by Leanne Ogasawara

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream. Vincent Van Gogh

It is my second favorite essay of all time: C.S Lewis' Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages. First delivered as a lecture in 1956, the piece was later published posthumuously in this collection of his essays in 1966. Unlike in my #1 favorite essay, William Golding's magnificent Hot Gates, CS Lewis does not seek to form arguments or to persuade. What he does instead is to transport the reader back in time, illuminating the medieval world-view using nothing more than words alone.

He begins his essay urging the reader to perform an experiment. He says,

Go out on any starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that pre-Copernican astronomy is true.

He says,

Look up at the sky with that assumption in mind. The real difference between living in that universe and living in ours will, I predict, begin to dawn on you.

Intrigued, I decided to take him up on his suggestion. It so happened that my beloved and I had found ourselves up on the summit of Mauna Kea, on the Big Island. Home to the world's greatest collection of large telescopes, the skies up there are dark and famously clear.

As a girl, I had wanted to become a cosmologist. It was my first great passion. And, in addition to reading astronomy books voraciously, I spent many nights using my amateur telescope to look up at the stars from my parent's house in Los Angeles. Growing up, I drifted away from cosmology, turning naturally toward philosophy. Still, I always loved the stars–for as Van Gogh said, they make me dream. Returning home to Los Angeles about twenty five years after leaving it, I have been dismayed by their disappearance. What happened to all those myriad of stars of my childhood? Indeed, I cannot recall the last time I saw the Milky Way–had never seen it in Japan and was sad to see it was simply invisible from LA now. It is dis-heartening, really, since the splendid vision of the stars at night is something that we used to just take for granted.

Read more »

by Grace Boey

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treating – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –

* * *

In the poem, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, Emily Dickinson watches a part of herself die as she sinks into insanity. The fragmentation and loss of the Self that Dickinson describes is a common theme amongst victims of mental illness. By their very nature, conditions like schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder have profound impact on one's personality, behaviour and beliefs. Mental illness can rear its head and usurp one's identity at any time; what happens next can be confusing and frightening, for victims as well as their loved ones.

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

My earliest memory is of a song about a fly that married a bumblebee. I've been told–I don't really remember this–that early one morning I played that record so often that it drove a visiting uncle to distraction.

I don't know how many people count music as their earliest memory, but I surely can't be unique in that. For music is a basic and compelling form of human experience. Martin Luther believed that “next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits.” And so it does.

Which perhaps is why we are so ambivalent about it. If it can control us, then it is dangerous. Why else would repressive regimes have worked so hard to suppress jazz and rock and roll? Why would the Taliban attempt to suppress all music?

But let us set the danger aside. It is the power that interests me.

Some years ago Roy Eldridge, the jazz great trumpeter, told Whitney Balliett (American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz) about playing with Gene Krupa:

When … we started to play, I'd fall to pieces. The first three or four bars of my first solo, I'd shake like a leaf, and you could hear it. Then this light would surround me, and it would seem as if there wasn't any band there, and I'd go right through and be all right. It was something I never understood.

What's going on? I suppose we could say it had something to do with the brain and nervous system, but what?

In a similar vein Vladimir Horowitz, the classical pianist, told Helen Epstein (Music Talks: Conversations with Musicians): “The moment that I feel that cutaway–the moment I am in uniform–it's like a horse before the races. You start to perspire. You feel already in you some electricity to do something.” Again, the nervous system, getting him primed, for what?

For this?

“When I'm right and the band is right and the music is right,” [Sonny] Rollins said, “I feel myself getting closer to the place where the sound is less polished and more aboriginal. That's what I'm striving for. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge once told a guy he could only reach a divine state in performance four or five times a year. That sounds about right for me.”

A divine state? What's that – perhaps it's another one of those things that the nervous system rigs up, no? Perhaps. We might also wonder whether or not it's the same thing that Martin Luther had in mind when he talked of music as “the greatest treasure in the world.” And yet they lived in such different worlds, after all: Martin Luther, Sonny Rollins, Roy Eldridge, and Vladimir Horowitz.

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

A few years ago I decided I should learn a few card tricks. Like tying a necktie, eating with chopsticks, or building a fire, it seemed like the sort of thing everyone should have in their skill-set. As a person with mediocre dexterity I need tricks which don't depend on slight-of-hand. Fortunately for me the combinations, symmetries, and probabilities of playing cards means there is a rich tradition of card tricks which depend on math more than skill. That's the sort of trick even I can do.

My current favorite is Colm Mulcahy's Ice Cream Flavor Trick. Mulcahy is a mathematician and magician at Spellman College. He has written numerous articles and books on math and card tricks. You can find links to many of them on his homepage.

While idly shuffling cards I stopped and wondered: what is the chance that a deck of cards has ever occurred before in exactly the same order as the ones in my hand? [1]

On the one hand, I knew that there are many, many, many possible orderings of a 52 card deck. On the other hand, there are millions of decks of cards being shuffled all the time. Just imagine all the shuffling in Vegas alone!

The answer is truly startling! I was surprised and delighted by the how incredibly likely my deck of cards had never occurred before. Let's do the numbers together.

First, how many orderings are there for 52 card deck?

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

On the evening of March 3 in 1514, Steven is sitting next to Friar Clay in a Nottingham pub, covering his face with his hands.

“I am losing the will to live”, Steven sobs, “Death may be sweeter than life in this world of poverty, injustice and war.”

“Do not despair, my friend”, Clay says, “for the printing press will change everything.”

Let us now fast-forward 500 years and re-enact this hypothetical scene with some tiny modifications.

On the evening of March 3 in 2014, Steven is sitting next to TED-Talker Clay in a Nottingham pub, covering his face with his hands.

“I am losing the will to live”, Steven sobs, “Death may be sweeter than life in this world of poverty, injustice and war.”

“Do not despair, my friend”, Clay says, “for the internet will change everything.”

Clay's advice in the first scene sounds ludicrous to us because we know that the printing press did not usher in an era of wealth, justice and peace. Being retrospectators, we realize that the printing press revolutionized how we disseminate information, but even the most efficient dissemination tool is just a means and not the ends.

It is more difficult for us to dismiss Clay's advice in the second scene because it echoes the familiar Silicon Valley slogans which inundate us with such persistence that some of us have begun to believe them. Clay's response is an example of what Evgeny Morozov refers to as “Internet-centrism”, the unwavering belief that the Internet is not just an information dissemination tool but that it constitutes the path to salvation for humankind. In his book “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism“, Morozov suggests that “Internet-centrism” is taking on religion-like qualities:

“If the public debate is any indication, the finality of “the Internet”— the belief that it's the ultimate technology and the ultimate network— has been widely accepted. It's Silicon Valley's own version of the end of history: just as capitalism-driven liberal democracy in Francis Fukuyama's controversial account remains the only game in town, so does the capitalism-driven “Internet.” It, the logic goes, is a precious gift from the gods that humanity should never abandon or tinker with. Thus, while “the Internet” might disrupt everything, it itself should never be disrupted. It's here to stay— and we'd better work around it, discover its real nature, accept its features as given, learn its lessons, and refurbish our world accordingly. If it sounds like a religion, it's because it is.”

Morozov does not equate mere internet usage with “Internet-centrism”. People routinely use the internet for work or leisure without ascribing mythical powers to it, but it is when the latter occurs that internet usage transforms into “Internet-centrism”.

Read more »

by Kathleen Goodwin

Men worldwide may have been startled to hear a ticking as their biological clocks sputtered into existence this week. A study of Swedish children born over a nearly 30 year period revealed there are negative health outcomes for those born to older fathers. In a paper published in JAMA Psychiatry this past Wednesday researchers found that in a sample size of over 2.6 million, advanced paternal age has a detrimental effect on the mental health of offspring, with a greater risk for autism and attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, as well as likelihood of suicide attempts and low educational attainment, even when controlling for multiple other factors. These findings have the potential to drive a cultural shift in the attitudes currently directed at mothers who postpone pregnancy until later in life.

For years research has shown that women put their unborn children and themselves at increased risk for a host of issues when they delay the onset of pregnancy— the most well-known example being that children born to mothers over 35 are significantly more likely to have down syndrome than children born to younger mothers. Despite these complications, and the reality that fertility peaks in the mid to late 20s, women in developed countries are delaying having children in ever higher numbers and at increasingly later ages. This demographic shift is attributed to women prioritizing education and career advancement before marriage and children— thus while women are making up a larger percentage of law, medical and MBA classes and achieving the kind of power in business and government that second-wave feminists dreamed of, they are also still committed to fulfilling roles as mothers, and consequently putting themselves and their children at risk.

In an powerful piece on her New Yorker blog page, Amy Davidson responded with provocative insight to the controversy created by the Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, earlier in February of this year. Armstrong explained his decision to make cuts to employee retirement benefits by offering the excuse, “two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost.” The ensuing firestorm of criticism directed at Armstrong was deserved and revealed a pattern of repugnant behavior when it comes to protecting quality of life for his employees and their families throughout his career. However, Davidson aptly connects this one example to a larger problem in American culture, where young adults are expected to delay the responsibilities of family in order to study and/or work round the clock. Davidson writes:

“We have an economy, culture, and workplace that push women and families in a certain direction, and then treat the higher risks they take on as theirs alone. Contempt replaces community. If Armstrong illustrates anything, it is the quickness with which a modern company can abandon those who reshaped their lives on its behalf, and made it rich.”

Read more »

by Madhu Kaza

There's a story I can't get out of my head. Except it's not a story, only the barest, stray thread. One winter morning a little over a year ago I turned on the radio to hear: “At least ten girls were killed yesterday as they were collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan. The girls, said to range in age from nine to eleven died in an apparent bomb blast . . . . In a separate incident in Kabul . . . ” And just like that the news ticked on. On that particular day the news cycle was consumed with the tragedy of the mass murder of twenty children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Reports patched together detailed timelines of what had happened at the school. As the names were released, stories of each of the victims began to take shape. And commentators launched into debates about gun control and school safety. I searched online for more information about the Afghan girls but the news became less and less clear. There were nine dead, not ten, and two girls were injured. There might have been one boy in the group. The youngest was possibly six, the oldest perhaps thirteen. The explosion was due to a land mine planted by the Taliban. Or it might have been a mine from the Soviet era.

It's a story I can't forget though there's so little to remember. Ten girls. Ages nine to eleven. Collecting firewood. Eastern Afghanistan. Died. When I think how strange it is that this particular incident, so meager in its narrative, should haunt me as it does, I am reminded of Alice Oswald's extraordinary book length poem Memorial.

Memorial is Oswald's version or “excavation” of Homer's Iliad. Only in a very loose sense can it be considered a translation. Oswald writes in her introduction that she has brushed away the narrative of The Iliad, and what remains is a “bipolar” poem that includes only the biographies of the dead soldiers and the similes of the original. The book according to Oswald is an “oral cemetery.”

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

One fish says, “So, how's the water?”
The other fish replies, “What water?”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Richard Stallman, shuffling onto the stage at Cooper Union's Great Hall. Accompanying Stallman is the veritable Platonic Ideal of a potbelly; left behind are his shoes, which are almost immediately discarded and left by the podium. Padding around the same stage where, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave the speech that ignited his political career, Stallman proceeded to subject his New York audience to a rambling disquisition on freedom and computer code, consisting of oftentimes astonishingly petty invective, and peppered with various requests that veered from the absurd to the hopelessly idealistic, but which ultimately served to drive away a good portion of the audience, including myself, well before its conclusion, nearly three hours later.

Why is this recent encounter with a nerd's nerd at all worth recounting? (While entertaining, I will forego the petty bits, although you can view the whole talk here). Simply because, in computing circles, Stallman is an archetype: the avenging angel of free software. Over 30 years ago, he founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which has since that time been developing the GNU system, a free operating system that was completed by the addition of Linus Torvald's Linux kernel. It is no understatement to say that the smooth functioning and scalability of much of the Internet is thanks to the overall availability and robustness of the GNU/Linux operating system and its various derivative projects. These, in turn, are the result of probably millions of hours of volunteer labor.

So when Stallman says ‘free,' he really means it, and this is where the trouble begins. According to the FSF, free software allows anyone

(0) to run the program,

(1) to study and change the program in source code form,

(2) to redistribute exact copies, and

(3) to distribute modified versions.

This is a simple and powerful set of axioms. It also requires certain conditions to be met, the most challenging of which is access to the code in its source form. Any time the chain of modification and distribution is broken – say, if the person modifying the code chooses to make the source code unavailable, or chooses to charge a fee for the modification – the code is no longer considered free. Of course, ‘unfree' code can also be made free (this is in fact what Torvalds did with Linux).

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Jinn: a spirit capable of appearing in human and animal forms and influencing humankind for either good or evil.

A startling laugh, low as if muffled by a dupatta, an old net dupatta I imagine, makes me turn but there is no one there. The walls are the color of vanilla ice cream and the décor is simple and modern apart from a few objects like doilies with Baluchi embroidery, an heirloom paandaan, a tray from the copper bazaar. There are the usual consumer electronics and curtains in a thick, embossed fabric— good for darkening the room against the defeating heat. A whiff of chambeli oil hangs in the punishing late June air for a moment. I recall how the jinn are attracted to fragrances too sweet on the human olfactory scale. Like animals, the jinn have a different wavelength for sensory perception. That low laugh might have actually been much lower or higher for non-human ears, the scent not as sickly sweet. Both probably came from the realm of the jinn, though my rational mind would not allow that thought.

Rumor has it that the maid, a middle aged stocky woman, is either a jinn in human form or a medium for the jinn. She speaks only when spoken to but she speaks in two distinct timbres: one, an ordinary female voice, the other heavy like gravel, a wolf-like growl. It’s hard to predict how the next utterance will sound, whether it will come from the woman or the jinn she houses in her body. Her name is Ishrat, which means luxury. In Urdu Ishrat is a male name too. She is barely noticeable in my peripheral vision in her hand-me-down lawn suit in candy colors as she goes about her usual cooking and cleaning but then her eyes meet mine in the mirror she is dusting. I feel a chill when I glimpse her classic jinn face—eyebrows arching high over the most ancient eyes—eyes brimming with the intense heat of summer afternoons, quicksand eyes that one will descend into uncontrollably; nose—an alignment of broken things, forehead vertiginously high like the ceiling of old train stations.

I don’t want the jinn to detect my loss of composure. I reach for the tea tray she has placed next to my stack of books. The sound of china is comforting and when I go back to my reading, I tell myself never to look into those eyes again. Extracting myself won’t be easy the next time. I’m pulled by the weight of the long afternoon, its lull, and Urdu’s sonorous script, each looping “laam” and “noon” cradling me, but I cannot let myself fall asleep in Ishrat’s presence. The minute I close my eyes, I’m reminded of other jinns I’ve known in stories. There was one that possessed my aunt when she was six or seven— a docile and petit girl, she acquired superhuman strength for no apparent reason and became capable of knocking down several grown men at a time until she was exorcized. This was the India of my imagination and my grandmother’s memories where women who were careless about covering their hair when they were near aged trees were certain to attract the attention of the jinn. I recall long hair, coconut oil, the slow combing and the washing with scented amla, the advice to keep away from the sprawling Oak and Tamarind.

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Last November, creationist objectors in Texas tried yet again to sabotage the state's textbook adoption process. One of the objections concerned the age of the Earth, using the long refuted cooling argument that goes back to Kelvin in the 1860s. An online conversation about the matter directed me to the real flaw in Kelvin's reasoning, which is different from what I had believed (see my earlier posting). Further digging led me to the oldest formulation I know of Intelligent Design (ID) creationism (of course, it was not called that, but “Unsolved Problems of Science”. Now over a century old, it already shows the key features of “modern” ID, even down to the link with conservative politics, and the despicable misuse of fraudulently edited quotations.

Kelvin's reasoning was based on a very simple physical model, heat flow from a solid sphere initially at uniform high temperature. This model, and estimates of the rate of heat flow and temperature gradient, led him to assign a maximum age of a mere hundred million years, with the most probable age around a quarter of that. And yet the argument from radiometric dating, something with which Kelvin himself was never happy, gives overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Rutherford, and everyone else for decades afterwards, thought that Kelvin's error lay in the neglect of the heat generated within the earth by radioactive decay itself. Actually, it is a mistake to imagine that radioactive heating has all that much to do with it, and I must confess to having repeated this mistake many times in my own teaching and writing.

The real error (details here and in Pt I) had been pointed out a decade before Rutherford confronted Kelvin at the Royal Institution, and three years before radioactivity had even been discovered. Kelvin's calculation only considered heat transfer by conduction, whereas convection from depth is far more important. Convection can efficiently transport heat over long distances. It would have brought far more to the surface than Kelvin's model allowed for, meaning that it must have taken far longer to get rid of it. John Perry, one of Kelvin's own former students, was sure that Kelvin's estimate of the earth's age was far too low, suggested that Kelvin could have drastically underestimated the efficiency of heat transfer, and even suggested that the Earth's interior could be in a partly molten state, making convection possible.

Christ Church College. The future Lord Salisbury studied here, but did not sit his final examination.

In this piece, I want to talk about two things, how I learned the error of my ways, and exactly what it was that goaded Perry into an uncharacteristic public quarrel with his former mentor. I will also very briefly discuss the enormous importance of mantle convection for the present-day science of geology.

Read more »

Un About

snow glittered to the wavelength of a streetlamp
on swells and bellies of the yard slope
down across a white savannah
from asphalt to nirvana

at a window I stood looking out
forever in a moment
in today or yesterday or mañana
enmeshed, engaged, rapt
and un about

senseless to the dialogic loop ever playing in this headspace
of fruitless whys and how-comes a chronic head case

stopped now ….. still ….. synchronized ….. void

empty ….. apophatic ….. absent ….. unalloyed

vacant as a black hole

silent as the innards of a whole note
vibrating to the rhythm of sixteenths

unmoored, unsyntaxed
adrift and tuned

until a plow truck threw its plume across the driveway
and I was back and bound again, too soon

.
by Jim Culleny
2/8/14

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Perhaps a reasonable proxy for wisdom is the ability to stop thinking when you want, to interrupt the tortured spiraling progression of thoughts that serve no function and lead nowhere, the symbolic productions of a machine gone mad. Like much else, this can (and, I think, should) be approached as a skill that can be practiced, as part of a general package of cultivable techniques and approaches that help in being happy, especially for those not naturally gifted in that way and especially for the anxious neurotic, constantly harried by thoughts that something is not right and that it will all come crashing down[1].

As a (mostly) former obsessive I'm still not very good at this, but I'm thankful for all the time spent practicing. Obsessions and compulsions take an ordinary pattern (that of a persistent thought or behavior) and, by carrying it to an extreme, reveal a pathology that was always there. Being confronted by a thought that won't leave is a dramatic education in the possibility that perhaps the thought wasn't yours to start with and that its trajectory and dynamics are unsettling and alien. These moments shake the uncritical notion of a unified self. I imagine we all have these experiences as we grow and realize that a single unified self is either an illusion (for the Buddhists) or a distant goal lying at the end of many sublimations (for the Nietzscheans and psychoanalysts)[2].

What does one do with unwanted thoughts? The famous example of instructing someone to not think of a pink elephant shows that active suppression is generally futile. It takes constant energy and vigilance, which is exhausting. And anyhow, pushing thoughts away gives them increased significance and emotional valence making them more likely to return again and again. This is all the more true of obsessional thoughts, which are often terrifying; a panicked suppression does nothing but bring them back.

Read more »

by Omar Ali

This headline refers to two separate (though distantly related) subjects. First, to Pakistan. Apparently the Pakistani army is now conducting some operation or the other against some group or the other in North Waziristan and other “tribal areas” infested by various Islamic militant groups under the umbrella of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This operation was preceded by some farcical negotiations in which the Nawaz Sharif government nominated a group of powerless “moderate Islamists” to conduct negotiations with the TTP. It is likely that these “talks” were never meant to be serious, and that Nawaz Sharif and his advisors intended to use them to expose the bloodthirsty Taliban and their civilian supporters (like Imran Khan’s PTI and the Jamat-e-Islami) as unreliable and extremist elements against whom a military operation was unavoidable. This gambit had worked once before in Swat in 2009 when a peace deal was signed with the Swat Taliban and they were given control of Swat. They proceeded to behead people, whip women and begin marching into neighboring regions, thus showing that no reasonable peace was possible and only a military operation would work against them.  But the Taliban 2.0 have learned some lessons of their own. They announced their own farcical committee (briefly including cricket star turned political buffoon Imran Khan) to hold negotiations with Nawaz Sharif’s farcical committee.  Within a few days the airwaves were dominated by Taliban representatives asking Pakistanis if they wanted Islamic law or preferred to be ruled by corrupt Western dupes? The Taliban, who routinely behead captives and even play football with their heads, were suddenly respected stakeholders and negotiation partners, holding territory, nominating representatives and promising peace if the state acted reasonably and responsibly.  At the same time, their “bad cop” factions continued to knock off opponents and spread terror (including a gruesome video in which they brought freshly killed, blood soaked headless bodies of soldiers they had taken captive 3 years ago, in broad daylight, in an open pickup truck, and dumped them on a “government controlled” road in Mohmand).

Read more »

by Mara Jebsen

In 2006, when I had finished my MFA; when I had completed a poetry class with a famous professor I worshipped; when I had absorbed the fact that despite my increasingly panicky efforts to write a true good poem I had not only not been anointed but had not even been remarkable within the small class, I shut down completely. This shutting-down lasted almost a year, and it seemed to signal some real weakness of character. A real writer would not stop writing just because she had not been chosen by a professor. A real writer would just write.

But I didn't. Then, slowly, I did, but with a strange tic. I had to draw a line down the center of a page so that it was made of two columns. In the thin columns I could write strange little stories in the voice of someone like myself. They were emphatically not poems because I could no longer write poems. But they had to stop at the line, and so they were not exactly stories, either. I filled several notebooks with these little things, all the while still worrying that I was not writing, because I did not think I was writing. The pieces–I don't know what to call them–seem to me to be written by a woman named Lita. Lita has since become a minor character in a play I am writing about ex-patriot family businesses in West Africa. At some point in the play, she throws away her manuscript. It falls into the audience. Here is one of the pieces that falls.

In Which I Try to Tell A Frenchman What It Is Like To Grow Up Here

We lived near the ocean,

But it meant very little.

Almost Nothing appeared on the horizon

That thing just sliced

Your dreams crossways. Did you know, Alexandre

It’s the only straight line in nature, besides

The plumb line? I’ve heard

They credit geometry to sea-side peoples

Because of a circle’s enormous joke . . .

The rest of the world is a dance

Is a series of arabesques,

And who would have guessed

At the use of straight lines,

That they’d behave

So predictably and that the earth

Would fall under the sway of men

Enthralled by a magical stickish order?

Read more »