CapitalistImperialistPig

Book Review: The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson One of the stars of the Paris World’s Fair of 1889 was Gustave Eiffel’s marvelous tower.   That fair celebrated the 100 th anniversary of the French Revolution.   With the 400 th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World approaching, the United States wanted to do something to top Paris, showcase the arrival of the US as a world power and center of technological innovation.   A fierce competition emerged between US cities to host and build the Fair.   To the surprise and consternation of the cities of the East, the upstart Midwest city of Chicago won the competition. The World’s Fair and Columbian Exhibition of 1893 was Chicago’s chance to show that it wasn’t just the dirty, smelly, hog butcher of the world, and they mustered most of the great architects in the US to design it.   Daniel Burnham was the lead architect and Fredrick Law Olmstead, the designer of Central Park and Biltmore, design...

...of the coronavirus is here in the USA.  Thanks to a despicably corrupt President and some nitwit governors, we have seen a new peak of infections here.  Where it will end, we don't know, but here is what W. B. Yeats had to say on the subject 100 years ago (very slightly edited): Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst    Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    When a vast image out of  Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    A shape with lion  whale body and the head of a man,...

...two mutually unintelligible languages, one spoken by mathematicians... In his book on Differential Geometry, Loring Tu includes a story about a remark by Physics Nobel winner C. N. Yang. “Gauge fields are deeply related to some profoundly beautiful ideas of contemporary mathematics, ideas that are the driving forces of part of the mathematics of the last 40 years, . . . , the theory of fiber bundles.” Convinced that gauge fields are related to connections on fiber bundles, he tried to learn the fiber-bundle theory from several mathematical classics on the subject, but “learned nothing. The language of modern mathematics is too cold and abstract for a physicist” Tu represents that his book is intended to be intelligible to physicists, and prerequisites are just his previous book "Introduction to Manifolds,"  a bit of point set topology, and, evidently, some abstract algebra. Seven chapters into the present book,  https://www.amazon.com/Differential-Geometry-Connections-Char...

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...............Yeats, The Second Coming I watched a bit of Obama's last speech to the Washington Correspondent's Annual dinner.  My reaction was a deep shame that the US could have fallen so far in four years. How did we go from Obama to the present horrifying incumbent so fast?

California, Texas, and Florida are the new centers* of US infection.  California has already passed New Jersey, and we can only hope that it won't challenge New York).  Most of the blame goes to the the incoherent and counter productive policies of the Trump administration.  The contrast between countries that handled coronavirus well (New Zealand, Vietnam, Norway and even China) and those run by morons (Brazil, US, UK, Sweden) is stark. *Earthquakes have epicenters, pandemics do not.

My State made the national news today because yesterday a man was shot in a scuffle between demonstrators trying to tear down a statue of Juan de Oñate in Albuquerque and a group calling themselves the New Mexico Civil Militia..  Oñate was a Spanish explorer, conquistador, and first governor of the Spanish province of Santa Fe.  He is a controversial figure due to his savage response to the murder of a baker's dozen of Spanish settlers by Indians from the Acoma Pueblo. His response destroyed the Pueblo, killed 800-1000, and enslaved many more.  Surviving men over 25 had their right foot cut off.  Oñate was eventually convicted of excessive force by Spain and temporarily exiled from New Mexico and Mexico City. His name and statues have long been prominent and controversial.  My sons graduated from Oñate High School here in Las Cruces.  One of his statues had its right foot cut off some years back - a condign punishment if ever there was one. Interestingly en...

No and yes.  Biologically, they are not very real, since the variations we see between so-called races are small compared to those within any of them.  However, as social constructs, they can be very real, strongly influencing the ways people interact with each other and how they view themselves.   Social constructs (including money, nations, corporations, etc.) have tremendous influence on our lives, but they also are pretty ephemeral compared to biological realities.  Of course there are real differences among people that are correlated with ancestry.  Some time after leaving Africa, most Eurasians developed lighter colored skin, which seems to be adaptive in climates where sunlight is in short supply.  Most of these differences are as superficial as the melanin proportion in our skin cells. Since those who first developed racial theories were light skinned, it was not coincidental that they picked skin color as a defining characteristic, and their o...