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TWO OWLS IN LOS ANGELES
They fly over the roofs
in a ghostlike flight;
disappear into a tree.
Then they perch in parallel,
each on a TV antenna.
Absolute in upright stillness,
in a silent overlap of feathers,
urn-shaped bodies
on metal branches that draw
signals from the city sky,
the owls are ambassadors,
come to relay messages
even to us,
unvisited as we are
by the gods.
Only my lover and I,
meeting here in secret,
see them.
~ Oriana
*
THE CZECH PLAY THAT GAVE US THE WORD “ROBOT”
By the time his play “R.U.R.” (which stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”) premiered in Prague in 1921, Karel Čapek was a well-known Czech intellectual. Like many of his peers, he was appalled by the carnage wrought by the mechanical and chemical weapons that marked World War I as a departure from previous combat. He was also deeply skeptical of the utopian notions of science and technology. “The product of the human brain has escaped the control of human hands,” Čapek told the London Saturday Review following the play’s premiere. “This is the comedy of science.”
In that same interview, Čapek reflected on the origin of one of the play’s characters:
The old inventor, Mr. Rossum (whose name translated into English signifies “Mr. Intellectual” or “Mr. Brain”), is a typical representative of the scientific materialism of the last [nineteenth] century. His desire to create an artificial man — in the chemical and biological, not mechanical sense — is inspired by a foolish and obstinate wish to prove God to be unnecessary and absurd.
Young Rossum is the modern scientist, untroubled by metaphysical ideas; scientific experiment is to him the road to industrial production. He is not concerned to prove, but to manufacture.
Thus, “R.U.R.,” which gave birth to the robot, was a critique of mechanization and the ways it can dehumanize people. The word itself derives from the Czech word “robota,” or forced labor, as done by serfs. Its Slavic linguistic root, “rab,” means “slave.” The original word for robots more accurately defines androids, then, in that they were neither metallic nor mechanical.
The contrast between robots as mechanical slaves and potentially rebellious destroyers of their human makers echoes Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and helps set the tone for later Western characterizations of robots as slaves straining against their lot, ready to burst out of control. The duality echoes throughout the twentieth century: Terminator, HAL 9000, Blade Runner’s replicants.
The character Helena in “R.U.R.” is sympathetic, wanting the robots to have freedom. Radius is the robot that understands his station and chafes at the idiocy of his makers, having acted out his frustrations by smashing statues.
Helena: Poor Radius. … Couldn’t you control yourself? Now they’ll send you to the stamping mill. Won’t you speak? Why did it happen to you? You see, Radius, you are better than the rest. Dr. Gall took such trouble to make you different. Won’t you speak?
Radius: Send me to the stamping mill.
Helena: I am sorry they are going to kill you. Why weren’t you more careful?
Radius: I won’t work for you. Put me into the stamping mill.
Helena: Why do you hate us?
Radius: You are not like the Robots. You are not as skillful as the Robots. The Robots can do everything. You only give orders. You talk more than is necessary.
Helena: That’s foolish Radius. Tell me, has any one upset you? I should so much like you to understand me.
Radius: You do nothing but talk.
Helena: Dr. Gall gave you a larger brain than the rest, larger than ours, the largest in the world. You are not like the other Robots, Radius. You understand me perfectly.
Radius: I don’t want any master. I know everything for myself.
Helena: That’s why I had you put into the library, so that you could read everything, understand everything, and then — Oh, Radius, I wanted to show the whole world that the Robots were our equals. That’s what I wanted of you.
Radius: I don’t want any master. I want to be master over others.
Helena’s compassion saves Radius from the stamping mill, and he later leads the robot revolution that displaces the humans from power. Čapek is none too subtle in portraying the triumph of artificial humans over their creators:
Radius: The power of man has fallen. By gaining possession of the factory we have become masters of everything. The period of mankind has passed away. A new world has arisen. … Mankind is no more. Mankind gave us too little life. We wanted more life.
Humans were doomed in the play even before Radius led the revolt. When mechanization overtakes basic human traits, people lose the ability to reproduce. As robots increase in capability, vitality, and self-awareness, humans become more like their machines — humans and robots, in Čapek’s critique, are essentially one and the same. The measure of worth, industrial productivity, is won by the robots that can do the work of “two and a half men.” Such a contest implicitly critiques the efficiency movement that emerged just before World War I, which ignored many essential human traits.
The debt of “R.U.R.” to Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is substantial, even though the works are separated by almost exactly a century. In both cases, humans show hubris by trying to create artificial life. (Recall that even today, Rodney Brooks, an esteemed roboticist and former director of he MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, refers to robots as “our creatures.”)
Whether humans get the recipe wrong, as in the earlier novel, or make beings smarter than the humans who spawned them, as in the case of Čapek’s play and its offspring, humans pay the price for aspiring to play God. In both works, the flawed relationship between creator and creature drives the plot, and in both cases, the conflict ends in bloodshed.
Few people today know “R.U.R.” But in its time, the play was a sensation, with translations into more than 30 languages immediately after publication. Nearly 100 years on, apart from our obvious reliance on the play’s terminology and worldview, we still hear its echoes. The author and play title turn up as Easter eggs in such popular venues as Batman cartoons, Star Trek, Dr. Who, and Futurama: The people who portray our culture’s robots certainly know of their debt to Čapek, even if most of us do not.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-czech-play-that-gave-us-the-word-robot?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
*
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A SCHOOL BARS SMARTPHONES
~ When the weather is nice, the Buxton boarding school moves lunch outside. Students, faculty and guests grab their food from the kitchen, and eat together under a white tent that overlooks western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains.
As the close of the school year neared last June, talk turned to final assignments (the English class was finishing Moby-Dick) and end-of-year fun (there was a trip planned to a local lake). It was, in most ways, a typical teenage afternoon – except that no one was on their phones.
Buxton was wrapping up the first year of a simple yet novel experiment: banning cellphones on campus. Or, rather, smartphones.
Instead, the school gave everyone on campus – including staff – a Light Phone, that is, a “dumb” phone with limited functionality. The devices can make calls, send texts (slowly) and can’t load modern applications; instead coming with deliberately cumbersome versions of music and mapping apps. They are about the size of a deck of cards, with black and white screens.
As one student put it: “It’s like the demon baby of an iPad and a Kindle.”
Most everyone agrees, however, that the school is better off without these hell devices. (And yes, that includes students.) There are fewer interruptions during class, more meaningful interactions around campus, and less time spent on screens.
“It’s a problem we’ve found a pretty good way to address,” Scott Hunter, who teaches English and music, said of smartphones. Bea Sas, a senior at Buxton, added: “I think people are a lot more social.”
For many teachers, their students’ phone use is exasperating. “It’s every class, every period,” said Mark McLaughlin, a math teacher at Neah-Kah-Nie high school in Oregon. “The worst part of my job is being the cellphone police.”
Educators across the country report waging a near-constant battle against phones. A survey of a school district in Virginia found that about a third of teachers were telling students to put away their cellphones five to 10 times a class, and 14.7% did so more than 20 times a class.
When a middle school in Canada surveyed staff, 75% of respondents thought that cellphones were negatively affecting their students’ physical and mental health. Nearly two-thirds believed the devices were adversely affecting academic performances as well.
“It’s a big issue,” said Arnold Glass, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University who has researched the impact of cellphones on student performance. “They lose anywhere between a half and whole letter grade if they are allowed to consult their phones in class.”
Ian Trombulak, a guidance counselor at Lamoille Union high school in northern Vermont, is also facing a flood of cellphones at his school. “I have kids who during the day get a Snapchat or text and it ruins their entire day,” he said. Another issue he’s seeing is that students use cellphones to coordinate mass trips to the bathroom so they can hang out during class. “It feels like it distracts from the learning that happens on the academic level.”
When I mentioned the Buxton experiment to Trombulak, he was intrigued. One thing it could address, he noted, was the argument from students that they need phones to communicate with their parents. And, he said, teenagers often adapt to new parameters relatively quickly. He remembers a field trip with his students where, at the last minute, everyone learned that cellphones wouldn’t be allowed. At first, the news was apocalyptic.
“They were so upset. They didn’t know how to handle themselves. I was really nervous,” said Trombulak, reliving the drama. But part way through the trip, the kids largely forgot about their phones and, at one point, they self-policed a girl who tried to sneak a phone on to the rope source.
“At the end of the first day, sitting around the campfire, they said, ‘We didn’t think about our phones all day,’” said Trombulak. “That was really cool.”
When the weather is nice, the Buxton boarding school moves lunch outside. Students, faculty and guests grab their food from the kitchen, and eat together under a white tent that overlooks western Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains.
As the close of the school year neared last June, talk turned to final assignments (the English class was finishing Moby-Dick) and end-of-year fun (there was a trip planned to a local lake). It was, in most ways, a typical teenage afternoon – except that no one was on their phones.
Buxton was wrapping up the first year of a simple yet novel experiment: banning cellphones on campus. Or, rather, smartphones.
Instead, the school gave everyone on campus – including staff – a Light Phone, that is, a “dumb” phone with limited functionality. The devices can make calls, send texts (slowly) and can’t load modern applications; instead coming with deliberately cumbersome versions of music and mapping apps. They are about the size of a deck of cards, with black and white screens.
As one student put it: “It’s like the demon baby of an iPad and a Kindle.”
Most everyone agrees, however, that the school is better off without these hell devices. (And yes, that includes students.) There are fewer interruptions during class, more meaningful interactions around campus, and less time spent on screens.
“It’s a problem we’ve found a pretty good way to address,” Scott Hunter, who teaches English and music, said of smartphones. Bea Sas, a senior at Buxton, added: “I think people are a lot more social.”
A student decorates a piece during a ceramics class, while other students interact during an art block at Buxton school.
When I mentioned the Buxton experiment to Trombulak, he was intrigued. One thing it could address, he noted, was the argument from students that they need phones to communicate with their parents. And, he said, teenagers often adapt to new parameters relatively quickly. He remembers a field trip with his students where, at the last minute, everyone learned that cellphones wouldn’t be allowed. At first, the news was apocalyptic.
“They were so upset. They didn’t know how to handle themselves. I was really nervous,” said Trombulak, reliving the drama. But part way through the trip, the kids largely forgot about their phones and, at one point, they self-policed a girl who tried to sneak a phone on to the rope source.
“At the end of the first day, sitting around the campfire, they said, ‘We didn’t think about our phones all day,’” said Trombulak. “That was really cool.”
To an extent, Buxton saw a similar progression through the stages of panic, grief and ultimately some level of acceptance. “When it was announced I practically had a breakdown,” said then senior Max Weeks. And while he’s still not a fan of what he says was a “unilateral” decision to switch to the Light Phone, he said, overall, the experience “hasn’t been as bad as I expected”.
It’s an open secret that students still sneak phones into their rooms on campus, with some testing the limits more than others. “People get pretty ballsy,” said Yamailla Marks, also a Buxton senior, and get caught. Generally, though, it’s hard to spot a smartphone on campus.
That includes staff. The head of the school, Peter Beck, says he gave up his iPhone for a Light Phone and installed an old GPS system in his car for when he needs to go out into the world. He’s thrilled with how the first year has gone. (Beck left the school at the end of the summer).
It’s difficult to tell how the new phone policy is affecting academic performance because Buxton uses a narrative evaluation system. But culturally, Beck says, the move has been transformative, often in small but cumulatively meaningful ways.
“People are engaging in the lounges. They are lingering after class to chat,” said Beck, who estimates that he’s now having more conversations than ever at the school. “All these face-to-face interactions, the frequency has gone through the roof.”
Another effect has been a surge of students signing up for the school’s photography class, which uses film cameras. Enrollment nearly tripled. While a popular new teacher may have been a factor, Light Phones also don’t have cameras.
“It’s much more of a process to get photos now than with the phone,” said Marks, but she’s fallen “in love” with photography. Still, when she goes home for breaks it’s back to her smartphone. Then she has to give it up again when she comes back to school. “It’s really funny how you adjust very quickly. Like subconsciously.”
Buxton isn’t alone in trying to curb the use of smartphones in schools. As of 2020, the National Center for Education Statistics reported more than three-quarters of schools in the US had moved to restrict the non-academic use of the devices. France banned smartphone use in schools in 2018. But whether the private schools’ Light Phone approach could – or should – be applied to public schools wrestling with how to handle cellphones is up for debate.
As a parent, Mark’s mother, Nina Marks, has been thrilled by the Buxton experiment. The school picked, and largely won, a fight that she hadn’t been able to with her daughter. But as a teacher, she’s hesitant.
“Children and adolescents have supercomputers in their pockets … It’s a constant battle to deal with,” she said, agreeing with other educators. But, she adds, having to police cellphones has created friction with her students in the past and can single out students in ways that can be problematic. She likes her current school’s policy, which is to let each teacher decide how to handle phones in their classrooms.
Marks isn’t alone in being skeptical of outright bans. A staff survey at a school district in Illinois found that 70% of the 295 respondents thought students should be allowed to have their phones at school. “We aren’t teaching them accountability and responsibility by storing it for the day,” wrote one anonymous commenter.
Trombulak also sees phones as a potential teaching moment for students. “They’re struggling with the phone, but they didn’t invent the phone. They didn’t buy the phone,” he said. “If school is a place you’re supposed to learn how to do things, then safe technology use needs to become more part of the curriculum.”
Providing dumb phones could be part of the way forward, Nina Marks admits, but she wonders if funds at already strapped public schools could be put to better use. “If you think of people as addicts, you have to replace that with something else,” she said. “If there was extra money to go around, rather than buying every kid another device, I would give every kid a journal and some really nice paint markers.”
Nonetheless, Light Phone has seen interest from other private schools and school groups, intrigued by the Buxton model, as well as organizations such as churches.
The company bills itself as an antidote to smartphone overuse – a non-alcoholic beer of phones. “We’re actually pretty into tech – we built a phone. We’re just not into extractive tech that manipulates your emotional state,” said Joe Hollier, one of the founders. “So many people got a smartphone and didn’t intend to wake up and check their email before they brush their teeth. But that’s what started happening.”
Light Phone is also working on potential tweaks to the design. While Hollier says that Light Phones are intentionally small and slow, so that people use them less, students report that they also break easily and the batteries die quickly, which wasn’t in the plan. They are also debating whether to add the option for a camera, or other features. But, Hollier doesn’t want the broader message to disappear in the details.
“It’s about trying to find a balance that’s appropriate for you, whether that’s a Light Phone, a simplified iPhone or whatever it is,” he advised. “[The goal] is to hopefully remind people that we have the agency to decide how we use these things.”
Hollier was among the diners as lunch wound down at Buxton. When the chatter waned, staff and students started making daily announcements. Seniors should meet in the library to go over their graduation speeches. A reminder that prom was just a few days away, followed by a reprimand for whoever stole sparklers from the chemistry lab and a note that the biology class was changing locations.
Then, over the speakers, Can I Call You Rose? by Thee Sacred Souls started to croon. And, on a walkway replete with flowers, a proposal to prom unfurled – they said yes. “The best promposal ever,” cheered one member of the crowd. Another added: “That was soooo good.”
No one caught the moment on camera.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/cellphone-smartphone-bans-schools?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Mary:
*
GAZA TUNNEL NETWORK MORE EXTENSIVE THAN FIRST THOUGHT
Israeli soldier, Shifa Hospital Tunnel
Senior Israeli defense officials now assess that Hamas’s Gaza tunnel network is between 350 and 450 miles long, far longer than previously believed, according to a Tuesday report.
The estimate reported by The New York Times is markedly higher than an Israel Defense Forces’ assessment last month that there are some 250 miles of Hamas tunnels under the Gaza Strip, and an astounding figure given the enclave is only some 140 square miles in total size.
The newspaper quoted Israeli intelligence officials estimating there are around 100 miles of tunnels under Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where IDF troops are engaged in intensive fighting as they search for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other terror commanders believed to be hiding underground.
Two Israeli defense officials who spoke anonymously said there were roughly 5,700 separate shafts leading down to the tunnels.
The report stressed that the estimates could not be independently confirmed and noted there are different assessments among Israeli officials on the extent of the subterranean passages.
Since launching a ground offensive following in the wake of the October 7 massacres, in which Hamas-led terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took around 240 hostages, Israeli forces have worked to destroy the tunnels, uncovering more and more of the Gaza-ruling terror organization’s underground network. A defense official told the Times that this task has grown easier as the ground offensive pushes deeper in the Strip.
The official said the IDF previously may have needed a year to detect a single tunnel, but is now able to do so much quicker as a result of the vast reams of intelligence gathered in Gaza during the ground campaign, finding details on the computers of Hamas operatives involved in the digging and discovering a list of families that “hosted” tunnel shafts in their homes, among other information.
The official said the IDF has also figured out about the “triangle” system, with troops likely to find tunnels below an area with a school, hospital or mosque.
The official cautioned that it could take years to dismantle the tunnels, noting that underground passages must be mapped and checked for booby traps and hostages before Israeli forces can destroy them.
Additionally, the report highlighted the different types of tunnels that Israeli forces have come across in Gaza, such as those used for fighting or manufacturing weapons. There are also differences in quality, with the more sophisticated tunnels slated for senior figures and rudimentary ones for fighters.
Last week, the IDF said Hamas has used more than 6,000 tons of concrete and 1,800 tons of steel for its extensive tunnel network, citing new intelligence. It also said Hamas likely invested tens of millions of dollars in the project.
Several hostages freed in a ceasefire deal in late November described being held inside tunnels, which Hamas has laid throughout the Gaza Strip and which Israel says have long been used to smuggle weapons and fighters throughout the enclave.
It is believed that 132 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza — not all of them alive — after 105 civilians were released from Hamas captivity during the late November truce. Four hostages were released prior to that, and one was rescued by troops. The bodies of eight hostages have also been recovered and three hostages were mistakenly killed by the military. The IDF has confirmed the deaths of 25 of those still held by Hamas, citing intelligence and findings obtained by troops operating in Gaza. ~
https://www.timesofisrael.com/gaza-tunnels-stretch-at-least-350-miles-far-longer-than-past-estimate-report/?utm_campaign=most_popular&utm_source=website&utm_medium=article_end&utm_content=8
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Mary:
The extent of the Hamas tunnel network, the resources used to build and maintain it, the millions it cost, and the obvious use of human shields evidenced by placing hubs beneath hospitals, schools and mosques, are all testament to the enormous dedication of the terrorists to their evil goal...which is neither peace nor a separate state, but the total eradication of Israel and the Jewish people.
Oriana:
You are absolutely right. At the same time, one has to admit that the dream of Theodore Herzl and other Zionists was a Jewish homeland without the Arabs. Each side can make a strong historical claim to the land (though the Arab population began arriving only with the expansion of Islam). Youtube is a rich terrain of a never-ending e-war of words over "whose land it is."
I know this is going to sound naive, but I dare hope that eventually there might be enough intermixing and intermarriage to cancel out any sharp ethnic differences — but that could take a century or two . . .
But yes, I totally agree that the funds used by Hamas to build the tunnels would be better spent on real schools and clinics, cultural activities, tree-planting, sports, and so on. But those who seek power rarely care about the welllbeing of the population. Grocery shopping is so boring compared to urban warfare. And not a week passes by without someone saying we are close to the Third World War — that this war is actually already happening, but is not yet "hot" except for a dozen or so trouble spots.
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ELENA GOLD ON TOILETS AND GENOCIDE
In Russia, more people are dying annually because of falling into the toilet hole and drowning than there were civilians killed in Donbas in 2021 — the year when Russia decided to invade Ukraine, “to stop the genocide” (21 civilians died in Donbas in 2021, because of hostilities).
So, Russian toilets are “committing genocide” of Russians.
Thanks to Beglov, we now know: Russian soldiers destroy Ukrainians schools, universities, kindergartens, cafes, shopping centers, raze the whole villages and towns to ruins, so that people in Russia never have access to bathrooms that can be used both by boys and girls.
Got it. ~ Elena Gold, Quora
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TIGER PARENTING
It's been over a decade now since tiger parenting became a parenting buzzword with the release of Amy Chua's book "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" in 2011. In it, Chua details the strict way she was raising her two daughters and the academic and extracurricular achievements she expected them to have.
While she may have popularized it, Chua didn't invent tiger parenting: the concept is similar to an "authoritarian" parenting style that's been around for decades. But she definitely got people talking about this intense style of child-rearing. So, what is tiger parenting? And is this firm approach worth it? Experts explain.
Tiger parenting is a term coined in Western culture by Yale Law School professor and mom Amy Chua. As Chua explains in her book, her parenting style was inspired by Confucian virtues and philosophy, which emphasize strong personal ethics and morality. Her book also compared traditional Chinese and Western approaches to parenting.
"It refers to a parenting style characterized by strict discipline, high expectations, and an intense focus on academic and extracurricular achievements," says Alisa Ruby Bash, PsyD, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Malibu, CA. "Tiger parents typically push their children to excel academically and often demand perfection in various aspects of their lives.”
Tiger parenting "puts a lot of demand on the child and there's a lot of parent direction, as opposed to child direction," says Robert Keder, MD, a pediatrician who specializes in developmental behavior at Connecticut Children's Medical Center. Meaning parents call the shots and children must follow their rules or face punishments. "Tiger parents have high demands on their kids but also produce kids who are very high achievers," Dr. Keder says.
What Does Tiger Parenting Look Like?
There are a few hallmarks of tiger parents, according to the experts we polled:
High academic expectations: "Tiger parents set extremely high academic standards for their children, expecting them to excel in school and achieve top grades," Dr. Bash says.
Intense schedules: Children in tiger parenting households usually have tightly regimented schedules that include extensive study time and extracurricular activities, with little room for free play, social interactions, or relaxing, Dr. Bash says.
Strict rules: "Tiger parents enforce strict rules and discipline, with little tolerance for disobedience or excuses," Dr. Bash says. "This can be accompanied with physical or emotional disciplinary measures."
Focus on specific skills: Parents usually require their children to master certain skills, like musical instruments or sports. Tiger parents "invest a significant amount of time and resources into these pursuits," Dr. Bash says.
Kids raised in tiger households are also usually very polite, Dr. Keder says. "They say 'please' and 'thank you,'" he says. "Everybody loves a child or young adult who says 'please' or 'thank you.’"
The Pros and Cons of Tiger Parenting
There are definite pros and cons of tiger parenting. "Kids may learn to be disciplined and push themselves," says Gina Song, MD, a pediatrician at Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital. Kids raised by tiger parents also tend to develop strong goals and work ethics, Dr. Bash says. These children often grow up to have mastery of a craft or skill and excel in their careers, she says.
But while tiger parenting can produce successful kids, it has plenty of drawbacks. "There are tiger parents who have good intentions, but their kids might be more anxious. This style of parenting just might not be the best fit for them," Dr. Keder says.
Tiger parenting can also lead to high levels of stress in kids, "which may have long-term mental health implications," Dr. Bash says. "These children often have experienced trauma and abuse if they ever disobeyed their parents' demands," she says.
Kids raised in tiger parenting households tend to have limited social development, per Dr. Bash. "Children raised in this style may have limited opportunities to develop social skills and make friends, as their schedules are often dominated by academic and structured activities," she says.
Tiger parenting can also strain relationships between parents and kids, Dr. Song says. "Kids may see the strict upbringing and their relationship with the parent as unfavorable," she says.
Some kids may even rebel or only follow the rules laid down by their parents when the parents are around, Dr. Keder says. "Sometimes the presence of the parent keeps the behavior there, but when the parent is not there, the behavior is not always there either," he says.
When it comes to choosing a parenting style, doctors recommend tapping into the needs of your kids, as well as those of your family, to settle on a method that works for you.
"Understanding your kid's needs at each stage of growth and figuring out what you would like them to learn may help on how to parent your children," Dr. Song says.
"Overall, it's up to parents to do their own inner work to discover how they can find their own parenting style," Dr. Bash says. "At the end of the day, parents must remember that their children are not their possessions or experiments, but unique sovereign beings who are on the planet to fulfill their potential and to know who they are.”
https://www.popsugar.com/family/tiger-parenting-49330974
Oriana:
When a parent is attuned to the child's talents, and provides opportunities to develop those talents, all is well. But that implies that the child needs to try out various activities and have a say as to the field s/he in which to excel.
Come to think of it, if here is a natural talent, usually nothing will stop the child from developing it — parental pressure is not necessary. A gifted child will find ways to learn — just let him or her be. A smart parent will enjoy watching a child pursue his activities with astonishing persistence.
In fact I've met students whose uneducated parents weren't in the least interested in matters of the mind, and yet the children turned out to be academic achievers. "There was a public library within a walking distance," they'd say. "Once I discovered it, there was no stopping me."
*
ONE LAST ARTICLE ON MAESTRO
~ Maestro, like many recent biopics about the great artists of our past, is more about the man than his art. The new Netflix film tracks the life of the great conductor Leonard Bernstein, but surprisingly sheds little light behind the making of his greatest works, Candide and West Side Story. Instead, Maestro—starring and directed by Bradley Cooper—focuses on Bernstein's complicated relationship with the many loves of his life. This includes, but certainly isn't limited to: music, his wife, Felicia Montealegre, and his various affairs.
In many ways, Maestro is exceptionally faithful to Bernstein's life. For starters, it was an open secret that he had extramarital relationships with men. In a letter to his clarinetist, David Oppenheim (played by Matt Bomer), he even suggested that it would be a good idea to marry a beard. Maestro alleges that the two friends and longtime collaborators also shared a relationship. The film may have inferred this through the letter's hint that Oppenheim second-guessed his marriage to singer Judy Holliday.
But after meeting at a party and having full awareness of Bernstein's struggles with his sexuality, actress Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan) married him anyway. As she once wrote to him in a letter published alongside Oppenheim's in 2014's The Leonard Bernstein Letters, their marriage was "a bloody mess." Still, they two stayed married for over 25 years and had three children together, until Montealegre's death in 1978.
“You are a homosexual and may never change,” she wrote at the time. “You don’t admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?... I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr... let’s try and see what happens if you are free to do as you like, but without guilt and confession.”
Montealegre also admits in the letter that she never regretted marrying Bernstein. She gave up her career as an actress to raise their family, and even converted to Judaism. "My mother was a fairly conventional lady and so she expected to be treated like one,” Bernstein's youngest daughter, Nina, told the London Times back in 2010. "The deal was that he would be discreet and that she would maintain her dignity.”
Leonard and Felicia, 1959
All the while, Bernstein tried to hide his affairs from a deeply homophobic 1950s America. He sought advice from Aaron Copland (played by Brian Klugman), a fellow composer who was openly gay but still held a very private life. Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky, one of Bernstein's mentors, allegedly urged the composer to marry Montealegre to conceal his private activities. In the film, Koussevitzky (played by Yasen Peyankov) goes even further—suggesting that Bernstein change his Jewish surname as well.
Maestro also details Bernstein's recurring affairs with music scholar Tom Cothran (played by Gideon Glick), with whom he would share many vacations in North Carolina. When his wife fell ill with lung cancer in the late '70s, Bernstein returned and stayed with her until her death. Even through all the fighting, resentment, and loose loyalties, many friends and family members affirm that Bernstein and Montealegre did share love for one another.
"They were really great friends and probably that counts for the most in the long run, that they could still make each other laugh," Bernstein’s daughter Jamie (played by Maya Hawke in Maestro) told PBS during an interview in 1997. "They could do things that they were interested in together, read the same books and go to the same theater and be interested in [what] one another has to say about those things, you know, I think that’s probably what keeps a marriage together more than, I don’t know, more than passion.” ~
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a46166568/leonard-bernstein-felicia-montealegre-true-story-maestro/
Oriana:
I am somewhat puzzled by the sharp dislike of Felicia I instantly felt whenever she was on the screen, and especially in the love scenes. Her barracuda smile and his pretending to be a conventional family man. I didn't think the two had any erotic chemistry on the screen. That existed in the glimpses of Lenny's yearning for his male lovers: the subtlety, the secrecy of that forbidden love. That was the real, private side of the complex artist, not the "normal family" façade. The movie, by protesting too much, actually makes it all the more obvious.
One of my favorite moments in the movie: Lenny and another man don't actually hold hands when sitting side by side; but they do hook their pinkies in a wonderful way.)
(It's not that I am against conventional families. It's just "for other people.")
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STARS ALONE DON’T EXPLAIN BLACK HOLES
At the center of practically every galaxy today isn’t just a collection of stars, gas, and dust, but a monster behemoth: a supermassive black hole. Ranging from millions to billions of solar masses, these cosmic monstrosities are responsible for some of the most violent, energetic events in the known Universe.
When a star or other massive object passes too close to one, the black hole’s gravity can violently tear it apart: a tidal disruption event.
When gas or other matter gets accreted around that black hole, the acceleration of that matter produces jets of radiation and particles: an active galactic nucleus, blazar, or quasar, depending on how we view it.
And when another black hole merges with a supermassive one, it generates incredibly energetic gravitational waves: perhaps the most energetic events in all the cosmos.
Today, even the most massive of the known black holes represent only about 0.1% of the stellar mass of the galaxy: just one-thousandth of the amount of mass found by summing up all the stars in the galactic environment surrounding it.
For a long time, astronomers have wondered just how these supermassive black holes came to be: did they form from earlier generations of stars, or was something else needed to explain them? With a large suite of new data now available owing to the advent of JWST [James Webb Space Telescope), the answer now seems certain: stars alone can’t explain these black holes. Here’s the evidence that leads us to that conclusion.
The first thing we have to understand is that there are two main ways that black holes can grow:
1. by the steady, gradual accretion and infall of matter, such as gas; and
2. by individual events such as mergers and the swallowing of massive objects, such as stars, stellar remnants, and other black holes.
The first one, in general, is the primary method that leads to growth over time, while the second can lead to growth in leaps, jumps, and bursts, particularly when violent events such as galactic mergers occur. (And, specifically, when two supermassive black holes, one originating from each progenitor galaxy, merge together.)
When you have an accreting black hole, such as an active galactic nucleus or a quasar, there has to be a balance between the outward force/pressure of the radiation and winds that emerge from the object and the gravitational force of matter that falls inward. If there’s too much infall of matter, then there will be a rise in the amount of radiation and winds, and that will blow the infalling matter back out: a phenomenon that occurs when black hole growth proceeds at a rate that exceeds a certain theoretical limit. Because of this relation, there’s a limit to how quickly objects like black holes can grow, and hence, if we extrapolate backward in time, there’s a limit to how large an initial “seed” for these supermassive black holes must have been.
For a black hole of even tens of billions of solar masses today, that doesn’t necessarily pose any sort of problem, because today’s black holes have had 13.8 billion years of cosmic history over which they grow. But if we look back in time, we would have naively expected that the most massive black holes that we would have seen at early times would be far less massive than the enormous black holes spotted today: in the billions or even tens of billions of solar masses.
In the pre-JWST era, it was rare to find astronomical objects — things like galaxies and quasars — from the first ~1.5 billion years of the Universe’s history (beyond a redshift of z = 4, in astronomy-speak), as those objects were not only incredibly far away, but were fainter, lower in mass, and had their light severely redshifted by the expansion of the Universe. The few that we did find, if they had enough activity coming from their centers, gave enough information to infer the masses of the supermassive black holes they housed from data in the non-visible portion of the spectrum: such as at infrared or X-ray wavelengths.
Quite surprisingly, we began to find that, even before the Universe was a mere 1 billion years old, some of these black holes had masses that rivaled or even exceeded a billion solar masses.
That led to a big puzzle: how did black holes get so massive so quickly? After all, there were three major options to consider that would still be consistent with the other data we had about the Universe from observations of cosmic structure, galaxy evolution, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, and more.
1. The Universe was born without black holes, and none arose until the first stars lived-and-died, with the most massive among them leaving black hole remnants behind.
2. The Universe was born without black holes, but formed them not only from stars, but from clumps of matter — such as streams of gas — that directly collapsed to form event horizons around them.
3. The Universe was born with either primordial black holes or incredibly massive, overdense seeds that would swiftly collapse to create black holes, long before any stars had the opportunity to form.
The first option is a certainty: as soon as our Universe made stars, many of those first stars would die in a catastrophic supernova explosion, their cores would collapse, and many of those stars would leave a black hole behind as a remnant. Those black holes, however, would only have masses around 100 times that of the Sun.
The second option is an intriguing possibility, bolstered by recent theoretical simulations by Muhammad Latif and Daniel Whalen, that could lead to more massive seeds: up to 10,000 or even perhaps 100,000 solar masses each. The third option, while exotic, would perhaps require invocation if still more massive seeds were needed.
Now that we’re in the JWST era, we’ve discovered our first black holes from when the Universe was less than 600 million (0.6 billion) years of age: from when the Universe was just 4.3% of its current age or younger. In fact, we now have three detected black holes from that era.
Seeing black holes that are more massive early on, as compared to the stellar masses we find in the galaxies that house them at those early times, is strong evidence that — at least in these galaxies — the black holes that we are seeing did not arise from the stars themselves, but rather from more massive seeds than stars, alone, can provide. The fact that these black holes are “only” a factor of 10, 100, or even 1000 times larger than they are at present suggests that they didn’t form from stars, but rather from the direct collapse process of clouds of normal matter, further suggesting that invoking something exotic, like primordial black holes, is unnecessary.
We still don’t know whether there are other, smaller black holes out there that have yet to be revealed, particularly among the faintest, lowest-mass galaxies that strain the limits of what JWST can detect. There could yet be multiple populations of galaxies with black holes: some of which were formed by direct collapse, and others that formed from the remnants of the first stars, as we are only beginning to take a census of these objects.
However, the era of claiming that nothing more than stars — living and dying as normal, with some of the most massive ones having their cores collapse down to black holes — are required to give rise to the supermassive black holes we find at later times is now over. Something more is required: perhaps it’s direct collapse, which is the leading suspect, or perhaps it’s something even more exotic.
Perhaps stars can still explain many of the supermassive black holes that arise in the Universe — or perhaps stars are only a sub-dominant effect, and it’s direct collapse that is responsible for the majority of supermassive black holes in the Universe. With the JWST era now in full swing, the good news is, we’re likely to soon find out.
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/stars-cant-explain-black-holes-jwst/
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ARE BOOMERS TO BLAME FOR THE HOUSING SHORTAGE?
~ Buying a family-sized home with three or more bedrooms used to be manageable for young people with children. But with home prices climbing faster than wages, mortgage rates still close to 23-year highs and a shortage of homes nationwide, many Millennials with kids can’t afford it. And Gen Z adults with kids? Even harder.
Meanwhile, Baby Boomers are staying in their larger homes for longer, preferring to age in place and stay active in a neighborhood that’s familiar to them. And even if they sold, where would they go? There is a shortage of smaller homes in those neighborhoods.
As a result, empty-nest Baby Boomers own 28% of large homes — and Milliennials with kids own just 14%, according to a Redfin analysis released Tuesday. Gen Z families own just 0.3% of homes with three bedrooms or more.
“Boomers love their homes. Even if they did want to sell, it is now prohibitively expensive for many Millennials,” said Sheharyar Bokhari, senior economist at Redfin, who did the analysis, to CNN. “These are larger homes where there are only one or two people living there and, typically, they bought it a while ago, so it has value.”
This is a change from the historical norm, according to the research. Ten years ago young families were just as likely as empty nesters to own large homes.
The report defines age groups in the 2022 Census data as: adult Gen Zers were 19 to 25 years old, Millennials were aged 26 to 41, Gen Xers were 42 to 57, and Baby Boomers were 58 to 76.
Even though Millennials with kids own half as many large homes as empty nesters, Millennials make up roughly 28% of the country’s adult population, the largest share of any generation.
With many young people already delaying having children as they work to find stability in their family and career, the well-established milestone of purchasing a home for the family is increasingly out of reach.
THE LOCK-IN EFFECTS, BECAUSE OF THE RATES, IS ONLY HALF OF IT
Few homeowners of any age want to sell right now. This is crushing inventory of homes for sale and keeping prices high.
Even though current homeowners have record high levels of equity in their homes, there is very little incentive to sell.
More than 90% of current homeowners with mortgages have rates that are 6% or under, according to ICE Mortgage Technology, a mortgage data firm. With the current average rate for a 30-year, fixed loan hovering around 6.6%, nearly all but the most recent homeowners would be taking on a mortgage rate higher than their existing rate if they were to sell and buy another home.
While that is surely keeping some Boomers in their home, said Bokhari, it is only part of the reason.
“Half of these Baby Boomers own their home outright, so the rate lock-in doesn’t even apply to them,” he told CNN. “They just aren’t downsizing. Even if it is just one or two people, or a couple. They love their big house.”
For those who own their home outright, the median monthly cost of owning a home, which includes insurance and property taxes, among other costs, is just $612, according to the report.
“Logically, empty nesters are the most likely group to sell big homes and downsize,” said Bokhari. “They no longer have children living at home and don’t need as much space. The problem for younger families who wish their parents’ generation would list their big homes: Boomers don’t have much motivation to sell, financially or otherwise.”
BOOMERS HAVE ALWAYS LOVED THEIR HOMES
Older Americans today own a much bigger share of large homes than they did a decade ago and young families own a smaller share.
But who owns them has changed.
Ten years ago, in 2012, empty nesters of the Silent Generation, who were between the ages of 67 and 84 at the time, took up 16% of homes that were three-bedrooms or larger. That is a smaller share than Gen Xers with kids, who were aged 32 to 47 at the time, and took up 19% of those large homes.
But even then empty nest Baby Boomers had the most large homes. In 2012, empty-nest boomers, who were then aged 48 to 66, owned and occupied 26.4% of three-bedroom-plus homes in the U.S., comparable to today’s share.
Young families take up the smallest share of large homes in coastal areas like California and Florida, where large homes tend to be more expensive. Instead, the Midwest is where Millennials own the largest share of larger homes. But there is no city where Millennials with kids own more than 18% of large homes.
Empty nesters own at least 20% of large homes everywhere in the country. But they take up the smallest share of three-bedroom-plus homes in popular migration destinations as well as California cities like Riverside, California, with 21.9%; Salt Lake City at 22%; and Austin, Texas, at 22.2%.
WHAT’S AHEAD
There’s some small silver lining in the year ahead, said Bokhari: Affordability is expected to improve somewhat in 2024.
Mortgage rates are trending down and are expected to come down more as 2024 goes on. That will bring the cost of homeownership lower for young families.
As mortgage rates fall, more homeowners will see the gap shrink between their existing mortgage rate and current rates for another home, making selling more palatable.
But would-be homebuyers waiting for a so called “Silver Tsunami” of older homeowners selling their homes en masse should not hold their breath, said Bokhari.
“Some Boomers are ready to downsize into a condo or move somewhere new for retirement, and the mortgage-rate lock-in effect is starting to ease,” he said.
But “there won’t be a flood of inventory. There will be a trickle,” he added.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/16/economy/boomers-own-more-larger-homes-than-millennial-families/index.html
Oriana:
The joy of having a large house and yard is undeniable, though there are of course times when you want to strangle the politicians responsible for property taxes and the insurance people who use every ruse and “act of God” to charge more.
But it is indeed a easy to comprehend the resentment that at least some young people feel about having to live in cramped apartments, with rent going up every year, while their parents enjoy a spacious house at a fixed mortgage, or perhaps even already paid off. The children of boomers typically grew up in single-family houses, and dislike seeing how they, and basically their whole generation, is stuck with a lower standard of living — at least for a while.
The expectation that each new generation would in fact be ahead of their parents ended a long time ago. And mind you, even some well-to-do boomers complain that they can’t give their children what their parents gave to them.
And while the adult children used to help out their parents financially, this situation seems to have reversed itself: now it’s the parents and grandparents who keep on subsidizing the younger generations.
I was puzzled as to why this article never mentions one big reason for not wanting to move: the expense and the back-breaking chores of moving. For me, moving is like a serious illness — or, without confusing the matter with analogies, moving is a huge upending of one's life and it takes a terrible amount of work! Even if you hire professional movers, you still have to figure out what to keep and what to discard. And then, in the new place, the weeks of taking things out of boxes and arranging the new space. To the younger set, with more muscle and energy, that may be relatively trivial; the “parent generation” gets physically and mentally exhausted as perhaps never before, now that various electronic gadgets have to connected and set up just right.
But it’s losing the trusted doctor and dentist, one’s favorite bank and grocery market, and the helpful friends that the old neighbors gradually became, that may hurt most. Establishing everything from scratch and notifying a gazillion places about “change of address” — just thinking about it can be exhausting. (OK, maybe that's just me: I find such chores incredibly boring and exhausting. But when I saw tears in the eyes of an elderly man who was moving out because his wife wanted to be "closer to the kids and grandkids," I thought that perhaps my attachment isn't unique after all. And did the wife look happy to be moving out? No.)
Unless property taxes become unbearably high, it’s a lot easier to stay put. Besides, there may not be a suitable place to move into. But supposing you do find a good-enough new place, the chores and expenses of moving are quite stressful. And finally, finally, let’s admit the real reason, even if it sounds sentimental: we love our house and the tall tree in front of it; we love the hummingbird that weaves its nest in the lower branches, and the owl that hoots near the top; we love the indestructible bougainvillea and hibiscus; we love the whole familiar neighborhood, down to a neighbor's dachshund.
Like a cat happy in a cardboard box, we too feel happy and safe when we live in a familiar space, dear to us. 
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THE LONG-FORGOTTEN PUBLILIUS SYRUS AND HIS IMMORTAL WORDS
Some quotes are far more famous than the people who invented of them. The best example of this was a man named Publilius Syrus. Syrus was a slave from Syria, brought to Rome and freed by his master on account of his wit. His master then educated Syrus, who ended up a writer.
Among the enduring sayings of Publilius Syrus, we count, for instance “ignorance is bliss”. He also coined “the end justifies the means”, “a rolling stone gathers no moss” and “honor among thieves” — all of these from a humble Syrian slave who lived and died decades before Jesus was born. Another great quote by the man that I hear less often, but that is no less apt: “To do two things at once is to do neither.” And of course the legendary and still-relevant: "Pardon one offense, and you encourage the commission of many.”
It’s remarkable to me how almost everyone on earth knows these sayings. Yet so very few people know the name of the man who coined them. His name was Publilius Syrus. A great mind who found himself in a shitty situation, climbing out of it by sheer power of will, using only that great and enduring mind. ~ Jean-Marie Valheur
Oriana:
What strikes me here is not only the easy way those sayings roll of the tongue, but also the wisdom contained in them. This is the marriage of art and wisdom. A saying won't survive just because it rhymes, for instance. To survive, it needs to contain an insight.
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ISRAEL’S ECONOMY WILL SUFFER IF THE WAR ESCALATES
KATZRIN, the Golan Heights — The tours at the Golan Heights Winery used to take place daily, stopping by the fermentation tanks and the cellar where thousands of oak barrels are stacked 20 feet into the air.
But the tourists and honeymooners stopped coming to this pastoral hills region after Oct. 7, 2023, when fighters from the militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel and touched off a war that has continued into the new year.
The Oct. 7 attack happened far from here, more than 100 miles away from the winery. But much closer is Israel's border with Lebanon, home to Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed armed force with whom Israel warred in 2006 — and with whom tensions have risen this month.
"The sound of planes, helicopters, booms, that's kind of routine," said Victor Schoenfeld, the head winemaker.
The conflict, even at its current simmer rather than the full-blown war taking place in Gaza, has already taken an economic toll in these northern regions: Towns are emptied of people.
Businesses are shuttered. Farm fields, including vineyards, lie untended, putting production timelines in jeopardy.
"We will need to find new strategies. I don't see any new or quick solution that will appear," said Ben Dov.
Six Israeli civilians have died in cross-border attacks from Lebanon, Israeli officials say, including an elderly mother and son killed Sunday by a pair of anti-tank missile strikes on their home in Kfar Yuval. Lebanese officials say at least 20 civilians have died on the other side of the border.
Residents have fled the region by the tens of thousands. If they decide it will never be safe enough to return home, "it will affect the economy in these places in the long run in a way that could definitely be lethal," said Tomer Fadlon, an economist at Tel Aviv University.
Even if Israel achieves its military objectives in the south, an economic recovery in the north is far from guaranteed, Fadlon said. "So this war was not only about winning the war. It is also about gaining back the feeling that they can go home safe, run a business and run their life," he said.
The winery is located in the Golan Heights, a territory claimed by Syria that Israel seized in 1967 and has occupied ever since. Hezbollah's rockets haven't yet reached as far as the winery, about 13 miles from the Lebanon border, but much of its staff lives in northern Israel, where the sounds of war are now routine.
Of the 130 employees at the Golan Heights facility, 12 are reservists who were called up to active duty after the war began. (In total Israel has mobilized some 360,000 reservists, causing significant labor shortages, including in the country's high-powered tech sector.) The loss of staff means the winery is running behind their normal production schedule.
Much more affected is the ownership group's second winery, the Galil Mountain Winery, which is located in Kibbutz Yir'On, only a few hundred yards from the Lebanon border. Visitors can see into Lebanon from the winery building, Ben Dov said. "You used to see Hezbollah flags right next to us," he said. "I hope they're not there anymore.”
The Israeli military ordered the evacuation of areas along the border in October, including Yir'On. The Galil Mountain Winery has been entirely shut down ever since. Managers must seek daily permission from the Israeli military to access the facility, Ben Dov said.
Most concerning are the winery's vineyards, 90% of which are located along the border and are currently inaccessible, Schoenfeld said.
Grape vines must be pruned in the winter, an important step in wine making. Were there not a war, the staff would be pruning now. But the military will not let staff access the vineyards while the conflict with Hezbollah is still so volatile, he said.
The pruning can be put off for a couple months, perhaps, Schoenfeld said. But eventually there comes a natural deadline: The plants will start pushing leaves by the end of March or early April, meaning pruning must be done before then.
"If things aren't accessible by then, we have some strategies," Schoenfeld said. "But the longer it goes on, the more complicated it's gonna be.”
In communities along the border, the economy is still far from normal
Consumer spending in Israel has been depressed since the outbreak of war, said economist Fadlon, who has tracked credit card spending. (Only in one week of the war so far — in late November, when a temporary ceasefire was negotiated to exchange Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners — did Israelis spend more than a typical pre-war week, he said.)
Unlike cities further from the conflict, like Tel Aviv, which have mostly rebounded from the initial shock of war, the economies of border communities are still profoundly impacted. In Kiryat Shmona, the largest city on Israel's side of the northern border, credit card spending levels are still 70% or more below normal, Fadlon said.
One of the few open businesses in Kiryat Shmona is Shlomi Baguette, a counter-service shawarma restaurant. "Most of Kiryat Shmona is evacuated. But we're working as usual," said Toby Abutbul, 22, whose father runs the restaurant.
Soldiers stationed in the north now make up 80% or more of the restaurant's sales, Abutbul said. "We will not let the soldiers stay hungry, you understand? We help them how we can," he said.
An estimated 60,000 people have fled the border region, staying for months with family or in hotels away from the conflict.
In November, the Bank of Israel estimated that the absence at work of 144,000 evacuated residents, about 40% of whom have fled the north, had cost Israel's economy about 590 million shekels, or $158 million, each week.
That impact would be felt even more widely should evacuees decide not to return, Fadlon said. "If you have so many people that want to stay in these places and want to move elsewhere, it will affect everything, the cost of living, even the real estate and everything else," he said.
The central bank has assessed that the total budgetary cost of the war, to Israel, will be 210 billion shekels, or about $56 billion — nearly half an entire year's budget for Israel, a country with fewer than 10 million residents.
That forecast "assumes that the lion's share of the war will occur on one front, Gaza," said Amir Yaron, the bank's top official, on New Year's Day. "It is clear that the length of time, and the developments of the war to additional areas, can change the estimates markedly.”
THE RISK OF A BROADER WAR WITH HEZBOLLAH
A potential second front could be the north. Leaders from Hezbollah and Israel have both said they are prepared to go to war if necessary. "We will restore security to both the south and the north. Nobody will stop us – not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anybody else," said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday.
"If we have a war with Hezbollah, given the arsenal that they have, they can paralyze the country for a month or longer," said Esteban Klor, a researcher at Hebrew University of Jerusalem who studies the intersection of terrorism and economics.
Hezbollah, the world's most heavily armed non-state actor, is far better equipped than Hamas, analysts say. It is estimated to have 130,000 or more rockets and missiles in its arsenal, some with a range that could allow the group to strike targets all across Israel.
The effects of a full-blown war with Hezbollah would extend far beyond the north, Klor said. "People are going to have to stay home in shelters, and so the entire country will probably stop working for the duration of that war," he said.
The question has taken on greater urgency this month after a strike in Lebanon's capital Beirut killed a top Hamas official. Israel has not taken responsibility for the strike, but still Hezbollah has retaliated. In addition to the two civilians killed in Kfar Yuval, attacks from Lebanon in recent days have damaged Israeli military infrastructure and injured at least six soldiers, officials say.
An outbreak of war with Hezbollah could drive the cost to Israel two or three times higher, Klor said. Such an increase might send the country into a period of economic stagnation like the one that followed Israel's last major war, the Yom Kippur War of 1973. It took Israel more than a decade to recover economically, he said.
In Lebanon, where the economy was already in a state of catastrophe before Oct. 7, the United Nations estimates that more than 76,000 people have fled the border region. The crisis, which dates back to 2019, is one of the worst the world has seen since the mid-1800s, the World Bank has said. Over the past four years, Lebanon's currency has collapsed and poverty has skyrocketed as political and financial leaders have resisted reform.
An outbreak of war along its southern border "could be truly, truly devastating, especially if we see what has happened in the Gaza Strip," Klor said.
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/16/1224767491/israel-hezbollah-economy-lebanon-gaza
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ARE ISRAELI JEWS INDIGENOUS OR COLONIZERS?
~ Are Jews “indigenous” or settler colonialists in Palestine? They are both.
The Jewish people originated in this land, and after two thousand years of exile, they developed an ideology and a political rather than purely religious movement of “return.” But their historical memory was not shared by the land’s inhabitants. The historical memory of the Jewish people did not create the right or capacity to confiscate or occupy a single dunam of land against the will of its possessors. The historical memory of one people, however tenacious, creates no right to rule over another.
Israeli Jews are settler colonialists with a historical memory of indigenous origin. This includes the Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries. They were indigenous to the region but not to Palestine, except in their own historical memory. That historical memory distinguishes Israel from other settler colonial states.
So does the fact that the nation founded through settler colonialism has no “mother country” to which its members might return, as the French did from Algeria. Today’s settlers in the West Bank and the Golan Heights could indeed return—their “mother country” is Israel—but the same is not true of the citizens of Israel as a whole. They cannot return to the scenes of the Holocaust or to the Arab and Muslim states that expelled them.
Great Britain, and then the United States, played the role of mother country by conquering the land, facilitating its settlement, and arming the settlers, but they have assumed no responsibility for the fate of Jewish refugees—whether from Hitler, from the persecution of Jews in Iraq in the early 1950s, or from a future conflagration in Palestine.
Instead, the Zionist movement and the Jewish state succeeded in building a new nation that is now indigenous to the land—though to what parts of the land, and with exactly what rights, is the core of the dispute over whether Israel is an apartheid settler state. The question “does Israel have the right to exist?” could have been meaningfully debated before the state existed, but now the only answer is, “Israel exists.”
As a member of the United Nations, it has the right to continue to exist and to exercise the right to self-defense against other states. According to the UN charter, it also has the right to defend its territorial integrity, but implementation of that right requires defining the borders of the State of Israel. This depends on a peace settlement recognizing Palestinian national rights. Only such a settlement can establish Israel’s security as a state.
Genesis is not destiny. Documenting the historical fact that Israel came into existence in part through Zionism’s collaboration with colonialism does not mean that the only solution is a “decolonization” that would destroy the state and expel its inhabitants. What is objectionable about colonialism is not the immigration or settlement of a population of a different ethnic or national origin, or of people that are in some sense non-indigenous, but the domination of one group over another.
It is impossible to rewind and rerun history. But it is possible, indeed necessary, to assure a future where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. Both peoples must be able to participate in choosing the government that rules them. Palestinians and Israelis must live either in two sovereign, equal states, or in one state as individuals with equal rights. The international consensus (excluding the government of Israel) in favor of the former—and the apparent impossibility of Israelis and Palestinians sharing a common sole polity—make the former the apparent choice.
Herzl’s utopian novel, The Old New Land (1902), addressed the messianic origins of Zionism. In his narrative of a 1923 visit to a futuristic—yet very Viennese—“Jewish Palestine,” the narrator visits the magnificent Opera House in Jerusalem to attend a performance of an opera based on the life of Sabbatai Zevi. In 1648, during massive massacres of Jews in Ukraine, which some Jews saw as the “birth pangs of the messiah,” Sabbatai proclaimed his messianic calling in a synagogue in Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey). He gathered a following among Jewish communities worldwide. Many sold off their belongings and prepared to move to Palestine, until their messiah was summoned by the Ottoman sultan, in whose presence he converted to Islam in September 1666.
In the novel, during the opera’s intermission, the audience puzzles over the history. How had such a con man gathered such a following?
The longing creates the Messiah
Zionism aspired for the Jews to assert their “folk personality” to become one of what Europeans then called “civilized nations.” The distinction between civilized nations and others contained the essence of colonialism. In his manifesto, The Jewish State (1896), Herzl wrote, “We [the Jewish state in Palestine] should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” That concept of salvation as domination ultimately proved to be yet another false messiah.
Without that salvation, the narrative of modern Jewish history loses its essential arc. Israel continues to lurch headlong into an offensive that leading scholars of the Holocaust have warned appears to be on the path to genocide. The transformation of victim into perpetrator does not inspire hope or give suffering meaning. Nor does comparing current events to the Holocaust amount to equating the two. As Masha Gessen has argued, it is impossible to learn lessons from an event if all comparisons to it are forbidden.
The destruction of the Second Temple, reversing the return of the Babylonian exile, destroyed the previous narrative of Jewish history as well. Third-century Palestinian rabbis had recent and bitter experience of failed messiahs. The Tractate Sanhedrin of the Talmud records that Rabbis ‘Ullah, Rabbah, and Johanan all said of the messiah, “Let him come, but let me not see him.”
Reish Lakish, another rabbi of that generation, asks whether it is because of the birth pangs of the messiah, as told by Jeremiah. Rabbi Johanan answers: “God says, These [the Gentiles] are my handiwork, and so are these [the Jews]; how shall I destroy the former on account of the latter?” Without justice, God himself cannot bear to see the salvation of Israel.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/false-messiahs/
~ there is also the other goal of Zionism: that Jews need to become proud of themselves. They need to have a sense of dignity. Herzl writes in many places that only by becoming a political force in the world and only by taking their fate in their hands can the Jews regain their honor.
Herzl also envisions the future Jewish national home as an ideal society that has harnessed technology for the good of all and is a model for the world. Herzl does not envision the Jewish-Arab conflict or of the need for a strong defense force.
Herzliyah, an affluent suburb of Tel Aviv
Charles:
It's also important to note that the Islamic army colonized three continents, Asia, Europe and Africa, from 630 to 1722.
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RUSSIAN ECONOMY: GUNS AHEAD OF GOODS
According to Rosstat, only 7.4% of Russians have income over 100,000 rubles ($1,000) per month.
That’s the number everyone should keep in mind when Putin is talking about:
Revival of Russia.
Continuous breakthroughs and advances.
The country “getting off its knees.”
And still, only 7% of Russians have more than a mere thousand dollars a month.
Rosstat is the official Russian government’s statistics service. It’s known for fudging numbers to present a rosier picture to the public. But even Rosstat can’t fudge the numbers enough to hide the fact that most Russians live in poverty.
20% of Russians have an income of less than 20,000 rubles ($200) per month.
This means, every 5th person in the “great superpower” is dog-poor with a maximum income of $200 per month — and many don’t get even $100 per month.
This is not just poverty, but hopeless poverty, without any prospects of getting out of it.
These 20% of Russians — 30 million people! – will spend their entire lives in poverty.
“Russia is the largest economy in Europe,” Putin recently raved.
“They are trying to strangle and crush us from all sides, but in terms of the volume of the economy as a whole, we are the first in Europe. We overtook Germany and took the 5th place in the world: China, USA, India, Japan, Russia. In Europe, we are number one,” Putin stated to a few dozen of loyalists — mostly, undercover officers of his FSO bodyguard service — during his pre-election stop in Khabarovsk. (Verbatim quote.)
Nothing is impossible if you have dementia.
In terms of democracy and freedom, Russia is ahead of the whole planet! (According to Kremlin bots.)
Reality check:
Germany's GDP is $4.4 trillion, Russia's GDP is $2.3 trillion.
The minimum wage in Germany is several times higher than in Russia.
The average salary in Germany is several times higher than in Russia.
Pensions in Germany are several times higher than in Russia.
Germany annually exports hundreds of billions of euros worth of high-tech industrial goods, while Russia continues to export raw materials.
For a prosperous and safe life, people travel from Russia to Germany, and not vice versa.
In Germany, retirees are traveling the world, while in Russia pensioners are standing in lines for hours, in hopes to buy cheaper eggs (outside, in winter) — or even fight for expired produce at the rubbish bins of large supermarkets.
Hello, Putin: in which ways (besides theft, lies and aggressiveness), has Russia overtaken Germany?
Dave Kaiser:
Russia has overtaken Germany as “biggest threat to the free world” and remained there since 1945.
Jorge Lopez:
The world would be much better off without Putin and some of his thug cohorts.
Allan Blackwood:
The problem for Russia is that its economic growth is fueled by ‘‘military Keynesianism”, which means that as in the UK or Germany in WW2 there is full employment but a large part of the output doesn’t become consumer goods but instead goes straight to the military to be fired (shells, missiles etc.) or destroyed (tanks, aircraft, ships etc.). The troops on the front line are employed and paid, but contribute little or nothing to the national income. The latest Russian budget devotes 30% of GDP to the military, so when calculating GDP or PPP p.c. It is necessary to reduce the gross figure by at least this amount.
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FREUD’S LESBIAN DAUGHTER; HIS PREJUDICES ABOUT WOMEN AND LESBIANS
~ December 3 is the 120th anniversary of Anna Freud's birth. She was a profoundly influential child psychoanalyst. Still, her main claim to fame was as Sigmund Freud's daughter. What most people don't know about Anna Freud is that it may have been particularly difficult for her to be Sigmund's favorite child. How and why was that the case?
Sigmund believed that homosexuality in men is neurotic but not particularly problematic. Lesbianism, however, he considered a gateway to mental illness.
This (according to Sigmund) is because only men have moral sense. We all evolve from apes, so no human is born with it. But boys acquire morality through the castration complex—the fear that their fathers will emasculate them for their misbehavior.
Having nothing obvious to neuter, girls and women are essentially amoral, lying and conniving to get what they want. Girls must be guided through civilized life by a father, and a woman by a husband. And because they choose not to marry, lesbians remain loose cannons, fundamentally untrustworthy and unstable.
His daughter Anna was his closest intellectual and emotional companion. Yet she was a lesbian.
Freud taught that lesbianism is always the fault of the father and is curable by psychoanalysis.
Freud cautioned followers that analysis is an erotic relationship. Analyst and patient together must scrutinize the amorous feelings that flow between them. This being the case, by rules he asked his followers to honor, Freud could not attempt to cure his own daughter’s lesbianism.
When Anna was 23 and enjoying an especially close friendship with another woman, he took her into analysis anyway.
In six nights a week over several years, he and Anna analyzed and dissected her masturbation fantasies, which featured an angry father figure (Freud?) beating a child who had made a mistake over which she had no control (Anna and her homosexuality?)
He spoke publicly about her fantasies at a conference while Anna sat on stage in “the wife’s’ chair” near the podium. (He did not, however, name the patient under discussion. We know the patient was Anna because, when she wanted to become an analyst, she described the same fantasies in a paper titled “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams.” She also wrote to her friends about her fantasies. )
Freud failed to “correct” Anna’s lesbianism. She enjoyed 54 years of happy monogamy with Dorothy Burlingham, heir to the Tiffany fortune.
All this being said, compared with his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud was indeed a compassionate, forward-thinking physician. He became a doctor at a time when lesbianism and masturbation were considered symptoms of hysteria. Most doctors treated hysteria with opiates, ovariectomies, and clitoridectomies. Freud profoundly misunderstood lesbianism, but he treated “hysterical” women by talking to them. He urged patients to look inside themselves and marvel at what they found. As problematic as details of his life and theory were, his idea that physical illnesses can be caused by emotions was a remarkable advance for humankind.
Oriana:
I'd love to see a movie based on her life. Anna was the only one of Freud's children to have followed a career as a therapist.
As for Freud's bigoted opinions of women (even though he knew quite a few brilliant women who became his disciples and, like Anna, were among the first analysts), I've been familiar with them for decades, especially the notion of a woman as a castrated man.
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THE UNKNOWN VERSUS THE MYSTERIOUS
~ Freud was interested in what a particular dream, slip of the tongue, or object meant to an individual. For example, a young man once told Freud about a recurring dream, one involving a river and certain strange events. Freud reasoned that the symbols in the dream reflected that the young man was anxious of a particular possibility—becoming an unexpectant father. The young man did not see this link between the symbols in the dream and his own fears.
Jung was interested in what symbols mean, not just to the individual, but to all humanity. According to Jung, these meanings could be inborn and stored in what he called “the collective unconscious.”
Thus, Freud and Jung attempted to illuminate what symbols mean to an individual (because of his or her life history) or to everyone (because of inborn knowledge or shared experiences). To them, the mysteries of the mind concerned the deep, true meaning of mental events. Thinking of water actually means X, which is really not about water, and dreaming of falling really means Y, which is not really about falling. To them, one does X (e.g., a slip of the tongue) because of Y, which is not obviously related to the malapropism. One dreams of falling, because one is worried that one’s soccer team will be dropped to second division, for example.
Regarding the brain, Freud and Jung were interested primarily in “semantic” (meaning) processes, which are largely carried out by the medial temporal lobes. It is important to circumscribe the kinds of processes in which they were interested. As in the anecdote above, semantics are often associated with one’s desires and motivations.
Of course, the popular press became interested in these insights, and of course, people at cocktail parties wanted to discuss the deep meaning of their own dreams and random thoughts. All symbols and thoughts held by one now became much more special. Regardless of the validity of the conclusions by Freud and Jung (many of which were controversial), it is important to note that these mysteries concern semantics—that is, the meaning of things.
And the meaning of things naturally varies to some extent across individuals. The sight of a piano means one thing to a frustrated musician; it means something else to a young child; and it means yet a different thing to a piano tuner. And the sight of certain colors might sadden someone who is a fan of a soccer team that wears those colors and that just lost a very close match.
Freud, through various kinds of analyses, was trying to ascertain the deep meaning of dream images, actions, and out-of-the-blue thoughts for an individual. To find out the true meaning, one must know much about the individual, about his or her history. The conclusions about the meaning of a symbol might be correct or wrong, but in either case, the question was about the true, deep meaning of the symbol (e.g., the meaning of “the sun”).
When an undergraduate student participates in one of my experiments, I do not know all the associations that he or she has toward, say, the image of a sun or a dog. For the latter, the image could be a generic line drawing of the dog. This would be the stimulus, and the activations in the temporal lobes in response to the stimulus would be the “semantic activation.” The participant might be a dog lover or could be a dog trainer or could be fearful of dogs, because of some past event that may or not be remembered (e.g., a dog barked at the participant when he or she was very little). Thus, to me, the experimenter, the meaning of “dog” to a particular participant is an unknown, at least to a consequential extent. To me, this is an unknown. However, that a stimulus will activate mental associations and meanings is, at least conceptually, not a real mystery today in cognitive science.
It is true that much is unknown about the semantic process, certainly, but it is not a mystery in the sense that it is what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn would call an “anomaly” in the current scientific approach. There are plenty of neural network models, and other kinds of models, that explain how neurons in the temporal lobe reflecting “semantic representations”—the meaning of objects or words—can be activated by external stimuli and possess meanings that are peculiar to an individual. Freud and Jung were trying to crack the ‘mystery’ of what a particular thing meant to an individual (or humanity, in the case of Jung).
This was their mystery about the mind. But this is not a deep mystery regarding how the mind works. What is a deep mystery, and continues to be an “anomaly” in the current approach of the cognitive sciences is how neurons are capable of generating conscious states, the subjective experiences that you and I have every day, every waking moment—and in dreams. The neurons, each of which is unconscious, form networks that, somehow, create conscious experiences, be they of after-images, the smell of coffee, or ringing in the ears. The cardinal mystery regarding how the mind works is consciousness. It is important to note that Freud and Jung were trying to crack a different kind of “deep” puzzle.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/consciousness-and-the-brain/202401/the-unknown-vs-the-mysterious
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WHAT CATS’ LOVE OF BOXES TEACHES US ABOUT FELINE PERCEPTION
It is a truth universally acknowledged—at least by those of the feline persuasion—that an empty box on the floor must be in want of a cat. Ditto for laundry baskets, suitcases, sinks, and even cat carriers (when not used as transport to the vet). This behavior is generally attributed to the fact that cats feel safer when squeezed into small spaces, but it might also be able to tell us something about feline visual perception. That’s the rationale behind a study in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science with a colorful title: “If I fits I sits: A citizen science investigation into illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus).”
The paper was inspired in part by a 2017 viral Twitter hashtag, #CatSquares, in which users posted pictures of their cats sitting inside squares marked out on the floor with tape—kind of a virtual box. The following year, lead author Gabriella Smith, a graduate student at Hunter College (CUNY) in New York City, attended a lecture by co-author Sarah-Elizabeth Byosiere, who heads the Thinking Dog Center at Hunter. Byosiere studies canine behavior and cognition, and she spoke about dogs’ susceptibility to visual illusions. While playing with her roommate’s cat later that evening, Smith recalled the Twitter hashtag and wondered if she could find a visual illusion that looked like a square to test on cats.
Smith found it in the work of the late Italian psychologist and artist Gaetano Kanizsa, who was interested in illusory (subjective) contours that visually evoke the sense of an edge in the brain even if there isn’t really a line or edge there. The Kanizsa square consists of four objects shaped like Pac-Man, oriented with the “mouth” facing inward to form the four corners of a square. Even better, there was a 1988 study that used the Kanizsa square to investigate the susceptibility of two young female cats to illusory contours. The study concluded that, yes, cats are susceptible to the Kanizsa square illusion, suggesting that they perceive subjective contours much like humans.
But the 1988 study was conducted in the laboratory and “primed” the two feline subjects via standard operant conditioning methods. Smith wanted to design a similar study that increased the sample size and observed the cats’ behavior in their natural environment—which is less stressful for cats than a lab environment—with no advance priming. A “citizen science” project involving cat owners recruited on Twitter seemed like just the ticket, especially given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. People were spending a lot more time at home with their pets, and they were likely to have more time to conduct the trials.
The only supplies participating owners needed were a printer with black ink, printer paper, scissors, tape, and a ruler, plus sunglasses and a digital camera or smartphone to record their cats’ behavior. Smith serially sent participants six randomized daily stimuli to print out and set up on the floor, per instructions, while the cat was not in the room. The stimuli included a simple square, the Kanizsa square illusion, and a Kanizsa control in which the Pac-Man mouths faced outward instead of inward. All dimensions were such that a cat could comfortably sit or stand inside with all its limbs without being able to sprawl.
The cats would be permitted into the room, and the owners would don the sunglasses and avoid interacting with their pets so as not to give the beasts any cues. The humans would videotape the cats’ behavior with the pairs of stimuli and upload the videos to a shared Dropbox for the project. If the cat sat or stood with all its legs inside the contours of a stimulus within the first five minutes, the owners would stop recording and make note of the chosen shape. If the cat didn’t select one of the stimuli in the first five minutes, the trial would end.
Although some 500 pet cats and their owners expressed interest, only 30 completed all six of the study’s trials over the course of the two-month study last summer. Of those, nine of the cats selected at least one of the stimuli by sitting within its contours (illusory or otherwise) for at least three seconds—a pretty good duration given the notorious fickleness of cats. As for preferences, cats selected the Kanizsa illusion just as often as the square; they selected both of those more often than the control stimulus. In other words, the cats treated the illusory square the same way they treated the real square.
“It’s the presence of the contours, either in the Kanizsa square or in the real square, that causes cats to sit inside, rather than the presence of shapes on the floor,” Smith told Ars. “Brains are very sensitive to contours that differ in luminance. Vision has evolved to answer questions having to do with boundaries and contours.”
The study comes with the usual caveats, notably the final small sample size (the result of participant attrition, a common challenge with citizen science projects). Smith and her co-authors also suggest replicating the study in a more controlled setting, despite the advantages gained from conducting the trials in the comfort of the cats’ own homes. “For the sake of cats, the home was really ideal, but otherwise, for the sake of science, it is best to do things in controlled settings [like a lab],” said Smith.
Smith and Byosiere are also keen to adapt some of the latter’s work with dogs and visual illusions to the study of cat behavior and cognition. "Cat cognition research is certainly lacking in comparison to domestic dogs," the authors concluded. “Although the reason for this is unclear, the use of citizen science as a precursor to in-lab investigations of cat cognition could greatly help bridge this divide.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-cats-love-of-boxes-and-squares-can-tell-us-about-their-visual-perception?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
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NEW EVIDENCE FOR THE STRANGE SYMMETRY OF THOUGHT
In 2014, the Swedish philosopher and cognitive scientist Peter Gärdenfors went to Krakow, Poland, for a conference on the mind. He was to lecture at Jagiellonian University, courtesy of the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, on his theory of conceptual, or “cognitive,” spaces.
Gärdenfors had been working on his idea of cognitive spaces, which explain how our brains represent concepts and objects, for decades. In his book Conceptual Spaces, from 2000, he wrote, “It has long been a common prejudice in cognitive science that the brain is either a Turing machine working with symbols or a connectionist system using neural networks.” In Krakow, Gärdenfors pushed against that prejudice. In his talk, “The Geometry of Thinking,” he suggested that humans are able to do things that today’s powerful computers can’t do—like learn language quickly and generalize from particulars with ease (to see, in other words, without much training, that lions and tigers are four-legged felines)—because we, unlike our computers, represent information in geometrical space.
In a 2018 Science paper, co-authored with Jacob Bellmund, Christian Doeller, and Edvard Moser—neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and the Kavli Institute in Trondheim—Gärdenfors, of the University of Lund, buttressed his idea with recent advances in brain science. He argued that the brain represents concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for the brain’s “inner GPS.”
Work spanning decades has found that regions in the brain—the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex—act like a GPS. Their cells form a grid-like representation of the brain’s surroundings and keep track of its location on it. Specifically, neurons in the entorhinal cortex activate at evenly distributed locations in space: If you drew lines between each location in the environment where these cells activate, you would end up sketching a triangular grid, or a hexagonal lattice. The activity of these aptly named “grid” cells contains information that another kind of cell uses to locate your body in a particular place. The explanation of how these “place” cells work was stunning enough to award scientists John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. These cells activate only when you are in one particular location in space, or the grid, represented by your grid cells. Meanwhile, head-direction cells define which direction your head is pointing. Yet other cells indicate when you’re at the border of your environment—a wall or cliff. Rodent models have elucidated the nature of the brain’s spatial grids, but, with functional magnetic resonance imaging, they have also been validated in humans.
Recent fMRI studies show that cognitive spaces reside in the hippocampal network—supporting the idea that these spaces lie at the heart of much subconscious processing. For example, subjects of a 2016 study—headed by neuroscientists at Oxford—were shown a video of a bird’s neck and legs morph in size. Previously they had learned to associate a particular bird shape with a Christmas symbol, such as Santa or a Gingerbread man. The researchers discovered the subjects made the connections with a “mental picture” that could not be described spatially, on a two-dimensional map. Yet grid-cell responses in the fMRI data resembled what one would see if subjects were imagining themselves walking in a physical environment. This kind of mental processing might also apply to how we think about our family and friends. We might picture them “on the basis of their height, humor, or income, coding them as tall or short, humorous or humorless, or more or less wealthy,” Doeller said. And, depending on whichever of these dimensions matters in the moment, the brain would store one friend mentally closer to, or farther from, another friend.
But the usefulness of a cognitive space isn’t just restricted to already familiar object comparisons. “One of the ways these cognitive spaces can benefit our behavior is when we encounter something we have never seen before,” Bellmund said. “Based on the features of the new object we can position it in our cognitive space. We can then use our old knowledge to infer how to behave in this novel situation.” Representing knowledge in this structured way allows us to make sense of how we should behave in new circumstances.
Data also suggests that this region may represent information with different levels of abstraction. If you imagine moving through the hippocampus, from the top of the head toward the chin, you will find many different groups of place cells that completely map the entire environment but with different degrees of magnification. Put another way, moving through the hippocampus is like zooming in and out on your phone’s map app. The area in space represented by a single place cell gets larger. Such size differences could be the basis for how humans are able to move between lower and higher levels of abstraction—from “dog” to “pet” to “sentient being,” for example. In this cognitive space, more zoomed-out place cells would represent a relatively broad category consisting of many types, while zoomed-in place cells would be more narrow.
yYet
the mind is not just capable of conceptual abstraction but also
flexibility—it can represent a wide range of concepts. To be able to do
this, the regions of the brain involved need to be able to switch
between concepts without any informational cross-contamination: It wouldn’t be ideal if our concept for bird, for example, were affected by our concept for car. Rodent studies have shown that when animals move from one environment to another—from a blue-walled cage to a black-walled experiment room, for example—place-cell firing is unrelated between the environments.
Researchers looked at where cells were active in one environment and compared it to where they were active in the other. If a cell fired in the corner of the blue cage as well as the black room, there might be some cross-contamination between environments. The researchers didn’t see any such correlation in the place-cell activity. It appears that the hippocampus is able to represent two environments without confounding the two. This property of place cells could be useful for constructing cognitive spaces, where avoiding cross-contamination would be essential. “By connecting all these previous discoveries,” Bellmund said, “we came to the assumption that the brain stores a mental map, regardless of whether we are thinking about a real space or the space between dimensions of our thoughts.”
Scientists still need to experimentally verify the link between the hippocampus and higher-order cognitive functions in humans. fMRI studies like the ones from the group in Oxford are, as yet, only suggestive. “Although the coarse nature of the fMRI signal urges caution in making conclusions at the level of neuronal codes,” the researchers concluded, “we have reported an unusually precise hexagonal modulation of the fMRI signal during nonspatial cognition.” It is also unknown whether place cells can actually represent objects at particular locations in a cognitive space. Revealing this in experiments with human subjects is hard, since they require very fine-resolution brain imaging. But recent advances in higher-resolution fMRI could possibly provide a solution.
Bellmund pointed out that rodent research could also reveal the existence of cognitive spaces. A 2017 paper, for example, found that place cells in rats can form a map of sound frequencies. Different cells in the hippocampus respond to different frequencies of sound—forming a cognitive space of sound. What’s more, studies in humans that have seen grid-like activity in the hippocampus have also seen this activity in other parts of the cortex. Therefore, it is highly likely that complicated, higher-order cognitive abilities arise from interactions between several parts of the brain.
Gärdenfors’ theory highlights a fruitful path, not only for cognitive scientists, but for neurologists and machine-learning researchers. It is a kind of incomplete, generic sketch on a canvas that invites refinement and elaboration. Cognitive spaces are, as Gärdenfors and Bellmund put it, a “domain-general format for human thinking,” an “overarching framework” that can help unravel the causes of neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s, and “to inform novel architectures in artificial intelligence.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/new-evidence-for-the-strange-geometry-of-thought
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"ONE AND DONE”
Among social and economic considerations, more parents are foregoing siblings, choosing to stop at one child.
When Jen Dalton got pregnant in 2018, she made a spreadsheet. Taking into account maternity leave, family-spacing health recommendations and even potential family holidays, she planned out when to have each of the four kids she thought she wanted. "I look at it once in a while and I giggle at how naïve I was," says Dalton, 31.
That’s because, just two months after her daughter's birth, she and her husband decided they were 'one and done'. Part of it was their struggle with sleep deprivation and mental health; Dalton dealt with a traumatic birth, postnatal depression (PND) and postpartum anxiety (PPA). But even when life became easier, the decision felt right.
It wasn't only that Ontario, Canada-based Dalton and her husband didn't want to risk her – and their family's – wellbeing by going through it all again. It was also that they knew there wasn't anything "wrong" with not "giving" their child a sibling. "I'm an only child, and I'm very happy," says Dalton. "I'm so close with my parents.”
Then, in 2022, Dalton had a wobble. She and her husband moved into their "forever home". Close friends had a new-born, who reminded them of their daughter. She felt if she had PPD or PPA again, she'd have more tools to manage it. And social-media algorithms kept pushing content showcasing big, beautiful families. "It really made us think like, 'Yeah, we could do it again'," she says.
It's not surprising that Dalton started to question her decision. Even though, in many countries, only children are becoming the norm, pressure to have more than one remains. Stereotypes about only children being spoilws or lonely persist, despite consistent debunking. Parents say they feel pressure to have more kids from everyone from family members to perfect strangers. On social media, mothers post adorable moments of their broods with captions like, "This is your sign, give them the younger sibling" and "I never met a mama who regretted having that one more".
Even as deciding to be one-and-done becomes more common, this background noise means parents who make this choice often find themselves having to convince other people – and even themselves – that they've done the right thing.
More common, but still judged
Particularly after the contraceptive revolution of the mid-20th Century, which gave many women some real control over fertility, the choice of how many children to have has been personal. But there have been clear social and cultural trends, too.
In many countries, those trends are shifting towards fewer kids. In the EU, the largest proportion of all families with children – 49% – have one child. In Canada, only-child families make up the largest group, ticking up from 37% in 2001 to 45% in 2021. And looking at mothers near the end of their childbearing years – arguably a better way to measure the popularity of only children, since census data gives only a moment-in-time snapshot – 18% of US women in 2015 had one child, up from 10% in 1976.
The fact that women are having children later is a significant piece. But there's also an element of choice involved, says investigative journalist Lauren Sandler, author of One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One. "There are a lot of people who will say, no-one wants to have just one kid – that [the rise in only-child families is] all because of delayed fertility," she says. "Well, that is a way of making this choice, too, right? You're saying, 'There are all of these other things that are really important to me as well, and I am going to prioritize them, and hopefully I'll get there.' Instead of, 'Those things don't matter and what comes first is my motherhood'."
Widespread ideas about the ideal number of children are also changing. For millennia, the preference to have more than one child made sense. Even just two centuries ago, more than four in 10 children died before their fifth birthday. Having multiple children helped the family with the many tasks required to survive. And, of course, in the absence of reliable contraception, and with women getting married at far younger ages, having just one child wasn't just undesirable. It often wasn't feasible.
Today, however, in many cultures (though not all), the picture is rather different.
Portugal, where 59% of families with kids have just one, is a good example: while the age of first-time mothers rose from 26.6 to 29.9 years from 2001 to 2019, almost one in five women also say today that one child is the ideal family size. Before the 1970s in the US, meanwhile, only 1% of poll respondents thought having just one child was best. While still a fraction of the total, that proportion has tripled. (There is, of course, still a big discrepancy between what people say is the ideal, versus how many kids they're actually having – but some of it has to do with how these data were collected. For both the Portugal and US numbers, for example, respondents were as young as 15 years old in Portugal and 18 in the US, and not necessarily parents themselves; like Dalton, many people change their mind once they become older or start their own families. For the US data, respondents were also answering what they thought the ideal was in general, not necessarily what an ideal size would be for them, personally.)
Yet the stigma against parents who consciously choose to have one child persists. When Sandler became a mother in 2008, she says, "I found myself with this kid who I was crazy about". But she also loved other elements of her life, like her career. Well aware of issues like the 'motherhood penalty', having one child seemed like the best way to have it 'all' – or as close to it as possible.
"I felt very excited by what it would mean to be able to love and raise this kid in a dynamic where I was also true to myself," she says. "And yet all of this cultural noise kept creeping in. I'd be accosted by people on the subway and in the supermarket saying things like, 'When will you have another one?' And I would say, very plainly, 'I'm not planning to'. And it would be all of a sudden like I was an abuser – like, call the Department of Social Services on this person. It felt to me, like, what is this calculation? … Why is the world telling you that, if you make this choice, you're a terrible parent, and you're a terrible woman?"
It's not just parents who face judgement. Only children have been stigmatised as 'weird' – or, as the researcher behind one 1896 study put it, "peculiar and exceptional" – for more than a century. Some of that stigma has persisted well into the 2000s, even in pop culture. Sandler references the popular TV show Glee, pointing out that despite the show's efforts to break down stereotypes, one main character that goes unexamined is that of the "spoiled, annoying" only child.
"I've had a lot of comments like, 'Oh, he's going to have only-child syndrome. He is going to be unable to share. He's going to be spoiled," says Victoria Fahey, 25, in Calgary, Canada. "I know plenty of people who have siblings who are spoiled and rude and entitled. To say that's just because of being an only child, not circumstances – that's crazy." (There is, in fact, no evidence that only children are any less well-adjusted or successful than those with siblings).
An intentional decision
These social pressures mean that, often, parents who are one-and-done by choice are "very conscientious" of their decision, says Dalton. "It's not just an auto-pilot approach."
Their reasons range from financial constraints to feeling like their family is already complete. But what many one-and-done-by-choice families have in common is that they feel, in contrast to what society often tells them, that being one and done isn't just best for them. It's best for their children, too.
While many people see a sibling as a 'gift' to a child, one-and-done parents point out that there is no guarantee children will get along. For some, it was their own experiences of growing up in larger families that made them consider having only one.
Fahey was the youngest of five. "The sibling rivalry was intense, to say the least. It really turned me off," she says. She sees introducing a new family member as a 'roll of the dice' with family dynamics. And, like many other one-and-done parents, she wants to make sure she and her husband can give their child everything they can.
One-and-done parents also worry that more children would divide their attention. "I see moms of two or more being torn in different directions, especially as kids get older," says Cristina Zaldivar, 44, of Miami, Florida. "Even at parent night at school, moms had to choose which child's teacher's presentations to sit through. I don't ever want to have to choose."
Because they have more patience and energy to draw on, many one-and-done families also say they feel like they can be more intentional parents. In Poland, Gosia Klimowicz, 39, grew up as the eldest of three. She says it's crucial to her that she can raise her family differently. "It is really important to me to have a calm and nurturing environment," she says. "And just to be able to control myself and my emotions, and make sure that I don't lose it" – aspects she feels like her overstretched parents couldn't manage.
Wanting to offer one child more also extends to other resources, including finances. Raising children today is expensive: one study showed raising two children in the US costs, on average, $310,605 (£255,369), not including college tuition. In the UK, one child is estimated to cost nearly £160,000 ($194,607) for a couple. In Australia, it costs almost AU$160,000 ($107,442, £88,307) or, by another estimate, nearly AU$550,000. Struggling to pay these bills, many families are falling further and further behind.
Indeed, compared to past generations, says Sandler, millennials are growing up forced to be more hard-nosed about life's challenges. "We haven't decided to make higher education affordable, or change our tax system so that there's a middle class again, or put a cap on inflated housing costs, or do any of the things that make a viable life possible," she says. "How on Earth do I bring a kid into that mix? And how on Earth do I then bring two kids into that mix?"
This has factored into Fahey's calculation, too. "If my son wants to do soccer and hockey and music, I want to be able to give him all of those things, not say, 'Oh no, your brother wants to do hockey, so you can only choose soccer'," says Fahey. "I want him to have all the opportunities to become who he wants to become, without any hindrance."
Some one-and-done parents also cite their concern over the kind of future their children will inherit."The planet is dying and there's not seemed to be as big of a push as needed to clean that up," says Fahey. "For those future generations, we're kind of leaving them to sort it out. I think it's really scary. There could be a struggle for resources – I don't want my kid to ever worry where he's going to get water."
Given that each new person is another consumer and another producer of carbon emissions, stopping at one seems to be the responsible, more selfless choice, says Berlin-based Vicky Allan, 33. (It’s worth noting not everyone agrees). "A long time ago, I heard that one of the best things you can do for the environment is to have one less kid, and this has always stuck in my mind," she says. "Bringing another human onto the planet is not a decision that should be taken lightly.”
The happiness factor
Part of many one-and-done parents' contentment is the impact their decision has on other parts of their lives, such as careers, hobbies and interests. "There's the question of what you want an adulthood to look like," says Sandler. "Like, what does it take to go to the movies? What does it take to go out to dinner? What does it take to have adult friendships where you actually get to have an uninterrupted conversation?"
It is also, of course, potentially easier to maintain one's health. Pregnancy, labor and the postpartum period all carry risks, including for fathers. Particularly for women older than 35, those giving birth to a second or later child, rather than their first, are at increased risk of pregnancy complications like eclampsia, gestational hypertension and preterm labor.
For women in particular, careers, too, take a hit the more children they have. In Europe, each child is associated with an average drop in wages of 3.6% – although this varies from no wage disadvantage in Nordic countries to a 6% decline per child in Germany and the Netherlands.
In the US, one study showed that, even accounting for differences in education or experience, the wage gaps between mothers of one or two children versus childless women are roughly the same, around 13%. But the decline falls to 17.5% at three children.
There are longer-term considerations, too. Dalton often hears that, even if it's hard to raise multiple children, you'll reap the benefits of a "full table" when they're adults. "It's rude to put that onto your children," she says, adding that she doesn't want her daughter to ever feel guilted by these kinds of expectations. And there are, she points out, no guarantees: "You could have another one and your children could hate each other. Or you could have another child that is disabled and may need care beyond 18 years old.”
Having one child also makes it easier to be a better partner, believes Laura Bennett, 33, in Cornwall, England. As it is, she says, she's able to take time for herself, going to festivals or away for weekends with friends. As a result, she feels no resentment when her partner goes surfing or out for a pint. She's not sure how they'd achieve that balance with another.
All of this might be part of why research has showed that, while having one child is associated with a gain in happiness, having a second is associated with a drop in happiness for mothers. (That study found no effect of a second child on fathers). Other research has showed that while parents are happier in the lead-up and first year after having their first child, there are diminishing returns: the boost of happiness for the second child is half that of the first, and by the third, there's no boost at all. "Globally, happiness decreases with the number of children parents have," one analysis across 86 countries put it.
It also depends on culture. Parenthood usually has a neutral or negative effect on wellbeing for US and Canadian parents, while it's the opposite for families in Northwest Europe – a possible result of how social policies in Nordic countries help parents balance the stressors of family life.
The impact on partnerships isn't imagined, either. One analysis found that more than six in 10 men and five in 10 women experienced a significant change in their relationship satisfaction after their first child, usually for the worse. After a second child, it was even higher, particularly among men.
Living with your choice
No matter how carefully they've made their decisions, many one-and-done parents say they still experience pressure. Melissa Urban, CEO of the diet program Whole30, is the mother of an only child – and the author of a book on boundaries. She's seen many parents in her Utah community receive unwanted comments, she says, she included scripts in the book for how to respond.
"Many people find the question uncomfortable, but just hint that it's unwelcomed. They'll laugh it off, or say, 'You know, we just aren't ready for another one.' But that's not setting a boundary, and it's likely to keep coming up," she says. Instead, she suggests having some phrases ready – like "Please don't ask, that's not something I want to talk about" – and practicing them so they feel natural.
As only children become more common, these kinds of questions are likely to become rarer. Even so, for many families, becoming one-and-done remains a difficult decision – one to which they give a great deal of thought and, at times, may even doubt.
In Dalton’s case, it was seeing idealized images of siblings everywhere that began to make her question herself. By then, she’d been content in her decision for most of her daughter's life, and had even, in 2020, started a community supporting parents who felt the same, an Instagram page called @oneanddoneparenting.
She and her husband decided to do regular check-ins to figure out whether they really wanted a second child or were just internalizing outside messages. At the end of every day, they'd ask each other if they would have liked to have had another child with them. Would they have preferred doing day-care drop-off, then school drop-off? Or going to the Science Museum with a four-year-old and a new-born? The answer, every evening, was no.
Dalton also took a step back from social media. "Truthfully, I thought I'd probably be away for, like, six months, because I thought it would take a really long time to make this decision," she says. Instead, within days she was asking herself, "What the heck was I thinking?", she says.
"Happy only child raising an only child", her @oneanddone bio now reads. She's happy, she says, for it to stay that way. ~
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230110-only-child-or-siblings-one-and-done
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MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS AND ANCIENT MIGRATIONS
Genetic risk for multiple sclerosis (MS) was brought into Europe by sheep and cattle herders migrating from the east approximately 5,000 years ago, DNA profiles from archaeological bones and teeth suggested.
Migration among pastoralists from the Pontic steppe -- a region that includes parts of what are now Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan — brought genetic variants that, in a modern environment, raise the risk of MS, reported Lars Fugger, MD, PhD, of Oxford University in England, and co-authors in Nature.
In the past, however, these variants may have served a purpose: they likely protected livestock herders against pathogens from their domesticated animals.
"The situation today is different because the diseases these variants originally provided protection against are no longer as big a problem as they likely were then," Fugger said in a news briefing. "Because in the intervening millennia, we have antibiotics, vaccinations, and far, far higher standards of hygiene than people had thousands of years ago. The risk genes are now miscast in terms of their original biological role."
Inherited risk for MS is located within or in close proximity to immune-related genes. Variants tied most strongly with MS are located in the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region, with the most prominent one -- HLA-DRB1*15:01 -- tripling the risk of MS for people who carry at least one copy of the allele.
MS prevalence varies throughout the world and is highest in Northern Europe. Why MS develops isn't clear, but gene-gene or gene-environment interactions are thought to play a role. Collectively, genetic factors are estimated to account for about 30% of disease risk.
Environmental factors, like the Epstein-Barr virus exposure, also raise the likelihood of developing MS.
To identify patterns in modern genomes, Fugger and co-authors evaluated ancestry at specific loci for 410,000 participants in the U.K. Biobank who self-identified as white British individuals, using a reference panel of 318 ancient DNA samples from the Mesolithic period to the Bronze Age and new Medieval and post-Medieval genomes. They compared the ancestry at each single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) to genome-wide ancestry in the U.K. Biobank to determine an anomaly score.
Two regions stood out as having the most extreme ancestry compositions: the LCT/MCM6 region on chromosome 2, which is well established as regulating lactase persistence, and the HLA region on chromosome 6, Fugger and colleagues observed.
"The frequencies of the alleles conferring the highest risk for MS (odds ratio >1.5), all of which are within the HLA class II region, showed striking patterns in our ancient groups," the researchers wrote.
The tag SNP (rs3135388[T]) for HLA-DRB1*15:01, which carries the highest risk for MS, was first observed in an Italian Neolithic individual and rapidly increased in frequency around the time of the emergence of the Yamnaya culture about 5,300 years ago in steppe and steppe-derived populations, they added.
MS-associated immunogenetic variants underwent positive selection both within the steppe population and in combination with other groups, "probably driven by pathogenic challenges coinciding with changes in diet, lifestyle, and population density," Fugger and colleagues noted.
"Our interpretation of this history is that co-evolution between a range of pathogens and their human hosts may have resulted in massive and divergent genetic ancestry-specific selection on immune response genes according to lifestyle and environment followed by recombinant-favoring selection after these populations merged," they added.
From a genetic perspective, the Yamnaya people are thought to be the ancestors of present-day people in much of northwestern Europe, they pointed out. Their genetic footprint in southern Europe, where MS risk is less, is much smaller.
The findings may help demystify MS, Fugger noted.
"We can do away with the conventional perception of MS, which defines the disease in terms of the impairments it causes, and instead understand and seek to treat MS for what it actually is: the result of a genetic adaptation to certain environmental conditions that occurred back in our prehistory and which has endured in our DNA, even though the environmental conditions have changed hugely in the time between then and now," he said.
The paper is one of four published simultaneously in Nature in which researchers compared modern and ancient human DNA. Other findings showed that the APOE4 gene associated with Alzheimer's disease could be traced back to early hunters-gatherers. Future work will look at genetic markers of autism, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/multiplesclerosis/108209?xid=nl_popmed_2024-01-12&eun=g2215341d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PopMedicine_011224&utm_term=NL_Gen_Int_PopMedicine_Active
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Ending on beauty:
Winter comes from the East,
winter comes at Christmas,
crows from the frozen heart
of Russia, a black wind off the Urals.
A ruddy ring around the moon
means frost.
Moon in a fox-fur hat
brings cold, great cold.
I paint ghost roses
with my breath,
lick icicles, wade
into wind-tilted snowdrifts.
One night across
the bright darkness,
I see a falling star. I’m young,
and do not make a wish.
~ Oriana
(photo: Cody Sanantonio)
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