Guest Post: A Mathematical Mastermind Gets His Head Examined

By: | December 16, 2015

CONWAY CARICATURE LWONOn a December day a few years ago, John Horton Conway settled in for an interview at the office of neuroscientist Sandra Witelson. Conway wasn’t there for an appointment proper, but rather to provide fodder for Witelson’s ongoing research on scientifically minded brains. All the same, he’d braced himself for an arsenal of standard neuropsychological assessments, and custom tests designed to capture his brain performing live during a functional MRI.

Witelson tried to reassure her subject, explaining what she was after with the tests. “With imaging, one can look at the microscopic anatomy of the brain, just through a picture,” she said. “So what I’m hoping is that these tests will get at different types of mathematics, and we will be able to see different parts of your brain light up when you’re thinking in different ways. We want to see which part of your brain is particularly active when you’re thinking some of your great mathematical thoughts.”

“Well, you know, I’m not sure that I can have great mathematical thoughts to order,” said Conway. “I can have lesser thoughts.”

“That’ll do,” said Witelson.

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Let’s stop pretending we give a damn about climate change, 2015 edition

By: | December 15, 2015

In 2011, I wrote about how little that year’s climate conference had accomplished. The latest edition of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change just wrapped up in Paris over the weekend with a historic agreement.

Nearly 200 nations acknowledged the importance of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels during this century. They even nodded to the benefits of keeping temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees. But nod is about all they did. As I wrote yesterday at FiveThirtyEight, the new agreement contains no binding targets and is essentially just an aspirational document. When it comes to climate change, we need strong aspirations, but we also need concrete actions to back them up, and this new agreement provides only empty words until the member states decide to take real action.

If this were, say, 1995, the year of the first COP talks, the aspirations and infrastructure laid out in the Paris Agreement would be an encouraging step in the right direction. But the Paris Agreement takes baby steps in a time that requires drastic measures. Continue reading →

Let Us Celebrate The Lack Of Total Failure

By: | December 14, 2015

501760645_a7ea1b90de_oThis past Friday evening, when I heard that the 195 nations represented at the COP21 climate meeting in Paris had reached a draft agreement, I was pleasantly surprised. On Saturday morning, when I saw the stronger-than-forecast draft text, I was shocked. And on Saturday afternoon, when the final agreement was signed—signed!—I was thrilled.

The Paris agreement won’t singlehandedly head off the worst effects of climate change, as many have already pointed out. But for the first time, almost every nation on the planet has committed to reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions. If you, like the rest of us, depend on the Earth’s atmosphere for survival, the agreement is good news.

Just how good, however, depends on your perspective. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | December 12, 2015

8744837175_d3256cd713_cDecember 7 – 11, 2015

The week begins on a dark note.  Bad things are governed by quantum entanglement, I maintain: one bad thing can set up a force field, out of which spring subsequent bad things.  Update: the washing machine is making screaming sounds and the laptop’s cursor works intermittently.

The dark note gets worse.  Jenny’s cousin attempted suicide and Jenny tries to piece out how her cousin’s mother, he aunt, must be reacting.  She tries science, science doesn’t help much except to suggest some physical correlation for a shattered heart.

Christie’s email inbox, like the inboxes of so many of us, is Out. Of. Control.  She has many schemes for dealing with it, tries many tactics, nothing much works well for long.  The stress is getting to her.  She considers bailing out, she considers just giving in.

Helen reduxes her antidote to this sad, stupid, dangerous world:  sing, sing with other people, let the lines of the song weave everyone together, just sing your hearts out.  This works best with William Byrd’s music.

All those traffic cams, the surveillance cams, the smartphone cams, they’re all taking pictures of Rose.  She doesn’t deeply care.  She does it right back — some of the cams are televised and she’s happy to watch them for as long as it takes.  An aside:  her GIF is pure genius.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Yorkers, I Am Watching You

By: | December 11, 2015

Cameras

I recently wrote a story for The Atlantic about a question that I have been obsessed with for a long time: How many photographs am I in, in the world? It’s something that has bugged me for years, and before you chalk this up to pure narcissism, here’s a fact: Facebook can now identify you in photos in which your face doesn’t appear with 83 percent accuracy. Your clothes, your slouch, your tilted head, they all give you away. Let loose on the entire Internet, Facebook’s algorithm could find me, and perhaps provide me with some beginnings of an answer to this question.

But without access to that powerful, if creepy, system, I couldn’t come to any real estimate in the piece. And that’s partially because there are so many more forms of image capturing going on than the form I had originally thought of. Sure, there are people with their cameras snapping pictures all the time. But there are also other lenses looking at you too, from the corners of buildings, from mall hallways, from drones or hidden in teddy bears. And you never quite know who is watching you on those things. It might be me. And for some people in New York, it is actually me.

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Redux: Singing Our Hearts Out

By: | December 10, 2015

People singing in Civil War-era costumes.

The very first blog post I wrote as an LWON regular, in August, 2013, was about singing in a group–how singers’ hearts speed up and slow down in unison, as we breathe in and slowly, tunefully, exhale. At the time I’d just sung on a recording that included the 16th-century motet “Haec Dies,” by William Byrd. This weekend, as it happens, I’ll be singing “Haec Dies” again, this time on stage, in front of thousands of my fellow Washingtonians.

The world has seemed like a sad and dangerous place lately. Recent shootings in places I’ve been–Paris, Bamako, California–have brought home the lesson that you never really know when someone is going to walk up and kill you.

But when I sing “Haec Dies,” I fight the angry, scared, shouting forces of the world. I join my heart with those of my fellow humans, and together we sing about this day, and how we will rejoice in it and be glad.

Here’s the original post:

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Email is an Untamable Beast

By: | December 9, 2015

Email

It’s not my imagination. Even gmail is telling me that my email is out of control, threatening that if I don’t dump some of my tens of thousands of emails (or pay them money) I will be “unable to send or receive emails.” That’s starting to sound appealing. I’ve caught myself fantasizing about creating an auto reply: sorry world, email no longer works for me. If it’s important, find me another way.

OutOfSpaceCropped

On November 30, I had 78,787 unread emails in my main email account. Today, that number is up to 78,929. Do the math and that works out to 142 unread emails in eight days, or just under 18 per day. Which does’t sound so bad, until you consider that this is just one of my five email accounts — the one with the best wheat to chaff ratio. Continue reading →

Shattered

By: | December 8, 2015

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A couple of weeks ago, my 20-year-old cousin put his father’s service revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. His parents and one of his brothers were home at the time. They heard the shot and ran to his room. His mother and brother tried to stop the bleeding while his father performed CPR. Someone called 911. The ambulance came.

Miraculously, my cousin is still alive. The bullet didn’t take a fatal path, though its full effects aren’t yet known. The doctors initially said not to talk to the patient, to let his brain rest. His parents and siblings sat quietly at his bedside those first days, lulled by exhaustion and the hum, beep, and hiss of hospital monitors, allowed only to stroke his hand and pray.

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