From the MIT Technology Review:

When it comes to automotive technology, self-driving cars are all the rage. Standard features on many ordinary cars include intelligent cruise control, parallel parking programs, and even automatic overtaking—features that allow you to sit back, albeit a little uneasily, and let a computer do the driving.

So it’ll come as no surprise that many car manufacturers are beginning to think about cars that take the driving out of your hands altogether (see “Drivers Push Tesla’s Autopilot Beyond Its Abilities”). These cars will be safer, cleaner, and more fuel-efficient than their manual counterparts. And yet they can never be perfectly safe.

And that raises some difficult issues. How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random? (See also “How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions.”)

The answers to these ethical questions are important because they could have a big impact on the way self-driving cars are accepted in society. Who would buy a car programmed to sacrifice the owner?

More here.

Orion Jones in Big Think:

Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who became a household name after conducting the Stanford prison experiments, argues that our online culture is disproportionately harming boys, who watch more pornography, waste more time playing video games, and are increasingly bored with their sedentary office jobs.

The cause, Zimbardo explains in his new book “Man (Dis)connected: How Technology has Sabotaged What it Means to Be Male,” is biological in nature. Men have what psychologists call “single-cue arousability,” meaning one mere stimulus brings them closer to happiness, such as a naked person on a screen, when compared to women who require more complex stimuli to become aroused.

We've long wondered if the Internet is like the crack cocaine of entertainment, but talking about online addiction as a substance-abuse problem is a misleading metaphor, says Zimbardo. The Internet is not a drug because drug addiction supplies its users with more of the same experience. Arousal addiction, which the Internet does provide for, requires the addict to always receive new stimulation.

More here.

Meghan Walsh in Today's Ozy:

On a sunny afternoon, at a bustling cafe less than a mile from Stanford University’s campus, near Palo Alto, and more than 5,000 miles from his home, an assistant professor from MIT is telling me about science. Very advanced science. His name is Jeremy England, and at 33, he’s already being called the next Charles Darwin.

Say what?

In town to give a lecture, the Harvard grad and Rhodes scholar speaks quickly, his voice rising a few pitches in tone, his long-fingered hands making sudden jerks when he’s excited. He’s skinny, with a long face, scraggly beard and carelessly groomed mop of sandy brown hair — what you might expect from a theoretical physicist. But then there’s the street-style Adidas on his feet and the kippah atop his head. And the fact that this scientist also talks a lot about God.

The 101 version of his big idea is this: Under the right conditions, a random group of atoms will self-organize, unbidden, to more effectively use energy. Over time and with just the right amount of, say, sunlight, a cluster of atoms could come remarkably close to what we call life. In fact, here’s a thought: Some things we consider inanimate actually may already be “alive.” It all depends on how we define life, something England’s work might prompt us to reconsider. “People think of the origin of life as being a rare process,” says Vijay Pande, a Stanford chemistry professor. “Jeremy’s proposal makes life a consequence of physical laws, not something random.”

More here.

Annie Marie Musselman in Wired:

In the popular imagination, the eternal trope is that the porn industry drives the adoption of new technology; that it accounts for some astronomically large portion of all Internet traffic; and, yes, that it generates equally enormous sums of money for all the faceless people who run its operations. We picture these people as sleazy Southern Californians wearing pinkie rings and polyester. Or, if we’ve come to realize that the pinkie-ring caricature makes absolutely no sense in the age of the Internet, we see them as ruthlessly clever businesspeoplewith a sixth sense for where the big money lies. That’s the stereotype Silicon Valley embraces. Later in the episode, when Hendricks turns up at an adult industry conference, we encounter an army of porn execs dressed like bankers.

But it isn’t like that at all.

More here.

Assaf Gavron in The Washington Post:

I was an Israel Defense Forces soldier in Gaza 27 years ago, during the first intifada. We patrolled the city and the villages and the refugee camps and encountered angry teenagers throwing stones at us. We responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Now those seem like the good old days.

Since then, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen stones replaced with guns and suicide bombs, then rockets and highly trained militias, and now, in the past month, kitchen knives, screwdrivers and other improvised weapons. Some of these low-tech efforts have been horrifically successful, with victims as young as 13. There is plenty to discuss about the nature and timing of the recent wave of Palestinian attacks — a desperate and humiliated answer to the election of a hostile Israeli government that emboldens extremist settlers to attack Palestinians. But as an Israeli, I am more concerned with the actions of my own society, which are getting scarier and uglier by the moment.

…In this latest round of fighting, the volume has been turned up still another notch. While the knife attacks are going on, my family and I are in Omaha, where I’m teaching for the semester, and what I hear and read from Israel leaves me appalled. Again led by politicians from the right (with the perplexing support of members of the supposed opposition, such as Yair Lapid), then circulated by the sensationalist mainstream media, there has been a unified demonization of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. One recent poll by the newspaper Maariv found that only 19 percent of Israeli Jews think most Arabs oppose the attacks. This past week, the trend reached its absurd peak, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ridiculous claim that Hitler decided to annihilate the Jews only after being advised to do so by Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of Palestinian Arabs at the time. (Israeli Twitter was full of jokes and memes about the speech, which one image in circulation dubbed “Hitlerious.” Even for Netanyahu’s supporters, apparently, this was too much.)

More here.

Alison Crawford in Science:

The bizarre reactor that might save nuclear fusion:

Tokamak or stellarator? That’s the question fusion enthusiasts are asking as a research lab in Germany prepares to flip the switch on the largest fusion device ever built, dubbed the “stellarator.” For Star Wars lovers, this epic construction device looks like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon and sports some of the most complex engineering models ever devised. We’ll soon find out if the stellarator is strong enough to withstand the enormous forces and temperature ranges in order to surpass tokamaks in the effort to advance nuclear fusion.

Scientists may have found the earliest evidence of life on Earth

When did life on Earth begin? A controversial new study presents potential evidence that traces of life arose more than 4 billion years ago. Clues lie hidden in microscopic flecks of graphite trapped inside a single large crystal of zircon found in the Jack Hills in Western Australia. These zircon crystals barely span the width of a human hair, but they are nearly indestructible and provide a rare glimpse into Earth’s earliest history.

Designer antibodies may rid body of AIDS virus

Anti-HIV drugs have extended life for millions of people, but they have never eliminated the virus from anyone because HIV integrates its genetic material into the chromosomes of some white blood cells, helping it escape notice of the immune system. New findings show that artificial antibodies could “redirect” the immune response to latently infected cells and help drain the HIV reservoirs into the body. The dual-action concept to reverse latency and then do the mop-up work is both promising and exciting, but it is also risky and won’t be tested in people for at least a year.

More here.

Now Sing

NOW sing: the guards howling
beat him with obscenities.
…….. But he did.
His legend is
He was singing
……………….. Venceremos
when they shot him.
Even for them, it was too much

The killed him,
they couldn't kill him enough,

Victor Jara
…………… sin guitarra,
who'd held out with bloody stumps
………………………………………….. and sung

by James Scully
from Poetry Like Bread
Curbstone Press, 1994

****

Victor Jara:

“Jara composed 'Venceremos' (We Will Triumph), the theme song of Allende's Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) movement, and he welcomed Allende's election to the Chilean presidency in 1970. Jara and his wife were key participants in a cultural renaissance that swept Chile, organizing cultural events that supported the country's new socialist government. He set poems by Chilean writer Pablo Neruda to music and performed at a ceremony honoring Neruda after the famous writer received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1972. Throughout rumblings of a right-wing coup, Jara held on to his teaching job at Chile's Technical University.

“On September 11, 1973, however, Chilean troops under the command of General Augusto Pinochet mounted a coup against the Allende government. Jara was seized and taken to the Estadio Chile, a large sports stadium. There he was held for four days, deprived of food and sleep. He was tortured, and his hands were broken by soldiers who told him to try to keep on playing the guitar with his damaged hands.

Read more:

Brian Switek in Smithsonian Magazine:

Living large isn’t easy. The sauropod dinosaurs—the biggest creatures to ever walk the Earth—required rapid growth rates, skeletons that were both light and strong and copious amounts of food, just for starters.

Now, paleontologists may have cracked one of the remaining mysteries about these giant dinosaurs: How did they pump enough blood up their long necks to feed their brains?

University of Southern California paleontologist Michael Habib was inspired to investigate sauropod necks after seeing bones from a giant titanosaur found in the New Mexico desert. The well-preserved neck bones included spines called cervical ribs that stretch almost six feet long. These rods, Habib says, turned out to be made of a very flexible sort of bone that “made pretty darn good springs.”

As the giant dinosaurs walked, the motion would have created an “inertial problem” for the sauropods. Without something to dampen this effect, Habib says, “the neck is going to start to sway back and forth like a badly mounted crane or tree in a breeze.”

This is where the cervical ribs came in. These springy bones dampened that effect, allowing the dinosaurs to keep their necks relatively steady as they plodded along, Habib told researchers gathered last week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Dallas, Texas.

More here.

Michelle Goldberg in DoubleXX:

Anne Trubek in Smithsonian:

Cuneiform made headlines recently with the discovery of 22 new lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh, found on tablet fragments in Iraq. As remarkable as is the discovery of new bits of millennia-old literature is the story of cuneiform itself, a now obscure but once exceedingly influential writing system, the world’s first examples of handwriting. Cuneiform, was invented some 6,000 years ago in what is now southern Iraq, and it was most often written on iPhone-sized clay tablets a few inches square and an inch high. Deciding to use clay for a writing surface was ingenious: vellum, parchment, papyrus and paper—other writing surfaces people have used in the past—deteriorate easily. But not clay, which has proven to be the most durable, and perhaps most sustainable, writing surface humanity has used.

Cuneiform means “wedge-shaped,” a term the Greeks used to describe the look of the signs. It was used to write at least a dozen languages, just as the alphabet that you are reading now is also (for the most part) used in Spanish, German and many other languages. It looks like a series of lines and triangles, as each sign is comprised of marks—triangular, vertical, diagonal, and horizontal—impressed onto wet clay with a stylus, a long thin instrument similar to a pen. Sometimes cuneiform was formed into prisms, larger tablets and cylinders, but mainly it was written on palm-sized pieces of clay. The script is often tiny—almost too small to see with the naked eye, as small the smallest letters on a dime. Why so tiny? That remains one of cuneiform’s biggest mysteries.

More here.

Marilynne Robinson at the Financial Times:

The First and Second Great Awakenings, religious revivals that swept through the midcolonies in the late eighteenth century and the northeastern states in the first third of the nineteenth century, were followed, I have come to realise, by a third awakening in the latter half of the twentieth century, just as I was coming of age. Historians usually treat the earlier awakenings as surges of religious enthusiasm primarily or exclusively, though they are attended by a characteristic cluster of reform movements — enhancements of the status of women, broadening of access to education, mitigations of social and racial inequality. These were consistent even while the demographics of the country changed. The religious and denominational character of the earlier awakenings seems to have been as much a consequence of the old centrality of the churches as centres of civic life as it was a result of their role in stirring religious passion. I hasten to say that in these instances religious passion — and there were occasions of hysteria, fainting fits, visions — led to, and was consistent with, stable and thoughtful social change. The period in the twentieth century I would call the third great awakening was led by the black church, and sooner or later had the support of all the major denominations. But it was not, and is not, understood as an essentially religious movement, though as I have said the distinction between civic and religious is never clear, and was certainly not clear in this case.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

“Paris,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “is a counterpoint in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the natural order: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active hotbed of revolution. But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that cover them, have been transformed into paradisal orchards, so the lava of revolutions provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of art, festivity, fashion.”

Such a statement reverberates through Luc Sante's “The Other Paris” like a thesis statement, an emblem of the city's soul. Paris, Sante wants us to understand, is both like and unlike other cities: an expression of class, of history, but also improvisational, serendipitous. “The city,” he insists, “— compact and curled within itself, a labyrinth — had to be played like a game.”

This is an idea — I'll admit it — that I love, not just in regard to Paris but also to the very essence of urban life. What are cities, after all, but what we make of them, the paths we carve through their maze of streets and neighborhoods, the individual existences we construct in relation to their collective ones?

more here.

Nicholas Fox Weber at the New York Times:

The mystery in these pages is Goldberger’s own judgment of Frank Gehry’s architecture. We certainly see Gehry in the company of famous artists — Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschen­berg and Robert Irwin were early friends — and we follow his meteoric rise to worldwide fame. We encounter a lot of powerful real estate developers, and learn the background stories of the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, 8 Spruce Street (to my mind Gehry’s most successful building, suggesting he is better at apartment towers than museums and concert halls) and, most recently, the Fondation Louis Vuitton museum. Yet Gehry’s entertaining and uncommonly intelligent biographer puts as much emphasis on details like the presence of Brad Pitt and Arianna Huffington at the architect’s 80th-birthday party as on the characteristics of the architecture itself. Reeling off names like Larry Gagosian, Bono, Ian Schrager, Candice Bergen and Ben Gazzara as being among the people to celebrate Gehry’s 82nd birthday, Goldberger seems to suggest that being famous matters as much, at least to Frank Gehry, as the social service and aesthetic impact of his buildings.

Bono sang at the funeral of the painter Balthus, whose biography I wrote. For me, that episode with Bono signified the infatuation with celebrity that had been one of the sillier aspects of the life of a gifted and brilliant artist.

more here.

After Aquinas
.

Try making a man with no soul, you who can do all things. Not quite all.  Is it you or your end that’s manifest in forms fixed before you, or in the first sums  the schoolchild learns, likewise unalterable. The triangle makes its dark refusal  of all you might be, great indefinite. Spared a body and this staggered mind, you cannot know the joy  our weariness embraces—what made you go without the saving play of memory. Yes, to forget and invent  is denied you. Though you transcend time you too cannot change what was. The sad dream  seizing you most of all, still you cannot feel sadness, only—who knows. Maybe you feel less and less  the rumored maker, more like one who simply sees himself reflected, unforgiving, in a foreignness…  Bound by such laws. A singular. You cannot make another of what you are, be less than yourself, disappear.

by Tomas Unger
from Ecotheo Review, July 2015

Andrew Robinson reflects on the most tantalizing of all the undeciphered scripts — that used in the civilization of the Indus valley in the third millennium bc.

Andrew Robinson in Nature:

The Indus civilization flourished for half a millennium from about 2600 bc to 1900 bc. Then it mysteriously declined and vanished from view. It remained invisible for almost 4,000 years until its ruins were discovered by accident in the 1920s by British and Indian archaeologists. Following almost a century of excavation, it is today regarded as a civilization worthy of comparison with those of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, as the beginning of Indian civilization and possibly as the origin of Hinduism.

More than a thousand Indus settlements covered at least 800,000 square kilometres of what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. It was the most extensive urban culture of its period, with a population of perhaps 1 million and a vigorous maritime export trade to the Gulf and cities such as Ur in Mesopotamia, where objects inscribed with Indus signs have been discovered. Astonishingly, the culture has left no archaeological evidence of armies or warfare.

Most Indus settlements were villages; some were towns, and at least five were substantial cities (see 'Where unicorns roamed'). The two largest, Mohenjo-daro — a World Heritage Site listed by the United Nations — located near the Indus river, and Harappa, by one of the tributaries, boasted street planning and house drainage worthy of the twentieth century ad. They hosted the world's first known toilets, along with complex stone weights, elaborately drilled gemstone necklaces and exquisitely carved seal stones featuring one of the world's stubbornly undeciphered scripts.

More here.