James' World 2

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Four years ago, Matice Ahnjamine filmed her first vlog. Ahnjamine, gorgeous in red lipstick and box braids, stands against a monochrome background and introduces herself to new viewers. “Welcome t-t-t-t-to my YouTube channel,” she says. “As you can ssssee I stutter, and that is why I wanted to start this YouTube channel.” Over the next five minutes, she describes how most of her life she felt alone until, at twenty-eight, she met another person who stuttered. It was exhilarating to encounter someone who spoke with “long pauses” and “made these crazy faces like me,” and now she wants to offer that same sense of connection to other people through her videos—to let us know we’re not alone.

I can imagine what Ahnjamine’s channel might have meant to me had it existed in those early, uncomfortable years of accepting and defining myself as a person who stutters. I had no role models to look to, and all the depictions of disfluency I saw came refracted through able-bodied performers in movies and on television—actors who wore disfluency as a costume. I only heard impressions of stutters, never real ones; I knew only characters who stuttered, not people.

This is still the case for most nonstutterers, whose points of reference for disfluency are usually either works of caricature or inspiration porn. The disclosure of my disfluency is sometimes met with invocations of scripted films: Oh, like The King’s Speech? like The Waterboy? like A Fish Called Wanda? But these are scripted stories, anchored by people pretending to talk like me. In these films stuttering is a dramatic obstacle, a tragic flaw, a character-defining challenge. Ahnjamine’s videos, on the other hand, give first-person insights into the experience of disfluency and impart that stuttering is what we do, not who we are.

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Screencap via Matice Ahnjamine/YouTube

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Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can’t explain. In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way.

In the case of this particular study, the object in question is a tiny glass nanosphere, 100 nanometers in diameter – about a thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. To our minds, that’s very, very small, but in terms of quantum physics, it’s actually rather huge, made up to 10 million atoms.

Pushing such a nanosphere into the realm of quantum mechanics is actually a huge achievement, and yet that’s exactly what physicists have now accomplished.

Using carefully calibrated laser lights, the nanosphere was suspended in its lowest quantum mechanical state, one of extremely limited motion where quantum behavior can start to happen.

“This is the first time that such a method has been used to control the quantum state of a macroscopic object in free space,” says Lukas Novotny, a professor of photonics from ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

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© ETH Zurich

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In 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other, Barricelli hovered over one of the world’s earliest and most influential computers, the IAS machine, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. During the day the computer was used to make weather forecasting calculations; at night it was commandeered by the Los Alamos group to calculate ballistics for nuclear weaponry. Barricelli, a maverick mathematician, part Italian and part Norwegian, had finagled time on the computer to model the origins and evolution of life.

Inside a simple red brick building at the northern corner of the Institute’s wooded wilds, Barricelli ran models of evolution on a digital computer. His artificial universes, which he fed with numbers drawn from shuffled playing cards, teemed with creatures of code—morphing, mutating, melting, maintaining. He created laws that determined, independent of any foreknowledge on his part, which assemblages of binary digits lived, which died, and which adapted. As he put it in a 1961 paper, in which he speculated on the prospects and conditions for life on other planets, “The author has developed numerical organisms, with properties startlingly similar to living organisms, in the memory of a high-speed computer.” For these coded critters, Barricelli became a maker of worlds.

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My favorite book of 2018 was Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier’s The Enigma of Reason. I covered it in my book club as a podcast, but the ideas are so interesting that I wanted to take a second chance to explain them.

The basic puzzle is this:

1. If reason is so useful, why do human beings seem to be the only animals to possess it? Surely, a lion who had excellent reasoning abilities would catch more gazelles? Yet human beings seem to be alone in the ability to reason about things.

2. If reason is so powerful, why are we so bad at it? Why do we have tons of cognitive biases? Reasoned thinking is supposed to be good, but we seem to use it fairly little as a species.

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