George Dyson in Edge:

Data mining, on the scale now practiced by Google and the NSA, is the realization of what Alan Turing was getting at, in 1939, when he wondered “how far it is possible to eliminate intuition, and leave only ingenuity,” in postulating what he termed an “Oracle Machine.” He had already convinced himself of the possibility of what we now call artificial intelligence (in his more precise terms, mechanical intelligence) and was curious as to whether intuition could be similarly reduced to a mechanical procedure—although it might (indeed should) involve non-deterministic steps. He assumed, for sake of argument, that “we do not mind how much ingenuity is required, and therefore assume it to be available in unlimited supply.”

And, as if to discount disclaimers by the NSA that they are only capturing metadata, Turing, whose World War II work on the Enigma would make him one of the patron saints of the NSA, was already explicit that it is the metadata that count. If Google has taught us anything, it is that if you simply capture enough links, over time, you can establish meaning, follow ideas, and reconstruct someone's thoughts. It is only a short step from suggesting what a target may be thinking now, to suggesting what that target may be thinking next.

Does this not promise a safer world, protected not only from bad actors attempting to do dangerous things, but from bad actors developing dangerous thoughts? Yes, but at what cost? There's a problem, and it's the problem that Alan Turing was trying to answer when he first set us down this path. Turing delivered us into the digital age, as a 24-year-old graduate student, not by building a computer, but by writing a purely mathematical paper, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” published in 1936. The Decision Problem, articulated by Göttingen's David Hilbert, concerned the abstract mathematical question of whether there could ever be any systematic mechanical procedure to determine, in a finite number of steps, whether any given string of symbols represented a provable statement or not.

The answer was no. In modern computational terms (which just happened to be how, in an unexpected stroke of genius, Turing framed his argument) no matter how much digital horsepower you have at your disposal, there is no systematic way to determine, in advance, what every given string of code is going to do except to let the codes run, and find out.

Nicholas G. Carr's criticism can be found here, and Dyson's rejoinder here.

Richard Marshall interviews Sean Carroll in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: I thought we’d start by getting your overview of the situation as you see it regarding the relationship between physics and philosophy. There have been some high profile and rather bad tempered disagreements recently between the two camps – I’m thinking of theKraus vs Albert recently which led to an invitation for Albert to share a platform with Krauss at an event being pulled, and Hawking and Mlodinow who start off their book ‘The Grand Design’ by announcing the death of philosophy – so I wondered if there was any general points that such cases helped illustrate for you about the relationship, in particular, whether there is some truth in the thought that physics has such an elevated status in the general culture reflected (as reflected in both popular culture eg The Big Bang Theory and funding eg it gets LHC machines built) that it feels itself impervious to criticism?

SC: From inside physics, it hardly seems like we are impervious to criticism! Funding is being cut, our ability to do big projects is running up against problems of finance and international cooperation, and it’s a struggle to explain the importance of increasingly abstract basic research. Much of this feeling is a matter of historical context, of course; fifty years ago physicists were at the top of the heap, a position that is increasingly occupied by biologists (or maybe economists?). But anyone paying attention can tell that there is still immense public interest in discoveries like dark energy and the Higgs boson, and a great deal of respect for physics as a profession.

The public spat between physics and philosophy is just silly, more a matter of selling books or being lazy than any principled intellectual position. Most physicists know very little about philosophy, which is hardly surprising; most experts in any one academic field don’t know very much about many other fields. This ignorance manifests itself in a couple of ways. First, a lot of scientists are quite comfortable with simplistic philosophy of science. This usually doesn’t matter, but there are cases where good philosophy has something to offer, and scientists rarely put in the work necessary to understand what that good philosophy has to say. Second, scientists tend to think of philosophy as a service discipline – what good does it do for my practice of science? The answer is almost always “no good at all,” which they then translate into thinking that philosophy has no real purpose. The truth is that almost all scientific work can proceed quite happily without philosophy – you can be very good at driving a car without knowing how an engine works. But when it’s important, philosophy very important indeed.

Very few philosophers, by contrast, are going to accuse science of being worthless. Nevertheless, it’s no surprise that there are problems of appreciation and understanding flowing in that direction as well. The only remedy, if one is interested in finding one, is constant interaction and communication.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu interviews Peter Tatchell in The Boston Review:

I was born and grew up in Zimbabwe, and I voted first in the 2002 election. The people of my generation were all excited and thought that things were going to change. But Robert Mugabe was re-elected amidst claims of fraud and has been continuously re-elected. Nothing has changed. This Wednesday was election day in Zimbabwe, and Mugabe—despite claims of voter fraud from the opposition once again—appears to have secured another term in office.

Peter Tatchell, a prominent LGBT activist, has put himself in harm’s way to fight a number of controversial causes, among them stopping Mugabe from committing crimes against the Zimbabwean people. The lanky Australian-born, British-based activist has tried to arrest Mugabe not once, but twice—in London in 1999 and in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Brussels in 2001—for crimes against humanity. On the second occasion, Mugabe’s Central Intelligence Operatives beat him badly and left him with permanent brain damage.

Tatchell has been beaten on more than 300 occasions, arrested more than 100 times, participated in over 3,000 protests and received more than 500 death threats. A live bullet has been sent through his letterbox, and his small south London flat—where I spoke with Tatchell—is frequently targeted by vandals.

. . .

Tinashe Mushakavanhu: In the 1980s were you one of the people who celebrated Robert Mugabe or whatever he supposedly represented?

Peter Tatchell: My association with Zimbabwe began way back in the early 1970s during the war of liberation when I was a young student. Like most Zimbabweans, I was opposed to the white minority regime of Ian Smith; the denial of votes to black people was unconscionable. Every attempt by a Zimbabwean nationalist leader to secure a peaceful negotiation of the transference of power to attain black majority rule was rebuffed. All the leaders ended up in prison or under detention or under house arrest, in fact, all kinds of restrictions were placed upon them infringing on their ability to campaign peacefully and non-violently for change. The end result was that many people concluded that the armed struggle was the only way forward. Although instinctively I am a pacifist and loathe violence, I felt that an armed struggle was the only option available to black Zimbabweans and somewhat reluctantly supported that struggle. As a young student I helped to fundraise to buy medical kits for guerrillas in the bush and for the civilian population in areas controlled by the liberation movement. At the time, Robert Mugabe seemed like a good guy. If you read the original program of ZANU-PF [The Mugabe-led Zimbabwean African National Union—Patriotic Front], it was a program for democracy, human rights, and social justice.

John Cole in thetimes-tribune.com:

Joseph Epstein in Standpoint:

Does his friend Larry Goodman know that Feldman knows he slept with his wife? Feldman himself knows because his wife Elaine told him. In words Feldman shall never forget this side of dementia, the day they decided on a divorce, Elaine, in their kitchen, announced: “You aren't doing me any good, either in bed or out of it. And by the way, you should know that I slept with your great pal Larry Goodman.” On which triumphal words-triumphal to her, devastating to Feldman-she departed the room and drove off in her red Mazda convertible from the house on Lake Street in Wilmette. At first Feldman wondered if Elaine made up the story about sleeping with Larry. He didn't, though, wonder too long. Not that Elaine was always truthful. She was full of little deceits; these helped to bring their marriage down. But the pleasure she took in saying she slept with Larry didn't allow much room for doubt. For Elaine the announcement struck a double wound. Not only did it make Feldman aware that he was a cuckold, a figure of humiliation every man wishes to avoid becoming, but she had brought this about through the agency of his oldest and dearest friend. Where they had done it, how frequently, with how much pleasure were details Elaine spared him, though this only added to the torture.

Elaine was home most nights, so she and Larry must have met during the day. Since the Feldmans had children in school, with kids coming in and out of the house through the day, they must have met at his apartment at Sandburg Village, though they could have ducked into motels. Did they do the same things in bed that in better days Elaine and Feldman did? Did Larry have a few new tricks into which he initiated Elaine? Is it possible she offered Larry favours she never bestowed upon Feldman? Like a man unable to keep his tongue from probing an aching tooth, Feldman played and replayed various pornographic scenes his wife and best friend might have enacted together. This hideous, unending little home movie played in his mind for more than a year after Elaine and he divorced. Sheer mental masochism, all this, of course — but what's a cuckold to do, if Feldman was in fact a cuckold?

More here.

John Horgan in Discover:

Frans de Waal stands in a watchtower at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center north of Atlanta, talking about war. As three hulking male chimpanzees and a dozen females loll below him, the renowned primatologist rejects the idea that war stems from “some sort of blind aggressive drive.” Observations of lethal fighting among chimpanzees, our close genetic relatives, have persuaded many people that war has deep biological roots. But de Waal says that primates, and especially humans, are “very calculating” and will abandon aggressive strategies that no longer serve their interests. “War is evitable,” de Waal says, “if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits.”

War evitable? That is a minority opinion in these troubled times. For several years I’ve been probing people’s views about war. Almost everyone, regardless of profession, political persuasion, or age, gives me the same answer: War will never end. I asked 205 students at the college where I teach, “Will humans ever stop fighting wars, once and for all?” More than 90 percent said no. This pessimism seems to be on the rise; in the mid-1980s, only one in three students at Wesleyan University agreed that “wars are inevitable because human beings are naturally aggressive.”

More here.

Justin Porter in the New York Times:

I have discussed the rise of China with Larry Summers over a few slices of pizza, taken a genetics course taught by one of People magazine’s sexiest men alive (shoutout to Kevin Eggan), and sat in the front row as one of my favorite writers, Atul Gawande, gave an astonishing talk on the difference between coaching and teaching.

Still, my freshman year was probably one of the most troubling of my life.

I was born and raised 1,500 miles away, in a small apartment in Jackson, Miss. For my entire life, it has mainly been just my mother and me. I have a loving father, but he and my mother broke off their engagement shortly after my birth, and since he worked odd hours as a bus driver, I rarely saw him when I was growing up.

I am an only child, so my mother overpowered me with her love. For someone who sees so much beauty in the world, she worked awfully hard to protect me from it. Television, rap music, even basketball with the kids on the block were beyond consideration. It left me a bit resentful as a teenager, but I grew to appreciate her enormous sacrifices — walking me to the library every afternoon, laboring at multiple jobs to keep food on the table, telling me stories late into the night.

When I announced the summer before my senior year of high school that I had decided to apply to a school in New England, I noticed a hint of hesitation before a warm smile enveloped her face. I pretended not to see, but I was never able to forget it.

More here.

Trying to Believe in Something

These nights since your death I imagine
you might be calling from under the sweetgum
where the swallows are darting beneath the leaves
that could pass for stars in a child's drawing,
darting to scoop the seeds released
from the round, spiked fruit the child
would draw too large on her page. All right—
there is no room left in the darkness for anything
except for the Indian pipe, those solitary
plants white and transparent as silence
you used to think the Indians made flutes of.
Once, we stayed all night in this grove,
unafraid, waiting for the swallows to reappear,
watching by the pure light of those plants.
I had thought I could believe in anything.
But I have imagined the stars so cold
they might as well be ash. All I know is
the gathering sound of swallows flecking
their wings white beneath the trees.
I am going to listen to them all night
where the Indian pipe grows in lichen,
gathering the seeds, believing again
that nothing stays lost forever.

by Richard Jackson
from Worlds Apart
The University of Alabama Press, 1987

Dominic Pettman in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In April of 2000, Michael Moore launched a campaign to help elect a ficus plant to the Congressional seat in New Jersey’s 11th District. The joke was that a ficus is more intelligent and dynamic than any of the highly partisan and corrupt official candidates. After reading Michael Marder’s new book Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life you may be convinced that plants are smarter than all of us. Theoretical work in the humanities has been branching out for several years now (if you’ll pardon the arborial pun), striving to go beyond the traditional human subject in order to account for other types of existence and experience, including animals and autonomous machines. A new field has emerged, loosely labeled “the posthumanities,” which attempts to fill in the millennia-long blind spots caused by our own narcissism. Such scholars are united in their efforts to expose or deconstruct ongoing “anthropocentrism.” The latest off-shoot of such thinking — known as Speculative Realism — goes so far as to consider objects like cameras, stones, pillows, cartoon characters, or electricity grids as “agents” in their own right.

It is interesting then that plants have, on the whole, been ignored in this intellectual rush to lobby on behalf of non-human existence. And while Marder’s book is not the first to broach the subject (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s recent edited collection Animal, Vegetable, Mineral [2012] is of special note, as is Francis Hallé’s In Praise of Plants [2011]), it is possibly the most sustained study yet to emerge from the rather esoteric world of Continental philosophy.

More here.

From The New Republic:

Pankaj Mishra: There seem to be two common descriptions of your work in the English-speaking world. One is of you as a Turkish writer, addressing Turkey’s history. The other is of you as an international writer, engaged in the project of creating a world literature. Neither of those descriptions seems to me to be quite right. Your work seems to belong to the tradition of people like Dostoevsky or Junichirō Tanizaki, who are writing about societies where the biggest preoccupation seems to be incomplete modernity, societies that have been prescribed the project of catching up with the West.

Orhan Pamuk: I agree with this description. One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.

PM: What was the initial reaction in Turkey to a writer who belonged very much to the secular elite, drawing upon Ottoman history, Islamic history, in the Western art form of the novel?

OP: At first, some people were a bit upset and grumpy. I was not using the pure Turkish that the previous generation of writers had used. I used, not excessively, the language of my grandmother—including Ottoman, Persian, Arabic words, which Turks use daily. And so they were grumpy about that. I remember also when I was showing some of my early work, people would say: “Why are you interested in all this failed Ottoman history? Why won’t you catch up with today’s political problems?” I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, “Look, I’m interested in Ottoman things, and I’m not afraid of it, and I’m doing something creative.”

More here.

Sam Kean in The American Scholar:

Aristotle called it aimless and witless. St. Augustine condemned it as a disease. The ancient Greeks blamed it for Pandora’s unleashing destruction on the world. And one early Christian leader even pinned the fall of Lucifer himself on idle, intemperate, unrestrained curiosity.

Today, the exploration of new places and new ideas seems self-evidently a good thing. For much of human history, though, priests, politicians, and philosophers cast a suspicious eye on curious folks. It wasn’t just that staring at rainbows all day or pulling apart insects’ wings seemed weird, even childish. It also represented a colossal waste of time, which could be better spent building the economy or reading the Bible. Philip Ball explains in his thought-provoking new book, Curiosity, that only in the 1600s did society start to sanction (or at least tolerate) the pursuit of idle interests. And as much as any other factor, Ball argues, that shift led to the rise of modern science.

We normally think about the early opposition to science as simple religious bias. But “natural philosophy” (as science was then known) also faced serious philosophical objections, especially about the trustworthiness of the knowledge obtained. For instance, Galileo used a telescope to discover both the craters on our moon and the existence of moons orbiting Jupiter. These discoveries demonstrated, contra the ancient Greeks, that not all heavenly bodies were perfect spheres and that not all of them orbited Earth. Galileo’s conclusions, however, relied on a huge assumption—that his telescope provided a true picture of the heavens. How could he know, his critics protested, that optical instruments didn’t garble or distort as much as they revealed? It’s a valid point.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

There is an egg in the middle of the universe. Sometimes the egg contracts. Sometimes the egg expands. Sometimes the egg fades away completely, though a hazy aftereffect of the egg-that-used-to-be hovers in the eye (or mind). The light around the egg changes slowly. In the beginning it is a soft white. Over time, you realize that hints of pink have crept in. Then it is violet, and blue, and rose, though not necessarily in that order. It is hard to remember the order of colors. They come and go as the egg contracts and expands. Your conscious mind does not always register the change in color until after the fact. The colors are pastels. Calm. Soft. The egg glows and hovers in the middle of a field of mesmerizing color.

The spell is broken when the guard finally says, “Everybody up off the floor.” We’ve all been lying on the floor of the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, the famous spiral building. The artist James Turrell has transformed the spiral into a giant art installation. The openings between the floors are covered with fabric. Hidden lights project color. Turrell calls the work “Aten Reign.” It is museum as light sculpture.

James Turrell has been working with light for a long time. He was part of the Light and Space movement that came out of Los Angeles in the 1960s. Those were the heady days of Minimalism. It was a time when artists were dissatisfied with art objects. They didn’t want to make traditional paintings or sculptures. They’d rejected the idea that art should try to represent what we see in the real world: sky, trees, buildings, people. They were even tired of abstract work in painting and sculpture. Why, they asked, do we make paintings and sculptures at all? In 1965, Donald Judd wrote an influential article called “Specific Objects.” He wrote, “Painting and sculpture have become set forms. A fair amount of their meaning isn't credible.”

More here.

Who is the greatest English-language poet of the 20th century? W.B. Yeats? Robert Frost? Wallace Stevens? W.H. Auden? A good case could be made for any of them. Still, if you’d asked this question 50 or 60 years ago, most people would have said, without hesitation, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). In 1948, he received the Nobel Prize for literature, and soon after his verse-play “The Cocktail Party” was a hit on Broadway; in 1956, 14,000 people jammed into a Minneapolis stadium to hear him speak. By then, “The Waste Land” was firmly established as modernist poetry’s supreme masterpiece, the verse analogue to “Ulysses” (both published in 1922, that annus mirabilis). It and Eliot’s other major poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Four Quartets,” were appearing in freshman English textbooks, next to his ground-breaking early essays, in particular “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Every college student could recite the opening words of “The Waste Land” — “April is the cruelest month” — and many knew, thanks to “The Hollow Men,” that the world would end “not with a bang but a whimper.” And yet, as this fourth volume of his letters reminds us, Eliot was for most of his life only a part-time poet.

more from Michael Dirda at the Washington Post here.

When, in the 1920s, the pioneering Southern California social critic Louis Adamic called Los Angeles “the enormous village,” he didn’t mean it as a compliment. Rather, he was referring to L.A.’s insularity, its status as what Richard Meltzer would later label “the biggest HICK Town (per se) in all the hick land,” a city of small-town values and narrow vision that “grew up suddenly, planlessly.” For Adamic, Los Angeles was defined by individual, as opposed to collective, passions, starting with its architecture. His idea of the place as a “garden city,” in which identity was less an expression of the public square than of the private home, has been echoed by nine decades of observers, from Nathanael West (“Only dynamite would be any use,” he sniffs in “The Day of the Locust,” against L.A.’s “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples”) to Norman Mailer, who, in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” grouses about the “pastel monotonies” of this “city without iron, eschewing wood, a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass men.” A similar sensibility underpins “Never Built Los Angeles,” a compendium of more than 100 architectural projects — master plans, skyscrapers, transportation hubs, parks and river walks — that never made it off the ground.

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

Death was early American photography’s killer app. Since the first pictures required long exposures, it was convenient to have a subject that held still. There was a psychological angle as well. A 19th-­century photographer reported that when he visited a town in upstate New York, all the residents welcomed him except the blacksmith, who at first reviled him as a swindler. But then the blacksmith’s son drowned — and the blacksmith came begging for an image of the boy. The tale is retold by Robert Wilson, the editor of The American Scholar, in “Mathew Brady,” his patient and painstaking new biography of the portraitist and Civil War photographer. Brady wasn’t one to overlook a sales tool. “You cannot tell how soon it may be too late,” he warned in an 1856 ad that ran in The New York Daily Tribune, advising readers to come sit for a portrait while they still could. When the Civil War began in 1861, thousands of new soldiers and their families became acutely aware that it might soon be too late. They were willing to pay a dollar apiece for tintypes, and Wilson reports that at Brady’s Washington studio, “the wait was sometimes hours long.”

more from Caleb Crain at the NY Times here.

From The Telegraph: