http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...110514.php

ARTICLE: There's more to the decline of the once mighty ancient Assyrian Empire than just civil wars and political unrest. Archaeological, historical, and paleoclimatic evidence suggests that climatic factors and population growth might also have come into play. This is the opinion of Adam Schneider of the University of California-San Diego in the US, and Selim Adali of the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Turkey, published in Springer's journal Climatic Change.

In the 9th century BC, the Assyrian Empire of northern Iraq relentlessly started to expand into most of the ancient Near East. It reached its height in the early 7th century BC, becoming the largest of its kind in the Near East up to that time. The Assyrian Empire's subsequent quick decline by the end of the 7th century has puzzled scholars ever since. Most ascribe it to civil wars, political unrest, and the destruction of the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, by a coalition of Babylonian and Median forces in 612 BC. Nevertheless, it has remained a mystery why the Assyrian state, the military superpower of the age, succumbed so suddenly and so quickly.

Schneider and Adali argue that factors such as population growth and droughts also contributed to the Assyrian downfall. Recently published paleoclimate data show that conditions in the Near East became more arid during the latter half of the 7th century BC. During this time, the region also experienced significant population growth when people from conquered lands were forcibly resettled there. The authors contend that this substantially reduced the state's ability to withstand a severe drought such as the one that hit the Near East in 657 BC. They also note that within five years of this drought, the political and economic stability of the Assyrian state had eroded, resulting in a series of civil wars that fatally weakened it.

"What we are proposing is that these demographic and climatic factors played an indirect but significant role in the demise of the Assyrian Empire," says Schneider.

Schneider and Adali further draw parallels between the collapse of the Assyrian Empire and some of the potential economic and political consequences of climate change in the same area today. They point out, for instance, that the onset of severe drought which, followed by violent unrest in Syria and Iraq during the late 7th century BC, bears a striking resemblance to the severe drought and subsequent contemporary political conflict in Syria and northern Iraq today. On a more global scale, they conclude, modern societies can take note of what happened when short-term economic and political policies were prioritized rather than ones that support long-term economic security and risk mitigation.

"The Assyrians can be 'excused' to some extent for focusing on short-term economic or political goals which increased their risk of being negatively impacted by climate change, given their technological capacity and their level of scientific understanding about how the natural world worked," adds Selim Adali. "We, however, have no such excuses, and we also possess the additional benefit of hindsight. This allows us to piece together from the past what can go wrong if we choose not to enact policies that promote longer-term sustainability."

1. The infintesimal point.

2. The infintesimally thin infinitely long line.

3. The infintesimally thin and infinitely long and wide plane.

4. The infintesimally vaccuous and infinitely expansive volume. (space)

5. The infintesimally instantiated and infinitely extended duration. (time)

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/beaut...-equation/

EXCERPT: Scientists prize elegant theories, but a taste for simplicity is a treacherous guide. And it doesn’t even look good. [...] The gravest offenders in this attempted redefinition of beauty are, of course, the physicists. This is partly because their field has always been heir to Platonism – the mystical conviction of an orderly cosmos. Such a belief is almost a precondition for doing physics in the first place: what’s the point in looking for rules unless you believe they exist? The MIT physicist Max Tegmark now goes so far as to say that mathematics constitutes the basic fabric of reality, a claim redolent of Plato’s most extreme assertions in Timaeus.

But Platonism will not connect you with the mainstream of aesthetic thought – not least because Plato himself was so distrustful of art (he banned the lying poets from his Republic, after all). Better that we turn to Immanuel Kant. Kant expended considerable energies in his Critique of Judgment (1790) trying to disentangle the aesthetic aspects of beauty from the satisfaction one feels in grasping an idea or recognising a form, and it does us little good to jumble them up again. All that conceptual understanding gives us, he concluded, is ‘the solution that satisfies the problem… not a free and indeterminately final entertainment of the mental powers with what is called beautiful’. Beauty, in other words, is not a resolution: it opens the imagination.

Physicists might be the furthest gone along Plato’s trail, but they are not alone. Consider the many chemists whose idea of beauty seems to be dictated primarily by the molecules they find pleasing – usually because of some inherent mathematical symmetry, such as in the football-shaped carbon molecule buckminsterfullerene (strictly speaking, a truncated icosahedron). Of course, this is just another instance of mathematics-worship, yoking beauty to qualities of regularity that were not deemed artistically beautiful even in antiquity. Brian Greene claims: ‘In physics, as in art, symmetry is a key part of aesthetics.’ Yet for Plato it was precisely art’s lack of symmetry (and thus intelligibility) that denied it access to real beauty. Art was just too messy to be beautiful.

In seeing matters the other way around, Kant speaks for the mainstream of artistic aesthetics: ‘All stiff regularity (such as approximates to mathematical regularity) has something in it repugnant to taste.’ We weary of it, as we do a nursery rhyme. Or as the art historian Ernst Gombrich put it in 1988, too much symmetry ensures that ‘once we have grasped the principle of order… it holds no more surprise’. Artistic beauty, Gombrich believed, relies on a tension between symmetry and asymmetry: ‘a struggle between two opponents of equal power, the formless chaos, on which we impose our ideas, and the all-too-formed monotony, which we brighten up by new accents’. Even Francis Bacon (the 17th-century proto-scientist, not the 20th-century artist) understood this much: ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’

Perhaps I have been a little harsh on the chemists – those cube- and prism-shaped molecules are fun in their own way. But Bacon, Kant and Gombrich are surely right to question their aesthetic merit. As the philosopher of chemistry Joachim Schummer pointed out in 2003, it is simply parochial to redefine beauty as symmetry: doing so cuts one off from the dominant tradition in artistic theory. There’s a reason why our galleries are not, on the whole, filled with paintings of perfect spheres.

Why shouldn’t scientists be allowed their own definition of beauty? Perhaps they should. Yet isn’t there a narrowness to the standard that they have chosen? Even that might not be so bad, if their cult of ‘beauty’ didn’t seem to undermine the credibility of what they otherwise so strenuously assert: the sanctity of evidence. It doesn’t matter who you are, they say, how famous or erudite or well-published: if your theory doesn’t match up to nature, it’s history. But if that’s the name of the game, why on earth should some vague notion of beauty be brought into play as an additional arbiter?

Because of experience, they might reply: true theories are beautiful. Well, general relativity might have turned out OK, but plenty of others have not.

[...] It’s not hard to mine science history for theories and proofs that were beautiful and wrong, or complicated and right. No one has ever shown a correlation between beauty and ‘truth’. But it is worse than that, for sometimes ‘beauty’ in the sense that many scientists prefer – an elegant simplicity, to put it in crude terms – can act as a fake trump card that deflects inquiry.

[...] Despite all this, I don’t want scientists to abandon their talk of beauty. Anything that inspires scientific thinking is valuable, and if a quest for beauty – a notion of beauty peculiar to science, removed from art – does that, then bring it on. And if it gives them a language in which to converse with artists, rather than standing on soapboxes and trading magisterial insults like C P Snow and F R Leavis, all the better. I just wish they could be a bit more upfront about the fact that they are (as is their wont) torturing a poor, fuzzy, everyday word to make it fit their own requirements. I would be rather thrilled if the artist, rather than accepting this unified pursuit of beauty (as Ian McEwan did), were to say instead: ‘No, we’re not even on the same page. This beauty of yours means nothing to me.’...

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-154773

EXCERPT: This is the first in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy.” The interview was conducted by email and edited. — George Yancy

George Yancy: What motivates you to work as a philosopher in the area of race?

Naomi Zack: I am mainly motivated by a great need to work and not to be bored, and I have a critical bent. I think there is a lot of work to be done concerning race in the United States, and a lot of ignorance and unfairness that still needs to be uncovered and corrected. I received my doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 1970 and then became absent from academia until 1990. When I returned it had become possible to write about real issues and apply analytic skills to social ills and other practical forms of injustice. My first book, “Race and Mixed Race” (1991) was an analysis of the incoherence of U.S. black/white racial categories in their failure to allow for mixed race. In “Philosophy of Science and Race,” I examined the lack of a scientific foundation for biological notions of human races, and in “The Ethics and Mores of Race,” I turned to the absence of ideas of universal human equality in the Western philosophical tradition.

I’m also interested in the role of the university in homelessness and have begun to organize an ongoing project for the University of Oregon’s Community Philosophy Institute, with a unique website.

G.Y.: How can critical philosophy of race shed unique light on what has happened, and is still happening, in Ferguson, Mo.?

N.Z.: Critical philosophy of race, like critical race theory in legal studies, seeks to understand the disadvantages of nonwhite racial groups in society (blacks especially) by understanding social customs, laws, and legal practices....

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives...-internet/

EXCERPT: [...] It is already possible to buy Internet-enabled light bulbs that turn on when your car signals your home that you are a certain distance away and coffeemakers that sync to the alarm on your phone, as well as WiFi washer-dryers that know you are away and periodically fluff your clothes until you return, and Internet-connected slow cookers, vacuums, and refrigerators. “Check the morning weather, browse the web for recipes, explore your social networks or leave notes for your family—all from the refrigerator door,” reads the ad for one.

Welcome to the beginning of what is being touted as the Internet’s next wave by technologists, investment bankers, research organizations, and the companies that stand to rake in some of an estimated $14.4 trillion by 2022—what they call the Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco Systems, which is one of those companies, and whose CEO came up with that multitrillion-dollar figure, takes it a step further and calls this wave “the Internet of Everything,” which is both aspirational and telling. The writer and social thinker Jeremy Rifkin, whose consulting firm is working with businesses and governments to hurry this new wave along, describes it like this:

"The Internet of Things will connect every thing with everyone in an integrated global network. People, machines, natural resources, production lines, logistics networks, consumption habits, recycling flows, and virtually every other aspect of economic and social life will be linked via sensors and software to the IoT platform, continually feeding Big Data to every node—businesses, homes, vehicles—moment to moment, in real time. Big Data, in turn, will be processed with advanced analytics, transformed into predictive algorithms, and programmed into automated systems to improve thermodynamic efficiencies, dramatically increase productivity, and reduce the marginal cost of producing and delivering a full range of goods and services to near zero across the entire economy."

[...] In other words, as human behavior is tracked and merchandized on a massive scale, the Internet of Things creates the perfect conditions to bolster and expand the surveillance state. In the world of the Internet of Things, your car, your heating system, your refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window shades, your scale, your medications, your camera, your heart rate monitor, your electric toothbrush, and your washing machine—to say nothing of your phone—generate a continuous stream of data that resides largely out of reach of the individual but not of those willing to pay for it or in other ways commandeer it.

That is the point: the Internet of Things is about the “dataization” of our bodies, ourselves, and our environment. As a post on the tech website Gigaom put it, “The Internet of Things isn’t about things. It’s about cheap data.” Lots and lots of it. “The more you tell the world about yourself, the more the world can give you what you want,” says Sam Lessin, the head of Facebook’s Identity Product Group. It’s a sentiment shared by Scoble and Israel, who write:

"The more the technology knows about you, the more benefits you will receive. That can leave you with the chilling sensation that big data is watching you. In the vast majority of cases, we believe the coming benefits are worth that trade-off."

So, too, does Jeremy Rifkin, who dismisses our legal, social, and cultural affinity for privacy as, essentially, a bourgeois affectation—a remnant of the enclosure laws that spawned capitalism:

"Connecting everyone and everything in a neural network brings the human race out of the age of privacy, a defining characteristic of modernity, and into the era of transparency. While privacy has long been considered a fundamental right, it has never been an inherent right. Indeed, for all of human history, until the modern era, life was lived more or less publiclly [...] In virtually every society that we know of before the modern era, people bathed together in public, often urinated and defecated in public, ate at communal tables, frequently engaged in sexual intimacy in public, and slept huddled together en masse. It wasn’t until the early capitalist era that people began to retreat behind locked doors."

[...] Even so, no matter what we do, the ubiquity of the Internet of Things is putting us squarely in the path of hackers, who will have almost unlimited portals into our digital lives. When, last winter, cybercriminals broke into more than 100,000 Internet-enabled appliances including refrigerators and sent out 750,000 spam e-mails to their users, they demonstrated just how vulnerable Internet-connected machines are.

Not long after that, Forbes reported that security researchers had come up with a $20 tool that was able to remotely control a car’s steering, brakes, acceleration, locks, and lights. It was an experiment that, again, showed how simple it is to manipulate and sabotage the smartest of machines, even though—but really because—a car is now, in the words of a Ford executive, a “cognitive device.”

More recently, a study of ten popular IoT devices by the computer company Hewlett-Packard uncovered a total of 250 security flaws among them. As Jerry Michalski, a former tech industry analyst and founder of the REX think tank, observed in a recent Pew study: “Most of the devices exposed on the internet will be vulnerable. They will also be prone to unintended consequences: they will do things nobody designed for beforehand, most of which will be undesirable.”...

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-an...leo-93579/

EXCERPT: [...] The bulk of [Lawrence] Lipking’s book is devoted to showing that the historical battle lines we tend to draw between science, religion, and art, aren’t as bright and clear as we like to tell ourselves.

[...] Galileo, forced to recant his heliocentrism by the Church, nobly refused “to be swayed by myths or orthodoxies,” and boldly declared, “Nevertheless it moves.” Except, there’s no record that he said that; the rejection of myths and orthodoxies is itself a myth—one of the founding stories of modernity’s science code.

[...] Along the same lines, Descartes’ famous mental experiment, in which he stripped the world down to what can be rationally known, was, it turns out, inspired by a series of vivid dreams, in which, Descartes believed, God had called him to a great work.

[...] The fact that the early scientific greats had numerous loopy ideas isn’t usually seen as that much of a problem. Kepler’s record as both an astronomer and an astrologer can be dismissed with mutterings about the superstitions of the time. The astrology is jettisoned, and the pure science is preserved. Disaggregating isn’t necessarily always that easy, though....

[...] Lipking steps daintily around [...a...] pit when he discusses Newton’s millenarian religious musings, for example, he is careful to note that the scientist’s breakthroughs “depended on meticulous calculations, not magical thinking.” But the pit still yawns off to the side distractingly. What after all do we mean by “depended”? Newton’s intellectual pursuits were inspired by his religious beliefs, and arguably vice versa. If Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter through his theory [whereas Francesco Sizzi did not], didn’t Newton see gravity through his God? And if so, is the gravity there without the God?

The skepticism there may seem silly or excessive. Of course we know that Newton’s gravity works. But then, don’t we also in fact know, via Einstein, that Newton’s gravity does not work? And how sure are we about Einstein’s? Likpking points out that one of the most important engines of the Scientific Revolution was skepticism—the willingness to question received wisdom, the recognition that authority could not be a guarantor of truth. But as Lipking writes, “this unsheathed skepticism” is “a two-edged sword.” Once you start questioning, where do you stop?

That’s why those enemies of science often come across not as anti-science, but as hyped-up, manic, science on steroids. No one can site as many statistics as an anti-vaxxer; no one is more doubtful or more demanding of evidence than a climate denier or creationist. It isn’t that these groups reject science, but that they take its skepticism too far, refusing the established, scientific consensus—rather like Galileo. The weapons of reason ultimately turn back on reason, until all certainty is voided, and we don’t know whether Galileo said “it moves,” or whether Newton understood gravity.

[...] In fact, one of Lipking’s achievements is to put science in the context not just of religion, but of art and poetry. Part of the reason Galileo’s ideas were so seductive was because he was an artist, who could express what he saw, and what he thought he saw, on paper for others to see. Science, in Lipking’s telling, is not opposed to imagination....

"Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.\

The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity."===http://www.quantamagazine.org/20130917-a...m-physics/

"FLOG"--To strike repeatedly with a club or stick, usually violently and in anger. See word spelt backwards...