The Fly On The Wall Always Gets The Best View:
Drone Aesthetics In A Time Before Drones

by Brooks Riley

Something odd happens when I look at the elder Pieter Bruegel’s paintings: I experience a jolt of vertigo, as though I’d stepped out on a ledge somewhere—not too high up, but high enough to initiate a physical reaction more like titillation than terror. I didn’t notice this right away: For a long time, I was too busy taking in all the business going on in those paintings: the crowds, the tussles and bustle of the marketplace, the hawkers, the wagons, the houses, the animals, and in some of his works a topography rather alien to his own very flat province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. A master of ‘everything everywhere all at once,’ Bruegel knew how to crowd a wooden panel.

In The Fight between Carnival and Lent, faced with a multitude of finely-rendered characters alive with attitude, it’s easy to be distracted from the shot itself—its acute angle, its distance from the action, its extended scope and high horizon achieved through elevation. This is a classic content-over-form dialectic that faces every viewer looking at a painting. What am I seeing? What am I supposed to see? Where am I seeing from? 

In this case ‘where am I seeing from’ has everything to do with ‘what am I seeing’’: It’s the high oblique angle that enables the viewer to take in all those individuals spread out over the market square. (An AI command to make each character look up at the painter, might force the viewer to think about where Bruegel is situated as he paints, even if he’s up there only in his imagination. It’s like the fourth wall: you’re unaware of it until a character turns and speaks to you directly.)

A cinematographer would recognize this as a crane shot, or its replacement, the drone shot. This crane or drone doesn’t move. It defines the POV (point of view) of the painter, and shows how far his perspective can reach and how much he can cram into the in-between, that 2D surface which expands vertically with every higher angle of his POV, as in this crane shot from Gone with the Wind. Read more »



by Jonathan Kujawa

Researching tide pools at the Oregon coast.

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 »

In Which a Student Tells Her Teacher How to Read Yeats and Be a Better Father

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 »

Jack Dunitz (1923-2021): Chemist and writer extraordinaire

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Jack Dunitz during a student outing at Caltech in 1948 (Image credit: OSU Special Collections)

Every once in a while there is a person of consummate achievement in a field, a person who while widely known to workers in that field is virtually unknown outside it and whose achievements should be known much better. One such person in the field of chemistry was Jack Dunitz. Over his long life of 98 years Dunitz inspired chemists across varied branches of chemistry. Many of his papers inspired me when I was in college and graduate school, and if the mark of a good scientific paper is that you find yourself regularly quoting it without even realizing it, then Dunitz’s papers have few rivals.

Two rare qualities in particular made Dunitz stand out: simple thinking that extended across chemistry, and clarity of prose. He was the master of the semi-quantitative argument. Most scientists, especially in this day and age, are specialists who rarely venture outside their narrow areas of expertise. And it is even rarer to find scientists – in any field – who wrote with the clarity that Dunitz did. When he was later asked in an interview what led to his fondness for exceptionally clear prose, his answer was simple: “I was always interested in literature, and therefore in clear expression.” Which is as good a case for coupling scientific with literary training as I can think of.

Dunitz who was born in Glasgow and got his PhD there in 1947 had both the talent and the good fortune to have been trained by three of the best chemists and crystallographers of the 20th century: Linus Pauling, Dorothy Hodgkin and Leopold Ruzicka, all Nobel Laureates. In my personal opinion Dunitz himself could have easily qualified for a kind of lifetime achievement Nobel himself. While being a generalist, Dunitz’s speciality was the science and art of x-ray crystallography, and few could match his acumen in the application of this tool to structural chemistry. Read more »

The Vegetarian Fallacy

by Jerry Cayford

Atelier ecosystemes des communs, Alima El Bajnouni, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Vegetarian Fallacy was so dubbed by philosophy grad students in a well-oiled pub debate back in the 1980s. There is a fundamental conflict—so the argument went—between vegetarians and ecologists. The first principle of ecology—everything is connected to everything else (Barry Commoner’s first law)—is incompatible with the hands-off, “live and let live” ideal implicit in ethical vegetarianism. The ecologists took the match by arguing that, pragmatically, animals either have a symbiotic role in human life or else they compete with us for habitat, and those competitions go badly for the animals. In the long run, a moral stricture against eating animals will not benefit animals.

Now, pub debates are notoriously broad, and this one obviously was. A swirl of issues made appearances, tangential ones like pragmatism versus ethics, and central ones like holism versus atomism. In the end—philosophers being relatively convivial drinkers—all came to agree that pragmatism and ethics must be symbiotic as well, and that the practice of vegetarianism (beyond its ethical stance) could be more holistically approached and defended. Details, though, are fuzzy.

A fancy capitalized title like “Vegetarian Fallacy” may seem a bit grandiose, given the humble origins I just recounted. What justifies a grand title is when the bad thinking in a losing argument is also at work far beyond that one dispute. And that is my main thesis. So, although I will elaborate the two sides, it will be only a little bit. I am more interested in the mischief the Vegetarian Fallacy is perpetrating not in the academy but in wider political and cultural realms. Read more »

Not Your Parents’ AI (Especially if your Parents are Functionalists)

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 »

Looking for Owls

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 »

Sunday, March 17, 2024

On Barbra Streisand’s “My Name Is Barbra”

Dolores McElroy in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

When I read that Barbra Streisand’s memoir, My Name Is Barbra (2023), would be 970 pages long, a devilish chuckle bubbled up from deep within me. There was something ecstatic about this moment—How pharaonic the ambition! What an absolute thrill that a woman famous for show business—and not, say, the Nobel Peace Prize—believes her life story worthy of such an expansive word count. I am grateful that someone, somewhere, isn’t endlessly struggling to feign correct attitudes, that someone believes there is time and space to read 970 pages about the life and times of Barbra Streisand, one of those someones being Barbra Streisand.

Streisand knows that there is something socially “tone deaf” about her. She talks about this at length in her book. Throughout her life, she just can’t seem to tell the public what they want to hear. Early on, the press would ask if she was thrilled with her success, implicitly demanding a “golly gee whiz, I sure am” response. She just couldn’t give it.

More here.

Claire Voisin on Mathematical Creativity

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

Voisin is a senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. There, she studies algebraic varieties, which can be thought of as shapes defined by sets of polynomial equations, the way a circle is defined by the polynomial x2 + y2 = 1. She is one of the world’s foremost experts in Hodge theory, a toolkit that mathematicians use to study key properties of algebraic varieties.

Voisin has won a litany of awards for her work, including the Clay Research Award in 2008, the Heinz Hopf Prize in 2015, and the Shaw Prize for mathematics in 2017. In January, she became the first woman to be awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics.

Quanta spoke with Voisin about the creative nature of mathematics. The interview has been  condensed and edited for clarity.

More here.

Supporters of Palestinian rights must change their rhetoric if they want to influence a broad cross-section of Americans

Zaid Jilani in Persuasion:

Imagine you’re a middle-class, middle-aged mom in any number of American suburbs outside Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, or Phoenix—the kind of civic-minded, active voter that both parties chase every election.

Since October, you’ve been paying more and more attention to the conflict in the Middle East. At first, you found yourself deeply sympathetic to the Israeli response to the October 7th Hamas-led terror attacks.

You’ve heard that Israel has treated the Palestinians unfairly for years, but how could that justify such a gruesome slaughter of civilians? You decide that Israel has a right to defend itself and tell your friends and coworkers that the country should do what it has to do in order to destroy Hamas and other militant groups.

More here.

For the Love of Cats in Turkey

Gideon Lasco in Sapiens:

As an anthropologist, this intimacy with cats fascinates me because they represent another instance of how “human culture” is in fact made up of our relationships with nonhumans. Globally, cats have accompanied humans since ancient times, beginning in Western Asia almost 10,000 years ago. Humans initially welcomed them in their nascent settlements for their ability to control rodents; today cats can be found anywhere there’s a human presence—including in cyberspace.

But what makes cats especially loved in Turkey, and what can we learn from this special relationship in one particular country?

More here.

Elephants and Rihanna and Billionaires, Oh My!

Sonia Faleiro in The New York Times:

Rihanna, Mark Zuckerberg, bejeweled elephants and 5,500 drones. Those were some of the highlights of what is likely the most ostentatious “pre-wedding” ceremony the modern world has ever seen.

On a long weekend in early March, members of the global elite gathered to celebrate the impending nuptials of the billionaire business titan Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son, Anant, and Radhika Merchant. Monarchs, politicians and the ultrawealthy, including Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump, descended on an oil refinery city in the western Indian state of Gujarat for an event so extravagant you’d be forgiven for thinking it was, well, a wedding. But that will take place in July. For the long windup to the big day, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars, though invited as guests, took to the stage to sing and dance in what amounted to a bending of the knee to India’s most powerful family.

Watching the event, I couldn’t help thinking of the 1911 durbar, or royal reception, when King George V was proclaimed emperor of India. Once India won its independence from Britain in 1947, it committed itself to becoming a democratic welfare state — an audacious experiment that resulted in what is now the world’s largest democracy. But in advance of this year’s general election, expected to begin in April, the Ambani-Merchant matrimonial extravaganza shows us where true power in India now lies: with a handful of people whose untrammeled wealth and influence has elevated them to the position of India’s shadow leaders.

More here.

Are Evidence-Based Medicine and Public Health Incompatible?

Michael Schulson in Undark:

IT’S A FAMILIAR pandemic story: In September 2020, Angela McLean and John Edmunds found themselves sitting in the same Zoom meeting, listening to a discussion they didn’t like. At some point during the meeting, McLean — professor of mathematical biology at the Oxford University, dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, fellow of the Royal Society of London, and then-chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense — sent Edmunds a message on WhatsApp.

“Who is this fuckwitt?” she asked.

The message was evidently referring to Carl Heneghan, director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford. He was on Zoom that day, along with McLean and Edmunds and two other experts, to advise the British prime minister on the Covid-19 pandemic. Their disagreement — recently made public as part of a British government inquiry into the Covid-19 response — is one small chapter in a long-running clash between two schools of thought within the world of health care. McLean and Edmunds are experts in infectious disease modeling; they build elaborate simulations of pandemics, which they use to predict how infections will spread and how best to slow them down. Often, during the Covid-19 pandemic, such models were used alongside other forms of evidence to urge more restrictions to slow the spread of the disease. Heneghan, meanwhile, is a prominent figure in the world of evidence-based medicine, or EBM. The movement aims to help doctors draw on the best available evidence when making decisions and advising patients. Over the past 30 years, EBM has transformed the practice of medicine worldwide.

More here.