Saturday, October 10, 2015
Synchronicity: The Meaning of Coincidence
The story I usually tell is this: one afternoon about a year ago I met up with a friend (I’ll call her Olivia), someone I hadn’t seen since college. We were giddy and caffeinated, exchanging stories about the shocking realization that we were both dating—falling in love with—people we’d first been adamantly certain were just flings. Erykah Badu played as a soundtrack: “I was not looking for no love affair.”
Life is utterly unpredictable, cheekily magical in its tricks, we agreed. Once “cracked open” (what we’d come to call this perspectival shift, the recognition that you never truly know what’s to come), rationality only goes so far. Olivia mentioned that her fling-turned-boyfriend had found lucrative gigs writing copy through mass staffing websites like Elance and thought I might be interested. So I took his email and sent him a message that night, checking his profile on Facebook, as one does, out of curiosity.
The next day I found myself in between appointments at a coffee shop near Union Square. While sitting there, I remembered Olivia’s boyfriend, and looked down to find an email reply from him, sent within the minute. Strange, but not unlike the remarkable but familiar experience of thinking about someone just before they call. After skimming the email, I noticed that the man sitting next to me was texting with a woman named Olivia (the café had close seating and I am a nosy seat mate). When he got up to go to the bathroom, I pulled up Olivia’s boyfriend’s Facebook profile again. Indeed, this was the very man sitting next to me! (I should mention that he lives in Brooklyn, I in Harlem, and that this coffee shop is a place that neither of us had ever been to before.) When he sat back down, I tapped him on the shoulder. Incredulous, we talked about this improbable meeting, had a good laugh, and then went on about our lives.
To some, this strange meeting would be known as a “coincidence.” A crazy coincidence, perhaps. Some might even argue that it wasn’t entirely accidental: maybe I subconsciously noticed him before checking my email, which would explain why he was already in my thoughts (but then how did we both end up there?). Maybe Olivia had mentioned offhandedly that he would be in that area tomorrow, and I took in the information, again subconsciously, and organized my own schedule accordingly (never mind that my appointments had been made weeks prior).
To others—particularly those given to the spiritual-meets-pop psychology of Oprah and Deepak Chopra that has worked its way into the mainstream over the last several years—our chance meeting would be known as “synchronicity.” First coined by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in the 1930s, and developed in his 1960 book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, the word describes a meaningful coincidence—the phenomenon where a thought is significantly, but not causally, connected to an event. In Synchronicity, Jung defines the title word as “the simultaneous occurrence of a psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state—and, in certain cases, vice versa.” (...)
Synchronicity isn’t verifiable through classical scientific methods, which can only test for phenomena that are reproducible, quantifiable, and, importantly, independent of the observer. Synchronicity, by definition, is dependent on the observer, since it’s only a subjective experience—the thought tied to the coincident event—that makes a synchronistic occurrence meaningful. (As a result, it’s not widely regarded as an actual theory.) Skeptics rationalize these happenings as mere coincidences, explainable as statistical chance or selective perception.
But Jung’s Synchronicity is meticulous in its data analysis, philosophical depth (pulling from the classical Chinese I Ching), and scientific inquiry. Jung was interested in studies of psychic processes and extrasensory perception, in astrology, and in the space-time continuum. Influenced by the “new physics” of the twentieth century—and his friendship with Albert Einstein, who was working on his theory of relativity—Jung wanted, he writes, to explore “a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality.” He proposed synchronicity as a fourth principle in addition to space, time, and causality—as a phenomenon primarily concerned with “psychic conditions, that is to say with processes in the unconscious.”
Rather than describing inexplicable miracles, Jung wanted to dismantle the magic and superstition surrounding the seemingly impossible, yet seemingly connected, events he and others had experienced. He approached the topic with trepidation, wary of “plung[ing] into regions of human experience which are dark, dubious, and hedged about with prejudice,” yet passionate to share the conviction that had been building within him for decades: that while the causal principle can only account for some natural processes, a significant connection between thoughts and events need not be absent simply because cause and effect are.
“The so-called ‘scientific view of the world,’” writes Jung, “can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.” It follows, Jung argues, that the existence of one or more other factors is necessary to explain the world, with all its contingencies and its deep, if not entirely explicable, meaning.
It’s a human instinct to search for meaning in the universe—to see a pattern in all the chaos, pain, and nonsensicality. The tendency to look for interconnectedness and order also helps explain why we all feel blessed when we encounter synchronicity; its importance feels self-evident.
Life is utterly unpredictable, cheekily magical in its tricks, we agreed. Once “cracked open” (what we’d come to call this perspectival shift, the recognition that you never truly know what’s to come), rationality only goes so far. Olivia mentioned that her fling-turned-boyfriend had found lucrative gigs writing copy through mass staffing websites like Elance and thought I might be interested. So I took his email and sent him a message that night, checking his profile on Facebook, as one does, out of curiosity.
The next day I found myself in between appointments at a coffee shop near Union Square. While sitting there, I remembered Olivia’s boyfriend, and looked down to find an email reply from him, sent within the minute. Strange, but not unlike the remarkable but familiar experience of thinking about someone just before they call. After skimming the email, I noticed that the man sitting next to me was texting with a woman named Olivia (the café had close seating and I am a nosy seat mate). When he got up to go to the bathroom, I pulled up Olivia’s boyfriend’s Facebook profile again. Indeed, this was the very man sitting next to me! (I should mention that he lives in Brooklyn, I in Harlem, and that this coffee shop is a place that neither of us had ever been to before.) When he sat back down, I tapped him on the shoulder. Incredulous, we talked about this improbable meeting, had a good laugh, and then went on about our lives.To some, this strange meeting would be known as a “coincidence.” A crazy coincidence, perhaps. Some might even argue that it wasn’t entirely accidental: maybe I subconsciously noticed him before checking my email, which would explain why he was already in my thoughts (but then how did we both end up there?). Maybe Olivia had mentioned offhandedly that he would be in that area tomorrow, and I took in the information, again subconsciously, and organized my own schedule accordingly (never mind that my appointments had been made weeks prior).
To others—particularly those given to the spiritual-meets-pop psychology of Oprah and Deepak Chopra that has worked its way into the mainstream over the last several years—our chance meeting would be known as “synchronicity.” First coined by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in the 1930s, and developed in his 1960 book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, the word describes a meaningful coincidence—the phenomenon where a thought is significantly, but not causally, connected to an event. In Synchronicity, Jung defines the title word as “the simultaneous occurrence of a psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state—and, in certain cases, vice versa.” (...)
Synchronicity isn’t verifiable through classical scientific methods, which can only test for phenomena that are reproducible, quantifiable, and, importantly, independent of the observer. Synchronicity, by definition, is dependent on the observer, since it’s only a subjective experience—the thought tied to the coincident event—that makes a synchronistic occurrence meaningful. (As a result, it’s not widely regarded as an actual theory.) Skeptics rationalize these happenings as mere coincidences, explainable as statistical chance or selective perception.
But Jung’s Synchronicity is meticulous in its data analysis, philosophical depth (pulling from the classical Chinese I Ching), and scientific inquiry. Jung was interested in studies of psychic processes and extrasensory perception, in astrology, and in the space-time continuum. Influenced by the “new physics” of the twentieth century—and his friendship with Albert Einstein, who was working on his theory of relativity—Jung wanted, he writes, to explore “a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality.” He proposed synchronicity as a fourth principle in addition to space, time, and causality—as a phenomenon primarily concerned with “psychic conditions, that is to say with processes in the unconscious.”
Rather than describing inexplicable miracles, Jung wanted to dismantle the magic and superstition surrounding the seemingly impossible, yet seemingly connected, events he and others had experienced. He approached the topic with trepidation, wary of “plung[ing] into regions of human experience which are dark, dubious, and hedged about with prejudice,” yet passionate to share the conviction that had been building within him for decades: that while the causal principle can only account for some natural processes, a significant connection between thoughts and events need not be absent simply because cause and effect are.
“The so-called ‘scientific view of the world,’” writes Jung, “can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.” It follows, Jung argues, that the existence of one or more other factors is necessary to explain the world, with all its contingencies and its deep, if not entirely explicable, meaning.
It’s a human instinct to search for meaning in the universe—to see a pattern in all the chaos, pain, and nonsensicality. The tendency to look for interconnectedness and order also helps explain why we all feel blessed when we encounter synchronicity; its importance feels self-evident.
by Lucy McKeon, Guernica | Read more:
Image: Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter Phänomene: eine psychiatrische Studie by Carl Jung 
How the Banks Ignored the Lessons of the Crash
Ask people where they were on 9/11, and most have a memory to share. Ask where they were when Lehman Brothers collapsed, and many will struggle even to remember the correct year. The 158-year-old Wall Street bank filed for bankruptcy on 15 September 2008. As the news broke, insiders experienced an atmosphere of unprecedented panic. One former investment banker recalled: “I thought: so this is what the threat of war must feel like. I remember looking out of the window and seeing the buses drive by. People everywhere going through a normal working day – or so they thought. I realised: they have no idea. I called my father from the office to tell him to transfer all his savings to a safer bank. Going home that day, I was genuinely terrified.”
A veteran at a small credit rating agency who spent his whole career in the City of London told me with genuine emotion: “It was terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. We came so close to a global meltdown.” He had been on holiday in the week Lehman went bust. “I remember opening up the paper every day and going: ‘Oh my God.’ I was on my BlackBerry following events. Confusion, embarrassment, incredulity ... I went through the whole gamut of human emotions. At some point my wife threatened to throw my BlackBerry in the lake if I didn’t stop reading on my phone. I couldn’t stop.”
Other financial workers in the City, who were at their desks after Lehman defaulted, described colleagues sitting frozen before their screens, paralysed – unable to act even when there was easy money to be made. Things were looking so bad, they said, that some got on the phone to their families: “Get as much money from the ATM as you can.” “Rush to the supermarket to hoard food.” “Buy gold.” “Get everything ready to evacuate the kids to the country.” As they recalled those days, there was often a note of shame in their voices, as if they felt humiliated by the memory of their vulnerability. Even some of the most macho traders became visibly uncomfortable. One said to me in a grim voice: “That was scary, mate. I mean, not film scary. Really scary.”
I spent two years, from 2011 to 2013, interviewing about 200 bankers and financial workers as part of an investigation into banking culture in the City of London after the crash. Not everyone I spoke to had been so terrified in the days and weeks after Lehman collapsed. But the ones who had phoned their families in panic explained to me that what they were afraid of was the domino effect. The collapse of a global megabank such as Lehman could cause the financial system to come to a halt, seize up and then implode. Not only would this mean that we could no longer withdraw our money from banks, it would also mean that lines of credit would stop. As the fund manager George Cooper put it in his book The Origin of Financial Crises: “This financial crisis came perilously close to causing a systemic failure of the global financial system. Had this occurred, global trade would have ceased to function within a very short period of time.” Remember that this is the age of just-in-time inventory management, Cooper added – meaning supermarkets have very small stocks. With impeccable understatement, he said: “It is sobering to contemplate the consequences of interrupting food supplies to the world’s major cities for even a few days.”
These were the dominos threatening to fall in 2008. The next tile would be hundreds of millions of people worldwide all learning at the same time that they had lost access to their bank accounts and that supplies to their supermarkets, pharmacies and petrol stations had frozen. The TV images that have come to define this whole episode – defeated-looking Lehman employees carrying boxes of their belongings through Wall Street – have become objects of satire. As if it were only a matter of a few hundred overpaid people losing their jobs: Look at the Masters of the Universe now, brought down to our level!
In reality, those cardboard box-carrying bankers were the beginning of what could very well have been a genuine breakdown of society. Although we did not quite fall off the edge after the crash in the way some bankers were anticipating, the painful effects are still being felt in almost every sector. At this distance, however, seven years on, it’s hard to see what has changed. (...)
Perhaps the most terrifying interview of all the 200 I recorded was with a senior regulator. It was not only what he said but how he said it: as if the status quo was simply unassailable. Ultimately, he explained, regulators – the government agencies that ensure the financial sector is safe and compliant – rely on self-declaration; what is presented by a bank’s internal management. The trouble, he said with a calm smile, is that a bank’s internal management often doesn’t know what’s going on because banks today are so vast and complex. He did not think he had ever been deliberately lied to, although he acknowledged that, obviously, he couldn’t know for sure. “The real threat is not a bank’s management hiding things from us, it’s the management not knowing themselves what the risks are.”
He talked about the culture of fear and how people are not managing their actions for the benefit of their bank. Instead, “they are managing their career”. He believed that the crash had been more “cock-up than conspiracy”. Bank management is in conflict, he pointed out: “What is good for the long term of the bank or the country may not be what is best for their own short-term career or bonus.”
If the problem with finance is perverse incentives, then the insistence on greed as the cause for the crash is part of the problem. There is a lot of greed in the City, as there is elsewhere in society. But if you blame the crash on character flaws in individuals you imply that the system itself is fine, all we need to do is to smoke out the crooks, the gambling addicts, the coke-snorters, the sexists, the psychopaths. Human beings always have at least some scope for choice, hence the differences in culture between banks. Still, human behaviour is largely determined by incentives, and in the current set-up, these are sending individual bankers, desks or divisions within banks – as well as the banks themselves – in the wrong direction.
How hard would it be to change those incentives? From the viewpoint of those I interviewed, not hard at all. First of all, banks could be chopped up into units that can safely go bust – meaning they could never blackmail us again. Banks should not have multiple activities going on under one roof with inherent conflicts of interest. Banks should not be allowed to build, sell or own overly complex financial products – clients should be able to comprehend what they buy and investors understand the balance sheet. Finally, the penalty should land on the same head as the bonus, meaning nobody should have more reason to lie awake at night worrying over the risks to the bank’s capital or reputation than the bankers themselves. You might expect all major political parties to have come out by now with their vision of a stable and productive financial sector. But this is not what has happened.
by Joris Luyendijk , The Guardian | Read more:
Image: uncredited
A veteran at a small credit rating agency who spent his whole career in the City of London told me with genuine emotion: “It was terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. We came so close to a global meltdown.” He had been on holiday in the week Lehman went bust. “I remember opening up the paper every day and going: ‘Oh my God.’ I was on my BlackBerry following events. Confusion, embarrassment, incredulity ... I went through the whole gamut of human emotions. At some point my wife threatened to throw my BlackBerry in the lake if I didn’t stop reading on my phone. I couldn’t stop.”Other financial workers in the City, who were at their desks after Lehman defaulted, described colleagues sitting frozen before their screens, paralysed – unable to act even when there was easy money to be made. Things were looking so bad, they said, that some got on the phone to their families: “Get as much money from the ATM as you can.” “Rush to the supermarket to hoard food.” “Buy gold.” “Get everything ready to evacuate the kids to the country.” As they recalled those days, there was often a note of shame in their voices, as if they felt humiliated by the memory of their vulnerability. Even some of the most macho traders became visibly uncomfortable. One said to me in a grim voice: “That was scary, mate. I mean, not film scary. Really scary.”
I spent two years, from 2011 to 2013, interviewing about 200 bankers and financial workers as part of an investigation into banking culture in the City of London after the crash. Not everyone I spoke to had been so terrified in the days and weeks after Lehman collapsed. But the ones who had phoned their families in panic explained to me that what they were afraid of was the domino effect. The collapse of a global megabank such as Lehman could cause the financial system to come to a halt, seize up and then implode. Not only would this mean that we could no longer withdraw our money from banks, it would also mean that lines of credit would stop. As the fund manager George Cooper put it in his book The Origin of Financial Crises: “This financial crisis came perilously close to causing a systemic failure of the global financial system. Had this occurred, global trade would have ceased to function within a very short period of time.” Remember that this is the age of just-in-time inventory management, Cooper added – meaning supermarkets have very small stocks. With impeccable understatement, he said: “It is sobering to contemplate the consequences of interrupting food supplies to the world’s major cities for even a few days.”
These were the dominos threatening to fall in 2008. The next tile would be hundreds of millions of people worldwide all learning at the same time that they had lost access to their bank accounts and that supplies to their supermarkets, pharmacies and petrol stations had frozen. The TV images that have come to define this whole episode – defeated-looking Lehman employees carrying boxes of their belongings through Wall Street – have become objects of satire. As if it were only a matter of a few hundred overpaid people losing their jobs: Look at the Masters of the Universe now, brought down to our level!
In reality, those cardboard box-carrying bankers were the beginning of what could very well have been a genuine breakdown of society. Although we did not quite fall off the edge after the crash in the way some bankers were anticipating, the painful effects are still being felt in almost every sector. At this distance, however, seven years on, it’s hard to see what has changed. (...)
Perhaps the most terrifying interview of all the 200 I recorded was with a senior regulator. It was not only what he said but how he said it: as if the status quo was simply unassailable. Ultimately, he explained, regulators – the government agencies that ensure the financial sector is safe and compliant – rely on self-declaration; what is presented by a bank’s internal management. The trouble, he said with a calm smile, is that a bank’s internal management often doesn’t know what’s going on because banks today are so vast and complex. He did not think he had ever been deliberately lied to, although he acknowledged that, obviously, he couldn’t know for sure. “The real threat is not a bank’s management hiding things from us, it’s the management not knowing themselves what the risks are.”
He talked about the culture of fear and how people are not managing their actions for the benefit of their bank. Instead, “they are managing their career”. He believed that the crash had been more “cock-up than conspiracy”. Bank management is in conflict, he pointed out: “What is good for the long term of the bank or the country may not be what is best for their own short-term career or bonus.”
If the problem with finance is perverse incentives, then the insistence on greed as the cause for the crash is part of the problem. There is a lot of greed in the City, as there is elsewhere in society. But if you blame the crash on character flaws in individuals you imply that the system itself is fine, all we need to do is to smoke out the crooks, the gambling addicts, the coke-snorters, the sexists, the psychopaths. Human beings always have at least some scope for choice, hence the differences in culture between banks. Still, human behaviour is largely determined by incentives, and in the current set-up, these are sending individual bankers, desks or divisions within banks – as well as the banks themselves – in the wrong direction.
How hard would it be to change those incentives? From the viewpoint of those I interviewed, not hard at all. First of all, banks could be chopped up into units that can safely go bust – meaning they could never blackmail us again. Banks should not have multiple activities going on under one roof with inherent conflicts of interest. Banks should not be allowed to build, sell or own overly complex financial products – clients should be able to comprehend what they buy and investors understand the balance sheet. Finally, the penalty should land on the same head as the bonus, meaning nobody should have more reason to lie awake at night worrying over the risks to the bank’s capital or reputation than the bankers themselves. You might expect all major political parties to have come out by now with their vision of a stable and productive financial sector. But this is not what has happened.
by Joris Luyendijk , The Guardian | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Reel-to-Reel Tape is the New Vinyl
Like string theory, audiophile subculture is complex and defined by unresolved questions. Is an insanely expensive cable really better than an outrageously expensive cable? Do tube amps trump solid-state amps? Horn, electrostatic, or ribbon hybrid speakers? What about Kind of Blue — mono or stereo? Each position can be defended or attacked with various specs, waveform graphs, and double blind listening tests.
One question, however, has been resolved: tape or vinyl? Even the most dubious critics find no ambiguity here. The verdict: tape sounds better than vinyl. Period. Not the cassette tapes of Walkman era, of course. Not those 8-track bricks from the land of shag carpet supervans either. That crude tech is an insult to tape, the same way Velveeta is an insult to cheddar. The real vinyl killer turns out to be reel-to-reel tape. Played on unwieldy machines that conjure visions of ABSCAM sting operations and Boogie Nights bachelor pads, R2R tape is the latest retro-trend for hi-fi geeks and design fetishists who curate their living rooms like a MoMA exhibit.
The roots of this audio trend can be traced back to 2013, when a persnickety critic for The Absolute Sound shocked his readers by proclaiming that a new reel-to-reel deck designed by a team of fanatic engineers absolutely crushed the highest rated turntable rig ever reviewed by the magazine. A refresh of this same audiophile tape machine snagged one of The Absolute Sound’s coveted "Editors’ Choice" awards this year. That fancy R2R, which is handmade and can be customized like a Bentley, is one of the most popular demos on the audio show circuit.
The resale market is booming, too. There are currently 13,729 "Reel to Reel" eBay listings, and the online auction house has posted a guide for prospective buyers. The pop-culture pervasiveness that feeds every trend is also evident. In hit shows like Narcos and The Americans, and major studio movies like Black Mass, R2Rs have become production design shorthand for hardcore audiophilia.
"We sell our open reel decks as quickly as they come out of the repair shop," says Jerry Gahagan, the owner of Oak Tree Enterprises, a website that specializes in vintage audio equipment. "This resurgence is about nostalgia and cool. It’s like buying an old Harley with a suicide shifter. These tape machines are chunky, solidly built, and sound great." Set decorator Kate Foster, who will be using several classic Tandberg decks in the upcoming season of the F/X series The Americans, says a R2R is more than just an old tape player. It’s a symbol. "Big tape reels suggests an audio connoisseur with technical skills," says Foster. "You don’t get the same vibe with a turntable. A R2R on the bookshelf means sophisticated and smart."
One question, however, has been resolved: tape or vinyl? Even the most dubious critics find no ambiguity here. The verdict: tape sounds better than vinyl. Period. Not the cassette tapes of Walkman era, of course. Not those 8-track bricks from the land of shag carpet supervans either. That crude tech is an insult to tape, the same way Velveeta is an insult to cheddar. The real vinyl killer turns out to be reel-to-reel tape. Played on unwieldy machines that conjure visions of ABSCAM sting operations and Boogie Nights bachelor pads, R2R tape is the latest retro-trend for hi-fi geeks and design fetishists who curate their living rooms like a MoMA exhibit.
The roots of this audio trend can be traced back to 2013, when a persnickety critic for The Absolute Sound shocked his readers by proclaiming that a new reel-to-reel deck designed by a team of fanatic engineers absolutely crushed the highest rated turntable rig ever reviewed by the magazine. A refresh of this same audiophile tape machine snagged one of The Absolute Sound’s coveted "Editors’ Choice" awards this year. That fancy R2R, which is handmade and can be customized like a Bentley, is one of the most popular demos on the audio show circuit.The resale market is booming, too. There are currently 13,729 "Reel to Reel" eBay listings, and the online auction house has posted a guide for prospective buyers. The pop-culture pervasiveness that feeds every trend is also evident. In hit shows like Narcos and The Americans, and major studio movies like Black Mass, R2Rs have become production design shorthand for hardcore audiophilia.
"We sell our open reel decks as quickly as they come out of the repair shop," says Jerry Gahagan, the owner of Oak Tree Enterprises, a website that specializes in vintage audio equipment. "This resurgence is about nostalgia and cool. It’s like buying an old Harley with a suicide shifter. These tape machines are chunky, solidly built, and sound great." Set decorator Kate Foster, who will be using several classic Tandberg decks in the upcoming season of the F/X series The Americans, says a R2R is more than just an old tape player. It’s a symbol. "Big tape reels suggests an audio connoisseur with technical skills," says Foster. "You don’t get the same vibe with a turntable. A R2R on the bookshelf means sophisticated and smart."
by Rene Chun, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Jeff Jacobs
Friday, October 9, 2015
I Met God the Other Day
I met god the other day.
I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did you know it was god?
Well, I’ll explain as we go along, but basically he convinced me by having all, and I do mean ALL, the answers. Every question I flung at him he batted back with a plausible and satisfactory answer. In the end, it was easier to accept that he was god than otherwise.
Which is odd, because I’m still an atheist and we even agree on that!
It all started on the 8.20 back from Paddington. Got myself a nice window seat, no screaming brats or drunken hooligans within earshot. Not even a mobile phone in sight. Sat down, reading the paper and in he walks.
What did he look like?
Well not what you might have expected that’s for sure. He was about 30, wearing a pair of jeans and a "hobgoblin" tee shirt. Definitely casual. Looked like he could have been a social worker or perhaps a programmer like myself.
‘Anyone sitting here?’ he said.
‘Help yourself’ I replied.
Sits down, relaxes, I ignore and back to the correspondence on genetically modified crops entering the food chain…
Train pulls out and a few minutes later he speaks.
‘Can I ask you a question?’
Fighting to restrain my left eyebrow I replied ‘Yes’ in a tone which was intended to convey that I might not mind one question, and possibly a supplementary, but I really wasn’t in the mood for a conversation. ..
‘Why don’t you believe in god?’
The Bastard!
I love this kind of conversation and can rabbit on for hours about the nonsense of theist beliefs. But I have to be in the mood! It's like when a Jehova’s witness knocks on your door 20 minutes before you’re due to have a wisdom tooth pulled. Much as you'd really love to stay… You can’t even begin the fun. And I knew, if I gave my standard reply we’d still be arguing when we got to Cardiff. I just wasn’t in the mood. I needed to fend him off.
But then I thought ‘Odd! How is this perfect stranger so obviously confident – and correct – about my atheism?’ If I’d been driving my car, it wouldn’t have been such a mystery. I’ve got the Darwin fish on the back of mine – the antidote to that twee christian fish you see all over. So anyone spotting that and understanding it would have been in a position to guess my beliefs. But I was on a train and not even wearing my Darwin "Evolve" tshirt that day. And ‘The Independent’ isn’t a registered flag for card carrying atheists, so what, I wondered, had given the game away.
‘What makes you so certain that I don’t?’
‘Because’, he said, ‘I am god – and you are not afraid of me’
You’ll have to take my word for it of course, but there are ways you can deliver a line like that – most of which would render the speaker a candidate for an institution, or at least prozac. Some of which could be construed as mildly entertaining.
Conveying it as "indifferent fact" is a difficult task but that’s exactly how it came across. Nothing in his tone or attitude struck me as even mildly out of place with that statement. He said it because he believed it and his rationality did not appear to be drug induced or the result of a mental breakdown.
‘And why should I believe that?’
‘Well’ he said, ‘why don’t you ask me a few questions. Anything you like, and see if the answers satisfy your sceptical mind?’
This is going to be a short conversation after all, I thought.
I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did you know it was god?Well, I’ll explain as we go along, but basically he convinced me by having all, and I do mean ALL, the answers. Every question I flung at him he batted back with a plausible and satisfactory answer. In the end, it was easier to accept that he was god than otherwise.
Which is odd, because I’m still an atheist and we even agree on that!
It all started on the 8.20 back from Paddington. Got myself a nice window seat, no screaming brats or drunken hooligans within earshot. Not even a mobile phone in sight. Sat down, reading the paper and in he walks.
What did he look like?
Well not what you might have expected that’s for sure. He was about 30, wearing a pair of jeans and a "hobgoblin" tee shirt. Definitely casual. Looked like he could have been a social worker or perhaps a programmer like myself.
‘Anyone sitting here?’ he said.
‘Help yourself’ I replied.
Sits down, relaxes, I ignore and back to the correspondence on genetically modified crops entering the food chain…
Train pulls out and a few minutes later he speaks.
‘Can I ask you a question?’
Fighting to restrain my left eyebrow I replied ‘Yes’ in a tone which was intended to convey that I might not mind one question, and possibly a supplementary, but I really wasn’t in the mood for a conversation. ..
‘Why don’t you believe in god?’
The Bastard!
I love this kind of conversation and can rabbit on for hours about the nonsense of theist beliefs. But I have to be in the mood! It's like when a Jehova’s witness knocks on your door 20 minutes before you’re due to have a wisdom tooth pulled. Much as you'd really love to stay… You can’t even begin the fun. And I knew, if I gave my standard reply we’d still be arguing when we got to Cardiff. I just wasn’t in the mood. I needed to fend him off.
But then I thought ‘Odd! How is this perfect stranger so obviously confident – and correct – about my atheism?’ If I’d been driving my car, it wouldn’t have been such a mystery. I’ve got the Darwin fish on the back of mine – the antidote to that twee christian fish you see all over. So anyone spotting that and understanding it would have been in a position to guess my beliefs. But I was on a train and not even wearing my Darwin "Evolve" tshirt that day. And ‘The Independent’ isn’t a registered flag for card carrying atheists, so what, I wondered, had given the game away.
‘What makes you so certain that I don’t?’
‘Because’, he said, ‘I am god – and you are not afraid of me’
You’ll have to take my word for it of course, but there are ways you can deliver a line like that – most of which would render the speaker a candidate for an institution, or at least prozac. Some of which could be construed as mildly entertaining.
Conveying it as "indifferent fact" is a difficult task but that’s exactly how it came across. Nothing in his tone or attitude struck me as even mildly out of place with that statement. He said it because he believed it and his rationality did not appear to be drug induced or the result of a mental breakdown.
‘And why should I believe that?’
‘Well’ he said, ‘why don’t you ask me a few questions. Anything you like, and see if the answers satisfy your sceptical mind?’
This is going to be a short conversation after all, I thought.
by Anonymous, Quora | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How Tom Wolfe Became … Tom Wolfe
[ed. He had The Write Stuff.]
Is he, like, really old?” Dixie asks. Dixie is my 13-year-old daughter, who, a few days earlier, had been told that her special trip with her father needed to be interrupted for the better part of a day so that he might pay a call on Tom Wolfe.
“Eighty-five,” I say. “But he’s a very young 85.” As if that helps. To a 13-year-old, 85 might as well be 2,000. She doesn’t like the idea of this trip at all. “Look,” I say, or something like it. “I want at least one of my children to meet him. I think he’s a big reason it ever occurred to me to do what I do for a living. Because the first time I ever thought ‘writer,’ I also thought ‘delight.’ ”
She’s not listening. She knows we’re going to see Tom Wolfe for reasons that have nothing to do with her. She doesn’t care what I do for a living. She doesn’t care who Tom Wolfe is—it was all she could do to drag herself to click on his Wikipedia entry. What she cares about, intensely, are plane crashes. She hates flying, and, in this case, I can’t say I blame her. So I try all over again to explain why, to travel quickly from Martha’s Vineyard to Long Island, you can’t fly in a normal plane, only a small one or a helicopter, and that the weather’s too dicey for a helicopter. That’s when our pilot finally appears. He’s got a swagger about him, which might be reassuring, or the opposite, depending on your feelings about male confidence. He leads us onto the Martha’s Vineyard airport runway and into a maze of Gulfstreams and Lears and Hawkers. The sight of the jets perks Dixie up—private planes aren’t nearly as small as she imagined. They’re sleek and indestructible, like the chariots of visiting gods. When our pilot stops, though, it is not beside a Hawker or a Lear or a Gulfstream. It’s not clear what it is. When I first spotted it I thought it might be a drone. I half expected the pilot to pull out a remote control and show us how to play with it. Instead he produces a step stool and shows us how to climb up on the wing without breaking it. My child looks at me like, well, like a 13-year-old girl being taken on a suicide mission to visit a 2,000-year-old man—and then crawls on all fours across the wing, to squeeze into the doggy door on the side.
“Where’s the other pilot?” I ask, before following.
“It’s jes’ me,” the pilot says, with a chuckle. It’s a reassuring chuckle. A faintly southern chuckle—though he’s not from the South. “Something happens to me, here’s what you do,” he says as he straps himself in. “This lever here.” He grabs a red knob beside his seat. “This shuts down the engine. Jes’ pull that back and you shut it down. And this lever here … ” He grabs a bright-red handle on the ceiling over his head. “Yank down on this with 45 pounds of pressure. That’ll release the parachute.”
“The parachute?”
“No sense having the engine running with the parachute open,” he says, ignoring the 10 questions that naturally precede the one to which this is the answer.
“What did you say your name was?” I hadn’t paid attention the first time. Now that I was going to be parachuting into the ocean with his inert body I needed to be able to explain to the authorities who he was.
“Jack Yeager,” he says.
“Yeager?”
“Uh-huh.”
“As in—”
“I get that all the time. People think we’re related.” He fires up his toy propellers.
“You know who Chuck Yeager is?”
“Everyone knows who Chuck Yeager is.”
Dixie doesn’t know who Chuck Yeager is, but her brain is on tilt. One day, perhaps, she’ll want to know.
“You know why—right?” I holler.
“He broke the sound barrier.”
“No, I mean, you know why anyone knows Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, or cares?”
He shakes his head. He’s busy declaring to the airport authorities his improbable intention to take off from their runway in his toy plane.
“It’s because of Tom Wolfe,” I shout.
“Who’s Tom Wolfe?” (...)
In the late 1960s a bunch of writers leapt into the void: George Plimpton, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and the rest. Wolfe shepherded them into an uneasy group and labeled them the New Journalists. The New Journalists—with Wolfe in the lead—changed the balance of power between writers of fiction and writers of nonfiction, and they did it chiefly because of their willingness to submerge themselves in their subjects, and to steal from the novelist’s bag of tricks: scene-by-scene construction, use of dramatic dialogue, vivid characterization, shifting points of view, and so on.
I doubt I was ever alone in failing to find the whole New Journalism story entirely satisfying. (Hunter Thompson, for instance, wrote Wolfe, “You thieving pile of albino warts…. I’ll have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connexion [sic] with that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re promoting.”) For a start, there wasn’t anything new about the techniques. Mark Twain used them to dramatize his experiences as a riverboat pilot and a gold miner. George Orwell set himself up as a destitute tramp and wrote up the experience as nonfiction. Virtually every British travel writer who has ever left an unpaid bill might be counted a New Journalist. When you look at that list of New Journalists, what pops to mind is not their common technique. It’s their uncommon voices. They leapt off the page. They didn’t sound like anyone else’s.
Is he, like, really old?” Dixie asks. Dixie is my 13-year-old daughter, who, a few days earlier, had been told that her special trip with her father needed to be interrupted for the better part of a day so that he might pay a call on Tom Wolfe.
“Eighty-five,” I say. “But he’s a very young 85.” As if that helps. To a 13-year-old, 85 might as well be 2,000. She doesn’t like the idea of this trip at all. “Look,” I say, or something like it. “I want at least one of my children to meet him. I think he’s a big reason it ever occurred to me to do what I do for a living. Because the first time I ever thought ‘writer,’ I also thought ‘delight.’ ”She’s not listening. She knows we’re going to see Tom Wolfe for reasons that have nothing to do with her. She doesn’t care what I do for a living. She doesn’t care who Tom Wolfe is—it was all she could do to drag herself to click on his Wikipedia entry. What she cares about, intensely, are plane crashes. She hates flying, and, in this case, I can’t say I blame her. So I try all over again to explain why, to travel quickly from Martha’s Vineyard to Long Island, you can’t fly in a normal plane, only a small one or a helicopter, and that the weather’s too dicey for a helicopter. That’s when our pilot finally appears. He’s got a swagger about him, which might be reassuring, or the opposite, depending on your feelings about male confidence. He leads us onto the Martha’s Vineyard airport runway and into a maze of Gulfstreams and Lears and Hawkers. The sight of the jets perks Dixie up—private planes aren’t nearly as small as she imagined. They’re sleek and indestructible, like the chariots of visiting gods. When our pilot stops, though, it is not beside a Hawker or a Lear or a Gulfstream. It’s not clear what it is. When I first spotted it I thought it might be a drone. I half expected the pilot to pull out a remote control and show us how to play with it. Instead he produces a step stool and shows us how to climb up on the wing without breaking it. My child looks at me like, well, like a 13-year-old girl being taken on a suicide mission to visit a 2,000-year-old man—and then crawls on all fours across the wing, to squeeze into the doggy door on the side.
“Where’s the other pilot?” I ask, before following.
“It’s jes’ me,” the pilot says, with a chuckle. It’s a reassuring chuckle. A faintly southern chuckle—though he’s not from the South. “Something happens to me, here’s what you do,” he says as he straps himself in. “This lever here.” He grabs a red knob beside his seat. “This shuts down the engine. Jes’ pull that back and you shut it down. And this lever here … ” He grabs a bright-red handle on the ceiling over his head. “Yank down on this with 45 pounds of pressure. That’ll release the parachute.”
“The parachute?”
“No sense having the engine running with the parachute open,” he says, ignoring the 10 questions that naturally precede the one to which this is the answer.
“What did you say your name was?” I hadn’t paid attention the first time. Now that I was going to be parachuting into the ocean with his inert body I needed to be able to explain to the authorities who he was.
“Jack Yeager,” he says.
“Yeager?”
“Uh-huh.”
“As in—”
“I get that all the time. People think we’re related.” He fires up his toy propellers.
“You know who Chuck Yeager is?”
“Everyone knows who Chuck Yeager is.”
Dixie doesn’t know who Chuck Yeager is, but her brain is on tilt. One day, perhaps, she’ll want to know.
“You know why—right?” I holler.
“He broke the sound barrier.”
“No, I mean, you know why anyone knows Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, or cares?”
He shakes his head. He’s busy declaring to the airport authorities his improbable intention to take off from their runway in his toy plane.
“It’s because of Tom Wolfe,” I shout.
“Who’s Tom Wolfe?” (...)
In the late 1960s a bunch of writers leapt into the void: George Plimpton, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and the rest. Wolfe shepherded them into an uneasy group and labeled them the New Journalists. The New Journalists—with Wolfe in the lead—changed the balance of power between writers of fiction and writers of nonfiction, and they did it chiefly because of their willingness to submerge themselves in their subjects, and to steal from the novelist’s bag of tricks: scene-by-scene construction, use of dramatic dialogue, vivid characterization, shifting points of view, and so on.
I doubt I was ever alone in failing to find the whole New Journalism story entirely satisfying. (Hunter Thompson, for instance, wrote Wolfe, “You thieving pile of albino warts…. I’ll have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connexion [sic] with that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re promoting.”) For a start, there wasn’t anything new about the techniques. Mark Twain used them to dramatize his experiences as a riverboat pilot and a gold miner. George Orwell set himself up as a destitute tramp and wrote up the experience as nonfiction. Virtually every British travel writer who has ever left an unpaid bill might be counted a New Journalist. When you look at that list of New Journalists, what pops to mind is not their common technique. It’s their uncommon voices. They leapt off the page. They didn’t sound like anyone else’s.
by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Gasper Tringale
Thursday, October 8, 2015
The Sky's Gone Dark
Today, the commercial exploitation of outer space appears to be a growth area. Barely a week goes by without a satellite launch somewhere on the planet. SpaceX has a gigantic order book and a contract to ferry astronauts to the ISS, probably starting in 2018; United Launch Alliance have a similar manned space taxi under development, and there are multiple competing projects under way to fill low earth orbit with constellations of hundreds of small data relay satellites to bring internet connectivity to the entire planet. For the first time since the 1960s it's beginning to look as if human activity beyond low earth orbit is a distinct possibility within the next decade.
But there's a fly in the ointment.
Kessler Syndrome, or collisional cascading, is a nightmare scenario for space activity. Proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, it proposes that at a certain critical density, orbiting debris shed by satellites and launch vehicles will begin to impact on and shatter other satellites, producing a cascade of more debris, so that the probability of any given satellite being hit rises, leading to a chain reaction that effectively renders access to low earth orbit unacceptably hazardous.
This isn't just fantasy. There are an estimated 300,000 pieces of debris already in orbit; a satellite is destroyed every year by an impact event. Even a fleck of shed paint a tenth of a millimeter across carries as much kinetic energy as a rifle bullet when it's traveling at orbital velocity, and the majority of this crud is clustered in low orbit, with a secondary belt of bits in geosychronous orbit as well. The ISS carries patch kits in case of a micro-particle impact and periodically has to expend fuel to dodge dead satellites drifting into its orbit; on occasion the US space shuttles suffered windscreen impacts that necessitated ground repairs.
If a Kessler cascade erupts in low earth orbit, launching new satellites or manned spacecraft will become very hazardous, equivalent to running across a field under beaten fire from a machine gun with an infinite ammunition supply. Sooner or later you'll be hit. And the debris stays in orbit for a very long time, typically years to decades (centuries or millennia for the particles in higher orbits). Solar flares might mitigate the worst of the effect by causing the earth's ionosphere to bulge—it was added drag resulting from a solar event that took down Skylab prematurely in the 1970s—but it could still deny access to low orbit for long enough to kill the viability of any commercial launch business. And then there's the nightmare scenario: a Kessler cascade in geosynchronous orbit. The crud up there will take centuries to disperse, mostly due to radiation degradation and the solar wind gradually blowing it into higher orbits.
So here's my question.
Postulate a runaway Kessler syndrome kicks off around 2030, at a point when there are thousands of small comsats (and a couple of big space stations), ranging from very low orbits to a couple of thousand kilometers up. Human access to space is completely restricted; any launch at all becomes a game of Russian roulette. (You can't carry enough armor plating to protect a manned capsule against a Kesseler cascade—larger bits of debris, and by "large" I mean with masses in the 0.1-10 gram range—carry as much kinetic energy as an armor-piercing anti-tank projectile.) Unmanned satellites are possible, but risk adding to the cascade.So basically we completely lose access to orbit.
There are some proposals to mitigate the risk of Kessler Syndrome by using microsats to recover and deorbit larger bits of debris, and lasers to evaporate smaller particles, but let's ignore these for now: whether or not they work, they don't work unless we start using them before Kessler syndrome kicks in.
So, suppose that with the exception of already-on-orbit GPS clusters and high altitude comsats, we can't launch anything else for a century. What effect does it have on society and geopolitics when the sky goes dark?
But there's a fly in the ointment.
Kessler Syndrome, or collisional cascading, is a nightmare scenario for space activity. Proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, it proposes that at a certain critical density, orbiting debris shed by satellites and launch vehicles will begin to impact on and shatter other satellites, producing a cascade of more debris, so that the probability of any given satellite being hit rises, leading to a chain reaction that effectively renders access to low earth orbit unacceptably hazardous.This isn't just fantasy. There are an estimated 300,000 pieces of debris already in orbit; a satellite is destroyed every year by an impact event. Even a fleck of shed paint a tenth of a millimeter across carries as much kinetic energy as a rifle bullet when it's traveling at orbital velocity, and the majority of this crud is clustered in low orbit, with a secondary belt of bits in geosychronous orbit as well. The ISS carries patch kits in case of a micro-particle impact and periodically has to expend fuel to dodge dead satellites drifting into its orbit; on occasion the US space shuttles suffered windscreen impacts that necessitated ground repairs.
If a Kessler cascade erupts in low earth orbit, launching new satellites or manned spacecraft will become very hazardous, equivalent to running across a field under beaten fire from a machine gun with an infinite ammunition supply. Sooner or later you'll be hit. And the debris stays in orbit for a very long time, typically years to decades (centuries or millennia for the particles in higher orbits). Solar flares might mitigate the worst of the effect by causing the earth's ionosphere to bulge—it was added drag resulting from a solar event that took down Skylab prematurely in the 1970s—but it could still deny access to low orbit for long enough to kill the viability of any commercial launch business. And then there's the nightmare scenario: a Kessler cascade in geosynchronous orbit. The crud up there will take centuries to disperse, mostly due to radiation degradation and the solar wind gradually blowing it into higher orbits.
So here's my question.
Postulate a runaway Kessler syndrome kicks off around 2030, at a point when there are thousands of small comsats (and a couple of big space stations), ranging from very low orbits to a couple of thousand kilometers up. Human access to space is completely restricted; any launch at all becomes a game of Russian roulette. (You can't carry enough armor plating to protect a manned capsule against a Kesseler cascade—larger bits of debris, and by "large" I mean with masses in the 0.1-10 gram range—carry as much kinetic energy as an armor-piercing anti-tank projectile.) Unmanned satellites are possible, but risk adding to the cascade.So basically we completely lose access to orbit.
There are some proposals to mitigate the risk of Kessler Syndrome by using microsats to recover and deorbit larger bits of debris, and lasers to evaporate smaller particles, but let's ignore these for now: whether or not they work, they don't work unless we start using them before Kessler syndrome kicks in.
So, suppose that with the exception of already-on-orbit GPS clusters and high altitude comsats, we can't launch anything else for a century. What effect does it have on society and geopolitics when the sky goes dark?
by Charlie Stross, Charlie's Diary | Read more:
Image: via:
The Paradox of the First Black President
In many ways, it’s a banal shot — just another photo for the White House Instagram feed, showing the president and his aides busily attending to matters of state. Stare at it a second longer, though, and a subtle distinction comes into focus: Everyone onboard is black. “We joked that it was Soul Plane,” says Burton. “And we’ve often joked about it since — that it was the first time in history only black people were on that helicopter.”
Souza snapped that shot on August 9, 2010, but it didn’t make any prominent appearances in the mainstream press until mid-2012, when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine. The following summer, July 2013, the president had a group of civil-rights leaders come visit him in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, and the optics, as they like to say in politics, were similar: An all-star cast of minorities (African-American and Latino this time) gathered in a historic place to which the barriers to entry were once insuperably high.
But this was not a meeting the participants laughed about afterward. When Obama opened up the floor, everyone spoke about what they’d witnessed in the 2012 election: how states that limited voter-registration drives and early-voting initiatives had left many African-Americans off the rolls; how strict new laws concerning IDs had prevented many minorities from voting and created hours-long lines at the polls. The answer was clear: legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court had just overturned a key provision of the landmark civil-rights legislation the month before.
But Obama’s response was equally clear: Nothing could be done. Not in this political climate, not under these circumstances. Congress would never allow it.
The group was stunned. As they’d stumped for Obama, one of the many talking points they’d used to turn out the black vote was the threat of disenfranchisement, the possibility that the Voting Rights Act was in jeopardy. Yet here was Obama telling them that a bill addressing this vital issue didn’t stand a chance.
These proximal events — the publication of a historic photo in a major news outlet, a demoralizing discussion about the prospects of amending our voting laws — may seem unrelated. But to many who’ve watched this White House for the last six and three-quarter years, particularly with an eye toward race, the two events are finely intertwined. They would more likely say: One cannot have that photo without a massive reaction to that photo. In a country whose basic genetic blueprint includes the same crooked mutations that made slavery and Jim Crow possible, it is not possible to have a black president surrounded by black aides on Marine One without paying a price. And the price that Obama has had to pay — and, more important, that African-Americans have had to pay — is one of caution, moderation, and at times compromised policies: The first black president could do only so much, and say only so much, on behalf of other African-Americans. That is the bittersweet irony of the first black presidency.
But now, as Obama’s presidency draws to a close, African-American intellectuals and civil-rights leaders have grown increasingly vocal in their discontents. They frame them, for the most part, with love and respect. But current events have broken their hearts and stretched their patience. A proliferation of videos documenting the murders of unarmed black men and women — by the very people charged with their safety — has given rise to a whole movement defined by three words and a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter.
“That’s one of the fundamental paradoxes of Obama’s presidency — that we have the Black Lives Matter movement under a black president,” says Fredrick Harris, a political scientist at Columbia University. “Your man is in office, and you have this whole movement around criminal-justice reform asserting black people’s humanity?”
Obama is hardly uncomprehending of these concerns. One can hear it in his rhetoric on race these days, which has become much more lyrical, personal, explicit. “Amazing Grace,” he sang in Charleston. “Racism, we are not cured of,” he told Marc Maron, “and it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘n-----’ in public,” using the full word. This summer, Obama visited a prison, the first president to do so, and commuted the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders. Last year, he started the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which zeros in on programs within federal agencies that can help young men of color. He is now trying, with the improbable cooperation of congressional Republicans, to pass a bill on criminal-justice reform.
Still, the question many African-American leaders are now asking is what his efforts will amount to, and whether they’re sufficient. At a panel about African-American millennials in August, the journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault made note of Obama’s recent emphasis on race matters and asked the group if it was “too little, too late.” Their responses, not surprisingly, were mixed. At the Aspen Ideas Festival this summer, Jarrett fielded a similar question from Walter Isaacson, the writer and head of the Aspen Institute. He noted that some Americans thought Obama publicly engaged with issues of race only “halfway.” Her reply was swift, pointed, and poignant. “I think you have to ask yourself: Why is that all on him?”
by Jennifer Senior, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Pete Souza
Adventures in the Science of the Superorganism
It is not only possible, it has in fact happened that a woman who vaginally conceived a child, then vaginally delivered her, had Protective Services threaten to take the child when a maternity test showed she was not, in fact, the mother. Nor was she the mother of her second child, genetically. Or her third, whom she was still carrying throughout the dispute with her estranged boyfriend — the man who, those same tests proved, was definitively the father. Only later did Lydia Fairchild discover that the true mother of all three of her children was her twin — if twin is really the word for one human embryo more or less swallowed by another before birth. The eggs that produced those babies had been with Fairchild her whole life, but genetically they belonged to an unborn sister, unknown to her and even her parents, living on in small parts inside her — a phenomenon that poetic scientists have called “parasitic” or “vanishing” twins. These days, they tend to prefer “chimerism,” after the mythic beast assembled, like Frankenstein’s monster, from multiple animals. But, man, isn’t that even creepier?
Don’t relax — it’s not just twins. In a new paper, “Humans As Superorganisms,” Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan of the University of Padua describe a typical human body as a teeming mass of what they call “selfish entities.” Picture a tree warped by fungus, wrapped with vines, dotted at the base with mushrooms and flowers, and marked, midway up, by what the tree thought the whole time was just a knot but turns out to be a parasitic twin. This is the human superorganism — not the tree, not the tangled mess of things doing battle with it, but the whole chunk of forest — and Kramer and Bressan would like to place it at the very center of the way we think about human behavior. They are psychologists, and their paper is a call to arms to their fellow shrinks, exhorting them to take seriously as a possible cause of an enormous buffet of behavioral phenomena — from quotidian quirks, to maddeningly opaque disorders like autism, to schizophrenia — the sheer volume and weird diversity of completely crazy alien shit going on in just about all of our bodies, just about all the time.
At least one part of this superorganism theory is not all that unfamiliar, especially to anyone who remembers recent articles by Michael Pollan and others about what is often called “the brain in your gut.” That part: that our stomachs are, actually, zoos. In fact, they’re not really our stomachs. Principally, they belong to the hundred trillion bacteria enticed by evolution into your chutes-and-ladders intestinal tract, then enlisted to eat your food for you. The weirder thing is that evolution also put hundreds of millions of neurons there, which means there’s a lot of trouble to be caused by those 160 or more species of bacteria (yes, full species). And the behavioral effects are pretty startling. Take a mouse, evacuate his intestines, and repopulate them with the microbes of another mouse, and he’ll act like the other mouse — adventurous mice become timid. In humans, what is delicately called “gut flora” affects not just obesity but also anxiety, and some think it plays a role in disorders as far-ranging as MS and Parkinson’s. What role exactly? Who knows? Though there have been some attempts to treat autism with yogurt.
Okay, so, the gut is weird. But what if you lived in the gut? What if you were the gut? Kramer and Bressan want us to stop looking at our stomachs like we’re hosts to some messy guests, or homeowners too disgusted by a particular closet to ever go poking around in it, because, they write, the human superorganism isn’t something to observe from the privileged perch of the self. Instead, they suggest, it envelops the self — the environment in which and against which genes give rise to who you are, an internal environment populated nevertheless by an entire orchestra of aliens, some of them fiddling away in the brain, and each with its own evolutionary interests at stake.
by David Wallace-Wells, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty
Don’t relax — it’s not just twins. In a new paper, “Humans As Superorganisms,” Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan of the University of Padua describe a typical human body as a teeming mass of what they call “selfish entities.” Picture a tree warped by fungus, wrapped with vines, dotted at the base with mushrooms and flowers, and marked, midway up, by what the tree thought the whole time was just a knot but turns out to be a parasitic twin. This is the human superorganism — not the tree, not the tangled mess of things doing battle with it, but the whole chunk of forest — and Kramer and Bressan would like to place it at the very center of the way we think about human behavior. They are psychologists, and their paper is a call to arms to their fellow shrinks, exhorting them to take seriously as a possible cause of an enormous buffet of behavioral phenomena — from quotidian quirks, to maddeningly opaque disorders like autism, to schizophrenia — the sheer volume and weird diversity of completely crazy alien shit going on in just about all of our bodies, just about all the time.At least one part of this superorganism theory is not all that unfamiliar, especially to anyone who remembers recent articles by Michael Pollan and others about what is often called “the brain in your gut.” That part: that our stomachs are, actually, zoos. In fact, they’re not really our stomachs. Principally, they belong to the hundred trillion bacteria enticed by evolution into your chutes-and-ladders intestinal tract, then enlisted to eat your food for you. The weirder thing is that evolution also put hundreds of millions of neurons there, which means there’s a lot of trouble to be caused by those 160 or more species of bacteria (yes, full species). And the behavioral effects are pretty startling. Take a mouse, evacuate his intestines, and repopulate them with the microbes of another mouse, and he’ll act like the other mouse — adventurous mice become timid. In humans, what is delicately called “gut flora” affects not just obesity but also anxiety, and some think it plays a role in disorders as far-ranging as MS and Parkinson’s. What role exactly? Who knows? Though there have been some attempts to treat autism with yogurt.
Okay, so, the gut is weird. But what if you lived in the gut? What if you were the gut? Kramer and Bressan want us to stop looking at our stomachs like we’re hosts to some messy guests, or homeowners too disgusted by a particular closet to ever go poking around in it, because, they write, the human superorganism isn’t something to observe from the privileged perch of the self. Instead, they suggest, it envelops the self — the environment in which and against which genes give rise to who you are, an internal environment populated nevertheless by an entire orchestra of aliens, some of them fiddling away in the brain, and each with its own evolutionary interests at stake.
by David Wallace-Wells, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty
Egg McNothin'
The greatest luxury is the one we cannot have—or at least, the one we cannot have very often. This is the definition of luxury, really, and not just expensive, unreachable luxuries, but also cheaper, smaller ones. Thanksgiving turkey and dressing, a decadence limited to one day a year. And also, breakfast—real breakfast, with grains and eggs and meat and starch. Even at a place like McDonald’s where, as of this week, a selection of the struggling fast food figurehead’s breakfast menu, including the venerable Egg McMuffin, is available all day.
Let me say something heretical: The Egg McMuffin is not that great, actually. Warm but slightly wet and gooey, sloppily constructed, oozing with quasi-cheese, the slap of Canadian bacon failing to yield to incisors. But what is great is the idea of an egg McMuffin. It’s an improbable domestication of Eggs Benedict, condensing that civil dish of lazy brunches into the harried hand of the commuter or the road-tripper.
For years, more Americans came into contact with the Egg McMuffin as an idea rather than a reality. Only occasionally, when dawn’s rosy fingers intersected with the golden arches: an early Interstate departure, or a next-morning drive-of-shame lamentation, or a pre-planned indulgence before a cross-town optometrist appointment.
Yes, sure, I realize that McDonald’s has breakfast regulars, and that breakfast is a meal whose delights are unfairly sequestered into the brisk, single-digit hours. But equally common is the McDonald’s near-miss breakfast. Hungover, lurching through the drive-thru at 10:25a.m. in search of cheap proteins; or skipping through glass doors with kids in tow, having succumbed to their big eyes; or meandering in to kill some time after arriving early for a client meeting in a strange part of town—only to discover that the lunch menus had cruelly flipped into place already.
Even when you wanted one, McDonald’s breakfast was withheld more often than it was supplied. Perhaps it was meant to be. Perhaps the dream of the Egg McMuffin is its truest payload, rather than its shaped meat and egg between English-muffin halves.
Writing in The Atlantic upon the announcement of McDondald’s all-day breakfast, Adam Chandler lamented the violation of well-established ritual. The 24/7 work world turns “morning” into “that time after whenever you woke up,” and all-day breakfast at McDonald’s only spreads a new layer of oil atop an already greasy period of precarity and overwork. “In demanding eternal breakfast,” Chandler mourns, “America is reverting to its adolescence.”
Perhaps so. But also, America is giving up McDonald’s breakfast as an indulgence meant mostly to be missed rather than savored. The Egg McMuffin and its brethren offered different sustenance—spiritual sustenance. Under the fluorescent lights inside its boxy chapel one discovered and not just endured but enjoyed the sensation of inaccessibility. Light door closing on its pneumatic hinge, coat unzipped, cold hands rubbing together, glasses fogging from the temperature change, accidental early birds enter McDonald’s for the anticipation itself. It might be on the way to or from a long drive or a dead-end job or a screaming child or a fouled-up marriage, but a dip into the quick-serve cathedral affirms that the universe is ultimately indifferent: “I’m sorry, sir, we’ve just stopped serving breakfast.”
Let me say something heretical: The Egg McMuffin is not that great, actually. Warm but slightly wet and gooey, sloppily constructed, oozing with quasi-cheese, the slap of Canadian bacon failing to yield to incisors. But what is great is the idea of an egg McMuffin. It’s an improbable domestication of Eggs Benedict, condensing that civil dish of lazy brunches into the harried hand of the commuter or the road-tripper.For years, more Americans came into contact with the Egg McMuffin as an idea rather than a reality. Only occasionally, when dawn’s rosy fingers intersected with the golden arches: an early Interstate departure, or a next-morning drive-of-shame lamentation, or a pre-planned indulgence before a cross-town optometrist appointment.
Yes, sure, I realize that McDonald’s has breakfast regulars, and that breakfast is a meal whose delights are unfairly sequestered into the brisk, single-digit hours. But equally common is the McDonald’s near-miss breakfast. Hungover, lurching through the drive-thru at 10:25a.m. in search of cheap proteins; or skipping through glass doors with kids in tow, having succumbed to their big eyes; or meandering in to kill some time after arriving early for a client meeting in a strange part of town—only to discover that the lunch menus had cruelly flipped into place already.
Even when you wanted one, McDonald’s breakfast was withheld more often than it was supplied. Perhaps it was meant to be. Perhaps the dream of the Egg McMuffin is its truest payload, rather than its shaped meat and egg between English-muffin halves.
Writing in The Atlantic upon the announcement of McDondald’s all-day breakfast, Adam Chandler lamented the violation of well-established ritual. The 24/7 work world turns “morning” into “that time after whenever you woke up,” and all-day breakfast at McDonald’s only spreads a new layer of oil atop an already greasy period of precarity and overwork. “In demanding eternal breakfast,” Chandler mourns, “America is reverting to its adolescence.”
Perhaps so. But also, America is giving up McDonald’s breakfast as an indulgence meant mostly to be missed rather than savored. The Egg McMuffin and its brethren offered different sustenance—spiritual sustenance. Under the fluorescent lights inside its boxy chapel one discovered and not just endured but enjoyed the sensation of inaccessibility. Light door closing on its pneumatic hinge, coat unzipped, cold hands rubbing together, glasses fogging from the temperature change, accidental early birds enter McDonald’s for the anticipation itself. It might be on the way to or from a long drive or a dead-end job or a screaming child or a fouled-up marriage, but a dip into the quick-serve cathedral affirms that the universe is ultimately indifferent: “I’m sorry, sir, we’ve just stopped serving breakfast.”
by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: blu_pineappl3 / Flickr
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Life after Death
Life after Death?
Yes. Can I help you?
Well, you know . . . I saw your ad in that travel magazine.
AFAR? or Destinations?
I don’t remember. It was at the doctor’s office. Does that matter?
Just wondering. It wouldn’t have been The New Yorker would it? One of those little bitty ads in the back?
I look at the cartoons but I never read those back ads.
You should. They can be pretty weird. Weird as in interesting.
Well, it was a travel magazine. Which is what I said. Which is why I called.
Right. That would be AFAR or Destinations. There’s a discount deal with AFAR, but only if you are a subscriber.
That doesn’t apply to me. I just saw it at the doctor’s office.
There’s a website, too. You can Google it. Lifeafterdeath.org, all spelled out with no periods. It has all the information.
That’s where I got I got this number, from the website. I wanted to talk to a live person. It’s kind of a thing I have.
That’s ironic, sort of, if you think about it.
What do you mean?
Never mind. I can tell you everything you need to know over the phone. It will be my privilege. Can I start by asking your name?
What does that have to do with anything? I just want to ask a few questions.
It’s all strictly confidential, if that’s what worrying you.
I called to get information, not give information.
Hey, I understand. That’s perfectly fine. I’ll be glad to help. What can I tell you about Life after Death?
Well, that’s it. Life after Death. Is this for real? How does it work? What does it cost?
It’s for real all right. First you’re dead and then you’re not. It’s quite a ride while it lasts.
What do you mean, while it lasts?
It’s not Eternal. It’s important that you understand that. It’s in the ad I think.
It did say Not Eternal but it didn’t say it was temporary.
Temporary is not exactly the word for it; just not permanent. It lasts about three months, give or take. It can seem longer.
Ninety days. And then what?
Then you are dead again. Life after Death is not permanent, that’s what Not Eternal means. It’s not affiliated with any religion. And I can assure you, it’s not hocus pocus. It’s for real.
I know what Not Eternal means. So what does it cost? The ad I saw was careful not to mention that.
$99,000.
Ninety-nine thousand dollars?
It’s not for everyone. That’s why it’s only advertised in certain magazines.
Which anybody can pick up at the doctor’s office.
What do you mean?
Never mind. And what do you get, what does one get, for one’s hundred grand.
Ninety-nine. Life after Death. First you’re dead and then you’re not. It’s quite a ride while it lasts.
How long are you dead?
Not long. You don’t need a death certificate or anything. It’s all prearranged, and prepaid of course. The service kicks in within hours after you’re gone.
Gone where? What’s going on there? Where is it?
It’s not exactly a where.
Then how can I be there if there is no where?
The where is not the thing. Think of it as adventure travel. Have you ever been to Antarctica?
That’s none of your business. But yes, in fact. Once. Year before last.
And did you get to the South Pole? Did you hug a penguin? Did you trek to the top of a mighty glacier? Probably not.
It was on a cruise ship. You’re not allowed to go ashore. What’s your point?
The thrill was just being there, right? Even just standing at the rail of the ship.
There was a helicopter trip included.
That too. You were experiencing it. That was the adventure, the experience.
Yes. Can I help you?Well, you know . . . I saw your ad in that travel magazine.
AFAR? or Destinations?
I don’t remember. It was at the doctor’s office. Does that matter?
Just wondering. It wouldn’t have been The New Yorker would it? One of those little bitty ads in the back?
I look at the cartoons but I never read those back ads.
You should. They can be pretty weird. Weird as in interesting.
Well, it was a travel magazine. Which is what I said. Which is why I called.
Right. That would be AFAR or Destinations. There’s a discount deal with AFAR, but only if you are a subscriber.
That doesn’t apply to me. I just saw it at the doctor’s office.
There’s a website, too. You can Google it. Lifeafterdeath.org, all spelled out with no periods. It has all the information.
That’s where I got I got this number, from the website. I wanted to talk to a live person. It’s kind of a thing I have.
That’s ironic, sort of, if you think about it.
What do you mean?
Never mind. I can tell you everything you need to know over the phone. It will be my privilege. Can I start by asking your name?
What does that have to do with anything? I just want to ask a few questions.
It’s all strictly confidential, if that’s what worrying you.
I called to get information, not give information.
Hey, I understand. That’s perfectly fine. I’ll be glad to help. What can I tell you about Life after Death?
Well, that’s it. Life after Death. Is this for real? How does it work? What does it cost?
It’s for real all right. First you’re dead and then you’re not. It’s quite a ride while it lasts.
What do you mean, while it lasts?
It’s not Eternal. It’s important that you understand that. It’s in the ad I think.
It did say Not Eternal but it didn’t say it was temporary.
Temporary is not exactly the word for it; just not permanent. It lasts about three months, give or take. It can seem longer.
Ninety days. And then what?
Then you are dead again. Life after Death is not permanent, that’s what Not Eternal means. It’s not affiliated with any religion. And I can assure you, it’s not hocus pocus. It’s for real.
I know what Not Eternal means. So what does it cost? The ad I saw was careful not to mention that.
$99,000.
Ninety-nine thousand dollars?
It’s not for everyone. That’s why it’s only advertised in certain magazines.
Which anybody can pick up at the doctor’s office.
What do you mean?
Never mind. And what do you get, what does one get, for one’s hundred grand.
Ninety-nine. Life after Death. First you’re dead and then you’re not. It’s quite a ride while it lasts.
How long are you dead?
Not long. You don’t need a death certificate or anything. It’s all prearranged, and prepaid of course. The service kicks in within hours after you’re gone.
Gone where? What’s going on there? Where is it?
It’s not exactly a where.
Then how can I be there if there is no where?
The where is not the thing. Think of it as adventure travel. Have you ever been to Antarctica?
That’s none of your business. But yes, in fact. Once. Year before last.
And did you get to the South Pole? Did you hug a penguin? Did you trek to the top of a mighty glacier? Probably not.
It was on a cruise ship. You’re not allowed to go ashore. What’s your point?
The thrill was just being there, right? Even just standing at the rail of the ship.
There was a helicopter trip included.
That too. You were experiencing it. That was the adventure, the experience.
by Terry Bisson, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Amanda Konishi
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
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