Weekly Picks – July 7, 2024

Credit (left to right): The Open Syllabus Galaxy; Brian Gratwicke / Flickr; Jose Miguel Picon Chimelis; Isai Ramos / Unsplash.

This week’s collection:

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. Galaxy Brain

“I remember learning in college that Max Weber was the last person who knew everything. This wasn’t meant literally, though he had a prodigious grasp of science, politics, and culture. Rather, it referred to his thinking about how knowledge and scientific inquiry are organized, and how we relate to them. Weber concluded that in the modern era, the fragmentation of knowledge into specialties and professions made a complete or unified view of knowledge impossible. We work in our little corners, and know that others are working in theirs, and that relationship to knowledge is, Weber argued, disenchanting.

Despite its name, the university doesn’t solve this problem so much as administer it: pushing students through years of training toward specializations. The intangible product of these experiences are fields. We work in them and are defined professionally by them, but it’s hard to see them. And the university multiplies this experience across dozens or hundreds of them.

A neat trick in the age of big data is to gather some subset of the experiences that define fields—say, the teaching choices recorded on millions of syllabi—and bring their connections into view. This is what the Open Syllabus “Galaxy” does. It’s a navigable plot of the million most frequently assigned titles across all fields, clustered by the extent to which they are assigned together. And it’s the closest thing available to a bird’s-eye view of anglophone higher education.

The Galaxy attracts a lot of oohs and aahs. We could say that it enchants in both the normal and Weberian senses—providing a whiff of the old unity of knowledge. And most people stop there, unsure how to make sense of it or use it. After all, there are no “Galaxy-brain” users—no institutions or agents that work at this level of abstraction.”

2. Learning to love monsters

“Today’s modern wind turbines seem to repel poetic or artistic engagement. It is difficult to imagine a landscape painter portraying their spare lines and uniform rows as icons of a pastoral idyll, as the windmills of the past often were.

Perceptions of modern wind turbines seem worlds away, for example, from how Robert Louis Stevenson described the windmills of England in 1882:

There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country, their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day, with uncouth gesticulations, their air gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape.

The aspects that struck Stevenson – the motion of windmills, symbols of prosperity, on the horizon – were highlighted a decade before by the French novelist Alphonse Daudet in his depiction of Provençal life:

The hills all about the village were dotted with windmills. Whichever way you looked, you could see sails turning in the mistral above the pines, and long strings of little donkeys laden with sacks going up and down the paths; and all week long it was a joy to hear on these hill-tops the cracking of whips, the creaking of the canvas of the sails, and the shouts of the millers’ men … These windmills, you see, were not only the wealth of our land, they were its pride and joy.

Yet perceptions of windmills have not been uniformly idyllic. Since they first appeared on the landscape of medieval Europe, windmills represented an imposition of the technological on the pastoral. They were, in the phrase of the wind energy author Paul Gipe, ‘machines in the garden’, straddling the boundary of the agrarian and mechanical. Unlike the static technologies shaping landscapes – from cathedral towers or canals in the past, to power lines, solar panels or rows of genetically modified crops today – windmills are constantly in motion. They refuse to passively disappear into the landscape.

With the spread of modern windfarms, the cultural positioning of wind power remains a contentious issue. But the debate is not new: for centuries, the symbolic nature of windmills – as technological monsters or icons of the idyllic – has been open to question. Understanding this debate can help open new avenues for engagement with today’s wind technology.”

3. One fish, two fish, 3,000 fish…

“East Africa is famed for its incredible wildlife such as mountain gorillas and savanna elephants, but for sheer diversity of species not much rivals a subgroup of cichlid fish known as haplochromine cichlids that swim in the waters of Africa’s Great Lakes.

“More than 1,000 species have emerged in these radiations in the past 3 [million] or 4 million years, and more than 500 in Lake Victoria alone within the last 100,000 years or less,” writes Ole Seehausen, an evolutionary ecologist and ichthyologist at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who has been studying haplochromine cichlids for decades. “These are the largest and fastest adaptive radiations known in the animal kingdom, and understanding them will be important for understanding the origin of species diversity in general.”

Scientists define adaptive radiations as the diversification of lineages or tribes into arrays of species with traits that allow them to exploit different environments and resources. Driving the radiations can be environmental changes that make new resources available, or mass extinctions that empty out habitats for creatures to move into. The extinction of the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago created new ecological niches that probably allowed mammals to radiate, for example.

. . .

“There is no other group known that matches the haplochromine cichlids of Lake Victoria in the rate of speciation and the species richness,” Seehausen says.

Adaptive radiations have enthralled evolutionary biologists ever since the days of Charles Darwin. Today, researchers in a variety of fields, including evolutionary ecology and genomics, are learning more about the underlying evolutionary processes and ecological mechanisms by which such biological diversity arises, as well as how it is maintained or goes extinct.”

4. Infiltrating the Family

“A locksmith with ready cash and expensive tastes, Carlo Neri proposed to Donna McLean on New Year’s Eve, just three months after they met. She said yes. That same night, talking to some of the male activists who were part of McLean and Neri’s shared social circle, he made an unusual suggestion: why not firebomb a charity shop connected to the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, an Italian fascist organization?

“Carlo Neri,” in fact, was an agent of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a covert unit of the Special Branch. He was a spy for the police.

For decades in the UK, police infiltrated the trade union movement, environmental groups, antiracist organizations, community centers, animal rights organizations, antiwar groups, feminist collectives, nuclear disarmament campaigns, and even the youth wing of the Liberal Party. Infiltration was not merely a matter of attending a few meetings or demonstrations. Instead, officers insinuated themselves into the intimate, romantic, familial, and comradely spaces of those on whom they spied.

The rituals of romantic love and family life could be used as part of an officer’s cover. Spy cops attended weddings, birthdays, and funerals as the partners of the women they spied on. Many years after their relationship ended, McLean came to the awful realization that Neri’s gesture of devotion had in fact been a distraction to conceal his other proposal later that night—an understanding that hit her “like a fist in the face.”

At every stage, undercover officers relied upon the structure and ideological force of the family to inveigle their way into left-wing political organizations, social scenes, and individual lives. In the process, they destroyed the families and communities of many thousands of people. It is a brutal irony that to keep their real names out of the public domain, many of the police officers have relied upon the Article 8 right to family life, the section of the Human Rights Act 1998 designed to safeguard individuals from intrusions into their privacy, personal identity, and intimate relationships.

“What about my privacy and my right to family life?,” demands McLean. “My head feels like it might explode. My body was used against my will. I did not consent to being a sexual experiment. I did not consent to being a mistress. I did not consent to being fucked all over the world by a man who did not exist. It seems they can act with impunity.”

. . .

As the infiltration of the intimate and sexual lives of activists shows, the notion that in the eyes of the state, the family is a protected space is nonsense, a malicious, seductive fiction. The family—as ideological conceit and as social practice—is precisely the mechanism through which state power most insidiously encroaches into the lives of individuals.

. . .

Not only are the police institutionally sexist, but police power targets women, using gender, sexuality, intimacy, and family—all things we experience as deeply personal—against us. The fact that the family—a space of loving bonds as well as more destructive processes—was cynically, ruthlessly deployed is instructive too. It reminds us that we live in a political system in which nothing is sacred: one’s sexual autonomy, emotional vulnerability, deep instinct to connect with others can all be sacrificed at the altar of capital.”

5. Dragon-shaped aurora and ‘scream of a dying star’ revealed as 2024 Astronomy Photographer of the Year finalists

“From mesmerizing “mythical monsters” to jaw-dropping distant constellations, the shortlisted candidates for Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024 showcase the magnificent beauty in the skies around us. Here are this year’s stunning nominees.”