Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Antibiotic Resistance: The Last Resort
The agency heads were talking about the soaring increase in a little-known class of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CREs). Davies, the United Kingdom's chief medical officer, described CREs as a risk as serious as terrorism (see Nature 495, 141; 2013). “We have a very serious problem, and we need to sound an alarm,” said Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.
Their dire phrasing was warranted. CREs cause bladder, lung and blood infections that can spiral into life-threatening septic shock. They evade the action of almost all antibiotics — including the carbapenems, which are considered drugs of last resort — and they kill up to half of all patients who contract them. In the United States, these bacteria have been found in 4% of all hospitals and 18% of those that offer long-term critical care. And an analysis carried out in the United Kingdom predicts that if antibiotics become ineffective, everyday operations such as hip replacements could end in death for as many as one in six1.
The language used by Davies and Frieden was intended to break through the indifference with which the public usually greets news about antibiotic resistance. To close observers, however, it also had a tinge of exasperation. CREs were first identified almost 15 years ago, but did not become a public-health priority until recently, and medics may not have appreciated the threat that they posed. Looking back, say observers, there are lessons for researchers and health-care workers in how to protect patients, as well as those hospitals where CREs have not yet emerged.
“It is not too late to intervene and prevent these from becoming more common,” says Alexander Kallen, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC. At the same time, he acknowledges that in many places, CREs are here for good.
Hindsight is key to the story of CREs, because it was hindsight that identified them in the first place. In 2000, researchers at the CDC were grinding through analyses for a surveillance programme known as Intensive Care Antimicrobial Resistance Epidemiology (ICARE), which had been running for six years to monitor intensive-care units for unusual resistance factors. In the programme's backlog of biological samples, scientists identified one from the Enterobacteriaceae family, a group of gut-dwelling bacteria. This particular sample — of Klebsiella pneumoniae, a common cause of infection in intensive-care units — had been taken from a patient at a hospital in North Carolina in 1996 (ref. 2). It was weakly resistant to carbapenems, powerful broad-spectrum antibiotics developed in the 1980s.
Antibiotics have been falling to resistance for almost as long as people have been using them; Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, warned about the possibility when he accepted his Nobel prize in 1945. Knowing this, doctors have used the most effective drugs sparingly: careful rationing of the powerful antibiotic vancomycin, for example, meant that bacteria took three decades to develop resistance to it. Prudent use, researchers thought, would keep the remaining last-resort drugs such as the carbapenems effective for decades.
The North Carolinan strain of Klebsiella turned that idea on its head. It produced an enzyme, dubbed KPC (for Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase), that broke down carbapenems. What's more, the gene that encoded the enzyme sat on a plasmid, a piece of DNA that can move easily from one bacterium to another. Carbapenem resistance had arrived.
by Maryn McKenna, Nature | Read more:
Image: Nature
Stranded by Sprawl
Yet in one important respect booming Atlanta looks just like Detroit gone bust: both are places where the American dream seems to be dying, where the children of the poor have great difficulty climbing the economic ladder. In fact, upward social mobility — the extent to which children manage to achieve a higher socioeconomic status than their parents — is even lower in Atlanta than it is in Detroit. And it’s far lower in both cities than it is in, say, Boston or San Francisco, even though these cities have much slower growth than Atlanta.
So what’s the matter with Atlanta? A new study suggests that the city may just be too spread out, so that job opportunities are literally out of reach for people stranded in the wrong neighborhoods. Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger.
The new study comes from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which is led by economists at Harvard and Berkeley. There have been many comparisons of social mobility across countries; all such studies find that these days America, which still thinks of itself as the land of opportunity, actually has more of an inherited class system than other advanced nations. The new project asks how social mobility varies across U.S. cities, and finds that it varies a lot. In San Francisco a child born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution has an 11 percent chance of making it into the top fifth, but in Atlanta the corresponding number is only 4 percent.
When the researchers looked for factors that correlate with low or high social mobility, they found, perhaps surprisingly, little direct role for race, one obvious candidate. They did find a significant correlation with the existing level of inequality: “areas with a smaller middle class had lower rates of upward mobility.” This matches what we find in international comparisons, where relatively equal societies like Sweden have much higher mobility than highly unequal America. But they also found a significant negative correlation between residential segregation — different social classes living far apart — and the ability of the poor to rise.
And in Atlanta poor and rich neighborhoods are far apart because, basically, everything is far apart; Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl, even more spread out than other major Sun Belt cities. This would make an effective public transportation system nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t. As a result, disadvantaged workers often find themselves stranded; there may be jobs available somewhere, but they literally can’t get there.
by Paul Krugman, NY Times | Read more:
Image via:
Monday, July 29, 2013
Star Wars
Today, via Yelp (or TripAdvisor or Amazon, or any Web site teeming with “user-generated content”), you are often troubled by the reverse problem: too much information. As I navigate a Yelp entry to simply determine whether a place is worth my money, I find myself battered between polar extremes of experience: One meal was “to die for,” another “pretty lame.” Drifting into narrow currents of individual proclivity (writing about a curry joint where I had recently lunched, one reviewer noted that “the place had really good energy, very Spiritual [sic], which is very important to me”), I eventually capsize in a sea of confusion. I either quit the place altogether or, by the time I arrive, am weighed down by a certain exhaustion of expectation, as if I had already consumed the experience and was now simply going through the motions.
What I find most striking is that, having begun the process of looking for reviews of the restaurant, I find myself reviewing the reviewers. The use of the word “awesome”—a term whose original connotation is so denuded that I suspect it will ultimately come to exclusively signify its ironic, air-quote-marked opposite—is a red flag. So are the words “anniversary” or “honeymoon,” often written by people with inflated expectations for their special night; their complaint with any perceived failure on the part of the restaurant or hotel to rise to this momentous occasion is not necessarily mine. I reflexively downgrade reviewers writing in the sort of syrupy dross picked up from hotel brochures (“it was a vision of perfection”).
In one respect, there is nothing new in reviewing the reviewer; our choices in pre-Internet days were informed either by friends we trusted or critics whose voices seemed to carry authority. But suddenly, the door has been opened to a multitude of voices, each bearing no preexisting authority or social trust. It is no longer merely enough to read that someone thought the vegetarian food was bad (you need to know if she is a vegetarian), or the hotel in Iowa City was the best they have ever seen (just how many hotels have they seen?), or a foreign film was terrible (wait, they admit they don’t like subtitles?). Critics have always had to be interrogated this way (what dendritic history of logrolling lay behind the rave about that book?), but with the Web, a thousand critics have bloomed. The messy, complicated, often hidden dynamics of taste and preference, and the battles over it, are suddenly laid out right in front of us.
by Tom Vanderbilt, Wilson Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Henglein and Steets
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Garry Davis, Man of No Nation, Dies at 91
On May 25, 1948, a former United States Army flier entered the American Embassy in Paris, renounced his American citizenship and, as astonished officials looked on, declared himself a citizen of the world.
In the decades that followed, until the end of his long life last week, he remained by choice a stateless man — entering, leaving, being regularly expelled from and frequently arrested in a spate of countries, carrying a passport of his own devising, as the international news media chronicled his every move.
His rationale was simple, his aim immense: if there were no nation-states, he believed, there would be no wars.
Garry Davis, a longtime peace advocate, former Broadway song-and-dance man and self-declared World Citizen No. 1, who is widely regarded as the dean of the One World movement, a quest to erase national boundaries that today has nearly a million adherents worldwide, died on Wednesday in Williston, Vt. He was 91, and though in recent years he had largely ceased his wanderings and settled in South Burlington, Vt., he continued to occupy the singular limbo between citizen and alien that he had cheerfully inhabited for 65 years.
“I am not a man without a country,” Mr. Davis told Newsweek in 1978, “merely a man without nationality.”
Mr. Davis was not the first person to declare himself a world citizen, but he was inarguably the most visible, most vocal and most indefatigable.
The One World model has had its share of prominent adherents, among them Albert Schweitzer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein and E. B. White.
But where most advocates have been content to write and lecture, Mr. Davis was no armchair theorist: 60 years ago, he established the World Government of World Citizens, a self-proclaimed international governmental body that has issued documents — passports, identity cards, birth and marriage certificates — and occasional postage stamps and currency.
He periodically ran for president of the world, always unopposed.
by Margalit Fox, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Carl Gossett/The New York Times
[ed. Dave Matthews, Tim Reynolds - One Sweet World]
In the decades that followed, until the end of his long life last week, he remained by choice a stateless man — entering, leaving, being regularly expelled from and frequently arrested in a spate of countries, carrying a passport of his own devising, as the international news media chronicled his every move.
His rationale was simple, his aim immense: if there were no nation-states, he believed, there would be no wars.Garry Davis, a longtime peace advocate, former Broadway song-and-dance man and self-declared World Citizen No. 1, who is widely regarded as the dean of the One World movement, a quest to erase national boundaries that today has nearly a million adherents worldwide, died on Wednesday in Williston, Vt. He was 91, and though in recent years he had largely ceased his wanderings and settled in South Burlington, Vt., he continued to occupy the singular limbo between citizen and alien that he had cheerfully inhabited for 65 years.
“I am not a man without a country,” Mr. Davis told Newsweek in 1978, “merely a man without nationality.”
Mr. Davis was not the first person to declare himself a world citizen, but he was inarguably the most visible, most vocal and most indefatigable.
The One World model has had its share of prominent adherents, among them Albert Schweitzer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein and E. B. White.
But where most advocates have been content to write and lecture, Mr. Davis was no armchair theorist: 60 years ago, he established the World Government of World Citizens, a self-proclaimed international governmental body that has issued documents — passports, identity cards, birth and marriage certificates — and occasional postage stamps and currency.
He periodically ran for president of the world, always unopposed.
by Margalit Fox, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Carl Gossett/The New York Times
[ed. Dave Matthews, Tim Reynolds - One Sweet World]
O.K., Glass
On a weekday afternoon in late June, a nondescript forty-year-old man in beige shorts, a blue Penguin sports shirt, and what appears to be a pair of shale-colored architect’s glasses with parts of the frame missing gets on an uptown No. 6 train at Union Square to go see his psychoanalyst, on East Eighty-eighth Street. As the man walks into the frigid subway car, he unexpectedly jerks his head up and down. A pink light comes on above the right lens. He slides his index finger against the right temple of the glasses as if flicking away a fly. The man’s right eyebrow rises and his right eye squints. He appears to be mouthing some words. A lip-reader would come away with the following message: “Forever 21 world traveler denim shorts, $22.80. Horoscope: Cooler heads prevail today, helping you strike a compromise in a matter you refused to budge on last week.”There is a tap on his shoulder. He turns around. An older man, dressed for the office in a blue blazer, says, “Are those them?”
“Yes.”
“My kid wants one.”
“If you give them to your kid, you’ll be able to see everything he sees from your computer. You could follow him around all day.”
The businessman considers this. “Are they foldable?”
The man with the glasses shakes his head. A young college student in a hoodie and Adidas track pants, carrying a Pace University folder, takes out one of his earbuds. “What does it do?”
Everyone on the train is now staring at the man with the glasses.
The man with the glasses jerks his head up and down. The soft pink light is on above his right eye. “O.K., Glass,” the man says. “Take a picture.” The pink light is replaced by a shot of the subway car, the college student with the earbuds, the older man, now immortalized. If they are paying close attention, they can see a microscopic version of themselves and the world around them displayed on the screen above the man’s right eye. “I can also take a video of you,” the man says. “O.K., Glass. Record a video.”
“That is so dope,” the college student says. It appears to the man that the student is thinking over the situation. There’s something else he wants to say. It’s as if the man with the glasses has some form of mastery of the world around him, and maybe even within himself. (...)
My first encounter with Google Glass came on a Saturday in June, when I showed up at the Glass Explorers’ “Basecamp,” a sunny spread atop the Chelsea Market. My tech sherpa, a bright-eyed young woman, set me up with a mimosa as we perused the various shades of Glass frames, each named for a color that occurs in nature: cotton, shale, charcoal, sky, and tangerine. I went for shale, which happens to be the preference of Glass Explorers in San Francisco. (New Yorkers, naturally, go for bleak charcoal.) I was told that I was one of the first few hundred Explorers in the city, which made me feel like some third-rate Shackleton embarked on my own Nimrod Expedition into the neon ice. The lightweight titanium frames were fitted over my nose, a button was pressed near my right ear, and the small screen, or Optical Head Mounted Display, flickered to pink-ish life. I was told how to talk to my new friend, each command initiated with the somewhat resigned “O.K., Glass.” In deference to Eunice and Lenny, I started off with two simple instructions, picked up by a microphone that sits just above my right eye, at the tip of my eyebrow.
“O.K., Glass. Google translate ‘hamburger’ into Korean.”
“Haembeogeo,” a gentle, vowel-rich voice announced after a few seconds of searching, as both English and Hangul script appeared on the display above my right eye. Since there are no earbuds to plug into Glass, audio is conveyed through a “bone conduction transducer.” In effect, this means that a tiny speaker vibrates against the bone behind my right ear, replicating sound. The result is eerie, as if someone is whispering directly into a hole bored into your cranium, but also deeply futuristic. You can imagine a time when different parts of our bodies are adapted for different needs. If a bone can hear sound, why can’t my fingertips smell the bacon strips they’re about to grab?
Glass responds to a combination of voice and touch-pad commands. After the initial “O.K., Glass,” you can tap and slide your way through the touch pad, but since there is no keyboard or touch screen, Googling and Gmailing will probably always involve voice recognition.
“O.K., Glass. Google translate ‘hamburger’ into Russian.”
“Gamburrrger,” a voice purred, not so gently, like my grandmother at the end of a long hot day.
And, all of a sudden, I felt something for this technology.
Photograph by Emiliano Granado
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Think About Nature
What's the role of mathematics? Why does mathematics come into physics? What's the nature of time? These two things are very related since mathematical description is supposed to be outside of time. And I've come to a long evolution since the late 80's to a position, which is quite different from the ones that I had originally, and quite surprising even to me. But let me get to it bit by bit. Let me build up the questions and the problems that arise.
One way to start is what I call "physics in a box" or, theories of small isolated systems. The way we've learned to do this is to make an accounting or an itinerary—a listing of the possible states of a system. How can a possible system be? What are the possible configurations? What were the possible states? If it's a glass of Coca Cola, what are the possible positions and states of all the atoms in the glass? Once we know that, we ask, how do the states change? And the metaphor here—which comes from atomism that comes from Democritus and Lucretius—is that physics is nothing but atoms moving in a void and the atoms never change. The atoms have properties like mass and charge that never change in time. The void—which is space in the old days never changed in time—was fixed and they moved according to laws, which were originally given by or tried to be given by Descartes and Galileo, given by Newton much more successfully.
And up until the modern era, where we describe them in quantum mechanics, the laws also never changed. The laws lets us predict where the positions of the atoms will be at a later time, if we know the positions of all the atoms at a given moment. That's how we do physics and I call that the Newtonian Paradigm because it was invented by Newton. And behind the Newtonian Paradigm is the idea that the laws of nature are timeless; they act on the system, so to speak, from outside the system and they evolve from the past to the present to the future. If you know the state any time, you can predict the state at any other time. So this is the framework for doing physics and it's been very successful. And I'm not challenging its success within the proper domain—small parts of the universe.
The problem that I've identified—that I think is at the root of a lot of the spinning of our wheels and confusion of contemporary physics and cosmology—is that you can't just take this method of doing science and scale it up to the universe as a whole. When you do, you run into questions that you can't answer. You end up with fallacies; you end up saying silly things. One reason is that, on a cosmological scale, the questions that we want to understand are not just what are the laws, but why are these the laws rather than other laws? Where do the laws come from? What makes the laws what they are? And if the laws are input to the method, the method will never explain the laws because they're input.
Also, given the state of the universe of the system at one time, we use the laws to predict the state at a later time. But what was the cause of the state that we started with that initial time? Well, it was something in the past so we have to evolve from further into the past. And what was the reason for that past state? Well, that was something further and further in the past. So we end up at the Big Bang. It ends up that any explanation for why are we sitting in this room—why is the earth in orbit around the sun where it is now—any question of detail that we want to ask about the universe ends up being pushed back using the laws to the initial conditions of the Big Bang.
And then we end up with wondering, why were those initial conditions chosen? Why that particular set of initial conditions? Now we're using a different language. We're not talking about particles and Newton's laws, we're talking about quantum field theory. But the question is the same; what chose the initial conditions? And since the initial conditions are input to this method that Newton developed, it can't be explained within that method. So if we want to ask cosmological questions, if we want to really explain everything, we need to apply a different method. We need to have a different starting point.
by Lee Smolan, Edge | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Enough is Enough
Kurt Vonnegut and novelist Joseph Heller were once allegedly at a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Vonnegut mentioned that their wealthy host made more money in one day than Heller ever made from his novel Catch-22.
Heller responded: “Yes, but I have something he will never have: enough.”
Whether it’s true or not, I’ve always thought this to be one of the smartest finance stories ever told.
All throughout college, I had one career plan: investment banking. The industry was attractive to me, and thousands of other students blinded by a lack of life experience, for one reason: You can make a lot of money. Six figures right out of school, and millions later in your career.
There’s just one catch. Your life becomes abjectly miserable.
One-hundred-hour work weeks, the most pressure you’ve ever experienced, and less exposure to sunlight than death row inmates. They had a saying: “If you don’t come to work on Saturday, don’t bother coming back on Sunday.” The senior bosses were worth millions, but stressed, overweight, anxious, never saw their kids, and hadn’t taken a vacation in years — I’m unfairly generalising, but only slightly. Almost no one actually enjoys it. I quickly cried uncle, moved on, and never looked back.
In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed 1,000 elderly Americans (most in their 80s and 90s), seeking wisdom from those with the most experience. One quote from the book stuck out:
In other words, young investment bankers assume a big income will make them happier because they think about a nice house and fancy cars, not working until 4 a.m. and having no social life.
In a New York Times column three years ago, David Brooks put a twist on this thinking by analysing the life of actress Sandra Bullock. He wrote:
Heller responded: “Yes, but I have something he will never have: enough.”
Whether it’s true or not, I’ve always thought this to be one of the smartest finance stories ever told.All throughout college, I had one career plan: investment banking. The industry was attractive to me, and thousands of other students blinded by a lack of life experience, for one reason: You can make a lot of money. Six figures right out of school, and millions later in your career.
There’s just one catch. Your life becomes abjectly miserable.
One-hundred-hour work weeks, the most pressure you’ve ever experienced, and less exposure to sunlight than death row inmates. They had a saying: “If you don’t come to work on Saturday, don’t bother coming back on Sunday.” The senior bosses were worth millions, but stressed, overweight, anxious, never saw their kids, and hadn’t taken a vacation in years — I’m unfairly generalising, but only slightly. Almost no one actually enjoys it. I quickly cried uncle, moved on, and never looked back.
In his book 30 Lessons for Living, gerontologist Karl Pillemer interviewed 1,000 elderly Americans (most in their 80s and 90s), seeking wisdom from those with the most experience. One quote from the book stuck out:
No one — not a single person out of a thousand — said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want.
No one — not a single person — said it’s important to be at least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it’s real success.
No one — not a single person — said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power.The elderly didn’t say that money isn’t important. They didn’t even rule out that more money might have made them happier. They just seemed to understand the concept of enough.Studies show that money does increase happiness. The latest research shows there’s not even a known satiation point — a higher income makes virtually everyone happier, although each additional dollar delivers less happiness than the one before it. (...)
In other words, young investment bankers assume a big income will make them happier because they think about a nice house and fancy cars, not working until 4 a.m. and having no social life.
In a New York Times column three years ago, David Brooks put a twist on this thinking by analysing the life of actress Sandra Bullock. He wrote:
Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?“If you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy.” Brooks concludes. But for the same reason investment bankers choose a miserable life while assuming money will make them happier, I’m willing to bet many otherwise happy people would have gladly changed shoes with Bullock three years ago. Research is clear that some things completely override any happiness that can be gained from money or work success. It’s just hard to realise that because money is tangible, measurable, and universal, whereas the “other factors” Kahneman mentions that have a greater impact on our happiness are vague and nuanced.
by Motley Fool Staff, Motley Fool | Read more:
Image: via
NSA: The Decision Problem
This spectacular intelligence coup was preceded by 13 failed attempts. Secrecy all too often conceals waste and failure within government programs; in this case, secrecy was essential to success. Any reasonable politician, facing the taxpayers, would have canceled the Corona orbital reconnaissance program after the eleventh or twelfth unsuccessful launch.
The Corona program, a joint venture between the CIA, the NSA, and the Department of Defense, was coordinated by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and continued, under absolute secrecy, for 12 more years and 126 more missions, becoming the most productive intelligence operation of the Cold War. "It was as if an enormous floodlight had been turned on in a darkened warehouse," observed former CIA program director Albert D. Wheelon, after the operation was declassified by order of President Clinton in 1995. "The Corona data quickly assumed the decisive role that the Enigma intercepts had played in World War II."
The resources and expertise that were gathered to support the Corona program, operating under cover of a number of companies and institutions centered around Sunnyvale, California (including Fairchild, Lockheed, and the Stanford Industrial Park) helped produce the Silicon Valley of today. Google Earth is Corona's direct descendant, and it is a fact as remarkable as the fall of the Berlin wall that anyone, anywhere in the world, can freely access satellite imagery whose very existence was a closely guarded secret only a generation ago.
PRISM, on the contrary, has been kept in the dark. Setting aside the question of whether wholesale, indiscriminate data collection is legal—which, evidently, its proponents believed it was—the presumed reason is that for a surveillance system to be effective against bad actors, the bad actors have to be unaware that they are being watched. Unfortunately, the bad actors to be most worried about are the ones who suspect that they are being watched. The tradecraft goes way back. With the privacy of houses came eavesdropping; with the advent of written communication came secret opening of mail; with the advent of the electric telegraph came secret wiretaps; with the advent of photography came spy cameras; with the advent of orbital rocketry came spy satellites. To effectively spy on the entire Internet you need your own secret Internet—and Edward Snowden has now given us a glimpse into how this was done.
The ultimate goal of signals intelligence and analysis is to learn not only what is being said, and what is being done, but what is being thought. With the proliferation of search engines that directly track the links between individual human minds and the words, images, and ideas that both characterize and increasingly constitute their thoughts, this goal appears within reach at last. "But, how can the machine know what I think?" you ask. It does not need to know what you think—no more than one person ever really knows what another person thinks. A reasonable guess at what you are thinking is good enough.
Data mining, on the scale now practiced by Google and the NSA, is the realization of what Alan Turing was getting at, in 1939, when he wondered "how far it is possible to eliminate intuition, and leave only ingenuity," in postulating what he termed an "Oracle Machine." He had already convinced himself of the possibility of what we now call artificial intelligence (in his more precise terms, mechanical intelligence) and was curious as to whether intuition could be similarly reduced to a mechanical procedure—although it might (indeed should) involve non-deterministic steps. He assumed, for sake of argument, that "we do not mind how much ingenuity is required, and therefore assume it to be available in unlimited supply."
And, as if to discount disclaimers by the NSA that they are only capturing metadata, Turing, whose World War II work on the Enigma would make him one of the patron saints of the NSA, was already explicit that it is the metadata that count. If Google has taught us anything, it is that if you simply capture enough links, over time, you can establish meaning, follow ideas, and reconstruct someone's thoughts. It is only a short step from suggesting what a target may be thinking now, to suggesting what that target may be thinking next. (...)
What we have now is the crude equivalent of snatching snippets of film from the sky, in 1960, compared to the panopticon that was to come. The United States has established a coordinated system that links suspect individuals (only foreigners, of course, but that definition becomes fuzzy at times) to dangerous ideas, and, if the links and suspicions are strong enough, our drone fleet, deployed ever more widely, is authorized to execute a strike. This is only a primitive first step toward something else. Why kill possibly dangerous individuals (and the inevitable innocent bystanders) when it will soon become technically irresistible to exterminate the dangerous ideas themselves?
by George Dyson, Edge | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Nick Cave's Love Song Lecture
Though the love song comes in many guises – songs of exultation and praise, songs of rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss – they all address God, for it is the haunted premises of longing that the true love song inhabits. It is a howl in the void, for Love and for comfort and it lives on the lips of the child crying for his mother. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the raving of the lunatic supplicant petitioning his God. It is the cry of one chained to the earth, to the ordinary and to the mundane, craving flight; a flight into inspiration and imagination and divinity. The love song is the sound of our endeavours to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre.
The loss of my father, I found, created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose. The great W.H. Auden said "The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting – had it not occurred, it would have found another- in order that its life come a serious matter." The death of my father was the "traumatic experience" Auden talks about that left the hole for God to fill. How beautiful the notion that we create our own personal catastrophes and that it is the creative forces within us that are instrumental in doing this. We each have a need to create and sorrow is a creative act. The love song is a sad song, it is the sound of sorrow itself. We all experience within us what the Portugese call Suadade, which translates as an inexplicable sense of longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the Love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting through our wounds.
In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Frederico Garcia Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friend and Dirty 3 have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualised are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.
All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil – the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here – so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.
The loss of my father, I found, created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose. The great W.H. Auden said "The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting – had it not occurred, it would have found another- in order that its life come a serious matter." The death of my father was the "traumatic experience" Auden talks about that left the hole for God to fill. How beautiful the notion that we create our own personal catastrophes and that it is the creative forces within us that are instrumental in doing this. We each have a need to create and sorrow is a creative act. The love song is a sad song, it is the sound of sorrow itself. We all experience within us what the Portugese call Suadade, which translates as an inexplicable sense of longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the Love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting through our wounds.In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Frederico Garcia Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friend and Dirty 3 have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualised are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.
All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil – the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here – so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.
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