Leonardo’s Wood Charring Method Predates Japanese Practice

Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it seems Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the protective benefits of charring wood surfaces more than 100 years earlier, according to a paper published in Zenodo, an open repository for EU funded research.

Check the notes

As previously reported, Leonardo produced more than 13,000 pages in his notebooks (later gathered into codices), less than a third of which have survived. The notebooks contain all manner of inventions that foreshadow future technologies: flying machines, bicycles, cranes, missiles, machine guns, an “unsinkable” double-hulled ship, dredges for clearing harbors and canals, and floating footwear akin to snowshoes to enable a person to walk on water. Leonardo foresaw the possibility of constructing a telescope in his Codex Atlanticus (1490)—he wrote of “making glasses to see the moon enlarged” a century before the instrument’s invention.

In 2003, Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, came across some recipes for mysterious mixtures while flipping through Leonardo’s notes. Vezzosi experimented with the recipes, resulting in a mixture that would harden into a material eerily akin to Bakelite, a synthetic plastic widely used in the early 1900s. So Leonardo may well have invented the first manmade plastic.

The notebooks also contain Leonardo’s detailed notes on his extensive anatomical studies. Most notably, his drawings and descriptions of the human heart captured how heart valves can control blood flow 150 years before William Harvey worked out the basics of the human circulatory system. (In 2005, a British heart surgeon named Francis Wells pioneered a new procedure to repair damaged hearts based on Leonardo’s heart valve sketches and subsequently wrote the book The Heart of Leonardo.)

In 2023, Caltech researchers made another discovery: lurking in the margins of Leonardo’s Codex Arundel were several small sketches of triangles, their geometry seemingly determined by grains of sand poured out from a jar. The little triangles were his attempt to draw a link between gravity and acceleration—well before Isaac Newton came up with his laws of motion. By modern calculations, Leonardo’s model produced a value for the gravitational constant (G) to around 97 percent accuracy. And Leonardo did all this without a means of accurate timekeeping and without the benefit of calculus. The Caltech team was even able to re-create a modern version of the experiment.

“Burnt Japanese cedar”

Annalisa Di Maria, a Leonardo expert with the UNESCO Club of Florence, collaborated with molecular biologist and sculptor Andrea da Montefeltro and art historian Lucica Bianchi on this latest study, which concerns the Codex Madrid II. They had noticed one nearly imperceptible phrase in particular on folio 87r concerning wood preservation: “They will be better preserved if stripped of bark and burned on the surface than in any other way,” Leonardo wrote.

“This is not folklore,” the authors noted. “It is a technical intuition that precedes cultural codification.” Leonardo was interested in the structural properties of materials like wood, stone, and metal, as both an artist and an engineer, and would have noticed from firsthand experience that raw wood with its bark intact retained moisture and decayed more quickly. Furthermore, Leonardo’s observation coincides with what the authors describe as a “crucial moment for European material culture,” when “woodworking was receiving renewed attention in artistic workshops and civil engineering studies.”

Leonardo did not confine his woody observations to just that one line. The Codex includes discussions of how different species of wood conferred different useful properties: oak and chestnut for strength, ash and linden for flexibility, and alder and willow for underwater construction. Leonardo also noted that chestnut and beech were ideal as structural reinforcements, while maple and linden worked well for constructing musical instruments given their good acoustic properties. He even noted a natural method for seasoning logs: leaving them “above the roots” for better sap drainage.

The Codex Madrid II dates to 1503-1505, over a century before the earliest known written codifications of yakisugi, although it is probable that the method was used a bit before then. Per Di Maria et al., there is no evidence of any direct contact between Renaissance European culture and Japanese architectural practices, so this seems to be a case of “convergent invention.”

The benefits of this method of wood preservation have since been well documented by science, although the effectiveness is dependent on a variety of factors, including wood species and environmental conditions. The fire’s heat seals the pores of the wood so it absorbs less water—a natural means of waterproofing. The charred surface serves as natural insulation for fire resistance. And stripping the bark removes nutrients that attract insects and fungi, a natural form of biological protection.

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica |  Read more:
Images: A. Di maria et al., 2025; Unimoi/CC BY-SA 4.0; and Lorna Satchell/CC BY 4.0

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

A young paleontologist may have discovered a record of the most significant event in the history of life on Earth. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark."

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.

A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or later, they’ve contended, a scientist will discover dinosaurs much closer to the moment of destruction.

Locked in the KT boundary are the answers to our questions about one of the most significant events in the history of life on the planet. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-­metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species.

On August 5, 2013, I received an e-mail from a graduate student named Robert DePalma. I had never met DePalma, but we had corresponded on paleontological matters for years, ever since he had read a novel I’d written that centered on the discovery of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by the KT impact. “I have made an incredible and unprecedented discovery,” he wrote me, from a truck stop in Bowman, North Dakota. “It is extremely confidential and only three others know of it at the moment, all of them close colleagues.” He went on, “It is far more unique and far rarer than any simple dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not outlining the details via e-mail, if possible.” He gave me his cell-phone number and a time to call...

DePalma’s find was in the Hell Creek geological formation, which outcrops in parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming, and contains some of the most storied dinosaur beds in the world. At the time of the impact, the Hell Creek landscape consisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands and floodplains along the shores of an inland sea. The land teemed with life and the conditions were excellent for fossilization, with seasonal floods and meandering rivers that rapidly buried dead animals and plants.

Dinosaur hunters first discovered these rich fossil beds in the late nineteenth century. In 1902, Barnum Brown, a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, found the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, causing a worldwide sensation. One paleontologist estimated that in the Cretaceous period Hell Creek was so thick with T. rexes that they were like hyenas on the Serengeti. It was also home to triceratops and duckbills. (...)

Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven, is still working toward his Ph.D. He holds the unpaid position of curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History, a nascent and struggling museum with no exhibition space. In 2012, while looking for a new pond deposit, he heard that a private collector had stumbled upon an unusual site on a cattle ranch near Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the Hell Creek land is privately owned, and ranchers will sell digging rights to whoever will pay decent money, paleontologists and commercial fossil collectors alike.) The collector felt that the site, a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the surface, was a bust: it was packed with fish fossils, but they were so delicate that they crumbled into tiny flakes as soon as they met the air. The fish were encased in layers of damp, cracked mud and sand that had never solidified; it was so soft that it could be dug with a shovel or pulled apart by hand. In July, 2012, the collector showed DePalma the site and told him that he was welcome to it. (...)

The following July, DePalma returned to do a preliminary excavation of the site. “Almost right away, I saw it was unusual,” he told me. He began shovelling off the layers of soil above where he’d found the fish. This “overburden” is typically material that was deposited long after the specimen lived; there’s little in it to interest a paleontologist, and it is usually discarded. But as soon as DePalma started digging he noticed grayish-white specks in the layers which looked like grains of sand but which, under a hand lens, proved to be tiny spheres and elongated ­droplets. “I think, Holy shit, these look like microtektites!” DePalma recalled. Micro­tektites are the blobs of glass that form when molten rock is blasted into the air by an asteroid impact and falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The site appeared to contain micro­tektites by the million.

As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-­tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century.

by Douglas Preston, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Richard Barnes

Finding Peter Putnam

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street.

It was 1987 in Houma, Louisiana, and he was headed to the Department of Transportation, where he was working the night shift, sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. He was just picking up speed when a car came barreling toward him with a drunken swerve.

A screech shot down the corridor of East Main Street, echoed through the vacant lots, and rang out over the Bayou.

Then silence.

 

The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.

His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.

“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching, a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,” Wheeler said in 1991. And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.

Robert Works Fuller, a physicist and former president of Oberlin College, who worked closely with Putnam in the 1960s, told me in 2012, “Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown.”

That word—unknown—it came to haunt me as I spent the next 12 years trying to find out why.

The American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, with its marbled floors and chandeliered ceilings, is home to millions of rare books and manuscripts, including John Wheeler’s notebooks. I was there in 2012, fresh off writing a physics book that had left me with nagging questions about the strange relationship between observer and observed. Physics seemed to suggest that observers play some role in the nature of reality, yet who or what an observer is remained a stubborn mystery.

Wheeler, who made key contributions to nuclear physics, general relativity, and quantum gravity, had thought more about the observer’s role in the universe than anyone—if there was a clue to that mystery anywhere, I was convinced it was somewhere in his papers. That’s when I turned over a mylar overhead, the kind people used to lay on projectors, with the titles of two talks, as if given back-to-back at the same unnamed event:

Wheeler: From Reality to Consciousness

Putnam: From Consciousness to Reality

Putnam, it seemed, had been one of Wheeler’s students, whose opinion Wheeler held in exceptionally high regard. That was odd, because Wheeler’s students were known for becoming physics superstars, earning fame, prestige, and Nobel Prizes: Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Kip Thorne.

Back home, a Google search yielded images of a very muscly, very orange man wearing a very small speedo. This, it turned out, was the wrong Peter Putnam. Eventually, I stumbled on a 1991 article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly newsletter called “Brilliant Enigma.” “Except for the barest outline,” the article read, “Putnam’s life is ‘veiled,’ in the words of Putnam’s lifelong friend and mentor, John Archibald Wheeler.

A quick search of old newspaper archives turned up an intriguing article from the Associated Press, published six years after Putnam’s death. “Peter Putnam lived in a remote bayou town in Louisiana, worked as a night watchman on a swing bridge [and] wrote philosophical essays,” the article said. “He also tripled the family fortune to about $40 million by investing successfully in risky stock ventures.”

The questions kept piling up. Forty million dollars?

I searched a while longer for any more information but came up empty-handed. But I couldn’t forget about Peter Putnam. His name played like a song stuck in my head. I decided to track down anyone who might have known him.

The only paper Putnam ever published was co-authored with Robert Fuller, so I flew from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, to meet him. Fuller was nearing 80 years old but had an imposing presence and a booming voice. He sat across from me in his sun-drenched living room, seeming thrilled to talk about Putnam yet plagued by some palpable regret.

Putnam had developed a theory of the brain that “ranged over the whole of philosophy, from ethics to methodology to mathematical foundations to metaphysics,” Fuller told me. He compared Putnam’s work to Alan Turing’s and Kurt Gödel’s. “Turing, Gödel, and Putnam—they’re three peas in a pod,” Fuller said. “But one of them isn’t recognized.” (...)

Phillips Jones, a physicist who worked alongside Putnam in the early 1960s, told me over the phone, “We got the sense that what Einstein’s general theory was for physics, Peter’s model would be for the mind.”

Even Einstein himself was impressed with Putnam. At 19 years old, Putnam went to Einstein’s house to talk with him about Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British astrophysicist. (Eddington performed the key experiment that proved Einstein’s theory of gravity.) Putnam was obsessed with an allegory by Eddington about a fisherman and wanted to ask Einstein about it. Putnam also wanted Einstein to give a speech promoting world government to a political group he’d organized. Einstein—who was asked by plenty of people to do plenty of things—thought highly enough of Putnam to agree.

How could this genius, this Einstein of the mind, just vanish into obscurity? When I asked why, if Putnam was so important, no one has ever heard of him, everyone gave me the same answer: because he didn’t publish his work, and even if he had, no one would have understood it.

“He spoke and wrote in ‘Putnamese,’ ” Fuller said. “If you can find his papers, I think you’ll immediately see what I mean.” (...)

Skimming through the papers I saw that the people I’d spoken to hadn’t been kidding about the Putnamese. “To bring the felt under mathematical categories involves building a type of mathematical framework within which latent colliding heuristics can be exhibited as of a common goal function,” I read, before dropping the paper with a sigh. Each one went on like that for hundreds of pages at a time, on none of which did he apparently bother to stop and explain what the whole thing was really about...

Putnam spent most of his time alone, Fuller had told me. “Because of this isolation, he developed a way of expressing himself in which he uses words, phrases, concepts, in weird ways, peculiar to himself. The thing would be totally incomprehensible to anyone.” (...)

Imagine a fisherman who’s exploring the life of the ocean. He casts his net into the water, scoops up a bunch of fish, inspects his catch and shouts, “A-ha! I have made two great scientific discoveries. First, there are no fish smaller than two inches. Second, all fish have gills.”

The fisherman’s first “discovery” is clearly an error. It’s not that there are no fish smaller than two inches, it’s that the holes in his net are two inches in diameter. But the second discovery seems to be genuine—a fact about the fish, not the net.

This was the Eddington allegory that obsessed Putnam.

When physicists study the world, how can they tell which of their findings are features of the world and which are features of their net? How do we, as observers, disentangle the subjective aspects of our minds from the objective facts of the universe? Eddington suspected that one couldn’t know anything about the fish until one knew the structure of the net.

That’s what Putnam set out to do: come up with a description of the net, a model of “the structure of thought,” as he put it in a 1948 diary entry.

At the time, scientists were abuzz with a new way of thinking about thinking. Alan Turing had worked out an abstract model of computation, which quickly led not only to the invention of physical computers but also to the idea that perhaps the brain, too, was a kind of Turing machine.

Putnam disagreed. “Man is a species of computer of fundamentally different genus than those she builds,” he wrote. It was a radical claim (not only for the mixed genders): He wasn’t saying that the mind isn’t a computer, he was saying it was an entirely different kind of computer.

A universal Turing machine is a powerful thing, capable of computing anything that can be computed by an algorithm. But Putnam saw that it had its limitations. A Turing machine, by design, performs deductive logic—logic where the answers to a problem are contained in its premises, where the rules of inference are pregiven, and information is never created, only shuffled around. Induction, on the other hand, is the process by which we come up with the premises and rules in the first place. “Could there be some indirect way to model or orient the induction process, as we do deductions?” Putnam asked.

Putnam laid out the dynamics of what he called a universal “general purpose heuristic”—which we might call an “induction machine,” or more to the point, a mind—borrowing from the mathematics of game theory, which was thick in the air at Princeton. His induction “game” was simple enough. He imagined a system (immersed in an environment) that could make one mutually exclusive “move” at a time. The system is composed of a massive number of units, each of which can switch between one of two states. They all act in parallel, switching, say, “on” and “off” in response to one another. Putnam imagined that these binary units could condition one another’s behavior, so if one caused another to turn on (or off) in the past, it would become more likely to do so in the future. To play the game, the rule is this: The first chain of binary units, linked together by conditioned reflexes, to form a self-reinforcing loop emits a move on behalf of the system.

Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior.

That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”

So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state.

Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn; its sequences of moves will become increasingly less random. It will create rules for how to behave in a given situation, then automatically root out logical contradictions among those rules, resolving them into better ones. And here’s the weird thing: It’s a game that can never be won. The system never exactly repeats. But in trying to, it does something better. It adapts. It innovates. It performs induction.

In paper after paper, Putnam attempted to show how his induction game plays out in the human brain, with motor behaviors serving as the mutually exclusive “moves” and neurons as the parallel binary units that link up into loops to move the body. The point wasn’t to give a realistic picture of how a messy, anatomical brain works any more than an abstract Turing machine describes the workings of an iMac. It was not a biochemical description, but a logical one—a “brain calculus,” Putnam called it.

As the game is played, perturbations from outside—photons hitting the retina, hunger signals rising from the gut—require the brain to emit the right sequence of movements to return to its prior state. At first it has no idea what to do—each disturbance is a neural impulse moving through the brain in search of a pathway out, and it will take the first loop it can find. That’s why a newborn’s movements start out as random thrashes. But when those movements don’t satisfy the goal, the disturbance builds and spreads through the brain, feeling for new pathways, trying loop after loop, thrash after thrash, until it hits on one that does the trick.

When a successful move, discovered by sheer accident, quiets a perturbation, it gets wired into the brain as a behavioral rule. Once formed, applying the rule is a matter of deduction: The brain outputs the right move without having to try all the wrong ones first.

But the real magic happens when a contradiction arises, when two previously successful rules, called up in parallel, compete to move the body in mutually exclusive ways. A hungry baby, needing to find its mother’s breast, simultaneously fires up two loops, conditioned in from its history: “when hungry, turn to the left” and “when hungry, turn to the right.” Deductive logic grinds to a halt; the facilitation of either loop, neurally speaking, inhibits the other. Their horns lock. The neural activity has no viable pathway out. The brain can’t follow through with a wired-in plan—it has to create a new one.

How? By bringing in new variables that reshape the original loops into a new pathway, one that doesn’t negate either of the original rules, but clarifies which to use when. As the baby grows hungrier, activity spreads through the brain, searching its history for anything that can break the tie. If it can’t find it in the brain, it will automatically search the environment, thrash by thrash. The mathematics of game theory, Putnam said, guarantee that, since the original rules were in service of one and the same goal, an answer, logically speaking, can always be found.

In this case, the baby’s brain finds a key variable: When “turn left” worked, the neural signal created by the warmth of the mother’s breast against the baby’s left cheek got wired in with the behavior. When “turn right” worked, the right cheek was warm. That extra bit of sensory signal is enough to tip the scales. The brain has forged a new loop, a more general rule: “When hungry, turn in the direction of the warmer cheek.”

New universals lead to new motor sequences, which allow new interactions with the world, which dredge up new contradictions, which force new resolutions, and so on up the ladder of ever-more intelligent behavior. “This constitutes a theory of the induction process,” Putnam wrote.

In notebooks, in secret, using language only he would understand, Putnam mapped out the dynamics of a system that could perceive, learn, think, and create ideas through induction—a computer that could program itself, then find contradictions among its programs and wrangle them into better programs, building itself out of its history of interactions with the world. Just as Turing had worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of computation, Putnam worked out an abstract, universal model of the very possibility of mind. It was a model, he wrote, that “presents a basic overall pattern [or] character of thought in causal terms for the first time.”

Putnam had said you can’t understand another person until you know what fight they’re in, what contradiction they’re working through. I saw before me two stories, equally true: Putnam was a genius who worked out a new logic of the mind. And Putnam was a janitor who died unknown. The only way to resolve a contradiction, he said, is to find the auxiliary variables that forge a pathway to a larger story, one that includes and clarifies both truths. The variables for this contradiction? Putnam’s mother and money.

by Amanda Gefter, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: John Archibald Wheeler, courtesy of Alison Lahnston.
[ed. Fascinating. Sounds like part quantum physics and part AI. But it's beyond me.]

'Atmospheric Rivers' Flood Western Washington; Blizzard Follows

WA floods hit many uninsured small farms with ‘varied’ damages (Seattle Times)

Over the past few days, farm owners and operators across Western Washington have been returning to their businesses after heavy flooding turned massive swaths of low-lying land into deep basins of water since the downpour began last week.

Farms up and down the I-5 corridor sustained losses, though for most of them, it’s too early to accurately account for damage. Some are still unable to reach their farms due to high water levels and road closures. Many don’t have insurance and those who do have it aren’t sure what it will cover. And the National Weather Service has forecast more minor to moderate flooding in the region through Friday.

Hundreds of thousands out of power in WA; blizzard warning continues (Seattle Times)

A storm brought high winds and heavy rain to Western Washington overnight into Wednesday, leaving more than 200,000 customers in the dark after days of flooding.

Wind speeds reached the 50s and 60s in Seattle and surrounding areas early Wednesday: In the Alpental Ski Area, 112 mph gusts were recorded around 2 a.m., and Snoqualmie Pass saw 82 mph wind speeds.

WA flooding devastates major roads. What’s the path ahead? (Seattle Times)

Even after the rain ends and waters recede, after workers remove trees and clean up landslides, after engineers finally get a good look at the damage to the region’s roads and bridges, Washington state’s transportation system faces a long, expensive and daunting road to recovery following this month’s devastating weather.

Yet an even more elusive — and immediate — task is determining when traffic will flow again on roads like Highway 2, where Tuesday’s news that a 50-mile stretch will be closed for months forced grim questions about the expense of repairing ravaged roads and the immediate economic future of communities in the Cascades.

Images: Brian Marchello/King County Sherriff's Office/Erika Schultz

[ed. One/two punch.]

Growing Pains: Taking the Magic Out of Mushrooms

‘The attrition is setting in’: how Oregon’s magic mushroom experiment lost its way.

Jenna Kluwe remembers all the beautiful moments she saw in a converted dental clinic in east Portland.

For six months, she managed the Journey Service Center, a “psilocybin service center” where adults 21 and older take supervised mushroom trips. She watched elderly clients with terminal illnesses able to enjoy life again. She saw one individual with obsessive compulsive disorder so severe they spent hours washing their hands who could casually eat food that fell on the floor.

“It’s like five years of therapy in five hours,” Kluwe, a former therapist from Michigan, said.

In 2020, Oregon made history by becoming the first US state to legalize the use of psilocybin in a supervised setting, paving the way for magic mushrooms to treat depression, PTSD and other mental health challenges. A flurry of facilities like the Journey Service Center, as well as training centers for facilitators to guide the sessions, sprung up across the state.

But five years later, the pioneering industry is grappling with growing pains. Kluwe recalled how early last year, her business partner abruptly told her the center was out of money and would close in March – the first in a wave of closures that set off alarms about the viability of Oregon’s program.

The Journey Service Center isn’t alone. The state’s total number of licensed service centers has dropped by nearly a third, to 24, since Oregon’s psilocybin program launched in 2023. The state’s 374 licensed facilitators, people who support clients during sessions, similarly fell. And just this week, Portland’s largest “shroom room” – an 11,000 sq ft venue with views of Mt Hood offering guided trips in addition to corporate retreats – reportedly closed down.

“The attrition is setting in, and a lot of people are not renewing their license because it is hard to make money,” said Gary Bracelin, the owner of Drop Thesis Psilocybin Service Center.

Many worry about how the program’s rules and fees have pushed the cost of a psilocybin session as high as $3,000, putting it out of reach for many just as psychedelics are gaining mainstream acceptance as a mental health treatment. Insurance typically doesn’t cover sessions, meaning people have to pay out of pocket.

Furthermore, the industry is struggling to reach a diverse group of clients: state data show that most people who’ve taken legal psilocybin in Oregon are white, over 44 and earn more than roughly $95,000 or more a year.

Depending on who you ask, these are either signs of an experiment buckling under hefty rules and fees – or a landmark program finding its footing.

“It’s not totally shocking for a brand new program to have a higher price tag,” said Heidi Pendergast, Oregon director of advocacy group Healing Advocacy Fund. She added: “I think that any new industry would see this sort of opening and closing.”

Pendergast pointed to data showing the program is safe with severe reactions vanishingly rare among the estimated 14,000 people who have taken legal psilocybin in the state since mid-2023.

Some practitioners, however, say the state has a long way to go to realize the program’s promises, while other centers are experimenting with new ways to keep costs down, broaden their clientele, and integrate with the mainstream medical system.

‘Some of them are total overkill’

Legal psilocybin seemed like a natural fit for Bracelin. The self-described serial entrepreneur previously founded a cannabis dispensary chain and did sales and marketing for outdoor products during snowboarding’s early days. When the program launched, he started jumping through the many hoops for Drop Thesis to start taking clients in January 2024.

The first obstacle, he said, was finding a property that met the state’s requirements to be more than 1,000 feet from a school and not located in a residential area – with a landlord willing to rent for the center. Bracelin said more than a dozen landlords turned him down before he found a spot. Then there was the challenge of getting insurance for a business centered on a federally illegal drug. The center used private funders instead of banks, he said.

Drop Thesis charges $2,900 for a session, which can last up to six hours as well as before and after meetings with a facilitator, while offering discounts to veterans and during Pride Month as well as one monthly scholarship that covers the full price, Bracelin said.

Factored into the price of a session is the cost of a facilitator and a “licensee representative” who walks clients through paperwork and other requirements. State rules require centers to pay a $10,000 annual licensing fees, install surveillance cameras, alarm systems and securely store mushrooms in safes.

“Some [rules] are definitely justified,” Bracelin said. “And some of them are total overkill, out of fear from people who don’t understand the product.”...

Adding to regulatory hurdles is the fact that Oregon’s local governments can ask voters to ban psilocybin businesses, creating a patchwork of bans in 25 of Oregon’s 36 counties and in dozens of cities.

Angela Allbee, the manager of Oregon’s psilocybin program, said in an emailed statement that the state became the first to enact regulations for a drug that’s federally illegal, and those regulations were written with broad input that have proven safe. As more data and feedback come in, the state will consider adjusting the rules, she said...

Although psilocybin is associated with mental health concerns, the 2020 ballot initiative that created Oregon’s program was designed to keep it outside of the medical system. Now, many supporters say it needs an outside source of cash, which could come from integration with the medical system.

Oregon lawmakers earlier this year took a first step toward making that a reality.

by Jake Thomas, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Jake Thomas 

Music, Forest, Body

The Musical Instruments Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a short walk across Central Park from Lincoln Center, reveals the tangled relationships among local ecologies, colonial trade, and the craft of instrument making. At first, the galleries seem like mausoleums for sound. Silent instruments sit illuminated behind sheets of plateglass, reliquaries for the remains of music whose spirits have flown. The glass, polished wooden floors, and long, narrow dimensions of the galleries give the sound of footfalls and voices a lively, clattery feel, unlike the expansive warmth of concert halls, reinforcing the sense of isolation from musical sound. This initial impression evaporates, though, when I let go of the idea that this is a space for direct experience of sound. Instead, we can marvel here at stories of materiality, human ingenuity, and the relationships among cultures. (...)

Precolonial instruments often used indigenous materials. Walking through the galleries is an education in the many ways that humans have sonified matter from their surroundings. Clay, shaped then fired, turns human breath and lip vibrations into amplified tones. Rocks turned to bells and strings reveal metallurgical connections to land. Plant matter is given voice in carved wood, stretched palm frond, and spun fiber. A bestiary of animals sings through taut skins and reshaped teeth and tusks. Each instrument is rooted in local ecological context. Condor feathers in South American pipes. Kapok wood, snake skins, antelope horn, and porcupine quills on African drums, harps, and lutes. Boxwood and brass in European oboes. Wood, silk, bronze, and stone in se, shiqing, and yunluo, Chinese percussive and stringed instruments. Music emerged from human relation- ship with the beyond-human world, its varied sounds around the world revealing not only the many forms of human culture but the diverse sonorous, reverberant properties of rock, soil, and living beings...

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonizers picked out the material most pleasing to their ears and most useful to instrument-making workshops. A few European materials made the grade and were retained, even as “exotic” woods and animal parts became more readily available. Spruce and maple, especially, remained the favored wood for the bodies of stringed instruments and the soundboards of pianos. Calfskin topped tympani. These European materials were joined by ivory, favored for its workability and stability, and tropical woods whose density, smoothness, elasticity, and tones met musical needs: mpingo’s tight, silky grain; Pernambuco’s extraordinary strength, elasticity, and responsiveness; rosewood’s warmth and stability; and padauk’s resonance. These tropical woods all belong to the same taxonomic family, tree cousins to the beans, and have tight-grained, dense wood from slow-growing trees. Most take seventy or more years to reach harvestable age. On a concert stage, we hear the voices of tree elders. (...)

The tropical woods and ivory most favored for instrument making are now mostly threatened or endangered. Nineteenth-century exploitation has turned to twenty-first-century ruination. Demand for materials for musical instruments, though, was not the primary cause of many of these losses. The volume of ivory used for violin bows and bassoon rings was dwarfed by exports for tableware handles, billiard balls, religious carvings, and ornaments, although piano keys consumed hundreds of thousands of pounds of tusks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pernambuco was extirpated from most of its range not by violin bow makers, but through overharvesting for dye made from its crimson heartwood. The country Brazil gets its name from brasa, “ember” in Portuguese, for the glowing-coal color of the wood whose trade was so important in the founding of the country.

Mpingo woodlands are in decline, driven by export for instruments and flooring, and by local uses for carving. Compounding the problem of overharvesting is the twisting, gnarled form of mpingo trunks. Carving straight billets for oboes and clarinets from such wood is challenging, and often less than ten percent of the cut log is usable. Rosewoods, often used for guitar fingerboards, are mostly exported for furniture, with more wood in one bed frame or cabinet than in any guitar shop. Although trade in many rosewood species is restricted by international law, the wood is now so valuable that financial speculators and luxury goods manufacturers drive an illegal market worth billions of dollars yearly.

The sound of contemporary music is therefore a product of past colonialism and present-day trade, but, with very few exceptions, it is not a driver of species endangerment. Indeed, the relationships between musicians and their instruments—often built over decades of daily bodily connection—serve as an inspiring example of how we might live in better relationship to forests. An oboe or violin contains less wood than a chair or stack of magazines, yet this single instrument yields beauty and utility for decades, sometimes centuries. Contrast this with the culture of overexploitation and disposability that pervades so much of our relationship to material objects and their sources. For example, we threw out more than twelve million tons of furniture in the United States in 2018, eighty percent of it buried in landfills, most of the rest burned, and only one-third of one percent recycled. Much of this furniture was sourced from tropical forests, often supplied to the United States through manufacturing hubs in Asia. Such trade is increasing and the World Wildlife Fund states that the “world’s natural forests cannot sustainably meet the soaring global demand for timber products.” If the rest of our economy took as much care of wood products as musicians do of their instruments, the deforestation crisis would be greatly eased.

Driven to action by a desire to honor the materials with which they work, some musicians and luthiers are now at the forefront of seeking alternatives to the exploitative use of wood, ivory, and other materials from threatened species. This is especially important work because musical instruments are now far more numerous than in past centuries. More than ten million guitars and hundreds of thousands of violins are made annually. Such volume of trade cannot be built on rare woods. It is therefore now possible, with some searching, to find instruments made from wood certified to come from sustainable logging operations. The Forest Stewardship Council, for example, puts its stamp of approval on several new lines of instruments. The Mpingo Conservation & Development Initiative in southeastern Tanzania promotes community-based forest management where local residents own, manage, and benefit from mpingo and other woodland species, managing forests sustainably to help the local economy. Instrument makers are also introducing new materials, relieving pressure on endangered woods. Until the late twentieth century, only twenty tree species provided most of the wood for guitars, violins, violas, cellos, mandolins, and other Western stringed instruments. Today the variety of wood sources for instrument making has increased to more than one hundred species. Alongside this diversification of natural products, manufactured materials like carbon fiber and wood laminate are substituting for solid wood.

In the decades that come, unless our path changes, it will not be the overharvesting of particularly valuable species that challenges our sources of wood and animal parts for instruments. Instead, the loss of entire forest ecosystems will remake the relationship between human music and the land. The forests from which we now draw our most precious musical raw materials are in decline...

A few old instruments—carefully tended by musicians—now evoke the memory of the departed or degraded forests. On the stage at Lincoln Center, we hear woods from past decades and centuries. Sherry Sylar plays on oboes whose woods were harvested decades ago in the early twentieth century. Each one has a “passport” documenting the wood’s provenance, showing that it was not obtained through recent cutting of now-endangered trees. When we talked, she described how some colleagues scour the country for sales of older oboes, hoping to find instruments with good wood from ages past. The music of Sylar’s violinist colleague, Sheryl Staples, comes from a Guarneri violin. Its woods are at least three hundred years old, harvested from spruce and maple forests that grew on a preindustrial Earth. Although wood for instruments still comes from the Fiemme Valley forests in northern Italy that supplied Guarneri and Stradivarius, springtime there now comes earlier, summer is hotter, and winter snowpack is diminished compared with that of previous centuries. This yields wood with a looser, less sonorous grain than the tight woods of past centuries. In another hundred years, it is likely that heat, droughts, and changed rainfall will push alpine forests off these mountain slopes. Music often now speaks of the Earth as it was, not as it is, a memory carried in wood grain.

by David Haskell, Orion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Populism Fast and Slow

It is natural that a person who is both concerned by the rise of right-wing populism and possessed of a bookish disposition might turn to the academic political science literature in search of a better understanding of the phenomenon. Such a person is likely to be disappointed. It does not take much reading to discover that political scientists are quite conflicted. (One might take this review article to provide a decent snapshot of the relatively large academic literature on the subject.) There is a modest level of agreement about what populism is, but the most widely accepted definition is both superficial and misleading. That is inauspicious, as far as combating the forces of populism is concerned.

Most importantly, academics have not done a great job confronting the most confounding aspect of populism, which is that the more it gets criticized by intellectuals, the more powerful it becomes. As a result, most of us are still playing the same old game, with the same old strategies, without realizing that the metagame has changed.

It is not difficult to see where the academic discussion went wrong. An unfortunately large number of writers on populism were wrongfooted by the decision, made early on, to treat populism as a type of political ideology, along the lines of socialism or liberalism. This gave rise to an immediate puzzle, because populism seems to be compatible with a large number of other conventional political ideologies. In particular, it comes in both left-wing (e.g. Chavez) and right-wing (e.g. Bolsonaro) variants. So if populism is a political ideology, it’s a strange sort of ideology, because it doesn’t seem to exclude other views in the way that a conventional ideology does.

The most obvious alternative is to treat it as a strategy, used to gain specific advantage in a democratic electoral system. This is a more promising approach, but it also generates its own puzzles. If populism is merely a strategy, not an ideology, then why are certain ideas seemingly present in all populist movements (such as the hostility to foreigners, or the distrust of central banking)? And if it’s just an electoral strategy, why do populists rule the way they do? For example, why are they so keen on undermining the rule of law (leading to conflict with the courts, attempts to limit judicial independence, etc.)?

The solution that many people have settled on is to accept a watered-down version of the first view, treating populism as an ideology, but only a “thin” one. The most commonly cited definition is from Cas Mudde:

I define populism as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.

The major problem with this definition stems from the fact that it needs to be so minimal, in order to accommodate the fact that populism comes in both left-wing and right-wing flavours, but as a result it is simply too minimal to explain many of the specific features of populist movements. For example, why are “the people” always conceptualized as a culturally homogeneous mass, even in the context of societies that are quite pluralistic (which forces the introduction of additional constructs, such as la France profonde, or “real Americans”)? Furthermore, reading the definition, it would seem as though the left should be able to get significant mileage out of populism, and yet throughout Europe the rise of populism has almost uniformly benefited the right.

A clue to the solution can be found in a further specification that is often made, with respect to this definition, which is that the “general will” of the people is not for any old thing, but takes the specific form of what is called “common sense.” The crucial feature of common sense, as Frank Luntz helpfully observed, is that it “doesn’t requires any fancy theories; it is self-evidently correct.” (One can think of this as the primary point of demarcation between the people and the elites – the people have “common sense,” whereas elites subscribe to “fancy theories.”) This distinction, in turn, does not arise from the ideological content of a belief system, but rather from the form of cognition employed in its production. More specifically, it is a consequence of the distinction between what Daniel Kahneman referred to as “fast and slow” thinking. (...)

Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism. Elites are perfectly capable of succumbing to faddish theories (and as we have seen in recent years, they are susceptible to moral panics). But in such cases, it is not all that difficult to find other elites willing to take up the cause and oppose those intellectual fads. In specific domains, however, a very durable elite consensus has developed. This is strongest in areas where common sense is simply wrong, and so anyone who studies the evidence, or is willing to engage in analytical reasoning, winds up sharing the elite view. In these areas, the people find it practically impossible to find allies among the cognitive elite. This generates anger and resentment, which grows over time.

This reservoir of discontent creates the opportunity that is exploited by populist politicians. Democratic political systems are fairly responsive to public opinion, but they are still systems of elite rule, and so there are specific issues on which the people genuinely have not been listened to, no matter how angry or upset they got. This creates an incentive to do an end-run around elites, and around institutions dominated by elites (e.g. traditional political parties), in order to tap into this fund of resentment, positioning oneself as the champion of the people. What is noteworthy about populists is that they do not champion all of the interests of the people, but instead focus on the specific issues where there is the greatest divergence between common sense and elite opinion, in order to champion the views of the people on these issues.

Seen from this perspective, it is not difficult to see why populism can be an effective political strategy, and why it has become dramatically more effective in the age of social media. As one can tell from the title of Kahneman’s book, a central feature of intuitive cognition is that it is “fast,” while analytical reasoning is “slow.” This means that an acceleration in the pace of communication favours intuitive over analytical thinking. Populists will always have the best 30-second TV commercials. Social media further amplifies the problem by removing all gatekeepers, making it so that elites are no longer able to exercise any control over public communication. This makes it easy to circumvent them and appeal directly to the aggrieved segment of the population. The result is the creation of a communications environment that is dramatically more hostile to the analytical thinking style.

Working through the consequences of this, it is not difficult to see why the left has been unable to get much traction out of these changes, especially in developed countries. People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals.

Seeing things in this way makes it easier to understand why people get so worked up over seemingly minor issues, like language policing. The problem with demanding political correctness in speech, and punishing or ostracizing those who fail, is that it turns every conversation into a Stroop test, allowing elites the opportunity to exhibit conspicuous self-control. It requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. “homeless”), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. “unhoused”). Elites are not just insensitive, but positively dismissive of the burdens that this imposes on many people. As a result, by performing the cognitive operation with such fluidity, they are not only demonstrating their superiority, they are rubbing other people’s faces in it. (From this perspective, it is not surprising that the demand for “they/them” pronouns upset some people even more, because the introduction of a plural pronoun forces a verb change, which requires an even more demanding cognitive performance.)

This analysis explains why populism, despite being a mere strategy, also winds up having a characteristic ideological tone and content. The key is to see it as a political strategy that privileges a particular style of cognition. (...)

This privileging of intuitive (or System 1) cognition generates a set of diverse features that can be found in most populist movements. What follows is a non-exhaustive list:

1. Frustration with elites on specific issues. Crime is an ongoing source of frustration, in part because elites – even those who declare themselves “tough on crime” – believe that punishment should be imposed within a legal framework. This creates an opening for populist politicians like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, who empowered the police to carry out summary executions, and Donald Trump in the U.S. who explicitly authorized a return to “street justice” by urban police forces, and has used the U.S. military to carry out summary executions (so far only in international waters). (...)

2. Collective action problems. Populists have never met a collective action problem that they did not feel inclined to make worse (e.g. climate change). That’s because, whenever something bad happens, there is an impulse to blame some other person, but in a collective action problem, the bad effects that you suffer genuinely are the fault of the other person! The catch is that the situation is symmetric — the bad effects they are suffering are your fault. Getting out of the situation therefore requires the cognitive insight that you must both stop, and that you must refrain from free-riding despite the incentives. Intuition, on the other hand, suggests that the correct response is to punish the other person, and since the best way to do this is typically by defecting, the intuitive response is just a formula for transforming a collective action problem into a race to the bottom. This is why civilizations collapse into barbarism and not the other way around.

3. Communication style. A very prominent feature of populist politicians is their speaking style, which has an unscripted, stream-of-consciousness quality (e.g. see Hugo Chavez’s Aló Presidente TV show, which one could also, totally imagine Trump doing). This is important precisely because it is the opposite of the self-controlled, calculated speaking style favored by mainstream politicians (which the French have the perfect term for: langue de bois). This is why populist politicians are perceived, by a large segment of the population, as being more “honest,” even when everything that comes out of their mouth is a lie. Elites typically focus on the content of what is said and ignore the manner in which it is said. Often this is because they themselves employ the controlled speaking style, and so are not bothered by others using it. And yet it is perfectly clear, when listening to Donald Trump, that what he is saying is exactly what he is thinking. Indeed, he obviously lacks the verbal self-inhibition required to speak in any other way. This is what leads people to trust him – especially if they are relying on intuitive cues, rather than analytic evaluation, to determine trustworthiness. (The use of vulgarity is another common tactic of populist politicians, to demonstrate their lack of verbal inhibition. Traditional politicians sometimes try to imitate this, without success, because they fail to realize that it is not the vulgarity, but rather the disinhibition, that achieves the important communicative effect.)

4. Illiberalism. Populists have great difficulty respecting the rule of law. If one listens to the explanations that they offer for their actions, a great deal of this reflects a bias toward concreteness in their thinking. They think the purpose of the rules is to stop bad people from doing bad things, but since they themselves are good people trying to do good things, they cannot see why they should be constrained by the rules. They have enormous difficulty treating themselves and the other political parties symmetrically. (Americans are currently being subjected to a non-stop display of this.) Unfortunately, as those of us who teach liberal political philosophy know, there is an essential feat of abstraction at the foundation of all liberal principles. John Stuart Mill described it as a rejection of the the “logic of persecutors”: “that we may persecute others because we are right... but they must not persecute us because they are wrong.” (...)

5. Conspiracy theory. Many people have wondered why populists are so drawn to conspiracy theories, or “conspiracist” thinking. Again, this is a straightforward consequence of the privileging of intuitive thought. The natural bias of the human mind is toward belief in conspiracy theories, through a combination of apophenia, hyperactive agency-detection, and confirmation bias. Rational suspicion is achieved through the subsequent imposition of explicit test procedures, designed to eliminate false positives. In other words, it requires active suppression of conspiracist thoughts. To the extent that populists reject the style of cognition involved in that override, they open themselves up to a variety of irrational thought-patterns. When criticized by elites, many are inclined to double down on the conspiracism, because the cognitive style being pressed upon them is precisely what they hate most about elites.

by Joseph Heath, In Due Course |  Read more:

Image: Philip Lorca di-Corsica

[ed. See also: The prospects for left-wing populism (IDC):]

***

The crucial thing to understand about populism, and populist anger, is that it is a revolt directed against cognitive elites, not economic elites. Its centerpiece is the affirmation of “common sense” against the sort of “fancy theories” defended by intellectuals and their lackeys. (...)

From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.)

The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.

Interstellar Space Travel Will Never, Ever Happen

1. Every sci-fi space opera is based on literal magic

The fact that travel to another solar system is basically impossible has been written about in excruciating detail by much smarter people (including this article and this one, I thought this was also good). It’s easy to get bogged down in the technical details (it’s rocket science) so I’ll try to bring this down to my own level of understanding, of an unremarkable man who got a Broadcasting degree from Southern Illinois University:

First of all, it turns out that the ships in Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune etc. are not based on some kind of hypothetical technology that could maybe exist someday with better energy sources and materials (as I had thought). In every case, their tech is the equivalent of just having Albus Dumbledore in the engine room cast a teleportation spell. Their ships skip the vast distances of space entirely, arriving at their destinations many times faster than light itself could have made the trip. Just to be clear, there is absolutely no remotely possible method for doing this, even on paper.

“Well, science does the impossible all the time!” some of you say, pointing out that no one 200 years ago could have conceived of landing a rover on Mars. But I’m saying that expecting science to develop real warp drives, hyperspace or wormhole travel is asking it to utterly break the fundamental laws of the universe, no different than expecting to someday have a time machine, or a portal to a parallel dimension. These are plot devices, not science. (...)

I’m sure some of you think I’m exaggerating, and maybe I am, but keep in mind…

2. We all think space is roughly a billion times smaller than it actually is

The reason space operas rely on literal magic to make their plots work is that there is no non-magic way to get over the fact that stars are way, way farther apart than the average person understands. Picture in your mind the distance between earth and Proxima Centauri, the next closest star. Okay, now mentally multiply that times one billion and you’re probably closer to the truth. “But I can’t mentally picture one billion of anything!” I know, that’s the point. The concept of interstellar travel as it exists in the public imagination is based entirely on that public being physically incapable of understanding the frankly absurd distances involved.

When you hear that the next star is 4.25 light years away, that doesn’t sound that far—in an average sci-fi TV show, that trip would occur over a single commercial break. But that round trip is 50 trillion miles. I realize that’s a number so huge as to be meaningless, so let’s break it down:

Getting a human crew to the moon and back was a gigantic pain in the ass and that round trip is about half a million miles, it takes a week or so. The reason we haven’t yet set foot on Mars despite having talked about it constantly for decades is because that trip—which is practically next door in space terms—is the equivalent of going to the moon and back six hundred fucking times in a row without stopping. The round trip will take three years. It will cost half a trillion dollars or more. But of course it will; all of the cutting-edge tech on the spacecraft has to work perfectly for three straight years with no external support whatsoever. There will be no opportunity to stop for repair, there can be no surprises about how the equipment or the astronauts hold up for 300 million miles in the harshest conditions imaginable (and the radiation alone is a nightmare).

Okay, well, the difference between the Mars trip and a journey to the next closest star is roughly the difference between walking down the block to your corner store and walking from New York City to Sydney, Australia. Making it to Proxima Centauri would be like doing that Mars trip, which is already a mind-boggling technical challenge that we’re not even sure is worth doing, about 170,000 times in a row without stopping. At current spaceship speeds, it would take half a million motherfucking years. That is, a hundred times longer than all of human recorded history.

I’m grossly oversimplifying the math but, if anything, those numbers still downplay the difficulty. To get the trip down to a single human lifetime, you’d need to get a ship going so absurdly fast that the physics challenges become ludicrous. In the hopelessly optimistic scenario that we could get something going a tenth of the speed of light (that is, thousands of times faster than our Mars ship, or anything that we even kind of know how to build), that means running into a piece of space debris the size of a grain of sand would impact the hull with the force of a nuclear explosion.

And that’s still a round trip of over 80 years, so this would be a one-way suicide mission for the astronauts. This is a spacecraft that must contain everything the crew could possibly need over the course of their entire lives. So we’re talking about an enormous ship (which would be 99.99% fuel storage), with decades’ worth of groceries, spare parts, clothes, medical supplies and anything they could possibly need for any conceivable failure scenario, plus a life support system that basically mimics earth in every way (again, with enough redundancies and backups to persist through every possible disaster). Getting something that big going that fast would require far more energy than the total that our civilization has ever produced. And if anything goes wrong, there would be no rescue.

All of that, just for . . . what? To say we did it?

Now, we could definitely send an unmanned probe there to take pictures. They’re tiny by comparison, you can get them going much faster without squishing the crew and you don’t have to worry about bringing them back. It’s the difference between trying to jump over the Grand Canyon versus just shooting a bullet across it. But unmanned probes aren’t the fantasy.

3. Every proposed solution to the above problems is utterly ridiculous

“What about putting the crew in suspended animation?” you ask. “Like in the Alien franchise. Ripley was adrift in her hypersleep pod for half a century and she didn’t age a day! You wouldn’t need to store all that food, air and water and it’s fine if the trip takes longer than a lifetime!”

See, this is what drives me crazy about this subject, we keep mistaking slapdash tropes invented by sci-fi writers for actual plausible science. I mean, think about what we’re saying here: “Crews could survive the long trip if we just invent human immortality.”

You’re talking about a pod that can just magically halt the aging process. And as depicted, it is magic; these people are emerging from their years-long comas (during which they were not eating or drinking) with no wrinkles, brain damage, muscle atrophy, or bedsores. Their hair doesn’t even grow. The only way that could happen is if the pods literally freeze time, like goddamned Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell. It’s as scientific as showing the astronauts drinking a magic potion that grants eternal youth, brewed from unicorn tears.

“What about generation ships,” you say, “I’ve read sci-fi novels where they set up a whole society on a ship with the idea that it will be their great-grandchildren who will reach the destination and establish a colony!”

Okay, now you’re just pissing me off. You’re talking about an act that would get everyone involved put in front of a tribunal. What happens when the first generation born on the ship finds out they’ve been doomed to live their entire lives imprisoned on this cramped spacecraft against their will?

Imagine them all hitting their teen years and fully realizing they’ve been severed from the rest of humanity, cut off from all of the pleasures of both nature and civilization. These middle generations won’t even have the promise of seeing the destination; they will live and die with only the cold blackness of space outside their windows. They will never take a walk through the woods, never swim in a lake, never sit on a beach, or breathe fresh air, or meet their extended families. They will not know what it is to travel to a new city or eat at a fancy restaurant or have any of the careers depicted in their media about Earth. They will have no freedom whatsoever, not even to raise their children the way they want—the mission will require them to work specific jobs and breed specific offspring that can fill specific roles. They will live knowing their parents deprived them of absolutely everything good about the human experience, without their consent, before they were even born.

If you’re insisting this could be figured out somehow, that the future will come up with a special system of indoctrination that will guarantee there are no mutinies, riots, crimes or weird cults, just think about what you’re saying here: “We can make this work if we just solve literally all of the flaws in human psychology, morality and socialization.”

by Jason Pargin, Newsletter |  Read more:

Image: Star Wars

[ed. But...but, Elon said..]

I Taught an Octopus to Play Piano in 6 Months

via: YouTube
[ed. It's been said that if there are intelligent aliens on earth, octopuses are probably the best candidates. Too bad they're so tasty.]

Tequila Wars: 100 Percent Should Mean 100 Percent

[ed. Costco, Kendall Jenner, Diego Corp (Don Julio, Casamigos, etc.) others accused of selling adulterated tequila.]

Mexico City— At an October 16 press conference, Remberto Galván Cabrera announced that four additional tequila brands have failed the purity test. According to Galván, these major brands are masquerading as premium 100% agave tequila, but are actually adulterated with industrial cane alcohol. He has the lab tests to prove it. And no, he’s not talking about Don Julio, Casamigos, Cincoro, or 818, which have been slapped with class action lawsuits for allegedly selling adulterated tequila in the US.

If you’ve been following this unfolding drama, you may remember that Galván is a spokesperson for agave farmers (currently Agaveros de la Agroindustria del Tequila) who have been protesting industry corruption and unfair practices for over a year.

 

In September, Galván lodged a formal complaint with the government, demanding a criminal investigation of the CRT, the organization that regulates the tequila industry. The CRT is tasked with ensuring that all tequila meets legal standards, but Galván alleges that the organization is instead profiting from authorizing the sale of adulterated tequila. Galván traveled to the neighboring state of Guanajuato to request the investigation. His home state of Jalisco is the stronghold of the CRT, which influences local politics.

“The CRT certifies a product as 100% agave when it isn’t,” Galván stated, “With these tests, we prove it. The organization acts as a monopoly that favors industrialists, marginalizes small producers, and puts public health at risk.”

The CRT is a nonprofit “interprofessional organization” that supposedly represents all players in the tequila industry–including agave farmers. In October of 2024, a coalition of agaveros challenged this claim. The price of agave had dropped from 32 pesos a kilo (in 2018) to just one peso a kilo, and the farmers had a litany of complaints. They alleged that the drop in prices wasn’t just the same old boom and bust cycle that had plagued agave farmers for years. At a protest outside of CRT headquarters in Zapopan, Jalisco, agaveros sounded the alarm, alleging that the CRT was colluding with major tequila companies to drive down agave prices and squeeze out small farmers. 

Curious to know more about the source of this unrest, I sought out Remberto Galván Cabrera. He was loquacious, passionate, and hellbent to expose the alleged corruption. Much of what he said seemed plausible. The idea of corporations colluding to screw over farmers? Sure. The agaveros’ accusation that a regulatory body (the CRT) was corrupt? Certainly possible. His allegation that giant corporations were breaking international laws to adulterate their supposedly premium tequilas? That was harder to swallow. I couldn’t understand why they would take such a giant risk when it would be relatively easy to prove that a tequila was corrupted. Galván assured me there was evidence, but he wasn’t ready to release it. Fast forward about a year…

Since we first broke the story of the allegations in January of 2025, the drama has escalated. Galván was kidnapped and beaten. His phone and paperwork were stolen. Two leaders in the movement, Julián Rodríguez Parra and Salvador Ibarra Landeros, were arrested and jailed. I received veiled threats. The agaveros continued to stage protests.

Casamigos, Don Julio, Cincoro, and 818 accused of selling fake tequila

Although the protesting agaveros were making a lot of noise, the story wasn’t picked up by major news sources until May 5, 2025, when we reported that a class action lawsuit had been filed in New York against liquor giant Diageo. The lawsuit alleges that two Diageo tequilas, Casamigos and Don Julio, were adulterated with industrial alcohol. Diageo refuted the allegations stating, “All Casamigos and Don Julio tequilas labelled as ‘100% agave’ are made from 100% blue weber agave. We will vigorously defend the quality and integrity of our tequilas in court, and against anyone who is spreading misinformation and lies about our products.”

On July 4, another class action lawsuit was filed in California, opening the field of plaintiffs to anyone in the US who had bought Don Julio or Casamigos products. Since then, additional tequila brands have been slapped with lawsuits, including Kendall Jenner’s 818 tequila. In a case filed in Florida, the plaintiffs accuse 818 of knowingly selling adulterated tequila.

According to the September 23 filing, “Defendants actively concealed and misrepresented the true nature of how their Products were manufactured and composition of their Products. Indeed, Defendants concealed and misrepresented that they had in fact utilized sugars other than those obtained from the tequilana weber blue variety of agave to enhance their tequila, despite the Products being labeled as 100% agave azul.” (...)

So how bad is the adulterated “tequila”?

“The four samples we analyzed were adulterated with cheap cane alcohol,” Galván says. “Two samples weren’t even recognized as mixto tequila, meaning they have 33% agave sugars or less. The other two barely reached 51% agave.” He notes that one sample also had unsafe levels of methanol–a factor the CRT supposedly monitors.

We contacted the CRT for comment but have not yet received a reply. They have declined our previous request.

The numbers Galván lists are consistent with the test results cited in the California class action lawsuit, which was filed on July 4 by Baron & Budd in conjunction with Hagens Berman, who were responsible for the first class action lawsuit in New York.

According to the legal team, tests revealed that Casamigos Blanco contains approximately 33% agave-derived alcohol. Supposedly, Don Julio Blanco is 42% agave, while their pricey 1942 Añejo contains just 33% agave. As the complaint summarizes, “These findings directly contradict the prominent ‘100% Agave’ labels on Diageo Premium tequila products and confirm that Diageo’s representations are materially false and misleading.”

by Felisa Rogers, Mezcalitas |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: Costco implicated in adulterated tequila scandal; and, Tequila test results revealed, death threats, and other breaking news (Mezcalitas):]

***

Since we last reported on the tequila adulteration scandal, A LOT has happened. To make sense of it, I’ve created a timeline of recent revelations, followed by my takeaways and a chilling message from the man who has risked everything to bring this story to light. (...)

My takeaways…

At this point, it’s challenging to track all these law suits, law firms, and formal complaints. Meanwhile, we wonder why this story isn’t receiving more attention in the mainstream press. (...)

We continued to cover the protests and negotiations, but the allegations of adulterated tequila didn’t gain traction until May, when we reported that a major law firm was bringing a class action lawsuit against Diageo, the parent company of Casamigos and Don Julio, for allegedly selling adulterated tequila masquerading as a 100% agave premium product. Our story was picked up by Reuters, trade publications, and other outlets. The scandal has since snowballed into more lawsuits, outraged declarations of innocence, and a whole lot of speculation.

But to me, the agaveros are still at the heart of this drama. In a nutshell: this is a story about giant corporations allegedly colluding with a regulatory agency to improve their profit margins. By allegedly adulterating tequila with industrial alcohol, these players are devaluing the price of agave. This is unfair to both the agaveros and the legitimate distillers who are still making real tequila with care and at much greater cost.

It’s also a tale of courage in the face of enormous danger. Since beginning this crusade, Remberto Galván has been abducted and beaten. Two other agavero leaders, Julián Rodríguez and Salvador Ibarra, were arrested for protesting outside of the Sauza distillery and held in jail for 72 days. We are seriously concerned for the safety of everyone who continues to speak out on this issue.

Galván says that he and his associates have received threatening anonymous phone calls. According to Galván, he was told that if doesn’t back down, his body parts will be strewn around his home.

But the alleged intimidation goes beyond death threats. According to Galván, his own distillery, La Alborada, was targeted. He says a friend and colleague was pressured to plant adulterated tequila on the premises.

This appears to be a theme. Galván, a crusader against adulterated tequila, may be charged with adulterating tequila. Julián Rodríguez, an advocate for the rights of farmers, was charged with extortion and intimidation of Sauza for engaging in a peaceful protest outside the entrance of their distillery.

Galván fears for his life. He asked us to put this in the public record.