Response to a post of Raman’s Jeevi

 This came as a part of my response to a Telugu post by Ramana Jeevi who said that there is no dictionary which defines a human being (manishi). In my response I used a couple of quotes of Barry Mazur on Grothendieck:

Possibly the same can be said for many words. Wittgenstein said some thing like ‘ that the meaning of a word is—in essence—determined by, in fact is nothing more than, its relations to all the utterances in a language.’ Similar ideas come in the work of the mathematician Grothendieck: ‘mathematical object X is best thought of in the context of a category surrounding it, and is determined by the network of relations it enjoys with all the objects of that category.’

From an obituary for him:

“He admired the HuaYen Buddhists for the attention they paid to the relationships between things rather than the things themselves, in the belief that whatever notions of identity and individuality we have emerge from those relationships.”

Thinking about Grothendieck by Barry Mazur.

The limits of clocks

 The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks

O dad needed

 No dad needed: Two California condors were born via ‘virgin birth’

A new video on climate change

 Talking dinosaur invades UN to give climate change speech in bizarre, yet brilliant, new video

An old mathematical question

 Recently, I posted the following question

There is an old paper of mine ‘Homeomorphisms of compact 3-manifolds’ in Topology 1977 (accessible online). I was trying to extend Waldhausen theory to irreducible non-orientable 3-manifolds. So these contain two sided projective planes. The case when there are no such planes was done by W. Heil in his thesis. By decomposing further one obtains 3-manifolds with projective planes in the boundary but any two sided projective plane inside is parallel to the boundary. I was able to show that these were sufficiently large except in one case: when the boundary consists of exactly two projective planes. Now much more is known and it may be possible to handle this case.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Hillman sent me a preliminary draft in which he studies Poincaré complexes using Crisp’s thesis. One of the results he obtains is: If M is a closed irreducible manifold which has an element of finite order > 1 which has infinite centraliser then M is homotopy equivalent to projective plane cross a circle.
In the above, if N is an irreducible manifold with exactly two projective planes in the boundary, then we can glue the boundary components to obtain M as above and so the answer to the question is yes by Hillman’s result. Actually, it is a homeomrphism in Hillman’s result by an old theorem of G.R.Livesay.
Here is an argument which could have been done in 1977. Take M as above and let L be the cover corresponding to Z\cross Z_2. Take the Scott Core of L, which we may assume to have incompressible boundary. If L is not closed, the boundary has at least two projective planes. Take a map to the circle to split L along a projective plane. The result of the splitting is another compact 3- manifold K with at least four projective planes in the boundary and fundamental group Z_2. Now a famous theorem of D.B.A. Epstein from his thesis in 1960 asserts that any such K has to be projective plane times an interval. This contradiction shows that L is closed and thus equal to M itself. We are done.
If this is correct, I am still in the game but I find that I do not understand my 1977 paper. It is going to be hard work and I won’t even try.

Sent from my iPad

Two about the economy

 Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the Latest Sign from NYTimes

Do taxes fund spending? From Crooked Timber

How to fix social media

 Why social media has changed the world — and how to fix it

Richard Wright and others

Outcasts and desperados by Adam Shatz

Einstein on socialism

 Why socialism?  By Albert Einstein.

Wikipedia discussion

What we can learn from John B.Calhoun's rodent experiments

 What Humans Can Learn

"When all needs are accounted for, and no conflict exists, the act of living is stripped to its barest physiological essentials of food and sleep. In Calhoun's view:

Herein is the paradox of a life without work or conflict.

When all sense of necessity is stripped from the life of an individual, life ceases to have purpose.

The individual dies in spirit." 

Another review THE BEHAVIORAL SINK The mouse universes of John B. Calhoun

"Death of the establishment leads to spiritual death

= loss of capacity to engage in behaviors essential to species survival

....

No matter how sophisticated we considered ourselves to be, once the number of individuals capable of filling roles greatly exceeded the number of roles,

only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. ... Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked."

on Stuart Hall

Politics without guarantees by Asad Haider

The unravelling of a conspiracy in India

The unravelling of a conpiracy by Siddharha Deb

In 2018, Indian police claimed to have uncovered a shocking plan to bring down the government. But there is mounting evidence that the initial conspiracy was a fiction – and the accused are victims of an elaborate plot.

Probably Freeman Dyson's last article

 Biological and cultural evolution: six characters in search of an author in Edge.org

Long read, a review of three books from 2010, mostly about George Price

 On George Price by Miriam Markowitz

A quote towards the end:

"If we know that altruism makes one feel good and useful—that, at least, has been tested in the laboratory of human emotion—then perhaps altruism evolved because it increases the fitness of the individual by protecting him from the desire to die. Life is hard; we know that as moderns, and it seems likely that it was as well for our predecessors. Perhaps, in her omniscience, Nature understood that she could not rely solely on the survival instinct to ensure the propagation of her magisterial creations; that occasionally one might grow disillusioned with this life, despite its beauties, and want to end it. Feeling that one is needed by others might just prevent this defection. Altruism, pure or not, may be a lifeboat, a dinghy we row. Within its confines, we experience the subtle brotherhood of men, and let it warm us."

Fifty years of Price Equation

 Fifty years of Price equation from Philosophical Transactions of thevRoyal SocietyB. Several interesting essays free online.

Introducing 'Khabar Lahariya'

 From The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/29/stop-patronising-me-and-give-me-an-interview-the-female-journalists-speaking-up-for-indias-poor?fbclid=IwAR2nEOZhINdjVkNuV7BdsShMECnPaijU3myrKhJWpNwjlN92BhRbZ92FQIs

"Khabar Lahariya is India’s only all-female news organisation. Based in Uttar Pradesh, its journalists passionately believe in reporting rural issues through a feminist lens."

From 'The natural selection of bad science'

 Seems applicable to other areas as well.

"The requirements for natural selection to produce design are easy to satisfy. Darwin outlined the logic of natural selection as requiring three conditions:

(i) There must be variation.

(ii) That variation must have consequences for survival or reproduction.

(iii) Variation must be heritable.

In this case, there are no biological traits being passed from scientific mentors to apprentices. However, research practices do vary. That variation has consequences—habits that lead to publication lead to obtaining highly competitive research positions. And variation in practice is partly heritable, in the sense that apprentices acquire research habits and statistical procedures from mentors and peers. Researchers also acquire research practice from successful role models in their fields, even if they do not personally know them. Therefore, when researchers are rewarded primarily for publishing, then habits which promote publication are naturally selected. Unfortunately, such habits can directly undermine scientific progress." 

"Despite incentives for productivity, many scientists employ rigorous methods and learn new things about the world all the time that are validated by replication or by being effectively put into practice. In other words, there is still plenty of good science out there. One reason is that publication volume is rarely the only determinant of the success or failure of a scientist’s career. Other important factors include the importance of one’s research topic, the quality of one’s work, and the esteem of one’s peers. The weight of each factor varies among disciplines, and in some fields such factors may work positively to promote behaviours leading to high-quality research, particularly when selection for those behaviours is enculturated into institutions or disciplinary norms. In such cases, this may be sufficient to counteract the negative effects of incentives for publication volume, and so maintain high levels of research quality. If, on the other hand, success is largely determined by publication output or related quantitative metrics, then those who care about quality research should be on high alert. In which direction the scale tips in one’s own field is a critical question for anyone interested in the future of science."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303698773_The_Natural_Selection_of_Bad_Science?fbclid=IwAR1zn5t6CzzuO2hGOYmWOAPYbtZxM5ggEXL8fybNJ0xmUHdjya-1G4j_Iqo

Victor Toth on entanglement

 No man is an island.

Victor Toth in Quora about entanglement:

Well, actually, that is precisely the point. Most of the time, everything is entangled with everything else.

When we talk about, say, creating an entangled pair of particles, the point is not to get them entangled with each other; the point is to reduce or eliminate their entanglement with everything else to the extent possible, for as long as possible. That is to say, make sure that the pair are isolated from the environment.

That’s the hard part. Not entangling them with each other; that’s a given.

The original question:

If interacting particles become entangled, why isn't everything entangled with everything else from the big bang?

A comment from Dan Kervick

 Dan Kervick comments in a Doug Henwood post;

Seems like leftists of various kinds and degrees are always bemoaning the failure of the masses to develop a consciousness of their “true” material interests, and their susceptibility to fake or fraudulent cultural, religious, identity or moral concerns. (What’s the matter with Kansas?)

Is it possible that, after many decades of failure, these kinds of leftists might want to reconsider their own flat, two-inch deep understanding of human nature and what they understand as its “real” material interests.

People actually care about their spiritual lives, their loves and friendships and family lives, their linguistic heritage and the cultural riches embodied in it, and their sense of justice and morality. Leftist philistines who think all of this is fake, false consciousness need to expand their own intellectual and spiritual horizons, and then might understand why they have failed, over and over and over, to gain much of a foothold.

The socialist vision of society is ancient and rich and varied. It is exalted. It has a noble artistic, moral and religious heritage. It didn’t begin in the cold, smoggy and mechanical mid-nineteenth century and isn’t solely the product of the satanic mills and what a handful of modernist urban European thinkers thought about them.

The plight of migrants

 The plight of twenty first century migrants by Mit Ali Husseni 

"But those who want to approach the question of migration truthfully must ask the question which Arendt asked about the Greek democracy but failed to answer when it came to the United States. To what extent does our freedom from the necessities of life rely, and has historically relied, on the labor of people living thousands of miles away? Just as America’s political ideals were founded on enslaved people’s labor, just as Europe was enriched by looting the colonies, today too, our freedom relies, at least partly, on exploiting other parts of the world.

So, as it turns out, to be a “Dane” does in fact have a meaning. The price of Denmark being named “the happiest country in the world” is paid not just by Danes, but also by others whom the global economy exploits. No political citizenry, despite what Arendt’s consecration of the political presupposes, can be stripped from its enabling social and economic conditions."