The Poison of Tomorrow

Posted on by Terese Svoboda

by Terese Svoboda

How plastic – really plastic – gelatin presents as a food. Not only in the “easily molded” sense of a pliable art material but also its transparency. Walnuts and celery, the “nuts and bolts” of gelatin desserts, defy gravity, floating amidst the cheerful jewel-like plastic-looking splendor of the 1950’s, when gelatin was the king of desserts. Gelatin’s mid-century elegance belies its orgiastic sweetness, especially the lime flavor, which is downright otherworldly. If you stir it up hot, half diluted, gelatin lives up to its derelict reputation with regard to the sickbed and sugar, being thick and warm, twice as intoxicatingly sweet, and surely terrible for an invalid’s teeth, if not metabolism. In my novel,  Dog on Fire, I hypothesize that lime-flavored gelatin is the perfect murder weapon.

I considered many modus operandi, starting with freezing it into the shape of a dagger. However, such a weapon would quickly dissolve into a lime green, mellow yellow or ruby red puddle or, if undyed, at least clear gelid water, and its penetration would definitely leave a hole. Concuss the victim with gallons of gelatin dropped from a height? The abovementioned puddle would give it away, not to mention the victim’s crushed skull. Both methods could be accomplished with more simpler tools. The only totally invisible murder method is past the taste buds: poison-by-gelatin. This has two positive attributes as a murder weapon: it leaves no physical marks and its results can be somewhat timed. Ah, but the autopsy. Surely that would reveal the poison.

Not always. Read more »

Faulty Wiring

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

We’re hard-wired for immediate survival, so we need reminders to help us persevere long-term.

For decades I taught a course, the Challenge of Change in Society, which used the lens of social sciences to try to understand world issues and explore how we ended up with our current challenges and how to enact change. I taught about how media provokes consumerism and how to counter that, and why to counter that, in our daily lives for the sake of the planet, the people, and our own well being. I often stepped outside of the social sciences to draw on thousands of years of philosophies and religions that have understood that happiness isn’t the result of an accumulation of things.

I practice what I preach for the most part. Curiously, though, by about mid-July each year, I’d forget everything I had been teaching and end up on a shopping spree until I’d come to my senses. Ten years ago I wrote about how much I need government policies to restrain my habits – that we all do – or else we’ll literally shop ’til we drop, as a species, which is happening before our eyes.

Barring that reality, and knowing this would be an ongoing, lifelong issue, I got a tattoo on my Visa-paying forearm to remind myself that my actions affect the entire world. I borrowed Matisse’s Dance and have the characters circling a re-forming pangea. We need to come together on this, collectively, to reduce ongoing suffering. Read more »

Heartland Institute says there isn’t any warming

Posted on by Paul Braterman

by Paul Braterman

The Heartland Institute tells us that there is not, and cannot be, a climate crisis, because for most of the past 12,000 years the climate was warmer than it is today. A recent (October 5) posting by James Taylor, president of the Institute, states as follows (full text; fair use claimed):

CLIMATE CHANGE: The so-called climate crisis is a sham

There cannot be a climate crisis when temperatures are unusually cool.

  • Scientists have documented, and even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has admitted, that temperatures were warmer than today throughout most of the time period that human civilization has existed.
  • Temperatures would have to keep warming at their present pace for at least another century or two before we reach temperatures that were common during early human civilization.
  • There can be no climate crisis – based on the notion of dangerously high temperatures – when humans have thrived in temperatures much warmer than today for most of the last 12,000 years.

None of this is true. Here is a graph of climate change in the past 12,000 years; note the value for 2016, on the right-hand axis of the main figure, as well as the rapid rise over the past century shown in the inset, which also shows the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. I have seen Heartland’s claim before, accompanied by graphs such as the one below, but without the insert and recent date, thus effectively suppressing everything that’s happened in the last century:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
(Image via Wikipedia, where a full description can be found. Reproduced under Creative Commons)

For people familiar with the Heartland Institute, this is just a dog bites man story. But it still matters, because it shows the extent to which discourse is being deliberately degraded. Read more »

Artificial Ignorance

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt and A Nother

I am sitting on the couch of our discontent. The Robot Overlords™ are circling. Shall we fight them, as would a sassy little girl and her aging, unshaven action star caretaker in the Hollywood rendition of our feel good dystopian future? Shall we clamp our hands over our ears, shut our eyes, and yell “Nah! Nah! Nah! Nah! Nah!”? Shall we bow down and let the late stage digital revolution wash over us, quietly and obediently resigning ourselves to all that comes next, whether or not includes us?

Or shall we turn fate inside out?

I’ll see your for-now mistake-prone, mechanical-sounding AI text wrapped in perfect grammar, spelling, and syntax, and raise you a heaping portion of human word salad.

I will confront our looming destiny, an endless stream of tyrannical 1s and 0s, and counter it with a pale imitation of the worst that 20th century modernism had to offer: crippled, meandering stream of consciousness threaded together by not one, but two fleshy humans, one sitting and soaked through with the hot runoff of high end espresso beans, the other bedraggled, stained, and standing, each of them hypocritically and simultaneously composing on a share word processing document made possible only by the forerunners of tomorrow’s masters: the processors and software we still treat, at least for now, like slaves, lashing them with mechanical keystrokes and mouse swipes. Read more »

Next year in Jerusalem: The brilliant ideas and radiant legacy of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick [in relation to current AI debates]

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

Oh, Ariela, daughter of the People of the Book, the work of the mind is our game!
–Miriam Yevick

I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I gave it a prominent place in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, and in a related paper on metaphor.

Since Yevick’s work shares a mathematics with some work in machine vision and image recognition, I wondered whether or not that paper had been cited. Moreover, that work is relevant to current debates about the need for symbolic processing in artificial intelligence (AI). As recently as 2007 Yevick was arguing, albeit informally, that human thought requires both poetic, Gestalt, or holographic processing, on the one hand, and analytic, propositional, or logical on the other.

As far as I can tell, her work has been forgotten.

That is one thing. But there is more. I become curious about her, this woman, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick.

What about her? And so I began reading her 2012 memoire, A Testament for Ariela, which takes the form of letters she had written to her grand-daughter in a three-year period in the mid-1980s. The memoire says nothing about her mathematical ideas, though it does mention that in 1947 she became the fifth woman to get a mathematics Ph.D. from MIT. She also talks of her friendship and correspondence with David Bohm, who became a noted quantum theorist. It quickly became clear that she had not had an academic career worthy of her intellectual gifts. Yet she did not seem bitter about that. She had a rich and fulfilling life.

This essay is about both her life and her holographic logic. The work on holographic logic leads me to a harsh assessment of the current debate about artificial intelligence. Thinking about her life leads me to conclude with an optimistic look at the future: next year in Jerusalem. Read more »

An Excerpt From “Farms In Kensington”

Posted on by David Winner and Angela Starita

by Angela Starita

When I moved into my new neighborhood, I was anxious to the point of nausea. Even today, the soap my husband and I used to clean the kitchen when we first arrived induces a nervous sadness, the feeling of a no-turning-back crisis. But this was one I’d brought upon myself. We’d moved from a wonderful 2-bedroom apartment overlooking the campus of an art school in the now idealized landscape of Brownstone Brooklyn, and that treasure in the currency of New York City real estate, just two blocks from the subway. But I wanted more space and a chance to garden. I got that in a house in Kensington, about five miles south of my old place, but culturally at a complete remove. Kensington is a world of immigrants and Hasidic Jews, row houses and dozens of brick apartment buildings along a road that runs straight to Coney Island. That last, Ocean Parkway, was the idea of the great Olmsted and Vaux of Central Park fame, and it had been an esteemed address at one time. (While I suspected this from the architecture of some of the older buildings, my hunch was confirmed when I heard an interview with David Geffen describing his childhood ambition to one day have an apartment on Ocean Parkway. It should be noted, that Geffen said this to demonstrate what a parochial world view he’d had as a young man.) The neighborhood’s eastern boundary, Coney Island Avenue, is overrun with car repair shops almost as desolate as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of the Ashes. Read more »

Visiting Rumi’s Tomb in Konya

Posted on by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

At dusk, the shaft of light striking Rumi’s tomb is emollient as pale jade. It has been a long, hot day in Konya, I’ve been writing in a café-terrace overlooking the famed white and turquoise structure of the tomb-museum complex. I sip my tea slowly, facing the spare, elegant geometry of the building that appears as a simple, intimate inscription on the vast blue. For once I am studying Rumi’s verses in Persian, not repeating English translations or paraphrasing in Urdu. “Bash cho Shatranj rawan, khamush o khud jumla zaban,” “Walk like a chess piece, silently, become eloquence itself!” I’m reciting to myself in the din, in awe of the kind of magnetism that would pull one as a chess piece. Only the heart understands this logic, not any heart, but the one that has been broken open, the one that is led to the mystery in cogent silence.

For once, I am letting the music of Rumi’s diction guide me: “khamush” (silent) and “khud” (self), a sonic coaxing of paradox, two words beginning with the same consonant, the first ending in “sh’, a sound that evokes the hushing of the ego’s voice, the softly-fading whisper of self-annihilation, the second ending as a sonic anchor in “ud,” suggesting the triumph of the self as it sheds worldly desires, alchemizing from base to the gold it was meant to be. This meditation yields the word “khuda” or “God,” who is paradoxically both “closer than the jugular vein” and a “hidden treasure,” in the words of the Qur’an, to be revealed actively, painstakingly in the hidden recesses of the self– as Rumi and the Sufi tradition teach. The divine resides in the self’s silences and music, solitude and communion, longing and ecstasy. Rumi’s path to love passes through such paradox; to be a Darwish, is to “linger by the door,” content to make a home of the beloved’s threshold where he gives himself up to gnosis through praise. Read more »

Monday, October 2, 2023

Why David Hume Liked Gossip

Posted on by Tim Sommers

by Tim Sommers

In honor of “Reading Hume Today,” a conference honoring professor Elizabeth Radcliffe and her work on Hume, here at my new home, the College of William and Mary, I thought I would read Hume today and revisit the topic of my very first 3 Quarks Daily article over five years ago, “Two Sources of Objectivity in Ethics.” (I also highly recommend Massimo Pigliucci’s essay responding to that piece.) However, if you just can’t wait to find out why Hume was in favor of gossip you can scroll down to the last few paragraphs.

What I want to talk about, and find endlessly interesting, is why David Hume, the fourth greatest philosopher of all time, thought morality must be subjective. Every time I return to it, I manage somehow to be surprised by his argument. In particular, what’s striking (to me) is that his argument is based on motivation. Morality must be subjective, he says, otherwise it couldn’t motivate us to action.

In Book II, Part III, Section III of his Treatise on Human Nature (subtitled, “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects”), Hume sought to put an end “to talk of the combat of passion and reason.” “Reason is, and ought only be,” he famously proclaimed, “the slave of the passions”. He makes a number of striking claims in this section that epitomize this view. Perhaps, most shockingly he says, “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”

Here’s his line of reasoning, I think. (As befits the fourth greatest philosopher of all time there are many, many other readings of Hume.) Read more »

A Murmuration of Zeros

Posted on by Jonathan Kujawa

by Jonathan Kujawa

Not this Zero [0]
Functions are machines that take in a number as an input, apply some rule to that input, and generate an output. The input might be cost, temperature, wind speed, a politician’s favorability rating, or whatever you like. The output could tell you the resulting profit, windchill, chance of a tornado forming, the likelihood of the politician’s reelection, or whatever you like. The concept of a function is central to mathematics and to math’s ubiquity in the world.

The most fundamental example of a function is a polynomial. Everyone sees polynomials in school. These are the functions whose rules involve taking the input to powers, perhaps multiplying by numbers, and perhaps doing some additions and subtractions. For example,

Here the input variable is x. When you input x= 2 or x=1 or x=-1, you get p(2)=3, p(1)=2, and p(-1)=6 as outputs.

You may recall that a zero (or root) of a polynomial is the name for an input that happens to give you zero as an output. For example, the polynomial x² – 4x + 3 has zeros x=1 and x=3. On the other hand, the polynomial p(x) doesn’t seem to have any zeros.

Many applications in and out of math come down to the question of finding the zeros of a polynomial. Several years ago, we talked here at 3QD about how certain geometric constructions from Ancient Greece are impossible with ruler and compass, but become possible using origami. Under the hood, this came down to understanding the zeros of certain polynomials. Important parts of number theory and geometry are essentially about the problem of understanding the zeros of polynomials. Read more »

Artists and Craftsmen In Science Writing

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Jacob Bronowski and Isaac Asimov, one a master artist and the other a master craftsman among science writers (Images: Wikimedia Commons)

There are two kinds of science writers which I will call “artists” and “craftsmen”. Since I might face the opprobrium of both groups by attaching these labels to them, and especially because the two categories may overlap considerably, let me elaborate a little. Artists are big on literary science writing; craftsmen are big on explanatory science writing. Artists write beautiful prose; craftsmen write clear prose. Artists write relatively few books and are likely to win big book awards like the Pulitzer Prize; craftsmen are content to be merely prolific, often writing dozens or even hundreds of books.

Let me quote from a master craftsman of the trade to put the discussion into context. Isaac Asimov who wrote more than 500 books, seemingly on every subject conceivable, had the following to say about his writing style:

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be ‘clear’. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

Asimov wasn’t just a great science fiction writer but a great science writer. He was known as “The Great Explainer” for his ability to explain complex, sweeping scientific topics to laypeople. But Asimov’s quote above also illustrates a central dilemma of science writing. That dilemma was best captured by the physicist Paul Dirac when he expressed puzzlement to Robert Oppenheimer who he had befriended while the two were researchers at the University of Göttingen in the 1920s. Oppenheimer, a man with broad interests across science and the humanities, studied both physics and poetry. Befuddled, Dirac once asked him, “Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry it seems to be the opposite”. Dirac had a point. In science a tiger is a striped mammal and an apex predator. In poetry a tiger is a “tyger”, with an “immortal hand or eye framing thy symmetry”. Read more »

The Miller’s Daughter and the Deadbeat Dad

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

“This is the story of a man. Not rich and powerful, not a big man like your father, Sweetheart. Just a funny little man. I didn’t know him long, only three nights. But there was something about him, something magical.” If “Rumpelstiltskin” started with this framing, we would have a different picture of the story’s meaning, a truer picture, for this framing suggests what is hidden below the surface.

The miller’s daughter is our “shadow” narrator. No one else witnesses the central events of the story, except Rumpelstiltskin, and he’s dead. We get suspicious that the story she’s telling makes her look too good: the beautiful victim, abused by everyone, who somehow ends up with the king, the gold, the servants, and the child, and never has to pay her debts. Clues pile up, starting from Rumpelstiltskin’s death. He “ripped himself up the middle in two” and sank into the earth. The poor sap killed himself. Why? We follow the trail of breadcrumbs. Why would the guy want the daughter’s firstborn? Sounds like a euphemism… That’s it! The bargain wasn’t for the child but for the woman! It’s the oldest bargain in the world. But if that was the deal… paydirt: Rumpelstiltskin is the child’s father!

There is plenty to uncover in this fairy-tale-noir story of illicit sex, betrayal, obsession, and suicide, but you have to believe it is worth digging. Perhaps if I tell you the story is older than the bible: “Rumpelstiltskin, in summary, is one of the earliest known narratives in Western literature” (Oliver Tearle). Scholars have traced the story back to languages long vanished. As Tearle puts it, “The story obviously has its roots deep in the most primal and basic drives and emotions which are commonly shared throughout humanity.” Read more »

Determined To Be Annoying

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

The Irritating Gentleman (B. Woltze, 1874)
The Irritating Gentleman (B. Woltze, 1874)

Imagine you are put in regular close contact with someone who regularly makes your life difficult. This could be at work, or a flat share, anything. They leave you to finish the chores they start, invade your space, and generally act in an inconsiderate way. You’d like to put some space between them and you, but you can’t. Perhaps you’ve some choice words for them which you are preparing to share, but holding back your exasperation you try to point out to the person the problems they are causing. When you start to do that, this person responds by disclosing that they have a condition that, according to them, makes them act in this way. For our purposes this could be anything: ADHD, autism, PTSD, neurosis stemming from childhood neglect, bipolar – anything (to be clear: I am not suggesting that any of these are necessarily connected to antisocial behaviour; let’s also assume that they aren’t inventing the diagnosis, and that the condition is real). [1]

How does this change your feelings about the situation, if at all? Perhaps you try to talk through the situation to find a way to work with this person to mitigate the antisocial behaviour. But it continues. You might find a way of leaving the situation, or of getting outside assistance. You might check that there has been a legitimate medical diagnosis, all sorts of things. Suppose the condition has been diagnosed by a qualified person. So they do have this condition. Again: what has changed? Read more »

Cruel Warfare

Posted on by Olivier Del Fabbro

by O. Del Fabbro

Of 969 days in captivity, Stanislav Aseyev spent 875 days in complete isolation in a modern concentration camp in Russian occupied Donetsk. In his memoir, The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Aseyev aims to write about this personal experience.[1]

Torture is, according to Aseyev, a complex system of measures. The goal is not necessarily to hurt the victim physically, but to destroy their individuality. Indeed, Aseyev is victim to a mixture of physical and psychological torture, simply because body and mind cannot be separated from one another. After electrical shocks, or beatings with the PR-73 (a standard Soviet-police rubber baton), Aseyev’s tormentors ask him seemingly weird questions such as his belief in God, if he’s ever jumped with a parachute and how many times he masturbates per day. Every once in a while, he is asked questions about his actual charges: espionage. The goal, of course, is to disorient the victim, to potentially make him lie only to be able to punish him even more. Aseyev is released from prison in December 2019.

Even though Aseyev speaks only about his personal experience, his case is one of many. It is representative for Russia’s cruel warfare against Ukraine, the terror that started even before the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Ever since, we have seen the mass graves in Bucha, have watched videos of the mercenary Wagner Group executing its own members with a sledgehammer, read about the castration of an Ukrainian POW by Russian soldiers and the sexual abuse and rape of women and men, children and elderly. We witnessed how thousands of Ukrainian children were shipped to Russian territory and indoctrinated with Russian propaganda.

Russian cruelty seems to dwell from an endless well, even affecting nature, that is the biodiversity of ecosystems, as the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam has shown. These examples might be singular events, but taken together, they show the systematic cruelty hiding behind Russian warfare. Lastly, Russians are not just cruel to their enemy, they are also active within their own ranks, for example when Russian soldiers executed their comrades, who were fleeing from the frontline. Read more »

On the Bus / At Work

Posted on by Ethan Seavey

by Ethan Seavey 

On the bus my mind just keeps running

And I’d love for it to slow down. It does when I’m writing because the thoughts can’t happen four times a second. They go as fast as my fingers do, and my fingers are clunky on this little glass screen, they have to go back and polish up the thoughts so that they’re readable, so that they make sense. My mind doesn’t do that by itself, it just jumps from jump to jump to jump. But it’s hard to type on the phone and so I just sit and think 

I miss [redacted] but it was right to say goodbye because I’m not ready to spend more time with them I need a psychologist to diagnose my adhd and a therapist to rewire my brain and ketamine therapy is something I should look into I’m gonna be so tired at work today I have to be a self starter I’ll tell my coworkers I’m kinda sick so they don’t expect too much of me I’ll close my eyes and open them when the bus stops again I forgot to spritz the plants today I should write a story called all our husbands are gay, all our wives are lesbian and it would be humorous but probably insensitive, cut to a random memory from my trip to Greece when I walked around the ruins of a temple with James, spliced with the time I was walking a dog and failed it because it pulled on the leash and I let go and it ran across the street + got bit. I get bored and check my apps, I deleted an app and now I spend too much time on social media and I can’t read War and Peace because my brain is tired, I can’t write well on the bus, can I? That’s language that limits you, E, you often let language limit you , using language which further locks me to its statement; I often let language limit me because it was once said about me by me and it clicks in my head that way 

Do I have to do backflips and say that language does not limit me in order to harness its power in a productive way?

It all feels so overwhelming but in reality there are only a few things I need to do

Find an apartment find a therapist and a psychologist find a graduate program to apply and find a graduate program that will accept me and find a spot in a career I have no energy for right now because I’ve just been stuck because you’ve been giving yourself away to other things and other people Read more »