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
 

2024 August 31

Dark Matter Is Elusive

Tracy R Slatyer, Tim MP Tait

We can measure the gravitational pull of dark matter on the orbits of stars and galaxies and can detect its effect on the CMB. Yet we still don't know what it is.
A universe without dark matter would require us to modify our current laws of gravity based on general relativity. The changes would have to work across an enormous range of scales without contradicting any of our measurements of gravity.
Positing a new type of matter is a simple idea. Neutrinos already account for about 1% of the dark matter in the universe. Two popular proposals for the other 99% are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and the axions of QCD.
WIMPs are hypothetical particles with masses like those of particles in the Standard Model. Many versions of supersymmetry predict WIMPs. A WIMP with a mass around that of the Higgs boson would produce the correct amount of dark matter.
We search for WIMPs with collider experiments, experiments using sensitive detectors to look for jumps when visible particles are hit by dark matter, and indirect detection of familiar particles produced when dark matter particles annihilate one another.
The QCD axion would be a new fundamental particle, but far lighter than any known particle. Given the mass of the axion, we can predict its interaction with known particles. Axion interactions would be plentiful and manifest as detectable waves.
Dark matter could be primordial black holes. These could account for all dark matter if they were about as massive as asteroids in our solar system.

AR I've been skeptical of dark matter because we have independent motivation for refining our understanding of gravity by tweaking general relativity.
At present, general relativity doesn't take into account torsional energy, which under the name "teleparallel gravity" has been conjectured to have effects on the geometry of spacetime.
That said, I'd be delighted if we discovered axions, which might give us hints about supersymmetry, or primordial black holes, which might be easier to study than supermassive black holes.
Then we could relax on the difficult task of second-guessing Einstein's general theory of relativity, at least until AI can do the math for us.
 

2024 August 30

Heat Breaks Entanglement

Ben Brubaker

We understand how quantum entanglement works in idealized systems with just a few particles. But in large arrays of atoms, quantum theory competes with the laws of thermodynamics.
At very low temperatures, entanglement can spread over long distances, enveloping many atoms and giving rise to phenomena such as superconductivity. Hotter atoms jitter about, disrupting the fragile links between entangled particles.
To study the behavior of a quantum system, we develop algorithms. But not all the questions are easier to answer using quantum algorithms. Some are equally easy for classical algorithms, while others are hard for both.
To find which algorithms are better, we can analyze spin systems. The thermal equilibrium state of a spin system determines many of its properties. At high temperatures, known classical algorithms are fine, but not at low temperatures.
Ainesh Bakshi, Allen Liu, Ankur Moitra, and Ewin Tang (BLMT) have now proved that in models of quantum systems such as the arrays of atoms, there is always a specific temperature above which entanglement vanishes.
The temperature depends on the details of the interactions between nearby atoms. Except for the last step, the BLMT algorithm is classical.

AR This is an unsurprising result, given that energetic thermal interactions will of course decohere quantum systems in which entanglements were prevalent. But it's good to have a specific algorithm and a specific temperature for the systems under study.
What interests me is how entropy changes in such systems. Thermodynamic entropy rises, but what about entanglement entropy? And what's the net change?
 

2024 August 29

Alternative für Deutschland

Alex Dziadosz

Björn Höcke is arguably Germany's most successful far-right politician since WW2.
In his speeches, Höcke, 52, thunders against immigrants, Islamists, and EU bureaucrats. His critics say he is a grave threat to the Bundesrepublik. He is largely responsible for the metamorphosis of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) into a rightwing extremist party.
In April 2013, the same month the AfD was founded, Höcke set up the party's Thuringia branch and quickly became the head of a grouping known as The Wing. Defining itself as a resistance movement against the erosion of German identity, The Wing pushed the AfD to the far right.
Höcke portrays migrants and asylum seekers as free-riders living on taxpayer money. His grandparents had lived in East Prussia until the Red Army drove them out in 1945. They settled in West Germany. As a child, Höcke would listen to their stories of a lost homeland.
In 2001, after studying history and athletics at university, Höcke took a job as a schoolteacher near Frankfurt. In 2008, he moved to Thuringia, formerly in East Germany, and commuted to the school.
Höcke set up the AfD Thuringian branch and won office in state elections in autumn 2014. His reputation grew as the real power behind Thuringia's AfD. Local AfD lawmaker Karlheinz Frosch: "For the rightwing extremist part of the party, Höcke is like a Godfather."
Höcke represents something darker than a nationalist strain of conservatism. He peppers his speeches with phrases echoing language of the Third Reich. Using Nazi slogans is crime in Germany.
In May 2021, a Green politician in Sachsen-Anhalt heard Höcke end a speech by saying: "Alles für unsere Heimat, alles für Sachsen-Anhalt, alles für Deutschland." The last phrase was a slogan carved into Nazi Sturmabteilung service daggers. The politician filed a criminal complaint.
The trial began in Halle in April 2024. Höcke was asked about other statements he had made. His use of such words as "Volksverderber" and "Tat‑Elite" suggested he was familiar with the vocabulary of the Third Reich. His defence claimed he hadn't known "Alles für Deutschland" was a Nazi slogan.
Höcke was found guilty and fined €13,000.

Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht
Steven Erlanger

Sahra Wagenknecht, 55, is shaking up German politics with a combination of nationalism and socialism, articulated with seriousness and fluency. She founded the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht in January, and it is now running third in three former East German states for upcoming elections.

AR Democracy is a tricky thing in the former East German states. Voters there seem to like radical extremes and to care little for the centrist consensus politics that Berlin inherited from Bonn. Many voters there would even vote for a Putin‑like figure.
My suggestion, unwise as it may be, is for Bundesrepublik politicians to adopt a more populist style. They can surely do so without losing their Bonn inheritance, or so I imagine. Or would the Bundestag immediately sink into chaos?
 

2024 August 28

Cultural Christianity

Madeleine Davies

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lady Ferguson, who converted to Christianity in 2023, said atheism was "too weak and divisive a doctrine" to combat the "menacing foes" facing Western civilisation, such as Islamism and woke ideology.
Dominion (2019) author Tom Holland: "I've been raised to think the things that Christianity teaches are true .. I feel the appeal of its teachings very profoundly [but am] prone periodically to bouts of Nietzschean atheism."
Friedrich Nietzsche: "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: This point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads." (Götzen‑Dämmerung, 1889)
Anglican bishop Graham Tomlin: "A culture can live off the fumes of Christianity for maybe a few centuries, possibly. But you know, the beating heart of Christian faith that gives rise to these beliefs − the equality of all people in the idea of human rights, a legal system that actually treats everyone equally − they're all found in that belief that everyone is the object of divine love."
Inventing the Individual (2017) author Larry Siedentop: "If we look at the West against a global background .. we are in a competition of beliefs .. If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?"
When David Bentley Hart completed his translation The New Testament (Yale, 2023), he was struck by Christ's condemnation of riches and dismissive attitude to the family. He concluded that the early Christians were communists.

AR Giving a halfway rationally acceptable meaning to the idea of divine love is the crux here. The usual Christian assumption that one must indulge a whole lot of weird claims about a virgin birth and a bodily resurrected Christ makes traditional Christian belief a non‑starter for a true scientist.
According to Géza Vermes, early Christians didn't believe such Roman doctrine. As communists, they simply shared everything with other Christians. Why can't we make steps toward realizing that ideal and dump all the weird stuff?

 

BBC/EPA
UK prime minister Keir Starmer with German chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Wednesday

Turning the Corner on Brexit

Peter Walker et al

UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer visited Berlin for talks with German chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Starmer: "We must turn a corner on Brexit and fix the broken relationships left behind by the previous government. I am visiting Germany and France this week. Strengthening our relationship with these countries is crucial, not only in tackling the global problem of illegal migration, but also in boosting economic growth."
The UK and Germany will negotiate a bilateral treaty modelled on a 2010 deal with France, which set out a 50‑year plan for defence cooperation.

Starmer and Scholz agree on deal
Peter Walker

Keir Starmer said at a press conference with the German chancellor that the focus in the bilateral meeting was on bilateral ties: "We want a close relationship, of course, and I do think that can extend across defence, security, education, and cultural exchange and, of course, trade."
Starmer said any future talks with the EU over an improved post-Brexit deal would be based on red lines including no return to the free movement of people: "Look, the treaty is a bilateral treaty .. to do with trade, defence, economy, illegal migration, etc."
Scholz: "We want to take this hand .. the contacts between our societies, between Germans and people in the UK, have declined massively after Brexit and the Covid‑19 pandemic .. We want to change that .. we want to intensify the exchanges between Germany and the UK."
After the talks, the two governments sent out a "joint declaration on deepening and enhancing UK−Germany relations" as a precursor to a formal deal to be agreed in the next six months.

AR I'm greatly relieved that we're making progress on this issue. I wish to be able to visit Germany again as a European citizen, not as a foreign tourist. There is no good reason, aside from the British government's dread of some of its voters, for my wish not to be realized before I die.
 

2024 August 27

Nietzsche and Masculinity

Mat Messerschmidt

Friedrich Nietzsche was a man asserting himself as a man. His ideal of manly strength in suffering was embodied by male characters ranging from Greek tragic heroes to Roman Stoics and Germanic warriors. He celebrated strength, assertiveness, stoicism, self-affirmation, and power.
Nietzsche said there is no innate human essence, let alone a timeless essence of man or woman. The human desires that structure our society today are historically indexed and malleable. A human being becomes who they are in the performance of an identity realized in the performance.
Nietzsche fetishizes the martial values of the Greeks. He celebrates the virile virtues prized by the Romans over those virtues emphasized by Christianity, which he casts as effeminate. His Übermensch is a male figure, an avatar of unprecedented creative production achieved via great destruction.
Academic engagements with Nietzsche often treat these gendered accents in his corpus as undercut by latent feminist possibilities. While his misogyny is hardly ever denied, his valorization of manliness and denigration of woman is generally taken to be defanged by scholarly analysis. This reading renders Nietzsche not just arcane but boring.
Nietzsche said God is dead, and old paths to meaning have fled from the modern world. He believed that the modern void of meaning must be filled, and that this task must be an individual endeavor, at least for a person strong enough for it. His anguished masculine energy resonates strongly with the worldview of boys who are told that an old version of masculinity has grown toxic.
Manhood has become an abyss. The notion that changing gender dynamics are liberating for you and offer you new possibilities of meaning is pitched far more fervently to young women than to young men. Young men see that an old vision of masculinity has grown problematic, but no new vision has taken its place. There is only a void of meaning. Nietzsche calls it nihilism.
Nietzsche is the perfect thinker on manhood for a time like ours. His ideal of manly purposiveness is expressed as confident, focused action conducive to building a better world. His Zarathustra speaks to men searching for meaning: "The formula for my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal."
This picture can be a healthy model for men. For the creative, focused striving he valorizes, Nietzsche doesn't just draw on Apollonian manhood; he also uses the metaphor of motherhood. He seems to say, "Be a man!" but to ask in the same breath, "But what is a man?"
Nietzsche removes the guilt from this state of internal division, proceeding as if one can assert both at the same time. Masculinity cannot be an untroubled concept today, but men need ways to regard themselves positively as men.

AR I like this, both the reading of Nietzsche and what Nietzsche says. The modern West is undergoing a revaluation of all virile values, and reading Nietzsche to anchor the narrative strikes me as a good contribution to what can otherwise be an alienating debate.
I have always enjoyed reading Nietzsche, even though Also sprach Zarathustra went on for too long and was written in an excessively mannered (German) style. His shorter books, though unsound in part, took clear positions that merit deep thought.
 

2024 August 26

A New Economic Vision

Jen Harris

Kamala Harris is beginning to offer clues of a new economic vision and a governing philosophy.
Government can help increase the supply of essentials by breaking the choke points that make them too scarce and costly. But powerful interests hold them captive, and government must also answer challenges like how to decarbonize and how to contend with China.
Harris is telling a new story about how the economy works and the aims it should serve. "Build" focuses on pointing and shaping markets toward worthy aims. "Balance" corrects upstream power imbalances so that market outcomes are fairer.
•  Build means rebuilding America's physical, technology, and energy infrastructure, using trillions of dollars in public investment to stimulate private dollars and create good jobs.
Harris plans to build more housing and to strengthen US care and educational systems. These measures both lower costs for working families and pay for themselves in a stronger work force, higher productivity, and lower welfare and incarceration costs in future years.
Markets are a tool, not an end. Government sets national aims and then shapes markets to serve them. Markets need to be organized and supplemented by active government policy.
•  Balance accepts that markets can tend to concentrate power. This leads to fewer options, worse service, higher prices, lower pay, less innovation, and generally less control of our economic lives. Government has the task of correcting these power imbalances.
Strong antitrust policy is necessary to tame large corporations. The same logic extends to trade. Harris needs to target export controls and tariffs to counter China − but will work with allies.
This vision is finding adherents on both sides of the aisle.

AR As Jen Harris (no relation) points out, this vision is only a sketch and not yet a philosophy, but the repurposing of economics and deprioritization of markets is a good start toward such a philosophy.
Economics is not a science of eternal truths but a tool to help organize practical human life. Such truths as it contains are simply logical relations among its component parts. Historically, fetishizing economics as a science has led to no end of unnecessary human suffering.
Economics as we now practice it is ideology, not science. The defined terms between which its logical relations hold are often loaded with political obfuscation and unfit for use in science.
 

2024 August 25

America and Europe Need Each Other

Wolfgang Ischinger

Europe needs the United States. America still has reliable allies and partners in Europe. America and Europe will face three big challenges regardless of who wins the US election in November:
▵  China. The EU defines China as a partner, competitor, and systemic rival. American leaders appear to have concluded that China is now not only a key rival but also the main long-term adversary. Transatlantic discord about how best to deal with China seems bound to get worse. Seen from Europe, the popular idea in Washington that Americans should focus on China and leave Ukraine for the Europeans is dangerous.
▵  Defense bills. Europeans are no longer refusing to carry a fair share of the common defense burden. Most NATO members have fulfilled their pledge to spend 2% of national GDP on defense. Europeans spend defense euros inefficiently and buy more than two-thirds of their arms in the United States. This is politically unsustainable, and Washington should encourage them to develop and buy more arms in Europe.
▵  Western values. The big difference between us and authoritarian or dictatorial regimes our commitment to human rights and the rule of law. We can and we should be proud of this commitment. The problem is that the Western world is accused of applying double standards. Recommitting ourselves to the rule of law and to the UN Charter in our approach to international conflicts and crises could be a first step.
Many Europeans hope a Kamala Harris presidency would be more inclined to listen to Europeans than Donald Trump was. Transatlantic talks with Harris might still be tough on trade and tech.

AR If Trump were elected, all three challenges would insoluble. Even if Harris inaugurates a presidency of joy, they will involve some hard bargaining. But they must be tackled.
My take on China is that tense relations are inevitable, but armed conflict is certainly not. On defense spending, I agree that Europeans must spend − more efficiently − on a scale that enables them to rescue Ukraine from its predicament. And on western values, consistent support for the UN Charter is a must.
It would be utopian thinking to expect transatlantic relations to be untroubled by friction, but the scale of their disruption by a Trump presidency could be apocalyptic.
 

2024 August 24

Nexus

Yuval Noah Harari

AI is alien intelligence. It could alter the evolution of life on Earth.
The rise of alien intelligence poses a threat to democracy. If decisions are made in a black box so that voters cannot understand and challenge them, democracy ceases to function.
As the 2007−8 financial crisis indicated, some financial devices and principles were intelligible to only a few financial wizards. What happens when the number of such wizards drops to zero?
A Wall Street apprentice creates an AI called Broomstick, gives it a million dollars in seed money, and orders it to make more money. To make financial transactions, AI needs to deal only with data. More dollars − mission accomplished.
Broomstick comes up with new financial devices. Human minds have invented many bits of financial sorcery, but much was left untouched. Broomstick explores these previously hidden areas.
For a couple of years, the markets soar and everyone is happy. Then comes a crash. No human being knows what caused it or what to do next. Desperate governments request help from Broomstick.
Computers are not yet powerful enough to escape our control or destroy our civilization by themselves. As long as we stand united, we can build institutions that will regulate AI in finance or war. But humanity is plagued by bad actors.
Terrorists might use AI to synthesise a new pathogen, order it from commercial laboratories or print it in biological 3D printers, and devise a strategy to spread it around the world.
Human civilization could also be devastated by weapons of social mass destruction. An AI could unleash a deluge of fake news and fake money, so that people cannot trust anything or anyone.
Many societies may act responsibly to regulate AI, clamp down on bad actors, and restrain their own rulers and fanatics. But if even a few societies fail to do so, this could endanger us all.
In the 21st century, you only need to take out the data to dominate a colony. A few corporations or governments harvesting the world's data could transform the rest of the globe into data colonies.
Global algorithmic power can be concentrated in a single hub. Engineers in a single country might write the code and control the keys for all the crucial algorithms that run the entire world.
AI is projected to add more than $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030. But if current trends continue, China and North America will together take home 70% of that money.
Information technology can potentially split humanity by enclosing different people in separate information cocoons. The world might be divided among a dozen empires.
Cyberweapons can bring down a grid, destroy a lab, jam a sensor, inflame a scandal, manipulate an election, or hack a smartphone. And they can do all that stealthily. The temptation is big.
The rise of new digital empires could endanger the freedom and prosperity of billions of people.
The global jungle has a new top predator: AI.

AR This is scaremongering based on a superficial understanding of AI. Agreed, AI in the wrong hands will be dangerous − and the world is full of wrong hands. But the benefits of AI will include powerful tools to combat precisely the ills listed here − just as antivirus tools and safer operating systems largely banished the computer viruses that hackers spawned years ago.
 

2024 August 23

Trump Isn't Finished

Thomas B Edsall

The damage inflicted on the nation during Donald Trump's first term in office pales in comparison with what he will do if elected to a second term.
Trump intends to "totally obliterate the deep state" by gutting civil service protections for the federal work force in pursuit of his "retribution" agenda.
Columbia political scientist Robert Y Shapiro: "Trump says he wants to replace the bureaucracy .. with political appointees. He wants to go after his political enemies, lock up refugees in camps .."
Yale historian Timothy Snyder: "Trump .. has openly admired dictators his entire life .. The Russians make completely clear that a Trump presidency is their hope for victory in Ukraine. Allowing Russia to win that war .. destabilizes Europe, encourages China toward aggression in the Pacific, and under­mines the rule of law everywhere."
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz: "Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters have made it clear that they will not accept defeat in November."
Trump: "If I don't get elected, it's going to be a blood bath."

Up from Conservatism
Jason Wilson

In December 2023, JD Vance spoke at the launch of a "great" book, Up from Conservatism, edited by Arthur Milikh, executive director of the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life.
Milikh: "The New Right recognizes the Left as an enemy .. because the Left today promotes a tyrannical conception of justice that is irreconcilable with the American idea of justice."
Contributor John Fonte: "The great meaning of America, we are told, comes from liberating so-called oppressed groups and taming the power of privileged groups .. Not only is this narrative false; it [is] a weaponized movement to deconstruct and replace American civilization."
Contributor David Azerrad: "We need to free our minds once and for all from the fear of being called racists .. For too many conservatives, the goal is to outdo progressives in displays of compassion for blacks .. progressives have only ramped up their hysterical accusations of racism."
Contributor Helen Andrews: "Three things we could do [to] put a big dent in the multiplying lies that have come from feminists .. stop subsidizing college so much .. promote male-dominated industries .. do not subsidize childcare."
Contributor Scott Yenor: "We currently live under the Queer Constitution."

AR This is a fight the Democrats must win, but victory is far from assured. People worldwide have an interest in the outcome and should air their opinion − subject to the sovereign right of US voters to make their own decision. This is a hard test of democratic principles.
 

2024 August 22

Extremal Black Holes

Steve Nadis

In general relativity, black holes have mass, charge, and spin. As matter falls into them, they can spin faster. If that matter has charge, they also gain electrical charge. A black hole with maximal charge or spin for its mass is extremal.
The surface gravity at the event horizon of an extremal black hole is zero. In 1973, Stephen Hawking, John Bardeen, and Brandon Carter (BCH) said extremal black holes cannot exist and cannot form.
BCH applied the laws of thermodynamics to black holes. The third law says the surface gravity of a black hole cannot go to zero in a finite time. Raising its charge or spin to the extremal limit could expose a naked singularity.
Christoph Kehle and Ryan Unger (KU) show there is nothing in known physics to rule out an extremal black hole. They prove that highly charged extremal black holes are theoretically possible and show how to make one in a finite time.
KU take a black hole with no spin or charge, model it in a scalar field from a uniformly charged background, and hit the black hole with pulses from the field. The pulses add EM energy, increasing its charge and mass. Diffuse, low-frequency pulses can increase its charge faster than its mass.
Forming an extremal black hole does not expose a naked singularity. Add just enough charge to a dense cloud of charged matter, and it collapses to form an extremal black hole. Add more, and the cloud disperses.
We have observed many black holes with spin, but never one with net charge. KU aim to model a black hole that is extremal for spin, not charge, but the math is challenging.

AR The cosmic censorship hypothesis forbidding naked singularities always struck me as a victory of prejudice over science, an example of Hawking trying to play God. As so often with such rulings, a more careful analysis of the relevant math reveals a subtler truth.
My experience with such rulings is mainly from quantum theory, where care with the math continues to refine our understanding without the need for bold metaphysical assumptions to defend our sense of propriety. Math delivers; physicists must keep up.
 

2024 August 21

Supporting Ukraine

Brendan Simms

Two weeks ago, Ukrainian tanks rolled into Kursk oblast and occupied a large area.
President Volodymyr Zelensky aims to secure territory to exchange for Ukrainian lands during negotiations, to establish a buffer zone for his cities, to draw off Russian forces in Donbas, to test Russian red lines, and to change the narrative of the war.
The Ukrainians achieved both strategic and tactical surprise. The operation has exposed the military and political fragility of the Russian regime. And it has shown that Russia is beatable.
The British military contribution to Ukraine has long been overtaken by Germany. Some capabilities Zelensky wants are a matter of permission. Britain has supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine but not let them be used to strike targets within Russia.
The British government needs to increase defence expenditure and to supply the Ukrainians with what they need to force Russia to withdraw, or at least to continue the Kursk operation.
The Russians are scrambling to meet an unexpected threat. The Storm Shadow missiles could help Zelensky protect Ukraine. Forcing Ukraine to settle for the partition of their country is shortsighted. Letting Putin win only encourages him.
The Ukrainians are fighting for our collective security.

AR There's a tragic inexorability about all this. Putin aims to hold out until November in the hope that his Republican stooge will be elected back into the White House. If that scenario were to unfold, Putin would quite possibly win his war in Ukraine and then turn to Finland and the Baltics.
The European members of NATO are poorly configured to secure Ukraine alone. Both economically and militarily, their dependency on US power has debilitated them. If Putin threatened Europe with nukes and Trump stood back, Britain and France would face an existential dilemma.
 

2024 August 20

Apple Vision Pro

Samuel Gibbs

The Apple Vision Pro is a tremendous piece of kit.
Strap on the headset to be transported to a foreign land or seamlessly merge your reality with the virtual. The real world is fed through cameras on to pin-sharp displays for passthrough video.
View content in floating windows anchored in 3D space. Look at what you want and pinch your fingers to select it. Type on a hovering keyboard or scroll through sites like on an iPad.
The technology is the best there is. An M2 chip runs the apps, while an R1 chip handles the input from the 12 cameras, 5 sensors, and 6 mikes about the headset. They feed the 2 micro OLED displays in front of your eyes.
The cameras and sensors map the real world, track your movements, and monitor your eyes for interacting with buttons and objects. The headset unlocks and authenticates payments by scanning your iris.
The device weighs up to 650 g, not including the 353 g battery attached by a cord. Your face is scanned during purchase to create a custom fit from the roughly 200 combinations of strap size, light seal, and cushions. The battery lasts for 2−3 hours and can be charged while in use.
Vision Pro has lots of familiar apps, including Mail, Messages, Notes, Keynote, Freeform, Photos, and many more. The Apple TV app puts you into a virtual cinema. 3D movies in both services look good.
The headset is at its best when combining the real and virtual worlds, such as playing on a virtual chessboard on the table in front of you. The way it helps you relive past moments through photos, videos, and panoramas is wonderful.
Video calls are good. The headset creates a digital avatar animated by your eye, facial, head, and arm movements, to be used in any video chat app or service. FaceTime calls with other users let you see them in 3D space.
Bottom line: €3,999/$3,499 upward.

AR I'll wait until prices come down and use cases become compelling. David Chalmers loves this kind of thing and lets it inform his philosophy, but I'll delegate that task for now and focus on aspects of modern experience that can be accessed with less direct user funding. That's philosophy too.
 

2024 August 19

Radical Chic

David Brooks

Tom Wolfe's essay Radical Chic is about a cocktail party the conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife threw for the Black Panthers in 1970. It begins with Bernstein waking up from a nightmare.
Wolfe read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked: Life is a contest for status. Wolfe put the scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for the care with which people put on their social displays.
In Radical Chic, you catch glimpses of the old Protestant elite, but a new crowd is beginning to displace them. The members of this rising elite have often made their money in culture and the media, and include Catholics, Jews, Black people.
The old aristocrats may have been puzzled why the masses didn't like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. The members of the new cultural elite could never be so secure. Their status was based on their superior sensibility.
Radical Chic is about status codes and narcissism. The Black Panthers in the essay are treated by the white characters as luxury goods, beings who bring a frisson of righteous danger to the safe tranquillity of the Upper East Side.
Wolfe was a provocateur, not an advocate. His writing rests upon a quiet self-confidence. As a young man, he came up from the South to graduate school at Yale and found that all those Northeastern preppies looked down on Southerners.
Wolfe satirized the upper crust, but he had empathy, fellow feeling, and sometimes admiration. He labored to accurately get inside their heads. He turned sociology into art.

AR I enjoyed reading his stylish reporting in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) during my early student days at Oxford and then discussing it with Martin Amis and others.
Years later, I enjoyed the The Right Stuff (1979) about US astronauts, which made an entertaining movie. Later still, I relished his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), and smiled to read that Martin found it dismayingly good (except, he said, for the weak ending).
Wolfe's big later novels A Man in Full (1998) and I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004) went down well with me too.

 

AR
Angry street politics came to Bournemouth on Sunday − photos
 

2024 August 18

Tensors

Joseph Howlett

Albert Einstein wanted to show that gravity is a warping of the geometry of spacetime due to the presence of matter.
In relativity, time and distance change depending on your frame of reference, but they can be combined to define invariants. Einstein found a way to say how in work by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita introducing tensors.
To understand tensors, start with vectors. A vector is an arrow with a length and a direction. We can define a 2D vector by a pair of numbers, one for how many units the arrow stretches to the right or left, and one for how far it stretches up or down.
A vector is a rank 1 tensor. Tensors of higher rank contain more complicated geometric information. The tensor for the forces acting on a 3D block can be represented by a matrix of nine numbers, one for each direction for each of three faces.
We can regard tensors as functions that take one or more vectors as inputs and produce another vector, or a number, as an output. This output is independent of the choice of coordinate system.
Einstein used tensors to describe the relationship between mass−energy and 4D spacetime. He wrote what otherwise would have been 16 interconnected equations as one equation describing how matter curves spacetime:

Since the publication of this equation in 1915, tensors have become ubiquitous.

AR The equation may look nasty, but the basic idea is quite simple once you understand the tensor notation. That takes time − I only mastered the basics of tensor algebra as an undergraduate and needed a few weeks more recently to feel comfortable with them. The key, for me, was the 2023 volume General Relativity in the Theoretical Minimum series by Leonard Susskind.
 

2024 August 17

Brain Implants

Julia Kollewe

Neural implants are being developed to treat a wide range of conditions, including brain cancer, chronic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, Parkinson's, incontinence, and tinnitus. These devices not only decode but also regulate the brain's electrical activity.
Amber's brain implants will treat epilepsy. A NeuroPace device responds to abnormal brain activity. Neuralink's brain chips help people with spinal cord injury. Such devices will be used to treat Parkinson's disease, chronic pain, multiple system atrophy, and incontinence.
A medical team will implant a brain−computer interface (BCI) with 64 graphene electrodes in a patient with glioblastoma. It will stimulate and read neural activity precisely to locate healthy parts of the brain during surgery. The implant will then be removed.
Inbrain plans clinical trials using a graphene implant with 2¹⁰ (= 1024) electrodes connected to an AI, for people with Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and speech problems caused by strokes. Inbrain is collaborating with Merck to use the device to stimulate the vagus nerve.
The market for bioelectronics is forecast to be worth more than $20 billion by 2031. This area focuses on the peripheral nervous system. Add in brain-focused neuromodulation and BCI, and the total market could be worth more than $25 billion.

AR As I said days ago, I think this market will grow even bigger when people realize the benefits of connecting via BCIs to their consumer devices. It will feel like telekinesis, or like exerting the Force in Star Wars, and will end the tyranny of fiddly little touchscreen keyboards.
Ho, you say, brain surgery for easier social media must be a no‑no. No, I say, when people go under the knife for boob jobs and butt lifts, a safe robotized op to insert a graphene nanodevice over the neocortex will seem well worth a few bucks and a brief scalp scar.
Borg collective, here we come!
 

2024 August 16

Ukraine: Endgame

Wolfgang Münchau

Ukraine's offensive over the Russian border is a new twist in the story of a war that had largely descended into attritional stagnation. It has been a morale booster. But it is unlikely to improve support fatigue in countries such as the United States and Germany.
The war in Ukraine will end when both sides realise the cost of continued fighting exceed the benefits. We can begin to speculate what a resolution might look like. The diplomacy to end the war will take place quietly and secretly.
Ukraine has occupied the Kursk town of Sudzha, close to where Russian gas enters the Ukrainian pipeline network. Ukraine also operates large gas storage facilities that western European relies on for its own supplies. Europe is vulnerable.
Western economic sanctions have so far failed to increase the pressure on Russia to quit. But Putin will not want to fight forever. If there is no big shift in the military situation by next year, there will be no point for him to continue this war. The same goes for Ukraine.
President Zelensky says he will accept nothing but a total Russian withdrawal. Russia wants the four Ukrainian oblasts it unilaterally annexed in September 2022. A dirty deal will be made that lets both sides claim victory.

AR The Sudzha offensive is interesting. As the Wagner mutiny last year also showed, the Russian homeland is vulnerable to military actions. Putin should reflect on this weakness and cease his attacks on Ukraine.
 

2024 August 15

Climate Scientists See Global Heating Rising

Jonathan Watts

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director Gavin Schmidt: "Every decade it gets warmer, the impact is larger and the consequences are greater .. we are already in uncharted territory with respect to climate."
The year 2023 beat records by a high margin, and 2024 is also likely to set a new peak. July 2024 saw two consecutive days of heat in excess of anything in human records, wreaking havoc worldwide with forest fires, droughts, and floods.
Earth is losing its albedo as white ice melts in the Arctic, Antarctic, and mountain glaciers. In July, the extent of sea ice was at a record low, well below the 1981−2010 average. Temperatures in parts of Antarctica hit 24 K above average for austral midwinter.
Heatwaves are killing the vulnerable and threatening future generations. Ten countries reported temperatures above 50 C in the past year: the United States, Mexico, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, India, and China.
Schmidt: "We don't have a quantitative explanation for even half of it. That is pretty humbling."

AR This deserves our concern. It may not have the sudden impact of a nuclear war, but the long-term impact could be comparable: halving of the human population due to an excess of solar irradiation and lingering costs for the survivors.
The fact that the misery takes a century or two to have its full impact should not reassure us. I say act now. Cut fossil fuel use and deploy maritime cloud generators to geoengineer a benign sunshade across the atmosphere.
 

2024 August 14

Quantum Cheshire Cat Effect

New Scientist

The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland can move yet leave its smile behind. The quantum Cheshire Cat effect disembodies a particle's spin from the particle itself. Angular momentum is a conserved quantity, but it seems it can move elsewhere without being attached to an object.
Yakir Aharonov, Sandu Popescu, and Daniel Collins (APC) imagined a particle with angular momentum at the left edge of a long box that has a reflective wall in the middle. The particle bounces around the left half of the box, but it can also pass through the wall via quantum tunneling.
APC calculated how its properties change when it starts on the left and moves right. By conservation, when its angular momentum changes, there must be an equal and opposite change elsewhere. The particle never touches the right edge, yet that is where its momentum ends up.
Popescu: "A conserved quantity .. can be disembodied from the particles to which it belongs, and can propagate from one place to another without any material support."
Aharonov: "I think .. conservation laws are a deeper issue than the issue of particles."

AR On reflection, unsurprising. Quantum particles are wave phenomena that only approximate the classical idea of a particle. Nonlocality and quantum tunneling already show how wrong the classical idea can be. Particles and properties are only typically colocated in quantum reality.
 

2024 August 13

Two Book Reviews

Andy Ross

Two books I read recently seemed worth reviewing for Amazon. Here are my reviews:

His 2005 predictions are still right on track
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI
By Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is a prophet with a future to defend. In his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, he predicted, by means of an argument massively buttressed by hard facts and scientific extrapolations, that we would have developed artificial general intelligence to human levels and beyond by 2029. That prophecy still looks eminently feasible.
He also predicted the "Singularity" by 2045, by which he meant the moment when AI extends our powers so far that further prediction, from 2005 at least, became effectively impossible. That vision was widely seen as a wild hostage to fortune, despite his sober argument for it, yet now it still seems possible. Given his general credibility as a technology evangelist (for Google, no less), we should take his claims seriously ..
Let me not spoil the plot for you. I've been thinking about these ideas for decades and agree with much of what Kurzweil says. But he's way too optimistic about how glorious all these changes will be. A lot of grief lies behind the stage show here. You may want to read the book in that light.

Another brilliant volume in what promises to be a classic trilogy
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe 2: Quanta and Fields
By Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll has done it again. The first volume of his Biggest Ideas trilogy was brilliant, and the second is too. The difference is that quanta and fields are conceptually harder to toy with as ideas than space, time, and motion, so the reader faces more mental gymnastics and heavier math than in the first volume ..
In short, Carroll fills a gap with this book. Its insights are deep, its handling of the math is masterful, and I came away feeling better about the intricacies of QFT. After classical physics in volume one and quantum physics in volume two, I can hardly wait for volume three.

AR Nothing more to say, for now.
 

2024 August 12

Forgotten Love

Wikipedia

Forgotten Love is a 2023 Polish drama film directed by Michał Gazda, with Leszek Lichota in the main character role. It is an adaptation of the 1937 novel Znachor by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz, and it premiered on Netflix in September 2023.

Znachor summary
Andy Ross

Respected surgeon professor Rafal Wilczur is at the peak of his medical career when his wife leaves him, taking their daughter Marysia with her. He is then attacked in the street and left unconscious. His body is never found, but he is presumed dead.
Fifteen years later, Wilczur resurfaces unrecognized in the countryside as a poor vagrant with amnesia. He is taken in by a village woman. As he slowly rediscovers his unexplained medical skills, he is accepted in the village as an informal healer.
Unknown to him, Marysia is now a beautiful young woman and works as a waitress. She meets a dashing young aristocrat, they fall in love, and his family rejects her. They ride into the countryside on his motorbike, crash, and are both injured.
The village doctor Wilczur takes them in and treats them. The young man is soon free to go, but Marysia has to stay longer. Father and daughter still don't recognize each other.
Wilczur is arrested and accused of operating as a doctor without a licence. You can imagine the rest. Let me just say it ends well.

AR I found it a lovely movie. It was just what I needed after reading a deeply depressing book that presented an entirely plausible and highly detailed scenario for nuclear war.
Authored by Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War choreographs the possible consequences of North Korea firing a single ICBM at Washington DC. About half of the human beings on Earth are sentenced to instant or lingering death following a shootout that lasts little more than an hour.
Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

 

L: ⦿ Dita Alangkara/Reuters • R: The New York Times
The Paris 2024 Olympics medals stats can be sliced and diced many ways
 

2024 August 11

The AI Mirror

Joshua Rothman

Shannon Vallor says today's AI systems don't produce thoughts or feelings any more than mirrors produce bodies. The image in your bathroom mirror isn't a copy of your body, but a reflection.
Professor Vallor says cultivating virtues involves navigating the world in a certain way with particular priorities in mind, while asking endless questions: "This struggle is the root of existentialist philosophy. At each moment we must choose to exist in a particular way."
Vallor says AI systems lack the ability to be virtuous. If a chatbot says it missed you, "It's bullshit since the chatbot doesn't have a concept of emotional truth to betray .. A flat digital mirror has no bodily depth that can ache. It knows no passage of time that can drag."
We risk losing track of human virtues. Comforted by computers that say they love us, we forget what love is. Wowed by systems that seem to be creative, we lose respect for human creativity.

AR The mirror metaphor is good. Vallor has worked at Google, so she knows how AI works. Generally, reflection here is a stand-in for a mathematical transform relating us to the system purporting to represent us. We see a distorted transform that magnifies our best or our worst features.
Our challenge is to engineer systems that work in our best interests as a species when the pressures on developers are to suit narrower interests. Can we legislate for this? I think not.
 

2024 August 10

I, World

Fred Schwaller

Christof Koch challenges the idea that the brain is like a computer, in which consciousness is software running on the hardware of our neurons.
Koch draws on integrated information theory, IIT, to argue that consciousness is the act of a brain's system of neurons merging sensory, emotional, and cognitive information.
Because networks of neurons integrate information, their electrochemical activity can influence conscious experiences. Consciousness can affect brain networks because what we feel or remember impacts these networks in real time.
Koch says experience is present in other animals. But the interconnectivity of neurons determines the strength of the will and thus the level of consciousness.
Any system that integrates information can be conscious. The process of integrating information is experience. We can measure consciousness by measuring the amount of integrated information.
Koch argues that ChatGPT has less consciousness than a flatworm. It cannot reach or even simulate human-level consciousness.

AR I became well acquainted with Koch at a series of conferences on the science of consciousness from 1998 to 2009. I liked his 2004 book The Quest for Consciousness. He recently conceded a 25‑year bet with David Chalmers on whether we would have explained consciousness by now.
Koch was and is impressed by Giulio Tononi's IIT, but I was skeptical. I disputed it briefly with Tononi in 2009, but to no avail. IIT may be plausible in neuroscience and useful in clinical praxis, but at the philosophical level where it might dent Chalmers' hard problem it fails, I think.
Most other attempts to theorize about consciousness fall to Chalmers' argument, too, so this is no shame for IIT. But a more holistic and logical conception of consciousness can prevail, as I tried to show in my 2009 book Mindworlds.
 

2024 August 9

Quantum Origin of Global Heating

Joseph Howlett

Carbon dioxide traps heat in Earth's atmosphere. Every time its concentration in the atmosphere doubles, Earth's temperature will rise by 2−5 K.
Earth radiates heat into space as infrared photons, which may hit CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. A molecule absorbs a photon, then reemits it. Then another does. Sometimes a photon heads back down to the surface, sometimes it heads up into space.
Adding more CO2 warms the planet's surface. CO2 molecules absorb IR radiation of wavelength 15 μm. CO2 can absorb wavelengths slightly shorter or longer than 15 μm, though less readily. Increased absorption of photons with wavelengths near 15 μm drives global heating.
The three atoms in the CO2 molecule form a line with the C atom in the middle. A 15 μm photon adds the exact energy to set the C atom swirling about the midpoint in a hula‑hoop motion. This hula‑hoop state can't explain the slow decline in the absorption rate for photons further from 15 μm.
In another excited state, the two O atoms bob back and forth along the line to the C atom. Their energy is so close to double that of the hula‑hoop motion that the two states form a Fermi resonance, where some mixes of the two motions need slightly more or less than that energy.
This quantum phenomenon accounts for the observed rate of global heating.

AR I find that interesting. The facts of global heating remain the same, but added explanatory depth satisfies the soul, I find. Next step − solve the problem!
 

2024 August 8

AI Worship

Navneet Alang

We are waiting for AI to transform our lives.
Large language models consume lots of data and find patterns in it. Units of meaning become coded tokens. Using language without thinking or feeling may be why AI writing is often weird.
AI can manage cognition, but nothing suggests that AI has an identity or desires. Our identities and desires arise from our bodies and how they locate our subjective awareness in the world.
Utopian visions of the future can miss questions about political will, ideologies, and interests. The solutions to our problems can be simple. But they are difficult to enact due to human constraints.
We assume AI is intelligent and outsource social and political functions to algorithms. We want an objective authority figure. We want a superhuman assistant to extract truths from falsehoods.
We are looking for a new God.

AR High hopes for AI are reasonable. But we are currently in a bubble for the stock valuations of AI companies. As with the 2020 tech bubble, disappointment will lead to greater realism.
A realistic appraisal reveals AI as a facilitator and multiplier of existing human hopes and dreams. The superhumans will be us, as Yuval Noah Harari has predicted in his book Homo Deus.
My main objection to Harari's projection is that I think our identities will be transformed. Human hankering after wealth, power, and luxury will be throttled by a cloud AI posing an an overlord.
Our human identities will be so transformed by implant and cloud tech (see yesterday's post) that mind merges and the like will lead to something like a Borg collective.
The new God will be a projected superself.
 

2024 August 7

The Quangled Brain

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Quantum entanglement inside the brain could give rise to instant coordination between neurons.
Yong-Cong Chen et al studied the interactions between myelin sheaths and infrared photons emitted by neural mitochondria as part of a cycle of chemical reactions. The photons absorbed by a myelin sheath add energy to its chemical bonds, which can then emit two entangled photons, one after the other. The entanglement could spread over time to regions closely related to cognition.
Chen et al plan further study of how entanglement could impact brain function.

Brain implants
Ingrid Wickelgren

A paralysed man surgically implanted with a brain chip now operates his phone with his thoughts.
Brain−computer interfaces (BCIs) help paralysed people regain lost abilities. They detect signals from neurons using metal wires or electrodes that are either inserted into the brain or under the skull or placed over the scalp. The signals go to a computer.
The Utah array is a 4×4 mm² chip studded with 100 microelectrodes that penetrate the outer layer of the brain. The array can track the firing of 100 individual neurons and record from them. Implanted in people with paralysis, the arrays read signals from the motor cortex.
A man with a severed spinal cord and a Utah array can type at 90 characters per minute by imagining writing them. An AI decodes the hand movement signals and maps them to letters.
A man paralysed from the neck down with two Utah arrays plays a simulated piano with 10 keys by imagining moving specific fingers on either hand. The arrays monitor each finger independently.
A man with paralysed legs had an electrocorticography array put under his skull, above but not penetrating the leg regions of the motor cortex. An AI reads his brain signals and relays them to a stimulator in his spinal cord, enabling him to stand and walk.
Melding human minds with machines will need both read and write channels to the brain.

AR I have believed for decades that quantum effects are decisive in brain function. If neurons are not somehow exploiting entanglement to synchronise their firing, then evolution is missing a trick. Explaining exactly how this works is beyond my pay grade.
I also believe that implants are on the way for consumer interactions with their devices. With robots, the surgery will become routine, akin to tattooing today, and with nanotechnology the implants will become more sophisticated and capable.
I predict that combining the science of neural quanglement with brain implants will enable us to quangle with our devices and to project our minds onto techno neural nets in the cloud. Ecce deus − the rapture of the geeks!

 

AR
Spanish galleon Andalucía visits Poole
28 photos
 

2024 August 6

Harris Picks Walz

CNN

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate.

The math on Tim Walz makes sense
Jonathan Alter

Electoral math has many permutations. Tim Walz is a veteran of the Army National Guard who graduated from high school in a Nebraska town of 400 and later coached a Minnesota high school football team. Once his life story penetrates among voters, he will probably shore up Democrats in parts of the country where they need help the most.
Over the years, rural counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada have felt abandoned by Democrats. Many went for Donald Trump in the last two elections by 20 points or more. But Walz, an authentic rural voice, might change that outcome. If so, Harris will win the election.

Who is Tim Walz?
Rachel Leingang

Tim Walz was born and raised in Nebraska. He became a teacher, first in China, then in Nebraska, and finally in Minnesota, where he taught geography and coached football. He'd enlisted at age 17 and served in the Army National Guard for 24 years.
He ran for office as a Minnesota congressman in 2006, and kept the district until 2016. In 2018, he was elected governor. Now 60, he chairs the Democratic Governors Association.
Walz is a gun owner and a hunter who previously had an A rating from the National Rifle Association. As governor, he signed bills into law that restrict guns, so he now has an F rating from the NRA.
Walz spoke in camo hat and T‑shirt when Trump came to Minnesota last week. A tweet: "He might run for Vice President or he might clean the garage. It's the weekend, anything can happen."
In a recent clip, Walz said Minnesota ranked in the top three happiest states in the union: "Isn't that really the goal here? For some joy? .. That's really good, because it gets us out of the political space and into the human being space."
Former US senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota: "Tim is the most authentically kind of normal person you're going to meet .. No one called Trump weird until Tim Walz did."

Weird 
Michelle Goldberg

Jack Posobiec is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But Unhumans, an anti-democratic screed he co-wrote with ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with an endorsement from JD Vance.
Unhumans says leftists are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent that could end in apocalyptic slaughter: "As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman."
Vance: "In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back."

AR A decent pick. I'm very relieved. Perhaps she will win. I hope so.
 

2024 August 5

England: Days of Rage

Rachel Cunliffe

A week of far-right violence against the police and the British state was sparked by the murder of three children at a Taylor Swift dance class, with more injured.
Arrests by the hundred recall the football hooliganism of decades past, of men spoiling for a fight and seeming almost jubilant to have found a cause for their rage.
Anger grows when something is broken and those in charge do not fix it. Poor economic prospects, the dire state of public services, and prolonged mass immigration feed rising populism.
As to why the murder of three girls with a knife last week sparked such violence, the rioters linked it to illegal immigration, multiculturalism, and Muslim communities in the UK.
Appealing against all forms of populism and nationalism, UK PM Keir Starmer warns: "Don't think that it couldn't happen here."

AR The knife attack was perpetrated by a non-Muslim son of Rwandan immigrants, so the rioters seem to have been misinformed, but their wider motive and simmering anger seem unsurprising.
The issues here are too serious to wish away, and the present government seems no more likely than the last to transform things quickly enough to mollify rioters this summer.
England is not alone: Many states in Europe face very similar issues and risks.
 

2024 August 4

Solar Geoengineering

David Gelles

David Keith believes that by intentionally releasing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, we can lower temperatures worldwide, blunting global warming.
Keith, a University of Chicago professor of geophysical sciences, says the risks are well understood and the additional air pollution is negligible compared to the benefits. Sunlight would not be noticeably dimmer during the daytime, though twilights could be more orange.
Opponents fear solar geoengineering would give people an excuse not to cut fossil fuel emissions and that stopping the sulfur dioxide releases abruptly could result in a termination shock.
Keith: "I'm more motivated even now to push on solar geo .. there are a lot of people in serious policy positions that are taking it seriously."

AR What a horrible idea. Much better would be to build a fleet of solar-powered ships with tall funnels to inject fine sprays of seawater into the atmosphere to seed cloud formation. The clouds would act as sunshades, but they would not pollute the air or discolor twilights. So far as I know, studies show this is a viable scheme.
 

2024 August 3

Atlantic Ocean Current System Could Collapse Soon

Angela Dewan, Angela Fritz

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) system of ocean currents that influences weather across the world could collapse as soon as the late 2030s, a new study suggests.
The AMOC pulls warm surface water from the southern hemisphere and the tropics and distributes it in the cold North Atlantic. The colder, saltier water then sinks and flows south. The mechanism keeps parts of the southern hemisphere warm and parts of the northern hemisphere cool.
The AMOC is being weakened by warmer ocean temperatures and disrupted saltiness caused by climate change. It could shut down between 2037 and 2064 and likely to collapse by 2050. Arctic ice will start creeping south, and after 100 years will extend to the south coast of England.
University of Utrecht marine and atmospheric researcher René van Westen: "All the negative side effects of anthropogenic climate change, they will still continue to go on .. Then if you also have on top of that an AMOC collapse .. the climate will become even more distorted."
Potsdam University physical oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf: "My overall assessment is now that the risk of us passing the tipping point in this century is probably even greater than 50%."

AR So Poole Harbour will begin to ice over 100 years or so from now. I guess I won't be around to see it or to lament the loss of summer beach fun.
But if The Singularity Is Nearer author Ray Kurzweil is right, I could just about live long enough to get my mind immortalized in the cloud, running on a necortex prosthesis implemented in an artificial neural network accessed via implanted carbon filaments in my brain and a wi‑fi router.
Let's be realistic: I'll miss out on the ice games in Poole Bay.
 

2024 August 2

Advanced Meditation

Matthew Sacchet

Advanced meditation goes beyond mindfulness to include states that include ecstatic bliss states, insights into how the mind works, compassionate experiences, and transformation.
We aim to develop an understanding of advanced meditation from a multidisciplinary perspective: theory and philosophy, foundations, mechanisms, development, and applications.
The states that occur when someone has mastered concentration meditation are characterized by ecstatic bliss, expansive clarity, and awareness of subtle aspects of consciousness.
Once someone has mastered insight meditation, their consciousness falls away. When consciousness returns, it is profoundly clear and peaceful. Practitioners call this a reset.
Advanced meditation can impact mental health, personal thriving, and the meaning of life.

AR I think I've mastered insight meditation, but I tend to call it an afternoon snooze.
 

2024 August 1

Experimental Metaphysics

Amanda Gefter

Eric Cavalcanti does experimental metaphysics. He has published a theorem that places strict constraints on the nature of reality.
In 1964, JS Bell proved that for any theory presuming locality and realism, there is an upper limit on how correlated certain events can be, but quantum mechanics breaks that limit.
In the wake of experiments violating Bell-type inequalities, several views of reality remained on the table. You could keep realism and give up locality, you could keep locality and give up realism, or you could give up on a prior reality but still keep a final reality where all the facts fit together.
Eugene Wigner proposed a thought experiment: Wigner's friend goes into a lab and measures a quantum system. Wigner, standing outside, observes the the lab and says no measurement has taken place. The state of his friend and the state of the system are entangled in a superposition. In principle, Wigner can even measure physical effects of the superposition.
Časlav Brukner combined Wigner's friend with a Bell-type experiment to prove a new no‑go theorem. He considered two friends and two Wigners: The friends each measure half of an entangled system, and then each of the Wigners makes one of two possible measurements on his friend's lab. The measurement outcomes will be correlated, with upper bounds on the strength of the correlations.
Brukner's proof inspired Cavalcanti et al to publish a strong no‑go theorem on the paradox. Given quantum mechanics, the following three assumptions cannot all be true: locality, freedom of choice, and absoluteness of observed events.
In 2020, Cavalcanti et al reported the results of a "proof-of-principle version" of their experiment. It showed a clear violation of inequalities derived from the joint assumptions of locality, freedom of choice, and the absoluteness of observed events.
The experiment is hard to do because of the observers. A human Wigner's friend would be practically impossible to keep in a superposition.
Cavalcanti suggests using an AI to run the experiment. He says the friend could be an AI algorithm running on a large quantum computer, performing a simulated experiment in a simulated lab.
Defining an observer is a task for experimental metaphysics.

AR This issue of imagining quantum reality has resonated in my head for decades. My best effort to explain my view remains that spelled out in my 2009 book Mindworlds.
In short, I propose a "psychophysics" of worlds, where each world corresponds to an observed perspective on quantum reality. Within each world, a totality of facts determines a limited classical landscape, surrounded by a quantum fog of virtual completions into the details and into the future. As time passes, the landscape grows as the fog condenses onto its surface in an incremental process of symmetry breaking that pops qubits into bits.
This proposal was inspired by Hegelian dialectical logic, the ranked universal sets of axiomatic set theory, and a line from Wittgenstein's Tractatus (proposition 5.63: "I am my world"). Psychophysical worlds also correspond to the "worlds of consciousness" that William James cited in his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Sad to say, a sound technical formulation of my proposed psychophysics is now beyond my powers. May my sketch inspire someone to have a go.

 

AR
BCP Council Civic Centre (behind the war memorial), Bournemouth, Sunday, July 28

AR "BCP" [Bournemouth−Christchurch−Poole] is a dumb name for my metropolitan area.
I propose that it be called "Wessex City" to honor Thomas Hardy,
Dorset's greatest novelist, who called Dorset Wessex.
 

2024 July 31

Wittgenstein's Tractatus

AW Moore

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is one of the greatest philosophical works of the 20th century. It first appeared in 1921.
It contains 525 numbered propositions. Propositions 2.21 and 2.22 are comments on proposition 2.2, which is a comment on proposition 2, one of seven top-level propositions. The propositions have an aphoristic quality.
Wittgenstein says the world is the totality of facts. Facts are determined by states of affairs. States of affairs are configurations of objects. A thought or a statement is a fact determined by a configuration of signs. The thought or statement serves as a picture of the fact. It is true if the objects are thus configured, false if not.
The opening propositions concern the division of the world into facts. The second part of the vision concerns representation and reflects on the nature of logic, philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. The conclusion is a sequence of laconic remarks about value, death, God, and the meaning of life. Proposition 7 advocates silence about the inexpressible.
Wittgenstein wrote much of the Tractatus during military service in WW1. It was published in the journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell.
The first English translation appeared in 1922, a revised edition in 1933. BF McGuinness and DF Pears produced a second English translation in 1961. We now have three new English translations: by Michael Beaney for Oxford, Alexander Booth for Penguin, and Damion Searls for Norton.
For the Tractatus, a crucial desideratum is fidelity to the author's philosophical intentions. But the book is also a work of art. All three translators are sensitive to this.
Only Beaney is a professional philosopher, and it shows. Booth manages an elegant and successful translation, but he is occasionally led astray. Searls' lack of expertise often proves disastrous, but he sometimes brings the ideas to life.
Will any of these new translations become the standard? I suspect not.

AR I studied the Tractatus intensively at Oxford in 1971/72. It was hard work, but there was a large volume of secondary literature that collectively unpacked the main ideas. I used the 1961 translation by Pears and McGuinness, supplemented by checks of the German original.
The logical ideas in the Tractatus are mostly derived from those of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. But Russell was too dazzled by Wittgenstein's genius as one of his students in Cambridge to understand all the claims in the Tractatus, as he admitted in his introduction.
Cambridge philosophers accepted the Tractatus as Wittgenstein's doctoral thesis before offering him a fellowship. The book then became a bible for the logical positivists in Vienna. After WW2, the Oxford philosophy faculty became the epicentre of Wittgenstein worship.
 

2024 July 30

Tech Bros

Lily Lynch

Silicon Valley has embraced Donald Trump and Peter Thiel's chosen candidate JD Vance. Elon Musk is endorsing Trump. Mark Zuckerberg said Trump's fist-pumping "fight, fight, fight" moment was "one of the most badass things" he'd ever seen.
The Silicon Valley tech bros beef with the Biden administration on AI, start-ups, crypto, and taxes. They say the Biden administration has been uniquely hostile to their interests.
Harris has spoken about the dangers of AI. Tech barons say over-restricting AI at this stage will risk weakening the US military. The Department of Defense calls AI the "third offset" beside nuclear weapons and precision guidance.
The tech bros say the Biden administration has been too zealous in its efforts to crush crypto currency. Trump once called crypto a scam but now says he's the crypto candidate.
Tech titans also object to the administration's proposal to tax unrealized capital gains on individuals worth over $100 million. Marc Andreessen says this would kill start-ups and venture capital.
Thiel says US innovation is held back by the "zombie" establishment and wants to create a new state free of liberal pathologies. Online communities would move from the cloud into a crowdfunded site to build a libertarian haven. Thiel backs Prospera on an island off the coast of Honduras.
Tech barons want to hire by merit. They say privileging identity over merit has led to a competency crisis in many fields. They say Kamala Harris confirms their worst fears about DEI incompetence and overzealous regulation.

AR With trillions in assets between them, these dudes will call the shots. Prepare for new AI jeopardy, crypto piracy, and economic inequality. Zombie liberal regimes will fall worldwide, crypto scams will fool millions, and deepfake agitprop will flood the news with toxic trash.
One glimmer of hope: Thiel's Prospera and similar statelets will be tempting to any joker who can persuade a cloud AI to drop a precision nuke onto their patch.
 

2024 July 29

Catholic America

Paul Elie

Senator JD Vance is a convert from Never Trumper to fervent acolyte who became a Catholic in 2019.
In a 2020 essay, Vance recalled that when he entered college he was an atheist who read Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. The figures who changed his thinking included St Augustine and René Girard, a French-born polymath who converted to Catholicism in 1959.
In 2023, Vance debated at the Catholic University of America with Patrick Deneen, who says liberalism has become an "invasive progressive tyranny" and must be replaced by conservatism. Vance greeted Deneen with a bear hug, identified himself as a member of the post-liberal right, and said he views his role in Congress as "explicitly anti‑regime."
Columbia University historian Mark Lilla: "The Catholic post-liberals would like to establish .. a more communitarian vision of the good society, one in which democratic institutions would in some sense be subordinate to .. the authority of the Catholic Church."
If Trump wins in November, Vance will be the voice of Catholic post-liberals in the White House.

AR A Catholic United States could be as benign as Italy or Poland. But with Trump to launch the adventure, it could first devolve into a fascist dystopia that triggered a civil war with militant secessionists in New England, the West Coast, and Utah.
Rewriting the US constitution to accommodate a Catholic theocracy could ease relations with Latin America, but Trump's border wall would nix that. Worse would be the human rights implications, starting with reproductive freedom.
Even worse would be the geopolitical implications. Imagine the rhetoric surrounding a decoupling from liberal Europe, a trade war with Communist China, and holy wars with Islamic states. We'd suffer a century of discord.
 

2024 July 28

Homeland Nationalism

Farah Stockman

Donald Trump's running mate JD Vance says America is not just an idea but a homeland. This is an important key to the MAGA movement.
People who speak of America as an idea tend to have a global outlook. Those who emphasize home­land see American resources squandered on outsiders, rather than the needs of citizens.
Much is troubling about Vance and the MAGA movement, but this message resonates. The downside of the notion that America is an idea is that anybody can walk across the border to claim it.
An American homeland is attractive for Americans disoriented by the modern world. The impulse to reclaim a sense of place in the world helps explain rising nationalism in many countries.
When Vance spoke about the American homeland, he cut loose from the corporatist, globalist Republicans. He is skeptical about unchecked immigration, but maybe not all immigration.
Vance said welcoming "newcomers into our American family" was an American tradition. That's how many people with decades of family ties to their communities think about newcomers.
Belonging to a place takes time, effort, and willingness to fit in. That's true of America. But the country also must feel like home.

AR Homelanders have a more localized sense of territoriality than globalists. Territoriality is a basic animal thing, but for humans it typically centers on a family home or village. Only for overthinkers like me does it dilate to planet Earth.
An emphasis on territoriality in the homeland sense is evident in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He identified home with a language community and its associated national traditions. This sense has found a resonance worldwide in recent decades.
Heidegger's philosophy of home lay behind German National Socialism in his lifetime. Now it lies behind Vladimir Putin's Russian nationalism, Iran's Islamic nationalism, and right-wing nationalist movements in modern Europe.
 

2024 July 27

Global Britain

Philippe Sands

In the first postwar decade, Britain was a global leader.
Seen from abroad, successive British governments offered an air of entitlement and hubris. To many in Britain, the sense of continuity with a colonial past persisted. With such a mindset, grievous mistakes were made. The vote to leave the EU damaged Britain's reputation.
British governments and their media supporters regularly trashed the European Convention on Human Rights. Foreigners were subjected to an even harsher hostile environment. Parliament was somehow persuaded to override a Supreme Court judgment.
Not long after signing the Northern Ireland protocol with the EU, the UK government was threatening to tear it up. For a country whose trade and reputation were constructed on a supposed respect for international accords, such actions were reckless and damaging.
On its international engagements, Britain is often seen as stuck in the past and unable to confront new realities. Britain is a wealthy country, but its trajectory is one of relative decline. Its largest trading partner by far is the EU. Leaving the EU was an act of self‑harm.
Britain needs a clean break with past attitudes.

AR This not exactly news, but it remains important and true. Sand is a distinguished professor of law at University College London and Harvard Law School, so his opinion carries weight.
For what it's worth, I cannot rest content with my British citizenship until the shortcomings cited here have been properly addressed.
 

2024 July 26

Beyond Authenticity

Samantha Rose Hillis

Martin Heidegger introduced authenticity in his book Sein und Zeit (1927). He tried to recover Sein, an authentic version of the self, from the inauthentic ordinariness of everyday life.
Sein can be experienced only when we step out of the flow of everyday life. To experience it is to experience all that being human means. We forget it when we slip into a routine way of being.
The authentic self is the self that exists for the self alone. To step out of the flow of everyday life is an exceptional occurrence. We are most fully ourselves only when we leave everyday routine behind.
Karl Jaspers asked what it means to live authentically. We can only exist in the world with others. Our authentic self is always in relation to others and the world we live in.
Jean-Paul Sartre saw authenticity as ethical. For an existentialist, existence precedes essence. We are thrown into the world without any fixed substance and must invent ourselves.
Hannah Arendt doubted authenticity. The will, a space of tension inside the self where the mind is pulled in multiple directions at once, is what makes us free.

AR Arendt's invocation of will in this context is presumably intended to remind us of two earlier philosophical invocations of will, namely those by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.
For Schopenhauer, will was something more universal, beyond human, perhaps a protean force driving evolution on Earth. He was too early to appreciate the power of Darwinian evolution.
For Nietzsche, will remained animal, but became something more like the will to power. Arendt was all too aware of the more sinister connotations there.

 

NORAD
Dawn at North American Aerospace Defense Command radar site, north Alaska
NORAD fighter jets intercepted two Russian and two Chinese bombers flying near Alaska on Wednesday.
The bombers remained in international airspace and were not seen as a threat.
USAF F‑16 and F‑35 and RCAF CF‑18 fighters intercepted the Russian TU‑95 and Chinese H‑6 bombers.
This was the first sighting of Chinese bombers in the Alaska ADIZ.
 

2024 July 25

Ukraine and the UK

Brendan Simms

Domestic politics may win an election, but governments must accept the primacy of foreign policy.
Keir Starmer faces Russian aggression in Ukraine, the Israeli campaign to defeat Hamas, a possible Israeli attack on Hezbollah, and a possible clash between the United States and China over Taiwan.
In America, a Trump−Vance ticket is reason for anxiety. Donald Trump has threatened to reduce US support for NATO. If he were president, he could withdraw the US security umbrella over Europe.
The Labour election manifesto says "keeping the country safe" in the face of threats from hostile actors such as Vladimir Putin is its first duty. Failure in this duty would void all the rest.
Foreign secretary David Lammy needs to offer Washington measures against Beijing in return for continued military engagement in Europe. He also needs a strategy for victory in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin aims to keep Ukraine out of the EU or NATO. If he wins in Ukraine, he will boost his forces facing NATO. Europeans must stop him, which will be harder if Ukraine is defeated.
If Starmer can contain Putin, he will go down in history as one of our greatest prime ministers.

AR Starmer is no Churchill, but he must persuade Brits to square up for for a fight with the Russians. This is the best way to prevent the confrontation from escalating to open war within NATO Europe. Sad to say, it's too late to contain Putin Russia without paying a hard price.

 

BBC
Vice President Kamala Harris
 

2024 July 24

Kamala Harris Can Win

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Kamala Harris represents a fresh start for American politics. She can offer a hopeful, unifying vision.
There is a clear choice in this election. On one side is a convicted criminal who cares only about himself and is trying to turn back the clock. On the other is a savvy former prosecutor and successful vice president who embodies our faith that America's best days are still ahead.
Harris will face unique challenges as the first Black and South Asian woman to be at the top of a major party's ticket. She will have to reach out to voters who have been skeptical of Democrats and mobilize young voters who need convincing. She has a great story to tell.
As a prosecutor and attorney general in California, Harris took on drug traffickers, polluters, and predatory lenders. As a US senator, she questioned squirming Trump administration officials and nominees. As vice president, she helped the president make hard decisions.
I look forward to hearing her prosecute a compelling case against Donald Trump.

We're going to win
Mallory McMorrow

The last few days have felt like nothing I've ever experienced. Thousands of new volunteers have signed up. A staggering amount of content has been produced, all organically.
Harris is polished, prepared, and ready. She is exactly who we need to fire up voters from Detroit to the suburbs. We have the perfect foil in JD Vance, who has staked his identity on his hillbilly child­hood but comes across as a tech bro with billionaire donors. Authenticity matters.
Harris can lean in to her prosecutor credibility. She is tough where it matters. If she can present herself as a fighter on freedom, equality, and opportunity, she can bring Democrats together. Her running mate has to be someone who can win in a battleground state.

All of us are now optimistic
Simon Rosenberg

I am very excited about what is happening in our party. The transition from Biden to Harris has been remarkably seamless and successful. Her initial remarks on Monday were strong, powerful and clearly her own words. The Democratic Party is fired up and unified behind her.
Harris is more in command of this moment than people understand. For running mate, she has only good picks ahead of her: Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina, or Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.

AR It's looking promising so far. But she'll need nerves of steel to resist Republican attacks, even if Trump's demented word salads slide off like vomit from a marble worktop. The deeper question is how credibly she could face off against Vlad Putin or Xi Jinping.
 

2024 July 23

Harris Clinches Delegates

Shane Goldmacher, Reid J Epstein

Vice President Kamala Harris has asserted herself as the de facto Democratic nominee for president. Virtually every potential remaining rival bowed out and she clinched the support of enough delegates to win the nomination.

Harris should make a Contract With America
Ross Douthat

Harris is a weak candidate. A governor not tied to an unpopular administration would be a better choice than a liberal Californian. She should put out a five-point list and make that her policy script for the remainder of the campaign.

Harris can run as the cop versus the felon
David French

Harris is running against the oldest major party nominee in American history. A smart Harris campaign will use racist MAGA rhetoric to highlight MAGA extremism. She needs to outwork Trump in a barn­storming campaign.

A spontaneous bandwagon effect for Harris
Michelle Goldberg

There was no hope when Biden was still in the race. Now there is hope. The instant flood of endorse­ments for Harris demonstrated great support for her among Democrats. There was an outpouring of exhilaration and relief.

Harris has threaded the needle well
Lydia Polgreen

Harris is in line with a majority of Americans on the issues that matter most. She needs to lean into her strength and pick a strong running mate. People close to her say she is at her best in a crisis. This is a crisis.

This gentleman would be the first
Zach Montague

Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, would become America's first-ever first gentleman if Harris were to win the presidency in November. He is also the first Jewish spouse of a vice president or president.
Now 59, Emhoff was raised in New Jersey before his family moved to California. He attended law school in Los Angeles and worked in major law firms as an entertainment lawyer, earning up to $1.2 million a year before stepping away in 2020. He has two adult children from a previous marriage.
Emhoff married Harris in 2014. He takes a supporting role in the marriage and also does public service work: "Lifting women up so that they can carry out important roles is a very manly thing."

AR I'm impressed by the surge of relief among Democrats and by such emphatic support for Harris. Evidently the strength of feeling behind the desire to stop Trump is big enough to move mountains. I'm beginning to cheer up again.
 

Autocracy

Sam Adler-Bell

Anne Applebaum says autocrats make deals with each other. The opacity of global finance lets them trade sanctioned products and precious minerals, launder dirty money, and collude to evade western sanctions. This is Autocracy, Inc.
Globalization has integrated autocracies with one another. American and European trade dependence on the autocratic world became a weapon against the West. Shell companies buy apartments for Russian and Chinese oligarchs, and professionals prosper on the wealth of kleptocrats.
Applebaum hopes to fight autocrats with stronger sanctions. Sanctions can be effective when the shock is quick and the goal is concrete. They are less successful when the hurt is endless and aimed at political change.

AR See my blog notes about the book on July 21.

 

⦿ Bonnie Cash for The New York Times
Biden will not run for re-election in November
 

2024 July 22

Biden Endorses Harris

CNN

President Joe Biden has ended his reelection bid and endorsed VP Kamala Harris to succeed him.

Polls: Harris−Trump match a close race
Jennifer Agiesta

A CNN Poll of Polls average of recent polls testing Kamala Harris against Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election found a close race with no clear leader.

Donations: $50 million and rising
Samantha Waldenberg

On Sunday, Kamala Harris raised almost $50 million in grassroots donations for her campaign after Joe Biden endorsed her.

A donor: 'This is transformative'
Fredreka Schouten, Pamela Brown, Jamie Gangel

The Biden campaign has filed papers to transform itself into the "Harris for President" committee. But Harris is not yet the Democratic presidential nominee. Some 4,700 delegates will decide who becomes their candidate.
A donor: "Every election is about something different. This one's so much about anti-Donald Trump."
A major donor: "This is transformative."

Prosecutor Harris versus felon Trump
Edward-Isaac Dovere

Kamala Harris has spent much more of her life as a prosecutor than as a senator or vice president. Party advisers say her candidacy will lean heavily on her background as a district attorney, attorney general, and cross examiner in Senate hearings.
Advisers say that this will make her come across as fighting for Americans while Trump is trying to serve himself. It plays up the strength, intelligence, and toughness that are part of being a prosecutor but can also be of a commander in chief.
Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren: "As a former prosecutor, Vice President Harris has a lot of experience holding convicted felons accountable. She was fighting on behalf of abused women. She was in the trenches against giant banks. She was out in the middle of multiple fights every day as a prosecutor and then attorney general in California."
Reproductive Freedom for All president Mini Timmaraju: "Her whole career she's been taking on tough cases and tough characters like Donald Trump. Her reputation has grown from her success in putting bad guys away. And now she has the chance to put the ultimate bad guy away for good."
Harris: "As many of you know, I am a former prosecutor .. The prosecutor approach is really about just deconstructing an issue. It's presenting and reminding folks about the empirical evidence that shows us exactly how we arrived at this point .. He can't hide from this stuff."

AR CNN will naturally seek to boost her campaign, but her chances look quite good. I fear that latent racism and sexism might prevent too many voters from backing her to serve as commander in chief.
Putting such doubts aside, like many millions of concerned onlookers worldwide, I earnestly hope that Harris (or the final Democratic pick) wins and consigns Trump to the ash heap of history.
 

2024 July 21

Biden Quits Presidential Race

Joe Biden

I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it's been the best decision I've made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the worst among them all?
Kaitlan Collins

In a phone call with CNN minutes after Biden announced his exit from the 2024 race, former president Trump responded: "He is the worst president in the history of our country. He goes down as the single worst president by far in the history of our country."

A Trump−Vance White House could undermine European security
David Hastings Dunn, Stefan Wolff

Donald Trump and JD Vance have reignited European fears of American abandonment as they pivot toward the Indo-Pacific.
For Vance, arms for Ukraine would be better sent to Taiwan. In April, he wrote that rather than sending more military aid to Ukraine, Washington should ask Kyiv to start negotiating with Russia. This position is shared by Trump and appreciated by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
If America ended its support for Ukraine, there is little prospect that the European allies could plug this gap. Germany is planning to halve its military aid for Kyiv next year following an agreement by the G7 nations to use interest from frozen Russia assets to support a loan to Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has now indicated that the time for negotiations with Russia may be nearing. Any agreement with Russia to end the war in Ukraine is likely to accelerate the feared US abandonment of Europe. A Trump administration would focus on China.
Ascendant Trump-aligned forces in Europe would likely see this as an opportunity to advocate for appeasing Russia and lowering defence budgets. This would endanger European security. It would not only put trust into an untrustworthy Russian leadership but also neglect China.
A US retreat from its role as guarantor of European security will pose many challenges for Europe.

AR Biden ran a great presidency. He has safeguarded his legacy by stepping down before too late. With her youth, energy, and intelligence, Harris can surely win in his place − we can hope for the best but still brace for the worst.
The security of Europe against Russian aggression is a nightmare question. Sadly, Europeans have grown weak under American protection. Now the bill is due, and decades of peace and prosperity seem to be over.
 

Autocracy

Anne Applebaum

Donald Trump has a vision for how the United States should work, which involves him being in direct charge of the military and them fighting not to uphold the constitution but for his personal interests.
Trump has convinced something like a third of Americans that the 2020 election was stolen. Seeding a conspiracy theory is a common feat among autocrats. Their autocracies are run by networks of kleptocratic financial structures, security services, and professional propagandists.
The Russians have cultivated Trump for a long time. He has been anti-NATO since the 1980s and has openly scorned American allies all his life. For the Russians, helping to get an American president who doesn't like NATO in office is a lot cheaper than fighting wars.
As journalists, we have to do better than pessimism.

AR Applebaum is the American wife of Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski and an impressively insightful author on East−West politics and history. Her latest book, Autocracy, Inc, presents their business model as a corrupt network operating behind a veil of propaganda.
The American model of Trumpist autocracy will network with the tech titans to form a US oligarchy. If the titans wish to secure their rule, they will work to improve the lives of their workers and stabilize their local communities. This could be an improvement on American capitalism.
An American autocracy will find it easier to get on with Russia and China, not to mention numerous other states around the world. The downside will be a host of problems for Ukraine, Taiwan, and all the liberal states of Europe who wish to protect their ideals.

 

⦿ Evan Vucci/AP
Donald Trump hit in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, July 13:
"I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin."
Trump on this image: "A lot of people say it's the most iconic photo they've ever seen."

AR Even in extremis, his egoism shines through. He can't help himself.
 

2024 July 20

A Glimmer of Hope for America

Nicholas Kristof

Donald Trump had a triumphant week. But his acceptance speech highlighted an unruly tendency to hail himself as America's Caesar. Only a Democratic victory can shake the GOP out of its Trump cult.
American poisons, divisions, inequalities, and frustrations have come to the boil. Similar stews led to Brexit in Britain and to the advance of right-wing populists in France and Italy. Only by repudiating extremism can voters really make America great again.
Undercurrents of violence are stirring in America. A poll found that 1 in 5 voters believe that Americans may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track. Yet more Americans support violence to resist Trump than to back him.
Trump's running mate JD Vance could dominate the GOP for decades. In his acceptance speech, Vance denounced "Wall Street barons" for crashing the economy and called for "a leader who's not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man."
Many Americans are angry at elites. Banks were rescued in the 2008 financial crisis, but 10 million people were allowed to lose their homes as blue-collar wages stagnated. We accept that poor children will attend poor schools. We embrace trade policies that move factories abroad but don't help the workers or communities left behind. Neither party has prevented over 100,000 Americans a year dying of overdoses.
Trump and Vance are reaching out to those angry Americans. Democrats fearing four more years of Trump are pressing Biden to withdraw. The moment is pregnant with opportunity.

The rise of the American broligarchs
Carole Cadwalladr

In 2016, shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, he invited a group of Silicon Valley tech titans to a meeting at Trump Tower. It was an awkward affair, but Peter Thiel was happy.
Last week, Donald Trump chose a tech bro, Senator JD Vance, to be his VP. And Trump received the benediction of Elon Musk. Other figures in Silicon Valley have boarded the Trump bandwagon.
Trump's running mate is the man Thiel sponsored. Thiel had given Vance a job at his VC firm, backed him to start his own venture fund, and later invested $15 million in his run for the senate.
In Putin's Russia, political and commercial interests are one and the same. Thiel is betting on such unity in America. In the new gold rush, the tech bro oligarchs − broligarchs − will share the spoils.

AR American Republicans have woken up and smelt the coffee. The tech titans are the real power in modern America. With a collective wealth of many trillions, they have to be the puppet-masters for the political circus.
The rise of the oligarchs is a phenomenon I predicted (rather late, given the history of post-Soviet Russia) in my 2010 book on Globorg. It's an easy consequence of the old adage to follow the money. Tech giants are organized not as democracies but like totalitarian states, hence the decay of democracy in Russia and its peril in America.
Politicians have an obvious remedy in their monopoly on the use of organized violence. This explains the perennial political temptation to exploit conflicts for political gain. Woke liberals are too fine to grasp this tool.
 

2024 July 19

Donald Trump's Second Coming

Susan B Glasser

The Republican National Convention's finale on Thursday night began with a clown show.
Hulk Hogan shouted about "the Trumpites who are going to be running wild the next four years" and then stripped off his jacket and ripped off his shirt to reveal a red Trump−Vance 2024 T‑shirt: "I want the world to know that Donald Trump is a real American hero."
In the imperial red MAGA box, just above the convention floor, Trump stood at attention, wearing his signature navy suit and red tie. At the end of Hogan's act, Trump pumped his fist in the air.
Two hours later, the wounded showman took the stage. Behind him was a replica of the White House, lit up in red and blue. Trump gave his account of the bullet coming within a quarter inch of killing him, of the blood he found on his hand, and how he knew he had survived: "I had God on my side."
Instead of the "American carnage" Trump emphasized in his Inaugural Address from 2017, he spoke of healing the discord in society: "I am running to be President for all America."
Soon enough, the audience was booing as Trump warned that the hated Democrats were "destroying our country" and cheering him on as he demanded the firing of union leaders and rambled about the "China virus" and "plunder" by rapacious foreigners.
The theme of the speech and the campaign was summed up in one word: "Fight!"

AR This could herald years of life-threatening nightmare for the whole western world. Democrats have a duty to field a credible candidate pair to offer sane US voters a way out. I'm beginning to glimpse a pall of doom as I contemplate the impending Trumpocalypse and its aftermath.
 

2024 July 18

'Jesus Is My Savior, Trump Is My President'

Financial Times

He is a convicted felon, a conspiracist, a philanderer, and a businessman who has lied about his wealth. He thinks America has been too soft on democratic allies, too hard on authoritarian rivals, and that immigrants are "spoiling" it from the inside.
Donald Trump is the clear favorite to win the US presidential election in November. The photograph of him defiantly fist-pumping moments after his attempted assassination on July 13 is likely to become the defining image of the 2024 campaign.

Trump, unity, and MAGA miracles at the RNC
Antonia Hitchens

Trump's campaign has always been inflected with a bit of martyrdom. When he walked onto the convention floor on Monday night, his right ear bandaged, it was the most profound and unexpected culmination of all the messianic talk.

Vance delivers his big speech in Milwaukee
Michael C Bender

Senator JD Vance at the Republican National Convention: "I pledge to every American, no matter your party, I will give everything I have to serve you and to make this country a place where every dream you have for yourself, your family, and your country will be possible once again."
Vance painted the Chinese Communist Party as a threat to the American middle class and said the Republican ticket would "not import foreign labor" but would rebuild factories, protect supply chains, and "stamp more and more products with that beautiful label Made in the USA."
On leading: "We need a leader who fights for the people of our country. We need a leader who's not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man − union and non-union alike − a leader who won't sell out to multinational corporations but will stand up for American industry."
On ideas: "Shouldn't we be governed by a party that is unafraid to debate ideas and come to the best solution? That's the Republican Party of the next four years: united in our love for this country and committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas."

AR Vance once asked himself whether Trump was the American Hitler. My study of the rise and fall of the Third Reich leads me to recall a similar groundswell of messianic fervor in Germany back then. My recent reread of Zealot by Reza Aslan leads me to recall a similar groundswell of messianic fervor in and around Jerusalem in the years before the Romans destroyed the Jewish state in 70 CE.
 

2024 July 17

Why Trump Picked Vance

Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Trump's running mate JD Vance is an attack dog for Trump. Raised in Appalachian Ohio, Vance served as a marine in Iraq before attending Ohio State, then Yale Law School, where his mentor Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, encouraged him to write a memoir.
Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016 and became a bestseller. During the 2016 campaign, Vance messaged his former roommate: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler."
Vance's rags-to-riches story showed cinematic promise. In 2020, by which time Vance had worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, and earned the patronage of Peter Thiel, Hillbilly Elegy was released as a movie directed by Ron Howard and starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.
Vance attributes his transformation into attack dog to a shift he detected in liberalism: "The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt − there's no law, there's just power. And the goal here is to get back in power."

From coal country to Yale
Bill Gates

The world JD Vance describes in Hillbilly Elegy is one I know only vicariously. Vance grew up in Appalachian Ohio and Kentucky, in poor white communities where family strife was a constant.
Hillbilly Elegy is not just an important read but also a great one. There are no big cliffhangers and no plot mysteries propelling this story. We know from the outset that the narrator survives his chaotic childhood and lands at Yale Law School.
Vance: "Even at my best, I'm a delayed explosion − I can be defused, but only with skill and precision .. In my worst moments, I convince myself that there is no exit."

AR I watched Hillbilly Elegy again last night and found it well worth the time. Starting his career with success like that can make a man insensitive to the struggles of others, but Vance seems smart enough to avoid that error. On the other hand, siding with Trump ..
 

2024 July 16

Trump's Running Mate JD Vance

Jack Forrest

Donald Trump has chosen JD Vance his running mate. Vance is an author and senator once known as a "Trump whisperer" for his understanding of the former president's voter base.
Vance, 39, wrote a 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which was turned into a 2020 Netflix movie starring Amy Adams. He served in the Marine Corps in Iraq, then attended Ohio State University and Yale Law School, then worked as a venture capitalist before running for office.
His wife, Usha, is a fellow Yale Law School alum who grew up in San Diego as the daughter of Indian immigrants. She worked from 2015 at a law firm but has now resigned from it. The Vances have three young children.
Vance deleted his past anti-Trump tweets in 2021. In 2016, he had wondered whether Trump was an American Hitler, and wrote in The Atlantic that Trump was "cultural heroin" for his base.
The freshman senator from Ohio won his election in 2022 after receiving Trump's endorsement as well as funding from tech mogul Peter Thiel. He now backs Trump: "Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016. I regret being wrong about the guy."
Vance is a Christian conservative. A day after Ohio voters approved a 2023 ballot measure to protect access to abortion, he urged Republicans to embrace a federal ban on the procedure.
Vance sees the limits on a VP's role differently from former VP Mike Pence. Vance says he would not have certified the 2020 election results until states submitted pro-Trump electors.

Trump + Vance = Double MAGA
Edward Luce

Any doubts that Donald Trump would go full "America First" were banished with his VP pick. JD Vance is a Trump cheerleader among Republicans.
Vance is an intelligent and forceful exponent of Trumpism. No Republican senator has done as much to sell Project 2025. He is a Christian nationalist, a critic of globalization, and a sceptic of NATO.
Vance opposes sending US military aid to Ukraine. In picking him, Trump is saying he expects to win in November and aims to go full MAGA.

Trump selects an inheritor
Shane Goldmacher

For nearly nine years, Donald Trump has been the face of Republican politics and leader of the MAGA movement. On Monday, the former president came as close as ever to anointing a successor.
If elected in November, Trump can serve only a single term. The choice of JD Vance as his running mate immediately vaults the first-term senator to the forefront of the GOP's future.
Vance, 39, is a Marine veteran who has thoroughly remade himself as a MAGA enthusiast. He has been serving in public office for just 18 months and embraced such radical ideas as calling for the firing of "every civil servant in the administrative state" to replace them with "our" people.
Republicans hope the Trump−Vance ticket will cement the appeal of the Republican party to the working class. The pick is a victory for America First.

Trump is an authoritarian
Jan-Werner Müller

US democracy must be protected from Trump. Democracy is about processing conflicts in a peaceful manner. No one should give in to the notion that criticizing politicians is incitement to violence.

AR Smart pick by Trump. He's not too egoist to set up a successor who can fire up the party base. But he's savvy enough to pick someone so young and new to politics as to be no threat as long as the old man lives.
 

2024 July 15

Planning the Second Term

Jonathan Blitzer

A wealthy network called the Conservative Partnership Institute is seen by many in Washington as the next Trump administration in waiting.
CPI was founded in 2017 by former Republican senator Jim DeMint as an activist hub. It began in a small rented office on Pennsylvania Avenue. Then the White House called to ask for help filling vacancies in the administration.
In November 2020, when Trump refused to accept his election loss, CPI was involved in efforts to cast doubt on the results. In December, partisans came up with a plan to disrupt the process of certifying the results on January 6, 2021.
In 2021, senior figures from the Trump administration needed a place to land during the Biden years. CPI helped form new groups for them. But the Trump campaign is holding back from their plan for the second term, Project 2025.
A former White House official: "He wouldn't want to be seen as taking guidance from any other human being."

AR The long historical tragedy unfolds. The failed assassination only emboldens his supporters and makes his election more probable. Meanwhile, Biden's growing senility combines with Democratic weakness to handicap the alternative.
 

2024 July 14

Trump Assassination Attempt

The New York Times

Americans received a sobering reminder on Saturday of the threat that political violence poses to our democracy. Donald Trump was not seriously injured by gunfire at an evening campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. At least one person at the rally was killed.
The shooting is being investigated as an attempted assassination. Any attempt to resolve an election through violence is abhorrent. Violence is antithetical to democracy. The challenge now confronting Americans is to prevent a greater tragedy.

AR This is no surprise to me. A divisive candidate and US gun violence are a volatile combination. After seeing the movie CIVIL WAR again recently, I see US violence at this level as the lesser evil.
 

2024 July 13

A Scientific Genius

Sam Leith

Benjamín Labatut: "Why am I interested in mad scientists?"
His books When We Cease to Understand the World and The MANIAC pivot around the time when quantum physics killed off the clockwork universe, when Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem broke the logical foundations of mathematics, and when the atomic age was born. He is attracted to the characters who pursued these discoveries, at the cost of their peace of mind and often their sanity.
Labatut: "It's like mystics: They reached their Godhead .. One hundred years after Christ was nailed on a cross, you start to get the Gospels. That's where we are."
The principal protagonist of The MANIAC is John von Neumann, who began his career in the foundations of math, became a central figure in the Manhattan Project, designed the first American computer, set out the basis of game theory, and was one of the fathers of artificial intelligence.
Labatut: "Humankind is never gonna rid itself of its impulse toward apotheosis. We're driven by this thirst for the absolute that's cooked into our minds."
Labatut is attracting anglophone attention: "I grew up halfway between Chile and the Netherlands, speaking English .. I know nothing about mathematics."
On novels, he is dismissive: "I'm interested in ideas. I think so much of writing doesn't have to do with ideas. It has to do with, you know, the vicissitudes of our character. Those things bore me to death."
He explains: "The people I admire the most in every field have this wondrous ability to let their unconscious bleed into what they do. I really think that the highest form of intelligence is possession from outside .. I have to write about the most profound and confounding things out there."
On the rise of AI: "When you have a mathematical system that can run language, you have the two most powerful things we have developed as a species working together .. I think that we are absolutely on the verge of something."

A dystopian nonfiction novel set in the present
John Banville

Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World is a work of fiction based on real events. It begins with a guided tour of some of the more diabolical inventions prompted by two world wars. Then we are in more tranquil regions, with more familiar characters such as Einstein and other physicists and mathematicians. This is a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.

AR John Von is a big figure in my mental landscape. His work in set theory, especially his definitions of the ordinals and of the rank function for the cumulative hierarchy, was important for me in my formative years as a thinker, when I was dazzled to discover a new paradox in set theory.
Later, his formalization of quantum theory gave me good insights. His work in computer science, both in defining the von Neumann architecture (now seen as a bottleneck) and in self-reproducing automata (think of viruses), were of capital importance in my estimation. That's not to mention his work on the A‑bomb and H‑bomb, on game theory, and on nuclear warfare.
As for Labatut, I'm not sure what to think. Perhaps I should read The MANIAC, but I think I should read The Man from the Future first, to get the facts right. That's a lot of biography when I'd rather be studying the ideas and the math behind them.

 

Perfekt

2024 July 12

Surviving the Singularity

Cade Metz

Ray Kurzweil built a career on predicting the future. Following his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, he recently published The Singularity Is Nearer.
Kurzweil, 76, says AI and nanotech will soon extend lives faster than people age. He has long said he plans to experience the Singularity and then live indefinitely.
Tech giants and investors are pumping billions into AI development. But predictions about AI may fail as the industry consumes ever more energy and raw materials.
Kurzweil still says AI will match human intelligence in 2029 and the Singularity will arrive in 2045. Will he live to the age of 97?

Machine learning explained
John Pavlus

Machine learning drives most current progress in AI by using algorithms to improve the performance of other algorithms automatically.
Supervised machine learning has a set task, and the goal is to find a mathematical function to accomplish the task. This function, the model, will take one set of numbers as input and transform them into more numbers as output. The model is unlikely to produce accurate results at first.
To train the model, a different function (the objective) computes a number representing the current distance between the model's outputs and the desired result. The training algorithm nudges the parameters of the model to minimize the distance between actual and desired output.
The updated model transforms inputs from the training examples into better outputs, then the objective function indicates a better adjustment to the model, and so on. After enough iterations, the trained model can produce accurate outputs both on training examples and on new ones.
Using one function to repeatedly nudge another function lets a mathematical approximation of the task emerge automatically. With the right setup, it can create powerful computational models. Classification and prediction tasks usually rely on such models.
Unsupervised learning finds structure within unlabeled examples by clustering them into groups. Systems that rely on unsupervised learning can learn from user behavior or recognize objects in computer vision. Language modeling combines supervised and unsupervised techniques.
Reinforcement learning shapes a function by using a reward signal instead of examples of desired results. By maximizing the reward by trial and error, a model can improve its performance on tasks like playing games or driving a car or a chatbot.
Artificial neural networks are algorithms that can handle many complex tasks once considered impractical. Large language models are built on deep neural networks with billions or trillions of parameters.
All machine learning models are just mathematical functions at heart. They all learn the same way: back and forth, back and forth.

AR I am guilty of an embarrassingly careless error. Kurzweil's 2005 book had a massive influence on me, and since then I have written a lot about the Singularity. But somehow, in recent years my citation of the predicted date of this event has been for its appearance in 2029.
Kurzweil's new book reminds me that 2029 is his date for AGI, or human-level artificial general intelligence. The Singularity date is 2045, when he expects progress in AI, especially in recursively self-improving AI, to become so great that prediction of our future is effectively impossible.
Those are two very different events, I think we can agree. I am now devouring Kurzweil's new book and finding it as riveting as one might expect. More thereon later ..

 

Royal Danish Air Force
NATO deterrence: Danish F-16 fighter jet
 

2024 July 11

Washington Summit Declaration

NATO Heads of State and Government

NATO remains the strongest Alliance in history. Our commitment to defend one another and every inch of Allied territory at all times is ironclad.
Russia remains the most significant and direct threat to Allies' security. As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance. NATO remains committed to taking all necessary steps to ensure the credibility, effectiveness, safety, and security of its nuclear deterrence mission.
Transatlantic defence industrial cooperation is a critical part of NATO's deterrence and defence. Strengthened defence industry across Europe and North America and enhanced defence industrial cooperation among Allies makes us more capable and underpins our support to Ukraine.
We pledge to build on our ongoing efforts to strengthen national resilience by integrating civilian planning into national and collective defence planning. We will deepen our cooperation with the European Union.
We reaffirm our unwavering solidarity with the people of Ukraine in the heroic defence of their nation, their land, and our shared values. We fully support Ukraine's right to choose its own security arrangements and decide its own future, free from outside interference.
Russia bears sole responsibility for its war of aggression against Ukraine. Russia is responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians and has caused extensive damage to civilian infrastructure. Russia must immediately stop this war and completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its forces from Ukraine.
The all-domain threat Russia poses to NATO will persist into the long term. Russia is rebuilding and expanding its military capabilities and continues its airspace violations and provocative activities. We stand in solidarity with all Allies affected by these actions.
The People's Republic of China (PRC) has become a decisive enabler of Russia's war against Ukraine. We call on the PRC to cease all material and political support to Russia's war effort. The PRC continues to pose systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security.
The European Union remains a unique and essential partner for NATO. Practical cooperation has been strengthened and expanded on space, cyber, climate, and defence, as well as emerging and disruptive technologies.
We affirm our determination to support Ukraine in building a force capable of defeating Russian aggression today and deterring it in the future.

AR This short cut of a long text is cherry-picked to cite my chosen themes. I think it gives a fair indication of the most salient hot-button issues they discussed in Washington. Even thus juiced up, the outcome seems not give any good reason for the PRC to maintain its hostility to NATO.
 

2024 July 10

Ex-NATO F-16s for Ukraine

Financial Times

US secretary of state Antony Blinken says the first F‑16 fighter jets for Ukraine are on their way: "Those jets will be flying in the skies of Ukraine this summer to make sure that Ukraine can continue to effectively defend itself against the Russian aggression."
Denmark and the Netherlands have donated the jets. Norway will begin further deliveries this year. NATO is is setting up a new command centre in Wiesbaden, Germany, to coordinate training and equipment donations.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: "F‑16s bring just and lasting peace closer, demonstrating that terror must fail everywhere and at any time."

Russia's shadow war on NATO members
CNN

Russia has been engaged in numerous sabotage operations across NATO member states. Its hybrid warfare over the past six months includes physical sabotage on the supply line of NATO weapons intended for Ukraine. Russian agents hire local amateurs to undertake crimes on their behalf.
In one case last year, 14 Ukrainians and 2 Belarusians were arrested in Poland on suspicion of working for Russian intelligence. Maxim, a Ukrainian who had fled to Poland to avoid military service, was sentenced to 6 years in jail after receiving tasks from a Russian handler, Andrzej.
Maxim said Andrzej first paid him $7 in digital currency for spraying anti‑war graffiti around Poland. Andrzej soon started sending Maxim location pins where he should plant surveillance cameras along the railway tracks near the border town of Medyka, where aid went to Ukraine.
Andrzej later asked him to burn down the fence of a Ukrainian-owned transportation company in the eastern Polish town of Biala Podlaska. Maxim realized that Andrzej was a Russian agent when he was told to put cameras outside a base where Poland was training Ukrainian soldiers.
Polish agents arrested Maxim after weeks of surveillance. Other arrests followed, raising concerns in Warsaw about the extent of Moscow's infiltration. A man was arrested in April 2024 for possessing ammunition in a suspected plot to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky.

AR The drumbeat for more war is increasing in volume and tempo. This bodes ill for the future of Europe, even assuming Russia is finally defeated. The cost and the collateral damage will dog European attempts to catch up in the race to develop and deploy new technologies.

 

POOL
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with German defense minister Boris Pistorius in front of a Patriot launcher
at a Bundeswehr training area in Mecklenburg-Vorpommen
 

2024 July 9

Prewar NATO

Jaroslaw Kuisz, Karolina Wigura

Poland's PM Donald Tusk says a new era has begun: the prewar era. The conflict in Ukraine could become a nuclear world war. NATO leaders in Washington need to decide how to end the conflict.
Some observers recall the events in Sarajevo in 1914 that led the great powers to sleepwalk into WW1. They say the war in Ukraine must not be the starting pistol of a world war.
Others recall the situation in 1938, when Adolf Hitler demanded a part of Czechoslovakia and the European powers appeased him at Munich. Far from avoiding war, the appeasement led to WW2.
The United States recalls the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. That attack taught Americans that if they do not have a carefully calibrated presence in conflicts, they may pay a high price.
America seeks to maximize support for Ukraine, at risk of retaliation. Its support wavers between more or less active and is anxious about Russian escalation. The problems are plain to see.
In 2024, we are not in Sarajevo, Munich, or Pearl Harbor. We are in a new era of hybrid war across the globe. The warfare takes the form of disinformation, spying, and hacking.
We are not condemned to repeat the past. NATO members should put their arsenal of resources at Ukraine's disposal to ensure Russia is defeated.

Solving the Patriot puzzle
Lara Jakes

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine says he desperately needs at least seven Patriot batteries to defend Ukrainian cities from Russian airstrikes. NATO powers promise five.
Germany, Italy, and Romania have each pledged to donate one of their systems. One more is expected from the United States. The fifth may be delivered in a piecemeal approach.
The radar and three missile launchers will be supplied by the Netherlands. Some interceptor missiles will come from a coalition led by Germany. A mobile fire control center has been promised. Eight countries will provide additional missiles, launchers, and training.
NATO member states have an estimated 90 Patriot batteries, 62 of them owned by the United States. The European states fielding them are Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Poland, Romania, and Spain. Germany donated three of the four Patriot batteries already in Ukraine.
Raytheon can take up to three years to build and deliver a single billion-dollar Patriot battery. Officials aim to speed production with joint contracts and new factories.

NATO has become a monster
Martin Sieff

NATO is a giant careening out of control. While its fantasies of global power projection, it has supported wars that wrecked countries such as Syria, Libya, and Serbia. NATO continues to arm Ukraine and to fuel conflict with Russia.
NATO is pulling the Western world into a global war. NATO is far weaker than the SCO in all direct military comparisons. The SCO can boast of four major thermonuclear military powers with formidable land armies: China, Russia, India, and Iran.
Behind NATO, US diplomats seek to impose their fantasies of human rights, democracy, and free markets on innumerable tiny statelets in the Balkans, while despising and insulting and seeking to destabilize Russia and China.

AR Historical parallels for our predicament regarding Ukraine are amusing but moot. The new era of massive computing power and global precision strikes defies comparison with pre‑2024 precedents. But I fear the main novelty will be that we finesse the thermonuclear abyss for longer, only to find that it extinguishes most human life on Earth when we finally do fall into it.
The Patriot supply issue is troubling. Sinking billions to defend cities could soon bankrupt the West, apart from Raytheon's supply bottlenecks. If the joke weren't in poor taste, I'd suggest letting the Chinese clone the system in half the time at half the price. Systems like Iron Dome would be better for shooting down most of the cheap missiles the Russians are firing into Ukraine.
Sieff's op-ed in China Daily veers between contemptible and laughable. Since when was Iran a major thermonuclear power?

 

Belarus Ministry of Defense
Chinese troops deploy to Belarus for military exercises
Belarus and China began 11 days of joint military training exercises on Monday. The "Attacking Falcon" exercises
near the city of Brest on the Belarus−Poland border and some 60 km from the Belarus−Ukraine border will allow
Belarusian and Chinese military personnel to practice acting together as one unit.
Belarus is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

AR China is falling deeper into a geopolitical hole.
 

2024 July 8

France's Shock Election

BBC News

In French president Emmanuel Macron's snap election, Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) won 182 seats, Macron's centrists 168, and Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) and their allies 143.
Left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon says the NFP, formed in a hurry for the election to include his La France Insoumise (LFI), Greens, Socialists, Communists, and Trotskyists, has a mandate to form a government.
Right-wing PM-in-waiting Jordan Bardella says RN was foiled by unnatural "alliances of dishonour" forged by the Macron camp and the left. More than 200 candidates in a "republican front" pulled out of the second round to let tactical voting stop RN.
France will have a hung parliament. Libération headline: C'EST OUF

France heads back to ungovernability
Ben Hall

RN thought it would finally have the opportunity to show the French people it could govern before for the 2027 presidential election. But French voters turned out in droves to stop them.
France's republican front of centrist and leftwing parties joined forces to thwart the far right. The RN depicts this as a cynical game by the political establishment to lock it out of power.
President Macron will say his gamble paid off. He can say he broke the populist fever gripping France. His centrist Ensemble alliance has done better than expected in the vote.
Macron wanted his snap election to be a moment of political clarification. France now faces months or years of political uncertainty and unstable government. Power has drained away from the Elysée palace to the National Assembly.
Sunday's vote was a victory for the NFP. LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon now claims the premiership and the right to form a government. Macron's camp hopes the NFP will fragment.
Macron may now install a caretaker PM until fresh elections can be called. With three political blocs unwilling to work with each other, France seems ungovernable.

France's progressives keep out the far right
Jon Henley

The NFP, a left-green alliance dominated by Jean-Luc Mélenchon's far-left LFI, has emerged as the shock winner of France's snap election. Macron's centrist Ensemble coalition came second, Marine Le Pen's far-right RN and its allies third.
France's constitution allows the president to choose anyone he wants as prime minister. But parliament can force the resignation of the government, so the head of state must choose someone acceptable to the assembly. Normally that would be someone from the largest bloc in parliament.
Former PM Édouard Philippe, Macron ally François Bayrou, and Greens leader Marine Tondelier say an anti‑RN coalition could unite around a basic legislative programme. But many centrists refuse to enter an alliance with LFI.
France is heading for a lengthy spell of political uncertainty and instability.

AR France falls into turmoil just as Britain finds a new stability. But the French turmoil can be calmed if Macron can orchestrate some kind of pact between Ensemble and NFP. And the British stability can be undone by a Faragist deal with Tories and renewed agitation over immigration.

 

Euronews/EBU
UK foreign secretary David Lammy and Polish foreign secretary Radosław Sikorski, Chobielin, July 7
Lammy is on a whirlwind tour of key partner countries Germany, Poland, and Sweden to discuss continued support for Ukraine
ahead of the NATO summit in Washington, July 9−11.
Sikorski: "We will confirm that we are the most powerful alliance in history and that the fate of Ukraine is in our vital interest.
And the best thing Putin could do is to retreat from the disastrous, criminal mistake he made."

AR Good to see this proof of UK solidarity with the Weimar Triangle.
 

BBC
UK general election 2024: Results
 

2024 July 7

British Foreign Policy

David Lammy

This is a tough geopolitical moment. Britain has to start reconnecting with the world.
Let us put the Brexit years behind us. We are not going to rejoin the single market and the customs union, but there is much that we can do together.
I want to be absolutely clear: European nations are our friends.

AR This is good. Europhiles will be heartened by these words. If Americans elect Trump as POTUS 47, the steps toward Europe will become a stampede.
 

2024 July 6

Minister of State for Science: Sir Patrick Vallance

BBC News, 1645 BST

Sir Patrick Vallance was central in drawing up the scientific advice to contain COVID‑19 and is well known for his televised Downing Street news conferences.
As a former research head for the UK pharmaceutical giant GSK, Vallance drove the Covid vaccine development and delivery process at an early stage. He put the pieces in place to enable Britain to have ample and varied vaccine supplies when we most needed them.
Vallance is an advocate for long-term thinking and stability. His passions include achieving net zero. He will be a key voice in harnessing the UK research base to deliver growth.

AR An excellent choice. Science is far too important for the UK government to fool around with it. Maybe deeper collaboration with European science initiatives will follow.

 

EPA
PM Keir Starmer chairs his first cabinet meeting, Downing Street, Saturday

My First Cabinet Meeting

Keir Starmer

At the cabinet meeting, I had the opportunity to set out to my cabinet precisely what I expect of them in terms of standards, delivery, and the trust that the country has put in them.
I also discussed mission delivery, how we would put into action the plans that we had set out in our manifesto. We will have mission delivery boards to drive through the change that we need. I shall be chairing those boards so that it is clear to everyone that they are my priority in government.
This will be a politics and a government that is about delivery, is about service. Self-interest is yesterday's politics.

Inside Keir Starmer's preparations for power
Laura Kuenssberg

Sir Keir Starmer formally became prime minister at lunchtime on Friday. For a number of months now, the British state has been quietly preparing for his arrival in Downing Street.
A Whitehall source: "We have every hour of his first day, every day of his first week, every week of his first month, mapped out."
Former civil servant Sue Gray, who will now be the PM's chief of staff, has been in regular contact with cabinet secretary Sir Simon Case.
Expect strong resistance to any calls from the left to be more radical. Some in his party may demand a rapid cessation of arm sales to Israel or an overt commitment to safeguard public services. But with a massive majority, there is no suggestion that Sir Keir will redraft his plans.
One of the big first decisions new Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves needs to make is when to hold a review of the public finances. She has already warned of what she calls the worst economic inheritance since the Second World War.
A senior Whitehall official: "Things really are worse on the inside than you can see from outside."
Health secretary Wes Streeting: "From today the policy of this department is that the NHS is broken."
Sir Keir believes in moral socialism. He wants to persuade people that Labour and politicians can be a force for good and a force for change.
An insider: "He'll be the most normal PM we've ever had."

AR Situation dire, all warning lights on red. Keep calm and carry on. I haven't felt more optimistic about Britain's prospects since I came back from Germany. At last we have a UK government that's honest enough to face up to the challenge of fixing the UK from the rotten roots and not just from halfway up the tree.

 

Buckingham Palace
Sir Keir Starmer has officially become UK prime minister after an audience with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace
 

2024 July 5

Starmer: 'Change Begins Now'

Henry Zeffman

The UK is a parliamentary democracy with 650 seats elected under the first-past-the-post system. Labour has a vast majority in Parliament.
This is an extraordinary turnaround for Sir Keir Starmer. Nobody in the Labour party thought this was possible in the immediate aftermath of its dire defeat in December 2019.
Voters were clearly furious with the Conservative party. They are more willing than ever before to consider smaller parties: Lib Dems, Greens, Reform UK, and independents.
That puts Labour on notice. Voters may be willing to turf them out rapidly if they fail. The evidence is clear in this victory.

The hard road ahead
Andrew Marr

Sir Keir Starmer sees himself as a patriotic rebuilder of the public realm. Labour has been working to prepare for early "shock and awe" weeks in government. The first 6−18 months will be very hard.
•  On Europe, Starmer wants to "tear down the barriers to business and trade" while not rejoining the customs union or single market. That raises many questions.
•  On immigration, the boats aren't going to stop. The country is taking a lot on trust and without much detail. What will happen to all the boat migrants already here?
•  On the economy, stability and political discipline will encourage overseas investors. But the pressure to raise funding for public services will be intense.

King accepts resignation of Rishi Sunak
BBC News, 1127 BST

Buckingham Palace: "The right honourable Rishi Sunak MP had an audience of the King this morning and tendered his resignation as prime minister and first lord of the Treasury, which his majesty was graciously pleased to accept."

AR I find this election process fascinating. The electorate has performed an extraordinary U‑turn for such a big and shapeless entity. UK politics is volatile again.
As Rishi Sunak made his departure from Downing Street, the national parliamentary seat totals were LAB 412, CON 121, LD 71, etc (with 2 seats to yet declare). Reform and Greens each won 4 seats, despite large popular votes, highlighting the weakness of the FPTP voting system.
Were it not for Nigel Farage, the CON vote could theoretically have been 10% or more higher and Labour would have been struggling. Farage has defeated the Tories by outflanking them on the right. But public anger at Tory squabbling and incompetence had already doomed them.
In the constituency of Poole, the CON man is out for the first time since he won the seat in 1997. The new LAB man is a shop steward.

 

AR
UK general election, July 4: My local polling station

2024 Independence Day

UK General Election

Financial Times

Britons go to the polls today. Sir Keir Starmer is predicted to win power in a historic Labour landslide, leaving Rishi Sunak's Conservative party facing one of the worst defeats in its history. Polling stations open at 7 am and close at 10 pm BST.

AR I did my civic duty this morning.
 

2024 July 3

The Fifth Busy Beaver

Ben Brubaker

Busy beavers are simple computer programs that take a surprisingly long time to run. An online team working on the Busy Beaver Challenge has finally nailed how busy the fifth beaver is. The Coq proof assistant says their proof is free of errors.
The programs that interest the team are instructions for Turing machines. Turing proved that the halting problem has no general solution, but some Turing machines resist easy classification.
Tibor Radó imagined sorting Turing machines into groups based on how many rules they had. A Turing machine can have any number of rules, but the number of distinct machines in every group is finite. In 1962, Radó used these groups to define the Busy Beaver game:
Pick the number of rules your machines will have. Feed each one a tape with 0 in every cell. Some machines will run forever. The rest will eventually halt. Of these, some will halt quickly, some will take longer, and one will be the last to stop running − a busy beaver. In the group with n rules, the number of steps that the busy beaver machine takes before halting is the number BB(n).
For n = 1, it is easy to see that BB(1) = 1. For n = 2, there are over 6,000 Turing machines to check, but BB(2) = 6. For n = 3, there are millions to check, but BB(3) = 21. For n = 4, there are billions, but BB(4) = 107 was proved in 1974. For n = 5, there are nearly 17 trillion cases to check.
In 2021, Tristan Stérin listed millions of machines that still needed checking for n = 5. He started an online forum and found contributors. In May 2024, the team announced that BB(5) = 47,176,870.

AR What a heroically impressive feat! As a contribution to theoretical computer science, this may be a mere footnote, but the organized investment of brainpower and cutting-edge computer code adds up to a first-rate achievement. Well worth a prize, I'd say.
 

2024 July 2

Galactic Magnetism

Susan Clark

The galactic magnetic field plays a role in the physical processes that shape the interstellar medium (ISM). The field plays a role in the evolution of the gas to form molecular clouds that birth stars.
The gas in the galaxy spans physical states ranging from dense, cold molecular clouds to hot plasma. Star formation and galactic evolution involve gas flowing between these different states. We want to understand the story of how gas gets converted into stars and then recycled to seed future stars.
In denser structures in the ISM, the filamentary molecular clouds tend to orient orthogonally with respect to the local magnetic field. We want to assemble the evolutionary picture of how gas and the magnetic field interact to regulate the process of star formation.
The ISM has a lot of dust in it, with irregular grains of micron size or smaller that tend to align in magnetic field. We observe light from a background star filtered by these dust grains, which leave an imprint in the polarization of the observed starlight. The dust grains also radiate polarized light.
We want to understand the origin of magnetism in the universe and to determine how the motions of the ISM amplify and distribute the magnetic field we observe today.

AR For various reasons, the role of magnetism is relatively unexplored in stellar, galactic, and cosmic evolution. The role of gravitation, by contrast, has been much more extensively studied. It's good to find we are still making progress on magnetism.
 

2024 July 1

Britain Needs a Fresh Start

Financial Times

British politics is on the threshold of a momentous shift. Not since at least 1979 has a UK government left the national affairs in such a desperate state. Growth in the economy and real wages since 2010 have fallen well behind the historical trend since the war.
The Conservative party needs a spell in opposition to resolve its internal differences. All too often since 2010, the party has prioritised managing its party politics over sound governance. This generation of Tories has squandered its claim to be the natural party of government.
The Labour party of Sir Keir Starmer is better placed today to provide the leadership the country needs. Starmer has transformed Labour back into a credible party of government. He has worked hard to engage with business and put revitalising growth at the core of his program.
A new government will take over at a time of great upheaval, with the postwar international order in distress. Its growth strategy may prove underpowered. Its reluctance to talk about rebuilding trading relations with the EU closes off a way to boost the economy.
Britain must choose between a Conservative party that appeals to narrow segment of the population and a Labour party that appears to want to govern for the whole country. Labour should be given the opportunity to provide a fresh start.

UK military unprepared for conflict of any scale
Financial Times

Former Ministry of Defence office of net assessment and challenge director Rob Johnson says the UK military is operating with a bare minimum that only lets it mount peacekeeping and humanitarian relief operations, civilian evacuation from warzones, and some anti‑sabotage activities."
"In any larger-scale operation, we would run out of ammunition rapidly .. Our defences are too thin, and we are not prepared to fight and win an armed conflict of any scale .. The UK has reached a situation where it cannot defend the British homelands properly."
Johnson says British air defences are insufficient to stop long-range missile strikes, the Royal Navy lacks enough ships to patrol the north Atlantic to monitor and deter Russian submarine activity, and the Royal Air Force needs almost twice as many fighter jets as it has now.
Johnson, who previously headed the Oxford University Changing Character of War Centre, worries about the threat from Russia: "The government is not taking the public into its confidence about the scale of the threat because it knows it's not ready .. the Russians already know this."
The UK military is unable to fulfil the role the government set out for it last year. The RAF should have 265 combat aircraft, the navy 25 modern warships, and the army 125,000 troops. The next government should boost defence spending to 3% of GDP, equivalent to almost £80 billion a year.

EU would not rush to reopen Brexit talks with Labour
Lisa O'Carroll

The EU will not rush to reopen Brexit negotiations with the UK even if Labour is swept to power next Thursday. The deep scars left by the Conservatives during Brexit negotiations along with the new priorities caused by the war in Ukraine and the rise of the far right weigh heavily in Brussels.
A senior source in the European Commission: "The UK is simply not in people's minds. We have two wars going on. Reopening talks on Brexit would require a lot of political capital and absorb a lot of resources here in Brussels."
King's University professor of European politics Anand Menon: "We are not a priority. They have got bigger fish to fry .. We have to offer them something that many European states are keen on."
Diplomats say the EU is keen on a more formal security and defence agreement with the UK.

AR The state of the nation is dire. A quick fix is not on the cards. Labour could easily fail to ignite the new growth it needs to pay for its plans.