CapitalistImperialistPig

 I was surprised and a bit taken aback by DJT's indictment today. I hadn't even had time to put the champaign on ice. So what to do if he fuels up Trump Force One and makes a run for Moscow or Riyad?  Let him go or escort him back.  I lean toward letting him go.  Let him be caught in the ruination of Mordor when Putin goes down.

  I first encountered Anaximander in a course I took in Ancient Greek philosophy, and I didn’t have the sense to be impressed.  Only four brief lines of his work survive, and to me they were utterly mysterious: All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity; they give to each other justice and recompense for injustice in conformity with the order of Time. Rovelli, Carlo. Anaximander (p. 79). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Neither my textbook nor my professor pointed out that these rather mysterious lines contain a profound idea – the notion of natural law, the idea that the phenomena of nature are due not to the whims of this god or that, but the operation in time of natural laws, or necessity. This was a profound innovation.   All previous explanations of rain, storms, thunder, lightning and other phenomena seem to have attributed them to the actions of gods and spirits.   Anaximander’s idea thus began a ...

If you haven't  sampled ChatGPT yet, I recommend it.  Deep neural networks and the new technology of transformers are producing a technological revolution that is likely the biggest one yet.  ChatGPT and its relatives can write you a sonnet, a coherent summary of the role of sheaves in algebraic geometry, or a computer program in Python or other languages.  A related technology can produce plausible images of persons, monsters, or imaginary landscapes based on a few words of prompting text.  Yet another can take a minute or so of anyone's speech to produce hard to distinguish speech in the speaker's voice. Would you like to hear the Silmarillion as if read by J. R. R. Tolkien?  It can probably be done.  

  A former English major decides to take some trips down Interstate 80 in the company of geologists.  I 80 runs from Teaneck, New Jersey, to San Francisco, a journey of 2901 miles.  Annals is a title borrowed from one of the founding documents of geology, by James Hutton: “ To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders undistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.” McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World (p. 77). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. Science is always a detective story, but in geology it finds its purest form. McPhee’s book is about the stories those rocks reveal and the geologists who read and tell them.   The interst...

Hunter-Gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian.  Civilizations and agricultural societies generally, tend to be hierarchical.  Why so? One possibility is that the greater productivity and fertility of agricultural societies means that they are always bumping up against the Malthusian bound, the maximum population the land and technology can support.  Peter Turchin has explored this idea in his books, including War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires . He documents how Europe has suffered a repetitive cycle of depopulating wars, followed by peace and a rapid expansion of population until individual farmers have been forced to ever smaller farms or more marginal farmland until the society has become broadly impoverished, at which point widespread wars break out as adventurers and the desperate seek more land at the expense of others. These wars depopulate both losers and winners. Of course the other horsemen of the apocalypse who also do their part. But I...

Svante Pääbo is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for the work described in this book. As a student in Sweden Pääbo conceived the dream of decoding the genome of ancient humans and Neandertal Man. This book is the story of that dream, that quest, and all that went into building the scientific institute and international collaboration that achieved that goal thirty years later. Like James Watson’s famous book  The   Double Helix , this is an inside look at how molecular biology is done at the very highest level. Much has changed in biology in the half century plus between these accomplishments and much has stayed the same, but for anyone who wants to know how science really works, here is the story, laid out in compelling detail. We also get a detailed look at the personal life of the author. Pääbo’s thirty year dream culminated in the publication of the Neandertal genome. So what did it take to achieve it? When the author began his quest, methods fo...

  Helgoland is windswept and relatively barren island where Werner Heisenberg repaired to contemplate the puzzles of quantum phenomena, and, ultimately, to invent quantum mechanics.  At this point quantum theory was already a quarter of a century old, invented by Max Planck in 1900 and further developed by Einstein, Bohr, and others but only very special and simple cases could be solved. A method of general application did not exist.  After weeks of intense mental struggle he found an answer in the behavior of tables of numbers, tables that would become the matrices of matrix mechanics. Carlo Rovelli, himself an important physicist, tells that story in the first chapter of his book Helgoland, as well as the struggles of Heisenberg and others to understand what he had found.   In quick succession the English Physicist Paul Dirac and the Austrian Erwin Schrodinger found apparently quite different but completely equivalent formulations of quantum mechanics.   All...