 1988, after the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa was issued against him and his novel, The Satanic Verses.”

Read more »

by Ahmed Humayun

Conventional wisdom has it that if you don't like your job or want to pursue your passion or just have a great idea, you should just go ahead and launch a startup, because the barriers to launching a for-profit company or social venture are lower today than they have ever been.

People will cite different reasons to bolster this claim, but the revolutionary impact of the Internet on connectivity is a big one. The Internet makes it easier to identify, access, and sell to potential customers or users. This has all kind of effects, such as increasing the pace of product iteration and the potential to scale quickly. Increased access to local or global labor, and a robust culture and infrastructure of venture capital investment, especially in technology centers such as Silicon Valley, are other reasons cited by those who encourage people to launch companies.

I don't know if it is a good idea for some or even most people to launch a startup- it is easy to get sucked into the hype while significantly understating the risks, effort, skills, and time involved in constructing a successful organization with a working, scalable business model from scratch. This true of any organization, let alone the multi-million or billion dollar entity we all might fantasize about retiring on. It can take many years to build a successful business – some estimates are, perhaps a decade. It all depends on the level of your interest and commitment (Do you really care about an idea?), personal goals (Do you want to build the next Amazon or a company you can sell after a few years?), skills (Do you have the wherewithal to realize your vision, or identify and attract people who do?), your appetite and ability to incur risk, and so on.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Silicon Valley juggernauts such as PayPal and Palantir, and venture capitalist, says in his book Zero to One, that even if you excel in what you do, it could be much better to join a great, fast growing company than launching one yourself. There is a vast disparity in returns between the tiny minority of the most successful, fast growing companies and the rest of the lot. This matters because:

'differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully find your own venture but if you fail you'll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable.' [1]

There are rare circumstances, in other words, that it would make sense for most people to choose an alternative to early-stage Google.

Read more »

by Tom Jacobs

The ants are my friends, the ants are my friends, the ants are just blowing in the wind.
—Lorrie Moore

Life is hard and nothing makes any sense. That is a problem. I don’t know everything there is to know, and that is also a problem. These are the bare facts. Impossible to ignore but things that must be ignored if I’m to go about my daily business. I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I’m also happy most of the time. Or at least content.

What I’m trying to say or at least think about is the role of love in understanding. Love is something that is not to be understood but rather just felt and expressed. Understanding, on the other hand, well, that’s a whole other deal. It requires the assemblage of evidence and critical analysis and narrative-building and seeing the pattern in what might seem to be a relatively random collection of things that are of some small interest. Why are these things and not others interesting to me, to you? That’s a tough one, and probably there is no answer. There’s a pattern in the rug, but where is it?

I read somewhere that there was a woman minding her own business somewhere in the Midwest somewhere in the mid-eighties who was watching television in her living room when a small meteor plummeted through her roof and hit her in the arm. A celestial body just intervened into her life and hit her in the arm, producing some fair amount of trauma. Sometimes I feel like this is a good metaphor for what it’s like to be alive. Meteors strike you unexpectedly and you are left to figure out what that means. Was it meant for you? Or did it just happen? Does it matter to even draw the distinction? Probably it doesn’t.

When I think about what I really want in life, about what really matters, I often think of Emerson and Whitman. They are in some subtle ways, very different thinkers. Emerson is the thinker who gives us lines like, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” or “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” That sort of thing.

Read more »

by Hari Balasubramanian

A selection of facts, research and personal encounters involving beavers and their habitat.

In October 2007, an 835-meter long beaver dam was discovered on Google Earth. It remains the longest one found so far. The dam was in the “thick wildness of Northern Alberta”, in Wood Buffalo National Park. In July 2014 someone called Rob Mark, an amateur explorer from New Jersey, managed to reach the dam. He reports that it was incredibly difficult terrain to get through. The mosquitoes in Alberta were much worse than the Amazonian rain forest; they sounded like helicopters and bit through his clothes. When Mark finally got to the dam, a resident beaver announced its displeasure with angry slaps of its flat tail on the water.

It was wonderful and somehow liberating to hear this last detail. To the beaver of course, the effort that had gone into this journey of discovery – the sort that seems to matter a lot of us humans – meant absolutely nothing; it only counted as an intrusion.

But I do understand why Mark made the journey. I've been chasing beavers myself in the conservation areas of Amherst, Massachusetts (where I live). Last year, I designed my summer and fall hikes so as to cover as many beaver ponds as possible: like a traveling salesman trying to cover all customer locations efficiently. One evening, with light fading fast, I was walking along the Fort River, a tributary of the Connecticut. Suddenly, there was a tremendous splash as if a boulder had been thrown from a considerable height into the water. It was October, and with winter fast approaching, the beavers were trying to dam the river. A red maple tree, leaves still clinging to its branches, had been felled. But it wasn't the tree that had caused the splash; the tree had been brought down perhaps a couple of days ago. The deep, explosive noise – impossible though that seemed – was the flat tail of a beaver hitting against the running water! As if to dissuade me from exploring further, the beaver produced yet another equally noisy warning.

Intrigued, I visited Amherst town offices a couple of days later, to ask if someone there had information on beavers in conservation areas. A town official heard me out, but he was concerned: “It would be unacceptable if the Fort River was being dammed as you say. This would flood nearby homes. Beavers change the ground water level so even people with homes that are far away from beaver dams notice flooding in their basements and are puzzled. I need to send my land manager out immediately.” A bearded stranger, who happened to be passing by and had overheard, stopped and said eagerly: “Do you need to take care of beavers? Because I know someone who does a very good job.” In effect he was claiming he knew a Beaver Hitman.

These reactions left no doubt about the beaver's modern status as a pest in residential areas. But there is another kind of status this natural engineer has, and it has to do, among other things, with how well it retains water on the landscape even in periods of drought and creates conditions where diverse types of wildlife can thrive. Let's take a closer look.

Read more »