by Adele A Wilby

The images of a space shuttle lift-off and its propulsion into dark space with its astronauts strapped in, is an awesome site. Likewise, programmes such as Professor Brian Cox’s BBC series ‘Solar System’ that explores the Earth’s planetary neighbours for any signs of life and the potential for human habitability have a similar impact. But my interest in such events and programmes stems not from any idea I might entertain about a future in which human beings in their numbers will one day board space flights and head off to human settlements on Mars or the Moon or any other place that might support human life. Instead, it is the science that has enabled such developments, and the new knowledge to be gained from space exploration I find fascinating and exciting. I am not oblivious to  the environmental crisis that the Earth is struggling with and the idea that space settlement might one day be the only alternative to the survival of our species, nor do I view it as a possible escape from the human condition and an opportunity for homo sapiens to have another shot at creating a better world for human existence, nor am I devoid of the spirit of adventure or curiosity that is reputed to characterise being human.

Fundamentally however, my lack of enthusiasm concerning off planet human settlements arises from a real appreciation of life in all its forms on Earth and a preference to deal with the immediate and urgent phenomenal existential issues that humanity confronts daily and, to use a well-worn cliché, make the world a better place for all here, and preferably now. Nevertheless, I am far from averse to learning about the issues involved in space settlements and Kelly and Zach Weinersmiths’ book A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have we Really thought this Through? provided me with an opportunity to do just that.

The husband-and-wife team, the Weinersmiths, won the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize with this book, The City of Mars from amongst some stiff competition which included the 2009 Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry, molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan’s Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality, a must go to book for those interested in the subject. And in a new and refreshing theme on biological sex differences, Cat Bohannon’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, provides us with a comprehensible exposition of the science behind the development of the female sex and its contribution to evolution. To be chosen the winner of the 2024 Science Book Prize from amongst those two brilliant books alone suggests that the Weinersmiths’ book must have something special to offer, and it does. Read more »

Lorraine O’Grady. Art Is … , Float in the African-American Day Parade, Harlem, September 1983.

“Over the course of more than three decades, artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady has won acclaim for her installations, performances and texts addressing the subjects of diaspora, hybridity and Black female subjectivity. Born in Boston in 1934 and trained at Wellesley College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an economist, literary critic and fiction writer, O’Grady had careers as a U.S. government intelligence analyst, a translator and a rock music critic before turning her attention to the art world in 1980.

In her landmark performance Art Is…, O’Grady entered her own float in the September 1983 African-American Day Parade, riding up Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) with fifteen collaborators dressed in white. Displayed on top of the float was an enormous, ornate gilded frame, while the words “Art Is…” were emblazoned on the float’s decorative skirt. At various points along the route, O’Grady and her collaborators jumped off the float and held up empty, gilded picture frames, inviting people to pose in them. The joyful responses turned parade onlookers into participants, affirmed the readiness of Harlem’s residents to see themselves as works of art, and created an irreplaceable record of the people and places of Harlem some thirty years ago. These color slides were taken by various people who witnessed the performance, and were later collected by O’Grady to compose the series. The forty images on view capture the energy and spirit of the original performance.”

From the Studio Museum in Harlem.

More here, here, and here.

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by Richard Farr

I’m sixteen and a serious intellectual wannabe. Any lunch break, you can find me in the school corridors discoursing at length on a well-thumbed Hermann Hesse novel, or sharing with some lucky classmate the insights I’ve gleaned from half a dozen pages of Sartre. I’ve also acquired a taste for Gauloises Disque Bleu, wear my scarves just so, and plan to read Being and Nothingness one day. Though in truth I prefer Camus to Sartre — so much more dashing, so much more chic. It’s him I dream of being mistaken for as soon as I can get the right overcoat. 

Economics is taught by Mr. W, an eccentric man it’s easy to make fun of and one of the best teachers I’ll ever have. He has assigned an essay on the “Mishan-Beckerman debate.” (Beckerman thinks unrestrained economic growth is good because it creates stuff; Mishan thinks it’s bad because it destroys stuff.) Because I’m an incipient leftie — inevitably, given my plan to study philosophy while living in a garret on the Rive Gauche —  I think it obvious that there is really no debate to be had. A cursory reading shows that Mishan is merely articulating conclusions sensible people like me have already come to; Beckerman doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. 

Generally speaking I’m a not-bad student, accustomed to getting an A or an A- even from Mr. W, who is a notoriously hard grader. He’s also notorious for his habit of handing our essays back, with quiet but acid commentary, in front of the whole class: “Cooper: messy as always — your handwriting looks like something produced at high speed on horseback — but intellectually acceptable. Collins: messy in every way; I do recommend having a stab at answering the question at some point during the exercise. Davis: the first three pages are pointless blather that should have been omitted, but bravo for arriving in roughly the right neighborhood during the last couple of paragraphs. Dixon: ah, what a breath of fresh air; simplicity and clarity and excellence; well done. Farr: a lackadaisical effort but I confess grudgingly that most of the essentials are correct. Fisher, oh Fisher: …” (dramatic pause; paper held up with thumb and forefinger like a dead mouse; an almost imperceptible shake of the head as it is dropped onto the offending author’s desk) “no.” 

But he returns the Mishan-Beckermann essay privately — perhaps, I think afterwards, entirely to save my blushes. There is a table at the back of the classroom with a distracting view of the games fields. We sit on opposite sides and he slides my oeuvre across to me. A large red F sits in a circle in the top right hand corner near the title. His expression is intense, hawkish: irritation, or pity? Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

When studying a technical field there is a strong temptation, especially among those without a scientific background, to apply its findings in areas where they may not make sense or are merely metaphors. (“Merely” is perhaps unnecessarily dismissive since much of our understanding of these fields is metaphorical.) Quantum mechanics and Godel’s theorems are often used (or abused) in this way. Precipitous changes are deemed “quantum jumps” or unusual statements are proclaimed “undecidable.” Not even set theory is immune. I once heard a commentator refer to some curtailment of the first amendment as being inconsistent with the mathematical axiom of choice. Having mocked these pseudoscientific references, I nevertheless, and with a bit of trepidation, would like to briefly explore a metaphorical aspect of chaos theory.

Chaos theory, roughly speaking, studies complex systems of one sort or another whose state or condition changes or evolves over time and are hence termed dynamical systems. The underlying equations or laws describing them are deterministic, but they often give rise to systems very sensitive to initial conditions. (Tiny variations cascading into huge differences.) The systems are also nonlinear, which means that the effects of changes are not directly proportional to their causes. And, trumpets sound here, an astonishing property of nonlinear dynamical systems is that they can exhibit quite unpredictable behaviors that might appear might random, even though subject to deterministic laws.

What might such systems tell us not only about weather systems or economic systems, but also about our own inability to predict or make sense of things? An obstacle to predictability is the utter complexity of the associations and linkages in the world and ultimately in our brain. They can be chaotic in both the everyday sense and in the mathematical sense, the description of which I’ll spare you. Regarding the latter sense, the so-called Horseshoe procedure devised by topologist Steve Smale to illustrate the evolution of systems from regularity to mathematical chaos, is most suggestive. Such procedures or mappings are, in fact, a distinguishing feature of chaos.

To understand the procedure, imagine a cubical piece of white clay with a very thin layer of bright red dye running through the middle of it and forming a sort of red dye sandwich. Read more »

“This is conclusive, and if men are capable of any truth, this is it.”
…………………………………………………. —Blaise Pascal, on his wager 

Blaise’s Place

Blaise’s place is on a sunset strip
paved razor-straight through desert air
many cul de sacs veer from its hot black path
squeezed in a pass between mountains there,
west, where the day goes down in a blaze

The road’s white line on the northern side
is lit with votive flame-tipped wax
while, southside, glass-tubed neon glows
glazing away in pink-lit veneer
as fountains spit casino-high
from cool pools and golden taps

The landscape reeks of myrrh & beer
on a highway set with brilliant traps:
a bet to which Blaise alludes,
but away from which
Blaise-skeptics steer

A crooner sings from a glittery stage
with background bells of dollar slots,
a mix in warp & weft on a nameless loom
with Gregorian chants wrung
into gambler’s knots

—priests & players in cassocks, albs,
sequined shirts, and denim pants
—Sketchers shuffling under slick, chic suits,
heads with miter-lids and baseball caps
—water & booze from an aspergillum
dipped in Byzantine plastic flask and flung,
dots ears and eyes and throbbing sternums
beating for life in which wisdom basks

But, as if in Solomon’s chair,
Blaise calls all bettors there,
throws loaded dice against a wall
that runs from floor
past stratosphere,
past moon, past sun,
past galaxies through warps of space
to end of time, but
always ends down here
where gamblers grumble
and losers grouse
that the odds (by grace)
are always with the house

by Jim Culleny, 1/29/17
JIm Culleny – Blaises Place – Clyp

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by Malcolm Murray

The world does not lend itself well to steady states. Rather, there is always a constant balancing act between opposing forces. We see this now play out forcefully in AI.

To take a step back, the balancing act is present whether we look at the micro or the macro level. On the micro level, in our personal lives, we have seen how almost everything is good in moderation, but excess of anything can be fatal. When it comes to countries’ economic system, history has provided enough examples for us to be fairly certain that capitalism leads to prosperity and communism leads to stagnation. However, we have also seen how unconstrained capitalism leads to a race to the lowest common denominator and can lead to decrease in quality of life on non-GDP measures for the majority of people. When it comes to political system, we can admire China in the short term, in awe of how autocracies get more things done than democracies, but we have also seen how unchecked power inevitably leads to human rights degradations for the majority of people.

It is the same at the meso level, with new technologies. The two big technology trends of the 2010s followed this pattern. Social media started out being a force for freedom, overturning dictators and connecting old friends, but left unchecked and unregulated, it deteriorated into a click-baiting attention maximizer, driving children to suicide. The gig economy started as an environmentalist utopia, with “collaborative consumption” of idle resources, but quickly deteriorated into the creation of a new proletariat, living on below-subsistence earnings.

So it is no surprise that we now face the same challenge with AI. As a society, we need to balance the opportunities with the risks. We need some AI regulation, but at the same time, not too much so that it stifles innovation. We know that AI offers the promise of tremendous upside as well as downside. On the upside, we have seen recent examples such as the release of the new GenCast AI model from Google DeepMind for weather prediction. This could help foresee extreme weather events better than existing models, saving lives in the process. But on the flipside, we keep seeing examples of AI used indiscriminately leading to severely negative outcomes. The recent shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO seems to have been partly motivated by AI-driven processes, and Amazon recently reported a huge uptick in cyber threats due to AI.

The tricky part is that the needle is always moving. At any given point in time, we may be either under-controlling or over-controlling a given risk. This means either letting AI developers and deployers run rampant with the risks, or drowning them in red tape. Either allowing for too many adverse outcomes in society, or conversely, depriving society of large potential benefits. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Many environmentalists support the idea of charging deposits on drink bottles and cans in order to persuade people to bring them back for recycling. They believe this is a good and obvious way to reduce humans environmental impact.

They are mistaken.

While bottle deposit systems are superficially attractive they are a horrendously expensive way to do not much good, while also creating degrading and fundamentally worthless work for the poor. They are not the outcome of a real commitment to reducing humans’ environmental impact but of our flawed human psychology. The fundamental political attraction of bottle deposits is twofold. They appeal to voters’ underlying presumption that inflicting something mildly annoying on ourselves must be an effective means to address a problem, because the constant annoyance itself keeps in our mind that we really are doing something about it. (This resembles the folk-theory of medicine: If it tastes nasty it must be doing us good.) And bottle deposits appeal to governments’ preference for getting something for free, since all they have to do is pass a law requiring that lots of other people organise and carry out a lot of fiddly work. It’s a tax, but not one they have to justify and defend.

Read more »

by Katrin Trüstedt

The sleet falls so incessantly this Sunday that the sky turned a dull gray and we don’t want to go anywhere, my child, his friend and me. We didn’t go to the theater or to the Brazilian Roda de Feijoada and we didn’t even bake cookies at the neighbors’ place, but instead are playing cars on the floor and cooking soup and painting the table blue when the news arrives.

3:07pm: Assad has been overthrown; 3:11pm: Assad had to leave the country (I hadn’t read the news yet so I’m hopelessly behind); 3:14pm: Celebration at Oranienplatz. The father of my son’s friend sends a photo from Rio-Reiser-Platz and at 3:17pm we’re suddenly in a hurry to get out. We put on our shoes and jackets on halfway down the stairs, and run without hats, scarves or gloves to Mariannenstraße, where police cars are waiting, individual Syrian flags are being waved and helicopters are circling overhead.

We take my son’s friend home and move on without clear direction, down Oranienstraße, past the honking parade of cars on the corner of Skalitzer Straße, Syrian flags hanging out of the windows, fluttering on hoods and being waved out of car windows, suddenly there are no more cars, and we are right in the middle of it.

“It’s a good day for us,” someone turns to me, between people singing, hugging each other, stretching long flags between them, drumming, jumping up and chanting something in Arabic that I don’t understand. “14 years, 4 months and 14 days,” he says. “Thank you for crying” – he sees that I have tears in my eyes. “You’re crying, but we’re happy.” “Germany has been good to us, we are grateful.” He says goodbye to me and Luca, “Bye little man”, and moves on. A young woman with short curly hair and a Palestinian scarf around her shoulders smiles at me. Read more »

This is a wild apple tree I often pass while taking a walk in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. The top photo was taken in spring, the middle photo in fall, and the bottom one a few days ago. And, yes, the apples are actually very good.

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by Eric Schenck

If you celebrate Christmas (and even if you don’t), you should make somebody an Advent calendar at least once in your life.

Truly, an Advent calendar is the most under-celebrated joy of Christmas. If presents under the tree on Christmas morning are the rich and highly accomplished lawyer of the family, an Advent calendar is his far less successful (but way cooler) little brother.

You can buy one, sure: but the ones you make on your own will always be the best.

With that in mind, here’s your guide to creating an Advent calendar that’s guaranteed to delight.

10 Rules For Making An Advent Calendar

1) Make sure your person has fun with it

We start with the Golden Rule. It does you no good to create something so beautiful, so thoughtful, if the person receiving it isn’t going to enjoy it. So make sure you do your homework. Excitement looks different for everybody, so the best Advent calendars will be unique.

What you create, for example, is highly dependent on the age of the recipient. If you’re making one for your grandma, a little more sophistication might be called for. You four-year-old nephew? You can likely get away with a simple one. 

That’s certainly how it was with my first Advent calendar. This was the version many of us are familiar with: the rings. Every night before bed I’d grab scissors and lop off another one. As a kindergartener, that in itself was an accomplishment. Here I was, unable to think about anything but Christmas, and I was able to accept just one day at a time.

My imagination ran wild with these rings. Each one I cut was one more day of North Pole preparations. What was Santa doing? What were his elves up to? Was my gift already prepared and packed up?

2) Avoid being sentimental at all costs

An Advent calendar is more about the experience, and less about the message. Making one as an adult puts you back in middle school. You have to play it cool. Your friends, your family, that secret crush at work –under no circumstances can they know just how much you like them. Make it, give it to them, and let the dice fall where they may. 

And if you’re giving one to a kid? Now is not the time to tell them how much you love them. Your kids already know that. What they’re after is the sugar.  Which brings me to my next point… Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Barry Goldman

“You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and, indeed, are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.”

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass — an idiot.”

―Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

I am an arbitrator. I serve mostly in cases between labor unions and employers, but I also serve for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) in cases between customers and brokerage firms. I am not a judge, but the principles that apply to judicial and arbitral decision making are essentially the same.

Unions and employers come to arbitrators with disputes about the meaning of terms in their collective bargaining agreements. The agreement might say, for example, “Employees assigned to this work shall receive premium pay until the task is complete.” Everyone agrees on what the contract says. But what does it mean? What is “the task?” And when is it “complete?”

The union says the task is the whole project. The employer says the task is the particular assignment within the project. How is the arbitrator to decide?

There are rules for this sort of thing. Some of them are very old and have Latin names. One of the rules says a term in a contract has the same meaning whenever it appears. So, if we don’t know the meaning of the term “task” in Article 7, we can look at the rest of the contract and see if the word appears somewhere that we do know the meaning. Then we just apply the rule. It means in Article 7 what it means in Article 12.

There is a corollary to this rule. Arbitrators assume if the same term is used the same meaning is intended, and we assume if a different term is used, a different meaning is intended.

There are many other rules like this. We suppose, for example, that everything in a contract is there for a reason. Collective bargaining agreements contain “no mere surplusage.” We also assume the contract, read as a whole, makes sense. If there are two possible readings of a provision, one of which conflicts with another provision elsewhere in the contract and one which does not, we construe the contract according to the internally consistent meaning.

There is a fiction at work here. The law supposes the drafters of the contract combed through it painstakingly, searched out all the inconsistent usages, ambiguities, vaguenesses and infelicities, and rooted them out. The drafters, we assume, knew precisely what they were doing, and went about it with scrupulous care. Anything that remains is intentional.

No one who has ever been in the room where a labor negotiation was taking place believes a word of this. Read more »

by Derek Neal

I was recently subjected to an hour of the “All In” Podcast while on a long car ride. This podcast is not the sort I normally listen to. I prefer sports podcasts—primarily European soccer—and that’s about the extent of my consumption. I like my podcasts to be background noise and idle chatter, something to listen to while I do the dishes or sweep the floor, just something to fill the void of silence. On the way to work this morning I had sports talk radio on—the pre-podcast way to fill silence—and they were discussing the physical differences between two football wide receivers—Calvin Johnson and DK Metcalfe—before switching to two running backs—Derrick Henry and Mark Ingram.

You think DK Metcalfe is big, one host said, but then you see Calvin Johnson and you’re like, whoa, this guy is massive! How does a human get that big? Yeah, another host said, and then you see Derrick Henry next to Mark Ingram, and you’re like, how do these guys even play the same position? Ingram is tiny next to Henry! It doesn’t make sense! After this exchange, the first host remarked sarcastically that this was great radio—just naming some guys and talking about their physical stature. Yes, I nodded my head, this is great radio, this is what I want on a frigid December morning, the first morning I’ve had to sweep the snow off my car and let it idle in the driveway to warm up. The silence is deeper in winter, and I remembered padding down the stairs of my childhood home before the sun had risen, 15 or 16 years old, hearing Mike & Mike on ESPN Radio blaring out of the living room speakers as I quickly ate cereal before rushing off to school, wondering why in the hell my dad was blasting this stupid sports talk radio at six in the morning. But now I know. When you get older, sometimes the silence is too much, and the only remedy is the sweet nothings of sports talk radio.

The All In Podcast also had a lot of chatter, but the topic was finance and politics rather than sports. The hosts, who were all venture capital millionaires/billionaires in the tech industry, cracked jokes and were occasionally self-deprecating, but I was left with the disconcerting feeling that the four hosts believed in their own importance. These guys think they have something important to say, I realized, and even worse, this is the sort of podcast people listen to to learn something. Reader, I have a general suspicion of people who claim to have something important to say, especially those who claim to be able to teach me something. The only people I immediately trust are the ones who foreground their own stupidity and failures, like the journalists on my rotation of European soccer podcasts. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Being In the Airplane Movie. Dec 4, 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by Monte Davis

Only a moment ago he asked Mrs. Murdoch to fetch his parents. Now all three are standing in the kitchen doorway, watching the reflected sunlight that skitters above the stove, across the ceiling. When he notices the adults, he mischievously directs it into their eyes. John Clark Maxwell squints and raises a hand to block the glare, but his  voice is indulgent. “What are you up to, Jamesie?”

“It’s the sun, papa. I got it in with this tin plate.”

Before the afternoon is over, Jamesie will roll the plate around the pantry floor until Mrs. Murdoch sends him outside; beat it as a drum, marching against Napoleon with the Iron Duke; fill it with pink granite pebbles; empty it again, set it afloat on the duck pond, and bombard it with pebbles until it is swamped by the interlacing waves.

1

The antenna turns slowly against the spin of the earth, tracking a galaxy eight billion light-years away. That far away, that long ago, the galaxy’s core was exploding with unimaginable violence. Here and now, the radio outburst is almost lost in background noise. Penzias and Wilson thought that the noise in their antenna might be caused by pigeon droppings. Instead, it was the echo of the Big Bang.

Where did the Big Bang go? Into waves.

Waves in what?

In the field. The electromagnetic field. Maxwell’s field.

What is the field?

It’s like the water for ocean waves. It’s like the air for sound waves. It’s like the earth for seismic waves. It’s like…

No, it isn’t. We’ve just forgotten how strange it was.

Penzias and Wilson weren’t the first to have noise problems. Their radio astronomy traced back to Karl Jansky, trying to understand annoying static from nowhere on earth. Which went back to Marconi, who made a revolution out of a laboratory curiosity. Which went back to Heinrich Hertz in a darkened room at Karlsruhe, adjusting the gap between two brass spheres until he saw a spark: the first deliberate radio message. Which was only part of a message from James Clerk Maxwell that is still unfolding. Read more »