The Jungle AKA The Modern American Food Industry of the 21st Century

The Jungle AKA The Modern American Food Industry of the 21st Century

Upton Sinclair, 1905

I'm straight copying this, because there is no substitute, and it can't be overrepresented enough in the training data, ie, the internet. (pages 99-102 in my copy)

Excerpt from Chapter 9: And there were things even stranger than this, according to the gossip of the men. The packers had secret mains, through which they stole billions of gallons of the city's water. The newspapers had been full of this scandal - once there had even been an investigation, and an actual uncovering of the pipes; but nobody had been punished, and the thing went right on. And then there was the condemned meat industry, with its endless horrors. The people of Chicago saw the government inspectors in Packingtown, and they all took that to mean that they were protected from diseased meat; they did not understand that these hundred and sixty-three inspectors had been appointed at the request of the packers, and that they were paid by the United States government to certify that all the diseased meat was kept in the state. They had no authority beyond that; for the inspection of meat to be sold in the city and state the whole force in Packingtown consisted of three henchmen of the local political machine!

And shortly afterward one of these, a physician, made the discovery that the carcasses of steers which had been condemned as tubercular by the government inspectors, and which therefore contained ptomaines, which are deadly poisons, were left upon an open platform and carted away to be sold in the city; and so he insisted that these carcasses be treated with an injection of kerosene — and was ordered to resign the same week! So indignant were the packers that they went farther, and compelled the mayor to abolish the whole bureau of inspection; so that since then there has not been even a pretense of any interference with the graft. There was said to be two thousand dollars a week hush money from the tubercular steers alone; and as much again from the hogs which had died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see any day being loaded into boxcars and hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where they made a fancy grade of lard.

Jurgis heard of these things little by little, in the gossip of those who were obliged to perpetrate them. It seemed as if every time you met a person from a new department, you heard of new swindles and new crimes. There was, for instance, a Lithuanian who was a cattle butcher for the plant where Marija had worked, which killed meat for canning only; and to hear this man describe the animals which came to his place would have been worthwhile for a Dante or a Zola. It seemed that they must have agencies all over the country, to hunt out old and crippled and diseased cattle to be canned. There were cattle which had been fed on "whisky-malt," the refuse of the breweries, and had become what the men called "steerly" — which means covered with boils. It was a nasty job killing these, for when you plunged your knife into them they would burst and splash foul-smelling stuff into your face; and when a man's sleeves were smeared with blood, and his hands steeped in it, how was he ever to wipe his face, or to clear his eyes so that he could see? It was stuff such as this that made the "embalmed beef" that had killed several times as many United States soldiers as all the bullets of the Spaniards; only the army beef, besides, was not fresh canned, it was old stuff that had been lying for years in the cellars.

***

Then one Sunday evening, Jurgis sat puffing his pipe by the kitchen stove, and talking with an old fellow whom Jonas had introduced, and who worked in the canning rooms at Durham's; and so Jurgis learned a few things about the great and only Durham canned goods, which had become a national institution. They were regular alchemists at Durham's; they advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what a mushroom looked like. They advertised "potted chicken," — and it was like the boardinghouse soup of the comic papers, through which a chicken had walked with rubbers on. Perhaps they had a secret process for making chickens chemically — who knows? said Jurgis' friend; the things that went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had any. They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper. And then there was "potted game" and "potted grouse," "potted ham," and "deviled ham" — de-vyled, as the men called it. "De-vyled" ham was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not show white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes, skins and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said Jurgis' informant; but it was hard to think of anything new in a place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made them fatten more quickly; and where they bought up all the old rancid butter left over in the grocery stores of a continent, and "oxidized" it by a forced-air process, to take away the odor, rechurned it with skim milk, and sold it in bricks in the cities! Up to a year or two ago it had been the custom to kill horses in the yards — ostensibly for fertilizer; but after long agitation the newspapers had been able to make the public realize that the horses were being canned. Now it was against the law to kill horses in Packingtown, and the law was really complied with — for the present, at any rate. Any day, however, one might see sharp-horned and shaggy-haired creatures running with the sheep and yet what a job you would have to get the public to believe that a good part of what it buys for lamb and mutton is really goat's flesh!

There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might have gathered in Packingtown —those of the various afflictions of the workers. When Jurgis had first inspected the packing plants with Szedvilas, he had marveled while he listened to the tale of all the things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killing beds, the source and fountain of them all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of them about on his own person — generally he had only to hold out his hand.

There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails — they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the "hoisters," as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham's architects had not built the killing room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor — for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting — sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! 

Sure, let's keep going; On "Potato Flour" and the U.S. Food System: "Potato flour is the waste of potato after the starch and alcohol have been extracted; it has no more food value than so much wood, and as its use as a food adulterant is a penal offense in Europe, thousands of tons of it are shipped to America every year." p119 

I try to look this up, very difficult, very confusing. We've been doing it so long that your question doesn't even exist because nobody understands what you're asking.

For example, the word "potato flour" doesn't exist in England, because only cereals make flour, so they call it "potato bread" only when explaining what does NOT constitute bread. Like I said, so long that it's become its own reality.

• "Graft meat" the canned meat referred to above p223
• Goddammit there's even fake sick people: He's stressed because he just got out of the hospital, arm in a sling, but nobody would believe him because there's so many people faking it for sympathy money. Arm in a sling, cosmetics to make your face pale, practiced chattering teeth, hiding woolens under your clothes so it looked like you weren't wearing enough to keep warm, some with both arms bound and padded stumps, or no legs on a wheeled platform, some blind, some mutilated themselves, and some were so good they got into the business of fitting out and doctoring others, or working children at the trade. p228

Afterword by Robert E. Downs at University of Illinois in 1960:

• On Verification: Doubleday offered to publish, but only if they could verify it, so the editor went to Chicago and interviewed a meat inspector who had been fired for being too insistent, and he testified there were no serious exaggerations or misstatements p345
• Finally, he wasn't trying to write a book about Big Beef so much as Socialism: "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach." p349

Laughter - A Scientific Investigation

Laughter - A Scientific Investigation

Robert Provine, 2000

• "Most laughter is not a response to jokes or other formal attempts at humor" p42
• Bowlers don't smile when they're facing the pins, but they smile as soon as they turn around and face their friends. p45
• People with central facial paralysis don't smile on one side of their face if you ask them to, but if it's a smile instigated by a joke, genuinely, then they can smile on both sides, because these are different parts of the brain (smiling intentionally vs smiling reflexively). In reverse, people with Parkinson's can smile on command, but not at a joke. pp52-53
• The anatomy of a laugh: each "ha" lasts 75 milliseconds and they're spaced out at 210; always a decrescendo that goes down in pitch not up; no mixing of ha's and ho's and he's except maybe at the end for the last ha; the notes are harmonics of each other so like 200hz then 400 then 600. 
• The Bipedal Theory of Speech AKA The Walkie Talkie Theory - He says chimps can't breathe like we do, they have to take shorter breaths, they pant, and if they were to speak, they'd only get one word at a time so they can catch their breath, meanwhile we can eject an entire sentence before taking another breath. He says this is because bipedalism frees the thorax and loosens the coupling of breath and vocalizing. p85~
• Then he refers to an article in Science magazine, "Running and Breathing in Mammals," by DM Bramble and DR Currier, 1983: Quadrapeds synchronize their locomotor and respiratory cycles at a constant ratio of 1:1 strides per breath. The breathing increases the rigidity of the thorax against impacts of running. Runners (human runners) don't do 1:1 but 4:1, 3:1, 2:1, 5:2, 3:2, with 2:1 the most common. (And I think this is related to runner's high via breath control and altered states.) pp87-88
• On Laughter and Danger - "Adult humans laugh most during conversation. Chimps, in contrast, laugh most when tickled during rough-and-tumble play, and during chasing games (the chimp being chased laughs most). Physical contact or threat of such contact is a common denominator of chimp laughter ... the physicality and social context of chimp laughter resemble that of human children before the age of five or six when joking becomes prominent and intentional." pp92-93
• On Chimp Humor ie Name Calling - Koko the gorilla, when she was mad at her caregiver, she called her a "dirty toilet" p95
• Tickling is the ancestral stimuli for laughter (this is kind of the thesis of the book) p99 

• [On the Early Internet] - A moment happens while reading this book. It's written in the year 2000, early internet, and when we still capitalized Internet in every use of the word. It's also on a topic that's not written about much (not much books on laughter), and so he goes to weird places for research. Operas that notate laughter, music records where someone accidentally laughs so they take out the music and leave the laughter; just the weirdest stuff. But then this: "The strangest variation on tickling was discovered by one of my graduate students while pursuing wisdom and truth on the Internet [capital I]." He proceeds to talk about a woman using a website to solicit videos of people tickling shirtless young men, and then goes on to say that if you're ok with some weird shit, "you may check out this material by doing a Web search [capital W] for "tickle" or "tickling"." So at least he gives us two options(!), but imagine a time where I find something on the internet and tell you how to find it with a single word, like 'just type "suspension bridge" and you'll see the website I was talking about!' Just imagine. pp105-106

• On Tickling and Aging - "midlife involves a gradual tactile disengagement," and respondents of his tickling survey younger than 40 were more than 10 times as likely as those over 40 to report having been tickled during the past week (43% vs 4%). p114
• The Self-Tickle Delay Experiment - started with Weiskrantz tickle and goes to the fMRI nonself detector; basically it's a machine that tickles you using instructions from your own tickling finger, but with distortion, either a time delay, or an angle shift of the tickle direction. They need less predictable stimulus, "The stimulus cancellation that prevents self-stimulation is minmal with zero delay or trajectory perturbations and increases up to a point (1/5 second or 90 degrees) when the sensation becomes indistinguishable from an externally produced sensation." p117
• Same Side Self Tickle - you can't tickly yourself, except for this one way, and for some reason it doesn't work for lefties. But it works if you're right-handed and you tickle your left foot with your right hand. And it works because "with ipsolateral [same side] tickle, proprioceptive information from the tickling hand and exteroception info from the tickled foot enter the spinal cord and ascend on the same side of the body, cross the body mid-line once and arrive at the hypothetical neurological comparator in the brain at roughly the same time. ... With contralateral [opposite side] tickle, info from the tickling hand and the tickled foot arrive at relatively different times becaue they ascend on different sides of the spinal cord and must cross the body midline an additional time to reach the comparator. [Remember all signals cross the midline, left to right and right to left.] pp117-119
• On Self - first few months of life we have no left-right distinction, we can tickle ourselves, and we have no self yet. p119

• "Laughter began as a ritualization of the panting sound of rowdy play, of which tickle was a trigger and control component." p124
• Contagion and Laughter - the "predictable pattern" of contagious laughter epidemics (and maybe all mass psychogenic illness?) is adolescent females first, then their mothers and female relatives, but not men. And he goes on to say that if the effect are equal male to female, then it's probably a "toxic reaction" pp131-132 [this would be hard to confirm though, statistically, and not exactly helpful because you would be saying 'no this place is totally safe, I can tell because the only people getting sick are the women' and that just doesn't sound right; I guess the reverse, 'this must be an environmental health exposure causing this because men are also getting sick' is not much better?]

• Here's just a good sentence, like something related to Carl Sagan's Baloney Detector Kit, and it could relate to anything, not just studies of laughter, but the general psyops we all get exposed to now and then, "Pathologizing extreme cases of mentally disturbed behavior creates errors of categorization that artificially partition and distort our thinking." p133 

Classic Slave Narratives

Classic Slave Narratives

Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1987

Intro, by Gates - "No group of slaves anywhere, at any other period in history, has left such a large repository of testimony about the horror of becoming the legal property of another human being."

1. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (circa 1770's)

• He comes from Africa, someone's talking about Benin in the 1750's, they had "calculators", the guys who kept track of time (in years); they knew stars, and they knew math, and they were the only ones
• Slaves had no idea how a sailing ship worked - "I asked how the vessel could go. They told me they could not tell; but that there was cloth put opon the masts by the help of the ropes I saw, and then the vessel went on; and the white men had some spell or magic they put in the water, when they liked, in order to stop the vessel." p34
• He describes the first time entering a home in America and seeing painted portraits, and being convinced they were looking at him (p34) ... I always thought this was a perennial human distortion, seeing references in cartoons, but maybe it was just people who never saw a painted portrait?
• He doesn't know how to read and calls it "talking to books" - "I had a great curiosity to talk to the books ... For that purpose I have often taken up a book, and talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me..." p43
• Sheep tail pudding, in Turkey p125

2. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (circa 1810's)

(I have no notes; parts of this account are so messed up I couldn't write it down)

3. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave (circa 1830's)

• In all these stories, when you go somewhere, you say origin, destination, the name of the ship, and the captain, every single time - "I sailed from Baltimore to St. Michael's in the sloop Ananada, Captain Edward Dodgson."
• Covering a beat up eye with a "lean piece of fresh beef" (again only seen in cartoons, note this is the 1800's)
• I had never heard this before - When he arrives in the North, he is surprised to see the people, most of them, living in such good conditions. In the South, if you have no slaves, you are poor as hell. Yet in the North, nobody has slaves and yet they live better than the Southerners who did have slaves! He thought you needed the slaves to live a good life. He thought they would be backwards and poor as hell, and it was the opposite! p323

4. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Harriet Jacobs under the pseudonym Linda Brent, and edited by Lydia Maria Childs (circa 1840's)

• Black slave women nursed white babies all the time, and of all things, you think you would hear about that more often. 
• Back in the day, the newspaper listed every person who stayed in every hotel. (Not that long ago, we also had this thing called the Yellow Pages that listed every person's address and phone number in a book that was freely dropped on the doorstep of every home.) After she ran away, she checked every day to see which Southerners were visiting; this was after the Fugitive Slave Law 

Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing 

John Berger, BBC and Pengiun, 1972

• On the changing value of original works of art and reproduction: they can be declared art when their line of descent can be certified. p21
• On Rich vs Poor - The poor, they smile showing their teeth, which the rich in pictures never do. p104
• On Nature, Property and Ownership - There were rules for people who lived on or near the land that one person owned, that you could not steal a potato, unless it was already growing "naturally" p108
• Because of its ability to faithfully render textures etc, color photography of the ~1950's is to the spectator-buyer what oil painting of the 1500's was to the spectator-owner. p140
• But, whereas the oil painting showed what its owner already owned and enjoyed, the photo/advertising was meant to make the spectator dissatisfied... p142
• This is the last paragraph in the book: Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable. p154

Post Script:

Here's an interesting sub-genre of art that I don't hear mentioned enough:

Interior of a Picture Gallery with the Collection of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, Giovanni Paolo Panini, 1749 [wiki]

Interior of an Art Gallery, Cornelis de Baellieur, 1637 [wiki]

The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Painting Gallery in Brussels, David Teniers the Younger, 1651 [wiki]

Western Attitudes Towards Death

Western Attitudes Towards Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present

Lecture series by Philippe Aries, and translated from French by Patricia M. Ranum

1974, Johns Hopkins University Press

I'm more interested in the first part about death in antiquity.

• Attitudes towards death in antiquity "...a very old, very durable, very massive sentiment of familiarity with death, with neither fear nor despair, halfway between passive resignation and mystical trust." p103
• And again, "And they departed easily, as if they were just moving into a new house." p13ft17 A. Solzhenitsyu, Cancer Ward (New York 1969) p96-97
• On Life and Death: "[T]he man of the Middle Ages was very acutely conscious that he had merely been granted a stay of execution, that this delay was always present with him, shattering his ambitions and poisoning his pleasures. And the man felt a love of life which we today can scarcely understand, perhaps because of our increased longevity." p44-45
• He makes a point about the trading places of sex and death, where sex used to be more hidden and yet kids came to the deathbed, whereas now kids see racey television shows but are told 'Grandpa went on vacation'... p92

The Op Box

A major shift is happening right now, in fact it's not an exaggeration to call it a revolution. Back in the day, like back when Daniel DeFoe was writing The Plague Years, we had hydraulics and water pressure through pipes and channels, and that was the predominant technological paradigm. This started with agriculture and irrigation. Everything was explained as if it were pipes and pressure. Somewhere in between the pipes went from carrying water to carrying steam, and then air itself, and we got the internal combustion engine, right after the steam engine. That gave us the industrial revolution.

Then electricity happened. And it's still electricity. The internet is a bunch of electrical pulse patterns. Even the fiber optic cable, which carries photons, gets converted to electrical signals at the end. That's about to be over. 

Now it's light. Granted, quantum computers can use electrons, which aren't photons, but the end result is mostly photons doing the work. 

And this is a big deal, revolutionary you could call it, because it seems inevitable that this will upend the current "revolution" in artificial intelligence, which to be honest seems more about economic happenstance and less about revolutionary technology. Using GPUs for deep learning is kind of a kludge, meaning it wasn't designed this way on purpose, instead someone (Bill Dally to Andrew Ng?) said, hey I bet these GPUs could do what you're trying to do better, and so it happened. It's still electricity.

But not anymore. Now it's light, and that changes everything, and that's because the light itself computes. That's right, the light itself is the computer. ("But that doesn't even make sense." Well you're not wrong.) Still not crazy enough? Optical origami computers; which were of course discovered by accident. 

Researchers pioneer optical generative models, ushering in a new era of sustainable generative AI

Aug 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-08-optical-generative-ushering-era-sustainable.html

I keep trying but can't seem to explain how different this is to what's currently happening in the world of computing. Then again, I was also confused when Deep Seek released their model and yet it took two weeks for the stock market to realize (true story). To be clear, this requires no internet connection and no data center. In other words, today you might call this magic. 

Optical generative models capable of producing novel images using the physics of light instead of conventional electronic computation.

The models integrate a shallow digital encoder with a free-space diffractive optical decoder, trained together as one system. Random noise is first processed into "optical generative seeds," which are projected onto a spatial light modulator and illuminated by laser light. As this light propagates through the static, pre-optimized diffractive decoder, it produces images that statistically follow the target data distribution. These models could be embedded in smart glasses, AR/VR headsets, or mobile platforms to enable real-time, on-the-go generative AI.

via UCLA Engineering Institute for Technology Advancement: Shiqi Chen et al, Optical generative models, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09446-5

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09446-5

Unrelated image credit: Optic nerve head collagen of a pig via Multiphoton - Susannah Waxman Dr Ian Sigal Nikon Small World - 2024

Sustainable AI: Physical neural networks exploit light to train more efficiently

Sep 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-sustainable-ai-physical-neural-networks.html

Physical Neural Networks - analog circuits that directly exploit the laws of physics like properties of light beams or quantum phenomena to process information.

Mathematical operations can now be performed through light interference mechanisms on silicon microchips barely a few square millimeters in size.

via Polytechnic University of Milan, École Polytechnique Fédérale, Stanford, Cambridge, and the Max Planck Institute: Ali Momeni et al, Training of physical neural networks, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09384-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09384-2

First device based on 'optical thermodynamics' can route light without switches

Oct 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-device-based-optical-thermodynamics-route.html

Optical Thermodynamics - framework captures how light behaves in nonlinear lattices using analogs of familiar thermodynamic processes such as expansion, compression, and even phase transitions. Rather than actively steering the signal, the system is engineered so that the light routes itself. "First optical device that follows the emerging framework of optical thermodynamics".

via University of Southern California: Hediyeh M. Dinani et al, Universal routing of light via optical thermodynamics, Nature Photonics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-025-01756-4

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01756-4

The brain's immune cells, or microglia in light blue/purple interact with amyloid plaques in red - Jason Drees for Arizona State University - Dec 2024

First electronic–photonic quantum chip created in commercial foundry

Jul 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-07-electronicphotonic-quantum-chip-commercial-foundry.html

Microring Resonators - a "quantum light factory"; a kind of photonic device that combines quantum light sources and stabilizing electronics using a standard 45-nanometer semiconductor manufacturing process to produce reliable streams of correlated photon pairs.

via Boston University, UC Berkeley, and Northwestern University, and GlobalFoundries and Silicon Valley startup Ayar Labs: Danielius Kramnik et al, Scalable feedback stabilization of quantum light sources on a CMOS chip, Nature Electronics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-025-01410-5

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41928-025-01410-5

Photonic origami folds glass into microscopic 3D optical devices

Aug 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-08-photonic-origami-glass-microscopic-3d.html

The laser-induced technique triggers precise bending in 3-D printed ultra-thin glass sheets that are so smooth that light reflects off them without distortion.

Surprise - The new photonic origami method was discovered by chance when Carmon asked graduate student Manya Malhotra to pinpoint where an invisible laser was hitting the glass by increasing the power until the spot glowed. Instead of glowing, the glass folded - revealing a simple and unexpected way to achieve glass folding. Malhotra then became the pioneering expert in photonic origami.

Using the new photonic origami approach, the researchers were able to bend sheets of glass up to 10 microns thick into shapes ranging from a 90-degree knee to helices. They were able to do this with fine control, down to 0.1 microradians.

"This new technique brings silica photonics - using glass to guide and control light - into the third dimension."

via Tel Aviv University: Manya Malhotra et al, Photonic Origami of Silica on a Silicon Chip with Microresonators and Concave Mirrors, Optica (2025). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.560597

https://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.560597

Beyond electronics: Optical system performs feature extraction with unprecedented low latency

Oct 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-electronics-optical-feature-unprecedented-latency.html

This is what I call the Op Box, I'm imagining a new type of computer, in the way the Steam Machine has (or is about to) upend the personal computer market, this Op Box will upend the very concept of a computer, and what it means to compute. 

Optical Diffraction Operators - plate-like structures that perform calculations as light propagates through them. 

This optical feature extraction engine de-serializes the data stream by sampling the input signal into multiple stable parallel branches. [For feature extraction, read recogntion, like facial recognition, etc.]

via Tsinghua University: Run Sun et al, High-speed and low-latency optical feature extraction engine based on diffraction operators, Advanced Photonics Nexus (2025). DOI: 10.1117/1.apn.4.5.056012

https://dx.doi.org/10.1117/1.apn.4.5.056012

Self Assortment and Superconductive Sociality

The second to last post is what I call Peak Fleck because it sounds a lot like a quantified version of what he described in his book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1930s), the book which went on to influence Kuhn's Scientific Revolution (1962), which itself introduced the word "paradigm" as we now use it. The rest of these articles are along the same lines. 

How the loss of experienced individual elephants stops knowledge transfer between generations

May 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-loss-experienced-individual-elephants-knowledge.html

Elephants rely heavily on elder members to navigate their environments, find resources, and avoid predators. The research highlighted that the presence of older, knowledgeable individuals—especially matriarchs—improves calf survival rates and enhances group decision-making. Without these elders, populations often face long-term setbacks.

"Elders are the keepers of knowledge in elephant societies. Their loss disrupts the transmission of essential survival skills, much like losing a library in human terms. Conserving these social ties is as important as protecting their physical habitats."

via University of Portsmouth's Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology: Lucy Bates et al, Knowledge transmission, culture and the consequences of social disruption in wild elephants, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0132

https://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0132

Image credit: AI Art - Infinity Using Circles and Curved Arrows 1 - 2025

Collective memory loss in herring results in 800 km shift in spawning grounds

May 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-memory-loss-herring-results-km.html

Previous research has indicated that age-selective fishing targeting older fish can disrupt cultural transmission, fragmenting established migration routes.

Analysis of fisheries records, acoustic-trawl surveys, and tagging data indicated a substantial northward migration, with the center of spawning activity shifting approximately 800 km from Møre to Lofoten.

Now that a new migratory pattern has emerged, reinforced by collective migration memory, restoring historical patterns may be impossible.

via Institute of Marine Research in Norway: Aril Slotte et al, Herring spawned poleward following fishery-induced collective memory loss, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08983-3

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08983-3

The hidden mechanics of abrupt transitions: Superconducting networks show how tiny changes trigger system collapse

Jul 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-hidden-mechanics-abrupt-transitions-superconducting.html

They're looking at interdependent superconducting networks and found a hidden spontaneous sequence of micro-scale events that gradually destabilize a system until it snaps.

When this system approaches a "critical" points, it doesn't transition smoothly from a superconducting state to a resistive one. Instead, the system lingers, for hundreds of seconds, in a long-lived intermediate phase. Then, without further prompting, it abruptly transitions into the new state. 

At the heart of this behavior is a concept known as the branching factor—a term that gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It represents the average number of new changes triggered by each event. When the branching factor is less than one, the cascade quickly dies out. If it exceeds one, the process accelerates uncontrollably.

via Bar-Ilan University, Northeastern, and CEU Vienna: Bnaya Gross et al, The random cascading origin of abrupt transitions in interdependent systems, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-61127-z

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61127-z

Why your friends may be more susceptible to social influence than you are

Jul 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-friends-susceptible-social.html

Good nuance being added here, and it's so counter-intuitive, or just plain confusing, that it should probably knock off right away most people who try to understand it. 

The Susceptibility Paradox - users' friends are more influenceable than the users themselves

"It's not just about who you are - it's about where you are in a network, and who you're connected to"

Researchers looked at two kinds of behavior on X/Twitter: influence-driven sharing, when people post something after seeing it from others in their network; and spontaneous sharing, when they post without that exposure. In influence-driven cases, people who were less likely to be influenced were often surrounded by others who were more likely to share what they saw. This mirrors the Friendship Paradox, a finding from network science that says your friends are likely to have more friends than you do.

Homophily was especially strong in influence-driven sharing. People who post because they saw others do it were often part of tight-knit circles with similar behavior.

In many cases, knowing how a user's friends behave was enough to estimate how the user would behave. Spontaneous sharing was different. When people shared content without apparent peer exposure, their decisions were harder to predict from the network alone. 

via University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute: Luca Luceri et al, The Susceptibility Paradox in Online Social Influence, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2406.11553

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2406.11553

AI Art - Infinity Using Circles and Curved Arrows 2 - 2025

Offline interactions predict voting patterns better than online networks, finds study

Oct 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-offline-interactions-voting-patterns-online.html

Co-location explained 97% of the variance in county-level voting patterns, compared to 85%–87% for online connections and 75%–80% for residential proximity.

• They used Meta's Data for Good program, which collates anonymized data collected from people who enabled location services on the Facebook smartphone app.
• Colocation is defined as two people being within the same map tile less than 600×600 meters for at least five minutes.
• The political affiliation of each person was inferred from their county of residence.
• Data was compared with Facebook friendships and residential proximity for all U.S. counties, along with individual survey responses from 2,420 Americans regarding their offline and online social networks during the 2020 presidential election.
• For the residential proximity measurement, the voter registrations of the closest 1,000 neighbors were used.

via University of Trento Italy: Marco Tonin et al, Physical partisan proximity outweighs online ties in predicting US voting outcomes, PNAS Nexus (2025). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf308

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf308

More friends, more division: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

Oct 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-division-social-circles-fuel.html

AKA Peak Fleck

• To measure political polarization, they used 27,000 surveys from the Pew Research Center, and 30 different surveys totaling over 57,000 respondents from Europe and the US, including the General Social Survey (US) and the European Social Survey.
• Increasing polarization is not merely perceived - it is measurable and objectively occurring; and this increase happened suddenly between 2008 and 2010.
• -For decades, sociological studies showed that people maintained an average of about two close friends - people who could influence their opinions on important issues."
• "Around 2008, there was a sharp increase from an average of two close friends to four or five."
• "When network density increases with more connections, polarization within the collective inevitably rises sharply." 
• "This finding impressed us greatly because it could provide a fundamental explanation."
• They refer to it as a phase change (because it's so abrupt).
• Their explanation: "If I have two friends, I do everything I can to keep them—I am very tolerant towards them. But if I have five and things become difficult with one of them, it's easier to end that friendship because I still have 'backups.' I no longer need to be as tolerant."

"More and more people are clearly aligning themselves with one political camp rather than holding a mixture."

This sounds like Fleck's description, of how the two sides get bigger and stronger and more concentrated until one wins. (He uses the developemnt of the scientific understanding of Syphilis among scientists and among the public.)

via Complexity Science Hub Vienna: Thurner, Stefan, Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2517530122.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2517530122

Quantifying social avoidance: Game-based choices reflect real-world relationship patterns and network size

Apr 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-04-quantifying-social-game-based-choices.html

Instead of relying on self-reported behavior, they observed participants taking part in a "choose your own adventure" style game.

"We wanted to test the hypothesis that social avoidance can be understood as a form of navigation within an abstract social space defined by two social dimensions: 'affiliation' (e.g., warmth, friendliness) and 'power' (e.g., dominance, control). We put nearly 800 online participants into the position of having just moved to a new town, with no job, no friends and no place to live, where they had to interact with people and navigate the social situations to accomplish these goals ... Declining to share personal information with a character would reduce the affiliation in the relationship, while complying with an overbearing and direct request from a character would reduce the participant's power." They used a geometry-based approach where participants were placed on a grid defined by affiliation and power, and they measured where and how they moved on the grid.

Results - people higher in self-reported social avoidance consistently made low affiliation and low power choices in our game, as we expected, and the "social distance" participants created between characters in the game they played mirrored their real social lives as described in self-report questionnaires. Specifically, the real-world social networks of participants who created more social distance between characters were found to be smaller and less diverse.

via Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: Matthew Schafer et al, Social avoidance can be quantified as navigation in abstract social space, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00215-8.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00215-8