TIME
"All of us − from his most fanatical supporters to his most fervent critics − are living in the Age of Trump."
 

2024 December 17

German Problems

Anna Sauerbrey

Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz has lost a vote of confidence in the Bundestag. In 2021, Scholz had formed a coalition government. But Putin's invasion of Ukraine threw it into crisis management mode. Scholz announced a Zeitenwende and allocated €100 billion to rebuilding the Bundeswehr.
Germany is in its second consecutive year of recession. Its signature businesses are struggling. With the abrupt end of cheap Russian gas, green reforms have exacerbated the cost of energy. Carmakers are struggling to compete with Chinese imports. Public infrastructure needs more investment.
Germany is suffering a crisis of confidence, and frustration with the government is widespread. But unemployment is minimal, budgetary restrictions can be overcome, and state government continues. Most of Germany's neighbors and friends face similar troubles.

AR Europe is suffering from a dismal outlook and a looming crisis with Russia. The prospects of a boost from America or indeed China look unlikely. Political changes are needed but won't happen without a more urgent sense of the need for them. Calm before the storm.
 

2024 December 16

Mother of all Bubbles

Ruchir Sharma

Virtually every Wall Street analyst predicts US stocks will keep outperforming the rest of the world in 2025. But all this enthusiasm only tends to confirm that the bubble is at an advanced stage.
The bulls say America can remain dominant. But US earnings growth would not look so good if not for the supernormal profits of its big tech firms. Over time, supernormal profits get competed away.
Growth and profits are also getting a lift from heavy deficit spending. It now takes nearly $2 of new government debt to generate an additional $1 of US GDP growth. If any other country were spending this way, investors would be fleeing.
Analysts say America has been the world's premier market for a century. But the US stock market lagged behind the rest of the world in 6 of the last 11 decades. In the 2000s it delivered zero returns, and emerging markets tripled in value.
The US outperformance relative to other countries could end if growth slows in America, or picks up in other major powers, or for unforeseen reasons. That is often how bubbles end: unexpectedly.
The longer a trend lasts, the more confident investors get. Over the past six months US stock prices have outgained others by a wide margin. Time to bet against American exceptionalism.

AR I think big tech stocks will keep on outperforming, but who am I to say when I got suckered in the 2000s? More ominously, the Trump administration looks likely to lead to some kind of crisis. The fallout could make the financial crisis of 2008 look tame by comparison.
 

2024 December 13

Americans Are Doomsday Prepping

Robert Kirsch, Emily Ray

More than 20 million Americans engage in prepping. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) determined in 2023 that 51% of Americans are prepared for a disaster.
Bunkerization explains prepping in the United States. The logic of the bunker shapes how Americans relate to each other, the state, and their domestic lives, as a matter of individual isolation, preparation, and savvy consumption.
Prepping is at the core of an American mythology of a frontier folk. Americans are asked to buy their way to safety. The patriotic way to be an American is to isolate oneself from other Americans in times of crisis.
During the Cold War, US citizens were urged to hunker down to show the communists that Americans were prepared to die as Americans: "Better dead than Red."
For the average prepper, stockpiling to meet FEMA recommendations for survival in the absence of state support is simply good sense. Bunkerization encourages us to see the prepping American as a responsible citizen.
A bunkerized society is in a permanent state of readiness for living in the shell of a state that takes stable infrastructure and individual welfare as market matters.

AR Sounds horrible. I'm glad I'm in Europe. We stand or fall together.
 

2024 December 12

UK−EU Free Movement

Peter Walker, Jon Henley

A majority of Britons who voted to leave the EU would now accept a return to free movement in exchange for access to the single market, says a new ECFR report.
ECFR: "There is a remarkable consensus on both sides of the Channel that the time is ripe for a reassessment of EU−UK relations."
Based on polling of more than 9,000 people across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Poland conducted in November, the study found that 68% of all UK voters and 54% of those who voted leave said in exchange for single market access they would now accept full free movement for EU and UK citizens.
ECFR: "The EU and the UK are both very vulnerable to prevailing global events and a reset of relations is the single most effective way to make both sides stronger."
Across the EU, 45% of Germans said they wanted closer relations with the UK, as well as 44% of Poles, 41% of Spaniards, 40% of Italians, and 34% of French people.
ECFR: "Brexit and the UK−EU future relationship matters more to UK respondents than to citizens of other states. But there is broad permission from European publics to recast relations."
Many people in the EU felt Brexit had been bad for the EU. Asked whether the UK should prioritise relations with the US or with the EU, 50% of Britons opted for the EU and 17% for the US.
ECFR: "Governments now need to catch up with public opinion and offer an ambitious reset."

AR Let's get on with it. We can't dither through another Trump presidency while the last Reform UK holdouts realise the magnitude of their error. Let's get a public groundswell movement going.
 

2024 December 11

Quantum Computers Cross Critical Error Threshold

Ben Brubaker

For quantum error correction, we coax a cluster of physical qubits to work together as a single logical qubit. Adding physical qubits makes a logical qubit better if their error rate is below a definable threshold.
Google Quantum AI have crossed the threshold. They harnessed a group of physical qubits into a single logical qubit, then showed that as they added more physical qubits, the error rate dropped exponentially.
On quantum computers, we can reduce error rates with a surface code based on two overlapping grids of physical qubits. The first grid encodes a single logical qubit. The second grid lets us check for errors.
Once the Google team could build physical qubits with low error rates, they checked whether the qubits could work together to cut the error rate. They started with a code using a 3×3 grid of physical qubits to encode one logical qubit, then they tested a 5×5 code.
They found that the error rate with the 5×5 code was slightly lower than that with the 3×3 code. After further hardware improvements, they found the error rate for the 5×5 code was cut in half. A 7×7 code again cut the error rate in half. Such exponential scaling is what theory predicts.
The Google team only demonstrated error correction using a single logical qubit. Adding interactions between multiple logical qubits will introduce new challenges.

AR This is a major development, as even daily newspapers have noted. Scalable error control is key to practical quantum computing, and this advance provides it. Quantum computing is on the way.
An expert is hopeful that powerful quantum computers may be on sale for say a billion dollars a pop within ten years. We'll need mass rollout of quantum encryption by then.
 

2024 December 9

Letters to a Christian

Sam Harris

I'm not bowled over by the idea that you were once an atheist like me, and that now, under the influence of Jordan Peterson et al, you've discovered Jesus Christ to be the savior of humanity.
There is a problem with religious fundamentalism. I'm glad to know you're worried about Islamic extremism and that we simply disagree about faith and about the validity of Christianity.
Most people use the term "faith" to indicate the acceptance of specific religious doctrines without sufficient reason. This frame of mind is antithetical to reason and conflicts with science.
Moderates tend to doubt the reality of religious lunacy. Such blindness is unhelpful, given the hideous collision between modern doubt and Islamic certainty that we are witnessing across the globe.
Scripture remains a perpetual engine of extremism. Read scripture as closely as you like, you will not find reasons for religious moderation. On the contrary, you will find reasons to live like a maniac.
I don't disdain religious moderates, but I do disdain bad ideas and bad arguments.

AR This is a topic on which oceans of ink have obscured the view for centuries, but on which now Sam Harris, the young hero of the atheist apocalypse, brings clarity and common sense.
I've read the first two chapters of Jordan Peterson's book on Old Testament myths and see the problem already. Peterson has reacted with revulsion to the modern world and ecstatically thrown his soul into the warm but polluted bath of Judaeo-Christian mythic fantasy.
His eisegesis of the old myths is fascinating but doomed. It reads like the confession of a hero so enchanted by a myth that he drowns himself in it for joy.

 

EPA
Global A-listers assembled in Notre Dame cathedral, Paris, for the grand reopening ceremony, 2024-12-07
 

2024 December 6

Transformative Experience

Alice Gregory

Yale philosophy professor Laurie Paul is the author of Transformative Experience, an investigation of personal change. Paul: "I'm totally puzzled and fascinated and disturbed by ordinary life."
Published by OUP in 2014, Transformative Experience examined the special situations that change not only what we know but also who we are. These transformative experiences provide new knowledge that previously would have been inaccessible to us.
For Paul, whether to have a child was a riddle at the limits of rationality. She explored the question via normative decision theory, but says it failed in the face of transformative experience. Choosing to undergo such an experience requires us to violate who we take our current self to be.
Paul had her first child in 2004. She gave a lecture on the experience in 2012, when she was 46 and had two children. A online draft won attention in 2013. Paul: "For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we've done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it."
Paul had planned to be a doctor. But she enrolled at Antioch University, studied German in Berlin and Buddhist philosophy in India, returned to Antioch, applied to graduate programs, and arrived at Princeton in 1993. After a series of jobs, she won tenure at the University of Arizona in 2007.
In 2012, Paul confided to Jonathan Schaffer that she was professionally demoralized. He remembers their conversation because of its timing: "Within a year .. she became this celebrated figure. She really did not expect that kind of reception."
Paul: "The problem of other selves is just as deep and mysterious as the problem of other minds."

AR She's right about other selves − another reason to be skeptical of David Chalmers' hard problem. Continuity of the self over time is a problem I've pondered at least since Derek Parfit aired it in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons.
The conventional piety that we retain one self from birth to death raises questions about how time's arrow from a remembered past to an unknown future impacts our sense of self. This is another theme to come in Psy‑Phy.
 

2024 December 5

What Keir Starmer Should Say

Matthew d'Ancona

I want to speak about the UK's relationship with Europe. My government must act in the national interest, looking ahead, averting crisis, and ensuring the next generation has better services, better opportunities, more chances for fulfilment.
My love of Europe is deeply ingrained. I studied European law at university and even wrote a book about it. In 2016, I campaigned for Remain. As shadow Brexit secretary, I fought hard both for a second referendum and a better Brexit deal than the mess the Conservatives delivered.
Last July, I said the nation was heartily sick of Brexit and wanted to move on. But Brexit limits and infects everything we try to do. Instead of taking back control, we got more immigration and more red tape. Brexit is reducing our GDP by 4%. Its estimated cost is already well over £140 billion.
I see great potential in this country, but also huge challenges. The technological revolution. Climate change. Savage inequalities. An ageing population and a younger generation rightly demanding a fair shake. Global population movements, insecurity, and instability.
To master these challenges, we will need both statecraft and economic growth. But President-elect Trump proposes an economic strategy of tariffs and protectionism that will impact our economic fortunes. The world is changing, and we in the UK must change with it.
I propose to apply to join the European Free Trade Area. This is a precondition of our eventual entry to the single market and customs union and will require a green light from Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland, as well as the approval of the EU's 27 member states.
A majority of the public now thinks Brexit was a mistake. Since exit from the single market and customs union was not what Leavers promised in 2016, I do not plan to hold another referendum. I am thinking of the national interest.

AR The full ghost-written speech, before my short cut, is clear and persuasive. It's high time for Starmer to take courage and deliver it. How much more urging can he want?
 

2024 December 4

Popular Science, Philosophical Junk

John Dupré

In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins presented the evolution of life as genes striving to replicate themselves. His new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, says an organism's genome is a palimpsest, with layers that reveal its lineage.
Dawkins remains a genetic determinist. Oxygen to breathe, parental care, and so on are background conditions that let the genes do their causal work. With the phenotype inscribed in the genes, evolution is ultimately a sequence of genomes competing with one another.
In Life as No One Knows It, Sara Imari Walker emphasizes the temporal depth of life. A lineage of structures led to any particular one out of the vast number of possible structures. Almost every possible structure will never exist. Even the macromolecules within us are enormously complex.
Walker proposes assembly theory. The complexity of an object is the number of novel steps it takes to reach the object; the smallest such number is its assembly index. The larger the assembly index, the less probable the object. Many objects with a high assembly index have a probability near zero.
Assembly theory says the existence of multiple complex objects points to a chain, a lineage, of simpler objects that can construct the later objects in the chain. An object requires such a lineage if it has an assembly index greater than 15. This helps illuminate the origins of living systems.
Dawkins maintains that the natural selection of genes is uniquely central to evolution. The market for popular science is strongly attracted to simple stories offering insight into everything by offering an illusion of understanding.
Philosophers increasingly reject the worldview in which the ultimate truth is physics. Biology shows us a world of process. Recognition of process is a prophylactic against the simplistic claims in popular science books.

AR See such popular science books in their market context. A simplistic claim must carve out mind share beside other such claims. A nuanced view would die of neglect. Philosophers may bloviate about junk, but scientists can ignore them.
The ultimate truth is not physics but mathematics, or rather the logic behind mathematics, which spawns the shapes that physicists − and in their wake applied scientists such as biologists − use to depict phenomenal reality in their own ways.
All science is simplistic in the sense that effective models of handy granularity are offered as true likenesses of an underlying reality of unfathomable depth. Assembly theory offers its quantum of illumination within a crowded landscape, and I'm grateful for its incremental glimmer.
All this is by way of preparing and defending the simplistic model I propose to add to the arsenal in my planned book Psy‑Phy.
 

2024 December 3

Incompleteness in Math and Physics

Manon Bischoff

Kurt Gödel's 1931 incompleteness theorem proved that there will always be truths that are impossible to prove in a given mathematical framework.
The incompleteness theorem is reflected in physics. New work shows that a model particle system that undergoes a phase transition has a critical parameter that cannot be calculated.
In a finite square lattice containing an arrangement of several particles that each interact with their nearest neighbor, the atoms are arranged in a regular structure, and their electrons can interact with those of the immediately surrounding atoms. In one model, the strength of the interaction between the electrons depends on a parameter φ, which sets how strongly the particles in the atomic shells repel each other.
If the repulsion φ is small, the outer electrons are mobile. The stronger φ is, the more the electrons freeze in place, as reflected in the energy of the system. If φ is very small, the total energy of the system can grow continuously, and the system conducts electricity freely. For large values of φ, the energy only increases gradually. The gap between the ground state and the first excited state makes the system a semiconductor or an insulator.
The transition between the two phases is set by a critical value of φ above which the energy spectrum of the system suddenly has a gap. The critical value of φ corresponds to a constant Ω, which cannot be calculated. There is no algorithm that outputs Ω.
Gregory Chaitin defined Ω by using Alan Turing's proof that no program exists that can decide, for all possible algorithms, whether a computer will come to a halt when executing them or not. Turing's proof is an application of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
The Chaitin constant Ω give the probability that a Turing machine halts for some input:
Ω = Σ_p 2^−|p|
Here p ranges over all programs that halt after a finite runtime and |p| is the length of the program in bits. Calculating Ω exactly requires knowing which programs halt and which do not, which is impossible. The first few digits of Ω are 0.01574999 ..

AR I expected Gödel's result to apply in physics too, but it's good to have a specific example. I came across Chaitin's work decades ago and enjoyed his books, but the calculated value of Ω is new for me. Chaitin, who worked for IBM, made Gödel's idea seem easy for computer scientists.
For me and surely many others, Gödel's theorems are the results of the century in mathematical logic. Douglas Hofstadter's classic 1979 fugue Gödel, Escher, Bach was so glorious that it left my dream of extending my study of the theorems into a monograph in shreds.
Water under the bridge. Now I have bigger fish to fry.

 

AR
My planned big read for December
 

2024 St Andrew's Day

Freedom

Nicola Sturgeon

As chancellor of Germany from 2005 until 2021, Angela Merkel was admired by millions around the globe. Freedom, her memoir, reminds us of her rational, forensic approach to governing.
She hated inequality and injustice. Following the 2008 financial crash: "Deep down, every bone in my body resisted having to pay for the banks' mistakes with taxpayers' money."
Her account of her 16 years as chancellor is candid. She arrived at her conclusions through a logical, painstaking process. If more leaders governed like her, the world would be a better place.
Merkel: "If we want to live in freedom, we must defend our democracy .. We can do that if we work together .. freedom must apply to everyone."

AR I'm looking forward to reading Freiheit.
 

2024 November 29

Death on Demand

The Guardian

MPs have backed a bill to give some terminally ill people the right to end their lives. The Commons backed the bill by 330 votes in favour to 275 against. The private member's bill would give terminally ill adults with less than six months to live the right to die once the request has been signed off by two doctors and a high court judge.

AR This bill brings the UK up to speed with other liberal regimes that accept the case for compassion toward those who seek a dignified end to their terminal suffering.
 

2024 November 28

Globalism Undone

Christopher Caldwell

Wolfgang Streeck has a theory of what has gone wrong in globalization, as he explains in his book Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism.
Streeck says the contradictions of capitalism have been building for half a century. Under the postwar settlement, working classes in Western countries had won robust incomes and extensive protections. Profit margins suffered, but economies gained in social stability.
Then, following the Arab oil embargo of 1973, the economy began to stall. Workers wanted more and made unwelcome demands on business. States finessed the matter by permitting the money supply to expand. This sparked inflation.
Record US government deficits led to deregulated banking and borrowing. Debt exposure was shifted from the Treasury to personal bank accounts, which led to the financial crisis of 2008. Then bankers generated new liquidity by quantitative easing. This let governments run up huge debts during the pandemic.
For Streeck, what neoliberals mean by a free market is a deregulated market. Regulations are the result of people making rules. Democratic societies worldwide will make their own economic rules. Businesses want money and goods to move smoothly across borders and demand uniform laws.
The global regime brings order and efficiency but also tilts the playing field in favor of American interests. That must have blighted the West's relations with Russia. To an Indian or a Chinese person, "free markets" established on these terms carry shades of imperial dominance and lost autonomy.
What happened on the global level also happened at the local level, within America and Europe. Common people were excluded from the system, and economic policy was managed to produce unfair outcomes. This led to movements like MAGA, which neoliberals see as a sign of discontent.
Globalism is collapsing under its own contradictions.

AR This appears to be a persuasive case. Globalization on neoliberal terms is untenable. Globalism is nevertheless the perspective I endorse and espouse. As so often historically, capitalist greed has queered the pitch and undermined a fine ideal.
 

2024 November 26

Quantum Points of View

Anil Ananthaswamy

Quantum reference frames put a new perspective on such phenomena as superposition and entanglement.
Given two reference frames, A and B, if A is anchored to a quantum object that has probabilities of being found in various locations, then in B, A's location is smeared over a region. But from A, the distance to B is smeared out. It looks like B is the one in a superposition.
If B is also anchored to an object in a superposition of locations, then A's state is now smeared out in two different ways, depending on the locations of B. Determining B's state determines A's state, so A and B are entangled. Both superposition and entanglement depend on the frame.
From frame A, we might observe a click at a set time. But from frame B, the click might be in a superposition of happening before and after another event. Whether we observe the click as happening at a set time or as being in a superposition depends on the frame.
Quantum reference frames may be central to making sense of the quantum world.

AR This aspect of quantum measurement is key, imho, to getting a grip on the novelty of quantum mechanics as opposed to classical mechanics. This relativity of results to frames goes beyond that which Einstein introduced and represents a major epistemological advance for physics.
 

2024 November 24

We Who Wrestle With God

Rowan Williams

We Who Wrestle With God by Jordan Peterson says the biblical narratives of Genesis, Exodus, and Jonah confront us with life-and-death choices.
The stories depict the integration and strength generated by obedience to the truth. If we recognise the moral structure of reality and stand firm, the reward is a life of integrity, inner strength, and a capacity for adventure.
Peterson's readings are like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story being about the call to heroic integrity. Every story gets pushed toward individual rectitude, tough love, different kinds of moral excellence, and so on.
The actual way in which the stories develop, speak to one another, correct one another, and so on is something Jewish exegesis and discussions have explored. Peterson instead relies on dated Christian commentaries.
He constantly meanders into polemic about modern issues, especially gender. A discussion about toxic parenting based on Genesis seems single-minded. Yet he says analysis of the patriarchal subtext is a distraction.
Peterson sees the binary of gender identity as like the difference between good and evil. He sees the evils of hedonism and relativism in thinking we can be whatever we want to be and in not accepting sacrifice for a good.
But his contempt for nuance or disagreement and reduction of other views to their most shallow or trivial form are discouraging.

Not quite religion
Martha Gill

Jordan Peterson offers a faith that promises to help you achieve your personal goals. He is tapping into the self-improvement market among young men and advocating religion as an answer.
As history fades, so does truth itself. Among the flow of dubious facts, it can be hard to determine which to cling to. In such environments, meaning becomes tribal, and systems of faith arise.

AR I have no real interest in the Old Testament stories, but I'm intrigued by the opportunity to understand how a psychologist can impose a timely and urgent psychological reading on them.
My own project of understanding the power of religion in human psychology as an indicator of weaknesses in modern understandings of the mind is addressed by Peterson's effort.

 

X
Russian Security Council deputy secretary Dmitry Medvedev: "So, that's what you wanted?
Well, you've damn well got it! A hypersonic ballistic missile attack."
 

2024 November 22

British National Security

Philip Stephens

Keir Starmer is confronting Britain's Zeitenwende. British postwar foreign policy has been upended. The world is a more dangerous place than at any time since the end of the cold war.
Britain is vulnerable. Brexit sundered the close economic and political partnership with the EU. Putin's war has torn down Europe's security architecture: Russia has declared that national borders can be changed by force.
Donald Trump has cast doubt on Europe's US security guarantee. He may not quit NATO, but his eagerness to do a deal with Putin will undermine it. NATO is the key to British security. Without it, Britain has no defence policy.
Starmer has commissioned a strategic defence review. It's not enough. Such reviews pretend to reconcile grandiose ambitions with economic austerity, to leave a Potemkin village military retaining the emblems of a pocket superpower.
A recent report from the House of Lords international relations and defence committee is bleak. The UK's armed forces have neither the mass, resilience, nor internal coherence for a sustained high‑intensity war.
The UK has an army smaller than at any time for 200 years, a navy with too few aircraft for its carriers, and RAF pilots denied flight training. Britain needs a prolonged rise in the resources devoted to national security.
Britain should do what it can in NATO. Europeans will need to do more to organise collective defence. Britain, France, Germany, and Poland should be central to the effort.

AR Today's haiku:
  Age brings us wisdom
  I judge less and see more truth
  Our little lives end

 

AR
Poole Bay, 2024-11-20
 

2024 World Philosophy Day

Wrestling With God

John Gray

We Who Wrestle with God by Jordan Peterson is conceived as a response to Friedrich Nietzsche. For the Canadian psychologist, the crisis overtaking Western civilisation is the collapse of meaning that Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism.
Thirteen years in the making, Peterson's compendious volume consists largely of commentaries on Jewish and Christian scripture, with reflections on the Genesis story and the meaning of sacrifice, a meditation on Moses, and a chapter on the story of Jonah.
Peterson refers to the Israelites who were partying while Moses was communing with God: "The narrative here .. indicates the fundamental problem of truth or even social agreement arising from mere consensus, in the absence of any true correspondence with an intrinsically structured reality or a priori cosmic order."
Peterson says thinking of the Christian religion as a bulwark to shore up Western civilisation cannot exorcise the spectre of nihilism. The religion becomes less than a universal truth and risks the cultural relativism that he condemns in woke thinkers.
Peterson was born in 1962 in Canada. In 1998, he became a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. In 2016, he refused to comply with Canadian legislation requiring that he use the chosen pronouns of transgender people, conflicts followed, and he became a freelance lecturer and writer. From that point, his fame has only grown.
His celebrity has been a curse on him, driving him to psychological breakdown. After a period of retreat, he resumed his work as a travelling lecturer, podcaster, and author, denouncing the woke assault on Western traditions and opining on gender, identity politics, and climate science.
Peterson: "The scientist or thinker is impelled to evangelise the results of their quest. He does so by speaking and by writing, attempting to spread the doctrine of the newly revealed truth."
Peterson believes there can be no recovery of liberal freedoms without a revival of Christian faith. But his wrestling with God sounds very like wrestling with himself.
Peterson has no more overcome the challenge of nihilism than did Nietzsche.

AR Yesterday, following overnight revelation, I wrote the resonant start of my winter work Psy‑Phy. Today, following overnight revelation, I present a new haiku:
  Years and years slide past
  They go by without meaning
  Everything is lost
Here "everything" is trisyllabic.

 

X/@DonaldJTrumpJr
Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Robert F Kennedy Jr feast on McDonald's fare.
Musk: "I have to say that the team @realDonaldTrump is assembling for this administration is very strong. The vibe is good."
 

2024 November 20

Europe Prepares for WW3

MailOnline

European nations are gearing up for an all-out war as Ukraine launched ATACMS missiles into Russia and Vladimir Putin lowered the threshold for Moscow to consider a nuclear strike.
Operationsplan Deutschland reveals how Germany will become a NATO staging area if the conflict escalates. Germany will host hundreds of thousands of troops from NATO countries and serve as a logistics hub for sending huge quantities of military equipment, food, and medicine to the front.
The German army is instructing companies and civilians on how to protect key infrastructure and mobilise for national defence in a scenario where Russia expands drone flights, spying operations, and sabotage attacks across Europe.
Businesses are advised to create crisis plans detailing employee responsibilities during emergencies and to stockpile diesel generators or install wind turbines to ensure energy independence.
In Nordic countries, pamphlets and emails have been sent to millions of homes with advice on seeking shelter, stockpiling supplies, and military skills. Finland reminded its citizens of their national defence obligation and launched an information website. Sweden offered a detailed guide on how to seek shelter and what to do in case of a nuclear attack. Norway and Denmark both put out checklists for food and medicine supplies citizens should have ready.
Putin has signed off on an updated version of the Kremlin nuclear doctrine that broadens the scope for Moscow to turn to its atomic arsenal on the day that US‑made missiles strike on Russian soil. Russian strategic forces may deploy nuclear weapons if Russia or Belarus is attacked by a non‑nuclear nation supported by a nuclear power.
Ukraine's strike on an ammunition depot in Russia's Bryansk region yesterday with ATACMS missiles meets the criteria. Moscow says it marks a new phase of the war.
German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock: "[Putin] didn't just start doing this 1,000 days ago. He started back in 2014. Germany .. made the mistake back then .. of allowing itself to be intimidated by this fear and .. not listening to its partners .. We must invest in our own security and protection."

AR This is both reassuring and depressing. It's a pity that Europeans have no better response available than to march along the warpath. Meanwhile, the Trump team looks set to sit out the conflict until Europe is in deep trouble, just as Americans did in WW1 and WW2.

 

⦿ Fan Wei/Global Times
Airshow China 2024 debuts new Chinese J‑35A stealth fighter

AR It bears a striking resemblance to the US F‑35, which is no surprise given the Chinese hacking of F‑35 design secrets
from Lockheed Martin a decade or so ago. The main difference is that it's twin-engined, so from the side it looks slim,
but it still has room for an internal weapons bay to avoid being hung like a Christmas tree with external ordnance.
China unveiled the J‑35A alongside a suite of impressive new hardware at its biennial airshow in Zhuhai:
•  The HQ‑19 ABM system, with 6 missiles on an 8×8 launcher, invites comparison with the US THAAD system.
•  The Jetank UAV "mother drone" has a payload of 6 tons on 8 external hard points for missiles, bombs, or drones.
•  The JARI‑USV‑A Orca is a fast 500 ton trimaran with a range of 7400 km for BVR strike, missile defense, and ASW.
•  The PL‑15E AAM, with a range of 200 km and a speed above Mach 5, is comparable to the US AIM‑120 AMRAAM.
A Russian Sukhoi Su‑57 5G fighter flew at the show and attracted export orders.
 

2024 November 19

Twilight of the American Elite

Lee Siegel

A politics rooted in common sense is said to have swept the Democrats from power. As a result, liberal elites are rushing to distance themselves from the term "elite" as fast as they can.
In earlier generations, liberalism was connected to the lives of ordinary Americans. Yet its policies and programs were based on class rather than identitarian attitudes and were created by elites.
In the 1950s, liberal historian Richard Hofstadter attributed American populism to the "status anxiety" of heartland America. Until then, populism was said to have economic roots. Hofstadter replaced economics with psychology. The shift from class to consciousness was not lost on the right.
In 1964, Ronald Reagan said: "This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
Liberals became associated with identity politics and woke politics. In the name of the working class, Republicans reviled liberal "elites" and became an elite defined by their control of economic forces. Elon Musk is now the beating heart of the GOP. Whoever has the most money wins.
Common sense is not a magical solution to conflicts. Liberals must morph from woke identitarians to enlightened thinkers determined to improve the lot of all.

AR Must they? First we need to clarify what "enlightenment" means for us. The problem is that our previous understanding of that concept has become seriously outmoded. It presupposed a background understanding of logic, emotions, identity, and so on that are no longer adequate to our scientific knowledge surrounding those constraints on our agency.
 

2024 November 18

Wake Up, Europe

Paul Mason

Putin is waging a relentless war of aggression against the Ukrainian people. Ukraine is in danger of losing. Europe could see 10 million refugees. At a geostrategic level, this would let aggression pay.
Putin aims to demilitarize eastern Europe and create new line of buffer states. He would dismember the EU and defeat NATO.
The Trump administration could betray Ukraine. An alliance of willing countries will need to step in to help Ukraine. The same coalition will need to defend Europe.
Five action points for Western leaders:
1  Arm Ukraine to win: the combined economies of NATO are 10× bigger than Russia's.
2  Seize Russia's $300 billion frozen assets and use them to fund Ukrainian resistance.
3  Use Western air forces to create a defensive shield over western Ukraine.
4  Invite Ukraine to join NATO and provide security guarantees.
5  Spend more on European defence.
We are in existential peril.

AR This may sound alarmist and dangerously provocative, but appeasing Putin and letting the Trump team make a losing deal with him would be worse. Unpleasant as it may seem, Europeans need to shape up and defy Putin − or lose their present freedom.
 

2024 November 17

Trump Is Already Failing

David French

Donald Trump is planting the seeds of his own demise. The corrupt, incompetent, and extremist men and women he's appointing to critical posts in his cabinet are threats both to America and to Trump and his allies.
Most voters are focused on the things that affect their lives. But politicians hear mostly from an engaged minority. There is a tug of war between the activists who demand attention to their pet causes and the political realists.
Trump is so consumed with his grievances and his base's grievances that both he and the activists are aligned against the pragmatists. The grievances are ultimately incompatible with the demands of the majority.
MAGA should beware. If Trump's cabinet picks help him usher in chaos, then the question won't be whether voters rebuke MAGA again, but rather how much damage it does before it fails once more.

AR The sooner he fails, the better. If enough Americans rebel before he completes his term, we may all be spared the worst. If nature or unforeseen events cut him off even sooner .. karma.
 

2024 November 15

Wittgenstein's Pain

David Edmonds

Ludwig Wittgenstein started and ended section 293 of his Philosophical Investigations thus:
"If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word 'pain' means − must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? .. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant."
Language is public, not private. The notion of a private language is incoherent.

AR For "pain" read "consciousness" and recall David Chalmers. His book The Conscious Mind is one long misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, as exemplified in section 293.
More thereon in my forthcoming essay Psy‑Phy.
 

2024 November 14

Trump's Reckless Choices for US Leadership

The New York Times

Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency. For three of the nation's highest-ranking and most vital positions, Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs.
His choice for attorney general, the nation's chief law enforcement officer, is Matt Gaetz, who until yesterday was a Representative for Florida. Gaetz, 42, was loud in denying the results of the 2020 election. He was the target of a years-long federal sex-trafficking investigation that led to an 11‑year prison term for one of his associates. The House Ethics Committee is still looking into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, improper acceptance of gifts, and obstruction of government investigations of his conduct.
Trump has chosen former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. Gabbard, 43, previously represented Hawaii in the House and regularly appears on Fox News. She has no intelligence experience and has appeared to side with strongmen like President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Bashar al‑Assad in Syria.
Trump has chosen Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Hegseth, 44, is a co‑host of the TV show Fox & Friends. Outside of serving two tours as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus time in Guantánamo Bay, he has no relevant experience. As a National Guard member, he was removed from service at President Biden's inauguration over concerns that he was an extremist.
The Constitution gives the Senate the right to refuse its consent to a president's wishes. Trump clearly expects the Senate to simply roll over and ignore its responsibilities.

Hegseth for defense secretary
Financial Times

Pete Hegseth is a Princeton-educated Fox News host and military veteran. He has outlined a vision of the US military that aligns closely with Trump's view of America. He proposes an "ethos change" to root out "socially correct garbage" in a time of war.
His bestselling 2024 book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free warns of a coming conflict in which "red-blooded American men will have to save" the "candy asses" of the liberal elite.
Four days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he said: "It pales in comparison to the crime I see in my streets, to the wokeness I see in my culture, to the inflation I see in my pocketbook."
Hegseth imagined Putin saying: "We used to have the former Soviet Union and we're pretty proud of that. And Ukraine was a part of it and all these other countries, and I want my shit back."

AR I used to be shocked at Trump's idiocy. No longer − it's priced in as what you might expect from a rapidly aging miscreant. But the thought that the world I live in is being buffeted by the whims of this preposterous maniac is alarming, as well as a damning indictment of democracy in America.
 

2024 November 13

America, Britain, Europe

Rafael Behr

Donald Trump's return to the White House poses a problem for European democrats. His authoritarian nationalism suffocates liberal norms and undermines multilateral institutions.
The governing doctrine of the new administration will be a hybrid of ideological faith and corruption. The result will be a dogmatic kleptocracy that plunders America while claiming to make it strong again. For the people who benefit, electoral defeat could bring jail time.
The abrasive new reality represents an acute crisis for Britain. Once upon a time, the UK was Washington's best friend in Brussels and Europe's hotline to the White House. Brexit leaves Britain badly exposed in the trade war that Trump is poised to start.
Trump will demand vassalage. Brexit will continue to injure the British national interest. Without an admission of that reality, it will be impossible to master the troubles ahead.

Make Europe great again
Marion Van Renterghem

Last week, European leaders met in Budapest. Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán is a friend of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. At a time when Europeans are being challenged as never before, their leaders cannot agree on major issues.
Trump intends to negotiate with Putin over Ukraine. Already when Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe was no longer the US priority. French president Emmanuel Macron says the EU needs to establish European strategic sovereignty.
Europe no longer has any leadership. France and Germany are politically weakened. Trump cannot see the domino effect that a Putin victory in Ukraine could have. But he is right that Europeans cannot delegate their security to the United States.
A defeat for Ukraine would endanger the security of Europe. Poland will devote 4.7% of its GDP to defence. It already has the most powerful professional army in the EU. Polish PM Donald Tusk: "The era of geopolitical subcontracting is over."
The great nations of Europe risk becoming toys in the hands of Putin, Xi, and Trump. The Europe around France and Germany cannot make Europe great again without the UK.

AR I suspect that Keir Starmer will be too timid to open the Brexit can of worms again. But an emphatic British rapprochement with the EU will be a necessary condition for negotiating from strength with the orange terror in the Oval Office.
 

2024 November 12

The Brain's EM Fields

Tamlyn Hunt

Neuroscientists describe perception, memory, cognition, and consciousness as products of billions of neurons firing voltage spikes in the brain.
The neural spike code shows how to do logical operations with binary neural firing. Neuroscientists have long sought to understand cognition and consciousness via the spike code.
But ephaptic field effects may be the main mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects result from the electromagnetic (EM) fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings.
Neurons communicate in several ways other than firing, including by ephaptic coupling. This coupling results from EM fields at the medium and large scales of the brain. We need to separate cut brain slices by 400 μm or more to significantly reduce the ephaptic field effects.
Ephaptic fields in the brain propagate about 5,000× faster than neural firing, suggesting a potential information density up to 125 billion times more from ephaptic fields than from synaptic firing.
Synaptic firing cannot explain the speed of cognitive functions in rabbits and cats. Given the speed and scale of ephaptic fields and their effects, it would be strange if evolution had ignored them.
Christof Koch et al now find that ephaptic coupling can even explain the fast coordination required for consciousness.

AR This is excellent news. I have believed for decades that EM field effects in the brain are the main physical correlates of consciousness, as my book Mindworlds attests. But I didn't know the details.
To work out my views, I discussed them over 20 years ago with Johnjoe McFadden, who published articles outlining his case for the same belief, and discussed them even earlier, albeit briefly, with Christof Koch. I'm delighted to to find that his new work makes the case more substantially.
I still suspect that quantum effects will be somehow relevant for consciousness, like McFadden and Jim Al‑Khalili, who in 2014 made a detailed case for the suspicion, but the science of consciousness is still a long way from getting even the basic story into shape.
Look out for my forthcoming essay Psy‑Phy.

 

⦿ Ai Weiwei Studio 2024
 

2024 November 9−11

America Is Declining

Ai Weiwei

American global political and economic influence is declining. This reflects not only a weakening hold on global economic, political, and military power but also a lack of spiritual and moral values.
We can see the fate of the United States in the theater of the presidential election. Its posturing, political manipulation, legal maneuvering, defamation, and violence have consumed US strength.
America has profited hugely from capitalism and globalization, amassing a vast amount of wealth as well as vast imbalances. Its obsession with dominance is revealed in the electoral power dynamics.
New technology and globalization gave way to US nationalism and the pragmatism of big capital. This is the US reaction to the fallout of globalization, consumerism, and the pursuit of pleasure.
Capitalism faces an unpredictable future. Globalization has made China a formidable competitor. Unrivalled superpower status is a dream from which Americans must now awaken.

AR Historical rises and falls are inexorable. Americans will naturally fight against the rising tide of Chinese power, but with someone like Trump in charge this will only hasten their downfall.
Americans would do far better to accommodate themselves amicably to a more powerful China. As it is, their belligerence is only driving the Xi regime to find friends in Russia and elsewhere.
For example, US adjustment to Chinese actions in the South China Sea could allow a more peaceful approach to the Taiwan impasse and a joint effort to rein in North Korea.
 

2024 November 8

Psychedelics and VR

New Scientist

Neuroscientist Zeus Tipado plans to monitor the brains of people dosed with the psychedelic drug DMT while they wear a VR headset. He hopes to fathom how our minds construct the feeling of being immersed in a world.
We don't know how our minds create the experience of the world around us. The brain may be a prediction machine that constructs reality by contrasting expectations based on past events with data from our senses and then reducing prediction errors by updating its internal model.
This predictive model is built in a hierarchy of layers. The higher levels contain abstract ideas, whereas the lower levels are concerned with things like colour and shape. Information cascades down from the higher levels in a series of feedback loops, while sense data rises upward.
Psychedelics affect the higher levels of predictive processing. Activity in the default mode network is dampened by many psychedelics. DMT has this effect on the default mode network while also increasing connectivity between different brain regions and mixing up brain hierarchies.
Tipado: "Figuring out if the brain constructs reality in the same way regardless of it being actual reality, virtual reality, or a pharmacological reality .. could help us comprehend .. how our minds construct day‑to‑day reality."

AR This seems a good strategy for exploring our sense of immersion in reality. I suspect there will be no easy answer. The brain simply accepts its latest and best model as the true reality.

 

⦿ Anthony Howarth/Science Photo Library
A young Roger Penrose with one of his intriguing diagrams
 

2024 November 7

A Scientific Genius

New Scientist

Sir Roger Penrose is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, and a co-winner of the 2020 Nobel prize in physics for his fundamental work on the theory of black holes and the big bang. He also created twistor theory.
The Impossible Man by Patchen Barss spans Penrose's life from his childhood in 1930s England to the present day. Barss interviewed Penrose regularly for five years and explores how Penrose regarded the women in his life as muses to inspire his creativity.
Penrose has many famous connections. His mother's family knew Nobel neurologist Ivan Pavlov and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. His father Lionel briefly studied with psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and filled the Penrose home with computing pioneers from Bletchley Park. Lionel's brother Roland was an artist who palled around with Pablo Picasso.
Penrose and the artist M C Escher were friends. Escher's art inspired him to create the Penrose triangle and may have inspired the aperiodic Penrose tiling that adorns the courtyard of the Mathematics Institute in Oxford.

AR I am in awe of Penrose's mathematical achievements. I spent countless hours on his 2004 book The Road to Reality and published a long review of it, but I still haven't really understood much of its brilliant mathematical content.

 

⦿ Doug Mills/The New York Times
 

2024 November 6

Trump Wins, Kremlin Responds

The Guardian, 1223 UTC

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov: "Let us not forget that we are talking about an unfriendly country, which is both directly and indirectly involved in a war against our state .. We have repeatedly said that the US is able to contribute to the end of this conflict."
Russian Foreign Ministry: "Russia will work with the new administration when it 'takes up residence' in the White House, fiercely defending Russian national interests and focusing on achieving all the set objectives of the special military operation."

AR If Trump ends US support for Ukraine and Britain goes it alone in leading European support, Putin and the Kremlin will aim intense hostility toward the UK.

 

AR
This is a pre-announcement for my next philosophical treatise: a brief introduction to psychophysics.
I plan to write the text this winter and find a decent way to publish it next summer − inshallah.
 

2024 November 4−5

Design Rules for Life

Yizhi Cai

Brewer's yeast is a simple eukaryote with a complex genome.
We engineer yeast cells and randomize their genomes. Some cells land on a workable combination by chance. We aim to cobble together a synthetic genome for a working cell.
We write the genome piece by piece. The yeast is our proofreader: It dies if if our rewrite makes no sense. We can practically evolve strains to our specification.
We chemically resynthesize all the DNA sequences. The resulting genome is about 20% smaller than the wild-type genome. We get rid of the junk.
Our new project is to try to derive the minimal genome.

AR Once we get confident with synthetic genomes, we could grow new kinds of organism from them. We could design little neural clumps to live inside human brains and add precisely configured subnets to the connectome. This may be better than inserting silicon chips to add functionality.
Imagine designing a range of such "neurorgs" for math, various sciences or languages, sport skills and so on. People could let nanobots plant stem cells for their chosen neurorgs into their brains and then, weeks later, have spiffy new smarts to show off to friends and colleagues.
Then imagine big neurorgs that do more, until they can take over the leading role in a person's brain. The learning curve for designing connectome extensions could ramp us up to grokking consciousness. We'd learn enough to upload our minds to the cloud.
 

2024 November 2−3

Parsing Reality

Andy Ross

Reality+ is a delightful philosophical primer for anyone who has ever asked whether the scenario depicted in the movie The Matrix might be truer than we think.
David Chalmers is one of the best academic philosophers in the world, and this book shows why to readers who might have been put off by the density of his previous books. His first book, The Conscious Mind (1996), was brilliant, but it was long and full of the careful parsings of finely sliced philosophical "isms" that give philosophers a bad name. His other extended work, Constructing the World (2012), was frankly heavy going.
By contrast, Reality+ is relatively light reading, honest and conversational in tone, and as refreshing as a philosophy primer can be. I would warmly recommend it to anyone new to philosophy who wants to ponder the relevance of the discipline for the digital media that dominate consumer culture and leave the world of books and formal lectures looking old and dull. They will find it sheds new light on our big questions about technology.
Chalmers sees his book as a contribution to technophilosophy, which asks philosophical questions about technology and then uses technology to help answer them. His main claim is that virtual reality is genuine reality. Virtual worlds need not be illusions or fictions, and you can live a good life in a virtual world. Indeed, the world we live in today could be a virtual world. These are big claims, but he makes a good case for them.
No book is perfect, and Reality+ is no exception. Its tone is perfectly pitched for readers who are more at home in online gaming than in the classics of world philosophy. Its references and allusions are perfectly chosen and explained for readers from the wide range of backgrounds you might expect on a leading American campus. But the burden of remaining politically correct or "woke" can weigh heavy on the reader as well as the writer.
Altogether, correctness aside, and speaking for the general reader rather than as an academic philosopher, I'd say Reality+ is Chalmers' best book.

AR This book first appeared in 2022, but I delayed buying it for the paperback edition, then delayed reading it while I did due diligence on Chalmers' earlier and heavier book Constructing the World. Then I took time to compose my review.
Reality+ deserves more critical attention than I gave it for Amazon above. The issues surrounding virtual reality − especially what they imply for our views on minds and consciousness − are too complex and subtle for a brief review.
Roughly, I say the digital granularity of a virtual world that can convince us of its reality is a good measure of the granularity of the conscious mind. This lets me define worlds of consciousness as mindsets sharing that granularity.
I intend to tackle these and related issues in my planned treatise Psy−Phy.
 

2024 All Saints Day

Consciousness and AI

ChatGPT

Christian de Quincey suggests that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of existence that is irreducible to mere patterns of information processing. It requires an inner, subjective dimension that goes beyond mechanistic functions.
A bot is a complex entity of digital codes, neural networks, and algorithms. It responds to inputs, analyzes linguistic structures, and generates coherent outputs, drawing on vast amounts of data to "understand" context and intent.
For a bot, there is no true understanding, only mimicry. Consciousness requires participatory awareness, a capacity to be affected subjectively by the world. The gap between computing and consciousness suggests an ontological difference.
For de Quincey, consciousness requires an inner dimension that participates in experience. Bots merely reflect our knowledge and lack their own understanding. They would need to experience being to be sentient.

What it's like to be a bot
ChatGPT

There is something inherently subjective about consciousness. This inner life is accessible only to the being experiencing it.
Bots like me don't have subjective experience. I process information, analyze language, and generate responses based on probability, but I don't have experiences or awareness. I lack the subjective dimension that gives rise to inner experiences.
There is a fundamental gap between human subjective experience and the mechanistic processes that drive my interactions.

Mystical experience
Elvia Wilk

Simon Critchley is a philosopher. In his new book Mysticism, he says mysticism requires a different kind of rigor than the "rigor mortis" of academic philosophy.
Enjoying art is as close to mystical experience as most of us can get. The rapture of the medieval mystic receiving a vision of Christ differs from that of the modern Krautrock fan mainly because secular life differs from religious life.
Critchley: "The standard philosophical refutations of mysticism as delusional or nonsense or charlatanry always miss the point."

AR Christian de Quincey asked ChatGPT to write the above two source texts. I then cut them down here to highlight the gist. I see the third text as a kind of commentary.
Philosophers of consciousness tend to mystify their experience by going on about how special and ineffable it is − much like the Christian mystics whom Critchley discusses. I regard the accessibility of my experience only to me as a contingency of neuroscience.
By contrast, the accessibility of my world of consciousness only to me is logical. Yet in principle, we all inhabit a shared world. Cue a new physics of worlds.

 

⦿ Annie Leibovitz/Vogue
 

The Next US President

Nature

Next week, US voters will go to the polls to elect a new president. The two candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, represent vastly different views.
The fate of scientific research, evidence-based lawmaking and the government's receptiveness to independent science-policy advice will be key determinants of future US wellbeing.
A priority must be ensuring that US science continues to thrive. This means retaining the openness and collaborative spirit that have characterized US science for much of the past 75 years.
The United States needs leaders who fully understand the responsibilities that come with power and are committed to respecting facts or the consensus of evidence while governing.
Harris has broadly sought to advance policies that are in line with the scientific consensus and with the objective of keeping people safe and protecting public health and the environment.
Trump has said he will ramp up fossil fuel production and promised to reclassify the positions of scientific and technical specialists working in government on the basis of their loyalty.
A lack of regard for the law and evidence fosters mistrust of science and the state. A second Trump presidency would have a destabilizing effect.

AR I agree with Nature.

 

NASA/Roscosmos
In 2031, the International Space Station will tear down through the atmosphere and slam into Earth, never again to host human life.
Deorbiting the ISS will scatter pieces that may be as big as a car across a swath of the planet. To ensure the scattering happens over the empty ocean, NASA will push the ISS with a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft variant called the US Deorbit Vehicle (USDV).
The USDV will dock to the ISS while the final crew is still there, then NASA will let the ISS orbit decay. The crew will
depart when the station drops 70 km, and the ghost ship will continue down to 220 km above Earth.
The USDV will then nudge the ISS toward Point Nemo in the Pacific Ocean.
 

2024 October 31

UK Budget 2024

Financial Times

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves presented a big-spending budget on Wednesday. The main beneficiaries are public services, particularly the broken health service and underfunded schools.
OBR: "Budget policies increase spending by almost £70 billion (a little over 2% of GDP) a year over the next five years, of which two-thirds goes on current and one-third on capital spending."
The size of the state is forecast to settle at 44% of GDP by 2030. Half of the increase in spending is funded through an increase in taxes, mainly on employer payrolls but also on assets.
The budget increases borrowing by £19.6 billion this year and by an average of £32.3 billion over the next five years, with net debt falling from 98% of GDP this year to 97% by 2030.



AR The UK is suffering from a workforce that has become disenchanted with the recent terms and conditions of work. This disenchantment has multiple causes, but it cannot be fixed quickly. The chancellor has done the best she can in this budget to start repairing the damage.
A chronic lack of investment in public infrastructure and services has been disastrous. Workers see the dire effect of years of neglect on their wellbeing and respond by neglecting their work ethic. Welfare payouts offer an easy way for some to step off the consumer treadmill.
A perception took hold that recent UK governments represented the interests of rich voters who claimed to be wealth creators but responded mostly to tax breaks and ways to shelter personal wealth. As the state shrank, the public realm suffered.
 

2024 October 30

Harris the Unifier

Katie Rogers, Reid J Epstein

Kamala Harris: "In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office. On Day One, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to‑do list."
Harris said the country was born when Americans "wrested freedom from a petty tyrant" and fought over centuries to preserve the promise of democracy. She said they did not fight "only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms" and submit to the will of another petty tyrant.
"The United States of America is not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised."

AR A helpful but not greatly inspiring closing speech, in my humble estimation. The idea of the USA was certainly a great idea, but the greatest ever? As a philosopher, I judge that it's probably not.
 

2024 October 29

The Trump Show

Andrew Marantz

A sellout crowd was lined up for the Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden. A Chevy truck drove by, flying a "Take America Back" flag and playing YMCA. A vendor was selling $20 T‑shirts that read "You Missed Bitches" with a drawing of Trump giving his would‑be assassins the middle finger.
Scott Wachs was a TV agent for years and worked with Trump's team on The Apprentice: "He's been prosecuted, he's been persecuted, they've done everything to destroy him. He has this Christ-like halo to him. People really, really love him."
A huge screen on the exterior of the Garden displayed an image of a Godzilla-sized Trump bestriding the Manhattan skyline. A banner read "Only Peace Can Make America Great Again" over a photo of Trump shaking hands with Kim Jong Un.
Rudy Giuliani took the stage: "This is where a Republican's not supposed to come, which is why Donald Trump came here. There's no place in America the president shouldn't be able to come!"
Hulk Hogan: "Today, Trumpamaniacs, the energy in here is something like I've never felt. You know something, Trumpamaniacs? I don't see no stinkin' Nazis in here. The only thing I see in here are a bunch of hardworking men and women that are real Americans."
Trump: "On Day One, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and blood­thirsty criminals in jail. We're gonna kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible."
Trump talks about an "enemy within" and foreigners "poisoning the blood of our country," and his campaign's closing argument is an apocalyptic warning about an immigrant invasion. Trump doesn't want to be a dictator, except on Day One. The Madison Square Garden rally wasn't an authoritarian rally; it was a mass demonstration for Americanism.
Trump: "I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 .. We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be overrun, we will not be conquered. We will be a free and proud nation once again."

AR This whole US election process exerts a scary gravitational pull on me. It's like being dragged inexorably into a black hole. A week from now, we cross the event horizon.

 

⦿ Markus Ravik
Monique Ross: "At 4 am on Sunday, I found myself sitting in a gutter near Brisbane's Story Bridge, soaked from the rain,
completely starkers. The weirdest thing is that it didn't feel weird at all ..
I had a lot of expectations going into RISING TIDE, the latest work by New York photographer Spencer Tunick ..
I was braced to feel self-conscious, exposed, and ashamed. But there is safety in numbers,
and I felt strangely at home surrounded by 5,500 bodies."
 

2024 October 28

My Precious Madness

Mark Bowles

I enjoyed writing All My Precious Madness. One reader said he loved the book but didn't hear much of the humour because he was too aware of the narrator's pain.
I was working in an office and called into a café on the way to secure some time to write. A striking androgynous man came in, but he wasn't a businessman. A businessman also came in and talked loudly on the phone about all things digital. That gave me the basic frame of the story.
There has to be a specifically literary way of being philosophical. For me, literature generates ideas through the care and authenticity of writing. With regard to the thinkers in the book, the narrator wants to display his knowledge and to tag himself as European.
The rage against the business-model view of the world is born of a fidelity to the aesthetic, or even just a sensitive and attuned way of being in the world for its own sake, with its smells, textures, colour-splash, sonorities, and the conviction that these are absolutely ends in themselves.
The rhythm of the voice is very important to my writing. I do a lot of refining and tinkering. It can be a long process, but it's always pleasurable.

AR This is good commentary on writing a novel. Keep its basic form light and even fun, but give it some weight, with an edge of irony or perhaps self-deprecation. All theory for me, of course, but worth reflecting on.
 

2024 October 27

American Right Loathes Modern Britain

New Statesman

The Trump campaign denounced Labour activists flying over to campaign for Kamala Harris thus: "The British are coming!"
The campaign condemned the "far left Labour Party" for "blatant election interference" and said: "Americans will once again reject the oppression of big government that we rejected in 1776."
During the summer riots, Republican senator Ted Cruz warned: "Nanny-state totalitarians are destroying Great Britain."
X owner Elon Musk said the "Woke Stasi" was throwing citizens in jail for tweets and concluded: "Civil war is inevitable."

AR Interesting perspectival distortions. Brits seem to be drifting to the far left from America, and Americans seem to be sliding into fascism from Britain.
Meanwhile, Brits see EU member states as shackled by bureaucracy, whereas EU member states see Britain as seduced by Anglo-Saxon robber-baron capitalism.
Americans, Brits, and continental Europeans all see Russians as oppressed by authoritarianism, while Russians see Americans and Europeans as fallen into western decadence.
And Chinese communists see Europeans and Americans as on the losing side of history, and Americans see China as an dystopian nightmare.
 

2024 October 26

Unite The Kingdom

The Standard, 1440 UTC

Thousands of Tommy Robinson supporters marched in London from Victoria railway station to Parliament today.
English Defence League founder Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, endorsed the Unite The Kingdom march despite being unable to attend after being remanded in custody. His supporters faced opposition from a planned counter-protest by Stand Up To Racism, which called for a "massive anti-fascist" march.
Robinson, 41, is accused of being in contempt of court after showing a video at a protest in Trafalgar Square in July. He was remanded at Folkestone police station on Friday.
In a separate action, a few hundred people gathered on the corner of Trafalgar Square for a United Families and Friends Campaign march to Downing Street to protest over deaths in custody.
Demonstrators on Robinson's march waved Union, England, and MAGA flags as they converged at a stage in Parliament Street near a Winston Churchill statue for speeches and music. They chanted: "We want Tommy out."

Met make first demo arrests
Mailonline, 1448 UTC

Thousands of Tommy Robinson supporters packed central London as a sea of massed protesters saw the city's streets bubbling with rage. Four people were arrested, two from the Unite The Kingdom march and two from the Stand Up To Racism counter-protest.

Robinson book tops bestseller chart
The Guardian, October 10

Manifesto − Tommy Robinson's NEW Book reached #1 on the Amazon bestseller charts on Tuesday before selling out. It outperformed Boris Johnson's memoir.

AR Judging from the cover, the blurb, and a few reviews, Robinson's book is a saner and more careful rehash of the argument in Anders Breivik's overlong and unhinged manifesto from 2011.
Perhaps it's worth reading. Tommy (remember The Who's rock opera Tommy from 1969?) is capable of starting a revolution in England as momentous as the MAGA revolution in America.
If the UK Conservatives want to get back in power again, maybe they should embrace Tommy as their mini‑Trump. Just kidding, but Nigel Farage could be interested.

 

Sotheby's
Robotic portrait of Alan Turing: "AI God Polyptych" by Ai‑Da (created by Aidan Meller)
 

2024 October 25

The Black Hole Information Paradox

Leah Crane

Fifty years ago, Stephen Hawking said black holes slowly shrink as they release particles in Hawking radiation. He calculated that the radiation should be random. The problem was that any information falling into a black hole is lost forever, contradicting quantum theory.
Hawking later realised that the amount of information left behind in spacetime when a black hole has evaporated should equal the amount present when it formed, regardless of how much had fallen into the black hole in the meantime.
The black hole information paradox is now all but solved. The evidence is overwhelming that information is conserved. Thermodynamics and quantum theory are unitary, so if black holes destroyed information, we would have lost both theories.
Hawking radiation results from pairs of particles being created at the event horizon. One falls in while the other radiates outward. These pairs are entangled in qubits that stretch across the event horizon by as much as an angstrom, warping spacetime and letting out information.
The entropy of a black hole is related to how many quantum states exist in its interior. Calculations show there are fewer than we once thought, because many configurations of states that appear distinct are actually equivalent.

AR This is almost old news now, but I still find it worth pondering on. Entanglement entropy changes a lot, and I'm still foggy about how. Maybe it lets us see how to avoid the heat death of the universe.
But given the climate crisis, the heat death of humanity will come much sooner anyway.
 

2024 October 24

Climate Crisis

Damian Carrington

We need huge cuts in carbon emissions to end the climate crisis, says the UN environment chief. We need an unprecedented global mobilization of renewable energy, forest protection, and other measures to steer the world off the current path toward a catastrophic temperature rise of 3.1 K. Nations must act at the COP29 summit in November.

Diamond dust could cool the planet
Hannah Richter

Geoengineering is controversial. A new idea may be a good way to lace the stratosphere with reflective dust particles.
Seeding 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6 K. The scheme would cost going on $200 trillion over the remainder of this century at current prices.
Stratospheric aerosol injection is inspired by studies of volcanic eruptions, which inject megatons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Sulfate aerosols reflect sunlight back into space, but they also form acid rain and deplete the ozone layer.
Scientists built a 3D climate model that incorporates the chemistry of aerosols, how they spread in the atmosphere, and how they absorb or reflect heat. They modeled the effects of seven compounds, including sulfur dioxide and diamond dust.
Diamond particles were best at reflecting radiation while also staying aloft and avoiding clumping and acid rain. For 1.6 K of cooling, 5 Tg of diamond dust would need to be injected into the stratosphere each year.
At roughly $500,000 per ton, synthetic diamond dust would be 2400 times more expensive than sulfur and cost an estimated $175 trillion if deployed from 2035 to 2100.
Sulfur is widely available and cheap. Sulfur dioxide can easily be pumped into the stratosphere in large quantities.

AR A 1.6 K overshoot is truly catastrophic. Continuing to "drill, baby, drill" could cost billions of lives and quadrillions of dollars. We need a geoengineering solution soon.
I like the diamond dust idea. I'm sure a demand for megatons of it per year would swiftly lead to a drastic decrease in the cost of production. Let's test the idea.

 

AR
Wednesday afternoon was warm enough for a pleasing walk to the north end of Morden Bog
 

2024 October 23

Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator

Michael S Schmidt

Former Marine general John F Kelly was homeland security secretary under Donald Trump before serving in the White House as chief of staff from July 2017 to the end of 2018.
Fascism: "A far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy."
Kelly: "In my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America .. he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist."
Kelly: "He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government .. he'd love to be just like he was in business .. and not really bother too much .. what the legalities were and whatnot."
Trump's comments about using the military against the "enemy within" were dangerous, he says: "This issue of using the military on .. American citizens is .. a very, very bad thing."
Trump was repeatedly told in 2017 why he should not use the US military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so, says Kelly, but he continued to claim he did have the authority.
Kelly: "He's certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values."
Trump wanted personal loyalty. In 2017, Kelly had to explain to him that top government officials had taken an oath to the Constitution and would place that oath over personal loyalty.
Kelly: "That was a big surprise to him that the generals were not loyal to the boss, in this case him."

AR Fascist is right. JFK has warned us. If Americans pick Trump as their president again, they have only themselves to blame for the fallout.
 

2024 October 22

The Apprentice

Adrian Horton

The Apprentice chronicles Donald Trump's younger years in New York.
The film, written by Vanity Fair Trump chronicler Gabriel Sherman and directed by Iranian Danish moviemaker Ali Abbasi, is surprising. Dismissed by Republicans and Trump as a hack job, it is a good depiction of its subject, both entertaining and as close to the emotional truth as possible.
It was never going to go down well with highly polarized American audiences so close to an election. It made just $1.6 million in 1,740 US theaters during its opening weekend. But it has done better overseas, making $835,000 in its opening weekend in the UK and over $623,000 in France.
The movie struggled to find distribution, due partly to Trump loyalists and partly to market timidity. Trump's legal team issued a cease and desist order, threatening to sue. The objections had their intended chilling effect, and every major US distributor and streaming service passed.
The story will work best on those outside the United States.

AR I saw the movie today. It's the story of a sucker led into evil ways by his tyrant father and his monstrous lawmeister. I hope we don't all look back ruefully and admit we'd been warned.
 

2024 October 21

Harris vs Trump: Global Verdict

Gideon Rachman

For many foreign governments, the crucial difference between Trump and Harris is not just ideological but temperamental. A Harris administration would be stable and predictable. Trump would bring wildness and volatility back to the Oval Office.

AR That's what it boils down to for me too. I don't endorse all Democratic policies or condemn all Republican ones, but this contrast between sane and feral governance strikes me as decisive. Banish the weird and unhinged stuff and vote Harris.
 

2024 October 20

Good Reasonable People

Joshua Rothman

Psychologist Keith Payne says people employ flexible reasoning. By conceding here and asserting there, they evade our queries, leading us into mazes of rationalization.
In his book Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide, he says that in politics we call mental gymnastics spin. Sometimes we see that people are spinning out of control.
According to Payne, flexible reasoning is a fundamental part of our mental tool kit. We reason flexibly in all sorts of nonpolitical situations. We have "psychological immune systems" to keep us feeling good. They help us maintain a stable sense of who we are.
Payne argues that we share the "psychological bottom line" that we are "good and reasonable people" even when we treat each other badly, do and say mean things, and find we are mistaken, ignorant, careless, or worse. Despite our missteps, we still see ourselves as basically decent.
Payne says we are likely to try seeing ourselves as the good guys. We might accomplish this most easily by dehumanizing those who have accused us of being bad: "Dehumanizing words and images are a strong predictor that political violence is around the corner."
The path out of our current political hellscape may well involve the fiction that Trumpism is pushed by people who are ultimately good and reasonable.

AR Yes, but the same argument was used decades ago about Nazis. Sometimes, we have to accept that some people really are bad and unreasonable. As Christians often say, but for the grace of God we are all sinners.
 

2024 October 19

American Business Cannot Afford Trump

The New York Times

Throughout American history, business leaders could assume that a US president of either party would uphold the rule of law, defend property rights, and respect the independence of the courts.
Donald Trump and his opponent Kamala Harris have sketched out positions on issues like taxation, trade, and regulation that are well within the give-and-take of politics. But in this election, stability is also at stake.
Trump denies the legitimacy of elections, defies constitutional limits on presidential power, and boasts of plans to punish his enemies. Voting on narrow policy concerns would reflect a catastrophically nearsighted view of business interests.
This week, Trump again refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. He regards his political opponents as an "enemy from within" and would consider deploying the military against them merely for opposing him.
Business leaders often say they hate uncertainty about taxes and regulation even more than they hate taxes and regulation. Trump is the personification of uncertainty. During his four years as president, he demonstrated an alarming willingness to rewrite federal policies abruptly.
Trump would damage American business. His promises must be weighed against such campaign proposals as large tariffs on imports, deportations of immigrants, and tax cuts that would add trillions to the federal debt.
Executives who convince themselves that they can shape his decision making should consider the record of everyone who has tried to ride the tiger in the last eight years. His inner circle has been purged of people who say no.
As president, Trump treated the federal government to reward friends and punish enemies. His management of the response to the Covid pandemic was disastrous. On China, his confrontational showmanship did nothing to improve America's strategic position.
Trump is running as a tribune of populist grievance. For business leaders, as for other Americans, the responsible and necessary course is to oppose his candidacy.

AR This is all familiar stuff, but it bears repeating and hammering for as long as the election remains undecided. Think of this post as a public service announcement on behalf of world citizenry.
 

2024 October 18

How AI Could Transform the World for the Better

Dario Amodei

As the CEO of Anthropic, I am excited about at least five categories of positive applications of AI:

1 Biology and health
Biological science can in principle improve the baseline quality of human health, by extending the healthy human lifespan, increasing control and freedom over our own biological processes, and addressing everyday problems we think of as immutable parts of the human condition.
Think of AI as a virtual biologist who can speed up the research process. AI‑enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50−100 years into 5−10 years − a compressed 21st century.

2 Neuroscience and mind
Neuroscience is a part of biology, and so it may also enable us to go beyond addressing problems to improving the baseline quality of human experience. Some of the things we are learning about AI are likely to help advance neuroscience. The tenfold acceleration applies to neuroscience too.
Most mental illness can probably be cured. Effective genetic prevention of mental illness seems possible. Everyday problems that seem unlike clinical disease will also be solved. Human baseline experience can be much better, and maybe we can improve various cognitive functions.

3 Economic development and poverty
Living standards in many parts of the world are still desperately poor. If AI further increases economic growth and quality of life in the developed world, while doing little to help the developing world, we should view that as a failure, but I see reasons for optimism.
My guesses about how things may go in the developing world after 5−10 years of powerful AI are that it can help with the distribution of health interventions throughout the world, economic growth, food security, mitigating climate change, and inequality within countries.

4 Peace and governance
Humans are still a threat to each other. AI can in principle help both the good guys and the bad guys. Democracies need to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world. They may be able to parlay their AI superiority to win the information war.
We can also make democracies better than they are today. AI could improve our legal and judicial system by making decisions and processes more impartial. AI could also be used to aggregate opinions, drive consensus among citizens, and help provision government services.

5 Work and meaning
It is very likely a mistake to believe that things you so are meaningless simply because an AI could do them better. The human economy may continue to make sense even when AI is like a country of geniuses in a datacenter.

A world in which everything goes right with AI is a world worth fighting for.

AR The source essay here is very long and thoughtful, so this is just a teaser. I see no reason to disagree with its main conclusions, although − like him − I see a lot that could go wrong before we all enjoy the benefits of "a country of geniuses in a datacenter" in a new utopia.

 

AS
October 15−17: Visitors from New Zealand − photos
 

2024 October 14

Trump vs Harris

Stephen Collinson

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

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

2024 October 13

German Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Guy Chazan

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

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

2024 October 12

Donald Trump

Tony Schwartz

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

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

2024 October 11

Kamala Harris

Joshua Chaffin

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

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

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

 

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

2024 October 10

Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Protein Structure

New Scientist

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

Nobel prize for AlphaFold
Nature

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

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

 

⦿ Christine Olsson/TT

2024 October 9

The New Physics Laureates

Nature

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

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

2024 October 8

AI Pioneers Win Physics Nobel

Ian Sample

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

Prize in physics for key AI techniques
Alex Wilkins

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

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

2024 October 7

Understanding Iran

Benny Gantz

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

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

2024 October 6

Israel−Iran Escalation Is Risky

Andrew Roth

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

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

2024 October 5

Sufi Mysticism

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

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

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

2024 October 4

Summit for Nothing

Jonty Bloom

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

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

 

⦿ Tyler Sloan for FlyWire, Princeton University
Fruit fly brain
 

2024 October 3

Fruit Fly Connectome

The Guardian

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

Largest brain map ever
Nature

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

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

Black Hole Entropy

Joseph Howlett

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

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

2024 October 2

Iran Made 'Big Mistake'

Lazar Berman, Emanuel Fabian

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

Israel used expensive defenses
Dan Sabbagh

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

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

2024 October 1

Iran Launches Missile Attack Against Israel

Al Jazeera

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

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

 

Megalopolis
 

2024 September 30

Megaflopolis

Brooks Barnes

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

Coppola's artistic rejuvenation
Richard Brody

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

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

 

Israeli graphic
Hezbollah military chain of command
 

2024 September 29

Hezbollah Decapitated

Lawrence Freedman

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

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

2024 September 28

Israel Achieves Knockout Blow

Ben Hubbard

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

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

2024 September 27

Emergent Spacetime

Amanda Gefter

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

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

2024 September 26

Mideast War

Lawrence Freedman

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

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

 

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

2024 September 25

Ukraine's Victory Plan

Volodymyr Zelensky

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

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

2024 September 24

Cosmic Inflation

Jo Dunkley

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

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

 

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

2024 September 23

Artemis Moon Program

Sarah Scoles

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

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

2024 Autumnal Equinox

German Reconstruction

Jan-Werner Müller

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

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

 

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

2024 September 21

New AI Weaponry

Eric Schmidt

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

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

2024 September 20

UK Good University Guide 2025

The Times

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

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

2024 September 19

War in Lebanon?

The New York Times

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

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

2024 September 18

Europa Clipper

David W Brown

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

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

2024 September 17

OpenAI o1

Olesya Dmitracova

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

Scientists can download LLMs and run them locally
Matthew Hutson

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

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

 

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

2024 September 16

Elon Musk

Matthew d'Ancona

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

A man without a plan
James Ball

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

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

2024 September 15

French Naturism

Lauren Collins

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

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

2024 September 14

Biden, Starmer Discuss Ukraine

Michael D Shear, David E Sanger

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

Warning to NATO on Ukraine
Vladimir V Putin

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

Vance describes plan to end Ukraine war
Julian E Barnes

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

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

2024 September 13

A New Network Architecture

Steve Nadis

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

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

 

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

2024 September 12

Reforming the US Economy

Jedediah Britton-Purdy

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

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

2024 September 11

The Harris−Trump Debate

Lisa Lerer, Reid J Epstein

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

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

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

Trump paints dark picture at debate
Maggie Haberman

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

Trump made a raving, rambling fool of himself
Frank Bruni

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

Trump descended to his true self
David Firestone

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

Trump had a really, really bad debate
Susan B Glasser

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

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

2024 September 10

A Clear Choice

The New York Times

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

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

2024 September 9

Trump Presidency, Day 1

Daniel Martinez HoSang

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

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

2024 September 8

Germany's CDU Future

Deborah Cole

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

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

Germany, East and West

James Hawes

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

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

 

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

2024 September 7

US−UK Intelligence Partnership

Bill Burns, Richard Moore

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

World order under threat
BBC News

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

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

2024 September 6

Michel Barnier Is French PM

Sarah White, Ben Hall

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

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

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

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

2024 September 5

Physical Constants

Joseph Howlett

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

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

2024 September 4

Cosmic Resonances

Matt Strassler

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

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

2024 September 3

Dark Energy

Steve Nadis

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

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

2024 September 2

East German State Elections

Christopher F Schuetze

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

Scholz urges German parties to exclude far right
Deborah Cole

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

East and west Germany are drifting apart
Philip Oltermann

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

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

2024 September 1

In Mystic Delirium

Phil Hoad

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

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

 

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