It's hard to find your way to new authors, even if you really want to branch out. The new website No Names, No Jackets, aims to solve the problem with a cool platform that allows readers to speed-date their way through a single chapter of a novel before potentially settling down with a whole book.

The site, created by freelance writer John Rickards, is actually more like blind speed-dating. Writers submit a single chapter of their novels. Readers come to the site and a randomiser presents them with the beginning of one of the submissions. If you like it, you can read the rest of the chapter and after that, if things are still going well, you can buy the whole book. And if the prose doesn't catch you, you just click through to the next submission.

One of the key features of the site is that the fiction stands by itself, without any of the cues that normally help us choose among books: no dust jackets, no blurbs, no reader reviews (although you can choose a genre). In fact, you don't even get the author's name until you click through to Amazon.

It is an exciting way to experience fiction but also daunting, too. We end up in content ruts in large part because we follow the kinds of cues that No Names, No Jackets strips away: We always read the same authors or take recommendations from the same small group of friends. But No Names, No Jackets forces you to reckon with the text directly, to decide if what you're reading actually speaks to you and meets your own idiosyncratic standards of aesthetic value.

It's difficult and maybe even a little scary to have to make those kinds of judgments completely on your own, which is why we rely on proxies so often to tell us what's good.

H/T The Paris Review.

Which is the real Korea?: Sheila Miyoshi Jager on the dramatic differences between North and South Korea and how those differences help us understand the North’s isolated, bellicose regime. As Jager explains, tension between the two countries dates back to the Korean War, which concluded in 1953 with no official peace treaty. In the eyes of North Korea that conflict is still playing out, and to adopt modern reforms that would make it more like South Korea would be tantamount to admitting defeat.

Revising your writing again? Blame the Modernists: Craig Fehrman on how revision became a standard part of the writing process. In a new book, “The Work of Revision,” Oxford University English professor Hannah Sullivan argues that revision became essential in the 20th century under the influence of modernist writers like Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf—and that their obsession with revision owed in large part to the invention of the typewriter, which made “massive structural transformation” more feasible than they were when people wrote by hand. Furthermore, the ability to revise was central to the Modernist push to create avant-garde literature, because with each revision writers could move towards a more uniquely, self-consciously created style.

American history, hacked to bits: William L. Bird Jr. on a unique breed of patriotic souvenir—pieces carved off of national monuments. Such moves are unthinkable (or at least illegal) today, but until the mid-19th century people were quite happy to chip off a piece of Plymouth Rock and bring it home. Bird details pieces of national monuments that will be on display as part of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution on souvenir collecting.

What your metadata says about you: Abraham Riesman interviews César Hidalgo of the MIT Media Lab, who has created a program called “Immersion” which analyzes your metadata. Metadata—as we’ve all learned recently thanks to revelations that the National Security Agency collects it—is everything about, say, an email exchange except the content of the message itself. “Immersion,” which went live yesterday, extracts metadata from your Gmail account (with the option to later delete this information) and presents you with a visual map of who you communicate with, how often you communicate with them, and the interactions between people in your network.

You can try out Immersion here.

Plus: Kevin Lewis on how sitting in a spacious (versus compact) seat makes people more likely to cheat; how people are willing to pay more for equivalent portions with larger-sounding labels; how political influence determines vaccine distribution when an epidemic is afoot; and more.

Top: David Guttenfelder/AP. Bottom: Pop sensation Psy performing in Seoul in August 2012, Lee Jae-Won/Reuters.

What makes an idea catch on? These days we might not think immediately of the dedication page of a book. But in ancient Rome, an author’s dedication could go a long way toward determining how many people would end up reading the work, Tom Standage wrote on his personal blog last week.

Standage, who is digital editor at The Economist, is the author of the forthcoming book, “Writing on the Wall,” about the long history of social media. In the blog post he pulls from the book to talk about how the dedication page of a manuscript was one of the key ways ideas were amplified in ancient Rome. The ideal candidate for a dedication, Standage explains, was "famous, influential and somewhat vain," with an "impressive library with plenty of traffic from visiting scholars and philosophers." This person would have been sure to tout the book to his wide circle of friends and might even have had scribes create additional copies. It was one way, pre-printing press, pre-Internet, to get your writing into more hands.

These literary kingmakers would have also, presumably, had to approve of the content of the book. For that reason, this old Roman system of backscratching makes us a little queasy: We want ideas to circulate because they're good, not because they gratify the right person.

One of the initial promises of social media was that it might help ideas succeed on their own -- removing the old gatekeepers, whether Roman aristocrats or publishers, and democratizing how information circulates. But this isn’t quite how it has turned out.

In my own life I had something of a Standage moment recently when I organized a group of English scholars to share their opinions about the “Gatsby” movie for the website The Millions. The post generated a good amount of traffic its first week, but on its ninth day online, readership suddenly doubled. What had happened? The movie's official Facebook page, which has been "liked" by nearly one million fans, linked to the post. Many thousands of readers poured in.

Social media is in fact not especially democratic. The most powerful people and institutions have the most Facebook fans and Twitter followers which means that content that serves their interests is much more likely to show up in your newsfeed. In the case of the Gatsby post, the scholars were mostly positive about the movie -- and it’s hard to imagine that the post would have had nearly the same readership if they’d hated it and thus the movie studio had ignored it. For people in the media, this kind of power sets up a dilemma that's not altogether different from the one authors faced in Cicero's time: the bigger the interests you please, the more likely you are to be read.

This post has been modified from an earlier version.

If you've ever held a dried leaf you know the urge, to crumple it, feel it splinter, watch the pieces float down to the ground. That urge- resisted, transformed- gives a great, bridled energy to British artist Susanna Bauer's unsuspecting creations. Instead of crumpling dried leaves, Bauer embroiders them, suturing along the edges, appending doilies, covering one in a spiderweb of thread. Visually, the embroidery and the leaves are a perfect complement, earthy and wholesome, and equally organic in their own ways. But still, it's the intricate construction of her work that instigates a craving for release. The thread and the leaves are unbearably joined; the whole world might end were they to break asunder.

Via Geyser of Awesome.

Images courtesy of Susanna Bauer.

For centuries the humanities were the core of a respectable education but in recent years they've fallen on hard times. In the age of data and at a time of scarce jobs, fewer undergraduates are willing to peg their futures on an English degree.

This is true at state schools and in the Ivy League, which is why last year a team of Harvard humanities faculty members set out to study the change. Last month the working group, chaired by Homi Bhaba and Sean Kelly, released its analysis in three reports that examine why undergraduates are abandoning the humanities and proposes strategies for bringing them back.

“We need to tell our students that the fields we teach are interesting and important to building lives,” says Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities, who commissioned the reports, “But also to disabuse them of the notion that whatever you major in in college determines what you end up doing.”

The decline of the humanities has been in progress for decades. Between 1966 and 2010 the percentage of college graduates nationwide earning degrees in the humanities fell from 14 percent to 7 percent. Over that same period, a similar decline took place at Harvard, where the number of undergraduates majoring in humanities dipped from 24 percent to 17 percent.

As the working group dug into the statistics they noticed two significant trends. First, that more than half of entering Harvard freshman who say they intend to major in the humanities—defined at Harvard as literature, philosophy, the classics, film studies, art history, music, and religious studies (but not history)—end up majoring in something else. And second, that most of those defections are to social sciences, like government, psychology, and economics.

Why do so many students who come to Harvard on fire for Shakespeare end up settling down with Milton Friedman instead? The authors of the longest of the three reports, “The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard: Mapping the Future,” point to perceptions of the humanities as impractical, frivolous, not rigorous, and antiquated to our technology addled time.

In reply to those broadsides, the working group makes a confident case for the humanities as the engine of social critique and social change, and a place to recover knowledge that has been lost through history. And for students worried about their job market skills, the authors affirm the value of the humanities for teaching competencies like “lucid and persuasive writing and speaking.”

The value of the humanities may be clear to its practitioners but it’s harder to convey to undergraduates who don’t necessarily see the connection between Kant and a thriving post-graduate life. To counter that challenge—while capitalizing on the initial enthusiasm freshman show for the humanities—the working group proposes a set of three “gateway courses”—the Art of Listening, the Art of Reading, and the Art of Looking—that will introduce students to the different ways of thinking about the world proposed by the humanities. The report also outlines a set of freshman seminars on the kinds of big themes that press on a teenager’s consciousness, like love, justice, and happiness.

Sorensen stresses that all is not lost for the humanities and she argues that they offer a perspective that is as important now as ever.

“We should all return to questions of value, of interpretation, of the tension between tradition and innovation,” Sorensen says. “This is an age of impatience and we may find this has estranged us from our own understanding of meaning and value. It doesn’t mean you’re going to hide in the desert and ponder these questions, it means [undergraduates] are going to take four years to prepare for a complex world.”

It's fun to think about an expert so deep in the weeds of inquiry that he wouldn't recognize the actual topic he studies if it walked through his kitchen. That, in an exaggerated sense, is what makes the two-week boot camp for botanists being held this month at the Arnold Arboretum so interesting.

As the Harvard Gazette reports today, the aim of the intensive program is to teach botany graduate students about plant morphology- the study of the external structures of plants. You might think that being able to identify plants visually is the first thing that botanists learn, but as the Gazette article explains, that's not the case anymore. “There aren’t that many places where the study of the whole organism is very prevalent," Arnold Arboretum director William Friedman told the Gazette. “Zoology, botany, ichthyology, all the ‘-ologies’ have been on the ropes across the world...And as faculty who used to study morphology and whole organisms were replaced by genomics people, we’ve lost the ability to connect genes back to the biology of the organisms themselves.”

Read more here.

See also a previous Brainiac post on the decline of superstar botanists.

Image of Asclepias syriaca courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The use of eminent domain powers to make way for sports stadiums is always controversial. An article in the latest edition of the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review heaps praise on the way Massachusetts has chosen to handle the thorny issue.

Steve Chen, an editor at the review, argues that eminent domain law has tilted too far towards the interests of sports franchise owners since a 2008 court decision (Goldstein v. Pataki) cleared the way for the highly controversial Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Nets now play. That ruling, he explains, construed legitimate uses of eminent domain so widely that “the burden of proving that a stadium project has no public purpose at all is insurmountable” for people trying to prevent their land from being seized.

Massachusetts, by contrast uses a case-by-case evaluation system that Chen says effectively protects citizens from improper land seizures while also ensuring that stadium projects with real public benefit go forward. In recent years the Massachusetts legislature has passed two bills—the Foxboro Stadium Act and the Fenway Park Act—which specifically delimited the uses of public funding for stadium construction and improvements. In those cases, Massachusetts taxpayers paid for infrastructure surrounding the stadiums (roads, sewers, traffic signals, sidewalks) while team owners were required to foot the bills for the stadiums themselves. Chen also applauds the Massachusetts legislature for engineering financial payback mechanisms into stadium legislation that further protect the interests of citizens. The Patriots, for example, are required to give the state $1.15 million in parking fees each year, and the Red Sox pay up to $12.1 million per year to lease Fenway.

Overall, Chen finds that some states, like New Jersey, are too friendly to sports franchise owners while others, like Florida, are too strict about when they’ll apply eminent domain. Massachusetts, however, sits nicely in the middle.

Image of Fenway Park courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

A lot of digital art photography today uses ever-improving camera technology to create, say, macro shots of water droplets or high-speed photographs of waves. The images are often beautiful but they are also hard to fully appreciate as art because it's hard to tell where the technological influence ends and a real image of the world begins. In that light, Japanese photographer Kouichi Chiba's work is particularly refreshing. Chiba makes simple paper cutouts of figures and positions them in an assortment of light, adventurous poses: dangling from a branch, leaping from a flower petal, poised atop an open book. Her photographs bear the tenderness of paper art and the sweep of landscape photography. Even more delightfully, her stoic paper people appear wholly absorbed in their worlds, completely unaware of the self-consciously artistic process that has produced them.

Via Geyser of Awesome.

Images courtesy of Kouichi Chiba.

Food makers care a lot about ingredients these days which leaves them in a bind: If farmers don’t produce just the right kind of this or that, their food won’t sing.

The MIT Technology Review ran an article last week on the chocolate maker Tcho, which is trying to solve this problem by teaching cacao farmers how to identify and cultivate the best tasting beans. It sounds like a simple step, but the article notes that many cacao farmers have never tasted chocolate made with their beans. As a result, chocolate makers and bean growers don’t always work with the same criteria in mind.

Tcho, which has roots in Silicon Valley and is headed by Louis Rossetto and Jane ¬Metcalfe, the cofounders of Wired, has equipped its farmers in Peru, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic, with mobile “sample labs.” The labs, which cost around $10,000 each, contain all the tools the farmers need—coffee roasters, spice grinders, modified hair dryers—to produce small batches of chocolate right on their farms. The farmers, who are also trained in how to identify excellent chocolate, send tasting notes back to headquarters in San Francisco. Based on that information, Tcho helps farmers adjust the fermentation process, so that there’s less uncertainty about the quality of the beans by the time they reach the chocolate plants.

Tcho’s innovation is another example of how artisanal trends—in food and just about everything else—are collapsing some of the skill gaps between capitalists and producers. The system gives Tcho’s cacao farmers knowledge that helps them become more firmly established in an industry, though as a new layer of oversight, they might be a bit of a headache, too.

Is health insurance an antidepressant?: Leon Neyfakh on evidence that giving people access to health care improves mental health. A growing body of research out of Oregon has shown that expanding access to Medicaid does not make people healthier or less likely to seek emergency room care, but it does make them less prone to depression (the thinking being that people are mentally healthier when they don’t have to worry about incurring catastrophic medical bills). But what value do we as a society place on safeguarding our fellow citizens’ mental health? And to what extent can that be a justification for policies like the Affordable Care Act?

Cross this line…and I’m gonna do nothing!: Simon Waxman on how world leaders don’t actually lose credibility when they fail to follow through on their threats. The Obama administration has been under heavy pressure to follow through on its earlier warning that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would constitute a “red line” that compelled U.S. intervention. But as Waxman explains, a careful look at the historical record shows that adversaries continue to take each other seriously, even given track records of bluster.

Meet the international revolutionary geek squad: Thanassis Cambanis on a small group of Internet security experts—about 100 worldwide—who teach dissidents in places like Syria how to evade regime surveillance. Ironically, much of the funding for this type of work comes from the U.S. government, which has been exposed recently as a major Internet surveyor in its own right.

How to talk like Whitey Bulger: Ben Zimmer runs through the trove of “pungent” Mob lingo that has come out during the Whitey Bulger trial (vig,” “makeup” money, “hang around guys”) and traces the history of “using coded language to keep illicit activities on the down low.”

Plus: Kevin Lewis on how juvenile offenders do better in the long run when they’re given probation instead of sent to jail; how conservatives describe multiracial people as “black” more readily than liberals do; how mathematical literacy doesn’t bear on your financial fortunes; and more.

Image by Dan Zedek, Globe Staff.

Some things lose their vitality up close but ammunition is not one of them. Austrian photographer Sabine Pearlman has created a series of photographs of cross-sections of firearms cartridges. The cartridges are amazingly diverse in their composition: long and slender, short and stumpy, packed with ball bearings, metal rods, and all sorts of other suggestive material in their tips. But they also share enough features in common to mark them as members of the same menacing species: brass casing, gun powder in the rear, a narrowing aspect as you go from back to front. Pearlman's photographs are mesmerizing and also tragic. They give ammunition integrity, a life apart from all the things that people do with them.

Images courtesy of Sabine Pearlman.

Update 06/24/13: The first version of this post incorrectly referred to the subjects of Pearlman's photographs as "bullets." As a number of readers pointed out, her photographs are in fact of ammunition cartridges, which contain bullets.

Quick: What's the limiting factor on how high elevators can go?

You're pretty good if you guessed, "the weight of the steel cable the raises and lowers the elevator car," but that's the answer. A piece in The Economist this week reports on the Finnish liftmaker Kone that has invented a new super-strong, super-light elevator cable made from carbon fiber. As the story explains, elevators today top out around 1,600 feet and, at that height, three-quarters of the mass they lift comes from the steel cable itself. So, if you can make the cable lighter while preserving its tensile strength, you can build taller elevators, and that's exactly what Kone has done. Their product, called UltraRope, weighs 90 percent less than traditional steel cables and can lift an elevator more than 3,300 feet high.

It's always fun to discover that there's some seemingly small, counterintuitive technological hurdle impeding a potentially breakthrough innovation. As in, for instance, what's one of the primary limiting factors on building height? That would be elevator technology.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Last year Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published "The Complete Poems: Philip Larkin." In the current issue of The Threepenny Review, poet James Fenton takes the occasion to write an interesting essay on what should be included (and what should be left out) when an editor sums up the oeuvre of an artist.

Fenton says there are two possible approaches and he explains them by way of metaphor. The first is what he calls collection as a form of “body-washing,” in which the executor picks and chooses among a dead poet’s work to present him in the best light, leaving out duds, first drafts, and noodlings that the artist never meant for the public.

The second is a collection that resembles a “yard sale,” in which everything the poet ever wrote is set out on the front lawn, Fenton writes, “all in the hope of raising a little cash.” Fenton notes that painters have been known to torch their worst works (as I wrote about in January). He says that most poets wish many of their written words could be rubbed out just as easily.

This current collection, edited by Archie Burnett, takes the yard sale approach. It runs past 700 pages despite the fact, as Fenton notes, that Larkin published and collected only about 90 pages of poems in his lifetime. The remaining 610 or so pages in the new volume are taken up with editor's notes, unpublished works, little jokes, and bawdy lines. This prompts Fenton to wonder whether we know Larkin better, or perhaps are distracted from what he really accomplished, when his sincerest words are intermingled with one-offs like, “After drinking Glenfiddich/ I say good rubbance to bad riddich.” Or, when his real artistic achievements are set beside an untoward set of lyrics called “How to Win the Next Election” that he sent to friends in 1966 and which may have been written ironically or may have instead been plainly racist.

Fenton’s review includes a quote from Larkin in which the poet explained the two poles from which his work originates. “Every poem starts out as either true or beautiful,” Larkin said. “Then you try to make the true ones seem beautiful, and the beautiful ones true.”

A similar idea may apply to the challenge of collection. Does it help us to see an artist more truthfully when we can read everything they wrote, or does completion simply make them less beautiful?

Cities are inherently nostalgic places. Times and technology change fast, littering city streets with relics: payphones, parking meters, horse stands that no one uses anymore.

But instead of tearing down these artifacts or suffering their presence, an upcoming exhibition at the Boston Society of Architects’ BSA Space gallery proposes that we find new uses for them instead.

“The city holds a vast amount of untapped potential and ability within its infrastructure,” says Scott Burnham, director of the show, which opens June 25. “By rethinking the function and creating a new use for it, the city becomes a platform for new possibilities.”

The exhibition is called “Reprogramming the City: Opportunities for Urban Infrastructure” and it contains 30 examples from cities around the world of innovative urban retrofitting. One project is from Lima, Peru, where engineers have equipped a skyscraping billboard with a water harvesting system that collects moisture from the humid air and turns it into 25 gallons of potable water daily. Another example, equally whimsical and practical, comes from Umeå, Sweden, north of Stockholm. There, dark winter days promote seasonal depression, so city officials have installed phototherapy lights in bus shelters.

“In America and Europe, both have to do more with less,” says Burnham, who works on projects around the world and is a leader of the reprogramming movement. “Reprogramming the city is harkening back to that age old ability of people to make do with what they already have. We’re realizing that the secret isn’t to redesign more stuff for the city but to work with what we already have.”

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a parking kiosk, donated by the City of Boston. These kiosks were once on the parking payment vanguard, but increasingly they’re being replaced by smartphone apps. Burnham worked with designer Mayo Nissen to reprogram the donated kiosk so that instead of printing dashboard receipts, it spits out information about traffic conditions, Red Sox scores, and updates on repairs to local infrastructure problems like potholes and broken street lights (though of course these are all things that smartphones can do, too). The exhibition also includes a space for visitors to suggest their own kiosk reprogramming ideas.

Cities are inherently nostalgic places but, as "Reprogramming the City" demonstrates, they're inherently optimistic places, too. In real life we confront intractable policy problems like budget deficits and entitlement reform. In city life, though, it’s possible to believe that all the solutions for social life are already before us.

Image of UTEC Potable Water Generator, Lima, Peru, 2013 courtesy of the Boston Society of Architects.

Interstate highways are where nature goes to die. This is true literally, in the case of roadkill, and it's true spiritually, too: Is there a less serene place in the world than the concrete desolation of I-95? Yet an article earlier this month in Yale Environment 360 reports that at a time of shrinking habitat, highway median strips might just be the wildlife home of the future.

Over the last decade, journalist Richard Conniff writes, an international movement has been growing to transform the land around roads into attractive places for animals to live. Techniques including planting wildflowers to support floundering honeybee populations, keeping grass long to provide homes for ground-nesting birds, and turning stormwater runoff ponds into amphibian habitats.

Highway embankments are not the first place most animals would choose to call home, but wildlife in many parts of the world are running out of options. As the article explains, agriculture and urbanization are claiming more and more land, leading Rebecca Kauten, manager of the integrated roadside vegetation management program at the University of Northern Iowa, to call roadsides “the last refuge, the last vestige of hope” for many species.

It’s a strange marriage in every respect: animals don’t have much experience living alongside big rigs, and state departments of transportation haven’t traditionally been at the vanguard of conservation. But the grass is green next to highways, and increasingly there is no other side.

For more on roadside ecology, see Roads of the Future, which ran in Ideas in 2011.

Western Sahara: Why Africa’s last colony can’t break free: Jenn Abelson on Western Sahara’s quest for independence from Morocco. Western Sahara was a Spanish colony (known as Spanish Sahara) until 1975 and when Spain left, Morocco and Mauritania moved in. Today Morocco retains control of this resource rich, coastal territory and a native group called the Polisario has been agitating—largely peacefully—for independence ever since. As Abelson explains, “Western Sahara is emerging as a case study on the limits of the international community’s power to help a people win self-determination when they choose not to be violent, but to follow the rules.”

What a little chaos does for music: Carolyn Johnson on how Diana Dabby uses the mathematics behind chaos theory to create new variations on old songs. Dabby, a professor of engineering at Olin College in Needham, has invented an app called CantoVario that uses principles of chaos theory to transform the notes, rhythm, and pitch of an original recording. As Johnson explains, variation is the essence of creativity, and Dabby’s work shows how mathematical models in conjunction with human input can be used to create art.

The laws of cyberwar: Gal Beckerman interviews Michael Schmitt, chairman of the international law department at the United States Naval War College and leader of a committee that this March issued the first international rules for cyberwarfare. Those rules were collected in a document called The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. In the interview Schmitt explains that the key definition the committee had to work out was when cyberwarfare should be classified as a “use of force” (ie: it causes real physical damage) such that the attacked country is entitled to respond in self-defense.

Boston’s population boom speeds up: Robert David Sullivan on new census data showing that the population of Boston is growing faster than its suburbs and faster than any city northeast of New Jersey. This growth begins to reverse decades of population decline and is being spurred by an influx of immigrants, a strong job market, and a residential construction boom that has added 20,000 units to the city’s housing stock since the turn of the century.

Plus: Kevin Lewis on evidence that employers in urban areas don’t discriminate against gay and lesbian job applicants; how marriages begun through online dating are healthier than marriages that begin offline; how home ownership causes unemployment; and more.

Image of Western Sahara courtesy of Bruno Barbey/Magnum.

Forget literacy rates and per capita income. In this age of rising sea levels, elevation is what's really going to distinguish states in the union. Michael Scott Cuthbert of MIT and designer Nate Barksdale have created and shared on Facebook a map of the United States in which each state is scaled according to its volume above sea level. As you'd expect, Colorado takes over nearly half of the midwest. Elsewhere, doomed California shrivels to half its current size, the Great Plains become a great puddle, Appalachia turns out to be a lot shorter than its reputation, and New England ends up submerged like a penny in a bathtub. The surprise global warming refuge, though? Volcanic Hawaii, which more or less holds its size.

After posting about John Gray's new book "The Silence of Animals" I found this talk that he gave at the Royal Society of Arts in April. There Gray concisely expressed the argument in his book. He explained that he doesn't deny the possibility of instances of progress, because such a statement is immediately, empirically false. Rather, he explained that he doesn't think that the advance of scientific knowledge has any correlation with advances in our ethical and political practices. That is, we could get smarter and smarter, know more and more about the world, and yet the same deep flaws in the human constitution would continue to cause the same ethical calamities to occur over and over again. Below you'll find the thesis of his talk and the video.

Errors in human thought in general, in ethics and politics, in human civilization and culture, are not like errors in science. Errors in science don't usually come back. We won't see an article in Nature saying 'By God, Nostradamus was right.' Whereas the exploded fallacies of a previous generation in human thought more generally, in human culture, like this idea of social evolution, always do come back. And that's why in my book I kind of conclude by saying that if human rationality was really a scientifc theory, if we approached the idea that human beings are even potentially reasonable, rational, and that the increase of knowledge would increase human reasonableness, if we treated that as a scientific theory in a truly critical way, we'd have abandoned it, dumped it, in the trash can of history a long time ago.

Is human history a story of progress? It’s a complicated question and how you decide it probably goes a long way towards determining your basic orientation on social and political life. In that view, a new book from British political philosopher John Gray is a wet blanket on our best ambitions: Belief in social progress, he argues, is every bit as delusional (and as dangerous) as belief in god.

Gray’s book, “The Silence of Animals,” was reviewed earlier this month in the Los Angeles Review of Books by philosopher Simon Critchley of The New School. Critchley explains that Gray’s main critique is of the liberal humanist faith that “concerted human action in the world can…bring about the perfection of humanity.” In this group Gray puts devastating mid-century ideologues like Stalin and Mao, but also George W. Bush, who believed that military intervention could democratize the world, and Barack Obama.

In place of earnest social action, Gray advocates for a position of detached, wordless observation (to be silent, like animals, as the book’s title suggests). He argues that this is our best chance both to perceive the world as it is and to avoid human-engineered calamity. He views human beings as intrinsically flawed—or at least hopelessly mismatched to our circumstances—and that given these limitations, the best we can hope for is a politics of the least worst—the way, Critchley says, of the passive nihilist.

Gray’s position has its seductions. It’s romantic to think that we live within a dream as opposed to a hard, real world that makes real demands on us to better ourselves and care about other people. And, yet, Gray’s perspective can’t be the whole story. American history shows that progress in some forms is at least possible. Women’s suffrage. Abolition. Gay rights. Surely these are good things wrought by deliberate human action.

Critchley, in his review, is unwilling to let Gray’s pessimism be the last word even though he agrees with it in spirit. So he turns to love, as many philosophers and artists do when logic leads them to the seemingly inescapable conclusion that progress and belief are impossible. If we were to become silent like animals we’d spare ourselves the buffoonery of human thought and the cruelty of human action, but we’d also forsake love.

And so, if there is to be such a thing as progress, he argues, let that be its basis.

Passwords are a pain, vulnerable both to being forgotten and to being extracted by "rubber hose cryptography" or, more colloquially, torture. An article last week in the MIT Technology Review detailed an innovative new fix for the problem being developed by researchers at Stanford and Northwestern: a passcode that sits safely in your unconscious, which makes it hard to forget and even harder for interrogators to extract.

The idea, which was published last year, sounds like something out of Inception but it's actually quite intuitive. The researchers use implicit learning- the same kind of learning we employ to learn to ride a bike or swing a tennis racket- to implant a passcode in a user's brain. The user is then able to reproduce the code without actually knowing what it is, in the same way that, once learned, you're unlikely to forget how to ride a bike even if you can't really explain how you do it.

The implicit learning takes place through a video game environment that resembles Guitar Hero and is based on what's known as Serial Interception Sequence Learning. Balls fall down columns and users press buttons that correspond to the correct columns as the balls land. Some of the falling ball sequence they encounter is random noise and some of it is their actual passcode sequence. Users train at the game for about 45 minutes. Later, they play the same game for a shorter period of time in order to enter a secure facility; their identity is authenticated based on their ability to perform better "playing" their passcode sequence than they do playing random elements that have been introduced into sequence. The key is, though, that people aren't able to consciously identify the elements of the pattern they've learned even as they've become better at reproducing them, meaning that even under waterboarding-style duress, they couldn't give up the goods even if they wanted to.

Here's an image from the study showing what the Serial Interception Sequence Learning environment looks like: