Chris Townsend at The Paris Review:

Last year marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, among the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Next year, 2017, will be the two-hundredth anniversary of Baron Karl Drais’s “running machine,” the precursor to the modern bicycle. Strange as it may seem, these three events are all intimately related; they’re all tied together by the great shift in climate that made 1816 the “year without a summer.”

Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia—then the Dutch East Indies—began its week-long eruption on April 5, 1815, though its impact would last years. Lava flows leveled the island, killing nearly all plant and animal life and reducing Tambora’s height by a third. It belched huge clouds of dust into the air, bringing almost total darkness to the surrounding area for days. The geologist Charles Lyell would reflect that “the darkness occasioned in the daytime by the ashes in Java was so profound, that nothing equal to it was ever witnessed in the darkest night.” According to Lyell, of the 12,000 residents of the province of Tambora, only twenty-six survived. Tens of thousands more were choked to their deaths by the thick black air and the falling dust, which blanketed the ground in piles more than a meter high.

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Iona Craig at The New Statesman:

Ten thousand dead – a conservative estimate at best. Three million internally displaced. Twenty million in need of aid. Two hundred thousand besieged for over a year. Thirty-four ballistic missiles fired into Saudi Arabia. More than 140 mourners killed in a double-tap strike on a funeral. These are just some of the numerical subscripts of the war in Yemen.

The British government would probably prefer to draw attention to the money being spent on aid in Yemen – £37m extra, according to figures released by the Department for International Development in September – rather than the £3.3bn worth of arms that the UK licensed for sale to Saudi Arabia in the first year of the kingdom’s bombing campaign against one of the poorest nations in the Middle East.

Yet, on the ground, the numbers are meaningless. What they do not show is how the conflict is tearing Yemeni society apart. Nor do they account for the deaths from disease and starvation caused by the hindering of food imports and medical supplies – siege tactics used by both sides – and for the appropriation of aid for financial gain.

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Joshua Hammer at The New York Review of Books:

The hesitation in the drive toward Mosul also has much to do with Iraq’s fractious politics. The three main forces advancing toward the city—the Iraqi army, the peshmerga, and the coalition of independent Shiite militias, some backed by Iran—are in conflict about their parts in the coming liberation. Nechirvan Barzani, the Kurdistan Regional Government prime minister, announced last summer that the peshmerga would play a “central role” in the liberation of Mosul, which has a minority Kurdish population. The top commanders of the Iraqi security forces, dominated by Shiites, insist that the Kurds stick to the outskirts of the city, which is itself largely Sunni—then withdraw as soon as the battle is over.

The Shiite militias, poised within striking distance of Mosul in parts of neighboring Kirkuk province, have also demanded that they participate in the Mosul operation. “They played a huge role in the liberation of areas [around Baghdad] and they are highly motivated,” a US military officer in Baghdad told me. But the prospect of armed Shiites sweeping through Mosul has alarmed many Sunnis, who recall the killings of Sunni civilians during the liberation of Fallujah and other parts of Anbar province last spring. Some Shiite militia leaders, meanwhile, say they will oppose any attempt by the peshmerga to march into Mosul. Kurdish leaders are also demanding a referendum on their own independence as soon as the Islamic State is driven out of the country. Al-Abadi has hedged on Kurdish independence, which is opposed by most of the Shiite majority. (The US government has repeatedly said it supports a united Iraq.)

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Carmen Nobel at the website of Harvard Business School:

One December evening in 2011, while preparing a lesson plan, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes picked up the phone for his weekly conversation with Bernie Madoff.

Soltes, who was doing an in-depth investigation on white-collar crime, had been interviewing Madoff every Wednesday evening for several months. Madoff, a renowned stockbroker turned fraudster, conducted the phone calls from FCI Butner, a medium-security federal correctional institution in North Carolina. At the time, he was serving the third year of a 150-year prison sentence for orchestrating the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.

Madoff’s phone-time allowance was limited, and he saved much of it for his conversations with Soltes. They conversed in 15-minute chunks, the maximum amount of uninterrupted call time that the prison would allow.

The professor and the felon shared a genuine, geeky interest in financial economics. Sometimes they discussed the early days of Madoff’s career, which began in 1960. Other times they chatted about new books, academic journal articles, or recent events in the news. But that evening Soltes led the conversation with a specific question: How would you explain your actions and misconduct to a group of students?

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Roses are red but violets aren’t blue. They’re mostly violet. The peacock begonia, however, is blue—and not just a boring matte shade, but a shiny metallic one. Its leaves are typically dark green in color, but if you look at them from the right angle, they take on a metallic blue sheen. “It’s like green silk, shot through with a deep royal blue,” says Heather Whitney from the University of Bristol.

And she thinks she knows why.

Similar metallic colours are common in nature—you can find it in the wings of many butterflies, the bibs of pigeons, the feathers of peacocks, and the shells of jewel beetles. These body parts get their color not from pigments but from microscopic structures that are found in evenly spaced layers. As light hits each layer, some gets reflected and the rest pass through. Because of the regular gaps between the layers, the reflected beams amplify each other to produce exceptionally strong colors—at least, from certain viewing angles.This is called iridescence.

Iridescence is less obvious among plants, but there are some stunning exceptions.

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From Notes on Liberty:

The average worker of the early twentieth century was probably less skilled – any way you define skill – than his 17th century counterpart. He also needed less intelligence to do his work properly.

Here is an illustration of these basic ideas. Today, one can buy shoes made by machine in South Korea or by hand in India. That is, modern mass production along rationalized lines, in the world, exists side by side with craft production fairly similar to all shoe production before 1750. The average line worker in a Korean shoe production does not need to be very bright, and he can be satisfactorily trained in a month or so. By contrast, a traditional Indian shoe-maker is apprenticed for four to five years, or more.** He cannot be stupid and he needs patience, perseverance, and a superior ability to focus, among other personal traits. It’s true that today’s unskilled Korean worker probably has more formal education that the Indian shoe-maker. That’s not because he needs it to do his job but because he lives in a rich society where formal education is a consumption item. It may also be to enable him to spend rationally. It may make him a better citizen. It’s not required by his job beyond basic literacy, if that.

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Brandon Keim in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In recent years scientists have even found that insects possess evolutionarily ancient brain structures responsible for creating mental maps of one’s own place in space. Some researchers consider these structures foundational to human awareness; if they are, then insects, too, would appear to be conscious. Whatever it feels like to be a bee, it feels like something. What that something is, how instinct and awareness interact, how different forms of memory shape experience, how evolution’s convergences and divergences have shaped the development of cognition across time and circumstance — these are frontier questions now being asked. Science has come a long way from a reflexive adherence to C. Lloyd Morgan’s wariness of “higher psychical faculty,” or the famed behaviorist B.F. Skinner’s insistence that other animals are “conscious in the sense of being under stimulus control” and experience pain with no more conscious resonance than “they see a light or hear a sound.”

Other questions involve capacities like morality: Might its biological building blocks be widespread in the animal kingdom? Or what about motivation? After all, a human whose every physical need is provided for, but who doesn’t actually do anything except sit in a room, won’t be very happy. Beyond seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and procreating, what might an animal find fulfilling? “I don’t think I can understand that unless I try, with a whole lot of humility, to imagine what it would be like to be that animal,” says Becca Franks, a cognitive psychologist at the University of British Columbia. “Then you take those insights to create an experimental, data-driven paradigm. That’s how science proceeds.”

More here.

martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935

when your man comes home from prison,
when he comes back like the wound
and you are the stitch,
when he comes back with pennies in his pocket
and prayer fresh on his lips,
you got to wash him down first.

you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled
and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism
back into what he was before gun barrels and bars
chewed their claim in his hide and spit him
stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.

you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears
from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks
from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary’s stench loose
from his hair, scrape curse and confession
from the welted and the smooth,
the hard and the soft,
the furrowed and the lax.

you got to hold tight that shadrach’s face
between your palms, take crease and lid
and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water,
and when he opens his eyes
you tell him calm and sure
how a woman birthed him
back whole again.

by Tyehimba Jess
from Leadbelly
Wave Books

Editorial in Nature:

In March 2011, this publication suggested that the US Congress seemed lost in the “intellectual wilderness”. The Republicans had taken over the House of Representatives, and one of the early acts of the chamber’s science committee was to approve legislation that denied the threat of climate change. As it turns out, this was just one tiny piece of a broader populist movement that was poised to transform the US political scene. Judging by the current presidential campaign, when it comes to reason, decency and use of evidence, much of the country’s political system seems to have lost its way. Is there anything left to say about the unsuitability of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate? Even senior figures of his own party have disowned him. The latest revelations about his sordid attitude and behaviour towards women only confirm what was obvious to many from the very beginning: Trump is a demagogue not fit for high office, or for the responsibilities that come with it.

Will the centre hold? Will the United States elect its first female president, Hillary Clinton? It should do. And not just because she is not Donald Trump. Clinton is a quintessential politician — and a good one at that. She has shown tremendous understanding of complex issues directly relevant to Nature’s readers, and has engaged with scientists and academics. Take health: as first lady, she led attempts to expand health care in the early years of her husband Bill Clinton’s presidency. She supported the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which reaches millions of poor children. She championed women’s rights, and as secretary of state made global health a priority through the Global Health Initiative, a framework to coordinate various US programmes. Clinton may not have the outsider appeal of a newcomer. But few politicians with her degree of experience and pragmatism do. She is arguably the best-qualified presidential candidate for two decades.

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Otto Umbehr. Self Portrait at the Beach. c 1930.

More here and here.

Huw Price in Aeon:

Should we be concerned? People have been speculating about machine intelligence for generations – so what’s new?

Well, two big things have changed in recent decades. First, there’s been a lot of real progress – theoretical, practical and technological – in understanding the mechanisms of intelligence, biological as well as non-biological. Second, AI has now reached a point where it’s immensely useful for many tasks. So it has huge commercial value, and this is driving huge investment – a process that seems bound to continue, and probably accelerate.

One way or another, then, we are going to be sharing the planet with a lot of non-biological intelligence. Whatever it brings, we humans face this future together. We have an obvious common interest in getting it right. And we need to nail it the first time round. Barring some calamity that ends our technological civilisation without entirely finishing us off, we’re not going to be coming this way again.

There have been encouraging signs of a growing awareness of these issues. Many thousands of AI researchers and others have now signed an open letter calling for research to ensure that AI is safe and beneficial. Most recently, there is a welcome new Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society by Google, Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft.

For the moment, much of the focus is on safety, and on the relatively short-term benefits and impacts of AI (on jobs, for example). But as important as these questions are, they are not the only things we should be thinking about.

More here.