by Ed Simon

Past the regal bronze lions of Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s towering and triumphant column, up the steps of the National Gallery and behind it’s porticoed, columned, Regency façade, and on the second floor in room 34, the same place where the museum displays William Hogarth’s formal, yet warm, portrait The Graham Children and Joseph Turner’s dramatic Dutch Boats in a Gale, is the most luminescent painting of the British Enlightenment, Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1768 masterpiece An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. Fully six feet tall by eight feet wide, Wright’s composition depicts a wizardly natural philosopher framed in long gray locks and draped in a red coat not dissimilar to a robe, contrasted by flickering candlelight in an eerie chiaroscuro, with his hand atop the perfectly spherical chamber of a vacuum pump, inside of which is a fluttering Australian cockatoo – exotic at the time – right before the pressure of the exhumed air crushes it’s tiny avian lungs. A number of characters witness the scientific presentation; a gentleman in powdered wig and green jacket gives the experiment his rapt attention, two young lovers seem more concerned with each other, an assistant boy at the window closes the bird’s cage while bathed in the light of a full moon, and an elderly man seems to time the demise with an intricate pocket watch.

Demonstrations such as these had been conducted for more than a century by the time Wright put brush to canvas, and during the eighteenth-century they were performed as often by theatrical presenters with a paying audience as they were by scientists, yet the choice of test subjects in these experiments was frequently as cruel as the painter depicted. Robert Boyle, the chemist and philosopher who commissioned the scientist and engineer Robert Hooke to construct England’s first air pump in 1659, records the results of an experiment on a lark, where as oxygen was pumped out of the chamber the bird “began manifestly to droop and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with as violent and irregular convulsions,” so that the animal “threw herself over and over two or three time, and died with her breast upward, her head downwards, and her neck awry.” The dispassionate empiricism of Boyle’s report is in keeping with the mechanistic philosophy which dominated the Royal Society, the scientific organization established by King Charles II’s proclamation shortly after Restoration in 1663, and to which the chemist would donate the vacuum pump. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by David Winner 

Coming from a Jewish family that arrived in America between the Slave Trade and the Holocaust, I thought that we were ethically in the clear, but researching my family story for Master Lovers, a book about my great-aunt Dorle’s love life in the 1930s, brought me face to face with famously fraught questions about evil and prejudice and the degree to which art and/or historical context can relieve us of its burdens.  I thought of Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s fascism, of course, Dustin Hoffman, Keven Spacy, and all the other actor/molesters but also Alice Walker’s interrogation of the Talmud, antisemitic or simply pro-Palestinian.  And V.S. Naipaul, Indian from Trinidad, whose work (Bend in the River, India: A Wounded Civilization) skewered the post-colonial world.

Dorle Jarmel Soria, a Jewish woman who was a force in mid-century music, integral to both Leonard Bernstein and Maria Callas’s careers, and her husband Dario, who’d fled Rome after the Mussolini/Hitler pact, essentially raised my father.  Once, he questioned Dorle about her friend soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s, close relationship (maybe affair) with Goebbels only to be rebuffed by the claim that “great art” lay “outside of politics.”  And learning more about both her family and her lover, John Franklin Carter, whom she nearly married, revealed more dark associations.  Ben Affleck convinced Henry Louis Gates not to reveal his enslaved-owning ancestors, but I – unfamous, little to lose – feel driven to out my family.  Dorle, who smoked Benson & Hedges, drank gin and tonics, and traveled to Capri well into her nineties always recalled Graham Green’s beloved Aunt Augusta (Travels with my Aunt), but learning more about her made her seem more like Aunt Denver from Beloved, Heathcliff perhaps, someone haunted by their past.

By age thirty, I knew only a few “facts” about my Jewish family: our name did not come from Weiner, we were from somewhere near Poland, a distant relative translated the Declaration of Independence or was it the Constitution into Hebrew or Yiddish.  Whereas my mother’s mother, born in Hapsburg Prague, compiled a genealogy going back centuries, my father’s Jewish side was apparently the family who fell to earth. Read more »

Magnolias and blue sky last week in Meran, South Tyrol.

by Rafaël Newman

Notational

A Zurich-based translator answers an ad that reminds him of his youth and is sent several lapel pins, or buttons, bearing the likeness of a 20^th-century French poet emblazoned with a motto. The creator of these buttons, a Chicago-based teacher, does not charge for his products, but asks only that they be worn. Their recipient is happy to comply.

The two men have not yet met in person; nevertheless, they discover a shared bond in their love of poetry and music, and begin to correspond. The second man eventually sends the first a new shipment of buttons (which he has been manufacturing together with his daughter), this time featuring the masked face of a contemporary Edinburgh-based artist and a new motto, once again free of charge. The first man agrees to wear these as well, especially since they give him the beribboned air of the dandy he once was.

The first man is then moved to distribute both series of buttons to people he meets during his travels, abroad and in his country of residence, on buses and at gatherings, and to photograph himself with these new recipients. He shares the photographs with the second man, as well as with the Edinburgh-based artist, who is, unlike the French writer, still alive. Read more »

by Bill Murray

First a note on the April 8th North American eclipse: Many people have seen a partial eclipse of the sun and wondered what all the fuss is about. The sky looks out of whack, things go all shimmery, you can see reflections of the partially occluded sun on leaves, animals act up, the sky darkens, maybe, and then it’s done.

That is a partial eclipse. The experience inside the narrow band of earth where the sun is entirely covered, called “totality,” is nothing like a partial eclipse. Two weeks from today North America experiences the longest path of totality for any eclipse this century.

The band of totality will be about 115 miles wide. Lots of people have the chance to get underneath it. If you’re interested, don’t settle for partial; go and find totality.

The longest totality in the US will be four minutes and 24 seconds. By comparison, the longest totality anywhere in the US for the 2017 eclipse lasted only two minutes and 41 seconds. These may sound like just statistics, but nearly five minutes of totality is a big deal. People pursue even a minute of totality across continents.

Totality is utterly unique. It’s something else entirely. Totality pulses with raw, brute, human-diminishing power. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

My nieces, Hannah and Sydney, came to visit for the weekend. Since they’re 8 and 9, the delightful Guardian Games in downtown Corvallis was a must-stop. Along with games galore, they have an amazing assortment of puzzles. They have puzzles with micro-sized pieces, puzzles with jumbo-sized pieces, puzzles with only a few pieces, and puzzles with a veritable googolplex of pieces.

The profusion of puzzles reminded me of a recent research paper in applied geometry. The authors are Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, a mathematician and data scientist at the University of Toronto, and her partner Kent Bonsma-Fisher, a quantum computing and optics researcher.

Like many of us, they assembled an inordinate number of puzzles during the COVID-19 restrictions. And like many puzzlers, they came to wonder:

How big a table do you really need if you want to assemble a puzzle?

Everyone knows you need extra room on the table to spread out the pieces. But how much extra room? Does the amount of space needed depend on the size of the pieces? Or if the puzzle has more or fewer pieces?

This is a frequent topic of discussion for puzzlers on the internet. A commonly cited rule of thumb is that the table should be twice the area of the finished puzzle.

But rules of thumb aren’t math. Fortunately, close readers of 3QD know of some math that could help here. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Years ago I was listening to Robert Bly talk about poetry. It was at a conference on form and he was in the process of leaving Whitman and going on to Yeats as part of his own conscious public wrestling, not so much with the Muse as which Muse and where the Muse comes from. He paused for a moment and, to let his batteries charge, said – “Well, what do you think of this Nils?” He’d been talking about the formal aspect of Yeats, the rhythm and the rhyme and the kind of consciousness such usage requires of the reader and the writer. I, startled, could think of nothing else to say than that Yeats writes the kind of poem that you can wake up in the middle of the night and find that you know by heart without ever having made the effort to memorize it. I mentioned having been at a wedding where, unexpectedly, I was asked to recite some poetry. I was able after a minute of two or two with a pencil to come up with a fairly accurate version of “The Folly of Being Comforted.” Bly nodded, and went on his merry way, but I found myself troubled. So, at the end when he asked for comments, I found I had to add this anecdote.

In the middle ’60s when I first was a new husband, a new teacher, and new father, I met my first indication of the changing consciousness of women in a freshman English class. I was teaching the Yeats poem “A Prayer for My Daughter.” I found it, and in many ways still do a marvelous poem and I spoke of it to my class with great enthusiasm saying that this is what I would wish for my daughter – that she would be “beautiful” but not “too beautiful” and “learned courtesy” for: 

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
by those that are not entirely beautiful…. 

I added that I’ve known enough of it in myself to think that,

An intellectual hatred is the worst. 

While musing in front of the class, thinking of my own infant daughter’s destiny, it seemed as if I too could pray –

May her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious…, 

having had because of growing up as a chauffeur’s child on a great estate, some illusions about what that would be like.

One of my women students, tough, honest, told me – “You’re wrong. You shouldn’t say wish that on your daughter.” In fact, she went on to say that “I had no right to wish that on my daughter.”

I was set back on my heels, shocked. It had seemed to me the most unexceptionable of fatherly wishes, what, indeed, any father, would want. The class finished with a good argument. And Bly’s evening finished when, shortly after my story, Robert said, “Well, something must be happening here because I feel a lot of anger in my stomach and it’s time for bed.” And yes, the evening all of a sudden had become filled with a strange uncomfortable energy. 

But the evening and my story are not quite over. Read more »

Dilara Begum Jolly. Untitled, ca 2014.

More here, here, and here.

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

The Theory of Mind That Says Artificial Intelligence is Possible

Does your dog feel pain? Or your cat? Surely, nonhuman great apes do. Dolphins feel pain, right? What about octopuses? (That’s right, “octopuses” not “octopi.”)They seem to be surprisingly intelligent and to exhibit pain-like behavior – even though the last common ancestor we shared was a worm 600 million years ago.

Given that all these animals (and us) experience pain, it seems exceedingly unlikely that there would only be a single kind of brain or neurological architecture or synapse that could provide the sole material basis for pain across all the possible beings that can feel pain. Octopuses, for example, have a separate small brain in each tentacle. This implies that pain, and other features of our psychology or mentality, can be “multiply realized.” That is, a single mental kind or property can be “realized,” or implemented (as the computer scientists prefer), in many different ways and supervene on many distinct kinds of physical things.

We don’t have direct access to the phenomenal properties of pain (what it feels like) in octopuses – or in fellow humans for that matter. I can’t feel your pain, in other words, much less my pet octopuses’. So, when we say an octopus feels pain like ours, what can we mean? What makes something an example (or token) of the mental instance (or type) “pain”? The dominant answer to that question in late twentieth century philosophy was called the “functionalism” answer (though many think functionalism goes all the way back to Aristotle).

Functionalism is the theory that what makes something pain does not depend on its internal constitution or phenomenal properties, but rather the role or function it plays in the overall system. Pain might be, for example, a warning or a signal of bodily damage. What does functionalism say about the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)? Read more »

Self portrait by reflection in a glass door in Meran, South Tyrol.

by Ethan Seavey

I’ve heard owls are signs of a big shift in your life; I also know that I only really look for owls during those times.

Exercise for me is short lived or long lived, short lived to match my attention or long lived to accommodate my frequent breaks for walking, exploring, writing, texting.

I’m running through the gulch and looking at the trees where the owl usually sits in the morning. It’s not morning really anymore. The sun is big in the sky and the owl is nowhere to be seen. I think to see the owl and to prove the shift in my life I’d need to wake up earlier.

After running out of the woods I follow the sidewalk to the water front and walk along that for a while. I see seagulls approach an old man who is bemused that they’ve identified him as a possible food source.

I walk down a pier for a while. It’s meant for fishing but it’s too early in the season for fishing so I don’t see anybody reeling in anything, and I’m looking for marvelous life-changing marlins. I watch a couple kiss on the other side of the pier. They point off into the distance at a warship.

As I run back to the woods, I have the thought that I don’t need to see an animal to decide I’m going through a life shift. That’s when I notice a globe in the water. Read more »

by Oliver Waters

The Matrix films depict a future dystopia in which oppressive super-intelligent machines have imprisoned human beings inside an entirely simulated world in order to exploit them as a power source. The human protagonists of the films – Neo and Trinity – lead a thrilling rebellion to free as many people as possible. It’s rather obvious why they are the ‘good guys’ and the machines are evil: imprisoning people in a virtual cage is wrong.

This is despite the fact that life in the Matrix actually seems more enjoyable than the alternative. Inside, you partake in the heady optimistic era of 1990s America. Outside it, you must endure the dusty remnants of the great civilisational war between humans and machines. There isn’t even any sunshine, on account of the humans having ‘scorched the sky’ to prevent the machines from accessing solar power. The only ‘free’ human city exists deep underground, where there’s very little entertainment unless scantily clad festival raves are your thing.

This is why the notorious character Cypher decides to betray humanity to the machines in exchange for a charmed life in the simulation. As he rationalises while eating a juicy virtual steak: ‘ignorance is bliss’.  The film pushes us to think of Cypher as a deeply mistaken jerk. But why exactly? Why is being trapped in the Matrix wrong even if it is seemingly more pleasurable than living in reality? Because it is assumed that the people stuck inside it possess the inherently human trait of curiosity. Deep down, they want to know how the world really works. By being trapped in a fantasy world, this basic need is being frustrated, even if they don’t know it. Their individual potentials as self-aware beings are being cruelly inhibited, and justice demands that they be freed.

If you haven’t seen the Matrix films by now – where on Earth have you been?

One plausible place is on North Sentinel Island, a tiny member of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. It is remarkable for the fact that the people who live on it (the ‘Sentinelese’) are in almost zero contact with the rest of our global civilisation. There have been several attempts to connect with them over the centuries with varying degrees of failure, brought vividly to life in Adam Goodheart’s recent book The Last Island (2023). The Sentinelese exist today in total isolation – an arrangement enforced by the Indian government within whose sovereignty the island lies. Read more »

by Richard Farr

You might think London’s National Portrait Gallery is a temple of celebrity, and it’s true that many of the faces on these walls belong to mere royalty, or influential past Nabobs, or those more recently glossy with fame. But the people who draw me back again and again are the ones who get to be here only because they were freakishly good at something.   

Poets. Dancers. Singers. Scientists. Generals. Explorers. Actors. Engineers. Diplomats. Reformers. Painters. Sailors. Builders. Climbers. Composers. In a pretty-good eighteenth-century copy of a portrait by Holbein the Younger, Thomas Cromwell is not so much a man as a slab of living, dangerous gristle. Henry James looks dangerous too, in a portrait by John Singer Sargent that more people would recognize as great if inverted snobbery hadn’t turned under-rating Sargent into a whole academic discipline. Humphrey Davy, painted in his forties, could not be more different. He looks about 14; thinking about science has made him glow with delight. 

Thomas Gainsborough is all over the place to good effect next door, in the National Gallery, but his self-portrait here makes him look embalmed. It seems almost cruel to have placed him next to his contemporary Joshua Reynolds, whose own self-portrait demonstrates how far wit and brio can take you. A less successful Reynolds captures Samuel Johnson looking morose, or constipated; no greater contrast than with that prince among wits Laurence Sterne (Reynolds yet again), seen in full gloat after the publication of Tristram Shandy.  Read more »