“Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No — not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.”

(Piet Hein)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/the-promise-of-vaping-and-the-rise-of-juul

With brains the size of a sesame seed, jumping spiders may seem like mental lightweights.

But a new study shows that many species plan out intricate detours to reach their prey—smarts usually associated with far bigger creatures.

The arachnids, already well known for their colors and elaborate mating rituals, have sharp vision and an impressive awareness of three-dimensional space. (See “Surprise: Jumping Spiders Can See More Colors Than You Can.”)

“Their vision is more on par with vertebrates,” says Damian Elias of the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “And that allows them to do things that are physically impossible for other animals that size.”

Jumping spiders of the subfamily Spartaeinae (spar-TAY-in-ay) are particularly ambitious—they eat other spiders. Researchers suspect that preying on other predators requires extra intelligence and cunning.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Robert Jackson of New Zealand’s University of Canterbury demonstrated that Portia fimbriata, a member of this spider-snacking subfamily, methodically plans winding detours to sneak up on prey spiders. Portia can even find hidden prey, suggesting that the predator can visualize its prey’s location and a path to get there.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160121-jumping-spiders-animals-science/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070814150630.htm

V.N. Tsytovich of the General Physics Institute, Russian Academy of Science, in Moscow, working with colleagues there and at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany and the University of Sydney, Australia, has studied the behaviour of complex mixtures of inorganic materials in a plasma. Plasma is essentially the fourth state of matter beyond solid, liquid and gas, in which electrons are torn from atoms leaving behind a miasma of charged particles.

Until now, physicists assumed that there could be little organisation in such a cloud of particles. However, Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other.

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve.”

Robin Hanson’s recent post “Two Types of Envy”, on the similarities & differences of redistribution of wealth vs the redistribution of sex, has generated quite a lot of heat and noise. Most of it (on all sides) is the usual horror-show that every internet controversy becomes. But I ran across a few things that I thought were interesting & thought-provoking reads. In the unlikely event that this post spreads beyond my blog’s usual audience, please note that by saying that I find these posts philosophically interesting, I am not taking or advocating any particular stance on the issue. Also note that while this post will be auto-shared to Facebook, I will not see any comments posted there.

• Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books: “Does anyone have the right to sex?” (written prior to Hanson’s blog post, but responding to the same recent events)
• Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized: “The Zeroth Commandment“
• Ross Douthat in the NYT: “The Redistribution of Sex“
• Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women” (only sort of related, but linked from one of the above)

The question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion. It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies. That said, the radical self-love movements among black, fat and disabled women do ask us to treat our sexual preferences as less than perfectly fixed. ‘Black is beautiful’ and ‘Big is beautiful’ are not just slogans of empowerment, but proposals for a revaluation of our values. Lindy West describes studying photographs of fat women and asking herself what it would be to see these bodies – bodies that previously filled her with shame and self-loathing – as objectively beautiful. This, she says, isn’t a theoretical issue, but a perceptual one: a way of looking at certain bodies – one’s own and others’ – sidelong, inviting and coaxing a gestalt-shift from revulsion to admiration. The question posed by radical self-love movements is not whether there is a right to sex (there isn’t), but whether there is a duty to transfigure, as best we can, our desires.

To take this question seriously requires that we recognise that the very idea of fixed sexual preference is political, not metaphysical. As a matter of good politics, we treat the preferences of others as sacred: we are rightly wary of speaking of what people really want, or what some idealised version of them would want. That way, we know, authoritarianism lies. This is true, most of all, in sex, where invocations of real or ideal desires have long been used as a cover for the rape of women and gay men. But the fact is that our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills – not automatically, but not impossibly either. What’s more, sexual desire doesn’t always neatly conform to our own sense of it, as generations of gay men and women can attest. Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

From John Stuart Mill, famed 19th C utilitarianist economist and free market advocate:

If the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices, if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it almost in inverse proportion to labour, the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessities of life; if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.

Via http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/30/book-review-history-of-the-fabian-society/

The relevant economic principles are not new. They date back to the first part of the 19th century, to the early days of socialism. In a certain sense their ancestry can be traced back further, to the classical economists of early capitalism: Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The basic idea is that a just society can only be established on the principle that those who work are entitled to the full proceeds of their labour. This was for a long time the most distinctive and popular of socialist principles. It sought a remedy for the exploitation of the workers by according them the right to get back out of each day’s work, in terms of wages, as much as they had put in during the day, in terms of time and effort. Along with this went a second principle: only work is a legitimate source of income.

This excluded all sources of income such as rent, dividends or interest which derive from the ownership of property rather than the personal efforts of their recipients. The exclusion of unearned incomes is obviously a necessary consequence of the first principle, since in a society where the producers were entitled to the full proceeds of their labour there would be nothing left over to supply unearned incomes…

The great merit of these original principles is that they provide a coherent foundation for an entire system, not just of economic organisation, but also a whole new legal, moral and social order. They imply a monetary system based upon time rather than upon arbitrary and meaningless currency units like Pounds, Dollars or Ecu. People would be credited with hours worked rather than money at the end of the week. Payments for goods and services would also be in terms of time. You would pay for a garment that took two hours to produce with two hours of your own time. An economy based upon time-prices would have built into it the democratic presumption of human equality.

It is interesting how the advocates of social inequality think that the wealthy respond to quite different incentives from the poor. If the rich are to be persuaded to work, they require the stimulus of still greater wealth: hence the paramount importance of reducing taxes on high incomes. When dealing with the poor, in contrast, it is held that there is nothing like the prospect of still greater poverty as a work incentive: hence the paramount importance of strictly limiting the benefits to which they are entitled.

The hotel I’m at plays terrible music. It’s as if someone created an XM radio station called ‘Sappy Lyrics.’ But just now when I walked in, they were playing Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland,’ which I really like, and which I think has some actual lyric subtlety.

‘She comes back to tell me she’s gone

as if I didn’t know that

as if I didn’t know my own bed.

As if I never noticed

the way she brushed her hair

from her forehead.’