Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Andrew Louth:

In the medieval university, contemplation was knowledge of reality itself, as opposed to that involved in getting things done. It corresponded to a distinction in our understanding of what it is to be human, between reason conceived as puzzling things out and that conceived as receptive of truth. This understanding of learning has a history that goes back to the roots of western culture. Now, this is under serious threat, and with it our notion of civilisation.

The free arts and the servile arts

Nobel prize winner Harold Varmus talks about his memoir, The Art and Politics of Science, also reviewed at NYT.

Occasionally on Saturday mornings, I traveled across the Charles River to join some Amherst classmates at Harvard Medical School, while they sat in the Ether Dome at the Massachusetts General Hospital, entranced by diagnostic dilemmas discussed at the weekly clinical pathology conference. These stories struck me as far more interesting than those I was reading, and my medical school friends expressed genuine excitement about their work. They also seemed to have formed a community of scholars, with shared interests in the human body and its diseases and common expectations that they would soon be able to do something about those diseases.

These Saturday excursions probably account for an influential dream that I had one night about my continuing indecision. In that dream, my future literature students were relieved when I didn’t turn up to teach a class, but my future patients were disappointed when I didn’t appear. It seemed I wanted to be wanted ...

From the NYT review:

The pleasure of science, he believes, lies in the “balance between the imagination of the individual and the conviction of the community.” If only civic affairs were so harmonious.

From Literature to the Lab

Barry Werth's new book earns a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly:

In this fascinating study, Werth shows how the idea of social Darwinism, as codified by Herbert Spencer, took hold in the United States, underpinning the philosophy of the Gilded Age's social, cultural and financial elite.

Anchoring his story with the stunning Delmonico's celebration honoring the departure of Spencer after a triumphant tour of the United States in 1882, Werth rightly depicts the frame of reference Spencer left behind as a predecessor to Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, with its focus on unrestrained self-interest and unbridled capitalism.

As Werth explains, Spencer's interpretation of Darwinism won the approval of not only robber barons but also prominent religious, scientific and political leaders. Henry Ward Beecher, writes Werth, used the most acclaimed pulpit in America to preach the gospel of evolution; that is, that it was God's way to... sort the worthy from the wretched.

This was survival of the fittest, which Spencer and his followers saw as not only just but necessary. Thus, Werth elegantly reveals a firm philosophical foundation for all the antilabor excesses of the Industrial Age.

From The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand:

If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea -- an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.

On ephemera:

Let's start with an assumption:

"Everything we post online is ephemeral."

Now, if we start with that assumption, how does that change our approach to what we put online?

To me, there are two likely reactions:

(a) post more! It doesn't matter how verbose you are, little of what you say will last very long

(b) post less! There's no point clogging up the net with ephemera; only post that which is essential; keep your ephemera to yourself

I've been wondering about it all. I've been thinking that perhaps I should make paper-based outputs of anything that I want to really last. By all means clog up the net with everything else in the meantime, but don't form any attachment to it. Don't depend on it being there.

Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America

Tim Flannery, on E. O. Wilson's new book, for NYRB:

Is it possible, The Superorganism left me wondering, that the invention of the Internet is leading to a similar social evolution of our own species? The proliferation of conflict, much of it prompted by defense of national boundaries, may make us doubt it, but other trends are occurring that give pause for thought. As we strive to avert a global economic disaster or agree on a global treaty to prevent catastrophic climate change, we inevitably build structures that, as with the ants, allow the superorganism to function more efficiently. But of course it's possible that we'll fail to make the grade—that our destructive path will catch up with us before we can make the transition to a seamlessly working superorganism.

The Superior Civilization

Oliver Burkeman:

The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us is known in social science as "homophily", and it shapes our views, and our lives, in ways we're barely aware of.

Even priding yourself on being open-minded is no defence if your natural, homophilic inclination is to hang out with other people like you, celebrating your love of diversity.

The unspoken assumption here is that you know what you like.

But if happiness research has taught us anything, it's that we're terrible at predicting what will bring us pleasure. Might we end up happier by exposing ourselves more often to serendipity, or even, specifically, to the people and things we don't think we'd like?

Should we hang out with people we don't like?

Brian Hayes, from 2001:

When base 2 is too small and base 10 is too big, base 3 is just right.

Third Base

Matthew Kirschenbaum, on why humanities students should learn to program:

The first program most people learn to write in any computer language is called Hello World. Its sole function is to display those two words on the screen. But the act of writing and then running Hello World can raise some intriguing questions: Who, or what, exactly, is saying hello to the world? The original author of the program? The neophyte who just transcribed it on a computer? The computer itself? All of these somehow together? Whose "world" is being greeted? The world around us, or the virtual world inside the machine? Is anyone (or anything) expected to return the salutation? Hello World, whose syntax varies from one computer language to another, is a postmodern cultural artifact, and to me such questions are irresistible.

From the archive, Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

From last year, David Lynch:

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Hello Worlds

Publishers Weekly gives Dan Falk's new book a Starred Review:

Beginning with a 5000-year-old tomb in Drogheda, Ireland, illuminated only at the winter solstice, Dan Falk asks the question, "What is time?... the stuff that flows... or a dimension, like space?"

Falk explores the origins of calendar time, from primitive astronomical observatories to the precision clocks of today. Though the movement of the heavens provided the basis for years, months, days and even the seven-day week, it wasn't until the Catholic Church needed to date important events like Easter that reconciling the lunar and solar calendars became a major concern; as such, the Church became "one of the strongest supporters of precision astronomy and timekeeping."

Falk seamlessly combines science with literary and philosophical observations ("Chaucer had no notion of the length of a minute; Shakespeare did but nowhere does he mention the second") and digresses to fascinating topics like root notions of past and future, the vagaries of memory and the behavior of birds at breakfast time. Rounding out his multi-course feast, Falk contrasts Newton's notion of "absolute, true, and mathematical" time with Einstein's final words in 1955, "the distinction of past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion," to present modern speculations on black holes and the universe's future.

In Search of Time: The Science of a Curious Dimension

Fred Ritchin's new book earns a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly:

Ritchen offers a supple, politically astute and fascinating account of the dizzying impact of the digital revolution on the trajectory of the photographic image that, like all new media, changes the world in the very act of observing it.

The myth of photographic objectivity has concealed fakery as old as the medium itself, he notes, but in the digital era, concealment and manipulation come to shape the very experience of the image as sui generis: The lens has dimmed and a distorting mirror has been added. All is not lost for photography as a truth-telling medium, however: the author suggests methods for verifying the authenticity and provenance of images through footnoting and labeling.

Moreover, Ritchen stresses how digital media, linked through the Web, offer an appropriative and hypertextual approach to photography that promises to reinvent the embattled authorial image into an evolving collaboration, conversation and investigation among an infinite number of ordinary people.

Cautiously optimistic, the author poses provocative questions throughout, including whether digital technology and Web 2.0 together provide a means for regaining a sense of the actual from deep within a virtual world.

After Photography