Archive for June 2022
“The more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size”*…
From the annals of animation…
A Boy And His Atom earned the Guinness World Records record for the “World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film.”…
What you see on screen are individual carbon monoxide molecules moving around. The film was zoomed in 100 million times. The actual plot of the film is about a boy who bounces his atom around and watches it morph into different forms such as clouds and the word “THINK,” which has been IBM’s slogan since 1911…
And as to how it was made…
“A Boy And His Atom is the world’s smallest movie,” from @BoingBoing.
* Aristotle, Poetics
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As we muse on the micro, we might lament that fact that it was on this date in 1944 that the final installment of George Herriman’s comic strip Krazy Kat appeared– exactly two months after Herriman’s death. The strip– aguably the best ever; inarguably foundational to the form– debuted in New York Journal (as the “downstairs” strip in Herriman’s predecessor comic, The Dingbat Family (later, The Family Upstairs). Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup stepped out on their own in 1913, and ran until 1944– but never actually succeeded financially. It was only the admiration (and support) of publisher William Randolph Hearst that kept those bricks aloft.
“[Hannah] Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space – in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely”*…
… and Alexandra Lange writes about an (imperfect) modern “work-around”: the way in which shopping malls won over a wide range of admirers, from teens to seniors, by providing something they couldn’t find in their dwindling public parks or on their crowded sidewalks…
… The mall, in its quiet early hours, provides affordances most cities and suburbs cannot: even, open walkways, consistent weather, bathrooms and benches. The mall is also “safe,” as Genevieve Bogdan told The New York Times in 1985; the Connecticut school nurse was “apprehensive about walking alone outdoors early in the morning before work.”
For the more vulnerable among us, malls’ privately owned and privately managed amenities offer an on- or off-ramp from the real world, sometimes literally. Skateboarders and wheelchair users both appreciate the fact that most malls were built to include ramps, escalators and elevators, or have been retrofitted to do so. At Grossmont Center, a mall in La Mesa, California, the parking lot features signs giving the step counts from your parking spot to Target, Macy’s and the movie theater. Few cities can say the same.
It isn’t only the ease of exercise that has made mall walking programs durable. On Twitter, city planner Amina Yasin praised malls as spaces that accommodate many racialized and even unhoused senior citizens, offering free and low-cost-of-entry access to air-conditioning, bathrooms and exercise, while throwing up her hands that “white urbanism decided malls are evil.” Gabrielle Peters, a writer and former member of the city of Vancouver’s Active Transportation and Policy Council, responded with her own thread on some ways malls offer better access for people with physical disabilities than city streets: dedicated transit stops, wide automatic doors, wide level passages, multiple types of seating, elevators prominently placed rather than hidden, ramps paired with stairs, public bathrooms and so on.
…
The food court at the Gallery offered a relatively low-cost way to hang out after the transit trip or mall walk. While public libraries and senior centers offer free public seating, they have neither the proximity to shopping, nor the proximity to the action that a mall offers. Like teens hanging out in the atrium, the seniors in the food court can observe without penalty and be a part of community life that can be overwhelming in truly public spaces. After police officers removed elderly Korean Americans from a McDonald’s in Flushing, Queens — managers claimed the group overstayed their welcome, buying only coffee and french fries — sociologist Stacy Torres wrote in The New York Times, “Centers offer vital services, but McDonald’s offers an alternative that doesn’t segregate people from intergenerational contact. ‘I hate old people,’ one 89-year-old man told me.”
…
As malls closed in the spring of 2020 because of Covid-19, mall walkers across the country were forced back outside, battling weather and uneven sidewalks in their neighborhoods, missing the groups that easily formed on the neutral ground of the mall. One New Jersey couple took to walking the parking lot of the mall they once traversed inside, drawn to its spaciousness and their sense of routine. As malls reopened in the summer and fall with social-distancing and mask-wearing policies, some malls suspended their programs until the pandemic’s end, while others curtailed the hours…
“Lessons From the Golden Age of the Mall Walkers,” from @LangeAlexandra in @CityLab.
* Masha Gessen
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As we ponder perambulation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1949 that Hopalong Cassidy (starring William Boyd, who’d created and developed the role in 66 films, starting in 1935) premiered on the fledgling NBC TV network and became the first Western television series.
“Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable”*…
How, Sarah Constantin asks, did we humans get so smart?
If you zoom way out and look at the history of life on Earth, humans evolved incredibly recently. The Hominidae — the family that includes orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and humans — only arose 20 million years ago, in the most recent 0.5% of evolutionary history.
Within the Hominidae, in turn, Homo sapiens is a very recent development [see image at top]. We appeared 800,000-300,000 years ago, or in the last 1.5%-5.3% of hominid history.
If you look at early hominid “technological” milestones like tool use or cooking, though, they’re a lot more spread out over time. That’s interesting.
There’s nothing to suggest that a single physical change in brains should have given us both tool use and fire, for instance; if that were the case, you’d expect to see them show up at the same time.
Purposeful problem-solving behaviors like tool use and cooking are not unique to hominids; some other mammals and birds use tools, and lots of vertebrates (including birds and fish) can learn to solve puzzles to get a food reward. The general class of “problem-solving behavior” that we see, to one degree or another, in many vertebrates, doesn’t seem to have arisen surprisingly fast compared to the existence of animals in general.
However, to the extent that Homo sapiens has unique cognitive abilities, those did show up surprisingly recently, and it makes sense to privilege the hypothesis that they have a common physical cause.
So what are these special human-unique cognitive abilities?…
“Is Human Intelligence Simple? Part 1: Evolution and Archaeology,” from @s_r_constantin. Part 2 is here.
* Henri Bergson
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As we study our species, we might send self-examining birthday greetings to Giambattista Vico; he was born on this date in 1668. A political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist, Vico was one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers. Best known for the Scienza Nuova (1725, often published in English as New Science), he famously criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism and was an apologist for classical antiquity.
He was an important precursor of systemic and complexity thinking (as opposed to Cartesian analysis and other kinds of reductionism); and he can be credited with the first exposition of the fundamental aspects of social science (and so, is considered by many to be the first forerunner of cultural anthropology and ethnography), though his views did not necessarily influence the first social scientists. Vico is often claimed to have fathered modern philosophy of history (although the term is not found in his text; Vico speaks of a “history of philosophy narrated philosophically’). While he was not strictly speaking a historicist, interest in him has been driven by historicists (like Isaiah Berlin).
“But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.”*…
The sparsely populated community of Wonder Valley, California, is a collection of shacks known locally as Jackrabbit Homesteads. Sitting abandoned against a dusty landscape, the worn cabins inspired a series by Berlin-based photographer Helin Bereket…
“I knew little about this place but was drawn to it by the sheer aesthetic of abandonment and isolation, alienation and wreckage, uncanniness and history unknown,” says Helin. During a recent visit to the Golden State, she decided to drive around and discover more about these so-called Jackrabbit Homesteads. The renowned cabins lie east of Twentynine Palms, a city in San Bernardino County, California, that serves as one of the entry points to Joshua Tree National Park. “I had no plan, my eyes scanning the desert landscape,” she says. “Shack-leftovers stuck out from the backdrop where sandy desert blended with the sun. I thought of taming this contrast by harmonising the colour palette and kept wondering about the human traces in what seemed to be a reckless wilderness.”
Why the buildings? These shacks are the last witness of the 1938 Small Tract Act that enabled Americans to obtain five sandy acres of land deemed unusable by the state. As the condition for owning the land was to build a small shack on the plot, many prefabricated or handmade structures were installed in the Mojave Desert, especially in the 1950s and the ’60s.
“Among the thousands of dwellers were veterans with lung problems seeking a cure in the hot desert air,” explains Helin. But today, hardly anyone remains…
Back to nature: “Photographs of abandoned shacks in California’s sparse community of Wonder Valley,” from @Helin__Bereket in @creativeboom.
See also: “Abandoned buildings seen reclaimed by nature.”
* Susan Sontag
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As we ruminate on ruins, we might recall that it was on this date in 2009 that Kodak ceded the victory of digital photography and announced that it would discontinue the production and sale of Kodachrome print and slide film, a repository of “precious memories” since 1935.
“I have all these great genes, but they’re recessive. That’s the problem here.”*…
When the Human Genome Initiative published its first findings in 2002, the world was shocked. Genetic biologists, however, had long ago come to realize that DNA sequences are only part of the story of how organisms develop…
Fueled by the expectation that knowing the sequence of our DNA would tell us who we are, US funding agencies launched one of the most ambitious scientific efforts of all time in 1990. I refer, of course, to the Human Genome Initiative. Since then, the pace of that effort has been furious:even before the decade was over, the finishing line was clearly in view. When in February 2001, two rival teams announced the results of their first analysis of this invaluable information, their report made front-page headlines around the world. Humans, it seems, have far fewer genes than had been expected — in fact, only a third more than the lowly roundworm. How can this be? And what does it mean? Are we really so similar to, and so little more than, mere worms? News of the extent of our commonality with all living species is as stunning as it is humbling. But at the same time, it invites a certain incredulity — and that not merely because of human pride. Simple observation of the manifest diversity of life also makes us resist, for it is impossible not to wonder: what is it, if not the number (and in many cases, even the structure) of the ‘genes’ encoded in our DNA that accounts for the extraordinary differences among living organisms? For the answer to this question, it seems that we will have to look to the regulatory dynamics that determine how the sequence information of the DNA is to be used by the cell. Here, in the complex regulation of genetic transcription, of translation, of protein structure and function, is where we will find what makes us human beings rather than worms, flies or mice. Knowledge of the sequence of our DNA can tell us an enormous amount, but it can almost certainly not tell us who we are.
But not everyone was taken aback by this news. While readers of the popular press may have been stunned, few biologists working at the frontiers of research in molecular genetics were astonished. True, they had expected a larger number of human ‘genes’, but they had long ago come to realise that DNA sequences are only part of the story of how organisms develop, and even of what we mean by a ‘gene’. They recognise, for example, that the spatial and temporal patterns of expression of a gene are even more crucial to the specification of an organism than the structure of that ‘gene’ is. They also know that no single definition of this word ‘gene’ can suffice. Of the many different definitions that are required to make sense of current usage, two stand out with particular clarity: one referring to a particular region of the DNA, and another to the unit of messenger RNA that is used in the synthesis of a particular protein. The number of genes of the second kind is in fact very much larger than that of the first kind (current estimates suggest more than ten times as many), for the fact is that many different ‘genes’ can be constructed out of a single specified region of the DNA. Because the particular context in which they use the word makes its meaning quite clear, ambiguities in usage rarely create problems for practising biologists. Not so, however, for most readers. Outside the laboratory, such linguistic uncertainties can lead to both confusion and misunderstanding — not only around the question of how many genes we have, but also of what genes are made of, where they reside, what they do and, perhaps most important, what genes are for.
The good news is that research in genetics has never been more exciting, and over the last few decades both the depth and the breadth of our understanding of the nature of genetic activity have grown spectacularly. With each advance, the picture of the role of genes in development that biologists learn to draw grows ever more complex and sophisticated, and in ever more conspicuous defiance of the simple mantra with which they began. The word ‘gene’ does not begin to do justice to the ingenuity of the mechanisms required to put biological organisms together — no more than the concept of the neuron does to the ingenuity and dynamic complexity of neural organisation, and no more than talk of individual minds to the complexities of language and cognition…
Unpacking the genome hasn’t turned out to be the master key to understanding life that many thought it would be– but that’s no reason not to celebrate what it does illuminate: “The century of the gene,” from Evelyn Fox Keller in @EngelsbergIdeas.
* Calvin, in Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson)
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As we investigate inheritance, we might spare a thought for D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson; he died on this date in 1948. A classics scholar who was also an accomplished biologist and mathematician, Thompson is best remembered for On Growth and Form (1917, new ed. 1942), a profound consideration of the shapes of living things, starting from the simple premise that “everything is the way it is because it got that way.” Thus one must study not only finished forms, but also the forces that molded them: “the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces’, in this sense, at least, that from it we can judge of or deduce the forces that are acting or have acted upon it.”
The book paved the way for the scientific explanation of morphogenesis, the process by which patterns are formed in plants and animals. Thompson’s description of the mathematical beauty of nature inspired thinkers as diverse as Alan Turing and Claude Levi-Strauss, and artists including Henry Moore, Salvador Dali, and Jackson Pollock. Peter Medawar, the 1960 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, called On Growth and Form “the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue.”
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