by Paul Braterman

Science, it is often said, is restricted in principle to the search for natural causes. Is this a fundamental rule for doing science? Or merely a useful procedural guide, derived from experience? Is it even true? Or meaningful? Does it matter? These questions are addressed in an important series of papers in 2010, 2012, and 2014, by Maarten Boudry at the University of Ghent and his colleagues. They conclude that it matters a great deal, that the alleged restriction does not in fact exist, and that appealing to such a principle in argument is harmful to the cause of science. I agree.

I will deal with the first four questions in reverse order. Can we make a meaningful distinction between the natural and the supernatural? I was initially inclined to say no. If something occurs, it's part of nature. It is a law of nature that water doesn't turn into wine, but if you believe that the miracle of the wedding feast of Cana really happened, then you need to modify the law to say “Water doesn't turn into wine, except when Jesus tells it to.” Maarten persuaded me that this was not a helpful line to take. Like all attempts to define a problem out of existence, it is logically unassailable, but useless. It denies us access to the very distinction that we should be clarifying.

The question, however, is more difficult than it seems. After all, we do not know everything that there is to be known about nature. We readily apply the label “supernatural” to purported phenomena such as telekinesis or telepathy, in which mind is regarded as operating on matteror on other minds without material agency, but we do not have a satisfactory account of mind-matter relationships anyway. Other prime candidates for supernatural status, such as precognition and remote viewing, would if real involve transcending the usual space-time framework, but space and time are much less rigidly defined now than they seemed to be before Einstein. The limits of natural explanation have been extended in the past, by invoking action at a distance (gravity, then other forces), intrinsic randomness (quantum mechanics), and more recently particle entanglement (quantum mechanics again). Presumably they will be in the future, in ways yet undreamt of. So the fact that something cannot be explained by today's science need not force us to invoke the supernatural. What would, then? Boudry and Taner Edis suggest a test for what they call unphysical causation, but it is highly technical, with their criterion based on demonstrated access to uncomputable numbers (I will not attempt to reproduce their argument). However, they suggest some examples. What, for instance, if Lourdes started producing undeniable miracles in large numbers, including the regrowth of amputated limbs, but only for devout Catholics? What if all organisms were found to contain an identical section of DNA, whose diffraction pattern spelt out the message “© Yahweh 4004 BC”? What, I might add, if we really did start receiving messages from the dead?

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by Jonathan Kujawa

In September the New York Times reported on an interesting tidbit in the annual budget request by the National Security Agency (NSA). You can read the full NYT article here, but the relevant lines are highlighted in this image from the NYT's article:

NSA's Budget Request (image by the NYT)

The NSA claims to be able to insert hidden weaknesses into the cryptographic technologies which are used to keep our data safe on the internet. Admittedly, in recent weeks alone the NSA has been accused of interdicting internet routers during shipment and inserting bugging devices, targeting human rights groups, and recording all audio from phone calls to/from the Bahamas. By now it's hard to keep track of all the various outrages committed by the US government in the name of security.

So why do I want to talk about something which is, comparatively speaking, old news? First, because it is an ongoing issue and inserting weaknesses into widely used cryptographic schemes has the potential to affect everyone — not just those targeted by the NSA. If there are weaknesses, then other nefarious characters may be able to exploit them. So much for the “They aren't interested in me” and the “I have nothing to hide” arguments.

Second, this isn't a case of bureaucrats over-promising and under-delivering. If we dig into the mathematics we find plausible independent evidence that the US government did indeed insert a backdoor into a widely used cryptographic system. It seems there is at least one branch of the federal government who can deliver on their IT promises.

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The Earth is on fire, but it was not always this way. Billions of years ago at the time of primordial life's genesis the Earth lacked free oxygen in the atmosphere. The evolutionary rise of blue-green algae in the oceans led to the advent of oxygen. And so today every creature burns a little when it breaths. Oxygen is an extremely reactive element. From oxygen's perspective the earth is a pile of fuel waiting to burn. Consider what a single spark would ravage with no human intervention. Cities are piles of neatly stacked kindling and forests are scattered matchsticks. So it is somewhat of an amazement the entire thing doesn't just catch fire. Perhaps one day it will.

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by Misha Lepetic

“I'm afraid my Japanese is a little rusty.”

~ Raymond Burr, Godzilla, King of Monsters

Sixty years on, is it still possible to care about Godzilla? Anyone who has consented to suffer through the latest defibrillation of the Godzilla franchise should set aside a few minutes to ponder the ongoing relevance of the venerable reptilian revenant. The prognosis is grim: for me, about the only thing that still registered a few days after seeing the new offering was a vague sense of satisfaction that San Francisco had been returned to a pre-gentrified state, and that Las Vegas would likely have to be given up as a total loss. As with robots and comic books, what do the Japanese know that we don't?

Back in 1954, Godzilla – or Gojira, to go by the original Japanese name, a portmanteau of gorira (‘gorilla') and kujira (‘whale') – was the most expensive film ever made in Japan. It was also an ad hoc idea shot on a tight timeline because Toho Studios needed to fill a hole in its production pipeline. Its popularity took everyone by surprise, becoming the eighth-most attended film in Japan that year. And yet, to this day Godzilla remains a poignant work of filmmaking. Enduring questions of science, technology and society are raised. A gently compelling love triangle moves gradually from subplot to the fore, and a quiet feat of self-sacrifice guarantees Tokyo's (temporary) redemption. The monster itself possesses an inscrutable rage, and, towards the end of the film, an inescapable air of melancholy, if not outright pathos.

It's common knowledge that the Godzilla myth was predicated upon several apocalyptic events. The first, of course, is the 1945 detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ensuing fire, destruction and especially irradiation. The second, which explicitly inspired the film, was the detonation of the first H-bomb in the Marshall Islands on March 1^st, 1954. The fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) was caught up in fallout created by a detonation that was two to three times larger than expected, but the ship returned to port and distributed its catch of tuna before being quarantined, only to have one of its crew died of radiation exposure in the following months. The death, as well as the poisoned fish that had entered the food supply, fueled Japan's anxiety towards nuclear weapons and especially of the Americans handling them. In fact, the first ship to be lost in the opening minutes of Godzilla is a fishing boat off the coast of Tokyo, a direct reference to the Lucky Dragon.

So it seems that the lynchpin of the film is the Ursprung of anxiety and the form that that anxiety actually takes. The unbridled nature of the aquatic lizard, and the arbitrary destruction it wreaks by virtue of that nature, are inseparable from the mystery of its existence. While the sea of flame that engulfs Tokyo was meant to directly invoke the preceding war (and not necessarily the nuclear subgenre per se), Godzilla asks for nothing, wants nothing, and has no discernible purpose or end. Unlike subsequent films, it is not seeking food or a mate; nor is it battling rivals or attempting to reach a spot that Tokyo just happens to be occupying. It is a sole remnant of a lost ecosystem that, at its acme, did not include humanity. So if it is so foreign, what does Godzilla really represent? The question is made clearer by contrasting Godzilla with the further development of the franchise, or rather by what is lost in that development.

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by Jalees Rehman

Konrad Heitkamp was taken aback by the extraordinary ordinariness present in the lobby of the Zurich hotel. In November of 1943, life in Zurich seemed unperturbed by the fact that the countries surrounding Switzerland were embroiled in one of the most devastating wars in the history of the world. Heitkamp realized that as the coach of the FC Bayern München soccer team, he was one of the privileged few who could bask in this oasis of normalcy for a few days before he would have to head back home to Munich. He surveyed the lobby and began waving his hand at some of his players standing across the vestibule. Hopefully, the Gestapo men watching him thought of this as an innocuous gesture, a soccer team coach acknowledging the arrival of his players and performing a headcount. But he could not bank on it.

The Gestapo must have known that for the past weeks, Heitkamp and his players were forward to the friendly match against the Swiss national soccer team because it would give them a chance to finally see their friend Kurt Landauer again. Before the team embarked on their trip to Zurich, the Gestapo had ordered all Bayern München players to attend a special “education” session in Gestapo headquarters of Munich. The team was informed that the Gestapo would accompany the team on their brief trip to Switzerland. The Gestapo explicitly forbade the team members to have any contact with German emigrants in Switzerland.

The Nazis were always weary of any potential contacts between Germans and German emigrants who were seen as traitors and collaborators of the Allied forces. But FC Bayern München was a special thorn in the flesh of the Nazi machinery. Nazis routinely referred to FC Bayern München as a “Judenclub” (“Jew Club”), because German Jews had held some of the key leadership positions. The club won its first German national soccer championship in 1932 under the leadership of the Jewish club president Kurt Landauer and the coach Richard Dombi, an Austrian Jew. Only a few months later in January 1933, Hitler came to power and soon all leaders of Jewish origin were forced to give up their leadership positions.

Kurt Landauer was one of the first to resign from the club presidency. He even lost his job as the manager of a Munich newspaper's advertising department, and was only able to find work in a textile shop owned by a Jewish family. In the wake of the anti-semitic pogroms in the night of the 9^th November 1938 (Kristallnacht oder Reichspogromnacht), this shop was attacked and devastated. Landauer was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp. After a brief period of internment, he was released and he used this opportunity to emigrate to Switzerland and survived the Holocaust. Most of his siblings were less fortunate and were murdered by the Nazis.

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Dignity
.

…. I sit still in the garden
…. falling away
…. among Pat’s lilies falling too

…. hummingbird
…. tiny as a big bee
…. red-head harvesting
…. hovers, not falling, but
…. falling too, around a star bud
…. also falling at the fringe
…. of a galaxy freefalling
…. among what?

…. hummingbird slingshots to hydrangea
…. impossible wings against falling
…. invisibly against falling
…. determined as one oppressed
…. not to fall, or to fall
…. of her own choosing
…. by her own hand, losing
…. at her own calling

….by Jim Culleny
….5/15/14

by Lisa Lieberman

I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness that I should merely be innocent.

Imre Kertész, Fatelessness

Something akin to survivor's guilt is at the core of Imre Kertész's novel, Fatelessness (1975), a fictionalized account of the year he spent while still a teenager interned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Published during the so-called “soft dictatorship” of the communist leader János Kádár, the book did not sell many copies in Hungary, and no wonder: György Köves, its young narrator, does not want us to feel sorry for him. “I was aware that I was about to start writing a novel that might easily turn into a tearjerker, not least because the novel's protagonist is a boy,” Kertész said in a recent interview.

He needn't have worried. György insists that he was complicit in his fate. “Everyone took steps as long as he was able to take a step; I too took my own steps, and not just in the queue at Birkenau, but even before that, here, at home.” This comes perilously close to admitting the charge that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter, that through their passivity, they colluded in their own destruction. As if anticipating the objection, Kertész voices it through one of his minor characters. Old Fleischmann, György's former neighbor, was not deported, escaped being murdered by the fascist Arrow Cross, and endured the siege of Budapest. He lived while others (including György's father) died, and yet he cannot hold himself to blame for his survival. “So it's us who're the guilty ones, is it? Us, the victims!” But György refuses to back down. Even though he recognizes the futility of explaining his views to those like old Fleischmann, who urge him to put the horrors of Auschwitz behind him in order to live, “it was not quite true,” he maintains stubbornly, “that the thing ‘came about'; we had gone along with it too.”

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by Debra Morris

“I remember when I really used to be into nostalgia.”

—Demetri Martin

And I remember when it began, about a year ago; when the artifacts of my past, most of them long gone, began to take on the shimmer of buried treasure. It's an odd sensation, to be struck by loss, to begin to see the world through the prism of what no longer exists. I can even imagine recollecting, in what I hope is the distant future, the first stirrings of nostalgia. “Grandma, tell me about your early-onset nostalgia. How did it feel when you first realized that no one under 25 could use a paper dictionary?”

For I seem to have grown very nostalgic lately (I humbly submit as evidence any one of my three posts for 3QD: see here, here, or here). Recently my husband and I were talking about something we wanted to write together, and we quickly realized that many of the touchstones for it—the objects, experiences, feelings, or points of reference that we wanted to discuss—were all things that had nearly disappeared within the space of our lives. It's not that we wished to resurrect them, or even imagined that they could be recreated. Rather, at least for me, the problem seemed to be that their disappearance left gaps where we might once have found knowledge, or even just know-how; tools or directions for coping with the challenges of parenthood, career, marriage, citizenship. Even tools for grappling with questions that, as academically trained theorists, we were used to engaging on a much more abstract level. An example: my husband is a devotee of 40s and 50s American cinema, and one thing that has caught his attention is that there used to be a whole range of jobs—careers, even, in that they were capable of sustaining a family; they conferred respectability; they carried an entire world of practice, sense-experience, and meaning in their wake—that no longer exist, though they featured in these films surprisingly often. The private eye was a stock character in film noir, of course, but so, my husband discovered to his surprise, was the milkman. (What, I wonder, can Thomas Piketty tell us about that?)

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MOTHER WRITES TO INDIRA GANDHI

Dear Madam

Just wondering, what’s transpiring?
Why does India despair of your Emergency?
Media are saying: Our star is fading
While you’re busy sexing a swami.

A pilot wants to bucklemeup in his sexjet.
He’s pompous. Frequency has amplified.
Madam G, hear my plea. Empty the sky.
Show your ire. Command him, Cease-Fire.

A woman’s mind is no man’s land.
I dry my vaginarags out on a string.
They flutter like pale buntings
In Kashmir’s pine-scented air.

My husband remarried. She’s young.
She waddles, yawns, burps, and farts.
Her two readymade kids call me, Dear
Sweet Big Mom, Pyaari Badi Ami Jan.

My husband says she will
take good care of me.
It’s tearing me apart, Indira,
And I’m again losing my mind.

By Rafiq Kathwari, Winner, The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2013.

by Mara Jebsen

In this iteration of this poem-essay on Brooklyn, Gentrification, Love, Baseball, Ghosts, and Gardens, I am heavy on instinct and making sense with the senses– in terms of my approach to the way these things connect. In another iteration I may add more of what I am slowly learning about the fascinating history of the neighborhood of Lefferts, which is in the process of changing, rapidly.

I. Scene: New café, “Tip of the Tongue”, outer outpost of whiteness, Lefferts Gardens. April.

Bakery, new folk music, wood everything—white people, white people.But the apportioning

is lovely. A partition between the space and the street,left open in clement weather.

Soft blue air blows in.

C brought me a cappuccino and gave me a kiss before catching his train.It feels like summer in England. Rainshowers, and I watch/ the umbrellas bob by like giant peonies. The gardens are all awakening. They’re staggering. They’re waking up/ I am such. . . a ninny. I can never remember the all of it—the shoots, the buds, the. . .

fronds, the whole. . .were there all along. C inherited from his mother

a love/sorrow about the bud, the perfect

miniature. “Its all there!” he keeps saying, though the crabapple in his yard

would’ve fit below my fingernail, a dot, …but already

red, already

exact. Everything it will be, it is.

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by Charlie Huenemann

(image from lthscomputerart.weebly.com)

Last month (April 19, 2014), 3QD's Robin Varghese linked to an article by philosopher Lisa Guenther on the effects of solitary confinement on the mind. (The original article was published in the online magazine Aeon.) Guenther's essay is fascinating, as it provides a vivid account of how our perception of the world depends heavily on the social relations we build everyday with other people. When those social relations are stripped from us, our experience of the world goes wonky. For this reason, Guenther's article is also disturbing, since it reveals the widespread practice of solitary confinement to be nothing less than mental torture.

Normally as we go about our business, we negotiate our way through a world of shared objects that become common pleasures, obstacles, or topics of conversation. And how we share those common objects, or compete for them, is what makes those objects real for us. As Guenther writes,

When I sit across a table from you, for example, I implicitly perceive you as both ‘there’ in relation to my ‘here’ and as another ‘here’, with your own unsharable perspective on the world, in relation to which I too am ‘there’ for you. The other people with whom I share space both give me an objective location in the world – they anchor me somewhere, and they also hold open the virtual dimensions of my own experience by reminding me that, no matter how hard I try, I can never directly experience another person’s stream-of-consciousness. The other confirms, contests, enriches, and challenges my own experience and interpretation of things.

Lest anyone think of this merely as frilly sentimentalism, read what happens to people when they are forced into prolonged and lonely encounters with very spare environments:

After only a short time in solitary, I felt all of my senses begin to diminish. There was nothing to see but grey walls. In New York’s so-called special housing units, or SHUs, most cells have solid steel doors, and many do not have windows. You cannot even tape up pictures or photographs; they must be kept in an envelope. To fight the blankness, I counted bricks and measured the walls. I stared obsessively at the bolts on the door to my cell.

There was nothing to hear except empty, echoing voices from other parts of the prison. I was so lonely that I hallucinated words coming out of the wind. They sounded like whispers. Sometimes, I smelled the paint on the wall, but more often, I just smelled myself, revolted by my own scent.

So the world, absent other people, starts to resemble a Dali painting. Another prisoner recounted in Guenther's article refers to his experience in solitary as an abyss, which Guenther describes as “a chasm without edges…. an emptiness that has become palpable and insistent, like a black hole that sucks everything into itself”. Without a changing world, and without other people serving as fellow travelers in that world, we become unhinged from any firm reality. Some prisoners end up striking at walls and fences until their hands are bloodied – not in any attempt to escape, of course, but to make vivid contact with an irrefutable world outside themselves. They are desperate to find an Other. True solipsism, it seems, is impossible for humans. Without other people, our experience of the world dwindles into whispers, specters, and madness.

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by Colin Eatock

Western classical music has generated a mountain of critical words: not just snarky reviews of specific performances and compositions, but also broader criticism of the genre itself. Of late, a small army of writers has stepped forward to declare classical music elitist, boring, passé, financially untenable, etc., etc.

I claim no personal exemption from this trend. A few years ago I wrote an essay called “What's Wrong With Classical Music,” that was, I believe, read pretty widely. My words were linked and re-posted on numerous websites, and were even quoted in a book by David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) called How Music Works. Encouraged by the world's fascination with in my insights, I wrote a second essay called “What Else Is Wrong With Classical Music.” (This second essay was, frankly, a bit of a rant.)

Recently, I was contacted by someone who read my first “What's Wrong” essay, and who put forward a challenge. “I was wondering,” she began, “if you have ever considered writing about what classical music means to you personally or has meant to you in your own life. You cherish it, right? (C'mon, of course you do!)”

Yes, I do cherish it. All my life, Western classical music has been my “home” musical environment (with occasional forays into other musical realms). So in accepting this challenge, I feel a little bit like a fish writing about how wonderful water is – not an easy thing to do. Nevertheless, I'll give it a try.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I visited Turkey in July 2013; this was 2-3 weeks after the protests and riots that rocked Taksim Square in Istanbul. Ramazan began on July 08, the day I arrived. After 3 days in Istanbul I flew to Erzurum, a city in Northeast Turkey. From there I hoped to visit villages and towns close to the Georgian and Armenian borders. My longtime Turkish friend, Serhat, joined me for the first half of the six days I traveled in the region. Some informal impressions below.

1. Erzurum

The flight from Istanbul to Erzurum took a course parallel to the northern Black Sea coast of Turkey, before turning inland for the final approach. The landscape was consistently mountainous: lush green and covered with cloud when close to the Black Sea, and dry in the interior, the mountains casting long shadows in the late afternoon light.

Erzurum, a city of about 367,000, lay in a sprawling plain at the base of one such dry mountain range. A haphazard checkerboard of farms stretched for miles and miles around the city. Many of them were hay farms, important in a region whose economy depends heavily on stock breeding. We rented a car at the airport. On our way to Erzurum center, we passed by the gates of Ataturk University.

By the time we had checked into the Esadaş Hotel along Cumhuriyet Caddesi (Erzurum's main street), it was close to iftar time: light was fading fast and the Ramazan fast would soon be broken, at 7:53 pm. On the way to the popular Gelgör Restaurant, we passed by two historic mosques: the Yakutiye (1310, Mongol) and Lala Pasha (1562, Ottoman). In the courtyard of the Lala Pasha, there were two boys, aged between six and ten. The younger one was selling tissue paper neatly folded in a plastic cover; the older one was selling small contraptions, one of which looked like a low plastic bench.

Serhat got to talking with them. He told them that I was from Hindistan. Almost immediately, the boys started repeating a few words excitedly to me. The younger one said “Amita..bhaccha” at least five times, before I realized he was referring to Amitabh Bachchan. The older one was saying Shahrukh Khan in his own way. Bollywood's popularity in unexpected places is not unusual — from West African tax-drivers in Minneapolis, to painters on the streets of Lima (Peru), to an Uzbek man I met on a Grand Canyon hiking trip: everyone was familiar with Bollywood. The bigger surprise was that these kids, making do with basic Turkish, were not locals but from Kabul, Afghanistan; they had entered Turkey illegally after what must have been a long journey from home.

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Myths, according to Barthes, follow a complex structure. There are two levels to be distinguished: The linguistic from the mythological one. On the linguistic level, we have Saussurean signs. The myth is a second order sign, made up of a Saussurean or linguistic sign as its signifier and a concept as its signified. To distinguish the sign as such from its use in the myth, Barthes introduces the two terms meaning and form. Meaning picks out the sign as an independent entity (3. Sign). When this sign or meaning is used as a signifier in the myth, it is called form (I. SIGNIFIER).
The important contrast is that meaning is rich, while form is impoverished. Meaning, according to Barthes, has a history. Form then empties meaning of its history and content, in order to use it as a signifier. The concept here, then, is the mythological signified (II. SIGNIFIED). The correlation of form and concept is called signification or myth (III SIGN).

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