⦿ Annie Leibovitz/Vogue
 

2024 October 14

Trump vs Harris

Stephen Collinson

Donald Trump is invoking a vision of an extreme new White House term that would transform America and rock the world. And Kamala Harris has only three weeks to avert it.
Trump is escalating the most toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric in modern US history. He says he could turn the military on "the enemy from within" and said a heckler should "get the hell knocked out of" her. He admires foreign tyrants like Vladimir Putin.
Dread is growing among Democrats that the euphoria over Harris has not translated yet into a decisive lead over Trump. Democratic leaders including former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are pleading with voters in swing states not to let Trump return.
Harris has spelled out policies to help people buy and rent homes, to ease the cost of health care, and to revive a bipartisan border bill that Trump killed. Trump vows to deport migrants, torch US trade competitors with tariffs, and fix a world of wars.
Republican campaigners: "The bottom line is that voters say President Trump will do a better job."

AR This is shockingly bad, a damning indictment of US democracy. If this is the best the American Constitution can offer, it's time to revise it. I guess many Republicans would agree, unfortunately.
On a related note, The New York Times is running a long piece explaining that the ongoing upgrade to the US nuclear arsenal is now projected to cost a total of $1.7 trillion − that's about $5,000 for each and every man, woman, and child in America. This is madness.
Imagine an old and mad President Trump with his hands on the upgraded nuclear trigger. For me, it's a nightmare. Republicans may say the idea of Harris facing off against Putin or Xi is a nightmare.
 

2024 October 13

German Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Guy Chazan

Bernhard Schlink is the author of The Reader, the only German book ever to top The New York Times bestseller list. He takes the darkest episodes of German history and weaves them into stories.
Schlink, 80, was a distinguished law professor and judge, specialising in constitutional law. "But I felt like something was missing in my life," he says. In 1995 came The Reader, and the rest is history.
The Reader captures the anguish of a whole swath of young Germans gradually discovering the terrible things their parents did during the war. Schlink: "Our parents or uncles or teachers who committed monstrous acts weren't monsters."
The Granddaughter, an English translation of his 2021 novel Die Enkelin, will appear in the UK later this month. It plays out in communist East Berlin in the 1960s and the neo-Nazi scene of the present day. Le Figaro called it the great novel of German reunification.
The Granddaughter centres on the figure of Kaspar, a West German who goes to study in Berlin in the 1960s and falls in love with an East German woman. Like Kaspar, Schlink also attended university in West Berlin. He also fell in love with an East German woman and helped her escape to the West.
Schlink uses his novel to explore the world of the German far right. Kaspar's teenage granddaughter Sigrun has grown up in an extremist "liberated zone" in rural eastern Germany. She denies the Holocaust and admires Nazi war criminals.
Schlink: "In West Germany, people wanted to be Europeans and Atlanticists first. In the GDR, people were always much less self-conscious about being German."

AR I shall soon be reading Die Enkelin.
I didn't read Der Vorleser, the book of the film The Reader, starring Kate Winslet, but the movie alerted me to the author, who seemed an interesting figure.
Schlink had studied law in Heidelberg.
 

2024 October 12

Donald Trump

Tony Schwartz

The Apprentice, a new movie that dramatizes the early years of Donald Trump's career, ends with a scene between Trump and an actor who plays me. The year is 1986 and I'm interviewing Trump for the first time, to begin ghostwriting his 1987 book The Art of the Deal.
The Apprentice tells Trump's story. The two men who most influenced him were his father Fred and his longtime lawyer Roy Cohn. What they had in common was their shamelessness when it came to winning and dominating others.
The movie starts with a disclaimer that some events have been "fictionalized" for dramatic purposes. For me, it felt emotionally true and consistent with the Donald Trump I came to know back then.
On the face of it, Trump was riding high. He had just built Trump Tower in New York, he owned two large casino hotels in Atlantic City and was on the verge of buying a third, and he traveled around in a limousine, a helicopter, a yacht, or a private plane.
Trump never let me know that he was in desperate financial trouble, drowning in debts that would lead him into a series of bankruptcies. I did not yet realize that he routinely lied as easily as he breathed.
The first day I met Trump, I was struck by his unquenchable thirst to be the center of attention. No amount of external recognition ever seemed to be enough. Beneath his bluster and his bombast, he struck me as one of the most insecure people I'd ever met.
Trump's father Fred was openly disdainful of any acknowledgment or expression of weakness or vulnerability. His view of the world: You were either a winner or a loser in life.
Trump: "The most importance influence on me, growing up, was my father .. I stood up to him and he respected that. We had a relationship that was almost businesslike."
The Apprentice captures Trump's transition from pleasing his father to enlisting Cohn as a mentor and role model. Cohn's role was to help Trump outdo his father.
Trump: "I think that next to loyalty, toughness was the most important thing in the world to him."
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, "antisocial personality disorder" is associated with seven characteristics: deceitfulness, impulsivity, failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, irritability and aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, consistent irresponsibility and lack of remorse.
I've observed all seven in Trump and watched them get progressively worse.

AR The DSMMD diagnosis says it all. This is not a man to be entrusted with safeguarding the future of human civilization in America and on Earth.
 

2024 October 11

Kamala Harris

Joshua Chaffin

Kamala Harris grew up in California. Her mother Shyamala Gopalan had come to America for graduate school at Berkeley and met Donald Harris, a Jamaican student who later become an economist at Stanford. After having children, the couple eventually divorced.
Kamala went to Howard University, the historically Black college in Washington DC, and then, after graduating with degrees in economics and political science, returned to the Bay Area to attend law school at Hastings. She opted to become a prosecutor.
After graduating in 1989, Harris took a position in Alameda County. By day, she toiled in the courts. By night, she might go to a symphony opening with Jay Leno or the Getty mansion with Gavin Newsom and other swells. By all accounts, she was bright and beautiful.
Harris began dating Willie Brown. Born in 1934, Brown was speaker in the California state assembly for 15 years before becoming mayor of San Francisco in 1996. In 1994, he appointed Harris to side jobs on the board of the California Medical Assistance Commission and on the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.
San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan hired Harris in 1998 to start a major crimes division. At a time when politicians were competing to get tougher on crime, Hallinan tried compassion. He fired 14 veteran prosecutors and diversified the DA staff, but soon the office was a mess.
In August 2000, Harris and half a dozen other prosecutors quit in protest at the mismanagement. Harris moved to the San Francisco city attorney, leading a division focused on children and families. In 2002, at age 37, she decided to run for San Francisco DA.
In the campaign, she faced Hallinan and Bill Fazio and ran as a fresh alternative. In the first round, Hallinan was first, Harris second, and Fazio eliminated. For the second round, she debated against Hallinan, who repeated the Brown attacks. She held her own and won 56% to 44%.
Harris eventually boosted the office's conviction rate beyond 70%. She also changed its mindset on crimes against women and established a program allowing some offenders to clear a felony conviction from their record if they pleaded guilty and completed a remedial program.
Over Easter 2004, Isaac Espinoza and another police officer were on patrol when they approached a suspect. The man drew an AK‑47 from his coat and began firing. Espinoza died. At his funeral in a big cathedral, Newsom praised him as a hero. Senator Diana Feinstein called for the death penalty. Harris had chosen against the death penalty.
Harris found her relations with the police forever impaired. The Espinoza case has been wielded against her in every election since, including by Trump. The presidential race is likely to be close: Polls show Harris and Trump neck and neck.

Scientific American: "Vote for Kamala Harris to support science, health, and the environment."

AR This is not the obvious biography for a US president, but it's a decent one, and much better than Trump's outrageously bad record. It would be unfair to diss her as benefiting from being a DEI hire when she is clearly smart and successful enough despite that and when Trump benefits from being rich, white, and unscrupulous. I back Harris.

 

Falklands Heritage Maritime Trust/National Geographic
HMS Endurance
A new 3D scan reveals details of the wreck of HMS Endurance, in which Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men
sailed for the 1914−1917 Imperial Trans‑Antarctic Expedition.
The ship was built in Norway in 1912. On the expedition, she became trapped and crushed in sea ice off Antarctica
and sank in November 1915. All the crew survived and were rescued in 1916.
The wreck was discovered in March 2022 and lies 3 km deep.
 

2024 October 10

Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Protein Structure

New Scientist

The 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry is awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for their work on understanding the structure of proteins. The machinery of life is made of proteins.
Nobel committee for chemistry chair Heiner Linke: "To understand life, you first need to understand the shape of proteins."
All proteins are made of chains of amino acids. The shape of proteins is determined by the sequence of amino acids, but the chains fold up in complex ways. Predicting structure from sequence is hard.
Hassabis and Jumper developed an AI called AlphaFold, first unveiled in 2018. AlphaFold2, released in 2020, predicted two-thirds of protein structures with more than 90% accuracy. By 2022, AlphaFold had been used to predict the structure of almost all known proteins, with the results made open access.
Nobel chemistry committee member Johan Åqvist: "It was an enormous breakthrough. This is a fantastic resource for chemical and biological research."
David Baker has long been working on the problem of designing a protein with a desired structure. New proteins may be used to do things from treating diseases to creating complex nanomachines.
Åqvist: "Baker opened up a completely new world of proteins that we had never seen before. It's a mind-blowing development."
Baker: "Over the last 20 years, we've been able to design proteins with more and more complex and powerful functions."

Nobel prize for AlphaFold
Nature

The 2024 chemistry Nobel was awarded to John Jumper and Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind in London, for developing the AI tool AlphaFold for predicting protein structures, and David Baker, at the University of Washington in Seattle, for his work on computational protein design.
Debuted in 2018, AlphaFold has made protein structures available to researchers at the touch of a button and enabled experiments unimaginable a decade ago. AlphaFold2, revealed in late 2020, was often so accurate that its predictions were as good as experimentally solved protein structures.
Nobel committee chair Heiner Linke: "It has long been a dream to learn to predict the 3D structure of proteins from knowing their amino acid sequences."
DeepMind co-founder and chief executive Hassabis and AlphaFold team head Jumper led the development of AlphaFold2. To predict protein structures, it incorporates data from libraries of hundreds of thousands of structures and millions of sequences from related proteins.
An AlphaFold database, created with the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute, now holds the structures of almost all the proteins from every organism represented in genetic databases, some 214 million in total. AlphaFold3 can model other molecules that interact with proteins.
A team used AlphaFold with experimental data to map the nuclear pore complex, which transports molecules into and out of the cell nucleus. Two teams mined the AlphaFold database to identify new families of proteins and folds and surprising connections in the machinery of life.
AlphaFold and other AI tools will transform medicine. Researchers use AlphaFold with experimental studies to map and tweak the structure of viral proteins for use in vaccines.

AR Well, the Nobel guys have really doubled down on AI. Good for them: AlphaFold has transformed work on protein chemistry, just as AI in other fields from physics and cosmology on thru, has done.
When the histories of our times are written, the impact of these AI breakthroughs in science and technology will dominate the story. This is an epochal development, a watershed in the story of Homo sapiens on Earth.

 

⦿ Christine Olsson/TT

2024 October 9

The New Physics Laureates

Nature

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton used tools from physics to come up with methods that power artificial neural networks (ANNs).
In 1982, Hopfield came up with a network of connections between virtual neurons as physical forces. By storing patterns as a low-energy state of the network, the system could recreate the pattern when prompted with something similar. It became known as associative memory.
Hinton used statistical physics to further develop the Hopfield network. By building probabilities into a multilayered network, his ANN could recognize and classify images, or generate new examples of a trained pattern. These networks were able to learn from examples, including from complex data.
Hinton wrote in 2000 that ANNs are "grossly idealized models" that differ from biological neural networks. In recent years, he has called for placing safeguards around AI, after deciding that digital computation is better than the human brain because it can share learning via parallel processing.
Hinton also won the shared the 2018 Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. Hopfield has won several other physics awards, including the Dirac Medal. In recent years, the Abel Prize and Fields Medals have also celebrated the synergies between mathematics, informatics, and physics.
Neuroscientists have used versions of Hopfield networks to investigate how neurons work together in memory and navigation. Neuroscience relies on network theories and machine learning tools to understand and process data on thousands of cells simultaneously.
Machine learning tools have had a big impact on data analysis and research on brain circuits.

AR So Hinton has won the Turing Award too. And Hopfield the Dirac Medal. It seems the Nobel prize committee is merely running with the pack.
During the 1990s, I worked at the academic science publisher Springer in Heidelberg, where I recall working on several books on the new field of associative memory and Hopfield networks. I became aware of Hinton later, when I was working at SAP.
As for the synergies between mathematics, informatics, and physics, I praised those in my 1996 novel LIFEBALL by coining the acronymic neologism "miph" for the union of the three disciplines and riffing on speculative futures enabled by the new miph.
My latest idea: Progress within the new miph enables us to develop a deeper understanding of human gropings for transcendence.
 

2024 October 8

AI Pioneers Win Physics Nobel

Ian Sample

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton have been awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physics for building artificial neural networks that store and retrieve memories like the human brain and are capable of learning.
Hopfield, now 91, built an artificial neural network that stored images and other information as patterns, rather like memories are stored in the brain, and recalled images when prompted with similar patterns.
Hinton, now 76, built on Hopfield's research by incorporating probabilities into multilayered networks and invented a method enabling large neural networks to independently discover properties in data.
Nobel committee for physics chair Ellen Moons: "These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics, material science, and astro­physics. They have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation."
University of Oxford computer science professor Michael Wooldridge: "The award is an indicator of just how much AI is transforming science. The success of neural nets this century has made it possible to analyse data in ways that were unimaginable at the turn of the century .. it is wonderful to see the academy recognise this."

Prize in physics for key AI techniques
Alex Wilkins

John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton share the 2024 Nobel prize in physics for their work on artificial neural networks and the fundamental algorithms that let machines learn.
Nobel committee for physics chair Ellen Moons: "While machine learning has enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future. Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefits of humankind."
In 1982, Hopfield, at Princeton University, created an architecture for a computer called a Hopfield network, which is a collection of nodes that can change the strength of their connections with a learning algorithm that Hopfield invented. That algorithm was inspired by a method to find the energy of a magnetic system by describing it as collections of tiny magnets.
In the same year, Hinton, at the University of Toronto, began developing Hopfield's idea to help create a related machine learning structure called a Boltzmann machine, which can learn and extract patterns from large data sets. Boltzmann machines are also inefficient and slow, so faster modern machine use learning architectures like transformer models.
At the Nobel award conference, Hinton was bullish but cautious: "We have no experience of what it's like to have things smarter than us. It's going to be wonderful in many respects .. but we also have to worry about a number of bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control."

AR This a creative extension of the physics prize to cover computer science, for which no Nobel Prize exists. Perhaps the award will prompt the Turing Award committee to reward these winners too, or perhaps it will prompt them not to bother, since this pair have already been amply recognised.
Whatever, the work of the pair is clearly of outstanding importance and well worth honouring. A month ago, I read the 2019 book Human Compatible by Stuart Russell, which I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend for its clear and vivid account of AI and its applications and control.
 

2024 October 7

Understanding Iran

Benny Gantz

Hamas was waging religious war. After its attack on Israel, Hamas in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Shiite militias in Syria, Iraq, and Iran would join in a war to destroy Israel.
Iran's leadership is devoted to exporting its fundamentalist ideology. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has established a "ring of fire" of terrorist armies around Israel.
Ayatollah Khamenei aims to annihilate Israel. Iran is preparing, building, and waiting for the right moment of weakness to pounce. It did so in Lebanon, using Hezbollah. It did the same in Syria and in Yemen.
Israel must be proactive and determined in the face of the threat. The world cannot overlook Iran's role in harming global commerce in the Red Sea or its support for Russia in Ukraine. Now is the time to confront Iran.
Along with Ukraine and Taiwan, Israel is a democratic outpost threatened by an axis of subversion. A fundamentalist terrorist state cannot be expected to act rationally. Israel is fighting a just war.
Israel bears the responsibility of sharing the lesson of October 7 with the world. The time to act against Iran is now.

AR This is the natural military view. Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine are at present the front-line states in the global struggle for democracy against authoritarian autocracy. The paradox is that democracy as we know it in the West is a deeply flawed system of governance.
Flawed as it may be, even our kind of democracy is clearly better than the governance structures in Russia or Iran, and probably better than the CPC monopoly of power in China. But I say this as a citizen of democratic Europe, which may reduce my objectivity.
I recall that when Ayatollah Khomeini was installed as leader of the fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran in February 1979, I thought it heralded dark days and decades to come. Months later, UK and US voters elected Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan into power.
Those times also saw the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israeli politics. Perhaps he can begin to undo the damage caused by that Iranian revolution. Then we can all focus on defending the independence of Ukraine and Taiwan. Then we can revamp democracy.
 

2024 October 6

Israel−Iran Escalation Is Risky

Andrew Roth

Israeli officials say their defenses stood firm last week but released few details about the damage.
Analysts say the initial reports could have been misleading. Satellite and social media footage showed missile after missile striking the Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert, setting off secondary explosions.
CNA analyst Decker Eveleth: "Iran has proven it can hit Israel hard if it so chose. Airbases are hard targets, and the sort of target that likely won't produce many casualties. Iran could choose a different target."
Israeli air defense stocks are both expensive and limited. Israel may become more vulnerable to Iranian strikes as the conflict goes on.
Eveleth: "Given that Israel [is] committed to striking Iran, this is likely not the last time we will see exchanges of missiles .. that Israel won't be able to afford to make if this becomes a protracted conflict."
The Iranian ballistic missile program is as dangerous to Israel as its nuclear program is.

AR Trump encourages Israel to retaliate by hitting the nuke sites. But these are too deeply bunkered to be vulnerable without US help, short of nuking them. Can Israel hold out until January in the hope of Trump's White House blessing?
If Israel were to dare a nuclear response, nuking Tehran might yield a surer quick win than trying to demolish a mountain. But the long-term blowback would be catastrophic. Netanyahu's "war on seven fronts" looks unwinnable.
 

2024 October 5

Sufi Mysticism

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

A new museum dedicated to Sufi culture and art, the Musée d'Art et de Culture Soufis MTO, has just opened in Chatou, near Paris. Housed in a bourgeois mansion, it is the world's first museum dedicated to exploring Sufism through contemporary art and culture.
Initiated by the Maktab Tarighat Oveyssi (MTO) Shahmaghsoudi school of Islamic Sufism, the collection includes a 19th‑century Qur'an with gold‑leaf illumination, sculptures, paintings, ceramics, textiles, calligraphy, manuscripts, and ceramic and mirror mosaics.
Sufis are Muslim mystics. Sufi teaching centers on the idea that self‑knowledge leads to knowing God, and followers are usually guided by a master. Islam is the second largest religion in Europe after Christianity.
French Islamologist Éric Geoffroy: "Sufism has long attracted a certain western public .. I explain to them that the greatest masters of Sufism have always said that they draw their spirituality from the Qur'an and the Prophet personally."
Duke University professor of Islamic studies Omid Safi: "What Sufism offers is the promise that the God of the mountaintop is also the God of the valley bottom, and that accompanied by God as the present all‑beloved, we will never be alone."

AR My reading in Sufi mysticism suggests it has strong parallels with Jewish (Kabbalist) and Christian mysticism. In all three traditions, the divine patriarch retreats to a mysterious presence beyond all empirical signs or attempts at corroboration.
In my (limited) understanding, this presence is indistinguishable from a self-alienated view of the transcendental self (in the Kantian sense) behind the phenomenal self. It is thus a symptom of the imperfection of the usual conception of the isolated self in a spatiotemporal universe.
My way around this conceptual logjam is to point to the logical vortex at the heart (or the navel) of our spatiotemporal world. Unpacked via the new idea that spacetime is an emergent feature in a world of entangled qubits, the result is a monism moved by the vortex of entanglement.
No reader of these words can be expected to get what I mean, so I shall have to spell it out in a new monograph. In short, a paradoxical logical monism is the truth behind both traditional monotheism and our shared physical world.
 

2024 October 4

Summit for Nothing

Jonty Bloom

Sir Keir Starmer spent Wednesday in Brussels holding talks with all and sundry.
The act of meeting the EU in Brussels is now a brave act for the PM, such is the toxic environment created around Brexit. Before his visit, he said free movement is off the table, no youth mobility schemes will be allowed, we are never rejoining the single market, and so on.
European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen: "I firmly believe that the British public want to return to pragmatic sensible leadership when it comes to dealing with our closest neighbours."
Final joint statement: "They agreed to take forward this agenda of strengthened cooperation at pace over the coming months, starting with defining together the areas in which strengthened cooperation would be mutually beneficial .."
Starmer needs to ignore the Tories and do what is best for the country.

AR I despair. Is Starmer so spineless that he can't do better than this? At this rate, I'll be long dead before reason prevails and Brits become European citizens again.

 

⦿ Tyler Sloan for FlyWire, Princeton University
Fruit fly brain
 

2024 October 3

Fruit Fly Connectome

The Guardian

Researchers have drawn a wiring diagram for the brain of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). They mapped nearly 140,000 neurons and over 54 million synapses inside the fly's poppy seed-sized brain.
The female fruit fly brain was mapped by slicing it into 7,000 thin slivers, imaging each section in an electron microscope at 4 nm resolution, using AI to analyze the images and trace the connectome, and manually correcting the errors to finalize the map.

Largest brain map ever
Nature

The FlyWire consortium developed the map using electron microscopy and used AI tools to stitch the data together. They proofread the data and identified 8,453 types of neuron.
Researchers used the connectome to create a computer model of the brain. The simulation was more than 90% accurate at predicting how the fly behaves.

AR Great work. Again, this is the sort of application area where AI really shows its promise. But since the human brain is about a million times more complex, we have a while to wait before AI can begin to map the human connectome and drive us to obsolescence.
 

Black Hole Entropy

Joseph Howlett

Stephen Hawking showed that the surface area of a black hole's event horizon increases in proportion to the mass falling into it. Jacob Bekenstein then conjectured that black holes have entropy, with the area proportional to their entropy. Entropy usually scales with the volume of a system.
The Bekenstein−Hawking formula says the entropy of a black hole scales with its surface area:
S_BH = A (c³k/4Gℏ)
where A is the surface area in Planck units and all the bracketed terms are standard constants.
String theorists later corroborated the formula by summing the microstates of a black hole.

AR It's a nice result. It ties together a lot of physics and gives us a good clue for pursuing quantum gravity. Also, the 2D/3D transition is a good illustration of the holographic principle in action and gives us a useful hint for pursuing Wheeler's "It from bit" idea.
 

2024 October 2

Iran Made 'Big Mistake'

Lazar Berman, Emanuel Fabian

Iran fired a massive salvo of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday night, sending almost 10 million people into bomb shelters as projectiles and interceptors exploded in the skies above. Some 181 missiles were launched in the strike.
The attack was largely unsuccessful. The IDF said there were "isolated" impacts in central Israel and several more impacts in southern Israel. It added that there was no damage to the "competence" of the Israeli Air Force in the attack.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu: "The regime in Iran does not understand our determination to defend ourselves and our determination to retaliate against our enemies .. They will understand .. Israel is on the move, and the axis of evil is retreating. We will do everything necessary to continue this trend .. and to ensure our existence and our future."

Israel used expensive defenses
Dan Sabbagh

Iran's decision to launch about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel indicates that its leaders sought to inflict serious damage in Tuesday's night attack. Firing so many missiles in a few minutes was an effort to overwhelm or exhaust Israel's air defenses.
Ballistic weapons are fast and hard to intercept. Iran's Emad and Ghadr missiles are estimated to be traveling at Mach 6 on impact, and take 12 minutes to fly from Iran. Iran said it deployed the much faster Fatteh‑2.
Initial reports of no fatalities within Israel suggest the attack was a military failure. Israel defended itself principally with long-range US−Israeli Arrow 3 and Arrow 2 systems, supported by the medium-range David's Sling system. Iron Dome is used for short-range interceptions.
An Arrow 3 missile typically costs $2 million, and a David's Sling interceptor $1 million. Destroying 180 missiles would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

AR An expensive fireworks show for both sides, but the consequences are big. The whole crisis, as Netanyahu may have anticipated, will highlight the ineffectuality of the Biden administration's call for a cease-fire. That could help Trump win in November.
 

2024 October 1

Iran Launches Missile Attack Against Israel

Al Jazeera

Iran has launched a barrage of missiles at Israel in response to the killing of senior Hezbollah and Hamas officials, sending Israelis rushing to bomb shelters.
Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said there were no reports of casualties from the attack, and that the IDF does not see "any more threats in our airspace".
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said the missile attack on Israel was a response to the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
The  IRGC said Iran had launched tens of missiles at Israel, and that if Israel retaliated, Tehran's response would be "more crushing and ruinous".
The IDF said a "large number" of missiles had been intercepted. Hagari said the attack was serious and will have consequences "in a timely manner".
The United States said its forces were ready to provide "additional defensive support" to Israel after helping protect it from the Iranian missile attack.

AR Interesting escalation. Iran has no better option available, apparently, then a repeat of the one that essentially failed last time. This time it seems there were some 180 missiles, all ballistic, but the IDF ABM systems did their job well.
Iran will naturally conclude that it needs nukes to impose its will. Israel will pre‑empt by hitting Iran's nuclear facilities. Since those facilities are deeply bunkered, the IDF attack will be massive. More escalation ..

 

Megalopolis
 

2024 September 30

Megaflopolis

Brooks Barnes

Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis died on arrival over the weekend.
Coppola, 85, spent decades on the avant-garde fable, plus about $140 million in production and distribution costs But ticket sales Thursday−Sunday will total roughly $4 million in North America.
Megalopolis almost didn't make it into theaters. In Hollywood, where backbiting runs rampant, some agents and publicists have privately referred to it as "Megaflopolis" for months.
Coppola's masterpieces include The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.

Coppola's artistic rejuvenation
Richard Brody

The fountain of youth cost Francis Ford Coppola $120 million out of his own pocket. But he got value for money: The film is more floridly and brazenly youthful than anything else he has made.
Coppola is one of the most gifted filmmakers of his era. He fills Megalopolis with fervent, rapturous rhetoric and an aesthetic flamboyance in the visual compositions, performances, design, costume, and scale and tumult of its spectacular action.
The movie is set later this century, in New Rome, a city with many of the landmarks of current New York. The cast of characters and a smattering of Latin words and phrases imbue this futuristic setting with conflicts and myths borrowed from ancient history.
Cinematically, Megalopolis is a skyscraper of cards. It's a mighty contrivance magnificently envisioned yet insubstantially joined, as fragile as it is wondrous. The fragility of conception isn't a bug but a feature of this cinematic soap bubble of a dreamy wonder.
The polymathic protagonist Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) has won a Nobel Prize for inventing a biological metal called Megalon. He's also an artist, an urbanist, an architect, and the head of New Rome's Design Authority. Cesar's name for his dream project is Megalopolis.
New Rome's mayor Franklyn Cicero opposes the construction of Megalopolis. But Cicero's only child Julia believes in Cesar's work and hopes to smooth matters out. Then Julia and Cesar fall in love, setting up a mighty clash in civic and romantic dimensions.
The drama turns on the volatile intersection of power and family. The rivalries and the conflicts are built on extravagant fantasy. What rescues the movie from cartoonishness is the authentic grandeur and crazed gravitas the actors bring to their roles.
Subplots proliferate, involving dark suspicions from the past, fake news from the present, and legal troubles from both. Cesar is devoted to the memory of his late wife, echoing Coppola's dedication of the movie to his late wife.
Megalopolis rises to its philosophical climax in a mighty paean to harmony and progress through reason and inspiration.

AR I went to see it this afternoon. For lovers of Coppola's past work (and I loved The Godfather and especially Apocalypse Now), I judge that it's worth seeing. It's clearly an old man's movie (fountain of youth notwithstanding), but if you're prepared to sit back and enjoy, it works.
Agreed, the setting and back story are contrived and unconvincing, the drama is too self-consciously classical or Shakespearean in tone, and the plot is implausible to the point of risibility, but given all that, the whole confection is fun enough to sit through. Once, at least.

 

Israeli graphic
Hezbollah military chain of command
 

2024 September 29

Hezbollah Decapitated

Lawrence Freedman

Hezbollah is leaderless and left on the defensive. Israel is disabling and disarming it, while rendering resupply from Iran more difficult. Israel would prefer to avoid another occupation if possible.
The Lebanese government is desperate for at least a 21‑day ceasefire as it struggles to cope with the grievous humanitarian consequences of the fighting. Nasrallah had showed no interest, as it would have meant abandoning Hamas.
The Iranian leadership appears to be struggling to work out what to do next. In the event of a large confrontation with Israel, it was relying on Hezbollah and Hamas to provide the main punch. Now it can only launch missiles at Israel.
Lebanon has a barely functioning state, huge debts, and a worthless currency. It is struggling with refugees from the Syrian civil war and from its own border areas with Israel. Many in the country blame Hezbollah for its current woes.
What started as limited action to support Hamas has now turned into a war of survival for Hezbollah. Nasrallah made strategic misjudgements. Israel has weakened Hezbollah and humiliated Iran.

AR The West's Jewish beachhead in the Mideast region is bugging Islamists beyond belief. As a philosopher who is skeptical of monotheist orthodoxies, I hope this may lead to a radical revaluation of the Mohammedan faith, if not to its complete ideological implosion.
Christianity was already an ideological orthodoxy that took the inheritors of Greco-Roman civilization some two millennia to contain and domesticate. The West is still in the process of extracting and repackaging the core content of the monotheist traditions.
This extraction and repackaging is an enterprise to which I have devoted some thought. I believe it requires a radical revision of psychology (as William James might have agreed) as well as new ideas on AI minds and the nature of consciousness.
 

2024 September 28

Israel Achieves Knockout Blow

Ben Hubbard

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is dead. The IDF targeted him on Friday, dropping bombs on the Hezbollah headquarters near Beirut. Both Israel and Hezbollah confirmed his death on Saturday.
Israeli intelligence had deeply penetrated Hezbollah, allowing Israel to track and kill a large number of Hezbollah commanders. Nasrallah appeared reluctant to respond in escalatory ways. Hezbollah boasted it had missiles that could hit cities deep inside Israel, but they remained largely unused.
Israeli officials say they seek to avoid a ground invasion of Lebanon by degrading Hezbollah capabilities and eliminating its leadership.

AR I'm impressed by Israeli competence and by Hezbollah and Hamas incompetence. Israel deserves to rule the region, and all the Islamists and their helpers deserve burial in the ash-heap of history. Either Arabs learn to accommodate Israel as a potentially benign partner or they go under.
 

2024 September 27

Emergent Spacetime

Amanda Gefter

John Archibald Wheeler (1911−2008) broke new ground in physics. He studied under Niels Bohr, walked and talked with Albert Einstein. He wanted to solve the mysteries of the universe.
His preoccupation with spacetime began after WW2. In 1952, he imagined waves of gravity folding into knots that looked like elementary particles from the outside. He called them geons.
Wheeler guessed that quantum fluctuations of spacetime could transform geometry into a maze of tiny wormholes he called quantum foam. At the Planck length, quantum uncertainty could destroy spacetime altogether.
Wheeler's textbook Gravitation, co-authored with his students Kip Thorne and Charles Misner, remains the bible of the field. He saw that beneath spacetime there had to be something else, some pregeometry, perhaps made of bits, 0 or 1.
Wheeler: "The quantum principle .. destroys the concept of the world as 'sitting out there,' with the observer safely separated from it .. He must reach in .. The universe will never afterwards be the same .. In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe."
Wheeler recalled the double-slit experiment. Particles such as photons are sent through a screen with two slits before hitting a photographic plate on the other side. He asked what if we delay the choice to measure which slit it went through until after it had passed through.
He described a doable version of the delayed-choice experiment. It was done, and quantum rules prevailed. He said delayed choice did not involve backward causation: "It is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon."
From his idea that physical properties emerge as answers to our questions − It from Bit − came the field of quantum information science. From his work on black holes came insights into black hole entropy and the holographic principle in quantum gravity.
Wheeler: "What troubles me more than anything else is how different observers combine their impressions to build up what we call reality .. Each of us a private universe? Preposterous! Each of us see the same universe? Also preposterous!"

AR Wheeler is a giant of the field. I recall an idea he aired with his student Richard Feynman that positrons are electrons going back in time, and all the positrons and electrons in the universe could be a single particle zig-zagging back and forth in time.
His "preposterous" dilemma is precisely the one I'm now stuck on with regard to what I call worlds. There are takes on the universe, in Wheeler's sense, that I model in set theory and use to resolve David Chalmers' "hard problem" about consciousness.
I'm going to have to write a monograph explaining anew my take on worlds. It will be a suitable project for a quiet winter in Labour Britain.
 

2024 September 26

Mideast War

Lawrence Freedman

Hezbollah claims up to 100,000 soldiers and a huge inventory of rockets and missiles. Israel believed it could win against Hamas but is less certain about Hezbollah.
An equilibrium could not last. Israel has evacuated more than 60,000 people from their homes close to the border with Lebanon because of concerns that Hezbollah might mount cross-border raids and take hostages.
The Netanyahu government is under pressure to get the hostages back home. The IDF has completed its operations in the last remaining Hamas stronghold, and a ceasefire offers the best chance of getting back the surviving hostages. If Gaza is left too long, Hamas will find ways to recover.
The IDF is moving from the southern to the northern front. Israel is pursuing a strategy of ramping up the pressure on Hezbollah to persuade it to look for a way out of the war and agree to a ceasefire. This is a coercive strategy.
Israel started its offensive in Lebanon when pagers handed out to senior Hezbollah personnel exploded on September 17, followed the next day by exploding walkie-talkies. Israel anticipated that Hezbollah would become so wary about being tracked through their mobile phones they would turn to pagers and walkie-talkies, so it set up a fake company to supply Hezbollah with doctored devices.
Israeli intelligence appears to have infiltrated Hezbollah. When Ibrahim Aqil and his commanders from the Radwan Force met in Beirut on September 20, their building took a direct hit from an Israeli rocket. Aqil was killed along with 11 commanders.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah: "We suffered the hardest blow."

AR A bigger war in Lebanon and Israel could ignite a wider war across the Mideast that dragged in first Iran and Yemen and then Jordan, Iraq Saudi Arabia, Gulf states, and more. It could devolve into a global jihad against America, NATO, and all European states with significant Muslim minorities.
That way lies WW3. We must act.

 

www
Sturmgeschütz III Ausführung G assault guns, Battle of Korsun−Cherkassy, Ukraine, February 1944
 

2024 September 25

Ukraine's Victory Plan

Volodymyr Zelensky

Victory is about justice. Our victory plan is a plan that swiftly strengthens Ukraine. A strong Ukraine will force Putin to the negotiating table. It spells out what our partners can do before diplomacy can be effective. Its implementation depends only on us and on our partners.
Ukraine has done everything possible to keep America out of this war. Had Ukraine not stood its ground, Putin would have marched on. The consequences would have been some forty million immigrants coming to Europe, America, and Canada. You would lose the largest country in Europe, and in Poland or Germany your influence would be zero.
Ukraine's resilience has allowed America to solve many other challenges. Russia found fake legal ground for its actions, but it could have been Poland or it could have been the Baltic states, which are all NATO members. This would have been a disaster, a gut punch for the United States. I believe that we have shielded America from total war.
This is a war of postponement for the United States. It buys time. Russia understands that Ukraine is struggling. It already stands excluded from the EU and NATO, with nearly a third of its territory occupied. If Russia struck Poland, for example, America would have to start investing from scratch in a war of a totally different caliber.
The idea that the world should end this war at Ukraine's expense is unacceptable. It would be an awful idea to make Ukraine shoulder the costs of stopping the war by giving up its territories. That approach would end up in a world where might is right.
Russia is pressing us in the east. Our bold step has slowed down the Russians and forced them to move some of their forces to Kursk. We have shown that Putin does not have everything under control. Some Russian people would notice how Putin did not run to defend his own land.
It has been more than a month since the start of the Kursk operation. We continue to provide food and water to the people in territories we control. These people are free to leave. All the necessary corridors are open, and they could go elsewhere in Russia, but they do not.

AR The plan looks good, but faced with Putin's intransigence and the Russian preponderance of forces, it has no chance until November at the earliest. At that point, the outcome of the American presidential election will prompt Putin to choose his response.
If Trump wins, Putin will deal with him to impose a one-sided "peace" deal. If Harris wins, Putin will make an aggressive bluff to test her mettle. In either case, Ukrainians face a bleak winter and a miserable start to 2025.
 

2024 September 24

Cosmic Inflation

Jo Dunkley

After the big bang, the universe may have expanded rapidly for a split second due to inflation.
The CMB is a snapshot of the universe when it was some 380 ky old. We can extrapolate what may have happened during inflation to produce the patterns we see in the CMB.
In the beginning was the inflaton field. The energy stored in that field drove an exponentially fast growth of space at the beginning of time. It did so until the inflaton field decayed and the universe evolved into what we see from tiny quantum fluctuations.
These quantum fluctuations grew, and gravity started to pull things together. If you run the universe forward from 380 ky ABB, the predicted result matches what we see in the CMB.
My colleagues and I have been collecting data with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile. We're about to do more with the Simons Observatory. Inflation may have made gravitational waves.
These gravitational waves should polarize the light of the CMB. We're looking for a very faint polarized signal in the CMB that could only come from gravitational waves. The current best attempt to see this signal came from the BICEP−Keck telescopes at the South Pole.
We have to look through the Milky Way to see out. Water vapor in the atmosphere is a problem too. When the Simons Observatory is up, we'll have data from both Chile and the South Pole.
We're looking for nK variations in the temperature of the CMB. The polarized signal is a tiny departure from uniformity. The Simons Observatory has three 0.4 m telescopes targeting the gravitational wave signature, with a 6 m telescope set to be up in 2025.
The big problems in cosmology are inflation, dark matter, dark energy, the S8 tension that galaxy clusters may be too small, and the Hubble tension that the universe may be growing too fast.
The new Simons Observatory telescope should help on the tensions and map dark matter.

AR We need a deeper understanding of inflation. When I read Alan Guth's 1997 book presenting it, I thought this was a bright idea with no theoretical foundation beneath it. Despite all the advances since then, the basic situation remains too mysterious.

 

⦿ David Wellendorf/NASA
Orion capsule for upcoming Artemis II mission, Kennedy Space Center
 

2024 September 23

Artemis Moon Program

Sarah Scoles

NASA is preparing to send people back to the Moon on the Artemis II flight, scheduled to lift off in the fall of 2025. Artemis II will send four astronauts on a 10‑day trip around the Moon using the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion space capsule.
The Artemis program has been plagued by long delays, cost overruns, and surprise problems. Its next step is essentially an Apollo 8 redo. Artemis II mission manager Matthew Ramsey: "In the end, our stated goal is Mars. That's very difficult .. so we take it in bite‑sized chunks."
Artemis I sent an uncrewed spacecraft around the Moon and back in 2022. Artemis III−VI will put people on the Moon and then set up pieces of the orbiting Lunar Gateway. Later missions will also focus on setting up habitable camps on the lunar surface.
The Artemis program will have devoured $93 billion by 2025. But Apollo cost around $290 billion in today's dollars. In those years, NASA took 4% of US GDP. Today, NASA gets around 1%, with the additional burden of many other spacecraft, telescopes, and research projects.
The Artemis program is a collaboration involving Japan (JAXA), Canada (CSA), the Europeans (ESA), and the UAE. Both the global nature of the program and the reuse of technology from previous space programs have increased costs.

AR This is politics rather than science. The way to keep public motivation high for space projects is to put humans up in space. In the long term, this will benefit space technology and the human future, but for the next few years, given competing commitments for funding, it's a hard sell.
Artemis is a high-tech remake of Apollo. It could be good but may be a PR flop.
 

2024 Autumnal Equinox

German Reconstruction

Jan-Werner Müller

Germany has reconstructed two Prussian edifices destroyed in WW2: the Hohenzollern Palace in central Berlin and the Garnisonkirche in Potsdam.
The Hohenzollern Palace was destroyed by order of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht in 1950. In its place, the regime built a modernist Palace of the Republic contained the East German legislature, restaurants, a bowling alley, and entertainment venues.
In 2002, the Bundestag voted to tear down the Palace of the Republic and reconstruct the Berlin Palace. The competition to design it was won by the Italian architect Franco Stella. He included a new façade facing the river Spree in a style associated with Italian fascism.
The palace opened to the public in summer 2021. People were invited to marvel at the contents of its ethnological museum, which turned into a PR disaster when many of its exhibits were shown to be looted by German colonizers with military help.
The Garnisonkirche was blown up by the East Germans in 1968 and replaced by a modernist Rechenzentrum. The Garnisonkirche had been erected by Frederick William I of Prussia in 1735. After WW1, a ceremony there had opposed the new Weimar Republic.
Since unification, Potsdam has become a preferred residence of the wealthy. Former West German president Richard von Weizsäcker donated to the recreation of the Garnisonkirche. Protestant officialdom consented to the reconstruction as a center of reconciliation.
The Garnisonkirche was newly inaugurated in August by German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

AR Glad to see Germany taking pride in its Prussian history. Despite the legacy of its militarism and its colonialism, there was much to admire in that state's constitution and achievements. There should be no shame in rebuilding such centrally important edifices of German history.
Berlin needed the Stadtschloss to remind its visitors that its history goes back beyond the Second or Third Reich. Potsdam needs even a church tainted by militarism to remind its wealthy new residents that the town has its own history too.
I look forward to visiting both buildings in a hypothetical future when I can go as a European citizen.

 

AR
Last day of summer at Poole Quay, where a tourist event featured a steam-powered traction engine
 

2024 September 21

New AI Weaponry

Eric Schmidt

Global military expenditure has increased. As defense budgets meet the AI revolution, procurement should favor weapons systems that are affordable, attritable, and abundant.
Lessons from the conflict between Ukraine and Russia:
•  The increase in US defense spending and replacement of arms sent to Ukraine should not simply reload US stockpiles but retool them and the defense industry that supplies them. More money should go into R&D. We should supplement F‑35 fighters with long-range autonomous drone units.
•  We need systems that can communicate in challenging environments, such as amid GPS denial and spoofing. We need weapons and systems that can function reliably even when conventional methods fail, including GPS alternatives like quantum navigation and visual odometry.
•  Asymmetric warfare reveals cost−capability disparities. It is unsustainable to fire a $4 million Patriot missile to intercept a $50,000 Shahed drone. We need cheaper, more numerous alternatives that take advantage of interconnected and nimble software.
US defense personnel costs have grown, limiting opportunities for modernization and weapons  R&D. The age of AI demands that we invent, adapt, and adopt AI weapons.

AR This is a set of rather basic truths from former Google boss Schmidt. We agree that ABM systems like Patriot are too expensive for use against mass drone attacks. What we need are laser ABM systems, enabled by AI, but where the main challenge is developing effective lasers.
Generally, the advent of modern computing systems (not just AI) represents a revolution in military affairs comparable to that triggered by the advent of nuclear physics some 80 years ago. We will soon find war against AI powers as hard as war against nuclear powers today.
 

2024 September 20

UK Good University Guide 2025

The Times

1 London School of Economics and Political Science
2 University of St Andrews
3 University of Oxford
4 University of Cambridge
etc.

AR Amusing, but don't take it too seriously. The LSE defends freedom of speech and St Andrews is in Scotland, whereas the Oxbridge pair are suffering from too much devotion to "woke" culture and too little funding, thanks to the government cap on student fees.
As a personal aside, I earned my second degree at LSE and the other three at Oxford. Gratifyingly, the LSE Master of Science got me back into heavy math, which my later work at Oxford (supervised by an All Souls man who later went to St Andrews) somehow eroded to a dead end.
If you want a supportive environment for study, I can recommend Oxford. London is a crowded city and offers too many distractions and challenges for a student bent only on academic work. Oxford is pretty, it has smart students, and you can walk everywhere.
 

2024 September 19

War in Lebanon?

The New York Times

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accuses Israel of breaking "all conventions and laws" and vows that "retribution will come" after the coordinated explosions of handheld devices belonging to his fighters: "Indeed, we have endured a severe and cruel blow."

AR Israel is seeking to pacify its neighborhood, but in the process it is antagonizing a new generation of potential Hezbollah and Hamas fighters. Perhaps this is a deliberate escalation to prepare the ground for wholesale ethnic cleansing in readiness for the erection of a fortified Greater Israel.
So long as Israel can count on a bountiful America to fill its war chest and arm its military, this is a tempting strategy against an enemy that remains both implacable and ineffectual. If they fail to change the narrative, the Palestinians may go down in history as a defeated people.
 

2024 September 18

Europa Clipper

David W Brown

The $5 billion NASA space probe Europa Clipper is the largest ever built. Its mission is to help determine the potential for life under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa.
The Europa Clipper project manager explained the problem on May 2. Someone had discovered that a type of transistor designed to survive radioactive environments was failing. Europa Clipper made extensive use of the MOSFETs, metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors.
Without the ability to survive intense radiation, there could be no Europa Clipper. Across four years, the spacecraft would swing past Europa 49 times, dipping into intense radiation close to the moon.
The team subjected a spare MOSFET to radiation. The mission was in trouble. There were about 1,500 of various types of MOSFET in the spacecraft. Replacing them all could cost $1 billion and take years. A tiger team was tasked with tracking down and testing samples.
When semiconductors are hit by radiation, they heal themselves to some degree by annealing as atoms rearrange and redistribute, and Europa Clipper only has to last four years. By powering down certain instruments during certain flybys of Europa and other tricks, plus trusting annealing, a credible strategy was developed.
The team would put samples of each type of MOSFET on special circuits in a box on the spacecraft to send health data back to Earth throughout the mission. They had only weeks to build and test the "canary box" as the spacecraft had already been shipped to Kennedy Space Center.
On August 27, the team told NASA leaders they had tested every type of MOSFET in the spacecraft. They were safe to fly. The canary box was good. The science requirements were assured.
The NASA leaders said Go. Europa Clipper is scheduled to launch on October 10.

AR There's excitement galore in the stories behind such missions. In years to come, these tales will thrill generations of kids much as tales of Spanish galleons thrill kids today. The movies will seem as vivid and tense as the movie Apollo 13 seems to us now.
 

2024 September 17

OpenAI o1

Olesya Dmitracova

OpenAI has unveiled a new AI that can reason and solve hard problems in science, coding, and math. OpenAI o1 was released Thursday as a preview, with regular updates and improvements expected. It will gradually become available to most ChatGPT users.
OpenAI: "We trained these models to spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would. Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies and recognize their mistakes."
OpenAI says they can be used by healthcare researchers to annotate cell sequencing data and by physicists to generate complicated mathematical formulas needed for quantum optics.
OpenAI research scientist Noam Brown: "OpenAI's o1 thinks for seconds, but we aim for future versions to think for hours, days, even weeks. Inference costs will be higher. But what cost would you pay for a new cancer drug? For breakthrough batteries?"
In tests, OpenAI o1 performs similarly to PhD students on difficult benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology. In a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad, it correctly solved 83% of problems.

Scientists can download LLMs and run them locally
Matthew Hutson

Some LLMs are so big they can be accessed only online. Now open-weights versions of LLMs, in which the weights and biases used to train a model are publicly available, can be downloaded and run locally.
Researchers might use such tools to save money, protect the confidentiality of patients or corporations, or ensure reproducibility. AIs running on laptops or mobile devices can meet all but the most intensive needs.
Several large tech firms and research institutes have released small and open-weights models. Researchers can build on these tools to create custom applications. They can also ensure the privacy of their data.
Users can fine-tune local models. Also, local models don't change, whereas commercial developers can update online models at any moment. In most of science, you want reproducible outputs.

AR The o1 model sounds much more useful for serious work than a chatbot. I want an AI that can do math and physics problem sets for me. I recall how I used to deprecate use of calculators for such problems by saying they led to reduced comprehension, but now my comprehension may be lower without AI.

 

⦿ Katie Yu
Shōgun is a masterpiece: bold, ambitious, and unwilling to underestimate the intelligence of its viewers.
The performances, direction, and writing are all majestic. In terms of television drama,
Shōgun stands head and shoulders above everything else made this year.
With 18 trophies, Shōgun has broken the all-time record
for Emmys won for a single season of television.
 

2024 September 16

Elon Musk

Matthew d'Ancona

Donald Trump says that, if re-elected president, he will "create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms" to be headed by Elon Musk.
On his social media platform X, Musk responded: "I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises. No pay, no title, no recognition is needed."
Musk has become far too powerful. Though he claims to serve only to science and tech, he now promotes bigotry and trolls entire nations. This summer, he posted a series of inflammatory tweets concerning the anti-immigrant riots in the UK. In one tweet, he said civil war is inevitable.
NASA, the Pentagon, and the US national security apparatus rely heavily on software, hardware, and IP from his companies. SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets launch US military payloads into space. The Starshield business unit is building hundreds of US spy satellites.
On X, Musk asked people to vote for Donald Trump in November: "I think you should support Donald Trump for president and I think it's actually a very important juncture in the road and we're in deep trouble if it goes the other way."

A man without a plan
James Ball

Elon Musk is often cited as the richest man in the world, worth almost a quarter of a trillion dollars. His company SpaceX now controls most of the planet's launch capacity. Starlink provides internet to remote locations via thousands of communication satellites.
Musk is a smart man. But his business story features less invention on his part than he likes to suggest. He started out in the payments business, running an early rival to the company that became PayPal. Because both companies were struggling, they merged, with Musk as CEO. A boardroom coup soon ousted him.
Musk then discovered a promising company called Tesla, founded in 2003 by two engineers. The core ideas that made Tesla electric cars special were theirs. Musk invested in the company in 2004. Three years later, he ousted the founders. Their Tesla Roadster was a success, but since then Tesla has been less stellar.
SpaceX is a similar story. Musk would like to be credited with the engineering breakthroughs that helped to build the best reusable rocket system on the planet. His inner team knows his need to take the credit for such things.
Musk demands a lot from his workers. He sets impossible deadlines and pushes people hard. This, with his willingness to take huge gambles, has led to success. He is not superhuman.

AR Musk has done great things for tech progress both in America and for all of us. His genius may be more managerial than intellectual, but it is undeniable. You don't get that rich for nothing, and I'm persuaded that his basic sci−tech intentions are honorable.
But no one ever said genius at herding geeks was transferable to political genius at the geostrategic level. Here his interventions have been naive and clumsy. His backing of Trump is too conveniently congruent with minimizing his possible tax bill over the next few years.
The bigger issue here is that it illustrates the advance of the global tech oligarchy that I predicted in my 2010 book on Globorg and Anne Applebaum describes in her new book Autocracy, Inc.
 

2024 September 15

French Naturism

Lauren Collins

Marseille's Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem) held its summer exhibition Paradis Naturistes in conjunction with the Fédération Française de Naturisme.
There are millions of naturists in France, 43% of them under 30. The FFN says naturism is a manner of living in harmony with nature, characterized by communal nudity, which fosters self-respect, respect for others, and respect for the environment.
Paradis Naturistes features photos, films, magazines, paintings, sculptures, drawings, maps, and artifacts. The exhibition is divided into three sections: the origins of naturism, naturist communities, and the future of the movement.
Naturism originated around 1900 in northern Europe. Utopian movements promoted vegetarianism, temperance, organic farming, sunbathing, and naked outdoor gymnastics. Some early proponents of naturism dabbled in eugenics and race science.
In the 1950s and 60s, naturism came to be associated less with medicine than with pleasure. As nude sunbathing entered the mainstream, naturists became more assertive. Turf battles between naturists and textiles continue.
On the nude museum tour, a young couple told me they'd started going naked with friends while living in Berlin: "Being naked makes us feel a little more free."

AR Sounds good to me. Given the world we live in, an easy acceptance of being naked in public seems far better than the repressed and repressive alternative. All it takes is the expectation that people will behave as decently when naked as when clothed.
That said, there is a downside in societies that include unknown numbers of sexual psychopaths and people, such as recent immigrants, for whom such textile liberalism seems shocking or depraved. To them, I say the freedom to offend must override the expectation not to be offended. Those who feel shocked should learn tolerance, and those who might shock should also be tolerant.
On a personal note, I shed my inhibitions during decades in Germany, where public mixed saunas and FKK beaches turned out to be a great way to relax and unwind from the usual stresses of urban life. I can recommend the lifestyle.
 

2024 September 14

Biden, Starmer Discuss Ukraine

Michael D Shear, David E Sanger

President Joe Biden's talks with UK PM Keir Starmer about whether to allow Ukraine to attack Russia with long-range Western weapons showed the president fears setting off a wider conflict.

Warning to NATO on Ukraine
Vladimir V Putin

This is not a question of whether the Kyiv regime is allowed or not allowed to strike targets on Russian territory. It is already carrying out strikes using unmanned aerial vehicles and other means. But using Western-made long-range precision weapons is different.
The Ukrainian army is not capable of using cutting-edge high-precision long-range systems supplied by the West. These weapons are impossible to employ without intelligence data from .. NATO satellites. Only NATO military personnel can assign flight missions to these missile systems. The decision is whether NATO countries become directly involved in the military conflict or not.
If this decision is made, it will mean that NATO countries, the United States and European countries, are parties to the war in Ukraine. This will mean that NATO countries are at war with Russia. We will make appropriate decisions in response.

Vance describes plan to end Ukraine war
Julian E Barnes

Senator JD Vance outlined a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine. He said Donald Trump would sit down with Russians, Ukrainians, and Europeans and outline a deal.
The Russians would retain the land they have taken, a demilitarized zone would be established along the current battle lines, and the remainder of Ukraine would remain an independent sovereign state.
Russia would get a guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine: "It doesn't join NATO, it doesn't join some of these sort of allied institutions. I think that's ultimately what this looks like."
Former senior US state department official Victoria J Nuland: "This is essentially the proposal put forward in February .. Putin will just wait, rest, refit, and come for the rest."
Hudson Institute senior fellow Luke Coffey: "I don't think he offered a realistic proposal for peace. He offered a plan for a Russian victory."

AR The Trump plan is the Putin plan. This is a no‑go for obvious reasons. Letting Putin get his way by military aggression and nuclear threat is a recipe for a more feral world. We let Ukraine hit back and defy Putin to attack NATO.
 

2024 September 13

A New Network Architecture

Steve Nadis

Neural networks use multilayer perceptron (MLP) building blocks. Humans can't understand how they arrive at their conclusions. The networks are like a black box.
An April 2024 study introduced a Kolmogorov−Arnold network (KAN) that is more transparent yet can do almost everything an MLP network can for a certain class of problems.
In an MLP network, layers of nodes are connected by weighted edges. Information goes through the layers until it becomes an output. The edge weights are tweaked during training to tune the output.
An MLP network may seek a curve that best fits certain data points. The closer it gets to the function, the more accurate its results. But it cannot find the exact function.
In 1957, Andrey Kolmogorov and Vladimir Arnold (KA) proved that you can transform a single function with many variables into a combination of many functions that each have a single variable.
KANs use edge functions instead of having edges with numerical weights. But the single-variable functions from the KA theorem might not be smooth. For a network to fit a multivariable function, the single-variable pieces need to be smooth so that they can bend during training.
In January 2024, Ziming Liu and Max Tegmark saw that even if the single-value KA functions were not smooth, the network could still approximate them with smooth functions.
Liu developed some KAN systems with two layers. The KA theorem breaks a multivariable function into distinct sets of inner functions and outer functions, which prompts a two-layer KAN structure.
Experiments with up to six layers show that with each one, the KAN can align with a more complicated output function. KANs invite curiosity-driven science.

AR This is an interesting and natural idea. But replacing numerical weights with functions will give a more compute-hungry network. We get a trade-off − when is it worth it?

 

SpaceX
Polaris Dawn mission commander Jared Isaacman emerges from a SpaceX Dragon capsule for the first commercial space walk
 

2024 September 12

Reforming the US Economy

Jedediah Britton-Purdy

In Tuesday's debate against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris outlined her plans for an opportunity economy. She promised tax credits for young families and support for first-time homeowners. This will not be enough to win the presidential election.
In a recent poll, Harris trailed Trump by 13 points on the economy, the issue that matters most to voters. Large majorities of Americans feel discontent and anger about it. Harris must speak directly to this experience and advance a strong economic program.
Most voters say the US political and economic system needs major changes or should be torn down entirely. They say the economy is rigged to benefit the rich and powerful. They feel powerless and ripped off by monopolies. They believe they deserve better.
Harris can tell a much stronger story about the economy. She can present her economic policies as part of a broader push for economic freedom. She can tell Americans: You deserve the freedom to live a good life. No one gets to take advantage of you to get rich.
A sunny calm and emphasis on unity have buoyed Harris and Walz. But she must emphasize that economic freedom protects what we value most against those who would take it away. Democrats must fight for workers and families.

AR I think he's right. Most Americans are trapped and cheated by the system. Sunny optimism alone won't cut it. Radical change, delivered with a strong moral vision, is the right way to go.
 

2024 September 11

The Harris−Trump Debate

Lisa Lerer, Reid J Epstein

From the opening moments of her debate against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris exploited his biggest weakness: his ego. She succeeded in puncturing his comfortable cocoon and triggering his annoyance and anger.

Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris
Nicholas Nehamas, Theodore Schleifer, Nick Corasaniti

Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris soon after the debate: "Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election."
Swift cited a deepfake image that had falsely suggested she supported Trump: "It really conjured up my fears around AI .. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth."

Trump paints dark picture at debate
Maggie Haberman

For most of the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump came off as angry and scattered: "Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War III."
He reiterated a debunked claim that Haitian immigrants have been eating pets: "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there."

Trump made a raving, rambling fool of himself
Frank Bruni

Trump made a raving, rambling fool of himself on Tuesday night. Harris had the good sense to alternately call him out on that and simply watch him unravel. She had the discipline to shake her head sadly and smile dismissively when he made laughably false accusations against her. She had the skill to needle him into maximal seething. His vocabulary disintegrated entirely by night's end.

Trump descended to his true self
David Firestone

For the first few minutes of the debate, Donald Trump stayed silent while Kamala Harris ripped up his economic plan, which she correctly noted was based on a tax cut for the wealthy and a sales tax on all imported goods. When it was his turn to respond, he accurately pointed out that the Biden administration had made no attempt to end the tariffs he imposed on China.
But within minutes, he descended into nativist hysteria on immigrants: "They are taking over the towns. They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they're destroying our country. They are dangerous. They're at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out .. They're eating the dogs."

Trump had a really, really bad debate
Susan B Glasser

Donald Trump's ego invariably gets in the way of what others might consider political good sense. Before the start of the debate, he posted a video clip with a quote from an admirer: "Donald Trump is probably the greatest political debater we've ever had in American history."
By the end of the evening, the polls were calling Harris a big winner. Pete Buttigieg was dunking on Trump's "crazy uncle vibe," Taylor Swift endorsed Harris in an Instagram post to her 283 million followers, and historian Michael Beschloss concluded: "Kamala Harris has just delivered what is easily one of the most successful presidential debate performances in all of American history."
To an early question about Roe v Wade, Trump spouted about Democrats supporting abortions after birth and everyone in America being in favor of getting rid of Roe. Harris called his argument "insulting to the women of America."

AR Well, that's a huge relief. Harris the dragon slayer seems to have banished Trump to one of the nastier regions of hell. But a lot can still happen between now and the election in November.
 

2024 September 10

A Clear Choice

The New York Times

Vice President Kamala Harris is committed to democracy and the rule of law. Donald Trump is not.
Many voters are outraged by the prices of familiar items at the grocery store. They will be weighing which candidate is more likely to improve their fortunes and prospects.
Neither candidate can quickly deliver a big cut in the cost of living. Harris has begun to describe thoughtful plans that could help. Trump has offered bad ideas.
Harris has proposed coupling higher taxes on large corporations with larger tax breaks for small businesses. She wants to invest in building new industries and to use government power to check corporate power in existing industries.
Trump has promised to cut energy prices in half during his first year in office by increasing domestic production of fossil fuels. The government cannot lower prices significantly by allowing more production.
Trump has proposed a tariff of up to 20% on imports from foreign countries, along with an even higher tariff on imports from China. That bill would be paid by American consumers.
He has proposed rounding up and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants. This would blast a hole in the American economy, depriving employers of labor and retailers of consumers.
He has proposed extending tax cuts for the wealthy and for large corporations. The benefits of such tax cuts do not pay for themselves. They just make the rich richer.
Trump's sweeping tax cuts would increase federal deficits by $5.8 trillion over the next decade.

AR The great debate is tonight, Eastern Time, overnight European time. I shall not stay up late. I'll assess the aftermath tomorrow morning.
 

2024 September 9

Trump Presidency, Day 1

Daniel Martinez HoSang

Late January 2025: Donald Trump takes the oath of office. During the campaign, he offered gestures to distance himself from Project 2025. But now the gloves come off on its playbook:
♠  The firings. Thousands of federal civil servants receive immediate layoff notices. Many will not be replaced. New personnel come from the Project 2025 application database. Political cronyism is now the official hiring policy of the US federal government.
♠  The roundups. A broad range of law enforcement personnel are deputized for a new deportation army. Sweeps of neighborhoods and businesses take aim at blue states and cities. Detention centers are established on military bases and federal facilities. Nearly a million legal immigrants are stripped of their protections. The Muslim ban returns.
♠  The cuts. Deep cuts in corporate taxes. An end to federal funding for public television and radio. Termination of Head Start programs and the Department of Education. Criminalization of abortion and emergency contraception. Cuts to labor rights.
Trump and the MAGA movement promise violence and retribution against political opponents, the dismantling of nearly all public goods, and a shrill Christian nationalism.

AR This is a dystopian nightmare. The idea that millions of Americans are prepared to vote for this playbook is shocking. I'd have said it's too horrific even for a plausible fictional story.
The United States of America is living down to the moniker coined for it by Wyndham Lewis, reused with attribution by Saul Bellow, and again reused with attribution, this time as the title of a book of essays, by Martin Amis: the moronic inferno.
If the USA goes with Trump, the last UK government's choice to go its way rather than roll back the Brexit vote folly will look, well, moronic. As indeed it already was.
 

2024 September 8

Germany's CDU Future

Deborah Cole

Germany's conservative opposition chief Friedrich Merz finds his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with a comfortable lead at about 32% support, nearly double the score of its nearest competitors.
Merz has been dreaming of the chancellery for decades. The strong showing for the AfD in last week­end's state elections has left the mainstream conservatives navigating a minefield.
The CDU must now seek strange bedfellows for an experiment in government. Former Stalinist Sahra Wagenknecht and her Kremlin apologist BSW party came third in Thuringia and Saxony.
Wagenknecht says the BSW has become a "power factor" in Germany. Polling at about 8% nationally, it can now exact the highest price from the CDU during the state coalition talks, suggesting it will aim to end Berlin's support for Kyiv and to block plans to station medium-range US missiles in Germany.
Merz says the BSW is "rightwing extremist on some issues and leftwing extremist on others" but gives each regional CDU chapter a green light to enter into coalition negotiations with the party.
Merz and Wagenknecht could agree to a hard line on migration. But AfD supporters are aggrieved because their party has been blocked from sharing power.
Political scientist Oliver Lembcke: "The strategy of the firewall was to marginalise the AfD in the east .. That has clearly failed."

AR I thought ten years ago that Merz had a promising future in German politics. I still think so, but doing a deal with the BSW doesn't look too bright.
As an expedient to respond to the state election results, a deal may be unavoidable, but the CDU needs to claim high ground on the wedge issues that drive ossi alienation, such as immigration.
Germans on both sides of the Elbe need to learn the art of mutual understanding.
 

Germany, East and West

James Hawes

German state elections in Thuringia have delivered the first win for the extreme right since 1945 in the region where the Nazis first tasted power in 1929.
At the Thuringian election in 2019, the AfD won 23.4% of the vote. This year, it won 32.8%. After five more years of populism and conspiracy theories, the AfD has managed to convince less than 10% more voters in its strongest state. The moderate German centre is holding up.
Recall the year 1147, when the Rhineland cities were established centres of high medieval Europe, Germania was where the Germans lived, and Berlin was a Slavic village. That year, German knights crossed the River Elbe to convert and conquer the pagan Slavs and Balts. In present-day Poland, the land remained disputed between the settler-colonists and natives. Further east, the Teutonic Knights colonised the local peasants.
Under Frederick the Great, Prussia became the most militarised culture in Europe. The Junkers were its backbone. Under Kaiser Wilhelm, Prussian officers ruled the conquered land in the East. In 1930−32, if the Prussians had voted like Rhinelanders, Hitler would have lost.
The German East has always voted differently to the German West. The political future of Germany is heading to something like blue/red America.

AR Hawes is good on this topic. His book The Shortest History of Germany tells the story more fully, with assurance and panache. I see no reason not to accept his analysis.

 

Sky
Kate Winslet plays US war photographer Lee Miller in Sky movie Lee
 

2024 September 7

US−UK Intelligence Partnership

Bill Burns, Richard Moore

The CIA and SIS stand together in resisting an assertive Russia and Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine.
Ukraine has been the first war of its kind to combine open-source software with cutting-edge battlefield technology, harnessing commercial and military satellite imagery, drone technology, high and low sophistication cyber warfare, social media, open-source intelligence, uncrewed aerial and seaborne vehicles, and information operations at such pace and scale.
Maintaining technological advantage is vital to ensuring our shared intelligence advantage. SIS and the CIA cannot do this alone. We are now using AI, including generative AI, to enable and improve intelligence activities. We are training AI to help protect and "red team" our own operations. We are using cloud technologies to make the most of our data.
The international world order is under threat. But we remain champions for global peace and security.

World order under threat
BBC News

The heads of the UK and US foreign intelligence services say international world order is under threat in a way we haven't seen since the Cold War.
Sir Richard Moore and William Burns say work is being done to "disrupt the reckless campaign of sabotage" across Europe by Russia, push for de‑escalation in the Israel−Gaza war, and counter terrorism to thwart the resurgent Islamic State (IS).
They say "staying the course is more vital than ever" in supporting Ukraine. Burns sees no evidence Putin's grip on power is weakening. Moore adds: "Don't ever confuse a tight grip with a stable grip."
Both foreign intelligence services see the rise of China as the main intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the century and have reorganised their services to reflect that priority.
They have pushed "hard" for restraint and de‑escalation in the Mideast and are working "ceaselessly" to secure a ceasefire and hostage deal.

AR Reassuring to know this pair and their organizations are on the case. I'm inclined to think the US−UK intelligence community is the best, beating the Russian and Chinese ones, but that may be wishful thinking or nativist pride. Whatever the truth, their work for Ukraine is impressive.
 

2024 September 6

Michel Barnier Is French PM

Sarah White, Ben Hall

Former EU commissioner and Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier is now prime minister of France. In 2022, he said of Emmanuel Macron, his new boss: "The president has governed this country, inside and overseas, in a solitary and arrogant manner."
Macron has now chosen Barnier to lean on his years of experience as a political dealmaker to forge a working consensus in a French political landscape that has rarely been so fractured.
Rassemblement National (RN) leader Marine Le Pen had nipped other nominations in the bud. She says she will wait until Barnier addresses parliament before deciding whether to support his government. She can determine whether Barnier survives.
Barnier, 73, will be expected to use his political experience, including four stints as a minister and two terms as a European commissioner, to build bridges in a bitterly divided parliament.
During the Brexit negotiations, Barnier held the EU27 members together. He was meticulously well prepared for meetings, but he also relied on his staff to handle the fine details.
Barnier: "I know how to get different people around the same table, and find a compromise without anyone being humiliated."

Macron has put France's fate in Le Pen's hands
Paul Taylor

Emmanuel Macron has chosen to bring Michel Barnier out of retirement at 73 to lead a government.
Barnier, whose Les Républicains (LR) party finished last in the election with 47 of the 577 seats in parliament, has a reputation as a consensus builder and a safe pair of hands. But his survival in government will depend on RN leader Marine Le Pen.
When Macron called an election, voters delivered a hung parliament with the New Popular Front (NFP) as the largest bloc. The left declared victory and demanded its choice as prime minister.
The president sought to build an improbable coalition. But no other party was inclined to help him. This week, his former prime minister Édouard Philippe declared his candidacy for the presidency.
The Gaullist LR aims to remain independent. Barnier is faithful to the Gaullist movement.

AR An excellent man for the job. Macron has made a good choice, maybe the best available to him. Barnier will have the good sense to smooth relations with Marine Le Pen sufficiently to keep France on an even keel for a while. It'll be on her if things go wrong.
 

2024 September 5

Physical Constants

Joseph Howlett

The thorium‑229 nuclear clock transition is extremely sensitive to changes in the fundamental forces.
Thorium‑229 has an excited nuclear state that involves reversing the spin of the outermost neutron. This takes far less energy than a typical nuclear excitation. The altered spin slightly changes the balance of forces on the nucleus, but the changes almost cancel out.
Typical nuclear transitions involve MeV energies, but the thorium‑229 spin flip takes less than 10 eV. A precisely tuned UV laser could trigger it. A nuclear clock based on thorium‑229 would be immune to much of the background noise that plagues the best atomic clocks.
The Standard Model has about 26 parameters we call constants, some of which might vary. The energies of nuclear states depend on the relative strengths of the forces acting on the nucleons. A tiny change in the strength of one force can lead to a big shift in energy.
A new measurement of the thorium‑229 transition is millions of times more precise than earlier ones.

AR Our terrestrial system of units in physics (m, s, kg) depends on the stability of the fundamental constants c, ℏ, and G in their Planck definitions. So their stability is an issue we dare not duck. Anyway, nuclear clocks will be cool!
 

2024 September 4

Cosmic Resonances

Matt Strassler

There is a field permeating the cosmos that generates the masses of elementary particles. The story of the Higgs field is all about vibration.
The universe is filled with fields, such as the electromagnetic field, the gravitational field, and the Higgs field. For each field, its corresponding particle can be seen as a little ripple in that field.
A stationary electron is a standing wave that vibrates with a resonant frequency. Every stationary electron vibrates with the resonant frequency of the electron field. Most fields have resonant frequencies.
In quantum field theory, the more rapidly a stationary particle vibrates, the greater its mass. Fields lacking a resonant frequency correspond to particles that have no mass.
A stronger Higgs field makes the elementary particles vibrate at higher frequencies, thus raising their masses. The Higgs field acts like a cosmic stiffening agent that increases the resonant frequencies of other fields.
A ball at the end of a string out in deep space will float aimlessly. If you put the pendulum in a gravitational field, the ball hangs straight down and, if disturbed, will swing. The gravitational field stiffens the pendulum, thereby giving it a nonzero resonant frequency.
The Higgs field has a restoring effect on other fields that changes the way they vibrate. Any field can have traveling ripples, but a restoring effect lets a field have stationary ripples. These standing waves are particles, rippling in their respective fields.
The Higgs field stiffens other fields, letting their ripples vibrate in place with a resonant frequency, thus giving their particles mass.

AR This is a much nicer prose account of how the Higgs mechanism works than most of the others out there, as Strassler knows. His book has been compared to The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, which I read with distaste some 40 years ago, but this fragment suggests something better.
So, yet another new book onto the reading list.
 

2024 September 3

Dark Energy

Steve Nadis

Results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration indicate that dark energy may be weakening.
The expansion of the universe is accelerating due to dark energy. In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy is spread uniformly, with constant density at all times. Such dark energy, known as the cosmological constant, expands the universe at an ever faster rate.
Albert Einstein introduced the cosmological constant into the equations of his general theory of relativity to keep his model of the universe static. He removed it shortly after Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding.
James Peebles said we need repulsive energy to counteract gravity and match the observations. Whatever the accelerant is, we call it dark energy. It comprises 70% of the mass−energy in the universe, but its constancy is only a hypothesis.
Quantum theory says space should be full of dark energy, but predicts 10¹²⁰ times more of it than we observe. If we live in a multiverse, dark energy density might range widely in different universes. The value we observe in our universe is about as big as it can be for life as we know it.
We call dark energy that changes over time quintessence. Quintessential dark energy could either increase or decrease in density. If it is decreasing, we can see the evolution as like a ball rolling down a hill. If it is increasing, we enter a phantom regime. The DESI data suggests that for most of cosmic history, dark energy sat in the phantom regime.
String theory permits a vast number of possible topologies of its hidden dimensions. Each of them gives a universe with distinctive properties. These possible universes form a landscape. Hypothetical universes with properties that contradict general principles are dubbed the swampland. The swampland program studies these myriad possibilities.
Cumrun Vafa et al find no stable solutions to string theory corresponding to universes with positive cosmological constants. They offer a formula for how fast the density of dark energy should fall in any universe outside the swampland.
Consider a thought experiment. In a universe with a positive cosmological constant, the Planck length should grow to the size of the Hubble horizon in at most 2 trillion years. The trans‑Planckian censorship conjecture forbids this.

AR The equation "dark energy density = cosmological constant" is a gratuitous confusion based on a crude guess. It reminds me of the equation "Quantum weirdness = consciousness" some of us laughed about a decade or two ago. Let's keep our puzzles separate and unite them only for good reasons.
As for the censorship conjecture, I'm inclined to abjure it with the sign of the cross. Agreed, letting the Planck length exceed the Hubble horizon would be an abomination as bad as dividing by zero, but you can't hide problems by censoring them. That was Hawking's sin.
 

2024 September 2

East German State Elections

Christopher F Schuetze

The AfD had a good night in two East German states on Sunday. Nearly a third of voters voted for the party, classified as extremist by the German domestic intelligence service.
In Thüringen, nearly half of the voters chose extremist parties: the AfD took nearly 33% of the vote and the BSW nearly 16%. In Sachsen, the AfD took 31% and the BSW nearly 12%.
AfD Thüringen party leader Björn Höcke announced that as the largest party in Thüringen, the AfD would be looking for coalition partners. BSW leader Sahra Wagenknecht says she will not join a coalition with parties that support arming Ukraine.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz saw his SDP garner enough votes to remain in both statehouses. The Greens and the FDP each took less than the 5% threshold in Thüringen, so both were kicked out. The FDP was also kicked out in Sachsen.
Both Thüringen and Sachsen seem set to have a CDU Ministerpräsident.

Scholz urges German parties to exclude far right
Deborah Cole

German chancellor Olaf Scholz urges mainstream parties to exclude rightwing extremists after preliminary results show the AfD has come top in a state election: "Our country cannot and must not get used to this. The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society, and ruining our country's reputation."
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel: "It is a historic success for us. It is the first time we have become the strongest force in a state election. It is a requiem for this coalition."
In both Thüringen and Sachsen, the BSW could prove key in talks on forming a government. Sahra Wagenknecht calls for higher taxes on the rich, a tougher line on immigration and asylum, and an end to military support for Ukraine.
The CDU is leading in the national polls and is on course to win in Sachsen. CDU leader Friedrich Merz aims to challenge Scholz in the national election next year.
In Thüringen, the CDU came in second behind the AfD and may be able to form an alliance with smaller parties, including the BSW.

East and west Germany are drifting apart
Philip Oltermann

The AfD is riding a populist wave across Germany and is now a dominant force in the east. If federal elections were held tomorrow, the party could become the second strongest group in the Bundestag.
Economics and demographics only go so far to explain this. The population of the former DDR is no longer demographically "bleeding out" to the west. In every year since 2017, more people have migrated from the west to the east.
About 19% of east Germans say they feel left behind, more than the 8% in the west but still not many. Yet many of them vote for a party certified as rightwing extremist.
Sociologist Steffen Mau calls this trend Ossifikation. He says east Germany is voting differently from the west because it has caught up and now claims the right to assert its own distinct identity.
Historian Christina Morina: "East Germany too claimed for itself to have found a .. story of how democracy worked .. which claimed to be truer and more representative of real people than democracy in the west, which they said was merely organising class hierarchies and representing the interests of capitalism."

AR The claim to have found a more compelling narrative for democracy relies on acceptance of street activism as its paradigmatic expression. In the "mature" western democracies, political tensions should never boil over into disorder on the streets.
The claim that activists deserve a special voice in the political process has some appeal. The sheepish western acceptance of mass voting by zombie citizens who simply follow the party line can seem to lack vital engagement with the issues.
The rise of populism is symptomatic of a malaise in the lazy idea that democracy is served by casting a one-bit vote every few years. Going through the motions is never enough. Getting out onto the streets is at least a sign of life.
 

2024 September 1

In Mystic Delirium

Phil Hoad

Alexander Grothendieck, born in 1928, arrived in France from Germany as a refugee in 1939, and went on to revolutionise mathematics as Einstein had physics. He developed a new conception of space.
Grothendieck developed his notion of the topos in the 1960s. Topoi were part of his quest to generate a geometry without fixed points. They are mathematical integrations of all the possible points of view on a given mathematical situation that reveals its essential features.
In 1970, Grothendieck resigned from the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. He occupied a few minor teaching posts until 1991, when he moved to Lasserre, where he lived in solitude, with no television, radio, phone, or internet, until his death in 2014.
Grothendieck was a thinker and a writer, whose approach to mathematics was that of a philosopher. A handful of acolytes trekked up to Lasserre, but he politely refused to receive most of them. His true friends were the plants.
Grothendieck's exhaustive memoir Harvests and Sowings was published in 2022. It reflected on his mathematical career and was filled with aphoristic insights, but is choked with rambling footnotes and comes over as relentless and overwhelming.
Beyond his mathematics, his final writings, an avalanche of 70,000 pages in an often near-illegible hand, were fixated on the problem of why evil exists in the world. He wrote in 1997: "The most abominable thing in the fate of victims is that Satan is master of their thoughts and feelings."
Grothendieck's father was Ukrainian Jewish anarchist Alexander Schapiro, who with his partner, German writer Johanna Grothendieck, left their son in foster care in Hamburg when they fled Germany in 1933. The son was reunited with his mother in 1939. His father died in Auschwitz.
In 1990, Grothendieck fasted for 45 days, cooling himself in the heat of summer in a wine barrel filled with water. He almost died. Shortly afterwards, he had someone collect 28,000 pages of mathematical writings.
He then delved further into mysticism. He looked to his dreams as a conduit to the divine and believed they were messages sent to him by a figure he called the Dreamer.
His family only discovered him in Lasserre by accident. His daughter Johanna: "He became totally isolated .. He had cut ties with everyone."

AR I first came upon topos theory in 1974/75 at Oxford, when I was researching the foundations of set theory. It seemed insufficiently fundamental to me so I passed it by at the time.
Much later, in his 2004 book The Road to Reality, Roger Penrose pointed out that topos theory was integral to Chris Isham's work on quantum gravity, where he uses topos theory to adapt set theory to work in intuitionistic logic, which had been a big theme of mine as a student.
Penrose also clarified the role of category theory for me. As a student, I could make no sense of it, since the available texts were too cryptic or advanced. Serendipitously, just weeks ago, I discovered the 2023 book The Joy of Abstraction by Eugenia Cheng. Professor Cheng is a renowned researcher in category theory and starts with the basics. I have high hopes for the book.
As for Grothendieck, I hope I may be spared having to read his writings.

 

AR
Bournemouth Air Festival, L to R: Eurofighter Typhoon, Spitfire Mk XIX, Swedish fighters Draken and Viggen