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.” 

Michael Pollan on food supply chains in USA

“ The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy.

The pandemic is, willy-nilly, making the case for deindustrializing and decentralizing the American food system, breaking up the meat oligopoly, ensuring that food workers have sick pay and access to health care, and pursuing policies that would sacrifice some degree of efficiency in favor of much greater resilience. Somewhat less obviously, the pandemic is making the case not only for a different food system but for a radically different diet as well.” from The sickness of our food supply by Michael Pollan 

Taleb on Covid-19

The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System
“ For Taleb, an antifragile country would encourage the distribution of power among smaller, more local, experimental, and self-sufficient entities—in short, build a system that could survive random stresses, rather than break under any particular one. (His word for this beneficial distribution is “fractal.”)

We should discourage the concentration of power in big corporations, “including a severe restriction of lobbying,” Taleb told me. “When one per cent of the people have fifty per cent of the income, that is a fat tail.” Companies shouldn’t be able to make money from monopoly power, “from rent-seeking”—using that power not to build something but to extract an ever-larger part of the surplus. There should be an expansion of the powers of state and even county governments, where there is “bottom-up” control and accountability. This could incubate new businesses and foster new education methods that emphasize “action learning and apprenticeship” over purely academic certification. He thinks that “we should have a national Entrepreneurship Day.””

Jimikki mammal by Laurel and Hardy

https://youtu.be/u-rwmzUWBPw superimposed on https://youtu.be/LAmb4dVJAmU
And also https://youtu.be/kMpB0qwHvyg

Journalism in the time of coronavirus

When a News Article Vanishes, We Have More Than Just a Pandemic to Worry About by Pritanka Pulla

Sarkar is only for the rich

Urban India didn't care about migrant workers till 26 March, only cares now because it's lost their services: P Sainath
Judith Butler on the Violence of Neglect Amid a Health Crisis
Sarkar is only for the rich 

Coronavirus lesson to india

Coronavirus has upturned the world – and forced us to revisit India’s economic history
“ Lady Corona is also lifting the cover off the ugliness we had hidden away. For example, in India, the dreadful exploitation of people who have been denied access to education, a living income, decent housing. Like in one of those science fiction horror stories, we chained them to oil the engines of production and exchange, and when Lady Corona walked in, we ran into our homes and cabins, leaving those who were oiling and running the engines of our economy, homeless and starving.

But that was not enough. When they decided to walk back to their families and homes to survive this deprivation, we sprayed them with disinfectant, stopped them and held them in cages. They were needed for our return to production and trade, they were the engines of the growth of our economy. After all, foreign capital came to India to reap the benefits of abundant, cheap and unorganised labour. 

Now governments and the firms want them back. We recently witnessed the viciousness of that desire when the chief minister of Karnataka banned outgoing trains for migrants. The audacity of that gesture reveals the terror the government felt over what would happen without vulnerable migrant labour. The entire edifice of our cities would collapse without them.“
See also Don’t blame Covid or financial package. Politics is holding India’s migrant workers hostage 

Facts about US labour market

Facts about labor markets ouch, when are rising wages bad edition

Via MR. “ Workers in the bottom quintile of the wage distribution experienced a 35 percent employment decline while those in the top quintile experienced only a 9 percent decline. ”

A documentary about Capital-21

Are we returning to “ “master and servant” laws in the United Kingdom that made it illegal for workers to quit.”
https://theintercept.com/2020/05/05/capital-21st-century-documentary-thomas-piketty/
Another review https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/capital-in-the-twenty-first-century-review-thomas-piketty-1234596239/

Cholera and coronavirus

Cholera and coronavirus: why we must not repeat the same mistakes “ Besides the basic moral argument for a system of public health and international cooperation that benefits all people, it is also in everyone’s interests, because as long as infections blight poor countries, they will continue to pose a threat to the west, too. The Nigerian global health scholar Obijiofor Aginam has written that “enormous sacrifices must then be made by the developed world to confront mutual vulnerability”. Coronavirus has reminded us, once again, of this mutual vulnerability.

To prevent further pandemics, Aginam calls for a “communitarian globalism”: a bottom-up approach, “based on ideals of fairness, justice, and equitable distribution of scarce but moderate global resources”. We have already seen glimpses of this kind of solidarity in the current crisis: from the communist government in Kerala giving food and shelter to migrant workers; to the Somalian doctors offering their help in crisis zones such as Italy; to Cuba allowing an infected British cruise ship to dock to receive timely medical care by its doctors.”

Jogan 1950

With subtitles, uploaded by Tammydan. If it does not work try the link below the picture.

https://youtu.be/SyA8_Vi5M-8

Not much to say in

these unprecedented times. The following article by Dani Rodriguez sounds plausible to me.

“Why the coronavirus pandemic is unlikely to change the world, for better or worse”

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3078766/why-coronavirus-pandemic-unlikely-change-world-better-or-worse

In a similar vein https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/18/history-fairer-society-coronavirus-workers-black-death-spanish-flu? 

India lockdown

Modi Orders 3-Week Total Lockdown for All 1.3 Billion Indians : With four hours’ notice, India’s prime minister announced that no one could leave home for 21 days — the most severe step taken anywhere in the war against the coronavirus.

Comparison with the great plague

The strange and startling similarities between the Great Plague and COVID-19 

Some articles about the current unprecedented times

The real pandemic danger is social collapse by Brando Milanovic
How the pandemic will end by Ed Yong
Interview with an expert Dr. Bruce Aylward

The Chinese Doctor who beat the Plague

The Chinese Doctor who beat the Plague

Cuba’s contribution to fighting Covid-19

Cuba’s contribution to fighting Cvid-29 

Seasonal effects on viruses and more

Why do dozens of diseases wax and wane with the seasons—and will COVID-19? 

On the Spanish Flu

The virus that killed 18 million Indians 

Mike Davis on the coronavirus

Mike Davis on COVID-19: The monster is finally at the door
See also  The extraordinary decision facing Italian doctors https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas
Viral Coronavirus 'Advisory' Is Not From UNICF https://www.boomlive.in/health/viral-coronavirus-advisory-is-not-from-unicef-7171 

A recent mathematics paper

Comparing decompositions of Poincaré Dulaity pairs One of my better papers, I think.it has massive contributions from collaborators and took about three years to complete. It is based on an earlier paper Canonical decompositions of Poincare Duality pairs which was a revised version of a 2007 manuscript. It is being revised again. Nice to work leisurely in retirement( I retired in 2005).

Mid Day Meals

Gujarat Headmaster Grows Organic Food For Students For 17 Years, Ensures 100% Attendance! 

CAA-NPR-NRC

What Is CAA, NPR, NRC? What Is Its Impact On Indian Citizens?  Confusing but may be one can try to see how they tried to implement these in Assam.
There is another article in India Today says:
“ Now, let's see the connection that troubles those skeptical of the government's move.It takes us to 2004, when another Citizenship Amendment Act had been passed - the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2003 - when the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government was in power. In the amendment to the Citizenship Act of 1955, a Section 14A had been inserted. Section 14A relates to issue of national identity cards.

According to Section 14A of the Citizenship Act, "the Central Government may compulsorily register every citizen of India and issue a national identity card to him."

The same Section 14A of the Citizenship Act says, "The Central Government may maintain a National Register of Indian Citizens and for that purpose establish a National Registration Authority."”

“ Refer to Section 14A of the Citizenship Act again. This Section 14A provides the legal basis for NPR preparation and links it with Census and NRC.

It says that the Registrar General India shall act as the National Registration Authority and also as the Registrar General of Citizen Registration. The catch here is that the Registrar General functions as the Census Commissioner of India.

This means if the government wants, at any point of time, the data collected for the NPR may be legally used for NRC.”

Freeman Dyson passed away

Obituary in NYTimes.
Some videos of his contributions to physics and the last one about Fermi indicates a humble person but he was always quite independent while admiring others.

https://youtu.be/i3RcN5UGwgI Linking the ideas of Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga

https://youtu.be/pToteaNcIdk Richard Feynman and his work

https://youtu.be/hV41QEKiMlM fermi’s rejection of our work.
And one more on Richard Feynman ‘Meeting Feynman with .....’

M.S.Raghunanthan on Modi dispensation

https://youtu.be/vOkpT44y1_U

An old virus in Delhi

Mosque set on fire as violent protests continue across New Delhi 

Old news

1966 anti-cow slaughter agitation “ M. N. Srinivas commented that the episode solidly convinced him that the Hindus of North India had not evolved into modern people” but I have seen similar attitudes in South India too.
Tradition in modern India by J.Heesterman from 1963.

About the new Coronavirus Covid-19

You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus from The Atlantic, a fairly comprehensive article.
Symptomless cases raise coronavirus control fears from SciDev.net

Sangeeta Sudha

English translations of Carnatic lyrics

100 most spoken languages in the world

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/100-most-spoken-languages/

An article on the brain

Take your brain for a walk

Vikram Chandra on Panini

Pāṇini: Catching the Ocean in a Cow’s Hoofprint Long read and worth several reads.

Emmy Noether

A short and comprehensive article on her influence.
Our introduction to modern mathematics was through Van der Waerden’s book ‘Modern Algebra’ which stayed that it was in part based on lectures by Emil Artin and army Noether. Do her name was familiar from the beginning. Here he describes the sources of his boo in which her father’s name is also mentioned. I remember when Emil Artin died in 1962, Fr. Racine probably had no one to share his grief. He came to my room in Loyola College hostel to tell me of the sad news. Now Facebook has changed that I think. We can share our emotion with distant people. On the sources of my book Modern Algebra 

Mistakes in mathematics

I probably did a Stallings. I spent the whole of last night ‘proving’ some thing which bothered me off and on for forty years. When the mind is calmer, mistakes will emerge but not in the current state. As Stallings said in  ‘How not to prove the Poincaré conjecture’ some excitement and blindness takes over: “I was unable to find flaws in my ‘proof’ for quite a while, even though the error is very obvious. It was a psychological problem, a blindness, an excitement, an inhibition of reasoning by an underlying fear of being wrong. Techniques leading to the abandonment of such inhibitions should be cultivated by every honest mathematician.” May be the body needs rest too. In any case I got some training from Stallings writing his Tata Notes which I wrote in 1967 adding many mistakes of mine to his. He describes the genesis of those Noted towards the end here in Remambering John Stallings
“Early in my career, when I was starting to teach at Princeton, I got to give some seminar talks on my work on PL manifolds, involving the Engulfing Theorem and high-dimensional Poincaré Conjecture. I did not do a good job of this; there were many details, such as general position, which I did not really know how to do; the typical proof was just by hand-waving. I do recall “great” topologists in the audience, such as Milnor. And I think I called it off eventually, finally getting the proofs of some details in my Tata notes of 1967 or so.”

A bit about Indian educational system

Gautam Menon from three years ago. For some reason I could not share the post. So, I copied and pasted. I saw while I was wondering why many in India including strong leftists who recommend Naxalism for others try to send their children and grand children abroad at considerable expense. This may explain part of the background. Here is the old post:

Some of you may remember my difficulties with the 'summer student' I wrote about a few weeks ago. The one who couldn't plot a graph, not even of y = x. I wish I could report that the situation had miraculously improved. Alas, after almost daily meetings in which we've tried to make some progress on these matters as well as marginally more advanced material, I continue to be mystified as to how she could have qualified for *any* degree in physics in the first place.

The situation is coming to a head now that her term here is drawing to an end and she must write a project report for her university. Apparently, the rule is that the report must be not less than 40 pages in length!  It doesn't matter what is in the report, really, provided it is of the appropriate length.

I honestly don't see what I could have done differently. If we were not going over really elementary material that she should have know from school, even, I might have ensured that she did something that might have qualified to be put into a report. Right now, the report can only be an undigested mishmash of copied material from a few chapters of a book that I suggested she read. I am sure that she will achieve a high grade for doing precisely that, just as I'm sure my signature will be required at some place in the report, to sign off on the statement that she did something while she was here.

I'm deeply embarrassed by this charade but, as I said, I don't see anything that I could have done differently. Should I refuse to sign the report? But what good would that do? If the whole system is so messed up that it puts out students who go through bachelors and masters degrees in science without gaining the slightest idea of what science is, gives them high marks and ranks in university exams, even gives them a completely inflated estimate of their own abilities, it seems unfair to penalize a particular student for what is a far more deep-rooted and systemic problem. Perhaps I could write to the head of the department who replied to me following my specific question in this regard, that this was a good student, interested in pursuing research and that she was being specifically recommended? Would I be able to get my point across? What good would it do?  Should I at least suggest that asking a student to prepare a 40-page report for a 6 week project is a silly thing to do, that even a 5 or 10 page report on something new that was learnt would be sufficient, if sincerely done?

(At least the student has learnt to plot simple functions which, all said and done, is a tentative first step towards something, although I'm not sure what.)

You are all welcome to weigh in - any advice is welcome.

Peter Scott is visiting

I have been busy completing some mathematics work with Peter Scott who is in Melbourne for  a month. One paper which was first out in 2007 is nearing completion now with new material added during the last year. It is about 125 pages long on JSJ decomposition of Poincaré Duality pairs and deals with many loose ends that have bothered us. The second with the same theme ( Lawrence Reeves is also involved) is shorter and compares various such decomposition. These complete some of our long standing concerns. Then there is one more long paper which is essentially complete and has to be tidied up. These may not interest others but it is a satisfactory conclusion of problems that engaged us for a long time.

Seeing rain for the first time

https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2020/01/16/aussie-toddlers-overwhelmed-by-seeing-rain-for-the-first-time/#.XiOrcC_ZWf0
'She was in shock': Mum captures daughter's excitement at seeing rain for the first time 

Possibility of contagious diseases through microbiome

Cancer And Heart Disease Could Be Contagious Through Our Microbiomes, Scientists Argue

From a book on Buddha

‘The Buddha was a very wise man, but a man’ 

Vivekananda on inclusiveness

I read a lot on nonsense by Vivekananda. But this indicates different things. And then there is his enduring legacy Ramakrishna Mission which has monks of various religions. One of the monks is an old friend Mahan Maharaj. He liked this.
‘Our watchword will be acceptance and inclusion’: Nine memos from Vivekananda to Hindutva warriors 

A poem by Alisetty Prabhakara about his wife

‘‘కలగా పులగంగా కలసిపోయిన రోజుల్లో

ఇంచుమించు ఒకే కంచంలో

ఇంద్రధనస్సుల్ని తుంచుకుని తిన్న రోజుల్లో

మా గుండెల్లో సమస్యలు మండని రోజుల్లో

సిగరెట్‌ పీకలాంటి నన్ను

సిగలో తరుముకొని

గాజు కుప్పెల్లాంటి నా కళ్ళలోనే

ఆశల అగరొత్తులు వెలిగించుకుందే తప్ప

తులతూగే ఐశ్వర్యమో

తులం బంగారమో కావాలని

ఏనాడూ ప్రాధేయ పడలేదు''
More about him here https://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/అలిశెట్టి_ప్రభాకర్

A recent comment by Pramathanath Sastry

Pramathanath Sastry comments in a post of Balasubramanian Anantharaman on his Facebook wall.

The premise that the design of the constitution is such that terrible things were inevitable. Constitutions are always imperfect documents. And it is applied on the ground via interpretations. I don’t even know where to begin regarding your statement. Suggests because we are not a confederation it is all unnatural and hence this pox upon us. (Wake up and smell the coffee; every codification, every constitution, is in the end unnatural.) That certain high culture stuff like Bheeshma in Yudha Parva not being in the document or Ain-e-akbari not being in the document is the reason for the horrors visited upon us. Cynical me knows that the US constitution was interpreted in very different ways at different times without any amendments to the constitution. And that no document can cover the edges of the self perception of a nation (Manipur). In the end it is us who are the problem. Our bigotry. The churning. The centripetal forces towards the centre and the centrifugal forces (Kashmir, Manipur), no document could have taken care of them. Good people could have. A generous liberal people could have. Those are independent of the various constitutions which are possible from a broadly liberal menu. Sedition is not in the constitution. Article 372 which says that any existing law in the IPC would continue to be in force until modified, is why sedition is in the law books. The IPC could have easily been modified without amending the constitution. I am not defending the constitution. I just find this belief that it, not society, is the root cause just a bunch of nonsense. It could have been interpreted a million ways. But judges, ministers, policeman, are from our society and that whole thingamajig has a certain direction today. It is us. Rather than seeing a mismatch between the society and the constitution, I see actually a movement towards a match with the views of the dominant, something all judicial and political systems manage. The brief liberal court of the US (30 years at best in 245 years) was an anomaly.

An old article by Khushwant Singh

Came across this superb piece says Dipankar Khasnabish:

On Feb 15, 1970 Khushwant Singh wrote under the headline
'Why I am an Indian'.

I did not have any choice; I was born one. If the good Lord had consulted me on the subject I might have chosen a country more affluent, less crowded, less censorious in matters of food and drink, unconcerned with personal equations and free of religious bigotry.

Am I proud of being an India? I can't really answer this one. I can scarcely take credit for the achievements of my forefathers. And I have little reason to be proud of what we are doing today. On balance, I would say, 'No, I am not proud of being an Indian.'

'Why don't you get out and settle in some other country?' Once again, I have very little choice. All the countries I might like to live in have restricted quotas for emigrants; most of them are white and have prejudice against coloured people. In any case I feel more relaxed and at home in India. I dislike many things in my country--mostly the government. I know the government is never the same as the country, but it never stops trying to appear in that garb. This is where I belong, and this is where I intend to live and die. Of course, I like going abroad. Living is easier, wine and food are better, women are more forthcoming--it's more fun. However, I soon get tired of all those things and want to get back to my dung-heap and be among my loud-mouthed, sweaty, smelly countrymen. I am like my kinsmen in Africa and England and elsewhere. My head tells me it's better to live abroad, my belly tells me it is more fulfilling to be in 'phoren' but my heart tells me 'get back to Ind'. Each time I return home and drive through the stench of bare-bottomed defecators that line the road from Santa Crux airport to the city I ask myself:

"'Breathes there a man with soul so dead
who never to himself hath said
this is my own land, my native land?"

I can scarcely breathe, but I yell, 'Yeah, this is my native land. I don't like it, but I love it!'

Are you an Indian first and a Punjabi or Sikh second? Or is it the other round? I don't like the way those questions are framed. I am all three at the same time. If I was denied my Punjabiness or my community tradition, I would refuse to call myself Indian. I am Indian, Punjabi and Sikh. And even so I have a patriotic kinship one who says I am 'Indian, Hindu and Haryanvi' or 'I am Indian, Moplah Muslim and Malayali' or 'I am Indian, Christian and Assamese'. I want to retain my religious and linguistic identity without in any way making them exclusive.

I am convinced that in our guaranteed diversity is our strength as a nation. As soon as you try to obliterate regional languages in favour of one 'national' language or religion, in the name of some one Indian credo, you will destroy the unity of the country. Twice was our Indianness challenged: in 1962 by the Chinese; in 1965 by the Pakistanis. Then, despite our many differences of language, religion and faith, we rose as one to defend our country. In the ultimate analysis, it is the consciousness of the frontiers that makes a nation. We have proved that we are one nation.

What then this talk about Indianising people who are already Indian? And has anyone any right to arrogate to himself the right to decide who is and who is not a good Indian?

(Khushwant Singh's Editor's Page, Edited by Rahul Singh, IBH)

Night rider

Night rider: 21 years sleeping on a London bus

More on anti-CAA protests

Anti-CAA protests: A reiteration of people power over political muscle by Ankur Bhardwaj
Some earlier articles from the middleDecember 2019:
Scars of CAB protests will further burn bridges between northeast and rest of India Suhas Palshikar
The morning after CAB: It will be a mistake to rely just on Supreme Court by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Arjun Appadurai on the current situation in India

Three Observations From India's Past to Contextualise the Present Struggle Seems to be a perceptive article but I am not sure whether he gets the whole picture and whether it is a guide to what is coming. To me an earlier article What Women from a Slum Near AMU Can Teach CAA-NRC Protesters  is more perceptive.
Check also Mukul Kesavan article posted earlier An evil hour. A quote “ According to him [Suhas
Alshikar] the problem with liberals is that they expected abstract ideas to win political victories whereas the truth was that in real life “[d]emocratic struggles for high principles do not happen in a vacuum.” The only way that liberals can prevail against the BJP’s clear-headed majoritarianism is if their “... principles [were] married  to lived realities and actual group anxieties.”“

Top risks of 2020

Eurasiagroup’s top risks of 2020 with Modification at 5

Georgi Abratov’s prescient warning

“ In 1987, Georgi Arbatov, a senior adviser to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, had warned: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you – we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”” from Freedom without constraints: how the US squandered its cold war victory by Andrew Bacevich.

Photo essay on women left behind

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/world/africa/migrants-women-work.html
Left Behind by Migrant Husbands, Women Break the Rules and Go to Work 

Reconciling capitalism and socialism

Sort of political economy in a single lesson by Seth Ackerman The Red and Black “ What is needed is a structure that allows autonomous firms to produce and trade goods for the market, aiming to generate a surplus of output over input — while keeping those firms public and preventing their surplus from being appropriated by a narrow class of capitalists. Under this type of system, workers can assume any degree of control they like over the management of their firms, and any “profits” can be socialized— that is, they can truly function as a signal, rather than as a motive force. But the precondition of such a system is the socialization of the means of production — structured in a way that preserves the existence of a capital market. How can all this be done?
......
The lesson here is that the transformation to a different system does not have to be catastrophic. Of course, the situation I’m describing would be a revolutionary one — but it wouldn’t have to involve the total collapse of the old society and the Promethean conjuring of something entirely unrecognizable in its place.“
Can this sort of thing be accomplished without bureaucracy by some sort of block chain mechanism?
The Light on the Hill: A Reply to Seth Ackerman by John Quiggin. Some more can be found google search.

An overview of Saudi-Iran conflict

In four parts A Tale of Oil and Fire: The Saudi-Iran Conflict from Brown Pundits.

Perepa Joshi remembering his father.

Prepa Puran Chandra Joshi was a classmate and friend since 1964. I found these videos uploaded by his son in a meeting remembering Perela Mrityanjayudu.

https://youtu.be/01h9EgyfofE

https://youtu.be/IAxXvCvHUIQ

A report about the current protests in India about CAA

More from the grass roots level What Women from a Slum Near AMU Can Teach CAA-NRC Protesters. It seems different from the posts by academics. Possibly this kind of development has better chances of surviving and thriving.

The death of Osama Bin Laden

It an old story but I missed it The Killing of Osama bin Laden by Seymour M. Hersh

Bushfires in Australia

Why firefighters are so worried about the inferno to come Mostly about Victoria.

From NSW Amid the ruins of the NSW bushfires, this pharmacist is keeping his doors open

From Victoria Thanks dhal: Sikh group to the rescue with hundreds of free curries
And from somewhere https://i.redd.it/85wma5kdmj841.jpg

An opinion piece on Suleimani assassination

The Suleimani assassination goes against Trump’s policy – but not his character “ That he will get away with this, despite all the bien pensantwails and warnings, just as he got away with the Jerusalem embassy move. That while an expert such as Sanam Vakil of Chatham House might say that “this time the gloves will be off”, and that Iran will no longer hide behind the plausible deniability offered by proxies but will “strike back and strike back directly”, there is nothing to fear because Tehran will be smart enough to know its own limits, restrained by the certainty that the US could answer any attempt at retaliation with devastating force.”

Finland ends homelessness

Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need

Tyler Cowen with Abhijit Banerjee

My conversation with Abhijit Banerjee. A little part:
“COWEN: How well do you think economists understand economic growth more generally?

BANERJEE: I think they don’t understand it. This is the point we make in the book. I think we understand some very basic insights, one being the one that my colleague, Bob Solow, made very clear, which is that growth has a tendency to run out, that once you used up your best talent and your best capital and your best locations, there’s going to be less and less so. And I think that’s probably the only thing which has been pretty consistently borne out: that fast growth slows down. China’s slowing now.

And there’s nothing tragic about it. It’s a normal way of things. I think that the question is more — the thing that we don’t understand is what makes that happen sooner or later, more or less, et cetera. Brazil grew for 20 years, extremely fast, between 1960 and 1980, and then essentially stopped for 20 years. Why do those kinds of things happen? That we don’t understand. I think we’re lousy at predicting growth in general.”

Tyler Cowen on Modi

Tyler Cowen in a recent post What to think of Modi these days:
 “Nonetheless I find most of the extant commentary on Modi fairly misleading and/or naive.

As this outsider sees it, India’s secular democracy was never liberal.  It had certain de facto liberal elements, but largely out of low levels of state capacity, necessitating a kind of tolerance but of course also leading to a very sub-par infrastructure.  Furthermore, it has been commonly described by political scientists as a “democracy without accountability.”  National voting has so much to do with religion, caste, and other particularistic principles that Indian democracy never enforced superior practical performance as it should have.”

“Low dishonest decade”

https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939