Casting Allusions

The modest philosophical literature on allusion focuses on descriptive issues concerning literary examples, and thus tends to neglect both allusions in other media and normative concerns about allusions in general. In this paper I will help fill both gaps through an analysis of three different cases of what I call casting allusions, which depend on the audience’s recognition that a certain cast member was also in the cast of a different work. These cases vary greatly in aesthetic merit, and this is best explained via two dimensions of allusive value: richness (given the medium) and dynamic engagement. All else being equal, an allusion will be more aesthetically pleasing when it relies on a wider variety of medium-relevant channels or prompts less passive, more evolving audience response. Such an account finds further support in elaborate cinematic examples, such as the tapestry of allusions to Bruce Lee in the Kill Bill films

Ex Ante Allusions

We tend to think of allusions as indirect references to objects that already exist. Here I argue against this post facto orthodoxy and for the view that certain cases of allusion count as ex ante allusions (i.e. allusions before the fact). I argue that the standard view conflates the epistemic dependence of allusion (knowledge of the object of allusion) with an existential dependence (the object must already exist). As an adequate account of allusion should explain both the apparent paradoxical character and the possibility of ex ante allusions, I propose that literary allusions should be understood in terms of what might be called reference from rather than reference to

Three-body forces and shell structure in calcium isotopes

Understanding and predicting the formation of shell structure from nuclear forces is a central challenge for nuclear physics. While the magic numbers N=2,8,20 are generally well understood, N=28 is the first standard magic number that is not reproduced in microscopic theories with two-nucleon forces. In this Letter, we show that three-nucleon forces give rise to repulsive interactions between two valence neutrons that are key to explain 48Ca as a magic nucleus, with a high 2+ excitation energy and a concentrated magnetic dipole transition strength. The repulsive three-nucleon mechanism improves the agreement with experimental binding energies.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures; improved version and added coupled-cluster benchmark; published versio

Availability of humic nitrogen to phytoplankton

The chemical, physical, and biological factors affecting the bioavailability of humic nitrogen (N) to coastal phytoplankton were examined. Historically, humic substances have largely been considered biologically refractory, and humic-N is though to be unavailable biologically without prior oxidation via photochemical cleavage or remineralization by bacteria. This is due in part to the high aromaticity and low N content of humic substances. This dissertation investigates whether these assumptions are valid, and whether humic substances may be a more important source of N to the coastal phytoplankton community than previously believed. The research consisted of four main parts. First, changes in the structure and N content of humic substances were monitored by forming humics in the laboratory and following the changes in structure and chemical composition as they aged. It was found that as humics age, they become more aliphatic and fulvic-like. It was also determined that the commonly used XAD-8 extraction technique may underestimate the N content of aquatic humics by stripping ammonium (NH4+) from the humic structure. Second, whether or not this underestimation of humic-N has an effect on previously reported rates of photochemical N liberation from humic compounds was investigated. It was found that while the potential for the underestimation of photochemical release exists, previously reported rates are close to correct, largely due to physical and chemical interactions of humic substances with the surrounding environment. Third, the bioavailability of humic-N was examined using a suite of coastal phytoplankton strains. In short, all coastal strains exposed to humic substances could take up humic-N in short-term incubations; an open ocean strain tested did not take up humic-N. Furthermore, younger humics appeared to be more labile than those aged for time periods greater than three months. Finally, the significance of the salinity-mediated release was investigated and found to be a potentially important transport mechanism of NH4 + to the mid-saline regions of the estuary. In conclusion, the combination of chemical, physical, and biological processes occurring in the estuarine and coastal ecosystems suggests that humic substances are highly dynamic, biologically active compounds and not the biologically recalcitrant molecules portrayed in current literature

The InDeVal insertion/deletion evaluation tool: a program for finding target regions in DNA sequences and for aiding in sequence comparison

BACKGROUND: The program InDeVal was originally developed to help researchers find known regions of insertion/deletion activity (with the exception of isolated single-base indels) in newly determined Poaceae trnL-F sequences and compare them with 533 previously determined sequences. It is supplied with input files designed for this purpose. More broadly, the program is applicable for finding specific target regions (referred to as "variable regions") in DNA sequence. A variable region is any specific sequence fragment of interest, such as an indel region, a codon or codons, or sequence coding for a particular RNA secondary structure. RESULTS: InDeVal input is DNA sequence and a template file (sequence flanking each variable region). Additional files contain the variable regions and user-defined messages about the sequence found within them (e.g., taxa sharing each of the different indel patterns). Variable regions are found by determining the position of flanking sequence (referred to as "conserved regions") using the LPAM (Length-Preserving Alignment Method) algorithm. This algorithm was designed for InDeVal and is described here for the first time. InDeVal output is an interactive display of the analyzed sequence, broken into user-defined units. Once the user is satisfied with the organization of the display, the information can be exported to an annotated text file. CONCLUSIONS: InDeVal can find multiple variable regions simultaneously (28 indel regions in the Poaceae trnL-F files) and display user-selected messages specific to the sequence variants found. InDeVal output is designed to facilitate comparison between the analyzed sequence and previously evaluated sequence. The program's sensitivity to different levels of nucleotide and/or length variation in conserved regions can be adjusted. InDeVal is currently available for Windows in Additional file 1 or from

Three-body forces and the limit of oxygen isotopes

The limit of neutron-rich nuclei, the neutron drip-line, evolves regularly from light to medium-mass nuclei except for a striking anomaly in the oxygen isotopes. This anomaly is not reproduced in shell-model calculations derived from microscopic two-nucleon forces. Here, we present the first microscopic explanation of the oxygen anomaly based on three-nucleon forces that have been established in few-body systems. This leads to repulsive contributions to the interactions among excess neutrons that change the location of the neutron drip-line from $^{28}$O to the experimentally observed $^{24}$O. Since the mechanism is robust and general, our findings impact the prediction of the most neutron-rich nuclei and the synthesis of heavy elements in neutron-rich environments.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to be published in PR

Art by Jerks

Is it wrong to enjoy art created by immoral people? Some people express discomfort with listening to or reading the works of artists who have been abusive to others in their personal lives. In this paper, the authors argue that, generally speaking, moral and aesthetic judgment should be kept distinct, as authors and their works formally differ. Indeed, works by morally dubious artists may well contain crucial acts of moral imagination we should not deprive ourselves of as ethical beings. Nonetheless, the authors argue there are limits to how far the ethical and aesthetic can be divorced. Art that is completely divorced from the good ceases thereby to be art no matter what its formal beauty. Thus, it is possible, in principle, to identify works of art whose authorship would be an obstacle to aesthetic appreciation