Links for July 8
The Dalai Lama's advice for killing Hitler, painting Martian landscapes, and the Quixote of Kashmir
Apparently Owen Flanagan, Buddhist-philosopher and author of the new How to do Things With Emotions, once asked the Dalai Lama what the proper moral action would have been for dealing with Hitler. The Master’s advice: “Kill him, but don’t be angry.”
I indulge in the occasional bit of futurology here, but nothing I do could match the Post-Quantum Cryptography team at the National Institute of Standards Technology. The idea is that quantum computers, which could be widely available by the end of the decade, are so freakishly fast that they will tear through most current encryption standards like so much tissue paper. This week, the NIST publicly announced four quantum-proof encryption algorithms that should be adopted by industries and governments sooner rather than later.
Excellent round-up of recent Perseverance rover photos from Mars, with a bonus “first” picture of Mars from the Mariner 4 mission in 1965. Processing data into photographic images was slow, so while they waited, JPL engineers read the numbers visually, then painted an approximation with pastels. Paint-by-numbers is usually an insult, but in this case it’s brilliant.
Somebody who might be interested in upping stakes for Mars: an unidentified middle-aged man in China’s Sichuan Province is now internet-famous after hikers stumbled into his cave hermitage and surreptitiously recorded him. In the video, he is surrounded by books, smoking, and taking notes. The kind thing to do, it must be said, is leave him alone. I think of the old Eliot Weinberger quote about Chinese hermits: “Confucianism holds that, when the government is bad, one ought to run for the hills. Taoism holds that, regardless of government, one ought to run for the hills.”
Don Quixote has been translated into Sanskrit. Or, rather, in 1935 Carl Tilden Keller, the great American book collector, asked the India-based explorer Aurel Stein to hire a couple of pandits to translate Cervantes’s novel into India’s great classical language. Keller wanted to round out his collection of foreign Quixotes, including Icelandic and Mongolian translations. The Sanskrit Quixote, translated by Nityanand Shastri and Jagaddhar Zadoo, languished in a manuscript copy on a bookshelf until a few years ago, and was finally published this year. (Curiously, nobody seems to have translated the novel into Ancient Greek or Latin.)
The great Sasha Frere-Jones rounds up some of his favorite krautrock— “kosmische,” really, but it’s been hard to evict the slur—albums. “The kosmische spirit of unrestricted movement and the krautrock ability to establish a human regularity that mimics the steady attack of machines—these were major and wildly fruitful innovations that have never stopped creating new possibilities.” A fantastic mix of the familiar and the strange. Even for a dedicated kosmonaut like me, I’d never even heard of about 30% here, let alone heard it. (Hamel by Hamel is great.) That said, it should be criminal to leave Tago Mago off the list. No matter how popular it is, every music writer has an obligation to spread the true gospel of peak-era Can. (And don’t tell me Ege Bamyasi is better. You really listen to “Soup” all the way through? Every time?)
The Georgia Guidestones have been destroyed. The population-control stuff about limiting humanity to 500 million was always creepy, but I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic warning systems. (My favorite, in Robert Macfarlane’s Underground, will always be a team of Finnish anthropologists dreaming up ways to create a local folklore around nuclear dumping grounds as pits of curses and evil gods.) No suspects have emerged yet, but after partial damage from an explosion, the rest was destroyed by local authorities. I was not aware, per Alex Tabarok, that destroying the Guidestones was an actual campaign pledge for a third-string Republican gubernatorial candidate, though I had known Christian-ish conspiracy theories had surrounded the stones from pretty much the beginning (built by a shadowy group advocating one-world government, population control, looks like a pagan monument). In light of all that, it’s hard to take the local government’s word that the rest was destroyed for “safety reasons” rather than an opportunistic attack. Maybe another, different conspiracy theory is called for?
That’s it! The next Bibliophilia newsletter currently consists entirely of notes on turning human skin into leather, but will hopefully be a full-grown essay in a week’s time. Happy reading!