by Mike O’Brien

Montreal is quite safe from natural disasters, relatively speaking. We should be regularly tossed by earthquakes, given our tectonic environs, but in my two-score-and-change lifetime the rumblings have been so minor as to be mistaken for a passing truck. When everyone on the island feels a passing truck at the same moment, it is evident that the disturbance was rather an earthquake, but only for reasons of statistical probability.

We are also subject to invasions of smoke from the burning forests north of us, but, owing to the vagaries of wind currents, not much more so than are New York or Philadelphia, apparently. We had a tornado years back, striking the only mobile home park in the area (apparently tornadoes have bought into the myth that they are especially drawn to such modes of living). We also have worsening heat waves, exacerbated by the swampy humidity of the St-Lawrence valley and the thermal properties of modern city construction. But this is hardly a distinguishing mark, given that every place from the Arctic to the Antarctic suffers heat waves these days.

The natural disaster that really sets Montreal apart from other cities is ice storms. Historically, this city has suffered nasty winters. They are cold, but not so cold as the wind-lashed prairies out west. It is the snowfall that really makes them iconic, and also expensive, given that our car-based infrastructure requires us to scoop up and relocate all the snow that falls on our roadways. The cold has abated over my lifetime; I can remember waiting for delayed trains in -40C weather (factoring in “wind chill”, which is a deceptively mild label for something that can cost you your fingers and toes, or even your life). Such extreme cold is rarer now, but so is cold in general. Read more »

Water lilies on a pond in Auer, South Tyrol.

by Derek Neal

An essay about Stoicism appeared on this website about a month ago. The essay was critical, seeing Stoicism and its contemporary manifestation as a sort of individualistic therapy that excluded the possibility of political and collective action. Instead of attempting to improve society or grapple with its problems, the turn to Stoicism, the article seemed to be saying, allowed one to ignore political and social ills in favor of a personalized approach focusing on one’s wellbeing. This is probably true, at least with regard to the way Stoicism is portrayed on social media and the internet, but it is also an argument could that be made about almost any mental health approach, whether it’s ancient philosophy repackaged for the 21^st century or a contemporary self-help routine.

This may simply be a result of living at the end of history. When other possible constructions of society become unimaginable, there is no reason to diagnose society’s ills because one cannot hope to change them. Thus, one turns inward, or, on the other hand, embraces their fate by turning themselves into a self-optimizing marketable product. What other choices are there? My father and I were discussing this the other day when planning the movies we would watch at our family cottage. At the moment, our favorite genre is European thrillers about political corruption from the 70’s. So far, we’ve watched French Conspiracy (1972), Illustrious Corpses (1976), and next on our list is Z (1969) by Costa-Gavras. In these films, everyone is guilty; everyone is corrupt. The people who try to do the right thing end up sacrificing their ideals, or if not, dead. There is no escape. My father argued that this genre doesn’t exist anymore because it was one that expected the audience to be outraged by political scandal. Now, we are desensitized. Scandals come and go with such regularity that we turn off the news and go do yoga instead. I, being a millennial, argued that this was, on the whole, a sensible choice. My father was disconcerted by this but found it difficult to disagree. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

To 3 Quark Daily Readers:

I write to you as an ambassador from the Kingdom of Old Age. It a country near to some of you and far, far away for others. It is a good country to be able to visit. I hope you can come, but don’t hurry. It will be there when you have time.

On Houses and Towers

Living in a house/ we live in/ the body of our lives….   “House,” Robert Hass

Packing up to leave the house I’ve lived in for 50 years, deciding what books to take and what to leave behind to create their own fate, I came across Hass’s Field Guide. It won for him the Yale Younger Poets Prize. I’d already packed his collected poems so I thought to leave it behind with a couple a hundred other poetry books finding their own fates, but I leafed through and eye caught the words above.  They seemed so true, I tucked it in the bag I was taking with me in my drive north with my younger daughter and my dog.

For fifty years the house I’m leaving made up the body of my life and the life of my wife and daughters. My daughters tell me they think of it as “Home,” even though neither one has lived in it for 30 years and more. 

Mostly it was a good body, though like even in the best of bodies, there were aches and pains in it and us. The new owners will have to exercise it some to renew its elegance but it has, as is sometimes said of a face that looks good no matter what its age, good bones.

I found this this morning in The London Review of Books, “There is a fine Scots word for the sale of a house, farm or factory: a displenishment.” Well yes, that’s exactly what the emptying of my house felt like, a displenishment, the “plenish” of 50 years is gone, and one heads towards a minimalist world. Haven’t gotten there yet. Dragged a lot of stuff with me. Daughters not yet off the hook. 

Illness and aging have made this move necessary. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

I never heard Henry Bull, my father-in-law, claim he invented the Whee-Lo, but his proud sons have on occasion. He manufactured and distributed the toy, and made it into a nationwide sensation in 1953, just before the hula hoop and Frisbee. A curved double metal track that held a spinning plastic wheel, the gyroscopic magnetic Whee-Lo is still available for purchase, most frequently at airport gift shops.  By flicking your wrist, you propel the wheel and its spinning progress down the track and back. Mesmerizing, it’s a sort of fifties’ analog Game Boy. First called the Magnetic Walking Wheel, it came  packaged with six colorful cardboard discs known as “Whee-lets” that created optical illusions as the wheel spun. According to Fortune, Henry’s company, Maggie Magnetics, sold two million units its first year.^[1]   Like the hula hoop, which Arthur K. “Spud” Melin and Richard Knerr claim to have invented in 1958, the Whee-lo had been around for a while, although maybe not for the uncounted centuries of the hoop. One version of the Whee-Lo was known as “Uncle Spinny Dervish” in the 30s.

Someone had given Henry a prototype, which he brought home to test on his sons. My husband remembers it being about a quarter of the size of the eventual model. His father had to improve its engineering because the wheel didn’t have enough diameter and mass to create sufficient centrifugal energy to spin well. Terrible design, but interesting proof of concept. That someone was paid a licensing fee, and Maggie Magnetics manufactured it and patented improvements to the toy in 1972.

Two stories account for the genesis of Henry’s interest in the magnetics business. During the Depression, he managed to get a job selling refrigerators for GE. He became frustrated because he had no way to affix the prices in the showroom until he discovered that magnets held the labels to the fridge fronts without leaving a mark. Voila! The fridge magnet. Dull and utilitarian-looking, they came nine to a box, displayed like chocolates, each with its own compartment. Read more »

Race is a Political Animal

white is a color not a race
red is a color not a race
black is a color not a race
yellow is a color not a race
brown is a color not a race
human is a race of many colors

equines are animals that come in colors, not race
canines are animals that come in colors, not race
bovines are animals that come in colors, not race
felines are animals that come in colors, not race
homo sapiens are animals that come in colors, not race

race is a political animal

Jim Culleny © 6/15/23

by Rafaël Newman

It’s hard to feel sanguine about the human project these days, insofar as there still is, or ever was one. Canada has been on fire, in part evidently because we have yet failed to address the dire effects of our fossil fuel use; while a Ukrainian reservoir, willfully damaged by fascist-imperialist belligerents, is threatening eco-death by flooding, and imperiling the stability of the nuclear reactor it was built to serve. The United States, in the meantime, the country in which we are to place our faith for an end to the latest European violence, is seeing the forces of reaction on the march, waging a proxy war over sexual and reproductive rights (alongside similarly regressive anti-abortion activists in Poland and Italy) to distract from economic inequity, the police murder of Black people, and a brain-eating gun lobby. And all the while, that nation’s principal transatlantic allies—France, Germany, and Britain—have been rendered sclerotic by various strains of autocracy, historical compromise, and nativism.

Nor is a rosier prospect offered by the global south and its various satellites. In Iran, women are beaten to death for sporting the wrong headgear, while in Israel/Palestine a cutting-edge military power is deployed to kill children, there too no doubt in a bid—however vain—to distract attention from government malfeasance, which in Israel’s case constitutes an attempt to refashion the judiciary after ethno-nationalist whim. Female genital mutilation continues to be practiced in Guinea-Bissau, while “gender apartheid” is again the norm in post-occupation Afghanistan. In Turkey, the laicism foundational to the republic’s modern rebirth is being further eroded, by a religious conservative whose hold on power could not be shaken even by his sluggish response to a massive natural disaster (or who perhaps took advantage of that disaster to influence the election results). Over-burdened, under-maintained rail systems bring death and destruction to India (as, of course, to North America). Sudanese civilians are dying in a pointless dispute between military factions. And people trying to reach Europe from Africa, merely to survive, continue to capsize in the Mediterranean—often because they have been repelled by the “forces of order” to face the perils of the open waters in makeshift craft.

If there is any hope for our common endeavor, it comes currently not from our “leaders” but from our streets. Black Lives Matter, Fridays For Future, Jin Jiyan Azadî, Pussy March, Stonewall Was A Riot, Get Your Laws Off My Body, Métro Boulot Tombeau: such are the latest watchwords of a global grass-roots protest movement. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by William Benzon

During the last half of the 20th century various groups of insiders and outsiders adopted mind-altering drugs and computer technology to create cultural spaces in which we imagined and realized new venues for the human mind. These spaces engaged fundamental issues of freedom and control, of emotion and reason, which have bedeviled humans everywhere, and elaborates them in the through modern science and technology. The psychoactive drugs which, in some sense, free us, have been synthesized through laboratory techniques we have invented, but only recently. The computers which extend our powers of control and order in often surprising ways embody logical forms that date back to Aristotle but where only recently brought to fruition in the late nineteenth century work of George Boole and others. Science and technology thus provide us with objective physical touchstones for the otherwise abstract powers and activities of our hearts and minds.

Taken together with that great Victorian invention, childhood innocence, the technologies of drugs and computers would constitute a cultural arena which served as incubator, nursery, and playground for some of the major lines of development in late twentieth century culture. For, if a society is to progress it needs cultural playgrounds where new ideas can be conceived, tested and developed. Psychedelic drugs and computing – and their associated cultures – functioned as such playgrounds in the latter half of the 20th century. They were, in fact, among the most important cultural playgrounds in America.

Given the fundamental differences between drugs and computers – what they are and how people use them, between Dionysian drugs and Apollonian computers – it is not surprising that different groups of people have been most interested in one or the other. What is most curious is that these people, and their creations, have often interacted, either directly or indirectly. In some cases, drug people and computer people are one and the same, as was the case in the San Francisco-Silicon Valley area during the 1970s. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

Human treatment of animals is a moral calamity at an outrageous scale, that I can get from zero to really quite worked up about in a matter of seconds. For fear of hurting the cause, I allow myself to take part in polite conversation about the dead bodies on the dinner table only if there is a more soft-spoken ally nearby. Two minutes into the conversation, when I find myself suppressing the urge to yell at a meat apologist how that kind of excuse might equally well be used to justify eating human babies, I am often grateful that there is somebody who can steer the conversation instead towards the socially acceptable topic of plant-based recipes.

It especially helps if they look fit (which they always do!), and are able to say with a straight face that “it’s perfectly simple to lead a healthy lifestyle and cook a tasty dinner without using meat”. Meanwhile, I don’t know how to cook a tasty dinner no matter the ingredients, and I have rarely given a moment’s thought to what it takes to lead a healthy lifestyle. It’s completely beside the point, is what I’m really thinking while nodding along. We were not talking about precisely how full of life everyone feels when their alarm clock rings, were we; we were talking about the food on your plate; about the moral issue, about the crime …

Luckily, things do not depend on my ability to express myself eloquently and effectively without alienating everyone present. I can also simply try to nudge people towards reading Peter Singer, especially now that he published an updated version of his Animal Liberation. What follows are basically my notes from reading this 2023 edition, with very few thoughts of my own mixed in. If you have immediate access to the book itself, switch to that; if not, you might as well keep on reading and buy or borrow it afterwards. Read more »

Onion plant (I think) in a nursery in Auer, South Tyrol, yesterday.

by Bill Murray

We’re here early this year. June has just gotten started, and after a day or two of intermittent rain with a blustery sky and a stiff wind off Lake Saimaa, fifty degrees Fahrenheit feels a lot colder than the same back in Atlanta. I’ve just learned that it hasn’t been this cold in June since 1968. It snowed today right down the road. The paper took the laconic approach and called it the ‘first snow’ of summer. On the other side of the comfort ledger, we have a fire of easy to light birchwood, and if the Finns understand one thing well, it’s insulation.

We come to Finland every summer. The best time to visit is July into August, when the lakes have had a chance to warm, it never gets completely dark, and saunas and swimming are in full swing. To heat your naked body just past tolerable in an old wooden building and then run screaming and jump in the lake is the national pastime.

It’s not time for that yet. Already the days are long again but this year at least, the nights are still jacket-and-gloves cool down on the water, where the fish are jumping and the bird life thrives.

Never in my life have I heard a swan demonstrate the Doppler effect. But such utter silence reigns in the twilight after midnight, when our bit of the lake is glassy still, that far back to the southeast I heard the steady repetition of a swan’s two-note honking from beyond a stand of spruces.

For perhaps half a minute she approached, wings stroking a meter above the water, neck extended, churning forward and back stroke by stroke, steady honking, and in her wake her cry changed pitch as surely as a two-toned Parisian ambulance on the motorway. She continued the half kilometer further I could see her, flying upstream above the lake, announcing her arrival all along the way. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

During the height of lockdown, I was stressed. We were all stressed. We were scared of getting sick and terrified that the most vulnerable among our friends and family would get sick. We were anxious and bored, but many of us, more than anything, were lonely. Very, very lonely. My husband worked out of the house at night and slept during the day. So even though I was one of the lucky ones and did have another human presence in the house, that presence mainly manifested as a lump under the bedclothes. Many people had no one, and there was a surge in pet adoptions as people looked for anything to help cope with the day-after-day overwhelming loneliness.

Before COVID, I attended a regular kickboxing studio. A month or two before lockdown, a random group of students gathered to celebrate one woman’s birthday. I knew some of the women well, some not at all. Many I’d smiled at over the years I’d been attending the class but had never talked with. We had so much fun at that dinner that we decided to do it again and said we’d use the Facebook chat from the original dinner to coordinate. Then, COVID happened, and we started chatting as a group. First, occasionally, but as we all became lonelier and more desperate for company, it became a constant scrolling chat about parenting, marriage, TV shows, anything and everything. The one thing we all agreed on was that the connection we made to each other, through that chat, in those hard times was a lifesaver (we’re still friends, and we still use the chat even though we meet regularly now in person.) Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Widely-respected philosopher, Tufts professor, one of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” of the New Atheists’ movement, and an “External Professor” for the prestigious Santa Fe Institute, Daniel Dennett recently took to the very public soap box of The Atlantic to issue a dire warning.

“Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the ‘passing along’ of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.”

“The most dangerous artifacts in human history?” What about gunpowder, the printing press, chemical weapons, fission bombs, fusion bombs, biological weapons, machines that burn massive amounts of fossil fuels and dump carbon into the atmosphere, Adam Sandler movies, social media in general, and TicTok in particular?

Before I say anything else I should say that Dennett is not only a brilliant philosopher, but also a charming, affable, and generous person. At public events he seems to make a special effort to seek out and spend time with students. I could say more, but you get the idea. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In March David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss announced that they discovered an “Ein Stein”. The choice of name can only be described as a tour-de-force of PR: Ein Stein translates as One Stone but also evokes a certain physicist. The Ein Stein got wide play in the media, including here at 3QD. Unfortunately, the same authors’ discovery of the “Spectre” tile two weeks ago seems to have gone under the radar. Since it is even more interesting, I thought we should take the time to talk about it.

First off, what is this all about? This research is in the area of geometry about tilings of the plane. If you have a collection of tiles of various shapes and sizes along with a set of rules about how they can be placed, then a successful tiling of the plane with those tiles and rules is exactly what you think: you cover the entire plane going to infinity in all directions using only those tiles and following those rules [1].

Sometimes this is easy. If you have a rectangular tile with no rules restricting you, you see successful tilings all around you in the brickwork. If you use a rectangle with no rules, there are infinitely many different tilings.

Sometimes tiling the plane is impossible. If you have only a circular tile, then there is no way to tile the plane without leaving gaps. Sometimes it is the rules which cause a problem. If you have a triangular tile, but the rule says you aren’t allowed to rotate the tile, then there is a triangular tiling (here on the right), but it’s forbidden by the rule [2].

One common way of enforcing rules is to color the tiles and make requirements on where colors can be placed relative to each other. We discussed these sorts of tilings ages ago here at 3QD. Read more »