“Limbus Patrum # 4”, by Randall Tiedman, who died yesterday
No matter which hollow man occupies the bunker at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the evidence from 225 years points to an inescapable conclusion: the Founders erred horribly in creating the presidency. To invest in one man quasi-kingly powers over the 13 states then, 300 million people and half a continent today, is madness. And it didn’t have to be this way.Many Anti-Federalists proposed, as an alternative to what they called the “president-general,” either a plural executive—two or more men sharing the office, a recipe for what a sage once called a wise and masterly inactivity—or they wanted no executive at all. Federal affairs would be so limited in scope that they could be performed competently and without aggrandizement by a unicameral legislature—that is, one house of Congress—as well as various administrative departments and perhaps a federal judiciary.
The New Jersey Plan, fathered by William Paterson of the Springsteen State, was the small-f federal option at the Constitutional Convention. It is the great decentralist what-might-have-been. The New Jersey Plan provided for a unicameral Congress with an equal vote for each state, and copresidents chosen by Congress for a single fixed term and removable by Congress if so directed by a majority of state governors.
This would have saved us from the cult of the presidency, the imperial presidency, the president as the world’s celebrity-in-chief—the whole gargantuan mess.
Systems biology did not rise without skepticism. The great geneticist and Nobel-prize winning biologist Sydney Brenner once defined the field as “low input, high throughput, no output science.” Brenner, a contemporary of Chomsky who also participated in the same symposium on AI, was equally skeptical about new systems approaches to understanding the brain. When describing an up-and-coming systems approach to mapping brain circuits called Connectomics, which seeks to map the wiring of all neurons in the brain (i.e. diagramming which nerve cells are connected to others), Brenner called it as a “form of insanity.”Brenner’s catch-phrase bite at systems biology and related techniques in neuroscience is not far off from Chomsky’s criticism of AI. An unlikely pair, systems biology and artificial intelligence both face the same fundamental task of reverse-engineering a highly complex system whose inner workings are largely a mystery. Yet, ever-improving technologies yield massive data related to the system, only a fraction of which might be relevant. Do we rely on powerful computing and statistical approaches to tease apart signal from noise, or do we look for the more basic principles that underlie the system and explain its essence? The urge to gather more data is irresistible, though it’s not always clear what theoretical framework these data might fit into. These debates raise an old and general question in the philosophy of science: What makes a satisfying scientific theory or explanation, and how ought success be defined for science?
Inside League of Legends developer Riot Games is a team of more than 30 staffers trying to make the experience of playing their game kinder, gentler, more honorable and less “toxic.”Team Player Behavior, a roughly six-month-old division of Riot, has implemented measures designed to reduce toxic behavior like negative chat, offensive language, and verbal abuse. And while toxic behavior and online gaming often go hand-in-hand, says League of Legends producer Carl Kwoh, “We’ve looked at our own game and said ‘This is not a great experience and we want to try to handle this problem.’”
Earlier this year, Riot Games started assembling its player behavior team, bringing in PhDs in cognitive neuroscience, human factors psychology, and statistics to reduce toxic behavior online and increase sportsmanship in the League of Legends community.
At present, there is no experimental evidence of any significant concentration of antimatter in our observable universe. In other words, the universe we live in consists almost entirely of matter. This phenomenon is puzzling to physicists, given the symmetry between matter and antimatter.Many competing theories attempt to explain how such an asymmetry could have come about. One group of theories focuses on understanding how nature, at the particle level, might favour certain matter reactions in comparison to their antimatter counterparts. Such reactions have been observed and studied extensively in the laboratory, but we do not know whether they alone can explain the matter imbalance in the universe. Other theories propose that there are indeed regions of the universe composed primarily of antimatter (a so-called antiuniverse), but that these regions are widely separated from matter-dominated regions or are possibly outside of our visible universe. After all, there may be more to the universe than can be seen from Earth!
Deploying the fruits of years of research — as well as a wealth of observations and interviews — [Kevin] Dutton makes the argument that psychopaths are rich in many personality traits key to survival. Their flatlined emotion and lack of compassion, he proposes, is akin to that of a Buddhist monk, who has studied the art of controlling one’s response in stressful situations. On practically every page, Dutton gives us an example of what we can learn from the psychopathic brain. What if “that kid with a knife in the shadows at the back of the movie theater might well, in the years to come, be wielding a rather different knife at the back of a rather different kind of theater?” Here he means the operating theater. He even interviews a brain surgeon (the names have been changed) who tells him “I have no compassion for those that I operate on…. When you’re cutting loose and cheating death high above the snowline of the brain, feelings aren’t fit for purpose.”
From James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen, shared by Brain Pickings
This past year Michael Murray brought out Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind, tracking his subject’s astonishing life from a French boyhood in which Barzun played marbles with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire through a brilliant career at Columbia University, first as an undergraduate, then as a teacher, and finally as the university’s provost. Murray relates a particularly delightful story about young Professor Barzun. In one of his first history classes, Barzun recalled, there “was a beautifully dressed man of about forty, with very black hair and a signet ring with a diamond and a tie pin; he was done up to the nines. At the end of the first semester, he came to me and said: ‘I am a Turk, and I want to express my gratitude because in your dealing with the Turkish question you have been perfectly fair. This means so much. I want to tell you that if ever at any time someone stands in your way or has done you harm, here is my card, just call me, and he will be taken care of.’”