From ancient Jewish texts to androids to AI, a just-right sequence of numbers or letters turns matter into meaning

 

The power of putting basic elements in just the right order is key to both Jewish mysticism and computer coding. WhataWin/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction collection “I, Robot” tells the story of androids created at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. The androids range from “Robbie,” who is nonvocal, to “Stephen Byerley,” who may or may not be a robot – he is so humanlike that people can’t tell.

Yet each model is made of the same elementary components: the binary code of ones and zeros. The differences in behavior between the simplest robot and the most advanced one, nigh indistinguishable from a human being, is simply the sequence of these two digits.

All computer languages are ultimately rendered in ones and zeros, even artificial intelligence programs – today’s equivalent of “Stephen Byerley.” But though this technology is relatively new, the concept it’s hinged on is not.

The idea that rearranging elemental units just so can produce powerful, even seemingly magical results appears all around us. It manifests in everything from technology and science to religion and art – a pattern I focus on in my work about how literature intersects with science, technology, engineering and math.

Some of the examples of this pattern that I find most fascinating are also the most ancient: They come from Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism that first appeared in print in the 12th century C.E.

Building blocks of creation

Integral to Kabbalah is the notion that Hebrew letters are the building blocks of the cosmos. According to mystical interpretations of the creation story in the Book of Genesis, God brought the world into being by creating the alphabet, then assembled the earth and sky by recombining letters.

“God is portrayed as an architect and the Torah a blueprint in the creation of the world,” Jewish studies scholar Howard Schwartz writes in his book “Tree of Souls.” “The way the letters of the alphabet emerge and combine has an uncanny resemblance to the combining and recombining of strings of DNA.”

The letter aleph, often believed to symbolize the oneness of God. Ben Burton/BRBurton23/Pixabay

The “Sefer Yetzirah,” or “Book of Creation,” which Torah scholar Aryeh Kaplan called “the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabbalistic texts,” describes the Hebrew letters as having great power. In Rabbi Kaplan’s translation of and commentary on verse 2.2, God “engraved” the letters “out of nothingness,” then “permuted” them into different combinations and “weighed” them.

“Each letter represents a different type of information,” Kaplan wrote. “Through the various manipulations of the letters, God created all things.”

From mud to man

In Jewish storytelling, Hebrew letters’ sacred power can be manipulated into combinations that animate inanimate matter. Such is the case of one of the earliest humanoid robots or “androids” in literature: the golem, a manlike creature made of clay.

A scene from the German movie ‘The Golem: How He Came into the World,’ released in 1920.

While there are numerous versions of this Jewish legend, the notion that letters animate the golem is common to them all. The mass of molded earth becomes lifelike when its maker intones secret combinations of letters. Engraved on the golem’s forehead is the Hebrew word for truth, “אמת,” comprised of the first, middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet – which Jewish tradition interprets to mean that truth is all-encompassing.

The golem sometimes helps the Jewish community, or sometimes wreaks havoc, depending on the story. But the golem also represents something bigger: With mystical knowledge, man imitates God’s act of creation.

To deanimate the creature, its maker must remove the first letter written on its forehead: א, or aleph, which represents the oneness of God. That leaves מת, the Hebrew word for “dead” – reflecting the Jewish tradition that there is no truth without God.

A sculpture of the golem made up of carvings of Jewish letters, by artist Joshua Abarbanel and displayed in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

‘Coding’ everywhere you look

Like the golem, robots, androids and even AI are powered with recombinations of elemental units. Instead of Hebrew letters, the units are ones and zeros. In both instances, the specific permutation makes all the difference – and all these creations have inspired speculative stories about what happens when familiar building blocks are rearranged.

The creature in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” arises as an assortment of body parts. Novelist Margaret Atwood’s “Crakers” are humans 2.0, bioengineered from reshuffled genes. In science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s novella “Seventy-Two Letters,” which draws from golem legends, dolls move according to the sequence of letters on a parchment placed in their backs.

Such patterns are not just the stuff of fiction, nor are they limited to computer science. Permutative “coding” is all around. Music notes are arranged to form a melody; gene sequences are combined to form an organism. In all living things – owls, geckos, people, roses – the instructions encased in DNA comprise recombinations of the same four nucleobase pairs.

The biological difference between a complex human and a simple bacterium is the order in which the nucleobase pairs are arranged. Hugo de Vries, a biologist working at the turn of the 20th century, observed that “the whole organic world is the result of innumerable different combinations and permutations of relatively few factors.”

Each rung on the DNA ‘ladder’ is made up of pairs of four base nucleotides: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Martin Steinthaler/Moment via Getty Images

Power of sequence

Not all combinations “work” – neither in science nor in storytelling. In “On the Nature of Things,” a famous poem about philosophy and physics, the first-century Roman writer Titus Lucretius Carus cautions that “we must not think that all particles can be linked together in all ways, for you would see monsters created everywhere, forms coming to being half man, half beast …”

Fantastical imaginings aside, the core idea stands: Not all permutations yield viable results. To put it in terms of modern biology, genes with certain combinations of the four nucleobase pairs would not lead to a functioning organism.

Writer Jorge Luis Borges explored similar ideas in “The Library of Babel,” a short story about a library-like universe filled with books that contain every possible permutation of 25 characters. Most amount to nonsense – strings of letters that bear no meaning.

What sets apart something that works from something that doesn’t is sequence. The difference between the behavior of a simple robot like Asimov’s “Robbie” and the behavior of AI so complex that it seems sentient boils down to the sequence of ones and zeros that instruct it – not altogether dissimilar from the way a single letter is the difference between animation and deanimation, or creation and destruction, in Jewish folklore.

The potential consequences of AI’s novel permutation have caused fear and uncertainty. Yet perhaps there is some comfort in the notion that, as the Bible says, אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ: There’s nothing new under the sun.

Rocio Benabentos, Mark Finlayson and Mendel Hendel contributed feedback for this article.

Rhona Trauvitch, Associate Teaching Professor of English, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Israel’s army exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox are part of a bigger challenge: The Jewish state is divided over the Jewish religion

 

Israeli police scuffle with ultra-Orthodox Jews as they block a main road in Jerusalem during an October 2017 protest against Israeli army conscription. AP Photo/Ariel Schalit, File

Just when you think nothing can surprise you anymore in Israeli politics, someone always comes along with a new twist.

This time it was Yitzhak Yosef, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis. In response to debates over whether ultra-Orthodox Jews should be required to serve in the military, or continue to be excused to study religious texts full time, he had a simple answer:

“If they force us to go to the army, we’ll all go abroad,” he declared on March 9, 2024.

Ultra-Orthodox resistance to conscription is nothing new.

But the forcefulness of this declaration is new, especially coming in the midst of a war. And Yosef is not any random rabbi. He is the son of Ovadia Yosef, who was the spiritual leader of the Shas Party: an important partner in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing and religious governing coalition.

Ever since the state of Israel’s founding in 1948, ultra-Orthodox Jews – those who take the strictest approach toward following Jewish law, and are now around 14% of the population – have been exempt from military service. Among all other Jewish citizens, from the secular to the modern Orthodox, men are required to serve 32 months, and women 24, plus reserve duty.

In 2017, the country’s Supreme Court ruled against the exemptions, but they have continued through a series of legislative workarounds. The latest is due to expire at the end of March 2024, however – and other Israelis’ resentment toward the ultra-Orthodox exemption is at a high.

As a historian, I see the conscription debate as more than a political crisis for Israel’s government. The question is so sensitive because it opens up fundamental questions about the cohesion of Israeli society in general, and of the ultra-Orthodox, or “Haredi,” population’s attitude toward the Jewish state in particular.

It also illustrates the complexity of a country that is not as easily explained as many of its supporters and critics alike believe.

Yitzhak Yosef, center, the Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, attends a protest against religious reforms in Jerusalem in 2022. AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean

Initial compromise

Historically, Orthodox Jews struggled to justify the idea of a Jewish state. They prayed for centuries to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, but had a specific return in mind: a Jewish state established by the Messiah. Any other kind of Jewish sovereignty, they believed, would be blasphemy.

Theodor Herzl, who founded modern political Zionism in the late 1800s, had a long beard and looked like a Biblical prophet. Yet he was thoroughly secular and assimilated – he even lit a Christmas tree with his family. Herzl’s movement to encourage more European Jews to migrate to the Holy Land had little appeal for the Orthodox.

There was, however, always a minority among the Orthodox who identified with Zionism, the belief that Jewish people should have a sovereign political state in the land of Israel. According to the Talmud, the central source of Jewish law, saving lives is more important than other commandments – and Zionism saved Jews from pogroms and other anti-Jewish violence in Europe.

During the Holocaust, the vast majority of observant Jews in Eastern Europe were murdered. Afterward, many survivors who had previously opposed Zionism sought refuge in the new state of Israel.

On the eve of Israel’s independence, David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of the state-to-be, entered an agreement with the leaders of the two camps of Orthodox Jews.

The Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox, still refused to recognize the legitimacy of a secular Jewish state. The so-called national religious camp, on the other hand, embraced it.

Among other concessions, the new state granted exemption to young Haredi Jews who wanted to study religious texts full time instead of joining the army. That hardly seemed consequential, as the young men in question numbered only a few hundred.

Shifting views

During the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel captured the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem as well as the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. Since then, the national religious camp, once a moderate force, has developed into the spearhead of the right-wing settler movement.

Jewish settlers study the Torah in a tent at the West Bank outpost of Homesh, near the Palestinian village of Burqa, Jan. 17, 2022. AP Photo/Ariel Schalit

Unlike the first generations of Orthodox Zionists, national religious Israelis today are Zionists not despite but because of messianism. Israel, they believe, will help bring about the messianic age. Therefore, right-wing religious Zionists – like Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich – are enthusiastic proponents of army service.

Not so the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox.

To be clear, Haredi Jews are very diverse. This demographic includes families with roots everywhere from Poland and Romania to Morocco and Iraq. It includes people who support Israel’s existence, and opponents who burn the flag on Independence Day. It includes men who join the workforce and men who dedicate their life to religious study.

The majority of Haredim living in Israel are not Zionists, yet live there because it is the Holy Land and the state subsidizes their study. Anything else – secular education, army service, and often paid work – is seen as a distraction.

A minority of Haredi Jews serve in the armed forces voluntarily, and more have enlisted since the beginning of the latest Israel-Hamas war. But they have no legal obligation to do so; nor do Israel’s Arab citizens.

Jewish men pray in Jerusalem for the success of the Israeli army and for the return of the Israeli hostages, on Nov. 9, 2023. AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg

Growing Haredi sector

Israel’s governments have continued to tolerate this situation as ultra-Orthodox political parties became much-needed partners.

Yet legal and popular opposition has increased.

In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that the defense minister has no right to exempt Haredi Jews from military service and asked the government to find ways to draft them. In 2014, a center-right government under Netanyahu passed a law aiming to have 60% of Haredi men serving within three years. But the 2015 elections brought Haredi parties back in power, and implementation was effectively abandoned.

Since then, Haredi parties have become more powerful as their population grows. Yet the Supreme Court has made clear that by the end of March 2024, the government either needs to draft Haredim, or the legislature has to come up with a new law to excuse them.

Seven in 10 Israeli Jews oppose the blanket exemption, meaning another exemption might jeopardize Netanyahu’s government. Frustration is also rising over plans to raise the military service of men to three years and to double the duty of reservists to 42 days a year during emergencies.

None of this would matter if the Haredim were still the same tiny segment of society they were in 1948. Today, however, ultra-Orthodox women have 6.5 children on average, compared with 2.5 among other Jewish Israeli women, and 1 in 4 young children are ultra-Orthodox.

The resulting transformation of Israeli society is easy to see. If the trend continues, Israel will become a very different, very religious society – one that can hardly survive economically.

On average, a non-Haredi household pays nine times more income tax than a Haredi one, while the latter receives over 50% more state support. Even if they were ready to work, most Haredim would have a hard time finding well-paid jobs, as their state-subsidized private schools teach hardly any secular topics.

For Israeli society, this portends further fragmentation and a weakening of the economy – to say nothing of the army.

But, Chief Rabbi Yitzhak says, this will never happen. In his and other Haredim’s eyes, Israel’s soldiers succeed only because religious Jews study and pray for them.

“They need to understand that without the Torah, without the yeshivas, there’d be nothing, no success for the army,” he said.

This article has been updated to correct the date that the military exemption is due to expire.

Michael Brenner, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig Maximilian University and Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

What animals can teach us about stress

 

Guppies who are under constant threat of predation do worse than those who live without predators. Reuters

Humans, being essentially self-centred, want to know what makes them different from their wild relatives, as well as what similarities exist. But it’s not just a matter of curiosity. Other species can teach us a lot about the big issues that challenge us in modern society.

Stress is seen as a pervasive modern-day killer. It has an impact on everything from our intestinal processes to our cherished cognitive performance. But stress is not a modern thing. All animals stress about predators, hunger, and lack of sex. So, what can we learn from them?

If there were a sweet spot – the optimal stress level – at which most stressed animals show peak cognitive performance we could possibly use the information to modulate our own stress and mental feats. And it would be brilliant if we could develop a deep understanding of how wild animals perform under varying levels of risk, given that they have evolved to deal with these over millions of years.

Studying the link between stress and cognitive performance, however, is hampered by many challenges. Although our methods of measuring stress have improved dramatically in recent years, outside the lab it’s still very difficult to contrast chronic stress from, say, a long drought, versus acute stress, such as the presence of a predator. Or linking our measures of stress to wild animals’ learning and memory skills.

We’re only just scratching at the surface of this problem.

Not stressing the animals

The study of stress itself is coming into its own. Traditionally, researchers actually increased their study subjects’ stress levels by the collection of blood used to measure circulating stress hormone (cortisol) levels. More recently, though, we have been given a barrage of less invasive tools with which to measure animals’ anxiety.

Perhaps the most widely used technique is to extract hormonal data from fecal samples. There is no need to catch or handle the animal. By happy coincidence stressed animals produce even more poo than their calm counterparts. Fecal hormones have certainly confirmed many of our suspicions. Animals become more stressed when they are handled and in captive conditions like zoos. They also find losing a friend very stressful.

There have also been some surprise findings. It may seem obvious that being a subordinate animal is stressful, but research on baboons shows that alpha males may actually be the ones heading for a stomach ulcer.

Another way of indirectly assessing anxiety is by measuring changes in how much food wild animals leave behind in experimental feeding patches. The idea is that a relaxed animal will eat more of the food than an anxious individual, leaving behind more food. This is called the giving up density. Experiments such as these allow us to clearly see how wild animals perceive variation in risk in their natural landscapes.

We know from Giving Up Density experiments that Nubian ibex perceive increased tourism as risky, while samango monkeys use human observers as potential shields against predators, eating much more food when their human “guards” are nearby. These same monkeys also feel much more threatened near the ground, compared to positions higher up under the tree canopies.

An even more exciting recent development is the measure of stress through thermal imagery. Researchers are knee-deep in the development of reliable techniques using thermal cameras to detect rapid changes in body surface temperatures.

A spike in stress levels causes blood to shunt away from an animal’s body surface (may this be what gives us the chills when we panic?). Suddenly, and quite literally, the animal appears to be cooler. Armed with this knowledge, we may be able to monitor fluctuation in stress levels in real time.

With all of these tools at our disposal, you may imagine that we know everything there is to know about wild animals’ performance under pressure. Unfortunately we don’t.

There is still a lot to learn

Our knowledge of cognitive performance and stress is heavily skewed towards lab rats. A great deal has been learnt from them.

For example, experiments have shown some positive effects of stress on lab rats. Brief, acute stress can actually lead to an increase in neurons in rats’ brains. And rats who were stressed out as teenagers become more impulsive as adults, which can make them more effective foragers, especially under high risk conditions.

In some ways, these findings sound like great news. We can perhaps all relate to the idea that we perform rather well when the stressful situation is short-lived, but flunk out when the pressure is either non-existent or overwhelming. But what we can say about these very rodent-focused studies is that it’s time to move beyond rodents and beyond the lab.

Moving past rodents

Data are slowly trickling in.

Studies on wild animals appear to confirm the idea that long-term, chronic stressors can truly decrease your mental acuity. For example, a recent study on wild-caught guppies showed that those used to stress make a lot more mistakes in cognitive challenges compared to the relatively relaxed fish.

Left-handed marmosets, which are the target of more social attacks and are therefore perhaps more chronically stressed, also show negative cognitive biases compared to their right-handed group members.

Marmosets don’t function well cognitively in stressful situations. Reuters

In my own lab we are trying to assess various ways in which varying risk can affect learning abilities. We are using Giving Up Density experiments to determine how well wild bat-eared foxes may perform in low-risk and high-risk situations.

The key to unlocking how animals deal with stress requires that we step off our pedestal and acknowledge that other animals may outdo us in some cognitive tasks. If we do this we may learn how to truly cope in our own rapidly changing landscape.

Aliza le Roux, Associate Professor, University of the Free State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Is my water safe to drink? Expert advice for residents of South African cities

 

In early March 2024 the residents of Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city and the economic capital of the country, were hit by extended cuts in water supplies. This was a new low after months of continuous deterioration. Professor in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand Craig Sheridan sets out the risks this poses to drinking water in the city.

What can get into my water that will make me sick?

Two things.

You can have chemicals in the water that are toxic, or you can have pathogenic organisms which can make you ill. These lead to different diseases and have different treatment strategies.

As a general rule, South Africa’s water works are able to remove almost all chemicals such that the water is safe to drink. The water treatment works also disinfect the water, killing harmful bacteria and viruses. This is primarily done with chlorine, but the water is overdosed slightly. This leaves a little chlorine in the water for “residual” disinfection. The residual chlorine travels with the water down the pipe to the reservoir and into your home, keeping the water pathogen free. Pathogens include viruses, bacteria and small animals such as worms and larvae.

This is why the water from taps sometimes smells a little like chlorine. This is a good thing. It means your water is safe.

Is my tap water safe to drink?

As a rule, the answer here is yes, but probably only if you live in a big city. If there is a continuous supply of water, the pressure in the pipe prevents contaminants from entering the pipeline. And if the water has residual chlorine in it, that means the supply to your home is good.

Unfortunately, this relies on drinking water treatment works functioning properly, which is not always the case. The department of water and sanitation runs an auditing process of the water treatment works and the water they supply. The results are released as Blue Drop reports. Johannesburg has been classified as having excellent quality of supply, both chemically and microbiologically. However, the overall scores in Gauteng, the province Johannesburg is located in, are dropping even though they are still high.

Across the country 46% of drinking water is classified as “unacceptable” and scores of towns and cities have substantially declined in the last decade. The latest Blue Drop report shows a decreasing quality of drinking water supply across South Africa.

My water supply has been interrupted a lot. Is my tap water safe to drink?

Unfortunately, the answer to this question may not be yes, depending on a range of factors.

If there is no water in the pipe, and there is an underground sewage leak near the water pipe, or contaminated storm water near the pipe, there’s a real possibility that contaminated water can enter the pipe. Or, if maintenance work is done on a pipeline, as happens after any major leak, there is no real way to prevent soil and external untreated water entering the pipeline.

As water supply returns, this “first flush” down the pipe has the potential to contain contaminants. Because there is no way to know what it looks like underground around the pipe, it is sensible to protect yourself as water returns. You can protect yourself by flushing your taps until the water is fully clear. I would recommend that you wait until after the air has finished exiting the pipe and give it another minute or so, or until fully clear. Collect this water in a bucket for watering plants or flushing toilets. Once the water is clear, your quality should be similar to the bulk supply.

If you are worried, boil the water before use.

If your water remains brown or discoloured, report it and drink purified water.

I get my water from a mobile water tanker. Is this safe to drink?

Here the answer is supposed to be yes. But there are far too many instances of unscrupulous, roaming water tanker suppliers selling water, especially in areas with no access to safe tap water.

Since water supplies have become less dependable, the state has turned to businesses to supply water to communities. This has developed into a big business, as is clear from the size of one of Johannesburg’s tenders for vacuum trucks (honeysuckers) and water tankers. As a result, fraud and collusion are on the rise.

Unfortunately having no access to piped tap water is the daily reality more than 4 million South Africans. If this is the case, it is sensible to purify the water.

What are the diseases that make drinking water unsafe? How are they spread?

There are a number of water-borne diseases that can cause very serious illness and death.

When water is sent to a laboratory for testing, the first test is for an organism called Escherichia coli, or E. coli.

E. coli is found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals. It does not necessarily cause disease. But if it is found in the water, there is absolute certainty that the water has been contaminated with faecal matter which has not been properly treated. This is why it is used as a screening tool for more serious diseases which are also spread through faecal matter.

Not all water that has E. coli will have pathogens. But the presence of E. coli is a serious warning that there is a high chance of other pathogenic organisms in the water such as cholera.

Cholera is caused by a bacterium found in the faecal matter of sick people. It is highly contagious and can spread by contact mainly from drinking contaminated water, food or from unwashed hands. The symptoms of cholera are watery diarrhoea (runny tummy), vomiting and leg cramps.

If I store water in bottles, how long before it’s unsafe to drink?

This is a really tricky question to answer. There are too many factors that can cause your water quality to deteriorate. For example, is the cap of the bottle open? How warm is the water? Is the container very clean or just rinsed? Water safety cannot be fully assured without analysing the actual water.

At the Centre of Water Research and Development we are doing research partly funded through the Water Research Commission to develop test strips to give a rapid analysis of drinking water quality that can easily be understood by the general public.

But I’d recommend that you try not to keep water too long. Preferably not more than a day. And if you do, then boil or purify the water before drinking it.

Is purifying water difficult?

At the University of the Witwatersrand we commissioned a short animation in all of South Africa’s 11 official languages as well as French and Portuguese on how to prevent cholera transmission and how to purify your water to ensure you stay safe.

There are eight videos in different languages on the University of Witwatersrand’s YouTube account, this is the English version.

We have also shared guidance on how to purify your water to make it safe.

Craig Sheridan, Professor, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why do we usually sleep at night? What happens when we don’t sleep? Expert insights into this essential part of our lives

 

Sleep is as essential to our health as food and water. It is important to a number of brain functions, including how nerve cells communicate with each other. We sleep for a third of our lives and there are many restorative processes going on during sleep that are needed to stay healthy.

Why do we usually sleep at night? What happens when we don’t sleep? On World Sleep Day, Nadine Dreyer asks a group of experts to tell us more about this essential part of our lives.

Why do we need sleep and why do we sleep better at night?

We sleep for a third of our lives, yet it is only when we cannot sleep or when we experience poor quality sleep that we really start noticing it.

During sleep, our muscle activity drops, our breathing slows down, and our heart rate and blood pressure decrease. At the same time our brain actively clears toxins, which cause neurodegenerative diseases.

It also consolidates memories, wiping out “useless” ones during deep sleep, known as slow wave sleep.

All this allows us to start afresh the following day.

Our lives are organised around our sleep-wake schedule. As we’re a diurnal species, our master clock in the brain, which maintains many of our 24-hour rhythms, schedules our period of activity with daylight, and our period of rest with the night.

In some other animals, like rodents, evolutionary pressure has pushed those species to become nocturnal, which allows them to scurry and feed outside the view of their diurnal (daytime) or crepuscular (twilight) predators.

Not sleeping at the right time has been associated with poor health. Some of the side-effects are poorer cognitive performance, lower energy and worse mental health.

There’s also a higher risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and a higher risk of developing high blood pressure and diabetes.

After a poor night’s sleep, we try to get on with our lives but research has shown this is not so easy. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the strictest lockdown, South Africans rated their sleep quality as poorer, with more insomnia symptoms. These were were both in turn associated with worse levels of depression and anxiety.

What happens when we don’t sleep?

Sleep is a state of vulnerability where a “rest and digest” state dominates over the “fight and flight” state when we are awake.

Our early sleep “scans” the environment before allowing us to dive into deeper stages of sleep.

When a rupture in this consolidated bout of sleep happens, we will start complaining “I haven’t slept enough” or “I slept really badly last night”.

Such ruptures include those induced by specific sleep disorders like sleep apnoea or insomnia.

Sleep apnoea leads to unconscious sleep interruptions due to upper airways obstruction and can lead to hypertension and increased risk of diabetes.

Research in rural Mpumalanga province in South Africa found one out of three older adults had moderate to severe sleep apnoea and this was associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Yet there is no treatment in the public health system for this common sleep disorder.

Certain situations disrupt sleep: parents tending to their young children, doctors being awake while on call, loud generator noises during night-time electricity cuts, mosquitoes, or worse, gunshots or sounds of violence waking us up from our slumber, signalling danger.

Sleep health inequity in South Africa is also driven by socioeconomic status.

A recent study on sleep in men and women living in the urban township of Khayelitsha in South Africa’s Western Cape province showed that poor sleep quality was associated with fear of falling asleep in a violent environment. Sleep was disturbed by strange noises, fear of attacks and dreams about past traumatic experiences.

Electronic devices make it difficult to sleep. Why?

Even though our biology is meant to make us sleep at night, several societal, technological changes have progressively decreased our sleep opportunity.

Our sleep timing is controlled by our master circadian clock. This clock is exquisitely sensitive to light, so exposure to bright light and blue light such as that emitted from electronic devices such as smartphones shifts our bedtime to a later time.

In our recently published study of adolescent sleep in Nigeria, adolescents in urban areas slept less and sleep quality was worse.

Sleep duration was shorter, due to bedtimes being later but waking times in the morning similar to those of adolescents in rural areas. The use of electronic devices at night by urban Nigerian adolescents was associated with shorter sleep duration.

This is one example of a growing body of research that highlights the negative consequences of nocturnal tech use on sleep, even in African societies.

What are key habits to help people sleep better?

The most important habit is to take sleep as seriously as a healthy diet and regular exercise.

We advise the following:

• Keep regular wake times and bedtimes. This helps us sleep at the best time with respect to our master clock’s rhythm. This in turn helps ensure a consolidated bout of sleep.

• Aim for an average of 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night.

• Avoid watching screens one hour before normal bedtime. If this is unavoidable, choose the lowest brightness and add the orange night screen setting. Rather read a book under a bedside light.

• Get outdoor light during the day to strengthen the master clock’s circadian (near 24-hour) rhythm.

• Do some form of physical activity once a day. This helps build sleep pressure and also strengthens the master clock’s rhythms.

• Avoid alcohol before bedtime as this is associated with disrupted sleep.

• Avoid caffeine and stimulants after noon.

• Try to sleep in a quiet, cool and dark or dimly lit environment.

For more information please visit the South African Society for Sleep and Health.

Karine Scheuermaier, Associate Professor in Physiology, Chair of Science Committee, South African Society for Sleep and Health, Member of the World Sleep Society, University of the Witwatersrand; Alison Bentley, Honorary Lecturer in Family Medicine, University of the Witwatersrand; Dale Rae, Director of Sleep Science and associate professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town; Francesco Xavier Gomez-Olive Casas, Research Manager at MRC/Wits Agincourt Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand; Gosia Lipinska, Associate Professor, University of Cape Town; Jonathan Davy, Senior lecturer, Rhodes University; Joshua Davimes, Senior Lecturer in Anatomical Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand; Nomathemba Chandiwana, Principal Scientist at Ezintsha,, University of the Witwatersrand, and Oluwatosin Olorunmoteni, Neurodevelopmental Paediatrician, Obafemi Awolowo University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

From ancient Jewish texts to androids to AI, a just-right sequence of numbers or letters turns matter into meaning

 

The power of putting basic elements in just the right order is key to both Jewish mysticism and computer coding. WhataWin/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction collection “I, Robot” tells the story of androids created at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. The androids range from “Robbie,” who is nonvocal, to “Stephen Byerley,” who may or may not be a robot – he is so humanlike that people can’t tell.

Yet each model is made of the same elementary components: the binary code of ones and zeros. The differences in behavior between the simplest robot and the most advanced one, nigh indistinguishable from a human being, is simply the sequence of these two digits.

All computer languages are ultimately rendered in ones and zeros, even artificial intelligence programs – today’s equivalent of “Stephen Byerley.” But though this technology is relatively new, the concept it’s hinged on is not.

The idea that rearranging elemental units just so can produce powerful, even seemingly magical results appears all around us. It manifests in everything from technology and science to religion and art – a pattern I focus on in my work about how literature intersects with science, technology, engineering and math.

Some of the examples of this pattern that I find most fascinating are also the most ancient: They come from Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism that first appeared in print in the 12th century C.E.

Building blocks of creation

Integral to Kabbalah is the notion that Hebrew letters are the building blocks of the cosmos. According to mystical interpretations of the creation story in the Book of Genesis, God brought the world into being by creating the alphabet, then assembled the earth and sky by recombining letters.

“God is portrayed as an architect and the Torah a blueprint in the creation of the world,” Jewish studies scholar Howard Schwartz writes in his book “Tree of Souls.” “The way the letters of the alphabet emerge and combine has an uncanny resemblance to the combining and recombining of strings of DNA.”

The letter aleph, often believed to symbolize the oneness of God. Ben Burton/BRBurton23/Pixabay

The “Sefer Yetzirah,” or “Book of Creation,” which Torah scholar Aryeh Kaplan called “the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabbalistic texts,” describes the Hebrew letters as having great power. In Rabbi Kaplan’s translation of and commentary on verse 2.2, God “engraved” the letters “out of nothingness,” then “permuted” them into different combinations and “weighed” them.

“Each letter represents a different type of information,” Kaplan wrote. “Through the various manipulations of the letters, God created all things.”

From mud to man

In Jewish storytelling, Hebrew letters’ sacred power can be manipulated into combinations that animate inanimate matter. Such is the case of one of the earliest humanoid robots or “androids” in literature: the golem, a manlike creature made of clay.

A scene from the German movie ‘The Golem: How He Came into the World,’ released in 1920.

While there are numerous versions of this Jewish legend, the notion that letters animate the golem is common to them all. The mass of molded earth becomes lifelike when its maker intones secret combinations of letters. Engraved on the golem’s forehead is the Hebrew word for truth, “אמת,” comprised of the first, middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet – which Jewish tradition interprets to mean that truth is all-encompassing.

The golem sometimes helps the Jewish community, or sometimes wreaks havoc, depending on the story. But the golem also represents something bigger: With mystical knowledge, man imitates God’s act of creation.

To deanimate the creature, its maker must remove the first letter written on its forehead: א, or aleph, which represents the oneness of God. That leaves מת, the Hebrew word for “dead” – reflecting the Jewish tradition that there is no truth without God.

A sculpture of the golem made up of carvings of Jewish letters, by artist Joshua Abarbanel and displayed in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

‘Coding’ everywhere you look

Like the golem, robots, androids and even AI are powered with recombinations of elemental units. Instead of Hebrew letters, the units are ones and zeros. In both instances, the specific permutation makes all the difference – and all these creations have inspired speculative stories about what happens when familiar building blocks are rearranged.

The creature in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” arises as an assortment of body parts. Novelist Margaret Atwood’s “Crakers” are humans 2.0, bioengineered from reshuffled genes. In science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s novella “Seventy-Two Letters,” which draws from golem legends, dolls move according to the sequence of letters on a parchment placed in their backs.

Such patterns are not just the stuff of fiction, nor are they limited to computer science. Permutative “coding” is all around. Music notes are arranged to form a melody; gene sequences are combined to form an organism. In all living things – owls, geckos, people, roses – the instructions encased in DNA comprise recombinations of the same four nucleobase pairs.

The biological difference between a complex human and a simple bacterium is the order in which the nucleobase pairs are arranged. Hugo de Vries, a biologist working at the turn of the 20th century, observed that “the whole organic world is the result of innumerable different combinations and permutations of relatively few factors.”

Each rung on the DNA ‘ladder’ is made up of pairs of four base nucleotides: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Martin Steinthaler/Moment via Getty Images

Power of sequence

Not all combinations “work” – neither in science nor in storytelling. In “On the Nature of Things,” a famous poem about philosophy and physics, the first-century Roman writer Titus Lucretius Carus cautions that “we must not think that all particles can be linked together in all ways, for you would see monsters created everywhere, forms coming to being half man, half beast …”

Fantastical imaginings aside, the core idea stands: Not all permutations yield viable results. To put it in terms of modern biology, genes with certain combinations of the four nucleobase pairs would not lead to a functioning organism.

Writer Jorge Luis Borges explored similar ideas in “The Library of Babel,” a short story about a library-like universe filled with books that contain every possible permutation of 25 characters. Most amount to nonsense – strings of letters that bear no meaning.

What sets apart something that works from something that doesn’t is sequence. The difference between the behavior of a simple robot like Asimov’s “Robbie” and the behavior of AI so complex that it seems sentient boils down to the sequence of ones and zeros that instruct it – not altogether dissimilar from the way a single letter is the difference between animation and deanimation, or creation and destruction, in Jewish folklore.

The potential consequences of AI’s novel permutation have caused fear and uncertainty. Yet perhaps there is some comfort in the notion that, as the Bible says, אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ: There’s nothing new under the sun.

Rocio Benabentos, Mark Finlayson and Mendel Hendel contributed feedback for this article.

Rhona Trauvitch, Associate Teaching Professor of English, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Scorsese’s gods of the streets: From ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ to ‘Silence,’ faith is rarely far off in his films

 

Even in films where religion isn’t front and center, Martin Scorsese’s attention to ritual and devotion comes through. Apple TV+

A widely circulated still from the set of Martin Scorsese’s latest film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” shows the director sitting in a church pew. Next to him is Lily Gladstone, who plays the role of Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman whose family is targeted as part of a broader conspiracy by white Americans to steal the tribe’s wealth, to the point of marrying and killing its members.

In the photograph, Scorsese appears to hold rosary beads, a common devotional object for many Catholics. Mollie is Catholic, so the rosary makes sense as a prop. But as a scholar of religion and film, I’m struck by how it calls to mind the director’s own complex Catholicism and its imprint on his decades of filmmaking.

Scorsese stands in a long line of Catholic American filmmakers, stretching back to the 1930s and 1940s – one that includes Irish Americans John Ford and Leo McCarey, and Italian immigrant Frank Capra. At a time when Catholicism still seemed foreign to many Americans, those directors helped normalize the faith, making it seem like part of a shared American story.

Yet in his films, Scorsese has taken a much more personal approach to exploring Catholic faith and experience. He doesn’t feel the need to defend the religion or burnish its image. His movies are steeped in Catholic sensibilities, but embrace painful questions that often accompany belief: what it means to hold on to religious commitment in a world where God can seem absent.

From altar boy to auteur

Scorsese has often spoken of his Catholic background. Born in New York City’s Little Italy, he went to Catholic schools and served as an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, which appeared in his early masterpiece “Mean Streets.” Scorsese even began seminary training, but he quickly realized the priesthood was not for him.

Yet the church proved influential. Scorsese has described St. Patrick’s as a spiritual alternative to the violence in the streets around his neighborhood. A priest introduced the young Scorsese to classical music and books that widened his cultural horizons.

Organist Jared Lamenzo performs at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on June 21, 2019. Kris Connor/Getty Images for NAMM

A similar tension runs through many of his films: Catholic devotion, mystery and ritual interwoven with ruthless crime. Indeed, the struggle with faith amid brutality is a theme Scorsese returns to over and over, asking what religion might have to offer the world as it actually exists, with all its cruelties, greed and despair.

Presence and absence

That struggle can be described as one between “presence” and “absence,” to use the terms of religious studies scholar Robert A. Orsi.

Religious presence refers to all the ways people experience their gods’ existence in the world and in their lives. For Catholics, for example, the Eucharist is not just a symbol of Christ; the consecrated bread and wine in Communion actually become Jesus’ flesh and blood, according to Catholic teaching.

Orsi describes religious absence, on the other hand, as the experience of doubt and spiritual struggle about a god not felt directly on Earth.

Both presence and absence shape Scorsese’s rendering of religion. God’s absence takes the form of violence and greed in his films. But some characters also carry their gods with them in the world. This is most dramatically seen in “Silence,” released in 2016, which was based on the novel by Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo.

“Silence” is the story of two Jesuit missionaries who travel to 17th century Japan in search of their mentor, another Jesuit who is believed to have renounced the faith during a wave of violent persecutions. One of them, Father Rodrigues, profoundly questions his own faith after witnessing the torture of Japanese Christians.

‘Silence’ dramatically explores faith, doubt and suffering.

Why, he wonders, does God allow such suffering? Eventually he himself will renounce his faith in order to save the lives of those to whom he ministers.

The silence of God is the film’s major preoccupation, yet it is filled with devotional imagery. At the climax of the film, Rodrigues tramples on an image of Christ in order to end the torture of other Christians. But just at that moment, he experiences the presence of his God.

The very final scene depicts his burial, years after the film’s main events – a small crucifix clasped in his hand.

Penance ‘in the streets’

This preoccupation with Catholicism stretches back to Scorsese’s 1973 breakthrough film, “Mean Streets.” Harvey Keitel plays a young Italian American man, Charlie, who grapples with his faith in the unforgiving world of New York’s Lower East Side.

Presence, as Orsi points out, is often as much a burden as a solace. Indeed, part of the emotional power in “Mean Streets” lies in Charlie’s own impatience toward Catholic practices and rules. He wants the freedom to be Catholic in his own way.

“You don’t make up for your sins in the church,” he insists in the opening voice-over. “You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it.”

Martin Scorsese at the corner of Hester and Baxter streets in 1973, one of the locations he used in his New York film ‘Mean Streets.’ Jack Manning/New York Times Co./Getty Images

Over the years, Scorsese’s own ambitions have led him far beyond the streets of Little Italy. A number of his films have little to do with religion. Yet movies such as “Casino,” “The Aviator” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” elaborate the same basic question as “Mean Streets”: What is important in a world that so often feels dominated by absence, money and violence? Through a long career, Scorsese has framed both the sacred and profane as compelling but competing forces of human desire.

Shortly before the release of “Silence,” Scorsese visited St. Patrick’s during an interview with The New York Times. “I never left,” he said. “In my mind, I am here every day.”

One might take him at his word. Even in his most recent movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a Catholic sensibility sneaks through in numerous ways. Characters attend Mass at parish churches and bury their dead on consecrated Catholic ground.

Further, the film’s attention to Osage religious practices demonstrates Scorsese’s sensitivity to the power of ritual and devotion. The movie opens with the burial of a ceremonial pipe, highlighting how objects can assume sacred significance. As Mollie’s mother dies, she has a vision of the elders.

But the questions that haunt Scorsese hang over moments that hardly feel religious, too.

Toward the end of the film, when Mollie asks her duplicitous husband, Ernest, to come clean, his refusal to fully confess the harm he did to her and her family epitomizes the depths of his ethical emptiness. Her silence as she gets up and leaves, with an FBI agent standing quietly in the corner, offers a more powerful moral indictment than any legal sentence. The refusal to pay for one’s sins at home and in the streets has rarely looked so damning.

Anthony Smith, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.