Brassicas

There was no sex in our village there was only

David Auerbach in Nautilus:

We humans, more or less, behave like unified rational agents, with a linear style of thinking. And so, since we think of ourselves as unified, we tend to reduce ourselves not to a single body but to a single thinker, some “ghost in the machine” that animates and controls our biological body. It doesn’t have to be in the head—the Greeks put the spirit (thymos) in the chest and the breath—but it remains a single, indivisible entity, our soul living in the house of the senses and memory. Therefore, if we can be boiled to an indivisible entity, surely that entity must be contained or located somewhere. This has prompted much research looking for “the area” where thought happens. Descartes hypothesized that our immortal soul interacted with our animal brain through the pineal gland. Today, studies of brain-damaged patients (as Oliver Sacks has chronicled in his books) have shown how functioning is corrupted by damage to different parts of the brain. We know facts like, language processing occurs in Broca’s area in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. But some patients with their Broca’s area destroyed can still understand language, due to the immense neuroplasticity of the brain. And language, in turn, is just a part of what we call “thinking.” If we can’t even pin down where the brain processes language, we are a far way from locating that mysterious entity, “consciousness.” That may be because it doesn’t exist in a spot you can point at.

Symbolic artificial intelligence, the Cartesian theater, and the shadows of mind-body dualism plagued the early decades of research into consciousness and thinking. But eventually researchers began to throw the yoke off. Around 1960, linguistics pioneer Noam Chomsky made a bold argument: Forget about meaning, forget about thinking, just focus on syntax. He claimed that linguistic syntax could be represented formally, was a computational problem, and was universal to all humans and hard-coded into every baby’s head. The process of exposure to language caused certain switches to be flipped on or off to determine what particular form the grammar would take (English, Chinese, Inuit, and so on). But the process was one of selection, not acquisition. The rules of grammar, however they were implemented, became the target of research programs around the world, supplanting a search for “the home of thought.”

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From Aftau.org:

Restricting calorie consumption is one of the few proven ways to combat aging. Though the underlying mechanism is unknown, calorie restriction has been shown to prolong lifespan in yeast, worms, flies, monkeys, and, in some studies, humans. Now Keren Yizhak, a doctoral student in Prof. Eytan Ruppin's laboratory at Tel Aviv University's Blavatnik School of Computer Science, and her colleagues have developed a computer algorithm that predicts which genes can be “turned off” to create the same anti-aging effect as calorie restriction. The findings, reported in Nature Communications, could lead to the development of new drugs to treat aging. Researchers from Bar-Ilan University collaborated on the research. “Most algorithms try to find drug targets that kill cells to treat cancer or bacterial infections,” says Yizhak. “Our algorithm is the first in our field to look for drug targets not to kill cells, but to transform them from a diseased state into a healthy one.”

Yizhak's algorithm, which she calls a “metabolic transformation algorithm,” or MTA, can take information about any two metabolic states and predict the environmental or genetic changes required to go from one state to the other. “Gene expression” is the measurement of the expression level of individual genes in a cell, and genes can be “turned off” in various ways to prevent them from being expressed in the cell. In the study, Yizhak applied MTA to the genetics of aging. After using her custom-designed MTA to confirm previous laboratory findings, she used it to predict genes that can be turned off to make the gene expression of old yeast look like that of young yeast. Yeast is the most widely used genetic model because much of its DNA is preserved in humans. Some of the genes that the MTA identified were already known to extend the lifespan of yeast when turned off. Of the other genes she found, Yizhak sent seven to be tested at a Bar-Ilan University laboratory. Researchers there found that turning off two of the genes, GRE3 and ADH2, in actual, non-digital yeast significantly extends the yeast's lifespan. “You would expect about three percent of yeast's genes to be lifespan-extending,” said Yizhak. “So achieving a 10-fold increase over this expected frequency, as we did, is very encouraging.”

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Leah Price in the TLS:

In the age of Slow Food, Slow Parenting and Slow Knitting, it is no surprise that we should be presented with a Slow Reading manifesto. Just as some are giving up Hovis or Mighty White in favour of artisanal loaves, so data-mining and webcrawlers have provoked some human readers to stage a slowdown.

A high proportion of them are literary critics. If you care as much about form as about content, if noticing apparently insignificant details is a tool of your trade, then The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Speed Reading (2008) may sound like a pleonasm. Ever since modern literatures were first taught at university a couple of centuries ago, their average professor has read at the same pace as her seven-year-old. But while the average holds, the spread is widening. At one end lies Franco Moretti’s computer-assisted “distant reading”, which multiplies by several orders of magnitude the number of texts that would count as evidence for any claim about literature. At the other, “slow” has begun to replace “close”. After “A Movement for Slow Reading”, an article by Lindsay Waters published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2007, came small-press essays (John Miedema’s Slow Reading, 2009), pedagogical research (Thomas Newkirk’s The Art of Slow Reading, 2011) and cultural history (Isabel Hofmeyr’s Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in slow reading, 2013).

The psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer recently showed that less legible fonts increase readers’ ability to remember the text, presumably because it slows them down. In Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, David Mikics explains how we can put on the brakes for ourselves.

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Patrick Cockburn in the LRB (image from Wikimedia commons):

Why have oppositions in the Arab world and beyond failed so absolutely, and why have they repeated in power, or in pursuit of it, so many of the faults and crimes of the old regimes? The contrast between humanitarian principles expressed at the beginning of revolutions and the bloodbath at the end has many precedents, from the French Revolution on. But over the last twenty years in the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus the rapid degradation of what started as mass uprisings has been particularly striking. I was in Moscow at the start of the second Russo-Chechen war in October 1999, and flew with a party of journalists to Chechnya to see the Chechen president, Aslan Maskhadov, in his headquarters in Grozny, where he was desperately trying – and failing – to avert the Russian assault by calling for a ceasefire. We were housed in a former barracks which seemed worryingly vulnerable to Russian air attack. But it soon became evident that the presidential guard’s greatest anxiety was that we would be abducted by Chechen kidnappers and held for ransom. The first Chechen revolt in 1994-96 was seen as a heroic popular struggle for independence. Three years later it had been succeeded by a movement that was highly sectarian, criminalised and dominated by warlords. The war became too dangerous to report and disappeared off the media map. ‘In the first Chechen war,’ one reporter told me, ‘I would have been fired by my agency if I had left Grozny. Now the risk of kidnapping is so great I would be fired for going there.’

The pattern set in Chechnya has been repeated elsewhere with depressing frequency. The extent of the failure of the uprisings of 2011 to establish better forms of governance has surprised opposition movements, their Western backers and what was once a highly sympathetic foreign media. The surprise is due, in part, to a misunderstanding of what the uprisings were about.

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Hussein Ibish in The National:

When Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, referred to Jesus in his recent Christmas greeting as a “Palestinian messenger”, the Israeli government accused him of an “outrageous rewriting of Christian history”.

Numerous pro-Israel commentators insisted that “Jesus was a Jew,” and that this only underscores the ancient Jewish connection to the land versus the supposedly tenuous Arab one.

Accepting, for the sake of argument, the traditionally-inherited histories about Jesus, both sides are right and wrong, factually and, especially, politically.

Israelis and their supporters are right that Jesus was born Jewish. But unless they are converts to Christianity or Islam, they accord him no religious significance. Jewish Israelis are on very shaky ground pointing to Jesus as a proto-Israeli, or anything other than a very heretical Jew at best.

Palestinians can make the counterargument that Jesus was the founder of Christianity, and that while he was born Jewish he became the first Christian, and was later identified as a prophet of Islam. Since the Christians and Muslims of the land almost entirely identify as Palestinians, by that logic Jesus was a proto-Palestinian.

Except that this is all historical, intellectual and political rubbish from both sides.

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Stuart Jeffries at The Guardian:

If you want to understand modern capitalism and consumer society, argues the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, you'd better explore the ramifications of Dostoevsky's metaphor. “He recognised the monstrous edifice as a man-eating structure,” Sloterdijk writes, “a cult container in which humans pay homage to the demons of the west: the power of money and pure movement.”

Sloterdijk sees Paxton's spawn everywhere today – crystal palaces containing the one and half billion winners of globalisation, while three times that number are excluded, some with their noses up against the glass until security guards hose them down. “Who can deny,” he writes, “that in its primary aspects, the western world – especially the European Union – embodies such a great interior today?” Who can deny, either, that the internet realises in cyberspace Paxton's dream of immateriality and of abolishing distance? “Experience the Arctic and the Amazon without the jet lag,” goes the ad. “Trek with Google Maps.”

It's perhaps inevitable that Sloterdijk would be catalysed by Dostoevsky's metaphor. In his vast trilogy Spheres, published between 1998 and 2004, Sloterdijk wrote the metaphysical history of enclosed spaces including Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes and space travel, though not Apple's iCloud (it hadn't yet appeared to Steve Jobs in a dream).

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J.C. Gabel at the LA Times:

Rafael Bernal, born in 1915 in Mexico City, doesn't come to mind when one thinks of great detective novelists of the 1960s. There is little about him on the Internet in English, and none of his other novels, plays, story collections or histories have been translated. Although he wrote dozens of books, his 1969 novel, “The Mongolian Conspiracy,” is considered his masterwork, but it was difficult to procure even an old dog-eared copy — until this past fall, when it was reissued by the folks at New Directions.

more here.

Ugly

Your daughter is ugly.
She knows loss intimately,
carries whole cities in her belly.

As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.
She was splintered wood and sea water.
They said she reminded them of the war.

On her fifteenth birthday you taught her
how to tie her hair like rope
and smoke it over burning frankincense.

You made her gargle rosewater
and while she coughed, said
macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell
of lonely or empty.

You are her mother.
Why did you not warn her,
hold her like a rotting boat
and tell her that men will not love her
if she is covered in continents,
if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island
if her thighs are borders?

What man wants to lay down
and watch the world burn
in his bedroom?

Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear,
a body littered with ugly things

but God,
doesn’t she wear
the world well.
.

by Warsan Shire
from teaching my mother how to give birth
publisher: flipped eye, London, 2011

Laura Miller in Salon:

Dad: Everyone has to finish the game, or no one wins.
Me: What?
Dad: No one wins unless everyone wins.
Me: So no one wins.
Dad: No, everyone wins.

That conversation perfectly captures the spirit of “Promise Land: My Journey through America’s Self-Help Culture,” Lamb-Shapiro’s deadpan, eyebrow-arched effort to comprehend the glass-half-full point of view despite her own half-empty propensities. There’s no shortage of books featuring “cultural history” and other quasi-sociological surveys of this terrain, but Lamb-Shapiro’s take is different. Part experiential journalism, part memoir, “Promise Land” is both funnier and more searching than detached forms of social commentary could ever hope to be.

…What Lamb-Shapiro does know a lot about is language, and even the self-help proponents she finds worthwhile have a tendency to put her off with their clichés and mushy terminology, buzzwords like “life-altering passage” and “healing circle.” Her “allergy” to this lingo derives in large part from her sensitivity to the way that words professing to name the truth can instead be used to mute it. Yet in the end, even Lamb-Shapiro finds herself recognizing that merit hides in the most banal self-help maxim of all (which you can guess easily enough with a glance at the book’s cover image of a kitten dangling from a twig). “Can even the most bastardized, laughable incarnations of self-help carry some kernel of redeeming value?” she asks herself. There’s the rub, because (as the late David Foster Wallace was wont to affirm), indeed they can. Sometimes even the smartest among us find ourselves with nothing to fight off the encroaching night but a well-worn incantation. And sometimes, even if only sometimes, it’s enough.

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Teller in The New York Times:

“Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner” is the “disheveled memoir” of the beloved Scientific American columnist, journalist and author or editor of more than 100 books of philosophy, humor, mathematics, poetry, puzzles, fiction, science, anthologies and annotations (e.g., “The Annotated Alice”), and essays on topics from logic to literary criticism. Gardner, who died in 2010, wrote “Undiluted Hocus-Pocus” at the age of 95 in a one-room assisted-living apartment in Norman, Okla. He worked on an old electric typewriter and edited with scissors and rubber cement as he stood at the lectern from which he had long addressed the world in print. “I am given five pills every morning after breakfast,” he writes. “My blood pressure is low, my cholesterol is so-so, and my vision is perfect.” But, he adds, “at 95 I still have enough wits to keep writing.” Gardner was a child of faith and skepticism. His mother was “a devout Methodist”; his father, a Scripture-doubting science buff, a wildcatter who built a career on oil. When his mother spotted a rainbow, “she would hurry to the phone and call a dozen friends, urging them to go outside” and see the miracle. His father explained the rainbow’s optics and built Martin a science lab next to the kitchen.

“The wonderful thing about a rainbow,” Gardner writes, “is that it is not something ‘out there’ in the sky. It exists only on the retinas of eyes or on photographic film. Your image in a mirror is similar. It’s not a thing behind the looking glass. By the way, what does a mirror look like when there’s no one in the room? And why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down?” “Undiluted Hocus-Pocus” is full of such challenges, teasing the reader in a warm, friendly way, like a sly uncle. As a child and teenager, Gardner was drawn to anything that smacked of ingenuity. He studied and invented magic tricks. He played chess. He revered science. “Newton,” he observes, “did more to alter the world than any king or queen or great military leader. Einstein, sitting alone and thinking, changed the world more than any politician.” At the University of Chicago, he studied writing with Thornton Wilder and laughed at the crazy, competing academic movements.

More here.

Over at Skull in the Stars [via Jennifer Ouellette]:

The final installment in a series of posts on the size of the infinite, as described in mathematical set theory. The first post can be read here, the second here, and the thirdhere.

We have taken a long, strange journey into the properties of infinity. Over the course of three posts, we have seen that we can characterize the different “sizes” of infinity, though not in the way one might think. We have found, in fact, that there are an infinity of infinities! The smallest one we looked at was the infinite set of counting numbers (labeled ); the next largest we found was the continuum (labeled ): the set of real numbers between 0 and 1. We then found that, for any size infinity, we can construct a larger one.

This leads to an intriguing notion: if we arrange the different size infinities we have found in order, we might have a set of the form

This would seem to suggest a really elegant possibility: if these are all the infinities, then we could imagine that the set of all infinities form a countable infinity themselves, of size, and then we could build up the larger infinities again from this, continuing an endless cycle! For instance, the set of all subsets of the set of all infinities would then be of size , and so on.

For this to be true, however, we need to know whether there are any other infinities between those we have been able to derive so far. We have shown that there are an infinite number of infinities, but we have not shown that these are the only infinities.

More here.

William Helmreich in Aeon:

When I was nine, my father found a new form of entertainment for me. Whenever our schedules were free, we took the subway from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to the end of the line and walked around, exploring the neighbourhood. We saw swampy marshes in Canarsie, Brooklyn, public housing projects in Astoria, Queens, and beautiful, forested Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. One time, my father poked his head into a pub and everyone scattered. We never found out why.

In this way, I learned to love New York City. I still do. And over the past four years, partly in homage to New York, but largely to furnish material for a book-length study, I’ve walked some 6,000 miles across the city’s built-up terrain — that’s 120,000 blocks. The question, for a professional sociologist such as me, is: was this the best way to study a city?

Approached correctly, walking forces you to slow down and really look at what you’re seeing. Like the flâneurs of times past, one needs to stroll leisurely and engage people in conversations about how they feel about where they live, what they do, and how they perceive the place is changing. Had I driven through the city, along its highways and thoroughfares, I would have missed 90 per cent of what I found: the teeming life of the city’s backstreets, its parks and playgrounds, its outdoor and indoor eateries — all this would have remained invisible to me. Besides, driving (and for that matter, cycling) tend to mark you as an outsider, even if you live there. When you cover ground quickly, people assume you’re just passing through. But when you walk through a neighbourhood, people assume you’ve got reason to be there.

With walking, it’s the journey that’s the destination. The minute you begin observing, you’re there.

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Rick Lewis talks to Blackburn about his atheism in Philosophy Now:

Some theologians have followed the late John Hick in suggesting that religious claims aren’t really about asserting the truth of propositions such as ‘God exists’, but instead are claims about perceptions of God; in other words theism is about an attitude towards the world. Do you think something parallel could be said about some atheists?

I have a great deal of respect for the view that ‘onto-theology’, that is, religious doctrines associated with existence claims, should be abandoned, but that such things as rituals, poetry, metaphor, music and dance still have a role in welding people together into a congregation or a society. This was Durkheim’s view of the function of religious practices. I think they have other functions as well, but that substantially he was right. Of course, on this view the whole subject changes, and the question turns to the value of these practices as they manifest themselves in particular historical and cultural contexts. You can very effectively weld people together by magnifying their differences from other people, and that has always been an aspect of religion, and not at all a nice one.

Marx is admired by militant New Atheists for saying that religion is the opium of the people. But they forget what he said next, which is that “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” I think that is right, which is why moral and political questions should occupy all of us far more than ontological questions.

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Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

The poet Kobayashi Issa suffered greatly in his life — suffered as we all, in time, suffer — and like us, Issa’s suffering informed his opinions about New Year’s. Beginning with his mother at age three, Issa’s loved ones seemed always to die — his grandmother, his children, his wife. No one Issa loved was immune. Issa’s body of work is a chronicle of loneliness and loss. It is not easy to laugh when everything in life goes wrong. Which is what makes Issa’s reputation as a funny poet even more significant. For example:

fallen among
the moonflowers …
horse turds

Issa was also a Buddhist and so had a Buddhist perspective on New Year’s. Meaning, he was inclined to view the big through the lens of the microscopic. (Issa wrote no less than 200 poems about frogs, around 230 on the firefly, over 150 about mosquitoes, 90 on flies, and over 100 on fleas, not to mention his gentle meditations on excrement and flatulence.) Issa began his autobiographical work The Spring of My Life with a New Year’s story. It went like this. Long ago, in Fuko Temple, there was a devout priest who was determined to celebrate New Year’s to the fullest. So on New Year’s Eve he wrote a letter to himself and asked a novice to deliver the letter back to himself — the priest — in the morning. On New Year’s Day, the novice entered the priest’s room and handed him the letter. The priest quickly opened the letter and read aloud. “Give up the world of suffering! Come to the Pure Land. I will meet you along the way with a host of bodhisattvas!” And then the priest began weeping so hard the tears soaked his sleeves.

more here.

Bernard Porter at Literary Review:

Gandhi's years in South Africa were the making of him and could be said to mark the beginning of the unmaking of the British Empire. Ramachandra Guha's fine new book examining this time is the first of two projected volumes that will eventually cover the whole of the Mahatma's life. Usually this period is treated by biographers simply, and relatively sketchily, as a prelude to the much more important events that happened after his return to India in 1914. Guha thinks this does 'injustice to both man and place'. If he had been killed then, rather than in 1948, he would still have left a huge mark. Gandhi himself, when informed of an assassination plot against him in Johannesburg in March 1914, told a nephew that, if it succeeded, it would 'be welcome and a fit end to my work'.

We forget how celebrated he already was, in India and Britain as well as in South Africa, before the great events of the 1920s and 1930s. He was in South Africa for twenty years, after all. That was time enough not only for some great achievements on behalf of 'Asiatics' living and working there, but also for him to hone his broader ideas and strategies into the distinctive forms we are familiar with from his later career. Guha ends this book with some speculation ('counter-factual history') on what difference it might have made if he had never gone abroad. (If his father had still been alive, he probably wouldn't have done.) There can be no doubt that the experience was crucial – to him and, consequently, the world.

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Mary Beard at The Times Literary Supplement:

The Emperor Augustus had a long life, dying at the age of seventy-five, in 14 AD – appropriately enough in August, the month that had already been renamed in his honour by the grateful (or sycophantic) senate. This 2,000th anniversary is now being commemorated in Rome by another exhibition just a few hundred yards away from the Palazzo delle Esposizioni: simply titled Augusto, it is on show in the Scuderie del Quirinale, the wonderful exhibition space created some fifteen years ago out of an eighteenth-century stable block on the Quirinal hill, from where in March it moves to the Grand Palais in Paris. Seventy-five years on, the curators of this new, and much smaller, show have clearly been concerned to distance it from its Fascist forebear. Indeed, in the first essay in the excellent catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Andrea Giardina takes great care to treat Mussolini’s Augustus with shrewd, analytic dispassion – and so to consign that Mostra to “history”.

The two shows are certainly very different. Where the Mostra Augustea celebrated the art of reconstruction, Augusto celebrates the artistic originality of the Augustan age (31 BC–14 AD), particularly in sculpture; though painting is discussed in the catalogue, there is none on display (no Livia’s Garden Room, for example, nor the exquisite decoration from the Villa della Farnesina). Even so, the show has managed to gather together in one place more of the most significant, original works of art of Augustus’ reign than have ever been assembled before – even in the ancient world itself. This makes it possible, for the first time, directly to compare portraits of the Emperor scattered across Europe (from London to Corinth, Ancona to Athens); and, no less important, to put side by side statues usually housed a short but inconvenient journey apart, the other side of the city of Rome.

more here.