A dovetail joint of news, art, science, politics, philosophy & global affairs

Grasping the currency true to our time

"Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει"







May 16th
11:52 PM
Rafsanjani into the Breach
Ian Black and Saeed Kamali Dehghan »   

Green activists are setting up Facebook pages to mobilise support for Rafsanjani’s campaign. Mousavi and fellow reformist Mehdi Karroubi remain under house arrest and are banned from political activity.
Mohammed, Karroubi’s son, said Rafsanjani would now win the support of those who voted for change in 2009 but instead got Ahmadinejad for a second term. “The majority of the Green movement feel they now have a voice in this election,” he told the Guardian.
Speaking on Thursday to Tehran University students, Rafsanjani struck a confident note. “I entered the race to perform my religious and national duty given the country’s situation … and its problems at home and abroad,” the Mehr news website reported. “Certain people and movements have resorted to lying and falsification and slurs to discredit others. These people, intentionally or unintentionally, are harming the Islamic revolution.”  >continue<

Rafsanjani into the Breach

Ian Black and Saeed Kamali Dehghan »  

Green activists are setting up Facebook pages to mobilise support for Rafsanjani’s campaign. Mousavi and fellow reformist Mehdi Karroubi remain under house arrest and are banned from political activity.

Mohammed, Karroubi’s son, said Rafsanjani would now win the support of those who voted for change in 2009 but instead got Ahmadinejad for a second term. “The majority of the Green movement feel they now have a voice in this election,” he told the Guardian.

Speaking on Thursday to Tehran University students, Rafsanjani struck a confident note. “I entered the race to perform my religious and national duty given the country’s situation … and its problems at home and abroad,” the Mehr news website reported. “Certain people and movements have resorted to lying and falsification and slurs to discredit others. These people, intentionally or unintentionally, are harming the Islamic revolution.”  >continue<

11:23 PM
Via
"In the parallels perceived by the human mind between putrefaction and the various aspects of sexual activity the feelings of revulsion which set us against both end by mingling. The taboos embodying a single dual-purpose reaction may have taken shape one at a time, and one can even imagine a long time elapsing between the taboo connected with death and the one connected with reproduction (often the most perfect things take shape hesitatingly through successive modifications). But we perceive their unity none the less: we feel we are dealing with an indivisible complex, just as if man had once and for all realised how impossible it is for nature (as a given force) to exact from the beings that she brings forth their participation in the destructive and implacable frenzy that animates her. Nature demands their surrender; or rather she asks them to go crashing headlong to their own ruin. Humanity became possible at the instant when, seized by an insurmountable dizziness, man tried to answer ‘No’."
—  Georges Bataille, Erotism, Death and Sensuality
12:01 PM
Via
"The beauty of things must be that they end."
—  Jack Kerouac
11:01 AM
Via

Daily Discussion: What’s the “worst thing ever”?

iheartchaos:

image

Sometimes if someone is describing a movie, a book or an experience, they might try to dull their criticism by saying something like “Well, it wasn’t the worst thing ever…” But what is the worst thing ever?

Being trapped or trapping others in the bewitchment of language. Using the immense power of the logos for the sake of merely appealing to and leaving people where they are. This is why philosophy in one sense can be said to begin with Plato and Aristotle, for each in their own way was tarrying and keeping close to the ultimate question: What does it mean to speak well?

1:48 AM

Brain overload after having witnessed Trekgasm 2013

Abrams’ Trek reboot pt.2 thrills on so many fronts. Let me say that again… so many fronts. Of course a few plot holes and WTF scenarios; and yet, astonishing.

Sounds weird though; for part of me is thinking of that line from Amadeus where some wigged out dude says “too too, too many notes”. Then it looked the preposterous insult, now I dunno. ‘Course, it does boldly go.

May 15th
3:59 PM
Via
"A population influx of such magnitude would be a huge problem anywhere. In Lebanon – with fragile institutions and infrastructure; a delicate political and sectarian balance; tense social fabric; and declining economy, all of which the refugee crisis worsens – it is a nightmare."
—  from Crisis Group’s most recent report, Too Close for Comfort: Syrians in Lebanon
3:57 PM
Via

Targeting the Tea Party

squashed:

On one hand, targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny looks like a massively and systemically unfair abuse of power by the IRS.

That said, it’s important to keep this in context. Additional scrutiny was given to “various local organizations in the Tea Party movement…applying for exemption under 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4).” A 501(c)(3) organization is a charity of the traditional sense that cannot support political candidates and gets massive tax benefits. So if a Tea Party group is applying for 501(c)(3) status, extra scrutiny is warranted. The only problem would be if left-leaning groups were routinely let through.

There has been an explosion of 501(c)(4) groups—which allow all sorts of dark money into politics. While they are nominally supporting “issues,” some of them are pushing even the relatively lax legal boundaries. And, yes, most of the new ones were conservative groups last time around. Additional scrutiny can both makes sure the laws are upheld from the beginning and prevents people from the facing the extremely unpleasant consequences of inadvertently breaking them.

This is worth investigating—but I suspect that the findings should be relatively benign. Somebody was trying to save time by a clumsy, albeit impermissibly partisan, shortcut. As a matter of accountability, it’s important to take this sort of thing seriously. Of course, insisting that there is a corruption scandal regardless of what the investigation shows is another way of not taking the investigation seriously.

May 14th
11:15 PM
The Cicada’s Love Affair With Prime Numbers
Patrick Di Justo  |  New Yorker&#160;&#187;

Since most predators have a two-to-ten-year population cycle, [any] twelve-year cicadas would be a feast for any predator with a two-, three-, four-, or six-year cycle. By this reasoning, any cicada with a development span that is easily divisible by the smaller numbers of a predator’s population cycle is vulnerable.
Prime numbers, however, can only be divided by themselves and one; they cannot be evenly divided into smaller integers. Cicadas that emerge at prime-numbered year intervals, like the seventeen-year Brood II set to swarm the East Coast, would find themselves relatively immune to predator population cycles, since it is mathematically unlikely for a short-cycled predator to exist on the same cycle. In [Stephen J.] Gould’s example, a cicada that emerges every seventeen years and has a predator with a five-year life cycle will only face a peak predator population once every eighty-five (5 x 17) years, giving it an enormous advantage over less well-adapted cicadas.
To test this hypothesis, researchers from Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Campinas used a computer simulation, very similar to John Conway’s Game of Life, in which simulated cicadas and predators battled it out in a hundred-by-hundred-cell matrix. They found exactly what Gould had suggested: cicadas with a prime-numbered life cycle had the most successful evolutionary strategy. If we discount those cicadas with life cycles of ten years or fewer (as being too close to predator life cycles), we find that the most successful emergence rates for cyber cicadas are thirteen and seventeen years—precisely what we find in the wild.  &gt;continue&lt;

&#8216;Course, the prime number strategy has been hypothesized to aid in overwhelming GOP obstructionism as well ;p

The Cicada’s Love Affair With Prime Numbers

Patrick Di Justo  |  New Yorker »

Since most predators have a two-to-ten-year population cycle, [any] twelve-year cicadas would be a feast for any predator with a two-, three-, four-, or six-year cycle. By this reasoning, any cicada with a development span that is easily divisible by the smaller numbers of a predator’s population cycle is vulnerable.

Prime numbers, however, can only be divided by themselves and one; they cannot be evenly divided into smaller integers. Cicadas that emerge at prime-numbered year intervals, like the seventeen-year Brood II set to swarm the East Coast, would find themselves relatively immune to predator population cycles, since it is mathematically unlikely for a short-cycled predator to exist on the same cycle. In [Stephen J.] Gould’s example, a cicada that emerges every seventeen years and has a predator with a five-year life cycle will only face a peak predator population once every eighty-five (5 x 17) years, giving it an enormous advantage over less well-adapted cicadas.

To test this hypothesis, researchers from Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Campinas used a computer simulation, very similar to John Conway’s Game of Life, in which simulated cicadas and predators battled it out in a hundred-by-hundred-cell matrix. They found exactly what Gould had suggested: cicadas with a prime-numbered life cycle had the most successful evolutionary strategy. If we discount those cicadas with life cycles of ten years or fewer (as being too close to predator life cycles), we find that the most successful emergence rates for cyber cicadas are thirteen and seventeen years—precisely what we find in the wild.  >continue<

‘Course, the prime number strategy has been hypothesized to aid in overwhelming GOP obstructionism as well ;p

8:41 PM

There’s a Victoria’s Secret model on Bill O’Reilly right now. She’s denouncing her past modelling, all the hyper-sexuality, having come to some message from God … and this is taking place up against an image-over collage of her modelling all manner of swimsuits and soft-pornesque postures

I kid you not

7:50 PM
Via
"We realise that something which makes sense in a local frame may make less sense in a broader frame: dumping your waste in the river is fine as long as you don’t think too much about the people downriver. When you do, you might decide to stop dumping. Government ought to be the process by which such overlapping ‘bigger picture’ considerations are negotiated: good government should make empathy practical."
—  Brian Eno (via azspot)
6:41 PM
Corsin Pfister &amp; Stephanie Wehner
&#8220;It has been suggested that nature could be discrete in the sense that the underlying state space of a physical system has only a finite number of pure states. Here we present a strong physical argument for the quantum theoretical property that every state space has infinitely many pure states. We propose a simple physical postulate that dictates that the only possible discrete theory is classical theory. More specifically, we postulate that no information gain implies no disturbance or, read in the contrapositive, that disturbance leads to some form of information gain&#8230;&#8221;
PhysOrg&#160;&#187;

Consider the famous Schrodinger&#8217;s cat paradox, a thought experiment in which a cat in a box simultaneously exists in two states (this is known as a &#8216;quantum superposition&#8217;). According to quantum theory it is possible that the cat is both dead and alive – until, that is, the cat&#8217;s state of health is &#8216;measured&#8217; by opening the box.
When the box is opened, allowing the health of the cat to be measured, the superposition collapses and the cat ends up definitively dead or alive. The measurement has disturbed the cat.This is a property of quantum systems in general. Perform a measurement for which you can&#8217;t know the outcome in advance, and the system changes to match the outcome you get. What happens if you look a second time? The researchers assume the system is not evolving in time or affected by any outside influence, which means the quantum state stays collapsed. You would then expect the second measurement to yield the same result as the first. After all, &#8220;If you look into the box and find a dead cat, you don&#8217;t expect to look again later and find the cat has been resurrected,&#8221; says Stephanie. &#8220;You could say we&#8217;ve formalised the principle of accepting the facts&#8221;, says Stephanie.Corsin and Stephanie show that this principle rules out various theories of nature. They note particularly that a class of theories they call &#8216;discrete&#8217; are incompatible with the principle. These theories hold that quantum particles can take up only a finite number of states, rather than choose from an infinite, continuous range of possibilities. The possibility of such a discrete &#8216;state space&#8217; has been linked to quantum gravitational theories proposing similar discreteness in spacetime, where the fabric of the universe is made up of tiny brick-like elements rather than being a smooth, continuous sheet.As is often the case in research, Corsin and Stephanie reached this point having set out to solve an entirely different problem altogether&#8230; &gt;continue&lt;

Paper

Corsin Pfister & Stephanie Wehner

“It has been suggested that nature could be discrete in the sense that the underlying state space of a physical system has only a finite number of pure states. Here we present a strong physical argument for the quantum theoretical property that every state space has infinitely many pure states. We propose a simple physical postulate that dictates that the only possible discrete theory is classical theory. More specifically, we postulate that no information gain implies no disturbance or, read in the contrapositive, that disturbance leads to some form of information gain…”

PhysOrg »

Consider the famous Schrodinger’s cat paradox, a thought experiment in which a cat in a box simultaneously exists in two states (this is known as a ‘quantum superposition’). According to quantum theory it is possible that the cat is both dead and alive – until, that is, the cat’s state of health is ‘measured’ by opening the box.

When the box is opened, allowing the health of the cat to be measured, the superposition collapses and the cat ends up definitively dead or alive. The measurement has disturbed the cat.

This is a property of quantum systems in general. Perform a measurement for which you can’t know the outcome in advance, and the system changes to match the outcome you get. What happens if you look a second time? The researchers assume the system is not evolving in time or affected by any outside influence, which means the quantum state stays collapsed. You would then expect the second measurement to yield the same result as the first. After all, “If you look into the box and find a dead cat, you don’t expect to look again later and find the cat has been resurrected,” says Stephanie. “You could say we’ve formalised the principle of accepting the facts”, says Stephanie.

Corsin and Stephanie show that this principle rules out various theories of nature. They note particularly that a class of theories they call ‘discrete’ are incompatible with the principle. These theories hold that quantum particles can take up only a finite number of states, rather than choose from an infinite, continuous range of possibilities. The possibility of such a discrete ‘state space’ has been linked to quantum gravitational theories proposing similar discreteness in spacetime, where the fabric of the universe is made up of tiny brick-like elements rather than being a smooth, continuous sheet.

As is often the case in research, Corsin and Stephanie reached this point having set out to solve an entirely different problem altogether… >continue<

Paper

3:13 PM
Symptoms of Benghazi Syndrome
Richard Cohen  |  Washington Post&#160;&#187;

&#8230;It is not a crime either to make a mountain out of a molehill, but this particular one is constructed of a fetid combination of bad taste and poisonous politics. Dig down a bit and it becomes clear that some — many? — Republicans suspect that Barack Obama and-or Hillary Clinton are capable of letting people die to cover up a terrorist attack. Either that, or this is what they want us to think.In the end, it all comes down to an irrational and absolutely rabid dislike of Obama that so clouds judgment that utterly preposterous statements are uttered, usually within the precincts of the Fox News studios. This, as you might have guessed, is classic Benghazi Syndrome. There is no known cure.   &gt;continue&lt;

Symptoms of Benghazi Syndrome

Richard Cohen  |  Washington Post »

…It is not a crime either to make a mountain out of a molehill, but this particular one is constructed of a fetid combination of bad taste and poisonous politics. Dig down a bit and it becomes clear that some — many? — Republicans suspect that Barack Obama and-or Hillary Clinton are capable of letting people die to cover up a terrorist attack. Either that, or this is what they want us to think.

In the end, it all comes down to an irrational and absolutely rabid dislike of Obama that so clouds judgment that utterly preposterous statements are uttered, usually within the precincts of the Fox News studios. This, as you might have guessed, is classic Benghazi Syndrome. There is no known cure.   >continue<

12:23 PM
"New Atheism has decided to target all religion, religion as such, regardless of time and place. On the one hand, they attack an abstract concept - sure in the background assumption of a pure distinction between science and religion (the other is purely opposite). And yet, when it suits, they shy away from attacking religion in its totality, apparently convinced they are safe in the assumption that what Pat Robertson, Tim Tebow and Osama Bin Laden say religion is is good enough for them.

We should look at the results and the path of the New Atheism and make bets on where it’s going! What does it look like when, angered by simpletons, a movement gets all stoked up in a fit of purity to attack all religion whatsoever - and then conveniently defines its opposition in terms of buying into the same premises of a temporally and historically limited practice, the one most suited to being blown out of the water, and then sits back and gloats as if it had scientifically exhausted the phenomenon and thereby won the fight?

…the figure of New Atheism shifts back and forth, finding the matter at hand at one moment in religion per se and yet, at another moment, in religion as it presents itself to us right now. At one moment, all religion is reduced to the same essential threat - the same target which we are enjoined to attack - but then (inevitably) when it amps up one manifestation of this threat (say Islam) as uniquely different, it slings charges of “the fallacy of false equivalence” at anyone who would question the logic of such a determination. What are we to make of the near simultaneous embrace of equivalence and its condemnation - of sameness and difference?"
May 13th
9:25 AM
"In one context all religion is the same, all religion is literalist, fundamentalist shit which makes truth claims about an objective world - and anyone else is a weak, moderate enabler of this heinous force of history. It’s all the same, and we must be so brave as to attack the monster. But then, in the context of this goofy game, it’s important to raise one target to a higher threat level - so hey, let’s now say that all religions are different and that one of them is the worst… never mind the crack snorting addiction to this haze of normativity that no natural science could ever cough up."
May 12th
7:42 PM
Via
"Lacan begins, seemingly resignedly, by noting: ‘Nowadays, well, we just don’t have that many substances. We have thinking and extended substance.’ This statement non-controversially true; Descartes reduced the number of substances to two only and the inheritors of his streamlining have been puzzling ever since over the problem of how to put them together. Having made this anodyne observation, however, Lacan grows more audacious, declaring next that for psychoanalysis two substances are simply not enough. To make up for this deficit, he therefore postulates a third, which he baptizes enjoying substance (la substance jouissante)…

…But sex, or enjoying substance, accounts not only for the radical disjunction of the other two from each other but also for the internal disjunction of each. Sex in this way purloins the substantial, or self-enclosed, dimension of each of the so-called substances … while Foucault argues that bio-power, abetted by the Freudian theory of sex, eliminates the void between life as function and life as historical experience, or between life and law, and thus eliminates the political space or space of possibility of human action, Lacan argues the opposite: Freud conceives sex as that which takes place in and holds open the space of human action."
—  Joan Copjec