Here’s a somewhat romanticized but fascinating account of the one-of-a-kind mathematical genius Ramanujan:

How did the minimally trained, isolated Srinivasa Ramanujan, with little more than an out-of-date elementary textbook, anticipate some of the deepest theoretical problems of mathematics—including concepts discovered only after his death?

The story of Ramanujan is a variation on the same mythopoeic tale related in Star Wars and the New Testament, of a special boy born into adversity. A mother cannot conceive. The Goddess appears in a dream, promising a son through whom the God will speak to his creation. While pregnant, the mother travels to her ancestral home. During the winter solstice, the boy is born, under signs in the heavens that portend great events: his horoscope, cast by his mother, predicts that he will be a genius beset by great suffering. “Svasti Sri,” it reads, “when the moon was near the star Uttirattadi, when Mithuna was in the ascendant, on this auspicious day” Ramanujan is born. And indeed, his will be a short life, full of triumph and disaster. Growing up, he is gentle and quiet. Weightless is the word one of his childhood acquaintances uses in Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. Beginning in his teenage years, Kanigel writes, Ramanujan “would abruptly vanish… Little subsequently became known” about these disappearances. Around this time, Ramanujan acquires a hoary old text (G. S. Carr’s Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics) that initiates him into the arcana. The Goddess begins to appear to Ramanujan in his dreams, showing him scrolls covered in strange formulae. “Nākkil ezhutināl,” he later said. “She wrote on my tongue.”

The Believer – Encounter with the Infinite

What would a truly ambitious plan to tackle climate change look like?

Despite the intensity of the debate around global warming, the question has long been considered theoretical, and few people have spent much time studying potential steps to “deep decarbonization” — certainly not at the level of detail needed for a concrete plan.

Lately, that has started to change. But the recent analyses make clear just how difficult a worldwide transition to a clean energy system is likely to be.

“The arithmetic is really brutal,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a prominent Columbia University economist. “We’re in such a dreadful situation that every country has to make this transformation, or else this isn’t going to work.”

[…]the experts focused on a specific question: Can emissions be cut enough from now to 2050 to meet an international target designed to head off the worst effects of climate change?

“It can still be done — barely,” said Guido Schmidt-Traub, the executive director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which helped organize the effort.

Really fantastic article from the NYT: A Path for Climate Change, Beyond Paris

A new scientific understanding of perception has emerged in the past few decades, and it has overturned classical, centuries-long beliefs about how our brains work—though it has apparently not penetrated the medical world yet. The old understanding of perception is what neuroscientists call “the naïve view,” and it is the view that most people, in or out of medicine, still have. We’re inclined to think that people normally perceive things in the world directly. We believe that the hardness of a rock, the coldness of an ice cube, the itchiness of a sweater are picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain.

[…]Our assumption had been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and so on contain all the information that we need for perception, and that perception must work something like a radio. It’s hard to conceive that a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert is in a radio wave. But it is. So you might think that it’s the same with the signals we receive—that if you hooked up someone’s nerves to a monitor you could watch what the person is experiencing as if it were a television show.

Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the signals, they found them to be radically impoverished. Suppose someone is viewing a tree in a clearing. Given simply the transmissions along the optic nerve from the light entering the eye, one would not be able to reconstruct the three-dimensionality, or the distance, or the detail of the bark—attributes that we perceive instantly.

[…]The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals. When Oaklander theorized that M.’s itch was endogenous, rather than generated by peripheral nerve signals, she was onto something important.

[…]The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

[WARNING! Full article contains what may be the single ickiest medical anecdote I’ve ever read. -egg]

The Itch’s Mysterious Power – The New Yorker (2008)

EMERGENCE LAB

The “Emergence Lab” is a hand painted anamorphic sculpture.
Its title refers to a phenomenon called emergence.
Through a plug system made out of 216 laser cut acrylic glass strips, a cubic framework, which contains layers pointing towards all three spatial dimensions, is created.
On each side of the cube there is one anamorphic painting that can always only be seen from one point. Since every figure fills the exact same surface as its counterpart on the opposite side, the rear image is covered while looking at one figure.

emergence lab

Whether hoverboards end up underneath every Christmas tree in America or on the shelves of the Gaoke company store, discounted for the people who made them — depends on the persistence of the capricious global consumer market, fomented by social media, which over the past six months has anointed these gliding hunks of metal and plastic its objet du jour and accepted their rapid appearance more or less unquestioningly, even though the facts around them are totally bizarre. You can’t generally buy them in brick-and-mortar stores, only off sketchy-looking Shopify sites that sometimes list fake physical addresses, or out of trucks in big cities, or in barely regulated mall kiosks. Big chains can’t even decide whether to sell them online. The price spread of the boards makes no sense: Some of them are $1,800 and some of them are $300, but they all look the same.

It’s as if the boards have come here faster than the places that should be selling them can handle. This is not a coincidence. The hoverboard industry that has unfurled in the concrete of Bao An and other similar districts is on-demand IRL content production, a super-flexible churn that hands us the playthings of social-media-driven seasonal diversion. It is the funhouse mirror reflection of the viral internet, the metal-and-cement consequence of our equally flexible commercial hype machine. It happened before with selfie sticks, and before that with drones. It may soon happen with virtual reality headsets and body-worn police cameras. It happens all the time.

Call it memeufacturing. It starts when a (typically) Western company, eager to cash in on a product made popular by the social internet, contracts a Chinese factory to make it. From here, the idea spreads throughout the elaborate social networks of Chinese electronics manufacturing until the item in question is being produced by hundreds and hundreds of competitors, who subcontract and sell components to each other, even as they all make the same thing. It reaches its saturation point quickly. It moves from product to product without sentiment. And it is proof that our never-ending digital output, our tweets and Vines and Instagrams and Facebook posts, has the power to shape the lives of people on the other side of the world.

Inside China’s Memefacturing Factories, Where The Hottest New Gadgets Are Made – BuzzFeed News

Back in 1991, in what now seems like a far more innocent time, Robert Reich published an influential book titled The Work of Nations, which among other things helped land him a cabinet post in the Clinton administration. It was a good book for its time—but time has moved on. And the gap between that relatively sunny take and Reich’s latest, Saving Capitalism, is itself an indicator of the unpleasant ways America has changed.

The Work of Nations was in some ways a groundbreaking work, because it focused squarely on the issue of rising inequality—an issue some economists, myself included, were already taking seriously, but that was not yet central to political discourse. Reich’s book saw inequality largely as a technical problem, with a technocratic, win-win solution. That was then. These days, Reich offers a much darker vision, and what is in effect a call for class war—or if you like, for an uprising of workers against the quiet class war that America’s oligarchy has been waging for decades.

Source: Challenging the Oligarchy by Paul Krugman | The New York Review of Books

Source: #1177; Stay the Course

The absolutely brilliant Bret Victor has done a fantastic piece about technologists and what role they can play in averting catastrophic climate change. Even if you’re not a technologist, this piece is remarkable: it’s one of the most lucid explanations of clean energy and climate change that I’ve ever seen, full of both well-written text and fantastic visualizations. I recommend it very highly.

What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.

Quite a bit of interesting info on this page.

HRQOL is a broad multidimensional concept that usually includes self-reported measures of physical and mental health.

For example, here’s a map of unhealthiness by state (2009 data):

Surveillance | HRQOL | CDC

To approach the subject of red mercury is to journey into a comic-book universe, a zone where the stubborn facts of science give way to unverifiable claims, fantasy and outright magic, and where villains pursuing the dark promise of a mysterious weapon could be rushing headlong to the end of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the broad agreement among nonproliferation specialists that red mercury, at least as a chemical compound with explosive pop, does not exist.

Legends of red mercury’s powers began circulating by late in the Cold War. But their breakout period came after the Soviet Union’s demise, when disarray and penury settled over the Kremlin’s arms programs. As declining security fueled worries of illicit trafficking, red mercury embedded itself in the lexicon of the freewheeling black-market arms bazaar. Aided by credulous news reports, it became an arms trafficker’s marvelous elixir, a substance that could do almost anything a shady client might need: guide missiles, shield objects from radar, equip a rogue underdog state or terrorist group with weapons rivaling those of a superpower. It was priced accordingly, at hundreds of thousands of dollars a kilogram. With time, the asking price would soar.

Source: The Doomsday Scam – The New York Times