Nihilism and hypergunk
Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism aren鈥檛 for everyone. Or maybe they are. Jonas Werner, a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, published a crisp, perhaps irresistible, 16-page-long jotting called .
The matter isn鈥檛 as simple as some people assume. Nor are some of its concepts, though they have colourful names. 鈥淕unky objects鈥�, for instance. Gunky objects, says Werner, are 鈥渙bjects such that every part of them has a proper part鈥�. Gunkiness has to do with how-many-ness. How-many-ness is seldom simple. Werner explains: 鈥淭here are distinctions between countable gunk (a gunky object that has not more than countably many non-overlapping parts), gunk of higher cardinalities, and hypergunk.鈥� Hypergunk is a variety of gunk that possesses particular mathematical qualities.
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Parts of the philosophy community have enjoyed arguing about hypergunk since before the turn of the most recent century. Patrick Reeder, at Kenyon College in Ohio, is a philosopher who not only appreciates hypergunk, but has also tried to make it easier for everyone to appreciate hypergunk. He wrote a simple guide called .
Reeder鈥檚 guide includes a provocative statement, which Feedback alas lacks space to explain properly here. So let us let Reeder鈥檚 words stand on their own, and let us hope those words provoke you, dear reader, to pursue what they might mean for you personally: 鈥淕iven the cost of hypergunk for theories of possible worlds, this is meant to raise the stakes for those eager to dismiss hypergunk as mere metaphysical decadence.鈥�
Nasal warfare
There is a war going on in your face. To be bluntly specific about it: there is bacterial warfare in the nasal cavity.
Britney Hardy and D. Scott Merrell at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Maryland, about it in the Journal of Bacteriology. They sketch the micro-military history of the clash: 鈥渂acteria that live in the nasal cavity have evolved a variety of approaches to outcompete contenders for the limited nutrients and space; broadly speaking, these strategies may be considered a type of 鈥榖acterial warfare鈥�.鈥�
Hardy and Merrell describe the territory over which the skirmishes rage: sun-deprived landscapes replete with battlefields that are rugged and often simultaneously slippery, sticky, wet, gooey and gross. The middle meatus, for one, 鈥渃omprises a network of bone and mucosal folds and is also home to mucin-secreting goblet cells that are responsible for the production of the mucus that lines the nasal cavity鈥�.
They point out that, as with almost any war, careful study of this ceaseless, dreary clash presents opportunities and hopes, both biomedical and commercial. 鈥淎 greater molecular understanding of bacterial warfare has the potential,鈥� they enthuse, 鈥渢o reveal new approaches or molecules that can be developed as novel therapeutics.鈥�
Pop science
鈥淲here do our music preferences come from?鈥� Alexandra Lamont at Keele University and Jessica Crich at the University of Sheffield, both in the UK. Mostly, they find, from our families: one way (directly) and another (our family鈥檚 reaction to our telling them about whatever new music we encounter). But Lamont and Crich mostly avoid a related question: when do our music preferences stop growing and become calcified?
Upon reaching adulthood, many people stop paying much attention to new popular music and performers. Successive generations of middle-aged people showed uninterest in the music of new kids on the block Elvis Presley, Taylor Swift, Lil Baby and others.
A done 10 years ago makes the case that musical-taste calcification sets in early 鈥� if you are strongly right-handed. Stephen Christman at the University of Toledo, Ohio, made that discovery by having 92 students answer a survey about their handedness and their musical likings. Christman鈥檚 paper says that right-handers have less 鈥渙pen-earedness鈥� than other-handed people.
David Hargreaves and Arielle Bonneville-Roussy at the University of Roehampton, UK, tried to refine the notion of open-earedness. (They ignored the handedness angle.) In a report called they take an open-minded approach to open-earedness. They propose a subtle blend of four definitions that, if considered together, 鈥減rovide a richer and more nuanced concept of open-earedness than hitherto鈥�. One definition involves a measure with the alluring name 鈥渢he .
Bonneville-Roussy 鈥� working with Tuomas Eerola at Durham University in the UK 鈥� has also found evidence that many adults, while ignoring new pop music, become interested in classical or other musical genres. This broadening of interest, they say, perhaps continues . By these lights, interest in Presley, Swift or Baby may roll over into interest in Ludwig van Beethoven, Miles Davis or Anna Netrebko. Thanks to this finding, we can be open-minded to the happy prospect of being open-eared even as age besets us.
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