NOW REPORTING FROM BALTIMORE. An eclectic, iconoclastic, independent, private, non-commercial blog begun in 2010 in support of the federal Meaningful Use REC initiative, and Health IT and Heathcare improvement more broadly. Moving now toward important broader STEM and societal/ethics topics. Formerly known as "The REC Blog."
NOTE: Comments are moderated, thanks to trolls and bots.
[per WBAL-TV]President Donald Trump said that his Thursday night address will focus on “free and fair elections” and include “really big news.”
Trump on Monday announced the “Speech to the Nation” in a social media post but offered no details other than the 9 p.m. ET time. Asked in the Oval Office Tuesday to preview the speech, and specifically if it’s about elections, Trump replied: “Well, I’d rather save it, it will concern that subject, and we’ll have a couple of other things to say, but I’d rather save it.”
“But it’s really big news,” he continued. “It’s really, really big news, and our country has to shape up.”
“It doesn’t get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” the president added. “We’ll be discussing other things too, but it’s going to be a very big announcement.”
The media will likely be speculating about this ad nauseum until it airs.
…Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet…
I love Jacob Soboroff's new MS NOW show "Connect." It's where I was apprised of this timely new book last weekend. On Courage jumped my endless Kindle backlog rope line.
Serious piece of work thus far. I'm way into it already. Some related priors, quickly: "The ICE Storm," "Oopsie...Too Late."
_____
STING
'eh?
UPDATE
I was just watching PBS News Hour and saw a segment featuring this author.
A Professor at UPenn.
Amazon blurb:
A compelling exploration of concrete strategies to reduce partisan animosity by building on what Democrats and Republicans have in common.
One of the defining features of twenty-first-century American politics is the rise of affective polarization: Americans increasingly not only disagree with those from the other party but distrust and dislike them as well. This has toxic downstream consequences for both politics and social relationships. Is there any solution?
Our Common Bonds shows that—although there is no silver bullet that will eradicate partisan animosity—there are concrete interventions that can reduce it. Matthew Levendusky argues that partisan animosity stems in part from partisans’ misperceptions of one another. Democrats and Republicans think they have nothing in common, but this is not true. Drawing on survey and experimental evidence, the book shows that it is possible to help partisans reframe the lens through which they evaluate the out-party by priming commonalities—specifically, shared identities outside of politics, cross-party friendships, and common issue positions and values identified through civil cross-party dialogue. Doing so lessons partisan animosity, and it can even reduce ideological polarization. The book discusses what these findings mean for real-world efforts to bridge the partisan divide.
I've just downloaded the Amazon preview for some initial impressions. to wit,
1. Is Overcoming Division a Fantasy?
On a blustery January day, just moments after being sworn in as the forty-sixth president of the United States of America, Joe Biden delivered an address centered on “that most elusive of things in a democracy: unity.” This was perhaps a slightly odd choice, as the country seemed to be more divided than ever. Just two weeks before, supporters of former President Trump had stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to block the certification of Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election. January 6 marked only the second time in US history that the Capitol had been breached, but the first time that American citizens—rather than foreign troops—had been the ones doing the ransacking. Even before that insurrection, few would have characterized the United States as unified: the country was seemingly torn asunder by divides over how to address the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic recession, as well as a centuries-overdue reckoning about the legacy of slavery and racism. Dissolution, not unity, seemed like a more appropriate topic for the moment.
Biden acknowledged that there were deep and significant challenges to be overcome. But he argued that to confront these challenges, we have to “end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.” He acknowledged that this will be difficult, and that unity does not imply unanimity: “The right to dissent peaceably, within the guardrails of our Republic, is perhaps our nation’s greatest strength. Yet hear me clearly: Disagreement must not lead to disunion.” But he argued that if we could come together as one, we could “heal a broken land” and “write an American story of hope, not fear, of unity, not division, of light, not darkness” (Biden 2021).
Those stirring words, poetic as they were, likely seemed hopelessly naïve to most Americans. Biden himself acknowledged as much, saying that he knew his words sounded like “a foolish fantasy” to many. The public agreed with his assessment: in a poll by the Pew Research Center early in his term, of all of the issues polled, the public was the least confident in Biden’s ability to unify the country, even when compared to major challenges like responding to the COVID-19 pandemic or reforming immigration policy (Pew Research Center 2021). This skepticism reflects the conventional wisdom about American politics: politicians in Washington, DC, are hopelessly divided and cannot come together on almost any issue, and ordinary voters are little better. Indeed, not only do voters disagree with one another, they also fundamentally dislike and distrust one another. This animosity seemingly eviscerates any calls for unity among members of the public…
the
conventional wisdom about American politics: politicians in Washington,
DC, are hopelessly divided and cannot come together on almost any
issue, and ordinary voters are little better. Indeed, not only do voters
disagree with one another, they also fundamentally dislike and distrust
one another. This animosity seemingly eviscerates any calls for unity
among members of the public…
Levendusky, Matthew (2023). Our Common Bonds: Using What Americans Share to Help Bridge the Partisan Divide (Loc 60). Kindle Edition.
In
the moment of transition between life and death, only one thing
changes: you lose the momentum of the biochemical cycles that keep the
machinery running. In the moment before death, you are still composed of
the same thousand trillion trillion atoms as in the moment after death—
the only difference is that their neighborly network of social
interactions has ground to a halt.
At
that moment, the atoms begin to drift apart, no longer enslaved to the
goals of keeping up a human form. The interacting pieces that once
constructed your body begin to unravel like a sweater, each thread
spiraling off in a different direction. Following your last breath,
those thousand trillion trillion atoms begin to blend into the earth
around you. As you degrade, your atoms become incorporated into new
constellations: the leaf of a staghorn fern, a speckled snail shell, a
kernel of maize, a beetle’s mandible, a waxen bloodroot, a ptarmigan’s
tail feather.
But
it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an
accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues
to be so wherever it goes. So you’re not gone, you’re simply taking on
different forms. Instead of your gestures being the raising of an
eyebrow or a blown kiss, now a gesture might consist of a rising gnat, a
waving wheat stalk, and the inhaling lung of a breaching beluga whale.
Your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing on a
lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulonimbus, a flapping
grunion birthing, a glossy river pebble gliding around an eddy.
From
your present clumped point of view, this afterlife may sound
unnervingly distributed. But in fact it is wonderful. You can’t imagine
the pleasure of stretching your redefined body across vast territories:
ruffling your grasses and bending your pine branch and flexing an
egret’s wings while pushing a crab toward the surface through
coruscating shafts of light. Lovemaking reaches heights it could never
dream of in the compactness of human corporality. Now you can
communicate in many places along your bodies at once; you weave your
versatile hands over your lover’s multiflorous figure. Your rivers run
together. You move in concert as interdigitating creatures of the
meadow, entangled vegetation bursting from the fields, caressing weather
fronts that climax into thunderstorms.
Just
as in your current life, the downside is that you are always in flux.
As creatures degrade and your fruits fall and rot, you become capable of
new gestures and lose others. Your lover might drift away from you in
the migratory flight of tropic birds, a receding stampede of wintering
elk, or a creek that quietly pokes its head under the ground and pops up
somewhere unknown to you.
Many
of your same problems apply: temptation, anguish, anger, distrust,
vice— and don’t forget the dread arising from free choice. Don’t be
fooled into believing that plants grow mechanically toward the sun, that
birds choose their direction by instinct, that wildebeest migrate by
design: in fact, everything is seeking. Your atoms can spread, but they
cannot escape the search. A wide distribution does not shield you from
wondering how best to spend your time. Once every few millennia, all
your atoms pull together again, traveling from around the globe, like
the leaders of nations uniting for a summit, converging for their
densest reunion in the form of a human. They are driven by nostalgia to
regroup into the tight pinpoint geometry in which they began. In this
form they can relish a forgotten sense of holiday-like intimacy. They
come together to search for something they once knew but didn’t
appreciate at the time.
The
reunion is warm and heartening for a while, but it isn’t long before
they begin to miss their freedom. In the form of a human the atoms
suffer a claustrophobia of size: gestures are agonizingly limited,
restricted to the foundering of tiny limbs. As a condensed human they
cannot see around corners, they can only talk within short distances to
the nearest ear, they cannot reach out to touch across any meaningful
expanses. We are the moment of least facility for the atoms. And in this
form, they find themselves longing to ascend mountains, wander the
seas, and conquer the air, seeking to recapture the limitlessness they
once knew.
Trust me, OK? You will not spend a better 90 minutes, total. More shortly...
ERRATUM
I hope everyone had a safe and pleasant July 4th. We just cocooned at home (it was SO hot in Bmore) and watched a ton more FIFA Futbol. I'm getting there.
UPDATE
More "Inner Cosmos" stuff.
Intelligence? It's a word that we usually reserve for something abstract and cerebral, something associated with problem solving and planning and passing IQ tests. We tend to picture intelligence as a property of brains and especially big human brains. We're generally willing to grant some intelligence to dolphins and chimps and clever birds like ravens, but it's hard to know how to think about so many other things happening in the world. For example, my skin cells heal a wound. Is that intelligence or is that just biochemical cascades? A plant grows towards sunlight. Intelligent. A worm gets its head cut off and it regrows it. That's amazing. But we don't tend to call that cognition. But what if we've been looking at the whole notion of intelligence too narrowly? What if intelligence isn't just about neurons and genes, but it's about goals? And specifically, it's about the ability of a system to navigate towards an objective, to adapt to its circumstances, to make decisions along the way. That's a broader definition of intelligence. And if we apply it, suddenly intelligence doesn't just belong to creatures with brains. It becomes something that shows up in places we didn't expect…
Brings this to mind:
TEN The Nature of Intelligence INTELLIGENCE AND EVOLUTION
Any exploration of the nature of intelligence is a precarious venture. Before we start out, we must know what we are seeking, and there is no generally accepted definition of intelligence. It is as hard to describe where intelligence begins and of what it consists as it is to define life itself.
There is no consensus about the point in evolutionary development at which life might be said to begin, nor even an exact demarcation between life and nonlife. Did life begin when amino acid molecules first formed self-replicating chains? Where is the boundarybetween the replication of crystal formations and that of carbon compounds? Indeed, there is no boundary. Life is a flow. It begins in inorganic material and emerges gradually along its course to sentience and intelligence.
The same may be said of intelligence. It begins with the simplest awareness of limited elements of the environment and it proceeds toward awareness of the self and then to abstract ideation by the most gradual stages. We may examine it and analyze it at any point along this continuum, but no one has yet been able to summarize its totality to the satisfaction of anyone else.
Before we go any further we must make it clear that our investigation is not about the qualities of especially brilliant human mental achievements or of the nature of the minds of those gifted individuals we call "bright," "great brains," or "geniuses," but of intelligence as an expression of life itself. By what means does an organism "know" its surroundings and what it must do to exist in them? What is the mechanism by which it makes a decision to take this path rather than that one? What, in fact, is a "thought"? Thought is nonmaterial. We cannot touch it, see it, or measure it. Yet at its inception arises from a material organ, from the living tissue of the brain, and as its outcome it directs concrete actions. This is the mystery of the thinking process. It arises in the concrete and ends in the concrete, but is itself intangible.
If we trace the thinking process back to its origins in the brain, we find ourselves back again at the origins of life. Sensitivity to external stimuli is a property of every living cell… [Other Senses, Other Worlds, pg 127]
