By Alyssa Pelish

I. What We Talk About

“It would seem that the variability of the weather was purposely devised to furnish mankind with unfailing material for conversation.” –Emily Post, Etiquette

It can’t be a difficult thing to compile a commonplace book on that most commonplace of topics, the weather. (In fact, a quick search at Amazon reveals at least six such efforts, including three variations of a Webster’s book of quotations, an illustrated book of Yankee weather proverbs, and a significant portion of the Pooh Book of Quotations.) As a fact of life, it’s inescapable (Wallace Stevens: “What is there here but weather…?”), as a conversation topic it’s failsafe (see Emily Post’s sincere advice, above), and as a failsafe conversation topic it is and has been poked and poked fun at by linguists, anthropologists, and the generally sardonic (Samuel Johnson: “It is uncommonly observed, that when two Englishman meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.”). But despite its completely talked-out status, the banality of talking about it and of talking about talking about it (or maybe because of it?), I can’t stop thinking about how we talk about the weather.

For a number of years, I wanted to believe that there were hidden depths to our talk about the weather. Of course, such small talk does contain an accepted subtext: phatic communion is what it’s called, coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski while living with the Melanesian tribes of Eastern New Guinea, where he equitably observed how “a mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawing room, fulfils a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant. Enquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things – all such are exchanged…not in order to express any thought.” He finally concluded that “each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment other.” So yes, small talk is a social gesture; it is connective tissue, not content – and weather comprises a substantial part of it. But still it seemed to me that passing talk of sunlight and snowfall and heat and humidity was different from other small talk. Or, at least, I needed to believe it.

Generations of parent-child relationships subsist on phatic communion: there may be real family feeling there, but inconsequential speech is the major mode of communication. With my father, it was always the weather. I was contemptuous of this in college, where I made a show of searching for profound conversation, while my father unfailingly tagged a report of the local weather to the documents he forwarded me, or inquired about the temperature where I was, three hours south. And I was amused by it in my mid-twenties, when he fondly informed me that, first thing every morning, he checked the forecast in the distant cities where my brother and I lived. But finally, when I was going through a depressive period and, consequently, checked the predicted hours of sunlight each day the way a diabetic monitors her blood sugar, I began to wonder about this consistent exchange of local forecasts that still largely comprised our regular if brief phone conversations.

In a piece Samuel Johnson wrote for the Idler – the one whose first line everybody who writes anything about the weather quotes—he castigates the idea that one’s mood – indeed, one’s very constitution – could be affected or determined by the weather. “Surely nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason,” he very scathingly writes, “than to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence on the weather and the wind.” He dismisses such convictions as if they were so much astrology.[1]

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by Akim Reinhardt

It wasn’t so very long ago that some Americans held people as slaves, other human beings as their own private property, as if that person were a horse or a chair, to do with, to use, abuse, exploit, beat, and rape as they pleased. What’s more, until the late 1840s most Americans thought that slavery was acceptable. The great majority found themselves somewhere along a spectrum that at one end actually exalted slavery as a positive thing, a benefit to black people they deemed radically inferior, and at the other end said, Well, it’s a real shame, and I certainly don’t condone it or want it where I live, but what’s done is done, and I guess it isn’t the worst thing in the world, and anyway there’s nothing we can do about it now, so that’s that. And in between those two ends of the spectrum rested any number of justifications and rationalizations that people used to explain, excuse, praise, rationalize, or simply accept the reality of human bondage in their nation.

Black slaves had been owned and held in every English colony prior to the Revolution and in every U.S. state after it, the practice only ending for good in the North during the early 19th century. Indeed, before the sectional crisis that began to emerge in the 1840s, the acceptance of slavery was so widespread that there was even a small number of black slaveholders, free blacks who themselves had purchased a slave or two.

Yet here we are, in our post-civil rights world, and we find the idea of slavery to be repugnant, horrific, and wretched. How could our ancestors have found this acceptable on any level, much less have engaged in it (Obviously I’m speaking as white person here.)? So it is left to us, as future generations, to try to make sense of it and, inevitably, to judge it. To cast our squinty gaze upon them and say: What the fuck. How on earth could you have been so incredibly fucked up? I just don’t get it. You people were fucking monsters.

Or there’s the whole process of murdering Indians and stealing their lands. Let’s judge that one. Pretty easy from this distance, huh?

What about the Holocaust? Care to take a whack at whether that was really, really wrong? Go ahead. My money says you’ll agree with us.

I study the past. It’s what I do for a living. Like any historian, I strive to understand the past in a historical context and on its own terms. But as a human being, I inevitably use my own presentist sense of morality and ethics when passing judgment on it. And here’s the thing. Slavery and genocides, those are easy for us now. Yeah, super wrong, we get it. But who would you have been back then, in the moment? We all want to believe that we would have been the person working to free slaves through the underground railroad, or living peaceably with Indians, or smuggling Jews out of Europe. But guess what? You wouldn’t have. Or at least, it’s not very likely. No, odds are, you would’ve been some douche bag who justified it with mealy mouthed excuses, or laid low and avoided talking about such unpleasantness. Why? I’ll tell you why.

Because when crazy shit is the norm, the lunatic fringe are the ones who embrace the right choice. If crazy is normal, then the right answer seems crazy. I’ll say it again. If crazy is the norm, then opposing it seems crazy.

Are you crazy? Are you on the fringe? I mean really on the fringe.

You know who the abolitionists were? Not to paint with too broad of a brush here, but a lot of them were religious fanatics. They were the crazies, the radicals, the ones that everyone else pointed to and said: Hey, you’re really nuts. What the hell’s wrong with you? Knock it off already. Abolitionists were the ones who regular people mocked, jeered, and cursed. They were the outsiders of their day, the lunatic fringe of the early 19th century. Slavery was normal, so a society that largely accepted slavery labeled them as crazy.

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Although, these days, my children would normally prefer to read to themselves than to have me read them a bedtime story, they both love it when I tell them stories of my family. Both my parents died before my daughters were born and so their only connection to their grandparents is through the people I conjure up with my stories. I tell them the stories my mother told me; sitting on my bed when I was home sick, she would tell me about her fights with her brother, about the family vacations to Butlins, a somewhat cheesy English vacation resort, and other stories that I would make her repeat over and over. And now my children ask me to tell them these stories, even though they can repeat them almost word for word.

Stories are important. They help us frame who we are, personally, culturally, professionally, morally. When we call up a friend and tell our latest love woes, we're telling a story; when we go for a job interview, we tell the story of our career so far. There are many types of stories, but one kind is a story that creates and shares a vision of the future, aiming to inspire people to follow the storyteller. As Steve Denning quotes in his book, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, “Winning leaders create and use future stories to help people break away from the familiar present and venture boldly ahead to create a better future…they help others understand why and what they must do to get there.” Denning gives examples of some of the most powerful uses of future storytelling, Martin Luther King's, “I have a dream” speech and Winston Churchill's, “We shall fight them on the beaches.”

I listened to President Obama's speech on Wednesday night in Arizona; it was inspiring, moving, and heartfelt as he wove the victims' stories into a compelling narrative. He told the story of the 9-year old victim, Christine Taylor Green, urging the American people to envision a different kind of future, a future where “…our democracy is as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it.” It was a powerful speech that, while seeming to sidestep partisan politics, instead urging all sides to abandon “the usual plane of point scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle”, extremely effectively scored huge political points – of course. Obama was presidential, an inspirational leader.

This speech was a vivid reminder of why people voted for him in 2008. Yet, what really struck me was this thought: clearly, this man knows how to use storytelling to inspire and lead, so why didn't he do a better job of this selling healthcare and TARP (amongst other, wildly unpopular policies). Don't get me wrong, I know he tried, but somehow he seemed to never manage to strike the same notes that he did the other day. And he should have been able to.

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When most people think of back problems they think of “slipped disks” or muscle pain. That's not what has caused my stepbrother Mark's troubles. His official diagnosis is degenerative disk disease. That means exactly what it sounds like—the disks between his vertebrae that are supposed to protect the nerves and bones are slowly deteriorating. The MRI of the area makes it look like he has a broken back: it's full of jagged discontinuities; the bones in his back are pushing straight into his nerves.

This is what has led to his disability. He has trouble walking, sitting, sleeping, doing almost any activity for any length of time—not to mention living with excruciating pain. In addition, he has arthritis in his feet that has become increasingly burdensome and painful in its own right. As I mentioned in my last column, he's finally receiving some disability payments from the government, but they are barely enough to survive on. Still, the Social Security Administration requires regular visits to a doctor to confirm that the disabling condition persists. A recurring feature of Mark's doctor visits is a urine test. There's nothing about the treatment of his back problems or arthritis that actually requires a urine sample; the test is for drugs. No, Mark's not some kind of recovering drug addict. His doctor is obligated by the government to make sure he's taking his pain medication and not selling it for profit.

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When I was in my mid-twenties, I visited Costa Rica as an ecotourist. One of the more memorable field experiences was watching a small snake consume a large toad over a period of several hours. I photographed the progression of this feast at a cost of just a few mosquito bites on my head,… or so I thought. As it turned out, the snake and mosquitoes were not the only ones dining that night.

Two weeks after my return home some of the mosquito bites had not gone away. Then one morning, I felt a small movement in the bite on my right temple. Weird. Maybe I imagined it. A while later, more movement. Definitely not my imagination. I looked closely in a mirror. At the center of the bite was a small opening with a snorkel periodically emerging from it! I had read about bot flies but never imagined becoming a host.

Bot flies have an interesting life cycle. The offspring must be deposited on living mammals or birds, but the adults, being large, noisy fliers, chase down quiet-flying mosquitoes and lay their eggs on them to avoid getting swatted. When the mosquitoes get a blood meal, the eggs, in response to the host's body heat, hatch and drop onto the host. Then they burrow into a hair follicle or sweat gland, where they begin feeding. The maggots or “bots” traverse their new home with alternating contractions of rows of hooks that encircle their bodies. As parasites go, they are usually pretty good guests despite dining on your flesh. They are careful to eliminate their waste outside their burrow, which they keep antiseptic. After a few weeks of feeding, they crawl out, drop off their host, and pupate in the soil. Some time later, an adult fly emerges to mate and repeat the cycle.

My thoughts alternated between excitement and revulsion. Fearing a highly visible scar, I squeezed the “bite” and the tiny maggot popped out like a zit. So much for that.

The next day, I noticed a now familiar movement in the upper, right rear portion of my head. This area was well concealed by hair and I thought even if this things takes a big hunk of flesh, no one will see it unless I become extraordinarily bald (so far this prognostication has held, if only just barely,…). Could I nurture my guest to pupation? As a male I thought this is probably the only opportunity I will ever have for another organism nourish itself on my living flesh. I imagined the movements of the maggot in my head were analogous to the kicking that pregnant women feel from their developing fetuses. It was thrilling, humbling, and a little alarming to suddenly be a link in the food chain rather than its terminal end.

For the next week or so, I proudly showed off my offspring to anyone who was interested. Most people were horrified but a few understood my motivation. Unfortunately, as the maggot grew it became much more active and painful. An occasional nibble could make my eyes water. Eventually it began waking me if I rolled over on it in my sleep. At that point I decided to end my experiment as a host.

Luckily, one of my housemates was from Brasil where botflies are fairly common and their removal is routine. There they hold a piece of meat over the fly's breathing hole until it begins suffocating and backs out into the meat. Alternatively, they cover the hole with Vaseline and sieze the maggot as it backs out. We tried this latter technique, and as the maggot emerged, my other housemate grabbed its snorkel with tweezers and pulled. It reflexively withdrew deeper into my scalp. A tug of war ensued and the rows of hooks dug into my flesh and felt like a hot poker. The inch long maggot, slowly stretched to over four inches before finally letting go. Note: I got lucky, because if the larva tears apart, whatever remains behind can lead to a nasty infection. As a single drop of blood oozed from my scalp, I preserved the bot in vodka.

As a result of my experience, I became much more interested in parasitology as a discipline within biology, and also began to think a bit more about humanity's place in the world. For several years afterwards, I would occasionally get tingling feelings where the botfly had once dined: A reminder that, to much of life on the planet, we are merely food.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

– The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

A Short History of DNA

Douglas Noel Adams was a best-selling British writer, born in 1952. (As you may have noticed, he had the distinct pleasure of having “DNA” as his initials.) He studied literature at Cambridge, UK, after being extended an invite on the basis of his essay writing. It appears he wanted to be part of the great university to join the the Footlights, an exclusive comedy club that was the springboard for many British comedians. There were various incredible opportunities that flew into Adams’ life, such as: being noticed by Python, Graham Chapman; being one of two non-Pythons to get a writing credit in Monty Python; performing with the likes of Pink Floyd (my favourite band) because he was friends with the incredible David Gilmour; and so on. More importantly, for us, was a radio-series he pitched to BBC Radio 4 in 1977, called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

His Hitchhiker series was not constrained to only one medium, of course. It began as this radio-show, then leaked into other mediums: a television series, a stage show, a three part DC Comics series, a computer game, and a major film. More importantly it became a series of books. Being bored easily by sounds, the written-version (and computer game) is my favourite medium of Adams’ universal message of weirdness, brilliance and the overall irony of existence in an uncaring universe.

The overarching story in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (now shortened to H2G2) is about Arthur Dent who is a dreary British Earthman (a tautology to many). Dent is friends with Ford Prefect – who is not in fact from Guildford, as he claims but “a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.” In the beginning of the story, Earth is destroyed by horrible aliens called Vogons – who appear to be based on any Home Affairs Department anywhere in the world. They are making way for a “hyperspace bypass”; an event that mirrors Dent’s troubles in the beginning of the books where his own house is about to be destroyed to make way for a bypass. (The idea of mirroring houses and planets will return later in this essay.)

From there, Dent finds himself transported all over the universe experiencing adventures that involve: hunting couches, the true nature of humanity, the bored and postmodernist ruler of the Universe (not god), god’s Final Message to his Creation, the evils of making tea, time-travel, and, famously, a cynical bowl of petunias and the first and final thoughts of a sperm whale.

We discover fascinating details about humans in the series. For example, the Guide tells us something rather interesting about human arrogance: “on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Yet, what makes these books and the whole series so important is the reflection that is thrust upon us as a species. Adams manages to deflate the petty worries and doubts of everyday human concerns by juxtaposing it to the movements and thoughts of greater, more intelligent alien-life forms: Beings who can create planets, talk to the controller of the universe, go to different dimensions and times, and so on. But throughout, he still manages to compact everyday human concerns but mock them at the same time.

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by Tom Jacobs

Over the course of many years of micturating into all manner of urinals (and, it must be said, the occasional sink, as well) from Buenos Aires to Brooklyn, my attention has been drawn again and again to the peculiar little devices that affix the stalls or the little barriers (the little planes of pressed metal that separate urinator from fellow urinator, presumably to prevent the awkward social encounters of standing exposed before complete strangers without a barrier to mitigate). I am speaking of what, in an unlovely phrase, must be called “bathroom screws”—the strange anti-theft screws used in public bathrooms. These screws are neither philips head nor flat head screws. These are what are called in the industry “hex” or “security torx” or “spanner head” (aka, “snake eye”) screws. These are screws that look usually like this * or this : (But not like the more familiar this – or this +. They are designed to prevent “you,” the faceless, nameless, and disembodied citizen from disassembling the bathroom, because you don’t have the right tools. This, it seems to me, is interesting.

To the type of person who is given to free ranging, loosely analytical reflections upon all the strange things that the world casts is his way, who finds himself attracted to strange little disturbances in the otherwise smooth surfaces of everyday life (things like the creative defacement of public advertisements, unpicked up dog poo on the sidewalk, the strange guy on the subway, the unexpected pattern of ice crystals on my kitchen window, and so forth), these bathroom screws have been a point of particular and considerable interest. What, the querulous mind asks, do these screws assume? And what do they imply?

Walter Benjamin was excited by the prospects of applying historical-materialist (or “Marxist, really, I suppose) analysis to everyday life. He thought that one of the great challenges of the age (his age, which is still, in some sense, “our” age, even if the mechanics of reproduction have gone all ethereal and immaterial) was to “assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.” What I take him to mean is something to the effect that we need to pay attention to how the little details of our experience can, if we pay proper attention to them, tell us something important about the larger world. These are what might be called “clues.”

A favorite professor (of sociology) once dropped this little iridescent observation in passing, which I immediately dutifully wrote down: “you can read a person’s class by paying attention to two things: their shoes and their watch.” These days, things have gotten much slipperier. No one wears a watch anymore, for one thing, unless out of affectation or nostalgia. And shoes? Well, rich people frequently pursue the shabby chic look while the impoverished seek to conspicuously display outward signs that they are not impoverished (I count myself among the latter, by the way…the shoes that I am now wearing I bought for ten bucks at a thrift store in Lincoln, Nebraska…these lovely suede buckskins are way above my pay grade, but you’d never know it.)

The literature of detection is inherently interesting because it hinges upon this fuzzy, slippery dimension of everyday life: that it is still possible to read the macro in the micro, to see in “the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.” This sort of thing relies upon the notion that there is a stable and coherent social order against which one can read a given particular clue. If, for instance, you lived in England during the Victorian age, you could pretty safely assume that someone sporting a tan had, in all likelihood been in the South at some point. Possibly India. Possibly in a military or civil/administrative capacity. So suddenly you know a fair amount about this stranger. There’s just no other way to obtain a tan. Callouses on your hands meant that you were a laborer.

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Book Review: It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, Michela Wrong (HarperCollins, 354pp, 2009)

by Edward B. Rackley

A fast-moving tale of intrigue, deception and murder, It’s Our Turn to Eat follows conflicted patriot John Githongo into battle with a $1 billion USD corruption scheme directed by co-workers in Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s administration. The arc of events leading to his exile in Britain, the barrage of threats by Kenyan security agents and Githongo’s prodigal return are recast through the lens of classical tragedy, but with a single, telling anomaly: there’s no redemption, no glory. This is the real world, not Hollywood.

Returning in 2007 after two years in hiding, Githongo watches Kenya plunge into a fratricidal abyss following botched national elections. Waves of inter-ethnic violence push Kenya to the brink, with much of the bloodshed fomented by political elites, six of whom are now wanted by the International Criminal Court. That political violence between ethnic communities was not caused by tribalism, as many outside observers believe, but was a direct result of state-sponsored corruption is the deep water current in this book.

Michela Wrong has written two previous accounts of visionary leaders gone mad; the first on Mobutu, ‘Le Roi du Zaire’ (In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo), the second on post-independence Eritrea (I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation). How the poorest pay the price for their country’s corrupt leadership is a recurring theme, but It’s Our Turn to Eat stands above her previous work thanks to the author’s friendship with the protagonist and proximity to his plight. Wrong risked her own safety by sheltering Githongo when he first landed in England.

The result is a distinctly personal portrayal of Githongo’s psychological makeup and his inner conflict between principle and belonging, Kenyan citizen and Kikuyu brother, as the scams reveal themselves and relations with Kibaki, initially an advocate of accountability, grow tenuous and distant. Readers will visualize a film adaptation of this thriller that, unlike John LeCarre’s The Constant Gardener, casts Africans as crusaders risking life and limb to reset the course of wayward leaders.

Githongo’s principled resistance reads at first like a dream-come-true for practitioners like myself who work in public sector reform, demand-driven accountability and anti-corruption in developing countries. The portrait of Githongo the man is fascinating and helps answer the perennial question – “Who in this country can lead real reform?” But by the end of the story, we see Githongo alone, tilting at windmills and abandoned by the global aid industry that initially championed his cause.

The closing chapters are devoted to teasing out the motivations behind donor silence, a passivity that Wrong, along with most average Kenyans, finds indistinguishable from complicity. And what of local opposition to corruption and tribalism’s destructiveness, why its seeming absence from the national psyche? Wrong has answers to that question too.

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In the middle of last month a violent storm blew across Palestine and Israel, the worst in decades. The strongest winds were felt in the East, but Gaza also took a battering. Fifteen-foot waves swept up the coast and cleared the breakwater of the fishing port, wrecking boats and gear, while a sandy wind scoured the fields and greenhouses, uprooting fruit trees, polytunnels, beehives and animal shelters. Initial assessments put the damage around $3 million – not a huge figure, perhaps, but to put it in context it is more than the entire agriculture sector received in emergency assistance in 2010. The only small compensation was for the few lucky fishermen who know where ancient wrecks lie (and who guard those secrets closely): when the water cleared the seabed yielded its customary crop of coins and artefacts from this richest of historical palimpsests.

Of course, modern-day Gazans live in nothing like the splendour of their Bronze Age, Roman or Ayyubid counterparts, and farmers and fishermen are among the poorest. Despite fertile soils and a (usually) clement climate, they are handicapped by the continuing Israeli occupation of the coastal enclave. Free-fire zones on land and sea prevent farmers from reaching 35% of the remaining arable land and fishermen from accessing 85% of their fishing grounds. Until June, when the deaths of nine Turkish activists attempting to reach Gaza by sea sparked international outrage, Israel imposed a sanctions regime harsher than any in force anywhere else in the world, including Burma and North Korea. Three lost winters for cash crops (including Gaza’s famous strawberries) crippled the once-thriving export industry, while production for the domestic market foundered for the lack of basic inputs such as insect-proof mesh, water pumps and greenhouse plastic. Although the blockade has been partially eased, gaps are still being filled by imports through the tunnels along the Egyptian border, including of unvaccinated cattle originating in countries where diseases like East Coast fever are rife.

The shortage of water also causes animals to sicken, with kidney diseases in ruminants on the rise thanks to the salinisation of the aquifer. Abstraction of water stands at around 200% of the annual recharge capacity, leaving less than 10% of Gaza’s water potable. Cruelly, it barely rained at all during the recent storm: this is the fourth consecutive year of below average rainfall, and the worst so far. Winter vegetables may not be grown at all in some areas. Finally (if you haven’t yet switched off), mention must be made of the dreaded tomato leaf miner, tuta absoluta, which has been munching its way through Gaza’s tomatoes since arriving in the Strip in 2010, and which could move onto sweet peppers, chillies, aubergines and potatoes if it gets really hungry. The woeful state of Gaza’s greenhouses caused by blockade and bombardment allowed the infestation to take hold, and the storm means that at least 3,000 will need insect-proofing again.

I anticipate that readers may well have switched off by this stage, because the only thing that seems to come out of Gaza is bad news.

I could add to this litany of woes for several more paragraphs (although foolishly I signed up to these Monday Columns using my real name, so don’t expect too many pearls of wisdom about the UN, the Palestinian Authority or Hamas), but most people already know that life for the 1.6 million people of Gaza is tough. Over 70% are dependent on external assistance, and each square kilometre contains an average of around 4,400 people. (For comparison, if you moved the entire population of the world to Mexico, it would be 20% less densely populated. Now try feeding everybody…) However, other people’s problems are never as interesting as our own, especially if they have been going on for a long time, and in any case I already spend a good deal of time talking about Gaza’s woes to an increasingly-fatigued donor community.

What you may find interesting, however, are the small pinpricks of good news that I come across in the course of my work.

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Artificial neural networks are computational models inspired by the organization of neurons in the brain. They are used to model and analyze data, to implement algorithms and in attempts to understand the computational principles used by the brain. The popularity of neural networks in computer science, machine learning and cognitive science has varied wildly, both across time and between people. To an enthusiast, neural networks are seen as a revolutionary way of conceiving of computation; the entry point to robust, distributed, easily parallelizable processing; the means to build artificial intelligence systems that replicate the complexity of the brain; and a way to understand the computations that the brain carries out. To skeptics they are poorly understood and over-hyped, offering little insight into general computational principles either in computer science or in cognition. Neural networks are often called “the second best solution to any problem”. Depending on where you stand, this either means that they are often promising but never actually useful or that they are applicable to a range of problems and do almost as well as solutions explicitly tailored to the particular details of a problem (and only applicable to that particular problem).

Neural networks typically consist of a number of simple information processing units (the “neurons”). Each neuron combines a number of inputs (some or all of which come from other neurons) to give an output, which is then typically used as input to other neurons in the network. The connections between neurons normally have weights, which determine the strength of the effect of the neurons on each other. So, for example, a simple neuron could sum up all its inputs weighted by the connection strengths and give an output of 0 or 1 depending on whether this sum is below or above some threshold. This output then functions as an input to other neurons, with appropriate weights for each connection.

A computation involves transforming some stream of input into some stream of output. For example, the input stream might be a list of numbers that come into the network one by one, and the desired output stream might be the squares of those numbers. Some or all of the neurons receive the input through connections just like those between neurons. The output stream is taken to be the output of some particular set of neurons in the network. The network can be programmed to do a particular transformation (“trained”) by adjusting the strengths of connections between different neurons and between the inputs and the neurons. Typically this is done before the network is used to process the desired input, but sometimes the connection weights are changed according to some pre-determined rule as the network processes input.

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By Liam Heneghan

[This is the first in an occasional series of pieces on the philosophy of science.]

In the guestbook of a flower shop near my Evanston, Illinois home, a few blocks west of Lake Michigan – that body of water which serves as a sea for those born far from the brinier fluids of a true ocean – I observed the tiny carcass of an insect compressed upon the page, beneath a comment that read, “Yellow roses are the gift of cowards, Carl.” Intriguing. Its antennae were shaped like little Christmas trees, an anatomical curiosity permitting many people, I expect, to readily identify the fly as a chironomid midge, a fly hatched from a larva that lived in the lake’s proximate substrate, whose pupating body rose at some late life-stage and floated upon the surface of the waters, whose pupal exuvium sloughed off like the skin of a small but darkly-meated banana, and which then, as an adult, rose again to swarm as part of a male-only congregation waiting for a mate to flit along. Chironomid males, recall, have those telltale plumose antennae which act as a delicate sexual nose of sorts, to detect the presence of female flies. The ephemeral and outlandishly sexual nature of their adult lives is underscored by the fact that they do not feed, being equipped with a greatly reduced feeding apparatus. This much is well enough known; a well-informed school-child will elaborate on the matter. What drew me to this tiny creature flattened beneath the testy comment in the guest book, however, was neither its antennae nor its little head bereft of proper chompers; I was drawn to the curious genital structures of the tiny beast. I could see from the arrangement of it gonocoxites, apodemae, and sundry genital appendages that it was a Tanytarsus species. Now this, I grant you, is relatively arcane knowledge, the sort of knowledge that comes with expensive training, a scientific training. A word or two, therefore, on said training.

I qualified as a zoologist at University College Dublin, getting a master’s degree for work on chironmids that I collected in Irish National Parks in 1987, having completed my bachelor’s work the year before. I eventually earned my PhD there in 1994. A rigorous education. In our Irish system a young person shows up at university at seventeen or eighteen years of age, knowing, it is assumed, exactly what subject matters they expect to devote a lifetime of work to. Choosing, in my case, the natural sciences, I was educated in these sciences: all other domains of knowledge were excluded. I was taught (eclectically) across four science sub-disciplines in my first year, in my second specializing in three, in my third year, two, and yes in my last year I honed my skills as a zoologist taking a suite of specialist courses and undertaking a year-long research project on the systematics of a genus of chironomid midges, the Thienemannimyia group. The task: to unravel the phylogenetic (roughly evolutionary) relationships between the numerous species in the group.

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At the V&A until 20th February 2011
www.vam.ac.uk/shadowcatchers
Sponsored by Barclays Wealth

by Sue Hubbard

In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato’s chained prisoners, trapped in their subterranean world, mistook shadows cast on the wall for reality. When they spoke of the objects seen what was it they were speaking of; the object itself or its shadow? Such conundrums lie not only at the heart of western philosophical debate about the nature of reality but, also, of photography. The essence of photography involves an apparent magical ability to fix shadows on light sensitive surfaces. As far back as the second half of the eighth century, the Arab alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (c.721-c.815) recorded that silver nitrate – the significant element of the light-sensitive emulsion of photographs – darkened in the light. In the eighteenth century Thomas Wedgwood experimented with painting on glass placed in contact with paper and leather made chemically sensitive to the effects of light. Sadly the results remain unknown as Wedgwood lacked the know-how to fix his images.

From 1834 William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) created ‘sciagrphaphs’ (the depiction of shadows) and ‘photogenic drawings’ using botanical specimens and lace placed on sensitized paper. These spectral images implicitly posed questions about the nature of reality. The term for all such works is a ‘photogram’, though strictly speaking they do not depict shadows as they are caused by the blocking of light rather than by a cast shadow. The photogram was later usurped by the process of projecting negatives through an enlarger lens. In an increasingly mechanist age this new technology proved more seductive to the scientifically minded Victorians than camera-less photography, which became the idiosyncratic realm of those interested in exploring the subconscious and the so-called spirit world. The playwright August Strindberg took to leaving sheets of photographic paper in developer exposed to the night sky, believing that his resulting ‘celestographs’ were caused by this exposure to the heavens rather than to the more prosaic explanation of dust collecting on the surface of the paper. In 1895 the previously unwitnessed interior of the human body was revealed by Wilhelm Konrad von Röntgen’s newly discovered x-rays, mirroring a growing interest in the unconscious and the revelation of that which could not be seen by the naked eye.

During the 1920s the photogram was rediscovered by a number of modern artists, particularly the Dadaists. Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy were both attracted by its automatic qualities and the possible patterns of light that could be developed on sensitised paper without the use of any apparatus. László Moholy-Nagy wrote: “The photogram opens up perspectives of a hitherto wholly unknown morphosis governed by optical laws peculiar to itself. It is the most completely dematerialized medium which the new vision commands”. In 1937 his move to Chicago, to teach at the New Bauhaus, ensured that an interest in camera-less photography was transported across the Atlantic.

During the Second World War the role of documentary photography, with its ability to act as a witness to unpalatable truths and humanitarian concerns, became ever more important. In 1947 Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour – photographers who had all been very much affected by what they had witnessed during the conflict – began the photographic agency Magnum, leaving the more experimental practice of camera-less techniques to the fringes of fine art practice. Now the V&A have mounted an intriguing exhibition entitled Shadow Catchers , the first UK museum exhibition of the work by contemporary camera-less photographers that includes Pierre Cordier (Belgium), Floris Neusüss (Germany), Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller (UK) and Adam Fuss (UK/USA).

[Photo credit: Floris Neusüss, Untitled, (Körperfotogramm), Berlin, 1962, Collection Chistian Diener, Berlin, ©Courtesy of Floris Neusüss.]

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by Fred Zackel

Didja hear?

This February, NewSouth Books will publish “Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in a single volume, removing the “n” word and the word “injun” from the text. The word “slave” will replace the “n” word.

Mark Twain must be twirling in his grave.

Last year 2010 marked the 175th anniversary of his birth, the 100th anniversary of his death and the 125th anniversary of the American publication of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

This book “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is, as Lionel Trilling said, was “America's most eloquent argument against racism.”

If you never read it, don't wait for some instructor to force you.

As Twain himself said, “I never let schooling interfere with my education.”

But let’s look at what else we can “hear” from Twain, the First Great, Internationally Famous California Writer.

Oh yeah. Mark Twain was a California writer.

Listen to the Voice in this 1865 yarn, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” his earliest success.

“I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”

And later …

“I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.”

The Jumping Frog was the first California International Best-seller. It made Twain famous. The story was spawned in the Gold Country. It traveled the world.

The story is about a con man getting conned. And what could be more All American?

Mark Twain said about the American art …

“To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.”

Yes, he was the first great California writer. Hard to believe, yes.

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by Colin Marshall

“No good movie is too long,” Roger Ebert once wrote, “and no bad movie is short enough.” Oh, how my inner cinephile regrets bringing up the 201-minute length of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles so early in the discussion, it supports that dictum so well! Later revised to “All good films are the right length,” the line now applies to the film that much more directly. I'll sound higher-flown but surely even more accurate when I claim that the form of all good movies closely fits their substance. Here we have one of the closest form-substance matches ever made.

The title may have already given this away, but those three-and-change hours don't serve a labyrinthine plot, an ensemble of dozens, or any particular historical sweep; we get a widow, her son, three days in mid-1970s Brussels, and the preparations for those days' three dinners. Already we hit the fearsome wall this film raises against critics: having watched (and perhaps loved) it, you want to insist that, against the implication of all possible summaries, it's not boring. Yet that insistence sounds, to the rightfully skeptical reader, like too much protestation. What's more, you feel all the while that the very impulse to deliberately highlight non-boringness trivializes the many fascinating (and actually relevant) qualities of a picture so richly non-boring on every level. It's like making a big deal out of the fact that it was shot with a camera; sure, it's true, but it's also part of the work's very nature.

Generally speaking, no serious viewer considers boredom a function of length. After all, many boring movies clock in around 90 minutes, and often they're filled with event after tiresome event. Neither, then, can a serious viewer consider boredom a function of happenings. Let's not even start on all the turgid “epics” the annals of cinema history offer us. I would submit that boredom is actually the result of a form-substance mismatch; it's the unpleasant sensation of those two aspects of a film grinding away at one another, rattling, vibrating, putting out that awful burning-rubber smell. Hence the dullness of so many films adapted from other media — literature especially — as well as those conceived first and foremost as screenplays. When the material can't properly engage all the creative bandwidth cinema has to offer, something's bound to burn out. Usually, it's the audience.

Having said that, I'll tell you what happens in Jeanne Dielman. Bear with me. The titular widow's precisely scheduled days have her cooking breakfast, polishing shoes, buying ingredients, preparing impressively bland dinners out of those ingredients, eating those dinners in near-silence with her son Sylvain, reading letters from relatives in Canada, and unfolding and refolding the sofa bed. Each afternoon, she makes the time to let a different man in the front door, take him into the bedroom, and not come out until the sun sets. It's not altogether clear at first what's going on with that last bit, though Jeanne does drop a few bills into a jar on the dining table after each visit.

“A-ha,” you might say to yourself as the first day ends. “The loss of her husband has forced this poor single mother into prostitution!” To be sure, nothing in the film refutes that interpretation, but almost everything in the film hints at a deeper, stranger, far less identifiable depravity. If you're looking for indicators of homes in chaos, mothers selling sex would seem promising, yet Jeanne, whose face at certain angles looks like a death mask of domestic efficiency, could hardly have regimented her household further. Each weeknight has its dinner — Wednesdays are veal — from which there can be no deviation. Jeanne and Sylvain step out of the apartment and into town at the same time every evening. That cleanliness reigns goes without saying; even right after seeing a “client,” Jeanne takes a bath that would do an obsessive-compulsive proud.

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Why Do We Have Heads At All?
—on Daniel Lieberman’s The Evolution of the Human Head

“The head presents an evolutionary paradox,”
says Lieberman, “The roof of the orbits
is the floor of the brain.” And I imagine a room
in which a miracle sponge sits soaking up
what it means to be alive while other skulls
orbit this particular one which,
a la Ptolemy, imagines it’s a sun

This head’s tenant thinks it knows
something of the world. It sits in its domed room
sometimes as if it were a church in a cloister
somewhere emanating wishes. It wonders if
somehow it'll ever change its world. It hopes that
someday all sapient heads will in
some way plumb the paradox, lay it bare, and
sum up what they find in pithy words without in
any way diminishing the comfort of brain's appendages

“I’m not ready to ditch fossil fuels, and war's good for business,” says Id.
“Why does the head look the way it does,” asks Lieberman?
“Why do we have heads at all,” asks Jim?

by Jim Culleny, 1/9/11

In the third week of November in 2004, I dialed up to the Internet on a cellphone for the first time, then actively searched for blogs to read and bookmark. Though six years have passed, I clearly recall the first post I read through on 3quarksdaily.com. It was this one, a brief report after a trip to Karachi by Abbas Raza.

For disparate reasons (which might become clearer in future columns) the post struck some chords with me. I felt immediately sympathetic to the author and his viewpoint – a feeling since reinforced by years of devoted reading of this blog – and I was also immediately touched by his recollection of a lost “culturally diverse, tolerant, and progressive” Karachi.

Now, it is true that I have never been to Karachi. But bizarre as it may seem to many of you, large numbers of Goans cherish their connections to the city. This is because from 1850 or so, it was where we made good in numbers.

Meet May Cordeiro (b.1912), sitting with poise between her much-older siblings. She will describe herself all through her life as a Karachi girl, and will assume a lifelong posture of disdain towards everyone who comes from everywhere else.

The Cordeiro family came to Karachi from Saligao, a modest village in Goa which has never been reknowned for agriculture or natural beauty or anything similar. Instead, Saligao has distinguished itself by exporting people.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

There were only two Nigerians in TIME Magazine’s ’60 Years of Heroes’ special issue in 2006: Writer Chinua Achebe and musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Apart from being artists both men were politicians too – drawn, when democracy beckoned in the late 1970s, onto that treacherous terrain by the prospects of providing an alternative to that god-awful brand of leadership Nigeria throws up with the constancy of clockwork.

Last November, I encountered both men in the United Kingdom – Fela as a reincarnated being in a National Theatre Musical (the Musical first opened on Broadway, earlier in 2010), and Achebe in flesh at Cambridge University, at a lecture he delivered in honour of Audrey Richards, the founder of the University’s Centre of African Studies.
I have written about my Achebe encounter elsewhere. Here is where I will pay my tributes to Fela, arguably the greatest musician to ever come out of Nigeria.

On the National Theatre stage in London, Fela came alive. But only just – in my opinion as a Nigerian speaker of pidgin, the corrupted version of English that served as the universal solvent for Fela’s lyrics and philosophy.

The “Fela” onstage clearly didn’t speak pidgin, he merely learnt it for the performance. And so his awkward handling of it kept getting in the – er, my – way. Fela’s pidgin (in which he delivered his trademark yabis – stinging verbal attacks on the political class, business elite and religious leaders) was as crucial to his persona as his saxophone was. Using a non-native pidgin speaker to play Fela was for me the equivalent of putting a violin in the maestro's hands.

But it was an ambitious performance, the kind one hardly ever sees in Nigeria – detailed costuming and stage set-up, and the accompanying band combined to (re)create a convincing setting. The scene in which Fela’s ‘Kalakuta Republic’ base is invaded is so well done you feel like you were a fleeing bystander on that horrible February day. Hundreds of soldiers stormed the premises on February 18, 1977, brutalising Fela’s band members, dancers and hangers-on.

By the time the soldiers were done, Kalakuta lay in ruins, and Fela's much-beloved mother, Funmilayo – the first Nigerian woman to drive a car, a woman who had left a revolt that deposed and popular monarch in the 1940s and, in defiance of the colonial authorities, visited the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s – lay dying. The soldiers had thrown her out of an upstairs window. She would die soon after.

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