by Misha Lepetic

“What would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?”
~ Thoreau, Walking

The inimitable Liam Heneghan, fellow 3QD-ista, recently posted the following idea for a sit-com:

It is true that Thoreau had great misgivings about the railroad coming to Concord, and he correctly surmised that the train would make his beloved town a suburb of Boston. Somewhat inevitably, this has lead to the following sketches for a series, most likely to be submitted to the History Channel for immediate development into that esteemed channel's next surefire hit. (Note to my agent: While some of these may not seem funny, I can assure you that they are. Humor in the nineteenth century was just a bit different from ours, is all.)

Henry David Thoreau, philosopher, naturalist and iconoclast, is bored and restless. He starts farming beans in his front yard but is soon issued a citation by the homeowners' association. At the next association meeting, with his case on the agenda, he stands up and, in his defense, gives a rousing speech about self-reliance. This is not especially well received. Thinking they can salvage the situation, Thoreau's children persuade their science teacher to make the bean plot their submission to the science fair. However, in order for it to be a legitimate science experiment, the teacher insists that half the plot be planted with GMO beans.

*

Thoreau goes for a walk in the woods and gets lost. He is found and saved by a troop of Boy Scouts. In gratitude, he teaches them to forage for food. However, one of the scouts has a nut allergy. After a lengthy and anxious detour at a hospital, Thoreau returns home with a lawsuit on his hands. (Production note: Scoutmaster to be played by William H. Macy).

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by Jalees Rehman

Summer grass:
That's all that remains
Of warriors' dreams.

–Basho

My favorite scientific experiments are those which resemble a haiku: simple and beautiful with a revelatory twist. This is why the haiku is very well suited for expressing scientific ideas in a poetic form. Contemporary haiku poets do not necessarily abide by the rules of traditional Japanese haiku, such as including a word which implies the season of the poem or the 17 (5-7-5) syllable structure of three verses. Especially when writing in a language other than Japanese, one can easily argue that the original 5-7-5 structure was based on Japanese equivalents of syllables and that there is no need to apply this syllable count to English-language haiku. Even the reference to seasons and nature may not apply to a modern-day English haiku about urban life or, as in my case, science.

Does this mean that contemporary haiku are not subject to any rules? In the introductory essay to an excellent anthology of English-language haiku, “Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years“, the poet Billy Collins describes the benefit of retaining some degree of structure while writing a haiku:

Many poets, myself included, stick to the basic form of seventeen syllables, typically arranged in three lines in a 5-7-5 order. This light harness is put on like any formal constraint in poetry so the poet can feel the comfort of its embrace while being pushed by those same limits into unexpected discoveries. Asked where he got his inspiration, Yeats answered, “in looking for the next rhyme word.” To follow such rules, whether received as is the case with the sonnet or concocted on the spot, is to feel the form pushing back against one's self-expressive impulses. For the poet, this palpable resistance can be a vital part of the compositional experience. I count syllables not out of any allegiance to tradition but because I want the indifference and inflexibility of a seventeen-syllable limit to balance my self-expressive yearnings. With the form in place, the act of composition becomes a negotiation between one's subjective urges and the rules of order, which in this case could not be simpler or firmer.

The seventeen syllable limit – like any other limit or rule in poetic forms – provides the necessary constraints that channel our boundless creativity to create a finite poem. It is a daunting task to sit down with a pen and paper, and try to write a poem about a certain topic. Our minds and souls are flooded with a paralyzing plethora of images and ideas. But, as Collins suggests, if we are already aware of certain rules, it becomes much easier to start the process of poetic filtering and negotiation.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Language on the tongue is need and desire and now, but more potently, it is the taste of ancestral memory: the truest flavor of our origins, almost indescribable and yet at the root of the desire for expression itself, like Michelangelo’s Adam reaching for God, permanently in pursuit of exactitude but touching only the energies emanating from it. Language is a wick in the space between their hands, burning with the desire for precision, joining past and present. The words we rummage for most desperately are the ones that were let loose by our forebears to inhabit this space between identification and imagination. It is in the nature of such words to float, like pollen, into the future, and germinate into poetry. If ever there was a language that hangs like pollen, it is Urdu— and a poetic form that allows for those floating, protean, seemingly disharmonious or paradoxical ideas to engage with one another, it is the ghazal.

Urdu, a hybrid, hangs between its many “parent” languages, between the divergent cultures and histories of its speakers— the people of the Indian subcontinent; it hangs between the imperial past of Indian Muslims who ruled India for a millennium, and their unique partitions post-Raj (British rule: 1857-1947), their new identities in our times as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. As the state language of Pakistan, Urdu hangs between the educated and the unlettered, between regional culture and ruling culture, between serving the immediate function as a communication tool for people of different provinces (with their own linguistic traditions and literatures) and the civilizational function of tethering the heritage of a millennium-long imperial culture to Pakistan’s evolving identity. It hangs ready to pollinate new time with old time.

“Urdu,” a variant of the Turkic “Ordu,” meaning “camp” or “army,” evolved due to the mixing of languages by soldiers employed in the extensive military of the Muslim empires of India (711-1857). Native speakers of North Indian languages as well as Persian, Arabic, Turkic Chagatai and others (English among them) were part of the army and the court, as various Muslim dynasties themselves came from different linguistic backgrounds and constantly imported not only soldiers, but scholars, builders and artisans from neighboring regions. A language with many dialects in the early phases of its formation, Urdu developed over centuries and came to find somewhat of a standardized form around the seventeenth century.

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by Tamuira Reid

Oliver, take your binky out.

Uh-uh.

Now.

Nope.

He wriggles free from my grasp and stands under a small television haphazardly jetting out from the waiting room wall. I hate waiting rooms. You're always waiting for something bad to happen.

A woman appears, says she is The Doctor, and begins to watch television with my two year-old son. He notices her but doesn't acknowledge her, a habit he's picked up.

What are you looking at, Oliver?

He grunts. Shrugs.

I asked, what do you see up there?

Without turning his head, he answers, It Nemo.

Close. It is a show about some burly fishermen in Alaska.

In her office, I'm told to take a seat in the corner and not to participate. I stuff my hands in my coat pockets. Unstuff them. Cross and uncross my legs.

They play cars. Look at books. Count blocks. She scribbles on a legal pad, glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose.

Eventually Oliver takes to a corner, rolls around on the carpet, and disengages except to push a tiny toy motorcycle with his finger. He looks bored.

I have some questions for you, she says, facing me.

Okay.

When did you first notice…

And it happens. I crack. She is so shrink-y and I really need shrink-y. I tell her all of our secrets in rapid-fire sentences, the weird little things that only Oliver and I know about. How he arranges everything into long rows. How he doesn't always answer when I call his name. How he can scream for hours, like he's trying to fight off a piece of himself. But I don't tell her how he pees in the houseplants. That one is mine.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

A few weeks ago the Numberphile website posted a short video. The video discussed an “astounding” sum and got considerable press (the video has 1,523,719 views so far). It appeared on both Slate and 3QD. The sum? It's:

3QD included links to the firestorm the video created (I know, I know, I too was shocked that the Internet was up in arms over something). But I was surprised by the kerfuffle. The Numberphile videos I had seen featured James Grime giving well thought out discussions of interesting bits of math. I am happy to recommend them to anyone.

This video, however, is complete rubbish [1]. The hosts cram a remarkable number of mathematical outrages into 8 minutes. But they all come from a single anthropological source:

Mathematicians are Sherlocks and physicists are Mycrofts.

Both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes are brilliant, devoted to reason, socially awkward, and sometimes downright unpleasant. But just the same we appreciate and even sometimes like them. Where they differ is in means versus ends.

Sherlock follows his reasoning wherever it leads. He never hesitates along the path of reason no matter the final outcome. As he says, “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'' Sherlock believes that he serves only The Truth. The means justify the ends.

Sherlock's brother, on the other hand, is perfectly willing commit all manner of sins as long as the end result is the desired one. The ends justify the means. In the TV series at least, Mycroft serves Queen and Country. He has the luxury of an ultimate authority to judge what is right and what is wrong.

Just so, physicists have Mother Nature. They are free to commit all manner of (mathematical) abuses because they know at the end of the day Mother Nature will judge their work as right or wrong. All sins are forgiven if they give an answer which matches experimental data. Indeed, less than a minute into the Numberphile video the hosts show our seemingly ridiculous sum on page 24 of a standard reference on string theory. And indeed it's true that this sum is used in string theory, quantum physics, etc.

It is entirely reasonable for physicists to take this view. By playing fast and loose they travel farther and see more. They can do this safe in the knowledge that Mother Nature will eventually catch them if they go too far. And it should certainly be said that physics has always been a rich source of new ideas and insights for mathematics.

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by Dwight Furrow

An advertising poster of “AKADAMA Port Wine” for Suntory Limited. Creative Commons License

Valentine's Day is fast approaching; it's time to think about which wine will precisely calibrate the proper mood. But why wine? Why not a nice craft beer or a glass of orange juice? Why is wine the beverage that signals romance?

I would imagine wine and romance have been linked since our ancestors first discovered the benefits of moderate inebriation. The loss of inhibition and gain in confidence make wine a natural ally in games of seduction. But the relaxing of inhibitions is not the only benefit that wine confers on the amorous. Romance requires illusion. We fall in love with an idealized version of the beloved, believing he/she has all the virtues we admire and none of the negative traits we shun. Evolution has designed us to drop the skepticism when presented with the promise of procreation.

The Roman poet Ovid, in his 17 A.D. work “The Art of Love” says of wine that, “It warms the blood, adds luster to the eyes, and wine and love have ever been allies”. Given the paltry proportion of “beautiful people” to ordinary shlubs, adding “luster to the eyes” may be the most significant contribution wine has made to human existence. But, in fact, scientists have demonstrated this effect with beer as well—it has come to be known as “beer goggles”. Inebriation cannot explain the connection between wine and romance since any alcohol would suffice—yet, a can of “bud” just doesn't have the same meaning as a bottle of Dom Perignon. There must be something else about wine that connects it to romance.

Is there something inherently and uniquely amorous about fermented grape juice? In fact the history of wine as an aphrodisiac is as lengthy as that of food. It gets a less-than-enthusiastic mention in the Talmud and a much more enthusiastic discussion in the Roman historian Pliny's 1st Century Natural History, where he recommends wine be mixed with the muzzle and feet of a lizard or the right testicle of a donkey to cure a reluctant libido. Are you feeling the romance yet?

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by Kathleen Goodwin

It goes without saying, yet, we keep saying it anyways, that the United States government has had its share of problems in recent months. From the federal shutdown to the Affordable Care Act fiasco, it hasn't been a period to build confidence or pride in the American government. Still, many Americans would find it preposterous if someone were to suggest that the U.S. should turn its gaze eastward in order to learn a thing or two about how a democracy should work. Specifically, to the only other democracy on the planet with more citizens than the U.S. itself. While India and the U.S. may be the world's largest democracies, the similarities may just about end there. The U.S. approaches nearly 250 years as a democracy, and almost a century as a global superpower, while India has yet to achieve seven decades of democratic independence and is unanimously labeled the next world power or the next abysmal failure, depending on the prevailing sentiment any given week. Yes, we in the U.S. may be floundering when it comes to democratic legitimacy and trust in the government, but in India the situation must be infinitely more corrupt, more complicated and just, overall, worse. What could the older, wealthier and more socially progressive United States possibly learn from India? As 2014 gets underway, the two countries are preoccupied with very different political debates and controversies…or so it may appear.

As the momentum builds towards a national election in India this spring, it is clear that Indian politics is facing a turning point where the established co-dominance of the incumbent Congress and its long time right-wing rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), faces a challenge not just from regional parties, as in the past, but from a new national party that plans to contest the national election.

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by Ahmed Humayun

(This is the second post on Pakistan's struggle against militancy. Part I is here).

To prevail against an insurrection, a state must fight on many fronts. It must construct a comprehensive military and political strategy, strengthen its institutional capacity to fight an internal war, and mobilize public support for a protracted struggle. Above all, an insurgency is a contest between the state and its challengers over legitimacy and credibility. In this clash of narratives, the state must persuade the population that its actions are those of a representative, duly constituted government attempting to restore its control even as the rebels repudiate the fundamental legitimacy of the state.

So far in Pakistan the militant groups are winning the war of narrative. As I wrote last time, the Pakistani Taliban is by no means a monolith but its different factions do come together around a clear strategic story. Insurgent propaganda states that the rebellion's goal is to replace an illegitimate, un-Islamic government subservient to Washington with an Islamic state. Their war is defensive—for Islam and against America. The state, on the other hand, speaks in contradictory voices. Some say that the state must fight until the rebels lay down their arms, forswear the use of violence, and respect the rule of law, while others insist on immediate, unconditional negotiations. The truth is that ending the turmoil within Pakistan requires some adroit combination of fighting and talking—but only if they are aspects of an integrated strategy that has as its aim the restoration of state control and that realistically accounts for the ambitions of the rebels, which are revolutionary, and which they have pursued from the mountains in the tribal areas to major urban centers across the heartland.

Yet advocates of negotiation —including leading politicians, retired generals, and influential pundits—blame the state and its alliance with Washington rather than the militants for fomenting the violence. As a result it is widely believed in Pakistan that the war against militancy has been foisted on the country by the United States; that insurgent violence is merely retaliation for Pakistani military aggression and American drone strikes in the tribal areas; and that conflict will cease when these operations end. The result is that formula recited by many: ‘This is not our war.' This dominant narrative has had a negative effect on the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the public, created demoralization in the country's army and police forces, and emboldened the insurgents.

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What God Says

I place before you a bowl of evidence
but will never make you eat

Chance is what you’re up against,
and the only is of me you’ll meet

You can pray until your tongue expires
and never know my heart’s desire

I roll the future out mysteriously,
you trace my trail of crumbs through mires

You profusely write of who I am
as if I were like you a man

You cannot know the I of me
unless you crack the I of thee

In the light and in the gloom
I beat a drum and hum your tune
.

by Jim Culleny
1/24/14

by Paul Braterman

Lord Kelvin (Smithsoinian Instituion Libraries collection)

Kelvin calculated that the Earth was probably around 24 million years old, from how fast it is cooling. Rutherford believed that Kelvin’s calculation was wrong because of the heat generated by radioactivity. Kelvin was wrong, but so was Rutherford. The Earth is indeed many times older than Kelvin had calculated, but for completely different reasons, and the heat generated by radioactive decay has nothing to do with it.

Disclosure: in my introduction to the Scientific American Classic, Determining the Age of the Earth, and elsewhere, I have like many other authors repeated Rutherford’s argument with approval, without paying attention to Rutherford’s own warning that qualitative is but poor quantitative, and without bothering to check whether the amount of heat generated by radioactivity is enough to do the job. He thought it was but we now know it isn’t. It was only when chatting online (about one of the few claims in the creationist literature that is even worth discussing) that I discovered the error of my ways.

On the face of it, things could not be plainer. Kelvin had calculated the age of the Earth from how fast heat was flowing through its surface layers. An initially red hot body would have started losing heat very quickly, but over geological time the process would have slowed, as a relatively cool outer crust formed. His latest and most confident answer, reached in 1897 after more than 50 years of study, was in the range of around 24 million years.[1]

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by Mara Jebsen

Rodin was famous for his fragments, and, in his era, hotly defended the choice to sculpt just a hand, or a torso, or a foot melting back into its original rock. The character Bernard, in Virginia Woolf's experimental “The Waves” seems to have revealed something about Woolf's thoughts on the unfinished, as he goes about talking, story-spinning, and worrying about the way life seems to accumulate more than culminate, so that all we get is phrases, bits. While coherence–in story, in body–provides a comforting pleasure for the audience, artists who know how to make wholes sometimes get weary of the falseness that an orderly whole brings with it–and take a pleasure in the fragment, the seemingly unfinished, strangely perfect, part.

I know, from my work as a writing teacher, that almost any student can produce a promising fragment, but very few can manage a coherent whole–in terms of idea, or story– without a great deal of coaxing, insistance, and endless re-writing. The work of a beginner is to complete the fragment. But perhaps the work of a master is to let the fragment be.

As a beginning storyteller myself, I find that whole tales are elusive, and the images arrive like little shards of a broken mirror. What to make of them–that's the hard part. What follows is the first piece of a tiny “novel” that is all pieces, inspired by a Sufi tale I heard three years ago, and subsequently garbled in my mind. In it, a man is visited by three different messengers, all strangers, each of whom require that he leap violently away from the life he is leading, and begin again. In the third phase of the man's life, he begins to show signs of spiritual enlightenment, and he ends as a mystic. The story, for some reason, made dozens of images–partial ones stuck in angled mirror-shards–arrive in my head for two years. In my version, the eventual mystic is a girl. She is young, wealthy, blank.

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TODAY WINDY THEN SHOWERS

Gold-plated heels
On heart-shaped leaves
Calf-highs below
Slim band of flesh
Flirty pleats creased
Above naked knees
Ruby clutch releases
Jangling of keys
Wanton cornrows unbraided
In last night's storm

In last night's storm
Wanton cornrows unbraided
Jangling of Keys
Ruby Clutch releases
Above naked knees
Flirty Pleats creased
Slim band of flesh
Below calf-highs
On heart-shaped leaves
Gold-plated heels

By Rafiq Kathwari

by Lisa Lieberman

I used to teach a course on French colonialism, from the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century through the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). On the first day of class, we read Jean de Brunhoff's classic children's book, The Story of Babar. De Brunhoff's story can be viewed as “an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers,” to quote New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik:

the naked African natives, represented by the “good” elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission. The elephants that have assimilated to the ways of the metropolis dominate those which have not. The true condition of the animals—to be naked, on all fours, in the jungle—is made shameful to them, while to become an imitation human, dressed and upright, is to be given the right to rule.

Gopnik, I should add, distances himself from such political readings of the book. He sees Babar as both a manifestation of the French national character, circa 1930 (when de Brunhoff's wife first came up with the tale, which she told to the couple's young sons as a bedtime story) and a gentle parody of it, “an affectionate, closeup caricature of an idealized French society.”

I remember enjoying the book as a child, and I've read it to my own children, but for all its charm, I'm not willing to let Babar off the hook quite so easily. The business of the civilizing mission—the “native” elephants adopting the values and behavior of the humans who inhabit the city—is cringe-inducing enough, but what really troubles me is de Brunhoff's ending. Here the fantasies of French nativists come true. The elephants come and immediately assimilate, recognizing the superiority of the mother country, hang around long enough to entertain their hosts with anecdotes about their exotic origins, and then they go home.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

In Spring 2003, as a first year doctoral student at Arizona State University, I took a class on queuing theory. This refers to the science that has its focus on reducing delays, irrespective of where they may be experienced: at a traffic signal; over the phone to speak to a representative (music and ads playing in the background); or, more critically, in a virtual queue of hundreds of patients, each waiting for an organ transplant.

My class required each student to do a hands-on project in a real setting. I chose mine to be the nearest supermarket, a busy metropolitan Safeway store. Broadly speaking, the two big pieces in any queueing study are: (1) how quickly people/requests arrive, and (2) how quickly they are serviced. The interplay of these determines the probability of delays. So for my project at Safeway, I decided to focus primarily on collecting data on customer arrivals and checkout times.

I talked to the store manager, Scott, about my plan. He was a tall, blond man, dressed formally, gentle but with a clear sense of authority. He was immediately worried and didn't get what I was up to. I tried to convince him by suggesting that my data might be useful. Scott was (quite rightly) skeptical, but I got some sort of an affirmation from him. You can't ask customers any questions, he said sternly, and I promised him that.

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by Randolyn Zinn

Meditative Rose by Salvador Dali

Owen

He walks into a millinery shop in Back Bay, looking for a straw Panama.

“Do you have any Persian lamb Papakhas?” he asks, just for the hell of it.

“We don’t work with skins,” the milliner replies, coiling a cloth measuring tape between his fingers. In the back workroom, a hot iron hisses as held by a red-faced girl with chubby arms, who yawns as she presses a piece of striped ribbon.

“Do you know,” Owen says, eager to impress the shopkeeper, “that President Karzai’s Afghan Karacul hat is made from the downy fur of aborted lamb fetuses?”

The milliner sniffs. “Is there something I can help you with, sir?”

Owen tries on every hat in the store. The porkpie is too retro. The Basque beret a bit better, and in the gray Fedora with a white grosgrain ribbon band, he’s a dead ringer for a 1920’s Chicago gunrunner. Not good.

“I’ll take this one in straw,” he says, fingering a Borsalino. “How much?”

“Only in felt, sir. We only deal in felt. And wool.”

Owen’s neck reddens and puffs out like the feathers on a parrot. “How idiotic,” he spits. “Aren’t you a hat store? I want a hat.”

He storms out of the shop and a little bell at the top of the door jangles like an angry fairy when it closes behind him. He knows he’s been unreasonable, but can’t help himself. He’s inconsolable.

Neighbors pushing grocery carts or sitting on benches look up as he passes, the violence of his exit a palpable disturbance to their calm.

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