Happy New year

 Grandson Ethan, about 7 weeks old. https://www.facebook.com/749518284/posts/10158335361373285/

Needham and related questions

 Needham and related questions:

Joseph_Needham

1.“ “Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo?”, and why it “had not developed in Chinese civilization” which in the previous many centuries “was much more efficient than occidental in applying” natural knowledge to practical needs? [16] [17]

"Gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing, which Francis Bacon considered as the four most important inventions facilitating the West's transformation from the Dark Ages to the modern world, were invented in China".[18] Needham's works attribute significant weight to the impact of Confucianism and Taoism on the pace of Chinese scientific discovery, and emphasises the "diffusionist" approach of Chinese science as opposed to a perceived independent inventiveness in the western world. Needham thought the notion that the Chinese script had inhibited scientific thought was "grossly overrated".” from Wikipedia.

2. The great divergence is the growing economic gap between west and china over 1100 years. And little divergence is the growing gap between northern and Southern Europe.

3.Modernity from Emmanuel Todd:

First hint from [A], page 33, "...urbanization, industrialization and the spread of literacy, in short by modernization..."

Second hint from [B], pages 2-3, "This is a cultural development, beyond the realm of the material. Cultural development first shows up as a rise in the rate of literacy....In the second stage, a fall in the rates of mortality and fertility follows the rise of literacy. Man thus takes control of his immediate biological environment. Only in the third stage does development appear as an increase in the production of industrial goods or, more generally, material wealth"

 A) The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, Translated by David Garrioch, 1985 B)The Causes of Progress: Culture, Authority and Change, Translated by Richard Boulind, 1987

Two recent books: 

 Davids, Karel. Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences. China and Europe Compared, c. 700-1800.

Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East’ by Jared Rubin.

Todd uses family systems to gauge changes. The two recent books use the institutions spawned by religions to gauge changes.

From a review of the second book:

“By combining an institutional argument with religion through the effect that religion had on institutions and politics (rather than on cultural beliefs), Rubin’s argument is reminiscent of an important recent book by Karel Davids, which has not thus far received sufficient attention (Davids, 2013). Both books, in a different way, stress how religious institutions mattered regardless of the precise content of religion. Davids, however, emphasizes another aspect, namely the role of religion in the generation and dissemination of technology. Rubin is primarily interested in institutions that support markets. “

The first book considers:

The aim is to connect the four debates:

1 Religion and visions of nature

2 Religion and Human Capital Formation

3 Religion and circulation of technical knowledge

4 Religion and technical innovation

I am trying to read and trying to understand around these topics.

Demography as destiny

 

The ‘Unconceivable Humankind’ to Come: A Portrait of Lévi-Strauss as a Demographer

Wiktor Stoczkowski

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0392192114568268

See also http://www.cerisepress.com/04/10/centennial-sauvage-the-survival-of-tristes-tropiques/view-all

A review of ‘Lineages of Modernity’ by Emmanuel Todd

 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/emmanuel-todd-lineages-of-modernity.html?fbclid=IwAR0QgOz70IWP4TMnJ6I_4KbFEfw46Qm-8Ku7CRbvGIPUnRK4mk3ybX1FKxQ

“ To be clear, half of this book is unsupported, or sometimes just trivial.  There were several times I was tempted to just stop reading, but then it became interesting again.  Todd covers a great deal of ground (the subtitle is A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus), not all of it convincingly.  But when he makes you think, you really feel he might be on to something.”

India of the last

 Some stories here http://www.indiaofthepast.org/?fbclid=IwAR32uaJgWZw4s5188p-9NO2BxbBIsiMnk6xFRdse7JwdE2lD8H9KjZljbRY

Faye D’Souza on Indian farm protests

 

From Noah Smith

 https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-super-scary-theory-of-the-21st?fbclid=IwAR3ZfMVAT-PBypx6aIsah0TurRsghUTYFxsgbveW-ZZdc7Nt6L0XAMvcWKw

About a scary theory of the new century “ The 2019 protests that rocked every region of the planet had no real unifying theme. They included separatist movements, protests against economic inequality, protests against authoritarianism, and even climate protests. The huge, unprecedented protests in the U.S. a year later were about police brutality. I’m not sure anyone ever figured out what the protests in France were about. 

If there’s one “silver bullet” explanation for why protests are erupting all over the world, it’s technology. Social media dramatically lowers the cost of both organizing a protest and spreading a protest-related ideology. Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Publicand Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas are essential reading on this topic. 

Big protests create instability and can paralyze governments — or even, as we saw with the color revolutions, overthrow them. Great-power conflict in the 21st century might simply be about outlasting your opponents — holding out longer against the naturally bubbling forces of internal dissent. “

So then the question becomes: If social media driven protests are a permanent feature of the modern age, what sort of institutions and technology allow governments to resist the resulting instability?

And I’m not sure we’ll like the answer.

India’s new farm bills

https://thewire.in/rights/farm-laws-legal-rights-constitution article from Wire

http://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2020/222039.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1RWBi7vz37kplkTW_selQEBOXGPP668VYB8yUmxjFrKsdUcXkUZ7EEXKM

Section 13: “No suit, prosecution or other legal proceedings shall lie against the Central Government or the State Government, or any officer of the Central Government or the State Government or any other person in respect of anything which is in good faith done or intended to be done under this Act or of any rules or orders made thereunder.”

A documentary on Ellis Dungan

 

https://youtu.be/gVw4Jtahy4s

Comments from Minai here

A review of one of my favourite books on complex functions

 By Caratheodory

A documentary on Saroj Khan

 

https://youtu.be/ZikNLJeJ17M

A civil servant during emergency

From 2009, another namesake. “The chaotic culture created by such a scramble still persists, and there is no sign that our bureaucracy will ever recover from it. Many of the Emergency era go-getter civil servants have gone from success to success, riding on the shoulders of all hues of politicians who welcome opportunistic civil servants willing to jettison their professional ethics for the rewards of pelf and patronage. Now, no politician or senior civil servant likes a subordinate who talks about what can or cannot be done within the constraints of laws and regulations\; people in power are looking for those who would get ‘any job' done irrespective of proprieties. Even today, unconditional personal loyalty is viewed as the ultimate criterion for judging suitability for jobs.” 

Sanjay Gandhi Effect

One of the greatest tennis shots

 Mary Pierce explains

Two on Sean Connery and Ian Fleming

Toxic Maculinity

The first 50 years of James Bond by Alexander Cockburn

This may explain Trump

 Growing through sabotage

Abstract

According to the theory of capital as power, capitalism, like any other mode of power, is born through sabotage and lives in chains — and yet everywhere we look we see it grow and expand. What explains this apparent puzzle of ‘growth in the midst of sabotage’? The answer, we argue, begins with the very meaning of ‘growth’. Whereas conventional political economy equates growth with a rising standard of living, we posit that much of this growth has nothing to do with livelihood as such: it represents not the improvement of wellbeing, but the expansion of sabotage itself. Building on this premise, the article historicizes, theorizes and models the relationship between changes in hierarchical power and sabotage on the one hand and the growth of energy capture on the other. It claims that hierarchical power is sought for its own sake; that building and sustaining this power demands strategic sabotage; and that sabotage absorbs a significant proportion of the energy captured by society. From this standpoint, capitalism grows, at least in part, not despite but because of — and indeed through — sabotage. 

Lectures on Polyhedral Topology by J.R. Stallings

 “Lectures on Polyhedral Topology” by J.R. Stallings, of his lectures in TIFR 1967, is available online. It also has bits of my first research. I think that the appendix to Chapter seven is mine. And 8.9.3, the proof of s-cobordism with prescribed torsion is mine. I did not understand Stallings proof which used Stiefel-Whitney classes which I was not comfortable with at that time. I came up with the argument given here which is now standard, I think.

https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/stallpl.pdf

Peter Scott

 My friend Peter Scott does not seem to be feeling too well. He had prostrate cancer for a long time and there was a relapse two years ago. Since then, he has been to the hospital off and on, recently to ER for a day. We first met in Liverpool in 1968. Later we corresponded in 1972, he was still in Liverpool and I in Bombay. Some of the resulting work by him was noticed widely and we lost touch, but he seemed to be keeping track of my work and sometimes referred to my work even when it did not seem necessary. Then around 1984, he was one of the organisers of a conference in Warwick. He told me that the conference was organised to understand some of Thurston’s work and I should attend and talk to others since it is difficult to understand it alone. I did attend and it helped. He seems to have decided to resurrect my career since he might have seen some promise in the early days of our contact. We met again in Stillwater in 1986 and he came up with two problems for us to work on, we ended up doing both, one each by correspondence. Then he visited a Melbourne in 1994 and again decided to work with me on some problems of common interest. I was aware of the first one but had no idea how to start. He gave me a paper of Tukia and said what all I had to do was to read about five pages there for the clues. This turned out to be the torus theorem that was completed by others later on. It also started a period of intense collaboration which is still going on. It is probably the hardest work that either of us was ever engaged in and slowly clarified several related problems that interested us. Like many of these things, this kind of difficult technical work may not interest others but was very satisfactory for us. The final clarifications came only this year. Meanwhile we found that we made some mistakes in the early days and since some of this material entered mainstream, it seemed a good idea to publish corrections. But corrections and extensions became another long and difficult affair and seems to be reaching completion now. This will be some thing which nobody may read but compelling to us. Meanwhile Peter keeps chiselling away whenever he is well.

Nobel to Gluck

 Nobel to Gluck privileges a literature whose job is to resist redemption or enchantmentBy Pratal Bhanu  Mehta

Australian strategy for Covid-19

 Australia's coronavirus lockdown strategy worked. Could this be a model for the US?

Long term studies of childhood and later development

The lifelong studies that hold clues to what today’s kids might have in store Book Review of 

The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later LifeJay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt & Richie Poulton Harvard Univ. Press (2020)

Capital as power

A review of 'Capital as Power'

Interview with the authors http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/372/4/20130900_bn_capitalism_as_a_mop_in_22_ideas_to_fix_the_world_long.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3yorJKTLf-IL9ScpHS3Kj_beurTQU5GZqOh7_7d5-LE2x3pAqDmHXKXRM

Related http://journal.eco.ku.ac.th/upload/document/thai/20150149101549.pdf on the average production function. Also https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/pikettys-fair-weather-friends/ And https://college.holycross.edu/eej/Volume31/V31N3P489_491.pdf

Frederick Soddy's economics

It seems that the Nobelm Prize winner in chemistry has written extensively on economics, in particular debt before Michael Hudson.
Frederick Soddy's Debt Economics
Another post in Illogical Economics with some links.
Michael Hudson:"Frederick Soddy pointed this out in the 1920s, describing financial claims as “virtual wealth,” on the opposite side of the balance sheet from tangible capital formation. Adam Smith had argued that money is not real wealth. Bank loans, stocks and bonds are financial claims on wealth. 

The essence of balance-sheet accounting is that assets on the left side equal liabilities on the right-hand side, plus net worth (assets free of debt). It would be double-counting to add an economy’s physical means of production (the asset side of the balance sheet) together with the debt and property claims on these assets (on the liabilities side). Yet most public discourse focuses more on asset prices than on the even faster growth of debt.

Soddy was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1921, showing that good economists sometimes do win – except that he won for his contribution to chemistry, not economics. In an analogy to Ptolemaic astronomy, today’s academic gatekeepers depict an economic system shaped by consumer choice rather than revolving around finance." from https://www.prosper.org.au/2010/05/the-counter-enlightenment/

Tim Harford on statistics and vivid reports

Tim Harford  "Statistics, lies and the virus: Tim Harford’s five lessons from a pandemic" in Financial Times :"Rather than bringing some kind of consensus, more years of education simply seem to provide people with the cognitive tools they require to reach the politically convenient conclusion. From climate change to gun control to certain vaccines, there are questions for which the answer is not a matter of evidence but a matter of group identity." https://app.ft.com/content/92f64ea9-3378-4ffe-9fff-318ed8e3245e?fbclid=IwAR3-oyqteypUnXpBV7MpVH-zL2hmgUXIlVuvZuMxl3i7-2g7ixF6e1bqsCs

Affirmative action returns to University of California

University of California votes to restore affirmative action nearly 24 years after it was outlawed

 An earlier strategy of the university:"The UC system subsequently sought to restore diversity with race-neutral measures. In 2001, it began guaranteeing admission for all students who ranked in the top 4% of their high school class, ensuring that those in all neighborhoods would have an equal shot at a UC education." from another report. The need is felt by reports such as this Black newborns three times more likely to die when cared for by white doctor: study though there are claims like this:

Med school professor removed by UPMC as fellowship director over white paper "In the paper, originally published in the Journal of the American Heart Association on March 24, Wang argued that affirmative action efforts through diversity, inclusion and equity in medicine have been largely unsuccessful because of a “limited qualified applicant pool and legal challenges to the use of race and ethnicity in admissions to institutions of higher education.”

Early years of C.R. Rao

THE ET INTERVIEW:PROFESSOR C.R. RAOInterviewed by Anil K. BeraUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignIt
A four hour series of opinions and speeches during his 100 th birthday cekebratipns, a bit chaotic but some of these are coming separately on YouTube https://www.facebook.com/100001729304581/posts/3297381710329440/
His popular book Statistics and Truth available free online at various sites.

Michael Hudson on Karl Polanyi

Michael Hudson: Debt, Land and Money, From Polanyi to the New Economic Archaeology There is also a discussion of Marx and origin of money along the way, 

Bellator 2019

Available on YouTube https://youtu.be/xs3aPA3X_5Y
One of the popular dances from the film https://youtu.be/sDZA54sTqwQ

S. Radhakrishnsn

The Calm, Studied Brilliance Of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan by Keerthik Sasidharsn in Swarajya, considered a right we ing magazine.

David Graeber links

David Graeber Left Us a Parting Gift — His Thoughts on Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid” by Pier Marco Tacca
An Everyday Anarchist: David Graeber, 1961-2020 by Paul Mason:"His most profound insight was, for me, not the need for prefigurative activism, but a critique of Marxism’s totalising claims and the all or nothing strategy that flows from them. Graeber’s antidote to the fatalism of a generation who thought themselves trapped in capitalism’s inescapable matrix was to reject the idea of a “capitalist totality”: there is capital, and it subsumes other things – like friendship, co-operation, consumption and culture."
A Jewish goodbye to David Graeber by Benjamin Balthaser in Jacobin
For the first time in my life, I'm frightened to be Jewish by David Graeber himself in Open Democracy about an year ago.
I neglected reading David Graeber because of his cantankerous attitude in some discussion, see for example, the discussion on his book 'Debt' in  Crooked Timber https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/seminar-on-david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years-introduction/.
And  https://crookedtimber.org/?s=David+Graeber 
But from these articles, if seems that he had several interesting ideas worth studying.

Trump medicine may be working if given in early stages

Long read Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale by Norman Doidge
“ The Henry Ford study also studied HCQ in combination with azithromycin to improve outcomes, and it did. It specified all doses, seemed to get them right, and gave them at the proper time, early, right after admission, which as we’ve seen, is crucial to precede the cytokine storm. The study followed the patient’s electrocardiograms (ECGs), and heart status throughout, checking for any of the alleged cardiac problems, to make sure the HCQ didn’t cause harm. It found that with early prescription of HCQ (82% within 24 hours of hospitalization, 91% within 48 hours), the patients had far fewer cardiac problems than are usually seen in later stages of COVID. Since this study, multiple studies have come out showing that HCQ, when properly monitored, is notassociated with increased cardiac fatalities. The authors made the very sensible point, that it is probably the case that we will have to work with several drugs to treat this disease, and the combinations will likely be different for different patients. Imagine.”
That is just one except. There is a lot more in the article. A shorter version is needed.
A shorter article on a much touted drug https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/remdesivir-clinical-trial-jama-gilead-bad-science/

Some vegetables from scraps

Seven vegetables you can grow from scraps and cuttings

Jonathan Adrian on sleeping positions

Why You’ve Been Sleeping All Wrong
“ By removing the pillow, we naturally transition into a lateral position, as it renders other possible positions quite disagreeable. If you don’t believe me, try it at home tonight. Hide your pillows in the cupboard, and then try to sleep without them. You’ll probably end up turning your arm into a makeshift pillow, but that’s kind of what you want, because you end up on your side, sleeping your way into a more salubrious future.”

A debut novel by Megha Majumdar

A Début Novel’s Immersive Urgency from The NewYorker

Is it time for MMT?

Like It or Not, a Modern Monetary Theory Experiment Is Underway “ Robert Hormats, who has worked in senior economic and trade policy roles under five different U.S. presidents and spent 25 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., believes the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the government to embark on what could be considered an involuntary experiment with Modern Monetary Theory..... What could disrupt the markets and what could cause either the Treasury to run into trouble with its issues, or the Fed to feel uncomfortable underwriting those issues for the indefinite future? We don't know that. This is all terra incognita.”

About collapse of civilizations

“The only material technologies that routinely survive collapse are small-scale agriculture and small-scale metallurgy, likely because the social technologies needed to sustain such smaller communities can arise organically.” From an article by Samo Burja Why civilizations collapse.

More on Ilaiyaraja

There’s India in Ilaiyaraja's music “ The phenomenon Ilaiyaraja has to be located in his journey from communism to spirituality -- both of which aspire for the greater common good. Ilaiyaraja’s music presents an integrated idea of India. May he be blessed with creative eternity.”
In Telugu KiranPrabha on the Beginnings, says his name used to be Daniel Rajaiah.
His friendship with SPB, both started around the same time “ Ilayaraja mentioned his early days with SPB when they did a number of live concerts before he got opportunities to compose music for films. Both have risen from the ranks. SPB left Andhra Pradesh for Chennai despite acquiring an Engineering degree. He was the lead singer at Ilayaraja’s live music events, with Ilayaraja and his brothers providing orchestral support.”
An earlier post here. 

Dharavi model

Jayaprakash Muliyil, India’s leading epidemiologist, who is part of one of the Indian government’s sub-committees on COVID, said, “Two factors must have worked. One, whatever screening they did, it helped extract the virus out of the system. Two, herd immunity must have done the trick.” From Did Dharavi model work? Is it herd immunity or plain luck?
The Earlier article of the series “ Testing was to be on a gargantuan scale — virtually impossible. Instead, team started to screen people on a massive scale by visiting houses and setting up fever camps in localities. Temperatures were taken by infrared thermometers and blood oxygen levels were read by pulse oximeters.

Screening holds no parallel to testing. But by screening about 0.4 million people helped in taking out suspect cases — some 15,000 — from the system. Among those suspected to be carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus, those with symptoms were quarantined and subsequently tested. The ones who tested positive, were sent to hospital isolation wards; those negative remained at the quarantine centres for 14 days.

While ‘test-test-test’ was the mantra of the experts, on ground in Dharavi it was ‘screen-test-screen-test’. This, local doctors and other epidemiologists said, is at the heart of the Dharavi model. It showed how smart testing could be a way out of shortages of resources and kits.”

50 books about india

The lounge guide to India in 50 books . I have read some of them.

Pandemic future

The World’s Best Hope for Enough Covid-19 Vaccine Comes from India

The rise of nationalism and oppression of minorities

Article by Patrick Cockburn

Against forgetting by Mukul Kesavan

Indian poor need smart phones

Netizens, NGOs donate smartphones to help marginalised students with online classes

Kamala Harris background

The progressive Indian grandfather who inspired Kamala Harris
The other side:
Who Is Kamala Harris's Dad Donald Harris, a Renowned Stanford Professor?

Early days of women in Bombay films

“Interestingly, it is Saraswati Devi herself who is credited with introducing the playback system in Indian cinema. According to legend, Chandraprabha nee Manek had to shoot a song sequence but had a sore throat. Himansu Rai suggested that Khorshed sing into the microphone instead while Manek moved her lips in a synchronized manner. And thus was the playback mode devised. The stories of women’s work in film, told through certain moments of irruption, also yield details of practice and innovation that tend to get obscured in the rush to glorify watershed transformative moments.” From

Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive
Debashree Mukherjee

A Canadian says the obvious

The unravelling of America by Wade Davis. India is not far behind.

The Mastani Mystery

The Mastani Mystery by Mitali Parekh. See also the Wikipedia page Mastani.

Virtue signaling

I met him about 7-8 years ago when I was visiting a village to help with Dalits with micro loans and such. He just finished his IT degree and gave me a ride of about 100 kilometres around the villages and to Pedavadlapudi. We got talking. He just finished his IT degree but was working as a labourer in his village since he could not get a job. At that time there were some short courses in Hyderabad which specialised in training graduates to jobs. I had 20,000 rupees left. I gave to him and asked him to go for some training in Hyderabad and try his luck. He did but fell sick since he was trying to save on food. During our journey he took me to  the college where he studied and reminisced about his happy days in college. Some time later, he told me of a girl he met in college. She came to him at the end of his college days and told him that she liked his ways and would like to marry him. He said that he had to look after his family first. Moreover he is a Dalit Christian and she is a Hindu possibly from one of the upper castes. He struggled. His father came down with paralysis, his mother with a serious snake bite. He got a small IT job in Bangalore in which he had to travel. He fell in a ditch during one of those trips and broke his leg. He stayed in a room with three others where the room rent and food was 5,000 rupees a month and helped with his brother’s education and parents health problems. Meanwhile the long distance love affair continued, she has been working in Madras. She refused to marry anybody else. Her parents did not agree. He built house for his father and the parents are well settled now. I kept meeting him off and on and tried through internet friends to help him. I think Avineni Bhaskar agreed but could not establish contact. Once he had to spend six months in Delhi and was like a fish out of water. I wrote to math ph.d student there, a UP Brahmin and he met him and tried to make him feel at home. Recently the girl picked up enough courage to go home and tell her parents. Her father threw her out but her mother was sympathetic. I kept telling him that it is hard to find good girls and he may regret for the rest of his life if he let her go. They married yesterday. He phoned me at midnight to tell me and I cannot sleep now.

Tributes to C.S.Seshadri

Many in one place Check David Mumford’swhose early work parallel that of Seshadri.

Physics and biology

Read of the day for me:Does new physics lurk inside living matter?
“ The informational basis of life has led some scientists to pronounce the informal dictum, Life = Matter + Information. For that linking equation to acquire real explanatory and predictive power, however, a formal theoretical framework is necessary that couples information to matter. The first hint of such a link came in 1867. In a letter to a friend, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined a tiny being that could perceive individual molecules in a box of gas as they rushed around.....
To resolve the paradox, information must be quantified and formally incorporated into the laws of thermodynamics.“

The spread of the virus in Melbourne

A city divided: COVID-19 finds a weakness in Melbourne's social fault lines
“ Now, new analysis by The Sunday Age and The Sun-Herald that matches geography with demography and the disease burden shows clearly that COVID-19 is not affecting us all the same.
Melbourne is a city divided. Of its five most disadvantaged municipalities, four of them have the most active COVID-19 cases.“

Namit Arora reviews a book on caste

Social Structure by Namit Arora
Raj Reddy briefly discusses meritocracy (from around 9:00-11:30) Here.

Ed Yong on immunology

Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
That was in relation to coronavirus. See also A vaccine reality check by Sarah Zhang linked by Ed Yong in the above article.

Ed Yong on how the pandemic defeated America

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/

A blog post from 2016 by Art Caplan

The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump

https://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2016/03/15/the-end-of-civilization-and-the-real-donald-trump/

Ramanan on Seshadri

CS Seshadri (1932-2020): World-class algebraic geometer, institution-builder and music lover
The author S. Ramanan was big influence on me when I joined TIFR in 1964. He (and M.S. Raghunathan) taught me several topics informally, sometimes during nights, and started an year long seminar for my benefit. He knew lot of mathematics in which he did not work and was a treasure to people around. I remember his insistence on canonical or natural thinking about mathematics. He is also one of those people who does not seem to have aged at all.
P.S. Raghunathan-Ramanan style: Once in a while, they would barge in to my office and ask something like ‘Do you know Peter-Weyl Theorem’. If I said no, they would say that everybody should know, start from scratch, develop the theory and prove the theorem.
Once I and Raghunathan were struggling to construct an inverse object in some K-group of projective modules with nilPotent endomorohisms. Ramanan came along ( this was around 1966-67) and suggested to look at the natural such object and map it on to our object in the obvious way.  The kernel was the inverse. The construction also led to a proof that any object representing the trivial element can be made trivial by elementary operations which can be easily imitated topologically.

Letters and numbers

The mysterious case of man who can read letters—but not numbers—exposes roots of consciousness
Ellen Contini-Morava comments:
This is fascinating, but too bad the story doesn't talk about the orthographic difference between a letter and a number.  A number is a "semasiographic" symbol, representing an idea rather than a word (so someone can "read" the symbol 8 in lots of different, unrelated languages).  A letter is a "phonographic" symbol, representing a sound.  So it's not that surprising that they might be processed differently in the brain.

The great migrant exodus in india

I die every day on such a long journey home by Sonjoy Hazarika. It may be soon forgotten except for a few articles like this.

Pandemics and politics in Victoria, Australia

One case where it seems possible to trace how it happened in Victoria but not the rest of Australia
Not happy, Dan: Victoria's Premier cops a pandemic pounding
Another As the enemy advances, who's in charge of Victoria's defences?

Covidization of research

Covidization of research: what are the risks? By Madhukar Pai

Interview with A.R.Venkatachalapathy

Here. A review of his book

IN THOSE DAYS THERE WAS NO COFFEE...WRITINGS IN CULTURAL HISTORY

BY A.R. VENKATACHALAPATHY 
 The Kaapi Cats

On Frank Ramsay’s pragmatism

Philosophy must be useful

seems to be happening with a lot of world leaders

 https://www.facebook.com/749518284/posts/10157927069633285/

Orwell's politics 'Quintessentially English'

Orwell and the British left
George Orwekk: voice of a long generation

indian politics

The Congress may be able to reinvent itself if India remains a democracy: Christophe Jaffrelot

India's civic response

As hunger grows, Mumbai’s community kitchens may hold lessons on ensuring nutrition for the poor

And that’s how our world leaders have acted in the face of Covid-19.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/495773-covid-leaders-disaster-movie/

India's covid response

Modi stumbles,India's deepening coronavirus crisis from Finsncial Times
Why won't India admit how Covid-19 is spreading? From BBC News.

Cavafy poems

“Waiting for the Barbarians” and the Government Shutdown By Daniel Mendelsohn
Other countries, other shores by Orhan Pamuk both from 2013

Long read on pandemics

How pandemics wreak havoc-and open minds

Some seem to have immunity to Covi-19

The people with hidden immunity against COVID-19 “ Most bizarrely of all, when researchers tested blood samples taken years before the pandemic started, they found T cells which were specifically tailored to detect proteins on the surface of Covid-19. This suggests that some people already had a pre-existing degree of resistance against the virus before it ever infected a human. And it appears to be surprisingly prevalent: 40-60% of unexposed individuals had these cells.”

Remembering C.S.Seshadri

Remembering C.S. Seshadri. Though I was not closely associated with Seshadri, in a somewhat closed atmosphere that I lived, some memories filter across. What I remember most about him is his good nature. TiFR had high attrition rates with respect to new students and a loose atmosphere of guiding students. Many who did well in university found it difficult to cope with the atmosphere where they had to do some independent thinking and many used to drop off or sent off. The reasons were never clear cut. Possibly it had some thing to with the personalities of students as well as seniors. In this sort of atmosphere, Seshadri was a sort of oasis for many who did not quite fit in. He took them under his wing and guided them with kindness and rigorous training. He was bubbling with ideas and always could provide them with problems to work on. But what probably mattered was the friendliness and kindness with which he treated them. Almost all thrived and went on to do well with their mathematical careers. And his friendliness also was helpful to those with whom he did not interact directly and differed from him in many ways. At the same time, he himself was constantly developing and changing. I think that all who knew him will remember him fondly.
https://thewire.in/the-sciences/c-s-seshadri-from-proofs-to-transcendence-via-theorems-and-ragas 

One of the next frontiers

Ashutosh Jogalekar makes me want to go back to school.
Brains, computation and thermodynamics

A long read on Gandhi

Was Gandhi racist?
“ Was Gandhi racist towards blacks? The short answer is: before 1906, emphatically yes; from 1906 to 1913, qualifiedly yes; after 1913 or so, increasingly no. However, we need to ask a supplementary question: what light and shade does thinking with Gandhi throw on our current understanding of racism and anti-racism? To that question, the schematic answer would be: most of us are anti-racist in a speciesist way, or by invoking the idea of a unified human species where all of us are equals.”

What the new coronavirus can do

Watch: From nose to toe, the Covid-19 virus attacks like no other ‘respiratory’ infection
And why does it spread so easily between people https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00660-x

‘Judicial evasion’ says Gautam Bhatia

Judicial Evasion
“ Two days ago, on this blog, we discussed the pending challenge before the Supreme Court to the government’s directions requiring employers to pay wages to their workers during the nationwide lockdown imposed under the Disaster Management Act. At the time, the matter had been reserved for orders; today, the Supreme Court passed an order that can only be described as bizarre: it refused to rule on the legal issues before it, postponed arguments to the end of July (seven weeks from now), directed employers and employees to “negotiate” between themselves, but in the meantime extended its interim orders preventing any coercive action against employers for not complying with the direction to pay wages. In effect, therefore, the Court made the wages direction unenforceable without holding it to be illegal or unconstitutional, at least for the foreseeable future.”

Some sites for Indian films, songs and dances

Some other sites for Indian film reviews film songs and dances:

https://p-pcc.blogspot.com/

https://indiancinema.sites.uiowa.edu

https://roughinhere.wordpress.com

http://cinemanrityagharana.blogspot.com

https://cinemachaat.com

https://madhulikaliddle.com

https://tunes.desibantu.com

https://mrandmrs55.com

James Baldwin on education

James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil by Clint Smith
A talk to teachers by James Baldwin in 1963
“ The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. ”

A long review of Tristes Tropiques by Paul Kahn

With several references to India. “ A long read with passages about India.
“He is appalled and revolted by what he finds in India. He sees colonial history and parliamentary democracy as so much veneer covering a social arrangement that has been in place for thousands of years. His analysis is based entirely on the density of population in relation to the physical resources. People in India treat each other in an inhuman way in order to reduce the number of humans per square foot.”
Centennial Sauvage: The Survival of Tristes tropiques
From pp 149-150 of 1974 translation by John and Doreen Weightman:
 “India’s great failure can teach us a lesson. When a community becomes too numerous, however great the genius of its thinkers, it can only endure by secreting enslavement. Once men begin to feel cramped in their geographical, social and mental habitat, they are in danger of being tempted by the simple solution of denying one section of the species the right to be considered as human. This allows the rest a little elbow-room for a few more decades. Then it becomes necessary to extend the process of expulsion. When looked at in this light, at the culmination of a century during which the population figures have doubled, […] can no longer appear as being simply the result of aberration on the part of one nation, one doctrine, or one group of men. I see them rather as a premonitory sign of our moving into a finite world such as southern Asia had to face a thousand or two thousand years ahead of us, and I cannot see us avoiding the experience unless some major decisions are taken. The systematic devaluation of man by man is gaining ground, and we would be guilty of hypocrisy and blindness if we dismissed the problem by arguing that recent events represented only a temporary contamination.

What frightens me in Asia is the vision of our own future which it is already experiencing. In the America of the Indians, I cherish the reflection, however fleeting it may have now become, of an era when the human species was in proportion to the world it occupied, and when there was still a valid relationship between the enjoyment of freedom and the symbols denoting it.”

Some good news

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/3-times-more-pay-air-travel-how-migrants-are-being-wooed-back/articleshow/76210270.cms
Via Madhukar Shukla “ Chennai realty firms hire chartered flight to bring back 150 workers Bihar;  Punjab farmers send buses to Bihar and offer three time higher wages; Small business in Haryana and other northern states book air tickets or send cars; Kerala govt comes out with a health insurance scheme for guest workers; Builders in Mumbai assure workers of job security and safety;  MP industrial units assign officials to bring migrant workers from their villages, and so on…”

Indus Martin on using social medis

https://youtu.be/5oVwrrshwSk

Vanaja C on the Indian migrant crisis

Simple and straight withouypt politics from one of those people helping the migrants in Telangana.

Privilege

I saw this on TV this morning and was not sure whether I would see it again. A comment in Reddit “This is the kind of priveledge I can get behind. Respect to her for knowing it exists and she has it and double respect for putting it to use in this situation. Powerful.”
https://www.upworthy.com/powerful-footage-shows-a-white-girl-putting-herself-in-front-of-riot-police-to-protect-a-young-black-man 

My cousin Baburao

https://www.facebook.com/749518284/posts/10157757607113285/

Ellis Dungan documentary

An American in Madras apparently free to watch on YouTube.

Revisiting old stuff

Since my education has not been systematic, I find that there are lots of things in mathematics that I assumed without learning the lengthy proofs. But I keep thinking about them and try to see why they are plausible. The process seems to help but takes time. Sometimes, the final proofs I found are considerably simpler than the original proofs. Here is one example of a proof found after about thirty years:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0108116.pdf
The final proof is only about two pages, assuming what was considered standard by then. This seems to be how things are simplified and subsumed in later work.
Another, slightly more complicated example:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0401308.pdf
I am currently revisiting a topic from 1974-75. This process of learning also makes research fun.
Here is a monstrosity from me and Peter Scott:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0703890.pdf
Waiting for it to be simplified.

Durga Devidas post on Facebook about the current govermental paralysis

“ I think this govt is shell shocked.

The stranded migrant situation is the first real big physical crisis they are facing and the modi and gang have got terrified and as usual have absolutely no clue on how to tackle it.

Moreover, they don't have a good machinery to sort this. Unlike the Congress, their own party workers are a bunch of freeloading unscrupulous untrustworthy louts who have only been trained to create insurgency but not to contain it or deal with it or direct a crowd to a good fruitful end like in this case, to help the poor migrant reach his home.

Though this is not an insurgency, the sight of so many people standing up together looks extremely intimidating and confrontational to this govt with a primary school bully mindset.

This govt which is stuck in a permanent election campaign mode, seems very confused.

The gigantic bunch of mostly poor people is not a crowd which the govt has pulled in, with the help of campaign event managers or agents.

This is not a strike or an election rally. This is not something the opposition party or parties have organised which needs to be quelled. The govt is unable to lathi charge them or call the army in which are only two options the modi and amit shah know when they see an unprecedented crowd of ten people or more for whatever reason.

Besides, the modi regime does not like anyone else, say the Congress or perhaps even a good samaritan individual or organisation, trying to help either, simply because, they are afraid they (the bjp) will lose credit and worse, their worst mortal damned enemy will score political or electoral brownie points for sure.

I have never seen such a tiny minded, jealous, petty and a completely petrified lot like the bjp when it comes to action, ever.”

Some good news from india

The work NGOs some formed spontaneously. The first one from Indus Martin in Telugu. He started distributing sandals and saw the transformation
https://www.facebook.com/1058915620/posts/10220422781413795/
The second from Bharati Ramachandran in The Guardian
Global development Where India’s government has failed in the pandemic, its people have stepped in
When people have this sort of capacity why did they elect the leaders they did?

Some good news but lots of shame too from India

Why we haven't seen an exodus of migrant workers on foot from Kerala
Feel a Little Shame for the Lost Soul of the Nation By Avay Shukla
Arundhati Roy: Enough of the cheap theatrics. We need brains. We need heart. We need accountability by Arundhati Roy

Why are India’s labour laws not working for migrants?

Why India's Legal and Labour System Needs to be Reconfigured to Really Help Migrant Workers :
“ If the law is there, then why was it not implemented? If the migrants are entitled to a dislocation allowance then why was it not given to them? In fact, why were even the monies due to them not paid? If the contractor who hires them is to be licensed then how did he disappear deserting them and leaving them to fend for themselves? Why were health facilities and other basic amenities not provided? If even some of this would have happened, then we may have been able to hold back these workers from embarking the journey back home. The answer is that the Act is in many ways obsolete and hardly enforced anywhere. One may wonder, how is that even possible, but that is the harsh reality.”
Barbara Harriss-White suggests that it is a deliberate policy:” So much for policies of apparently deliberate state inaction. When we turn to active policies, the direction of travel is obvious: states seizing opportunities to fast-track reforms to formalise de jure punitive practices that have operated de facto for years. Labour Law reforms in some states enable the working day to be formally lengthened to 12 hours, and overtime pay to be made unnecessary. Elsewhere they have been waived for three years. Minimum wages have been reduced. Reforms to Agriculture are being enacted at speed to incentivise contract farming by agri-business and to enable reverse tenancies, in which small landholdings are consolidated by large tenant enterprises  expected to benefit from economies of scale.  As the transport of marketable surpluses is dislocated by the lockdown, reforms relaxing the states’ Agricultural Produce Markets Acts are pushed through to incentivise the use of ‘e-NAM’ (NationalAgricultural Markets) – just as though e-markets can substitute for real markets for more or less perishable material supplies. A new wave of environmental assaults is also being reported. Hard-won citizens’ rights such as those to food and livelihood are being denied. The newly announced relief package is mostly an exercise in re-labelling allocations already made. The autonomy of bankrupt state governments is under attack as they reel under the weight of responsibility for ‘disposable people’: the country’s federal structure is being weakened.”

What can one say?

Congress, U.P. govt continue to spar over buses for migrant workers
“ The controversy took off on Monday when, after a studied delay, the U.P. government accepted Ms. Vadra’s offer of 1,000 buses but sought the names and other details of the drivers and conductors.”

About my mathematics

Recently, somebody asked me me to write about my mathematical experiences. Here it goes, based on comment in Pramathanath Sastry’s post.
There is no precedent for mathematics in the family. I came from a farming family, though my father was a teacher who taught English and History. I started studying mathematics, a B,A. (Hons) course in Madras University since father thought it would be good for competitive examinations, particularly, I.A.S. Examinations where one could choose two optionals in mathematics. I was doing ok but did not understand what I was doing. Even calculus I started understanding only after I saw how real numbers were constructed. Slowly, it be came a passion, mainly learning.  Also I was not in any sense trained, cutting classes and learning what I liked. When it came to research, I did not want to guided and continued learning what I could understand. So the background was always patchy and incomplete. There was no ambition or aim except that I settled on topology early after browsing Hausdorff’s ‘Set Theory’ in college. Some of the results seemed metaphysical, like the invariance of domain and dimension, and I wondered how such things could be proved at all. Luckily I found an unpublished lecture notes by Samuel Eilenberg in 1964 and saw the proofs. To this day Algebraic Topology has been the first love.

For a long time I was happy with abstract and formal thinking without worrying about examples. As late as 1992, a collaborator was exhorting that integers were a counterexample to what I was trying to prove. Anyway, with interest more in learning than career, learning continued. If I could not do a ph.d. there was always the possibility of going home and teaching in a mofussil college. After a few years, research came easy since there are always natural questions when you learn some thing. So it continues.
Then at some stage, around 1978 or so William Thurston came long, and learning became difficult. After a few years I went back to old books on Complex Analysis trying to learn the background to Thurston and organised a one year seminar in I.S.I. Delhi. Around this time Peter Scott advised that it would be difficult to learn this stuff without talking to others and invited me to a conference in Warwick which he organised. There I found that even senior professors were struggling with this and were trying to figure out even the definitions. In any case, I started talking to others and trying to learn through conversations.
Then luckily in the late eighties, Peter Scott decided to collaborate with me perhaps because he used some of my early work. That led to a different sort of approach. I was getting interested in other stuff like political economy and would not work in mathematics for months. But once in a while there would be queries from Peter related to joint work. It would take a week or so to understand the definitions and start thinking about the problems again. Sometimes, I did not understand my own papers and a colleague Lawrence Reeves kindly agreed to listen to me when I tried to read them again. Again talking to others helped. Then at some stage, some of the areas of research became more crystallised and one could start thinking about them without too much paraphernalia.
For the last 25 years or so, it seems more physical. You have these things floating around in front of you and keep staring and feel some thing emerging. Often the results are approximate but stable. Recently I found that several things in a 2003 paper were incomplete and since then there are few more papers based on that paper. But over all they seem correct. May be it depends on how much one is exposed to at a given stage. But in my case, keeping the problems in front of my mind and staring at them for days and months seem to help. But this is with somebody not particularly talented ( I know since I collaborated with some good mathematicians) and I do not know how it works for others. Somehow, the work in the last three four years seems to be the most satisfactory work I have done so far.

Two on graduate advantage

Experts have jobs. They have to understand those who don’t:” Lind’s book, “The New Class War,” argues that the best way to understand America today is through the lens of class conflict, which has been sharpened by the rise of an “overclass” that dominates the three spheres he mentions. In all three, leaders tend to be urban, college-educated professionals, often with a postgraduate degree. That makes them quite distinct from much of the rest of the country. Only 36 percent of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, and only 13 percent have a master’s or more. And yet, the top echelons everywhere are filled with this “credentialed overclass.””
Deaths of despair:Angus Deaton “And we saw very quickly that this was happening to both men and women, and, most importantly, that this decline was only happening to white people who didn’t have college degrees. Those of us with at least a bachelor’s degree, the educational elite, were somehow exempted from these horrors.”