“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”*…
Your correspondent is headed into a melange of meetings (and their attendant travel), so (Roughly) Daily will be on pause for a few days. Regular service should resume on or around June 19. I’ll leave you with a (timely?) tale from the past…
“Steve” publishes a wonderful weekly newsletter, Dates With History. In a recent post he shares the story of Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt…
If you walked into Smithfield in the City of London in the small hours of the morning, you’d find the great Victorian iron-and-glass halls of the old meat market, traders hard at work while dazed club-goers spill out of nearby Fabric nightclub, uncertain for a moment what century they’re in.
A few steps away stands St Bartholomew’s Hospital—Barts—the oldest hospital in London still on its original site, patching people up since 1123.
On one of the blocked window bays of the hospital’s north wall, a memorial marks where the Scottish hero William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305, alongside remembrances of the Protestant martyrs burned here under Queen Mary between 1555 and 1558.
A third plaque, on another blocked window bay, recalls an event 645 years ago next Monday—15 June 1381.
That day, a man rode into Smithfield at the head of a rebel army and tilted the course of English history. The fact that he was dead before the day was out is beside the point.
His name was Wat Tyler…
[Steve explains the origins and workings of the feudal system in England, the (extraordinary) impact of the Black Death, the Poll Tax, the subsequent rise of peasant resistance, the Revolt itself, Wat’s demise, and the immediate aftermath. He concludes…]
… Wat Tyler enters the historical record on 7 June 1381 and exits eight days later, 15 June 1381, when he was executed. That’s his lot.
The revolt failed.
But the idea it carried—that labour had value, that taxation required some semblance of fairness, that the common man had rights—survived.
The Peasants’ Revolt echoed what the barons had done at Runnymede in 1215—confront a king and extract written concessions from him. Tyler’s rebels knew their history. Had they succeeded, those sealed charters would have amounted to a Magna Carta for the poor.
Over the three centuries that followed, the power of English rulers to do as they pleased eroded steadily. By 1689, the Bill of Rights made explicit what three hundred years had been quietly establishing—that rulers governed within limits they did not set themselves.
Wat Tyler hadn’t written that principle. But he had fomented one of its earliest and most violent proofs of concept.
There wouldn’t be another poll tax in England for six hundred years—until Margaret Thatcher introduced one in 1990 and was promptly removed from office.
History, it turns out, has a long memory for bad ideas…
(Trying to) hold power to account: “It’s 1381 and the peasants are revolting.”
* “Howard Beale” (Peter Finch) in Paddy Chayefsky‘s and Sidney Lumet‘s Network
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As we ponder power, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939, at Hyde Park, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted a luncheon for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England. Despite his mother’s horror, FDR wanted to show the King and Queen an old-fashioned, American style picnic– featuring that most proletariat of dishes, the hot dog. In the U.S. to raise support U.S. for Britain’s cause in World War II, the royal couple at least appeared to enjoy the meal.
“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing”*…
… and so we shouldn’t. Ryan Weber (a professor of technical writing who, happily for us, moonlights) is here to help…
More at “‘Descartes Against Humanity’ and Other Games Designed by Famous Philosophers,” from @mcsweeneys.net.
Unrelated, but important: “Help save Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine by signing this petition.”
* George Bernard Shaw (though often mis-attributed to Benjamin Franklin)
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As we play, we might spare a thought for a philosopher whose game would likely be “The Game of Life,” Bernard Williams; he died on this date in 2003. As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks.
His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). Gilbert Ryle, one of Williams’s mentors at Oxford University, said that Williams “understands what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, and all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your own sentence.”
Described by Colin McGinn as an “analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist,” he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it “come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life.”
“Science explains how things work, it doesn’t always answer why they exist”*…
Still, it’s cool to know how things work. In a continuing series of “tear-downs,” Bryan Macomber obliges in the most elegant of ways…
Are you curious why a clicky Pen… clicks? How a Zippo Lighter flips open? Or what lives inside a Pez Dispenser?
I’ve illustrated tear-downs and break-downs of everyday products that you may have taken for granted. Let’s take a look inside and understand how they work. Click around, have fun and maybe learn something new!…
An illustrated celebration of the engineering around us: “Mechanical Pencil.”
* (Paraphrase of) Isaac Newton
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As we muse on the mechanical, we might recall that it was on this date (according to most sources, though a few cite the 12th or the 19th of June) in 1902 that Philadelphia restauranteurs Frank Hardart and Joe Horn opened the first Automat in the U.S. A cavernous, waiterless establishment that was a combination of fast (but fresh) food, vending, and a cafeteria. Customers put nickels into slots beside small glass-doored compartments in the Automats and turned a knob. In the compartment next to the slot, food revolved into place for the customer to receive through the glass door.
Horn & Hardart Automats expanded into a chain reaching Manhattan in 1912. With their uniform recipes and centralized commissary system of supplying their restaurants, the Automats were America’s first major fast-food chain.
For more on how they worked, see “Meet Me at the Automat” and the charming documentary “The Automat.”
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”*…
The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age [see also]. Does our polycrisis moment herald another big shift?
Nathan Gardels, editor-in-chief of Noema, introduces two provocative articles from the current issue that suggest that it might…
Is our present moment comparable to the first Axial Age some 2,500 years ago? This was a time when major religions, philosophical frameworks and ethical systems — from Hinduism and Buddhism to the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophes — emerged around the world in relative simultaneity.
In a Noema essay, Otto Scharmer thinks this is likely so. If history moves by cycles of challenge and response, he argues that today’s “planetary polycrisis” — widespread anomie, social distrust and disorientation in the face of war, climate change and the upheavals of AI — “demands not just better policies or technologies but a shift in our structure of consciousness” at the level of collective awareness. He continues, “For the first time in human history, the challenges we face require a planetary response.”
In the first Axial Age, the attainment of written language capacitated an inner life of reflection on the basis of abiding texts that created a platform for shared meanings. That critical self-distancing capacity for reflection, or “interiority,” enabled people to transcend their immediate circumstances, tribes and local narratives to become self-aware as individuals in the larger universe. The sociologist Charles Taylor called this process “dis-embedding.”
In this context, written language — the first cloud technology of stored information — fostered philosophical exchange, the codification of ethical systems and shared metaphysical notions of salvation from the earthly storm. The sense of ontological security these narratives promised amid perpetual turmoil spread the appeal among constituencies far and wide.
In our era, Scharmer sees a new axial shift toward “collective interiority,” in which a new consciousness of the relationality of all being as an indivisible unity conjoins the subjective inner world with the outer world. In a word, he sees the “re-embedding” of the individual back into the interdependence of community and nature, this time not out of narrow ignorance as in the ascribed past, but through an enlightened ecology of mind.
Scharmer’s prime anxiety is what he calls “an emerging epistemic monoculture.” He writes: “Just as industrial agriculture replaced the diversity of the living soil with chemical fertilizers and crop monocultures — productive in the short term, devastating over time — the current AI moment is producing an epistemic monoculture. It manifests in a single computational form of knowing that views the world as a set of objects.”
In this, he follows the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who feared in the 1960s that the integral nature of Being would be extinguished by the advent of cybernetic technologies, in which encompassing feedback loops self-reinforce calculating reason to the exclusion of any spiritual dimension or philosophical frame to elevate or govern it. He worried that what he called the “technicity” of instrumental means with no substantive end would inexorably prevail over the diminished soul.
The key question going forward is whether this is necessarily so. Is AI the path to an epistemic monoculture that depletes the rich soil of experiential existence? Or, through the capacity for planetary-scale computation, can it cultivate the very collective interiority that comes from a fuller understanding of how multiple intelligences comprise the Earth system as one self-regulating organism? Won’t augmenting the human field of experience with AI, and vice versa, generate the very awareness of relationality that bridges the divide between individual and collective interiority?
In a related Noema conversation, theoretical biologist and complex systems scientist Stuart Kauffman discusses how this new consciousness would manifest as a transcendent presence awakened within individuals’ inner lives.
Frontier scientific advances have made us humans realize we are embedded and entangled within Earth’s habitat. We are not above and apart from our biosphere, Kauffman says, but “co-creators” in its evolution. Like the poet Goethe, he sees a dynamic, creative universe as a continuous “divine” activity rather than a static set of laws for all time — creatio continua —in which humans are participants.
“What are the implications for the self-understanding and responsibility of human civilization in this undetermined unfolding?” I asked Kauffman.
He explained: “The spiritual consequence, I would argue, is a new sacredness of participation. If the world is not fully given in advance, then Creation is not only ‘back then’ but ongoing. The sacred is not merely a completed order; it is the act of becoming itself … [it is] reverence for the creative unfolding, not worship of a finished blueprint.
“A ‘Next Axial Age’ could be framed as a spirituality of co-creation rather than dominion. And crucially, this spirituality would not be anti-science — it would be a new science understood as careful participation in a living, creative world.”
The observant reader will surely note how far all of this is from the dominant zeitgeist of bitter polarization in both culture and politics, the backtracking on climate commitments, the waging of hard-power wars and the acceleration toward superintelligence with few guardrails in place. Yet it is precisely these extreme conditions that are fueling the search for a new way of seeing and organizing the world. It is in the nature of an axial shift that it arises in opposition to the present order…
Awareness of the relationality of all being is a response to the planet in crisis: “What Might The Next Axial Age Look Like?” from @noemamag.com.
Both of the cited pieces– “We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age” and “Emergence Is Not Engineering“– are eminently worth reading in full.
Apposite: “On metanarratives – or, how we transform our cultural mythology” by Sharon Blackie, complemented by Nicholas Carr‘s “Restoration of the Demon” and Alan Jacobs‘ “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology” together, a caution against mistaking re-enchantment for re-connection.
* Albert Einstein
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As we speculate on sea change, we might send compassionate birthday greetings to a man who tacked against the tide that may now be turning, Gustavo Gutiérrez; he was born on this date in 1928. A philosopher, theologian, and Dominican priest, he was one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology, and his 1971 book A Theology of Liberation is considered pivotal to the formation of liberation theology at large.
Gutiérrez’s theological focus connected salvation and liberation through the preferential option for the poor, with an emphasis on improving the material conditions of the impoverished. Gutiérrez argued that revelation and eschatology have been excessively idealized at the expense of efforts to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth. His methodology was often critical of the social and economic injustice he believed to be responsible for poverty in Latin America, and of the Catholic clergy itself. The central pastoral question of his work was: “How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?”
“Things that are so far removed from our daily experience… are inherently hard to understand”*…
That’s certainly true of numbers. And as the numbers grow, the cognitive challenges grow with them. (Indeed, by way of example: 1 million seconds, is roughly 11.5 days; 1 billion seconds is almost 32 years.)
We’ve looked before at the mysterious extremes of math: zero and infinity [and here]. But as Dan Falk reminds us, the numbers in between can seem pretty strange as well– especially the extremely large ones. In a review of Richard Elwes‘ Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, From 4½ to Fish 7, Falk spotlights some of the largest numbers humans have ever contemplated…
… Aficionados of huge numbers are called “googologists,” a reference to the number 10100, known as a googol. Such numbers have a peculiar sort of existence. For the vast majority of us, they’re of limited everyday value. Calculations at the supermarket checkout, or at tax time in April, typically involve far more modest figures. Perhaps we’ve read that the U.S. national debt is in excess of $38 trillion — a mind-numbing figure, to be sure, but it’s not as though any one individual needs to count it up in stacks of $20 bills.
And yet, much larger numbers await those who seek them out. Consider the kinds of numbers that crop up in problems involving combinations and permutations. For example, in how many distinct ways can one shuffle a deck of cards? Elwes takes us through the calculation, and we end up with a figure of about 8×1067. Compared to that number, the odds of getting a royal flush when dealt a five-card poker hand seem pretty decent, sitting at a mere 1 in 649,740 (still rare enough that many poker players have never held such a hand). Or consider that famous 1980s cultural touchstone, the Rubik’s cube. In how many ways can one scramble the cube? It turns out that the figure is about 43 quintillion, or 4.3×1019 — but in spite of that ridiculously large figure, people do routinely solve the puzzle, and champions can do it in mere seconds. In fact, as Elwes explains, no Rubik’s cube arrangement is more than 20 moves away from any other arrangement.
Or consider the age of the universe, estimated to be about 13.8 billion years. This may seem like a lengthy span of time, but our cosmic future is where the really big numbers come up. Elwes examines the so-called heat death of the universe, in which all matter has broken down into subatomic particles. We may reach this point in [10 raised to the 10th power, raised again to the 120th power] years — this dizzying figure is 10 raised to the power of 10120 — at which point, Elwes says, the universe will have ballooned up to a diameter of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 10120 light years. (Yes, that’s [10 raised to the 10th power, again to the 10th power, then to the 120th power] light years.) Elwes adds a footnote: “At this point, the choice of units hardly matters; the distance is so immense that whether we choose to measure it in Planck lengths or giga-light years makes little difference.” Let that sink in!
As mind numbing as such figures are, the highest numbers contemplated by humans come not from physics but from pure mathematics and computer science. Like “Graham’s number” — an immense figure put forward as the upper-bound for solutions to a problem in a branch of mathematics known as Ramsey theory. Some readers may find the ensuing discussion of multi-dimensional hypercubes a bit challenging, but one can enjoy the payoff regardless: We end up with a number that can’t even be expressed in conventional notation, and which earned a mention in the 1980 edition of the “Guinness Book of World Records” as “the highest number ever used in a mathematical proof.”
Reading this book is a little bit like sitting in the back row of an auction house where a rare Picasso (let’s say) is up for grabs: How high is this thing going to go? And indeed, Elwes keeps going. We eventually meet the so-called busy beaver numbers, a set of numbers that crop up in theoretical computer science, when one tries to deduce whether a particular computer program will eventually stop, or keep going forever — a conundrum known as the “halting problem.” As Elwes explains, it’s not at all straightforward to distinguish the two types of programs (and if it was, it would help mathematicians tackle some of the most vexing problems in their field).
The fifth busy beaver number, known as BB(5) — associated with a computer program that can access five internal states — works out to 47,176,870. And that’s as far as we’ve gotten, Elwes explains. No one has worked out the value of BB(6), but he assures us that it’s beyond the range of any physical computer; and BB(16) leaves even Graham’s number in the dust.
But wait, there’s more! “Rayo’s number,” concocted by Agustín Rayo — a dean and professor at MIT — using set theory, is bigger still (here’s a fun video about it); and “Fish 7,” mentioned in the book’s subtitle, named for a Japanese googologist who goes by the pseudonym “Fish,” builds on Rayo’s number, and … well, the details are not easily digested, but the mind-melting nature of these numbers comes across as a feature, not a bug, of Elwes’s story… the narrative is enlivened by explorations of the peculiarities of math history…
… Archimedes tried to estimate how many grains of sand would be needed to fill up the known universe, back in the third century B.C. Did he simply have too much time on his hands? Not at all, insists Elwes: The Greek thinker was articulating an important idea — that no matter how unfathomably large a quantity may be, we can describe it with precision, thanks to mathematics. “Archimedes,” he writes, “was penning a manifesto for the expressive power of large numbers.”…
… [Elwes focuses] on numbers that are ridiculously large and yet finite. In the end, perhaps this is the most mind-boggling fact of all: that these enormous numbers, from Graham’s number to Fish 7 and beyond, fall as far short of infinity as does the humble number 1…
The mysteries of the massive: “The Mind-Boggling Science of Enormous Numbers,” @danfalk.bsky.social on @richardelwes.bsky.social in @undark.org.
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As we enumerate enormity, we might spare a thought for a seminal mathematician, Alan Turing; he died on this date in 1954. He was a foundational computer science pioneer (inventor of the Turing Machine (an influential model for the general-purpose computer), creator of the “Turing Test” (only too relevant in these AI-infected times), inspiration for “The Turing Award” (the “Nobel Prize of computing“), and cryptographer (leading member of the team that cracked the Enigma code during WWII).
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