Vinyl.Album.Cover.Art

9780500519325_p0_v2_s192x300Jonathan Meades at Literary Review:

The 12-inch 33rpm vinyl LP began to oust the 45rpm single in the later 1960s. Peter Blake’s endlessly imitated design for the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Andy Warhol’s banana for The Velvet Underground & Nico were as inspired as the music itself, and inseparable from it. These were, however, exceptions to the general rule that the cover should be little more than a flattering publicity shot, even if those depicted were dressed in Alphonse Mucha’s clothes. During the bad-hair decade and a half of its existence, from 1967 to 1982, the prolific design studio Hipgnosis seldom succumbed to flattery. Instead it relentlessly exploited the freedom and limits of the format in multitudinous ways.

It shunned the creation of a house style or ‘signature’. The quality of the work collected here is, then, inconsistent. If you are the kind of artist who insists on starting from zero over and again, it is inevitable that there will be failures. Nevertheless, the triumphs are many. As much as, or perhaps even more than, any of the musicians and borderline-psycho gangster-managers who gave them pretty free rein, Aubrey Powell (who answers to the name ‘Po’), the late Storm Thorgerson and the late Peter Christopherson embellished their era with a mix of thefts, ‘appropriations’ and so on.

At their best they created utterly memorable and oddly moving images. Whenever they could, they did something other than litter their work with mugshots of hirsute interchangeables. The images they created were swift, crisp, neat.

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Wednesday Poem

Swan

We live on a river in the country,
we talk gently and listen easy,
we lost our smoky bark and city hiss.
You’ll play me the guitar, whilst I knead dough.
I make enough bread to feed the ten sons
we never made time to have.
You get under my feet when I ask you to
whisk the milk. Stir the gravy. Mind the oven.
We never agree about the temperature, maps and train time tables.

You hold the pegs whilst I hang the washing,
on the line hung between low-hanging crab-apple trees.
Our ramshackle garden is overgrown
and there are spiders in the lavender.
The radio plays the shipping forecast.
It’s getting cold. Cold enough to snow.
No. Not yet.

A skein of geese flocked overhead,
but you and me, we never migrated apart.
Together we become weathered
and soft as old cotton and as yellow as warm butter.
We keep chickens and ducks that rarely lay eggs,
an obnoxious mallard nests like royalty
in an armchair in the parlour.

Of course we brew our own beer
and we grow grass and tomatoes in the conservatory.
Laughter. Yes, we still laugh,
the lines are etched around our failing eyes.
Foam and lathered we bathe together too,
and play cards and drink rum and dare each other to
skinny-dip in the lake by the weeping willow when the moon is high.

Books are precariously balanced on slanting shelves
and guitars are in varying states of loving repair.
Boxes of dusty poetry and newspaper cuttings clutter the stairs.
And the piano has a few keys missing,
like teeth and the scissors and your spectacles –
they are on your head, you nincompoop!

We’ve collected empty Marmite jars for no reason,
no reason at all.

We get tired, we go to bed, have sex in the afternoon.
Snow flutters like feathers past the frosty winter windows.
Face to face, we lie on the cool side of the pillow,
wrapped in each other’s arms like two monkeys.
My fingers play with the silver hair at your temples,
you stroke my face and I breathe slowly.
Jigsaw pieces.
We always did fit nicely.

You call me in my dreams at night.
I’ve felt your plush wings
spread wide, enveloping me.
You and me, we will have all this and more,
we will have all this in time.
I have known you all my life.
We will find each other
one day,
my swan.

by Salena Godden
from Fishing in the Aftermath: Poems 1994 – 2014
Burning Eye Books, Portishead, 2014

How to Plant a Tree in the Desert

Russell Shorto in The New Yorker:

Shorto-How-to-Plant-a-Tree-in-the-Desert_01President Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord was perplexing to Europeans for many reasons, not least of which was their determination that climate change represents a for-profit opportunity. In particular, the Dutch, who more or less invented water management in Europe, a millennium or so ago, have developed a specialty in climate-change-related innovation. Four years ago, Jurriaan Ruys was a partner at McKinsey, focussing on global sustainability issues. The Dutchman had been an environmentalist since the age of eight, when he went door to door handing out stickers to save the sea turtles, but he became frustrated by the abstract nature of his work—flying around the world, advising governments on long-term climate strategy. Eventually, he up and quit. Ruys had trained as an engineer, and he was convinced that the current moment, thanks in part to instantaneous communication, was one in which grassroots solutions to yawning environmental problems could yield results. He decided to focus on desertification, which is both a symptom and an intensifier of climate change. It’s also one of the most multilayered problems on Earth, the results of which lead to human misery, political strife, and war. For the next year, Ruys hunkered down in a storage space, tinkering furiously, making frequent trips to the local hardware store.

The result of this freelance engineering is a low-tech invention that is succeeding beyond Ruys’s expectations. Three years after he emerged with his prototype, his invention has been adopted in Mexico, Cameroon, Malawi, Peru, Chile, Spain, Italy, Greece, Israel, China, Dubai, and the U.S. The company he formed, Land Life, with Eduard Zanen, an entrepreneur, has twenty employees who are working with the U.N., the World Wildlife Fund, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the U.S. National Park Service, and in remote villages and refugee camps. José Luis Rubio, the vice chair of the European Soil Bureau Network, called Ruys’s invention “remarkable” in its results and told me that it represents “an innovative method” to restoring vegetation to barren landscapes.

More here.

Live-in grandparents helped human ancestors get a safer night’s sleep

From Phys.Org:

LiveingrandpA sound night's sleep grows more elusive as people get older. But what some call insomnia may actually be an age-old survival mechanism, researchers report. A study of modern hunter-gatherers in Tanzania finds that, for people who live in groups, differences in commonly associated with age help ensure that at least one person is awake at all times. The research suggests that mismatched sleep schedules and restless nights may be an evolutionary leftover from a time many, many years ago, when a lion lurking in the shadows might try to eat you at 2 a.m.
"The idea that there's a benefit to living with grandparents has been around for a while, but this study extends that idea to vigilance during ," said study co-author David Samson, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University at the time of the study. The Hadza people of northern Tanzania live by hunting and gathering their food, following the rhythms of day and night just as humans did for hundreds of thousands of years before people started growing crops and herding livestock. The Hadza live and sleep in groups of 20 to 30 people. During the day, men and women go their separate ways to forage for tubers, berries, honey and meat in the savanna woodlands near Tanzania's Lake Eyasi and surrounding areas. Then each night they reunite in the same place, where young and old alike sleep outside next to their hearth, or together in huts made of woven grass and branches. "They are as modern as you and me. But they do tell an important part of the human evolutionary story because they live a lifestyle that is the most similar to our hunting and gathering past," said co-author Alyssa Crittenden, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "They sleep on the ground, and have no synthetic lighting or controlled climate—traits that characterized the ancestral sleeping environment for early humans," Crittenden said.
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“Goodbye, Vitamin” May Be the Best Novel You’ll Read This Summer

Julia Felsenthal in Vogue:

00-lede-rachel-khong“At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary,” Joan Didion once wrote. “My approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best.”

Her essay is called “On Keeping a Notebook,” and Didion, to be clear, kept one (perhaps still does)—a place to document not what happened to her, but “how it felt to be me,” scraps of experience, sometimes factual, sometimes embroidered. A recipe for sauerkraut evokes the coziness of a boozy, rainy day on Fire Island; the sense memory of cracked crab for lunch as a child makes her “see the afternoon all over again,” no matter that the crab was almost certainly fictitious. These are reminders not of life, but of Joan. “I think we are well advised,” Didion observed (cannily enough to be endlessly quoted), “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

In 2008, writer Rachel Khong began keeping a food log, a list of every meal she consumed. She was inspired in part by Robert Shields, keeper of the world’s longest diary, who recorded the goings-on of his life at five-minute intervals (to the tune of 37.5 million words). Khong hoped that by diligently tracking what she ate, she would open up a channel in her brain to remembering more: where she was; who she was with; how she was feeling. At the time she was reeling from a breakup, contending with the way a tanking relationship exposes a chasm between each partner’s memories of seemingly joint experiences. How can a person trapped in the morass of imperfect recall identify true north without signposts? “I’m terrified of forgetting,” Khong admitted in a 2014 essay that appeared in Lucky Peach, the food magazine where until recently she was an editor. “If I could remember everything, I thought, I’d be better equipped; I’d be better able to make proper, comprehensive assessments—informed decisions. But my memory had proved itself unreliable, and I needed something better. Writing down food was a way to turn my life into facts: If I had all the facts, I could keep them straight. So the next time this happened I’d know exactly why—I’d have all the data at hand.”

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The End of Economics

Matt Seybold in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

LongrunwearealldeadTired and slightly toasted after a long and draining dinner party, Virginia Woolf nevertheless kept a promise to her diary, recording her impression of the evening while it was still fresh. Fellow novelist Elizabeth Bowen arrived very late — “rayed like a zebra, silent and stuttering” — leaving Woolf the lone woman at a table ringed with notoriously self-assured men. This, combined with her fatigue, may explain why her account of their conversation was curt and occasionally cruel. T. S. Eliot, she wrote, was “like a great toad with jeweled eyes.” Her nephew, poet Julian Bell, was “trivial: like dogs in their lusts.” Even John Maynard Keynes, for whom she held an enduring affection, she portrayed on this occasion as bloviating and hypocritical. After mocking Christian rituals, Keynes, perhaps lightly lubricated himself, reminisced at length about a chapel ceremony held in his honor at King’s College. Woolf’s question — “Did this society, this coming together move [you?]” — is the elocutionary equivalent of an exasperated eye-roll. [1]

The dinner was held explicitly to discuss Eliot’s After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), which collected a series of lectures given the previous year at University of Virginia. Keynes, at the time among Britain’s most prominent public intellectuals, was preparing for his own trip to the United States, during which he would reassert himself as an “economic heretic” and preview his work-in-progress, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Eliot had recently conceded that they were living “in the age of the economist” when even poets were “compelled to think about economics,” so it was, perhaps, inevitable that the discussion would turn after dinner to what Woolf called “the economic question.” “This worst of all,” she wrote, “and founded on a silly mistake of old Mr. Ricardo’s which Maynard given time will put right. And then there will be no more economic stress, and then — ?”

It is hard to know how to read this lacuna in Woolf’s account. Is her faith that Keynes could eliminate “economic stress” sincere or sarcastic? Is she reflecting Keynes’s own ambivalence about utopian prognostications? In either case, her impression that Keynes was working on an audacious political economy designed to save the world from audacious political economy perfectly encapsulates a central paradox of Keynesianism, as elucidated by Geoff Mann’s In The Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (2017). Keynes expected The General Theoryto radically remake his profession, though not in the ways Mann demonstrates it has. In Mann’s account, Keynesianism ultimately helped sever economists from their own rich tradition of heretical political philosophy and reduced them to platitudinous apologists for plutocracy.

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Do apes produce metonymies?

Dan Sperber in Cognition and Culture:

ScreenHunter_2748 Jul. 11 20.14Your friend Olga is coming for a drink. You put two plates on the table, one with olives and the other with almonds. When both plates have been emptied, you ask Olga, “Do you want anything else?” “Yes, please!”, she answers, pointing to the plate where the almonds had been. What is she requesting? The empty plate? Of course not. She is requesting more almonds. To do so, she uses a gestural metonymy: pointing to a container to convey something about its (past) content.

Container-for-content metonymies are quite common in language use. Typical examples are: “I just had one glass” or “the school bus was singing.” Some of these gestural or verbal metonymies have become conventional but we can produce or understand novel ones without effort. What communicative abilities does it take to make use of metonymies? Could a 12-month-old child, who does not yet speak, spontaneously produce an appropriate gestural metonymy? For that matter, could an ape?

In his doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Manuel Bohn asked an even more basic question: can infants and apes refer to absent entities? (See also earlier work by Liszkowski et al 2009; Lyn et al 2014). The capacity to do so is generally linked to the possession of language, so showing that they can would be an interesting challenge.

In one study (Bohn et al 2015), Bohn presented apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) with two plates each containing three pieces of food: grapes (a higher quality food for apes) on one plate, and pieces of carrot (a lower quality food) on the other plate. The apes could point to one or the other plate and would be given a piece of food from it. As soon as a plate was emptied, the experimenter would take it out of the room and bring it back refilled.

In the critical test trials, however, the experimenter let the plates go empty without refilling them. Would the apes point to a now empty plate (as your friend Olga did)?

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Can The Handmaid’s Tale Change People’s Political Views?

From Wired:

Handmaidstale_TAHulu's adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian thriller in which a Christian theocracy overthrows the US government and forces fertile women to bear children for high-ranking government officials. It’s a premise that, reviewer Beth Elderkin notes, men find imaginative or improbable and women see as chillingly real.

“We’re afraid of our power being taken away,” Elderkin says in Episode 263 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxypodcast. “That’s something that’s happened over and over again for thousands of years—women’s power has been taken away, largely by men, who don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, what we’re capable of.”

Writer Sara Lynn Micheneragrees that the show hits close to home. She says that’s no coincidence, since Atwood based everything in the story on real historical events.

“It is not irrational for us to fear this, given that these are things that you can find in other cultures, or in our culture in different periods, or in our culture in the present,” she says.

Michener, who was raised by conservative Christians, wishes more people from that community would watch The Handmaid’s Tale, which she thinks might cause them to question some of their more extreme views.

“If anything can slip through it’s going to be the art,” she says. “Because the rhetoric is already so divisive the stories are the thing that really have the power to penetrate those ideologies.”

More here.

The Book That Predicted Trump’s Rise Offers the Left a Roadmap for Defeating Him

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Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic:

Rorty wasn’t dismissing bigotry as unimportant. He was quick to praise the post-’60s Left for being attentive to racial injustice and recognizing that sadism against minority groups would have persisted even apart from economic inequality. Still, he criticizes the identity politics of the left for developing a politics “more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,” because many of the dispossessed are thereby ignored.

Surveying academia, for example, he observes that “nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.”

For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help. “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will very likely be wiped out,” he worried. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

More here.

The Art at the End of the World

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Heidi Julavits in The New York Times:

We were taking an airplane, I told our children, to see what I dramatically billed as ‘‘the end of the world.’’

‘‘Can’t we go to a beach?’’ they asked. It was February. They were sick of the cold.

I promised them sand and plenty of water, but unless things went terribly wrong, we would probably not be swimming in it.

‘‘Where are we going?’’ they asked.

We were flying 2,000 miles to see more than 6,000 tons of black basalt rocks extending 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake in the shape of a counterclockwise vortex, designed by the most famous practitioner of ’70s land art, Robert Smithson.

‘‘It’s called the ‘Spiral Jetty,’ ’’ I told them.

I showed them pictures. I admitted that maybe ‘‘the end of the world’’ wasn’t the best way to advertise what I hoped we would experience, even though previous visitors had described the landscape as hauntingly spare, as resembling how our planet might appear following a nuclear holocaust. Smithson’s gallerist, Virginia Dwan, said the jetty ‘‘was something otherworldly, but I hesitate to say hell, because I don’t mean everybody being tortured and so forth, but the feeling of aloneness, and of it being in a place that was unsafe, and something devilish, something devilish there.’’

Adding to the excitement I presumed we now shared: The road conditions near the jetty were highly variable, which was to say not always roads. The lake’s water levels, too, needed to be below 4,195 feet for us to see it, and those levels were partly dependent on snowfall (this winter there was lots) and how much of that snow, by the time we arrived, had melted and sluiced down the mountains — water that also, en route to the lake, could turn the 16 miles of unpaved roads into impassable mush.

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INEQUALITY AND THE 2016 ELECTION OUTCOME: A DIRTY SECRET AND A DILEMMA

Hillary_Clinton_vs._Donald_Trump_-_Caricatures+(1)

James Galbraith in New Geography:

Using our measure of pay inequality, which avoids any distortion associated with making a conversion to income inequality measures, the fourteen states with the largest increases in inequality after 1990 without exception voted for Hillary Clinton.1 These fourteen included almost all of the large states that Clinton carried, including California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia and Illinois. The largest Clinton state below the top fourteen is Washington, and after that, Minnesota (which she carried by whisker); the others include Vermont and Delaware, small states embedded in regions (New England, the Mid-Atlantic) where the increase of inequality was much larger than it was in the states themselves. Vermont is not immune from economic change in New York or Massachusetts, nor is Delaware unaffected by events in New Jersey or Maryland.

Conversely, the seven states with the smallest increase in inequality, and ten of the lowest twelve, all voted for Donald Trump. These included Wyoming, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Utah, North Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Indiana, Nebraska and Kentucky, as well as the critical Obama-to-Trump states of Ohio and Michigan. In the middle range, we find a series of states that were (or, in the case of Georgia, might have been) competitive including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina.

The correspondence of inequality-change to the election outcome is almost uncanny.

A plausible explanation emerges with a moment's thought. Clinton-majority states are characterized by high-income enclaves of finance, technology, insurance and government contracts, which often exist alongside large low-income minority and immigrant communities, sufficiently separated by geography and political boundary lines to be almost autonomous from each other. Both of these communities vote Democratic, yet out of highly differing political and social interests; the former perhaps most of all for reasons of social liberalism and environmentalism; the latter out of economic interest and historical alliances on civil rights and immigration. Where they together predominate, Democrats prevail.

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Reading the Resistance

Ruth Graham in Slate:

BookReading groups have long served as spaces for kindred spirits to gather and talk their way through weighty issues; they also skew female, older, and educated—a prime “resistance” cohort. It is hard to overstate how thoroughly the anti-Trump movement is driven by the energy of women in general. The Women’s March in January was the biggest single-day protest in American history, and women made up the majority of the crowds at the March for Science and the People’s Climate March in April. Women also seem to make up the vast majority of those calling their representatives: A recent poll by the popular service Daily Action, which sends texts to users nudging them to call their legislators, found 86 percent of active users were women, and fully half were aged 46 to 65. As a Slate headline put it in January, “The Trump Resistance Will Be Led by Angry Women.”

Some independent bookstores, progressive media outlets, and activist groups have launched new clubs to meet the moment. In Seattle there’s “Reading Through It: A Post-Election Book Club.” (First selection: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of growing up in a poor white family in what is now Trump country.) Daily Action launched its own club in March, “drawing on America’s heritage of resistance.” (Latest up: Historian Timothy Snyder’s 21st century–minded survey of 20th-century Europe, On Tyranny.) “No longer can book club be the latest vampire YA novel (or at least, no longer can that be the ONLY book club we do),” the online magazine Argot wrote in announcing its Trump-era book club. “And for those of us who aren’t book club people, we can no longer read our radical texts, relevant novels and pertinent essays in silence.” Its first assignment: the Melville House collection What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America.

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Immunology, one cell at a time

Amir Giladi and Ido Amit in Nature:

CellFor more than a century, scientists have tried to characterize the different functions of the 10 trillion to 50 trillion cells of the human body — from neurons, which can reach 1 metre in length, to red blood cells, which are around 8 micrometres wide. Such efforts have helped to identify important cell types and pathways that are involved in human physiology and pathology. But it has become apparent that the research tools of the past few decades fail to capture the full complexity of cell diversity and function. (These tools include fluorescent tags fused to antibodies that bind to specific proteins on the surfaces of cells, known as cell-surface markers, and sequencing in bulk of the RNA or DNA of thousands of seemingly identical cells.) This failure is partly because many cells with completely different functions have similar shapes or produce the same markers. Single-cell genomics is transforming the ability of biologists to characterize cells. The new techniques that have emerged aim to capture individual cells and determine the sequences of the molecules of RNA and DNA that they contain. The shift in approach is akin to the change in how cells and molecules could be viewed during the 1980s, following advances in microscopy and the tagging and sorting of cells.

In the past five years, several groups of biologists, including our own laboratory, have gone from measuring the expression of a few genes in a handful of cells to surveying thousands of genes in hundreds of thousands of cells from intact tissues. New cell types1, 2, cellular states and pathways are being uncovered regularly as a result. Our lab was one of the first to study the immune system using single-cell genomics. The tools are particularly suited to this task because the heterogeneity and plasticity of cells are integral to how the immune system works — the nature of each agent that could attack the body being impossible to know ahead of time.

More here.

Putting the “cog” in “cognitive”: on the “mind as machine” metaphor

by Yohan J. John

Robot_toy_1950s_redditScientists have long acknowledged the power of metaphor and analogy. Properly understood, analogical and metaphorical thinking are not merely ornamental aspects of language, but serve as a bridge from the known to the unknown. Perhaps the most important example of this process was the one that epitomizes the scientific revolution: Isaac Newton's realization that both heavenly and terrestrial bodies were governed by the same physical laws. A precise mathematical analogy exists between the falling of an apple and the orbit of the moon around the earth. The moon can be thought of as a really big and far-away apple that's "perpetually falling". Newton's analogy rests upon a broadening of the concept of free-fall — in other words, it involves a more abstract concept of motion. A couple of centuries later, James Clerk Maxwell recognized the process of generalization and abstraction as central to the scientific enterprise. The new sense of an idea, "though perfectly analogous to the elementary sense, is wider and more general. These generalized forms of elementary ideas may be called metaphorical terms in the sense in which every abstract term is metaphorical." We might go so far as to call metaphor the alchemy of thought — the essence of creativity.

Words like "abstraction" and "generalization" can often appear neutral, or even positive, depending on your intellectual tastes. But there are drawbacks to these unavoidable consequences of analogical thinking. The one that most often receives comment from scientists and philosophers is the fact that analogies are only ever partial: there are always differences between things and processes — that's how we know that they aren't identical in the first place. In other words, every abstraction involves a loss of specificity.

If scientists discover processes that are "perfectly analogous" to each other, as in the Maxwell quote above, then this loss is so minuscule that it doesn't cause any real problems. But in areas of active research, much more circumspection is required. When we propose that one system serve as a model for another that we don't understand, we must be careful not to lose sight of the inevitable differences between the model and reality. Otherwise we may confuse the map with the territory, forgetting that a map can only serve as a map by being less detailed than what it represents. As a model becomes more detailed, it eventually becomes just as complex as the real thing, and therefore useless as a tool for understanding. As the cybernetics pioneers Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener joked, "the best material model for a cat is another, or preferably the same cat."

So the loss inherent in the process of analogy cannot be avoided through additional detail or specificity. In any case, any fastidious adherence to strictly literal language severely retards our ability to create new knowledge. If we seek any kind of usable understanding, we have to use analogy, taking care to watch out for the inevitable places where our analogies will inevitably break down.

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Black Holes and the Curse of Beauty: When Revolutionary Physicists Turn Conservative

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Main-qimg-da0bd0564345ac4af20890fb6dc10820-cOn September 1, 1939, the leading journal of physics in the United States, Physical Review, carried two remarkable papers. One was by a young professor of physics at Princeton University named John Wheeler and his mentor Niels Bohr. The other was by a young postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Hartland Snyder, and his mentor, a slightly older professor of physics named J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The first paper described the mechanism of nuclear fission. Fission had been discovered nine months earlier by a team of physicists and chemists working in Berlin and Stockholm who found that bombarding uranium with neutrons could lead to a chain reaction with a startling release of energy. The basic reasons for the large release of energy in the process came from Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, and were understood well. But a lot of questions remained: What was the general theory behind the process? Why did uranium split into two and not more fragments? Under what conditions would a uranium atom split? Would other elements also undergo fission?

Bohr and Wheeler answered many of these questions in their paper. Bohr had already come up with an enduring analogy for understanding the nucleus: that of a liquid drop that wobbles in all directions and is held together by surface tension until an external force that is violent enough tears it apart. But this is a classical view of the uranium nucleus. Niels Bohr had been a pioneer of quantum mechanics. From a quantum mechanical standpoint the uranium nucleus is both a particle and a wave represented as a wavefunction, a mathematical object whose manipulation allows us to calculate properties of the element. In their paper Wheeler and Bohr found that the uranium nucleus is almost perfectly poised on the cusp of classical and quantum mechanics, being described partly as a liquid drop and partly by a wavefunction. At twenty five pages the paper is a tour de force, and it paved the way for understanding many other features of fission that were critical to both peaceful and military uses of atomic energy.

The second paper, by Oppenheimer and Snyder, was not as long; only four pages. But these four pages were monumental in their importance because they described, for the first time in history, what we call black holes. The road to black holes had begun about ten years earlier when a young Indian physicist pondered the fate of white dwarfs on a long voyage by sea to England. At the ripe old age of nineteen, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked out that white dwarfs wouldn't be able to support themselves against gravity if their mass increased beyond a certain limit. A few years later in 1935, Chandrasekhar had a showdown with Arthur Eddington, one of the most famous astronomers in the world, who could not believe that nature could be so pathological as to permit gravitational collapse. Eddington was a previous revolutionary who had famously tested Einstein's theory of relativity and its prediction of starlight bending in 1919. By 1935 he had turned conservative.

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Perceptions

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Raphaël Krafft. A Reporter Becomes a Smuggler. March, 2017

“French radio reporter Raphaël Krafft traveled the world for 20 years reporting on war and conflict. From the Gaza Strip to the Balkans to the Iraq War, he’d witnessed suffering and met countless desperate people, but he’d never intervened in their lives.

Until 2015, that is, when Raphaël started covering the refugee crisis in France, and saw how his own country treated people fleeing wars in the Middle East and Africa.

France closed its borders that year, denying migrants and refugees entry. Many people who did manage to make it into the country – including families with children – ended up living on the streets in camps with no access to bathrooms or running water.

That October, Raphaël took a trip to the French-Italian border to report on how refugees were trying to sneak in, and how France was trying to keep them out.

…”

More here and here.

It’s a Kodak Moment — But Will it Last?

by Carol A Westbrook

I came across an old photo from about 1915, which had the names, "Anna, Rose, Mother" penciled on the back. The photo demonstrated that my grandmother, Anna, had a sister, Rose, which was also the name of the grandmother of a newly discovered DNA relative. We were second cousins–and a new branch of the Anna  Rosie and Mother copyfamily was discovered! I was pleased to find this old picture that had been kept for so long in a box in the attic.

How much we treasure our old family photos! They bring us our forebears, as well as old memories. But photos do more than preserve family memories. Since the beginning of civilization we have relied on permanent images to document lineage, leadership, historical events, wars, battles, and, of course, the news of the day. These relationships reinforce the foundation on which society is built.

Before photos, we had hand-painted portraits, sculptures, carvings and tomb paintings for these vital functions. These media were long lasting but not always accurate, not to mention difficult. Photography made it so much easier.

AswanThe invention of photography was truly a revolution, because it made permanent records available to everyone. The ruling class no longer had a monopoly on their memories, or on how history was to be interpreted.

Photography was invented by Daguerreotype in 1839, but it wasn't until Kodak introduced the Brownie camera in 1901 that it was available to all. Technology evolved rapidly, from the simple, instant Polaroid, to complicated single-lens reflex cameras with lenses, filters and flash attachments. Film photography allowed us to make slides and home movies. Life was full of Kodak moments, and we tried to capture them all.

We took pictures. We put them in albums to share with friends; we hung them on walls; we documented births, graduations, weddings and everything in between. And we kept them for posterity in a box in the attic. Haven't you noticed that your most vivid memories are the ones that were captured on home movies and photographs? Mine are.

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Poetry in Translation

Jihad

by Sir Mohammad Iqbal

“The pen is mightier than the sword,”
preaches an imam from the pulpit.

In our era such sermons lack virtue: Don’t
talk of a Muslim with a dagger, speak

instead of a Christian gunrunner who
smears a striving for truth as unholy.

Ask: If war is immoral for the East,
is it not so for the West, and if truth

is the path, why are Western blunders
burnished and those of Islam broadcast?

Translated, from the original Urdu, by Rafiq Kathwari

Did You Catch It?

by Elise Hempel

ScreenHunter_2747 Jul. 10 19.39Did you catch it? Right before that commercial (or, if you have TiVo, right before your thumb plunged down on the double forward-arrow on the remote) on the NBC Nightly News on July 3rd. A little report on Chief Justice John Roberts' commencement speech at his son's 9th-grade graduation last month from Cardigan Mountain School, an elite boys' boarding school in New Hampshire. And after that report, a light-hearted little comment from Peter Alexander, the anchor replacing Lester Holt that night.

John Roberts' June 3rd commencement speech to a class of 14-year-old boys and their parents/guardians is being described as "extraordinary," "a quiet rebuke to Trump" and "the best thing" he "wrote this term," is being praised for "bucking tradition." You may or may not have seen or heard any of the Chief Justice's speech, but here is a portion of what has gotten so much attention:

"Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I'll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don't take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either."

Nice words. But soon after these words, within his remarks giving both "deep" and "simple" advice to the class – including not to act like the "privileged young men" that they are – quickly, snuck in between the serious stuff, there was this: "You've been at a school with just boys. Most of you will be going to a school with girls. I have no advice for you." (Laughter from the audience.) And, on the July 3rd NBC Nightly News, just after the video of Roberts making his joke, just before the cut to a commercial, this comment from Peter Alexander: "On that you will get no dissent here."

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