Alice Liao

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on the atlas — 21

highlights — 76

Zhuangzi was right. So was June Thunderstorm. Our minds are just a part of nature. We can understand the happiness of fishes—or ants, or inchworms—because what drives us to think and argue about such matters is, ultimately, exactly the same thing.
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
Let us imagine a principle. Call it a principle of freedom—or, since Latinate constructions tend to carry more weight in such matters, call it a principle of ludic freedom. Let us imagine it to hold that the free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities will, under certain circumstances at least, tend to become an end in itself. It would obviously not be the only principle active in nature. Others pull other ways. But if nothing else, it would help explain what we actually observe, such as why, despite the second law of thermodynamics, the universe seems to be getting more, ra…
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
What would happen if we proceeded from the reverse perspective and agreed to treat play not as some peculiar anomaly, but as our starting point, a principle already present not just in lobsters and indeed all living creatures, but also on every level where we find what physicists, chemists, and biologists refer to as “self-organizing systems”?
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.” If so, and if Kropotkin was right, then glimmers of freedom, or even of moral life, begin to appear everywhere around us.
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
We don’t have to explain why creatures desire to be alive. Life is an end in itself. And if what being alive actually consists of is having powers—to run, jump, fight, fly through the air—then surely the exercise of such powers as an end in itself does not have to be explained either. It’s just an extension of the same principle.
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with the ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behavior of the young in mature life, there are others which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces—“the joy of life,” and a desire to communicate in some way or another with other individuals of the same …
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms—which in turn means describing an animal as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest—whatever their theory of animal psychology, or motivation, might be.
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
A society made up of human beings who have turned themselves into small businesses is basically the logical endpoint of free market capitalism, anyway.
Want to sell a book or release an album? Better start a TikTok. - Vox
“I had made a product out of some of the most devastating moments of my life. In its aftermath, I felt pressured to continuously comment on problems in my private life that I didn’t know how to fix,” wrote Elle Mills, a former teen YouTuber, on why she quit. “I think I am a writer and an actor and an artist,” wrote Tavi Gevinson of her relationship to Instagram. “But I haven’t believed the purity of my own intentions ever since I became my own salesperson, too.”
Want to sell a book or release an album? Better start a TikTok. - Vox
neoliberalism has created so much precarity that the commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security.
Want to sell a book or release an album? Better start a TikTok. - Vox
If you are a writer who wants to put sand in the gears, your technique, regardless of genre, must at minimum be smarter and more principled than that pulp fantasy trope of “children of light vs. children of darkness” that Netanyahu cited to justify genocide, or the persecution flip of “river to the sea” discourse. Every image in our shared consciousness, every grammar of narrative is part of this apparatus of meaning of which we are part, and into which we produce new work—it is how we understand things, it is how we enable each other to understand things, to think new thoughts. That is the wr…
Every Throne Will Fall – Vajra Chandrasekera
Fiction, even genre fiction, cannot be allowed to devolve into merely a set of tropes and reusable prefabricated bits, but especially not so when those prefab bits are regurgitations of imperialist propaganda in support of atrocities in the world. The work must work harder. Far more is asked of us than this.
Every Throne Will Fall – Vajra Chandrasekera
The work that must be done by art, the friction it must generate, is located in the contact it makes with the conditions of its production, which in our time and our field is an intermingled machine of the industrial and ideological.
Every Throne Will Fall – Vajra Chandrasekera
The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review. If that were true, why would writers go to the trouble of making up characters and relationships and plots and scenery and all that? Why not just deliver the message? Is the story a box to hide an idea in, a fancy dress to make a naked idea look pretty, a candy coating to make a bitter idea easier to swallow? (Open your mouth, dear, it’s good for you.) Is fiction decorative wordage concealing a rational thought, a m…
Ursula K. Le Guin — A Message about Messages
Your other self’s smile melts into something less cracked. You smile back in relief. “If it’s only regret,” she says, and reaches for your hand and you— The knife in the heart, held by the fisherman’s hand.
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
“But I want to,” she says again. “I’ve always wanted to know what it was like, to live somewhere else. To be the one to leave. To be American. I wondered about you. When I had to take suneung. When I would fight with mom. When I was getting married. Did you ever wonder about me?” You did. You thought about your other self when you picked your college major. When you fought with your mother. When it was Chuseok and you were alone in your dorm room, eating dduk that your mother mailed you. “I did,” you say. You want to know how she loves her husband. How she loves her daughter. How she talks wit…
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
The English word nostalgia is derived from Greek word algea, the plural personification of pain.
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
When Soyoung “Rose” Kang is done making her changes to the file, she will de-instance it, merging the file with the original on the server. The changes slot into the original, and the new copy becomes the official version on the server. The original copy without the changes is overwritten by the instance. Integration of the other into the self.
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
You hadn’t thought about your instance, your family in Korea, your grandfather, in months, and even when you thought of them it was in passing, as if they were a dream you only vacantly remembered, something tamped down and buried.
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
the laughter feels like a thin soap bubble film stretched across your words
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
Time polishes the memory of the undersea court to a pearl, something carefully tucked away under the rough cloth of his weekday worries.
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
it feels like you’re circling back around the conversation again, taking a derivative and never quite managing to meet the x-axis.
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
America assumes instances leave their original country permanently and defines them by the self left behind.
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
“In a conservation context, hybridization is usually seen as negative simply because the mantra of conservational biology is to protect species and lineages as they evolve, on the landscape they evolved in,”
Interspecies Hybrids Play a Vital Role in Evolution | Quanta Magazine
Adaptive introgression can in turn contribute significantly to adaptive radiation, a process by which one species rapidly diversifies into a large variety of types, which then form new lineages that continue to adapt independently
Interspecies Hybrids Play a Vital Role in Evolution | Quanta Magazine
For these effects to occur, the rate of hybridization can be — and most likely is — very small. For Mallet’s almost entirely hybridized butterflies, “the occasional trickle of one hybrid mating every 1,000 normal matings is sufficient to completely homogenize genes between the species,” he said.
Interspecies Hybrids Play a Vital Role in Evolution | Quanta Magazine
two genes found in the jaguar pointed to a past hybridization with the lion, which would have occurred after their phylogenetic paths had forked. Both genes turned out to be involved in optic nerve formation; Eizirik speculated that the genes encoded an improvement in vision the jaguars needed or could exploit. For whatever reasons, natural selection favored the lion’s genes, which took the place of those the jaguar originally had for that trait.
Interspecies Hybrids Play a Vital Role in Evolution | Quanta Magazine
But grizzlies and polar bears, as it turns out, have been mating since the species diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago. Polar bear genomes have retained mitochondrial DNA from ancient grizzly bears, and grizzlies have inherited genes from hybridizing with polar bears. “People worry that if they interbreed, polar bears will lose their beautiful white coats,” said Michael Arnold, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Georgia. “But the truth is these organisms have not been looking entirely like themselves for a long time now.” “If this mixing is a common natural event,” he warne…
Interspecies Hybrids Play a Vital Role in Evolution | Quanta Magazine
Because populations are often highly adapted to their own locales, mixed offspring can lack characteristics critical to survival in either of their parents’ habitats.
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
Some of the hesitation over genetic rescue also likely comes from memories of past mistakes, when interbreeding organisms that were too distantly related led to its own problems, called outbreeding depression. Some organisms from different populations look very similar, are physically capable of mating and can even produce living offspring, but the long-term viability or fertility of those hybrids turns out to be poor. For instance, separate populations within a species can have different numbers of chromosomes — it’s a surprisingly common phenomenon in rodents. Mismatches in traits that affec…
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
Within conservation, “a lot of people feel that preserving the ‘pureness’ and evolutionary history of species should be the main goal of conservation strategies,” Steiner said. “But more aggressive conservation actions may be needed when the adaptive potential of populations is at risk.”
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
Outbreeding like this isn’t even unnatural. Studies show that even hybridization between different species is more common in nature than one might expect. Hybrids and populations in boundary zones are often important for protecting species by infusing them with new genes or serving as repositories for genes that maybe aren’t currently advantageous but could be in the future.
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
Sprinkled throughout the genomes of even healthy populations are detrimental genes called deleterious recessive alleles. Only organisms that have two copies of these alleles, one from each parent, suffer health issues. Individuals who have only one copy are carriers of the condition. In most populations, the odds that two carriers will get together are relatively low, but if they do, one quarter of their offspring on average will express the defect. When populations are so small that close relatives are breeding, individuals are more likely to have the same gene variants as their mate. Carrier…
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
Most endangered or threatened species can’t claim the vaquita’s resistance to the harm of inbreeding. For species or populations at the brink of extinction, the best conservation strategy can sometimes be to bring in outsiders to restore healthy dominant alleles to the breeding pool. “By introducing genetically diverse individuals, the evolutionary potential of populations in peril might increase and, in turn, the resilience of the species as a whole,” Steiner said. “This is the notion of genetic rescue.”
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
the remaining vaquitas all seemed to be healthy and reproducing. Hardly any of the individual vaquitas carried copies of deleterious alleles, so inbreeding was essentially a nonissue for them. Using population models, the researchers reconstructed what the genetic profile of vaquitas might have been in the past. They deduced that because the vaquita population has always been relatively small, natural selection eliminated most of the harmful genes from the population and reduced the frequency of the remaining ones, long before gill nets became a problem.
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
Surprisingly, recent research has revealed that not all small populations are at risk of inbreeding depression. Inbreeding seems to be most detrimental to formerly large populations that are now small, as seems to be the case with the southern resident orcas. Organisms that have always had a tiny population, however, sometimes develop a kind of resistance to it.
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
“Before, people would say, we need to save the species,” Steiner explained. “But that’s not enough if you think about it. When you talk about species, you’re not considering the whole evolutionary potential of all the different groups that make up that species. That’s why the new notion is: We really want to save the genetic structure of the species, these different populations — subspecies — that have unique characteristics at the genomic level.”
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
The idea is to consider not just the current survival of a species but its potential evolutionary ability to adapt when faced with environmental changes or emerging diseases in the future. The source of this resilience is its genetic diversity. If a new pest or disease strikes a genetically diverse population, any individuals that happen to be naturally resistant can survive it and reproduce. If all the individuals are genetically alike and lack resistance, the population will die out.
How Pools of Genetic Diversity Affect a Species’ Fate | Quanta Magazine
The capacity to take the world as it is given to us and make something radically new out of it is an early meaning of the word “plastic,” which emerged in the English language in the 17th century. This capacity was fundamental to Renaissance humanism, the philosophy on which Milton was raised. The scholar Ernst Cassirer characterized humanism as the belief that “man is not simply the creation of a force beyond himself, but that he has to, and can, create himself.”
Greta Gerwig’s Paradise Lost ‹ Literary Hub
what Gerwig sees in Paradise Lost: poetry as a measure of our alienation from nature and each other.
Greta Gerwig’s Paradise Lost ‹ Literary Hub
I remember the first time when I read Milton and I realized this idea of, Paradise has no poetry. Because what do you need metaphor for if everything is literally what it is? You need this sort of separation from your environment in order to have a need for the beauty of poetry.
Greta Gerwig’s Paradise Lost ‹ Literary Hub
Like Milton’s Eden, Barbieland also contains the seeds of its own destruction: gender inequality. Ken exists in a state of perpetual anxiety, hoping only to please Barbie. In this, he resembles Milton’s Adam. When Eve is born, she falls in love with her own reflection in a pool of water. On first seeing Adam, she is unimpressed. Adam worries about her self-sufficiency and complains about his desire for her. Milton is said to have invented the word “self-esteem,” and that is exactly what Adam lacks. Fear of living without Eve compels him to eat the fruit. Both Ken and Adam suffer from patriarch…
Greta Gerwig’s Paradise Lost ‹ Literary Hub
Perhaps most crucially, a new skin test has proven effective at detecting alpha-synuclein clumps (the misfolded proteins in the nervous system that indicate a disorder), thereby providing a means of clinically diagnosing synucleinopathies like Parkinson's at far earlier stages. This needs the full weight of funding behind it, with the aim of rolling out these skin biopsies on long COVID patients. If atypical alpha-synuclein is detected across long COVID patients, it'd be convincing evidence that the condition is the beginning of a developing neurodegenerative disease.
Long COVID is devastating and far from rare. As infections rise again, why are we still ignoring it? | Salon.com
Then there's Birgit Högl at the Medical University Innsbruck, Austria, a clinician and researcher focusing on rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder and related biomarkers. This sleep behavior disorder is a strong predictor of a developing Parkinson's-like disease.
Long COVID is devastating and far from rare. As infections rise again, why are we still ignoring it? | Salon.com
hopefully diagnosis by exclusion will not be the required approach for much longer, as diagnostically detecting misfolded alpha-synuclein non-invasively in living patients is becoming possible.
Long COVID is devastating and far from rare. As infections rise again, why are we still ignoring it? | Salon.com
"From my standpoint," Galiatsatos went on, "long COVID is a disease of exclusion ... There's no biomarker for me to say: 'this is exclusive to long COVID' ... So the challenge we have is the fact that if we don't have a uniform, unified definition [of long COVID], you're going to get a lot of noise that's going to fail moving good trials ahead." A diagnosis based on exclusion takes 3 to 6 months, according to Galiatsatos – that's a lot of time to be suffering and potentially unable to work without qualifying for disability. Never mind the months it can take just to get into these types of clin…
Long COVID is devastating and far from rare. As infections rise again, why are we still ignoring it? | Salon.com
According to Nomi Health, cited by DMEC, employer spending on long COVID is already 26% higher than the average spending on diabetes, a chronic illness that inflicts massive costs. Projections indicate that long COVID will have a massive negative impact on the labor force and economy – costing the economy billions in lost wages. With an estimated 16 to 34 million Americans experiencing long COVID, a labor shortage is an area of real concern, as the chances of returning to full employment after a six-month absence due to injury or illness is around 55%. Extend that time to one year, and chances…
Long COVID is devastating and far from rare. As infections rise again, why are we still ignoring it? | Salon.com
A longitudinal analysis of SARS survivors found that sequelae (secondary symptoms) persisted 18 years later. It was also found that sleep disorders were prevalent among chronic post-SARS patients, which is a strong indicator of neurodegeneration. The H1N1 pandemic of 2009 also resulted in an uptick of sleep disorders. Therefore, perhaps the Mayo Clinic and Parkinson's Foundation observing a steady rise in the incidence of Parkinson's disease over the previous decades isn't entirely a coincidence.
Long COVID is devastating and far from rare. As infections rise again, why are we still ignoring it? | Salon.com
Take, for example, the prodromal stage of Parkinson's disease, which can last for decades prior to clinically-diagnosed Parkinson's. Before diagnosable motor deficits emerge, prodromal Parkinson's patients (though standard practice in medicine can't officially recognize them as such) report symptoms like loss of smell, autonomic dysfunction (POTS, hypertension, hypotension, etc.), loss of sensation in the skin (small fiber neuropathy), gastrointestinal issues, urinary dysfunction, visual anomalies (retinal microvascular alterations), depression/apathy, sleep disorders, hormonal changes, and mi…
Long COVID is devastating and far from rare. As infections rise again, why are we still ignoring it? | Salon.com