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Topic: Maths--General Interest
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This is a collection of short articles and reflections on topics of current interest. For older short posts, see here: #1-199 (Feb 2014-Oct 2019)


#290 – The Saxon Chronicles: The 600 year story of Britain after the Roman Occupation (400 CE) and before William of Normandy (1066)
21 October, 2023

The periods before 1066, the founding of Norman Britain under the control of William the Conqueror, are less well known. Below a sketch, primarily based on the less well known Saxon Chronicle

  1. Britons came from Armenia and settled the southern part of Britain.
  2. Scots were indiginous to Ireland
  3. Picts came from Scythian (northeastern Iran/western Siberia) area of the Black Sea and tried to settle in Ireland but were denied and were given help to settle in the north of Brtain
  4. The Romans came to conquer Britain (Julius Caesar). Why? Northern Britain had one of the largest tin deposits in the European continent, and tin was an essential ingredient to mix with copper to make bronze, the metal that was the backbone of war (swords, shields, armour, helmets, spears): hard but malleable. Were there also iron mines?
  5. The Romans went up to Hadrians wall, the Britons retreated to Wales.
  6. When Atila the Hun of the Goths sacked Rome c.400 CE, the Romans retreated from Briton, leaving it open to other forces.
  7. The Picts attempted to come southward over Hadrian’s wall.
  8. King of the Britons sailed over the water seeking allies to help him. Rome declined, occupied with Atila. But the Angles accepted
  9. The Angles found the Britons to be weak, and their land to be mild, rich and fertile, compared to their own land which was heavily forested and hard to till. So they sent for more help ostensibly to support the Britons, but ultimately turned against them and established their own kingdom..
  10. More settlers came from northern Germany and Denmark, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (from Jutland in Denmark), and by 600 CE they had established the 7 kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain, with the Britons retreating into Wales. The Anglo-Saxons wiped out the Celts and Romanized Britons from Britain.
  11. The kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Brtain: The Jutes had Kent, Isle of Wight. The Old Saxons from Saxony in Northern Germany had Essex (East Saxony), Wessex (West Saxony), and Sussex (South Saxony). The Angles had East Anglia, Middle Anglia, and Mercia. It is from the Angles that we get the name Angle-land or England.
  12. Then came the Viking attacks from Scandinavia, from Norway and Sweden.
  13. The Vikings fought the Anglo Saxons, establishing Northumbria as their kingdom, with their capital at York.
  14. They were successful, conquering most of the 7 kingdoms, except for Wessex, the Last Kingdom (the 2015-2022 series). King Alfred (the Great) fought back and eventually defeated the Vikings and Britain was partitioned into Wessex and Danelaw. Seven Kings Must Die completes the unification of Britain and peaceful coexistence of Northumbria under Viking governorship but subject to the Anglo-Saxon kings.
  15. Aethelstan the Second betrays the Danelaw and seeks to establish Anglo-Saxon superiority over all of Britain. This brings the revenge of the Vikings portrayed in the 2022 series Vikings: Valhalla.
  16. Then William the Conqueror, after travails of his own in Brittany and Normandy in France, leads an army of Normans (Northmen, also Vikings) to invade Britain from the south, and succeeds in controlling the country.
  17. King Edward I and the independence of Scotland – Braveheart, the story of William Wallace (1995)
  18. Robert the Bruce (2019) – the follow-on story of how Robert the Bruce eventually won Scottish independence (1300s)
  19. Henry V – told in the 2019 movie The King (starring Timothee Chalemet) and the loyal advisor Sir John Falstaff.
  20. Henry VIII and Thomas More – A Man for All Seasons (1988)


#289 – Progress in Space Exploration and Astrophysics
27 August, 2023

The links below capture in one place the various developments in space exploration and astrophysics that have been noted in the short articles series since 2014.

  1. #30 – Human Settlement of Mars – Mars One
  2. #43 – Quantum Propulsion Engine, EmDrive, and Next Generation Space Technologies
  3. #75 – Dot Space – New Space Companies in Seattle
  4. #91 – Photonic propulsion using lasers to reach closer to speed of light
  5. #94 – Mathematical model of probability of alien communication
  6. #106 – Interplanetary radar
  7. #109 – Dynamics of Planetary Size
  8. #110 – A Conscious Universe?
  9. #126 – Human Settlement of the Moon
  10. #131 – Tribute to Stephen Hawking
  11. #133 – Our Minute Place in a Vast Universe
  12. #169 – Dark Fluid? A theory of the universe; why is is 40% of the mass calculated as present at the big bang currently undetected?
  13. #173 – Property Rights in Space? US and Luxembourg pave the way
  14. #189 – Space Sailing on the Solar Wind – Light Sail
  15. #193 – Space collisions may have caused some of Earth’s ice ages
  16. #194 – Extremophiles, Pan-spermia, and space colonization
  17. #204 – How close are we to suspended animation? The prospects for long distance space travel
  18. #205 – Review of Space Propulsion state of the art (2019)
  19. #223 – Interplanetary Space Travel: Getting There, Staying There, Getting Back
  20. #226 – I’ve lost my moon
  21. July 2020 – BioDome2 – A group of eight volunteers spent two years inside a sealed shelter – the BioDome2 – to explore the challenges of prolonged space travel. Article
  22. July 2020 – SpaceX is on a mission to populate Mars with human colonists. (Aug 7th) SpaceX wins US Air Force contract in partnership with Lockheed Martin and the Boeing Company (United Launch Alliance), to provide rockets for NASA, breaking the dependence on Russian RD-180 rockets that has been the case for the past 20-30 years. The new rockets will use Bezos’s Blue Origin BE-4 high-power methane-oxygen engine amongst other components. More details on the contract and launch missions.
  23. Sep 2020 – Tardigrade hardiness: computer simulation identifies highly flexible proteins as the key to their armor.
  24. The strange thing about dark matter.
  25. #233 – Calculating Total Mass/Energy in the Universe
  26. #240- The practical business of breathing on Mars
  27. #246 – a Government for Mars? Elon Musk’s Starlink Terms of Service
  28. #264 – Settling Space – a look at where we might go
  29. Oct 2021 – Internet for the Moon! NASA’s LuRaNet for 2024. | Jovian moons Europa and Ganymede have persistant water wapor in their atmospheres
  30. Nov 2021 – Is our Solar System in a Magnetic Tunnel? Telescopic observations match an analogy with camera observations inside a tunnel
  31. Dec 2021 – Wormholes can exist, as they fit within the mathematical structure of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (which also predicted the existence of black holes before they were discovered). Stable microscopic wormholes can be created and held open using quantum entanglement (2017). Creating and holding open a stable human-sized (macroscopic) wormhole is an area of active research.
  32. Jan 2022 – Geomagnetic Storms and impact on a high tech earth society – the Carrington event is the last such massive event.
  33. Jan 2022 – 2020 XL5: a second “Earth Trojan” asteroid, but not yet ideal as a way-station for intergalactic travel. Trojans are asteroids that orbit a planet from deep space in a three-body system (asteroid-planet-Sun). These are typically orbitting in deep space, far from influence of other planets. 2020 XL5 was discovered in Dec 2020 and found to have orbital stability with Earth for c.4,000 years. In theory Earth Trojans could be ideal for human habited space stations, but in this case calculations of fuel budget to reach it show it is as yet too expensive (delta-v budget) to be a recommended mission. The search is on for additional Earth Trojans that are better positioned.
  34. Reinvention of the factory: microfactories | Robotics as a service (RAAS)
  35. Materials Science: stronger than steel but lighter than plastic: 2DPA1
  36. Aug 2022 – Living in the outer solar system:
    China sending orbiter to the outer planets
    Devastating effect on bones while traveling in space – we will need to go faster

  37. a new theory of gravitation called milgromian dynamics or mond, better matches the known data than the hypothesis of dark matter which, like many historical scoring hypothesis was invented purely to save the appearances. This is like the theory of epicycles in astronomy, the theory of the ether in the propagation of light.
    The xenon experiment has just raised the bar on how unlikely a result would have to be observed for dark matter to be measurable.
    Time to ditch the theory of dark matter
    Finding missing atoms in the vacuum of space

  38. plasma on mars could allow humans to form oxygen and rocket fuel from water.
  39. Nuclear fusion breakthrough: ignition reached: split second using 192 simultaneous lasers, reaching energy of sun, consuming more power than the entire us electrical grid for a fraction of a second.
    Google deepmind has trained an AI to control the highly complex real time fusion reaction

  40. Space travel speeds: It takes a speed (escape velocity) of 25,000 mph to escape Earth’s gravity field | A light year is approx 10 trillion km | Moon is 300k km away, light gets there in a second | Space speed stats: Sound travels at c. 800 mph | Bullets can travel 3x faster than sound at 2600 mph | NASA’s X3 jet plane travels 7k mph | Parker Solar Probe used the sun’s gravity assist to accelerate to 330k mph and will raeach 450k mph | 1% of speed of light is 7M mph | Speed of light is 700M mph | Current efforts are not fast enough to travel to other stars, as the Parker Solar Probe at 450k mph would take 6k years to reach Proxima Centuri (4.25 light years, or 40away)
  41. Did Jupiter eat other planets to get so big?
  42. August 2022
    1) the science of wormholes:
    2) using a spacecraft collision to nudge an asteroid’s position enough to shift its overall orbit


#288 – 2023 Collection (Jan-Jun)
July 26th, 2023

    Historic/Pre-Historic

  1. There is unlikely to be a Planet B for us: As astronomical observation capabilities improve and we find more examples of earth like planets (e.g. TOI 700 e) and think that perhaps we might move to other planets, it’s worth remembering why we should not assume that there’s a planet B waiting for us: it has taken 3.2 billion years of joint evolution of earth and life, each impacting the other.
  2. Panspermia: When we think about the remarkable diversity of life currently on earth (est. 1 trillion species overall, est. 8.7 million eukaryote species, of which only 1.2 million are known, mostly insects), and the even larger biodiversity lost (est. 5 billion extinct species), the question arises: if we could seed life in the universe using comets (panspermia), should we? Were we the result of such an seeding event (Cambrian explosion)?
  3. First life: missing link
  4. A virovore discovered
  5. Emergence of bipedalism in humans – new evidence (in trees, using branches for training)
  6. Paleolithic stone knapping – life/limb threatening occupation
  7. Simple stone tool flakes are created unintentionally by cracking nuts with stones: false causation (monkeys vs. humans), but also mode for human discovery.
  8. Ancient humans apex predators for 2m years.
  9. Did carnivorous lifestyle kill the Neanderthals
  10. 300,000 years ago: advanced wood working creating ancient spears
  11. Archeoastronomy: cave paintings or calendar?
  12. 12,000 year old bird bone flute: music or hunting?
  13. Human orgins: The Sumerian Problem: Mixed dna from 13 samples from ubaid period Mesopotamia
  14. 10m years ago, ancestors of African apes in Hungary had more flexible and longer lower back enabling upright gait
  15. 8.7m years old ape fossil from Türkiye provides link showing ancestors of African apes originated in Western Europe, migrated to Eastern Europe, Mediterranean, near east, and from there to Africa, following the change in climate and resulting savanna ecology
  16. 2m years ago, Greenland was tropical and had corresponding fauna and flora
  17. Humans and wild apes have a common gesture language. A gesture language may explain an additional advantage for bipedalism: hands free for hand speech
  18. Why humans do not have fur
  19. From homo Erectus to homo sapiens there may be another human species in China 750kya
  20. Tens of thousands of years ago, atlatl invention may have equalized men and women’s ability to hunt
  21. Gobekli tepe: 9000bce, 6000 years before Stonehenge
  22. 5000bce in Kurdistan north of erb there was a religion that has survived to the present: yazidism
  23. 3300bce in the alps, copper age people had periodontal disease
  24. The myths of ancient slavery
  25. Native Americans have Chinese dna links
  26. The temptation to over ascribe sophistication to ancient monuments: archastronony and Stonehenge: solstice alignment likely and awareness of solar cycle but not a calendar
  27. Why Roman concrete was so durable (they mixed it with material that filled in the cracks as they formed)

    Mathematics

  28. How math achieved transcendence
  29. Elliptic curves a new number system

    Science

  30. The physics of a warp drive: how it could work for faster than light travel by creating a space bubble and deforming space time so that gravity pulls the craft along
  31. Understanding the geological structure of the inner earth: a planet within a planet rotating freely
  32. Geological pressure produces diamonds in the center of continental plates
  33. MOND: Milgrom dynamics adjusts gravity theory beyond Newton/Einstein and the model fits unexplained astrophysical observations better than the parallel theory of dark matter. The case for two starts orbiting each other. | Another study | Third study
  34. Principle of least action shown to hold also in the quantum space
  35. Heat Resistant Wheat gene: key to future food security
  36. Scale of bird biodiversity loss: Europe has lost half a billion birds in the past 40 years due primarily to pesticides
  37. Battery from seaweed still charging after 1000 charges
  38. Lab grown brain cells play pong
  39. Electrified highway: Sweden is building world’s first electrified road to continuously charge electric vehicles
  40. Can an enzyme turn air into electricity? Yes…
  41. Have we found red matter? Superconducting material at room temperature and without requiring high pressures
  42. India moon landing South Pole(dark side); Russia lander crashes
  43. All of Physics is contained within an atom | But inside the proton is the most complicated thing you can imagine
  44. Humanoid robots with AI can operate human designed controls and do so better than humans: robotic pilots are now better than human ones
  45. Vagus nerve influences entire body processes, mental, mental, physical health are linked

    Current events/politics

  46. How influential Elon musk is to us government and U.S. interests in national infrastructure: space, electric vehicle charging, star link satellites
  47. How star link changed warfare
  48. What Apple did to Nokia in telecoms, Tesla is doing to motor vehicles. A car is a sled with software
  49. In summer 2023, Ukraine just need to advance 10 miles to secure a decisive military precision to actual victory: having them entire Russian supply line within range of long range strikes
  50. Wagner mutiny: internal sympathizers?
  51. Putin’s weakening
  52. Russian soldiers freezing to death in early ’23 (first winter since war began)
  53. Russians battling their own forces at their southern border with Ukraine
  54. The politics of neutrality: good economics
  55. What has driven Putin’s long game Ukraine strategy? An historian traces back
  56. The erosion of human capital in and talent flight out of Russia.
  57. How putin’s well-calculated big bet nontheless failed – Ukraine refusal to capitulate and Europe’s decision to refuse gas blackmail
  58. Why Ukraine bet everything on holding Bakhmut and denying Putin a victory
  59. Modern spying and the Brussels/EU vulnerability
  60. It is interesting that covid was perhaps the most effective take out for trump, forced the hands of Putin and Netanyahu, undid Bolsanaro (barely), and Johnson (finally), and weakened xi.
  61. China’s long term and short term bets go wrong: U.S. isolation in Asia, the Zero covid policy, wolf warrior diplomacy, stoking muscular nationalism at home while trying to win international alliances
  62. Zero-covid and xi, article 1, article 2
  63. Unrest and instability in China due to prolonged zero covid policy | Half a million covid cases a day: Chinese city
  64. Isolation attempt backfires, article 1
  65. Wolf warrior diplomacy backfires, article 1
  66. Rare metal curbs backfiring
  67. Economic policies backfiring
  68. Taiwan belligerence backfiring
  69. Trade errors: human rights hardline costs China strategic objective to further relationship with EU, article 1
  70. What’s driving China since Xi’s rise in 2012? National security, self sufficiency, winning an epochal super power showdown Elements of that isolationist strategy are backfiring
  71. Race power is the root of trump’s appeal and how he and others before him discovered it’s potency
  72. The politics of division and intolerance: Modi in India
  73. Trump and Jan 6: 4 criminal convictions sought
  74. How trump dodged two impeachments and Jan 6 committee.
  75. The Uk enablement of Boris Johnson is a replica of the US enablement of Donald Trump. In both cases, the people and the politicians knew but looked away. That ambivalence greatly damaged the social fabric of both countries.
  76. Giving more attention to crazy ideas gives them more fuel – the COVID conduct investigations in the UK
  77. The culture of truth denial in the U.S. and Uk: eroding democracy
  78. The Russia war: case study in the dangers of a pliant majority
  79. Mismanagement during covid in the Uk
  80. Corruption in Uk: why there continue to be sleaze stories
  81. Johnson coverups and denials
  82. The terribly grim humor of kwasi kwarteng’s departure and the last days of Liz truss
  83. Truss – broken leadership
  84. The long history of Uk economic malaise and mismanagement of resource. Failure to create prosperity due to governing according to ideology, most recently Brexit. Again Uk as sick man of Europe.
  85. Analysis of the fiscal problems in Uk over the past ten years. | historical look at Uk decline. Whodunnit.
  86. Uk budgets, from austerity to Truss, to hunt
  87. 50 years of western decline originating in the 1973 price rise in oil and the collapse of the Breton woods financial system
  88. Truss economics broke conservative orthodoxy but also lays a trap for those wanting to adopt the approach of Roosevelt
  89. Satirical roasting of Sunak, Britain’s 3rd prime minister in 50 days.
  90. The sad state of politics: finding the right attack lines
  91. The real reason the U.S. government has such a huge debt? Because at some point the U.S. government started accepting to fund its needs through money loaned to it by the wealthy, at high interest rates
  92. Is the US Supreme Court changing its right-wing judicial activism in the short term to counteract its growing negative perception?
  93. The U.S. Republican Party mantra: win at all costs
  94. Why extremism works: Hostage politics by minority groups: a consequence of win at all costs mantra in a democratic assembly
  95. Another win at all costs: Israel’s Netanyahu
  96. Resisting stubbornness in leadership: endgame of win at all costs mindset
  97. Another win at all costs: UK Labour
  98. The attempt to undermine U.S. elections by electing state secretaries who will not certify election outcomes they do not personally agree with
  99. The resistance remains in U.S. electorate. Listens and Georgia.
  100. The quietly corrosive effects of money politics in institutional integrity: EU not immune

    Education

  101. Top ten world universities. 4 in uk, 1 in Europe
  102. Top twenty European universities. 10 are in Uk

    Social Justice

  103. Poverty in Uk: less than £125/week is unlivable. Yet it is twice what the Uk government credit is. And a 1% tax on earnings above £2m would release £88bn more than enough to address the recent lurch towards higher rates of poverty, as well as the root causes of generational and regional poverty.
  104. Nepalese working in the gulf return home with damaged kidneys
  105. Underfunded nhs leads to avoidable deaths
  106. University reform required as foreign student funding dries up post Brexit
  107. Ultra rich: tax us now. A little extra tax here can fix the budget and start to pay down the National debt.
  108. Unfettered greed/wealth is as much a public hazard as unfettered power, for the same reasons (money proxies for power).
  109. The global proliferation of profit maximization: the history of McKinsey
  110. How UKs culture of secrecy impacts proper governing, transparency, accountability.
  111. What a genuine leveling up plan in the Uk would look like
  112. The deterioration of America’s low end infrastructure: a story of travel by greyhound post covid. Unrecognizable from when i did the same thing 30 years ago (1993)
  113. How 50% of UK wage earners can now only afford the bottom 10% of Uk houses (at 4.5x annual income).
  114. The impact of unaffordable housing on millennial relationships
  115. The impact of cost of living on socializing
  116. The physiological effects of sustained under heating on the human body. A look at the damage from not being able to afford adequate heating in winter
  117. Energy agreement (charter) is what keeps the governments buying fossil fuels when their populations are against it.
  118. Two race lenses on the world and what it means for media as economics, media as politics, and media for strengthening collective social fabric

    Life Hacks

  119. Don’t pour grease down the drain. Even the oil from tuna cans.
  120. From $15,000 to $2.1 million and bust. Gambling and the stock market. Similar pitfalls lurk for the wrong personality type (most humans)
  121. Bedtime affects development of teen brains
  122. Artificial sweetener changes the resilience of DNA


#287 – Jan 2023 Collection
January 8th, 2023

  1. Maths
    1) Terence Tao has a new allegory: Relativity & Middle Earth. Terence Tao’s previous physics/math allegory: Quantum Mechanics & Tomb Raider (c.2007)
    2) The symbols of modern mathematics are a relatively late invention, most not being standardized until early in the 20th century! Here’s a view of specifically set theory & logic symbols timeline, and here a timeline of words used in maths.

  2. Broken government
    1) The unravelling of the Right over 40 years: how the Right moved from the party that viewed itself as natural governors to a party of disruption and opposition that has shown it is unable to govern. 2016-2022 has shown this in UK the US. The question is whether there is a party that has the nous to govern well for all its citizens.

  3. The Extreme Right. Parallels between the Right in American and around the World.
    1) Brasilia riots – The brazenness with which the instigators of the US Jan 6th Capitol Riots (in particular Steve Bannon) have been involved in stoking the Riots in Brasilia over Bolsanaro’s election loss.

  4. Lifestyle
    1) If children lose connection with nature, they won’t fight for it — this was true 10 years ago. It is perhaps more true now, and COVID has shown us that we can do things differently if we really want to.
    2) How to talk to people you disagree with: this is true in politics, at work, at home

  5. Philosophical Considerations
    1) The Last Question — The Edge ended its years of “The Question” series, with this


#286 – Autumn 2022 Collection (September-December)
December 31st, 2022

  1. Math, Science, & Tech breakthroughs:
    1) geometric theory of motion:
    2) teenager solves number theory problem:
    3) mathematical trio solves number theory problem:
    4) Entering ExaScale computing with conventional (not quantum) computers
    5) Very Short Time Intervals and other very small numbers. Measuring zeptoseconds.

  2. Uncovering the past:
    1.1) Earth got its water from asteroids
    1.2) massive ocean in the subducting zone beneath Earth’s crust
    2) formation of the moon:

  3. Business:
    1) Silicon Valley giants hit a wall in 2022
    2) Amazon changed whole foods over course of five years

  4. Policy failure and the failure of government:
    1) sewage covered beaches. The wealthy who can fly to any beach in the world don’t have a vested interest in protecting local beaches
    2) billions in dark money influencing US politics
    3) billionaires wading into politics: Peter thiel

  5. the strategy of boosting extremists in orer to win a short term victory poisons the well of political conversation and encourages further toxicity that undermines political and social stability in the long run
  6. the Truss/Kwarteng debacle:
    1) kwarteng history of wrong footing others:
    2) how the pound collapsed over three weeks of truss prime ministership:
    3) the demise of the Tory party:
    4) negative equity and a new housing crisis:
    5) when politicians experiment with a country: UK 2016-2022
    6) the extremist Truss policy:
    7) kwarteng’s last talk show round before the ignominious exit
    8) This could be the longest ever recession the UK has experienced (per Bank of England)

  7. Future technology:
    1) the science of wormholes:
    2) using a spacecraft collision to nudge an asteroid’s position enough to shift its overall orbit

  8. Mediocrity in politics: sunak’s failed bid:
  9. alternative lifestyles: what goes into an inexpensive wedding that resembles an expensive one
  10. Russia & Ukraine:
    1) the thinking behind the war in Ukraine
    2) the turning of the tide in battle fortunes toward Ukraine ahead of winter:
    3) Kazakhstan’s shift away from closed autocracy:
    4) is the ship starting to sink?
    5) who might come after putin?
    6) Putin’s troop mobilisation:
    7) The Diminishment of Russian influence in the satellite regions/countries of Central Asia and the former Soviet union

  11. where government vision worked: investing in culture: the Brit school for music and Adele
  12. Trump and the Extreme Right. His protracted downfall, but the continuing strength of the right in America
    1) Inside look at the Trump organisation in light of the legal losses:
    2) how the gutting of America’s juicial appointments has helped trump slow being brought to justice:
    3) the Right’s movement seeking to amend the constitution:
    4) widespread failure to support election results imperils democracy:

  13. Earth health:
    1) mass deaths of sea birds at sea:
    2) refreezing the Earth’s poles. A few billionaires could do this:
    3) lantern fish and a huge unharvested biomass:

  14. when we accept what should not be accepted: divorces after years of a loveless marriage: avoiding stable, predictable unhappiness:
  15. inside look at royalty in 20th and 21st century. Elisabeth Windsor:
  16. inside the minds of tech billionaires revealed through musk texts
  17. Economics: The parallels between economic situation today and the Great Depression
  18. Development: “Work In Progress”


#285 – Summer 2022 Collection (May-August)
August 23rd, 2022

  1. Sophrosune (virtue in Greek) is the subject of Plato’s rather vexing dialogue Charmides
    |

  2. Interview with a Mathematician series: John Baez | Terence Tao |
  3. 7 planet alignment: 2004, 2022, 2040, every 18 years.
  4. Calculating Pi digits on an Intel 4004 | Graphics on ATTiny85 | Forth – Hackers Language | DIY Forth on Arduino | LISP in 436 bytes | Toy Pianos into MIDI keyboards
  5. The Standard Model of Particle Physics, another view, inaccuracies of the Standard Model and what would lie beyond it, experiments contradicting it
  6. Symmetry in Physics | 5 symmetries of the standard model of physics |
  7. Is the Google AI sentient?
  8. Metaverse and decline of cities
  9. Nuclear fusion breakthrough: ignition reached: split second using 192 simultaneous lasers, reaching energy of sun, consuming more power than the entire us electrical grid for a fraction of a second.
    Google deepmind has trained an AI to control the highly complex real time fusion reaction

  10. Russia getting hit by Ukraine in crimea. Russian Civilians leaving. Russia winning the economic war
  11. Turkey playing both sides, Russia and west
  12. Collapse of ocean circulation spells doom for oxygen needing deep sea life
  13. Britain failing to invest in infrastructure for decades
  14. The UK sewage system fail safe is to pump excess sewage directly into seas and rivers.
    The dark face of privatization and lax oversight from regulation: the pillaging of public spaces for profit. You protect what you use: if the wealthy no longer use our beaches, schools, high streets, health care system or social services, they will not protect these, to the loss of the overall national benefit

  15. Labor unrest in Uk: against 13% inflation in august and with 18% projected by January, workers across Uk unions are striking: port workers at felixstowe, postal workers at Royal Mail, amazon workers at warehouses, legal clerks, tube and rail
  16. British middle class will now experience the inadequacy of the Uk benefit system. Of course, all things are relative, and the UK system is better than the US system.
  17. how mitch mcconnel tilted the American balance of power to the right through tough tactics
  18. diversity and inclusion: little feather and the Oscar’s apology
  19. The midterm elections 2022 and even more so the elections in 2024 will be a referendum on trump and his direction for America https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/13/has-the-republican-midterm-red-wave-crested
  20. Lebanon an example of human grit, alongside Ireland, Bosnia, Palestine, Israel, India, China, and other waves of immigrants rebuilding after tragedy
  21. how to control shameless or narcissistic politicians? Trump, Johnson, le pen, putin, xi, erdogan, orban, Truss, berlusconi, …? A new game of fantasy politics just might
  22. The draining of the Uk economy continues
  23. White working class is a fictitious entity designed to influence by association
  24. rebuilding the center left, a game of patience in the midst of a painful period of political polarization
  25. Israeli soldiers leak what’s happening in the occupied territories
  26. The big business of alcohol and the dependence of government on tax revenues from alcohol, (along with cigarettes, lottery tickets, and fossil fuels)
  27. The first drone deliveries in Uk are with Royal Mail delivering to the Scottish islands and Boots pharmacy delivering by drone to the isle of wight
  28. A city on a line, dozens of miles, many stories high, on rails, with internally regulated conditions, housing several million people. Strange and Orwellian. It’s in Saudi Arabia:
  29. Senet an ancient Egyptian game
  30. Best view in the solar system: it would take 30 years to reach the point at which the sun’s gravitational effect provides a natural optical lens. There is now a mission to get there
    Images from the James webb telescope situated millions of miles from earth

  31. A British political tradition: being economical with the truth
  32. underwater humanoid robot reaches new depths
  33. A Fields Medal for advances related to solving a knights puzzle in chess.
    Another set of problems related to fields medals
    Complex numbers naturally describe the shape of space

  34. a shortage of electrical engineers
  35. the influence of money corrupts the egalitarian impulse to protect what is worth protecting.
    The US Supreme Court is now complicit.

  36. January 6 hearings
  37. Johnson loses second ethics advisor in under twelve months
  38. The tainting of justice by a ravenous media that needs to sell stories
  39. Newton’s principia, a paper
  40. Detachment, let it rot, bai lan, or the quiet alienation from party lines on China and in workplaces across the world
  41. Boris Johnson the man who would be king almost got away with the lockdown parties, after the met police inexplicably prevents sue gray from releasing her report for months | What the Sue Gray report found on Downing Street culture |
  42. The quiet pandemic after the pandemic
    The quiet regret of the unvaccinated
    The evolution of the covid virus – an outlook

  43. Brexit unraveling | Public services unraveling in UK
  44. theft of development funds
  45. the inglorious American retreat from Afghanistan in 2022, 20 years after entering
  46. Moves toward a Value based Healthcare – payment made on how well a patient is vs. providing treatment only
  47. Gun violence in US – a state by state infographic approach
  48. US Republicans hitching their wagon to Trump and the Big Lie for the midterms.
  49. German consumer savings being rapidly consumed by fuel price rises and inflation.
  50. Tough macro economic climate in the US gives an opportunity for Pinduoduo, an ultra cost competitive ecommerce company from China to enter the US, but its labor practices would be a new low in the e-commerce sector


#284 – April Collection
April 14th, 2022

  1. The crumbling of the facade around corruption, and the battle between autocracy and democracy:
    1. the mainstreaming of extremism in the US |
    2. Will Biden be willing to take on the wealthy?
    3. Elon Musk and his Entry into Twitter, the difference between his entry and Bezos’ rescue of Washington Post
    4. Putinism within Republicans
    5. The re-emergence of blocs in global relations – Western (US,Europe) vs. The Rest (Russia, China, Brazil, India, Mexico, Israel) | Autocrats united across borders |
    1. Ukraine – Chechniyan strongman’s shock troops take losses
    2. Russia uses Hypersonic weapons in Ukraine
    3. Is there a solution in Ukraine short of WWIII intervention?
  2. Monstrous Moonshine – Mathematicians chase abstruse connections between J theory of modular forms, sporadic simple groups, and connections to theoretical physics
  3. Mathematics behind winning strategy games
  4. From Pandemic to Endemic – the transition to a post-COVID world
    1. The cost of pursuing a zero-covid policy – China’s lockdown of Shanghai
    2. Economy and need for cheap labor opens up the West Bank security border
  5. How to Talk to People you have strong Disagreements With – a collection of resources
  6. Toxic metals in UK tap water
  7. Seoul introduces self-driving taxis
  8. UK politics muddles on: Rishi Sunak and the failed reboot of Austerity
  9. A month of Wordle and friends. Wordle | Dordle | Quordle | Octordle | Sedecordle
    STAIN, ROUGE, FLOCK

  10. Open Source Agriculture, and in detail


#283 – March Collection
March 23rd, 2022

  1. March saw the continued Russian invasion of Ukraine. The reverberations from the attack by a UN Security Council permanent and veto wielding member on a large, democratic neighbor with a sustained military assault on its main cities, are being felt in many areas: Further erosion of Globalization and the possibility of global blocs emerging (US/European bloc, Chinese bloc) | Understanding the origins of the Russian war in Ukraine (5 views) | Russian economy in freefall | A lost war – Ukraine | The Putin Doctrine |
  2. Corruption: Dirty Money, the Super-Rich, and the States & Policies that enable them | Is the US close to civil war? | Trump – a coup in 2024? |
  3. Clean energy: | Geothermal: instead of steam from coal, what about steam from the earth’s core? |
  4. COVID-19: | The changing nature of the pandemic |
  5. Refugees: Ukraine in 2022, Syria in 2016 – similar crisis, same aggressor, different responses
  6. Future of Warfare: Combat Drones |
  7. Materials Science: stronger than steel but lighter than plastic: 2DPA1
  8. What’s in a name? Turkiye from Turkey
  9. Bad luck: Half a Billion $ in Bitcoin sits in a landfill after being thrown in the dump
  10. Habits of Mind: 7 emotional intelligent behaviours | Bezos’ Day 1 mindset | How the body changes when walking 10k steps/day |
  11. Why some people are always late: they are optimists and pack too much in.
  12. The Great Resignation (2021) | Over 55’s struggle to find jobs |
  13. Reinvention of the factory: microfactories | Robotics as a service (RAAS)


#282c – Mathematics Papers and Resources (mathematics)
Feb 18th, 2022

  1. ArXiV – Papers on Quantitative Science
  2. Nick Higham’s Fifty What Is Articles on Numerical Linear Algebra and the GitHub page


#282b – The Bernoulli Numbers and the value of persistence in driving Change in Conventional Perspectives (mathematics)
Feb 17th, 2022

  1. An Introduction to the Bernoulli function, a detailed study by Peter Lucsny, (2020).
  2. The Bernoulli Numbers are the Children of the Zeta Function (The Bernoulli Manifesto).
  3. Don Knuth accepts the arguments of Peter Luchsny and changes the definition of B(1) to +1/2 instead of previously -1/2. Replacement pages for Concrete Mathematics


#282 – February Collection
February 16th, 2022

  1. Ken Schirriff decaps IC chips and reverse analyzes their design
  2. Robot Hand moves closer to human abilities. Developed by a team of researchers in South Korea. Paper (Nature). Featured on Hackaday


#281 – January Collection
January 26th, 2022

  1. Evangelicals: rightwing radicalisation of religion in America.
  2. Ocasio-Cortez: Will history view the last 50-60 years after the Civil Rights Act as the US’s flirtation with a multi-racial democracy, that was then given up because it was inconvenient for those holding power, and then the US returned to what it had before: Jim Crow segregation, laws enshrining racial superiority, institutional disenfranchisement.
  3. More investment in anti-age/life extension research: Alto funded by Bezos joins California Life Company (Calico) funded by Google, in the search for solutions.
  4. Drving-as-a-Service. With the rise of electric cars, the UK government is left with a £35B tax hole (and growing) from reduced fuel taxes. Discussions are ongoing to replace this with a pay-as-you-drive system, but this would require a) in-vehicle monitoring (privacy/tracking concerns), b) nationwide precision GPS. The fact that you are already paying as you drive due to the fuel tax is less apparent. Without a solution, the government’s reliance on fuel tax may erode its support for accelerated Climate pledge action.
  5. Automotive as a Service is already a thing, as car manufacturers add software features that require a subscription to unlock.
  6. China’s global investment initiatives, named Belt and Road, are focused on Africa, South America, and the Carribbean, poor countries not policy priorities on the lists of IMF or the US. But these efforts are not benevolent, and are fueling a cycle of corruption leading to asset stripping and ultimately indebtedness not unlike the “deregulation” policies of the IMF’s policies in the 2nd half of the 20th century.
  7. Omnidirectional Mecanum wheels! – 4 fixed direction wheels with steering through combination of independent wheel movements, forward or back. This provides a 4-bit digital steering mechanism, with 2^4=16 different combinations. Independent speed control would allow more granular directional steering. A good target for fuzzy controller. Removes the need for complicated steering mechanisms or compensation for tracking geometries. A mecanum-wheeled vehicle has 0 turning radius (unlike a conventional car) and no rotational requirement (unlike a pivoting uni-directional robot using e.g. differential steering).
  8. Sending pictures to the elderly, no smartphone needed – for the cost of a small thermal printer of the kind you might find in a receipt printer at a restaurant, you can provide a device for an elderly person to remain connected with the family through pictures and text.
  9. Geomagnetic Storms and impact on a high tech earth society – the Carrington event is the last such massive event.
  10. Alain de Botton – Why You will Marry the Wrong Person – an excellent Youtube video on human personality, recommended to watch!
  11. Distinguished blackness – Sydney Poiter, Denzel Washington, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King
  12. Donald Trump’s coup attempt on Jan 6th, 2020 is being whitewashed by the Republicans as legitimate political discourse, and they are gearing for another try. Seems horrifying to consider. But there was another coup attempt in 1930s on F.D.R. This one was nipped in the bud, but then was whitewashed and the perpetrators entered into a deal that spared them from treason charges. Highly insightful and at the same time troubling. Small seeds can yield big problems decades later.
  13. US could be under right-wing dictator by 2030. For anyone who has watched Margaret Atwood’s Handmaiden’s Tale, what this might be like does not seem so farfetched anymore. Interestingly the first of the 20th century was marked by economic market collapses, the bursting of financial bubbles, the drumbeats of war and aggression, the rapid impoverishment of the middle classes, and the rise of nationalism, xenophobia, and fascism. The first third of the 21st century seems to be following a similar pattern, with the addition of COVID mirroring the 20th century Spanish flu pandemic.
  14. After one year of Brexit, most UK voters say Brexit has gone badly. As an example of the mess: more than one third of UK importers are still not ready for full Brexit customs checks. Especially for smaller businesses, Brexit is pushing many UK businesses to breaking point.
  15. What would happen if UK triggered Article 16 of the Brexit Agreement?


#280 – Expository Math (mathematics)
January 20th, 2022

A tradition in advanced math is the exposition of a subject that makes it accessible to interested non-specialists. Expository writing in mathematics can aim to provide this service for other mathematicians, or for non-mathematicians.
In this entry, I will share some expository writing aimed at mathematicians that I find effective. For me the criteria are (1) brevity and (2) scope, that is, keep it short, and take a broad lens (breadth first) view of the subject. By contrast, most formally developed mathematics is depth first, which is why it takes an academic year to develop a subject from beginning to end, layer by layer, bottom up. You can judge for yourself the value of good expository writing.

  1. John Baez, Week 13: On Elliptic Curves, April 20, 1993, TWF-MP (This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics). Covers: elliptic curves by analogy with the sine function, but in two dimensions (complex variables), construction from first principles, as solution to differential equation, whose solution possesses a group structure, which can be used to find integer/rational solutions to polynomial equations (Diophantine solutions, related to Andrew Wiles’ solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem).
  2. Birth of a Theorem
  3. John Baez, Week 20: On Sphere Packings, the Golden Ratio, and Exotic Simple Groups, October 2, 1993, TWF-MP
  4. John Baez, Week 21: On the fundamental examples of elementary topology, Oct 10, 1993, TWF-MP
  5. John Baez, Week: 39 On Noncommutative geometry, differential forms, and the Higgs boson, Sep 24, 1994, TWF-MP
  6. John Baez, Week 40: On Logic and modern branches of logic used to model quantum computing, Oct 19, 1994, TWF-MP


#279 – Math & Reasoning Puzzles Suitable for Children (mathematics)
January 15th, 2022

Puzzles suitable for children need to be accessible, immediately appealing, and perplexingly difficult. This means they need to be easy to explain, not require a lot of symbolism or require specialized knowledge, and contain some deep ideas.

Here are a few I’ve used over the years with kids (6 years+) and teenagers through adults:

  1. Lion, Goat, Cabbage and Farmer. Variants: Cannibals and Missionaries. [Algorithms]
  2. Towers of Hanoi. [Algorithms]
  3. Permutations of N. [Combinatorics]
  4. 8-Matchstick Fish [Symmetry]
  5. Bridges of Konigsberg. Variants: Draw house with central X without lifting pencil. [Network/Graphs. Eulerian/Hamiltonian paths and cycles]
  6. Sum of First 100 numbers. Variant. Sum of Squares. Sums of Nth Powers. [Gauss problem. Proof by Induction. Bernoulli Numbers]
  7. Triangular Numbers. Square Numbers. [Number Theory]
  8. Sieve of Erastosthenes. Prime Numbers. [Number Theory]
  9. Prime Races. Variant: Consecutive Primes. [Number Theory]
  10. Pascal’s Triangle. [Patterns, Combinatorics, Combinatorial Identities]
  11. Divisibility Rules. [Modular Arithmetic. Casting out 9s]
  12. Rock Paper Scissors. [Strange Algebras]
  13. Enumerating subsets of N-Set. [Combinatorics]
  14. Doubling grains of Wheat on a chessboard. [Exponential growth] Variant: Sumerian cattle [Unconstrained population growth]
  15. Gray code tour of binary numbers on N digits [DFS/BFS algorithms]. Variant: Knights Tour
  16. More than K or less than L Heads out of N tosses [binomial distribution, tail probabilities and gambling]
  17. Fair distribution into 2 parts [Game Theory]. Variant: Into 3 parts. Into N Parts. [Knife Cutting Algorithm]


#278b – Math & Computer Science Breakthroughs – Year in Review
December 11th, 2021

Kernal Machines unlock Deep Neural Networks, a resolution of Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis and a larger size for the continuum than previously thought, and bridging probability theory and representation theory to come up with a model for 2D quantum gravity.


#278 – December Collection
December 10th, 2021

  1. Anthropomorphic robotic hands approach human levels of dexterity, invented and engineered by a South Korean university.
  2. The waves of COVID so far:
    1. the first wave in UK started in March 2020 with the western variant of original COVID. National lockdown was the eventual response and mistakes in policy led to 23% of deaths in care homes. Only national lockdown brought the R rate below 1. By late summer, COVID wave 1 was in decline.
    2. the second wave in UK started in September with the reopening of schools and universities alongside the relaxed mobility restrictions associated with hospitality, restaurants, and pubs in the late summer, and accelerated by poor policies such as “Eat out to Help Out” (credited with 8-12% higher infection rates).
    3. the third wave in UK started in January following a disasterous COVID policy that lifted restrictions in November and many families gathered over Christmas leading to 3rd wave. The emergence of the more infectious Beta (South Africa) and Gamma (Brazil) variants drove higher infection rates. Failing to heed the warnings of the science resulted in a large spike in the new year. UK entered a 3rd national lockdown lasting into early spring.
    4. the fourth wave in UK began in March 2021 when once again lockdown restrictions were reintroduced to control the spread of the new Delta variant from India which became dominint.
    5. the fourth wave in EU started primarily in central Europe fueled by low vaccination rates and disregard for precautions primarily in Eastern Europe and then spreading through western Europe. It was aggravated by the Euro 2020 football matches which had been deferred to 2021 summer and were met with unrestrained enthusiasm from fans.
    6. the fifth wave of COVID in UK is due to the sweep of Delta through the UK following the autumn term in schools and the opening up of society.
    7. the sixth wave of COVID in UK is expected to build before the fifth wave has subsided, driven by the highly accelerated spread of Omicron variant overlapping with Delta variant.
    8. Omicron wave in Europe – December 2021
  3. Variants of COVID so far: (recall, original COVID (China), Alpha variant (Kent), Beta (South Africa), Gamma (Brazil), Delta (India), Omicron (South Africa)
  4. Artificial blood is still, after 50 years of research, still elusive.
  5. 3D printing & biomechanics: you can now 3D print a prosthetic glass eye, and 3D print a prosthetic ear.
  6. A good interview measures a candidate’s potential by asking questions that explore whether they have the grit, courage and motivation to run at the pace of the hiring manager/company and be brave enough to consistently jump with the HM and level up.
  7. The politics of opposition: sometimes the most effective opposition is agreeing to support the incumbent in what’s right, when the incumbent party is drifting to what’s wrong.
  8. What’s behind Indian origin top leaders of large US companies
  9. The 3 Ages of Gadgetry: Mechanical until about 1950, Electromechanical from 1950-1990, Electronic from 1990s onward
  10. How ambitious R&D projects are undertaken — NASA’s moonshot, Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks, Google’s Search, Amazon’s Alexa developed quietly from 2011 over 5 years to first release.


Nines – the mathematics of vulnerability and risk and how to think precisely about COVID (Terence Tao)
November 10th, 2021

Non-mathematical Another article using data: Where you are most likely to catch COVID


DeepMind’s AI untangles mathematics of knots
November 9th, 2021


#277 – November Collection
November 8th, 2021

  1. Tenets for Calm Technology — one of them is “minimize clicks” | The Fixer’s Manifesto | The Cult of “Done” |
  2. Halloween electronics/coding hacks – Conor O’Neil, haunted doorbell | 2013: frying things | 12-foot talking & moving Skeleton
  3. Falling back in love with Engineering, Electronics, Making – by Conor O’Neil. This is a pretty good description of my journey – Commodore 64 instead of Spectrum ZX, BASIC and Pascal instead of Forth, and Applied Maths instead of Electronics. But in my day job at BioSonics, for 10 years I was next to talented hardware and DSP engineers, and it rubbed off. It was in Oct 2018 when the kids were 7yo and 4yo (6 years later than Conor, whose kids in 2013 were 9yo and 7yo) that I bit the bullet and got an 8051 dev board and got some motors going. It was fun! I then pulled out Charles Platt’s Make Electronics, 2nd edition, and began working through it systematically over 3 months. From 2019 onward, it has been a blur of creations, from RFID sensor systems, to programmable synths, to RC cars and servo system, and Aprils Fool/Halloween pranks, aided by the gift of time from lockdown’s elimination of the daily commute.
  4. Sifteo – Gaming Systems that don’t lock out the DIYer community
  5. Flight Planning/Navigation Control without GPS
  6. Group Narcissism and its rise in the populism of the 21st century.
  7. Drone deliveries: Zipline are already active in Ghana delivering medical supplies to remote locations. A tie-up with Walmart should accelerate entry into commercial space. Royal Mail are using drones to deliver to islands off UK. Amazon’s program has stalled. (Apr ’22) | Amazon drone program hits difficulties (Aug ’21)
  8. Democracy: Emotions, Identity, Policy. This study confirms what we are all witnessing: identity politics (aka tribalism) and emotion are far more divisive than policy preferences/differences.


#276 – October Collection
October 9th, 2021

  1. The ongoing turmoils post Brexit: Dairy farmers pour milk down the drain due to haulier shortages | Pig culls due to shortage of abbatoir workers | Fuel station actual supply disruption driven by panic buying following reports of HGV driver shortages risking resupply problems | Heavy Good Vehicle (HGV) driver shortages due to reduction of non-British driver labor | Shortage of nurses due to decline of new nursing professionals entering UK | IR35 regulation from 2019 impacting labor in the oil & gas industry driven by Government’s attempt to raise tax revenues by closing self-employed status loopholes | Northern Ireland checks might be largely scrapped after all | HGV driver shortage: response #2: Unlimited number of cabotage legs (domestic pick-up/drop-offs) may be permitted by foreign hauliers entering the country on an import journey, before having to exit UK 2 weeks later
  2. COVID 19 ongoing aftermath: New antiviral pill reduces COVID related deaths and hospitalisations by 50% | DVLA Driving License facing huge backlog due to COVID
  3. Corruption in Government, Corrosion in Society: Pandora Papers | Journalism: How Capitalism and the Search for a Digital Future Undermined Journalistic Integrity at the New York Times | Journalism: when reporting priorities are adjusted to avoid the hassle of harassment | The Capture of the Judiciary: How Trump and the Republicans came to nominate 3 Supreme Court Justices and tilt the highest court in the US toward conservative outlook | Boris Johnson and the Scandal’s of violating his own Christmas ’20 restrictions
  4. Single Point of Failure: How Facebook / Instagram / Whatsapp disappeared from the Internet
  5. Internet for the Moon! NASA’s LuRaNet for 2024. | Jovian moons Europa and Ganymede have persistant water wapor in their atmospheres
  6. Cool electronics: Microsynth – all analog | Electronoobs, a young guy making a living building cool electronics projects e.g. this 41-key silicone pushbutton keypad | 8-bit uC vs. 32-bit uC | MIDI shield tutorial (Sparkfun) | Guitar strung piano | Remote Cellular Watchdogs to kick a restart process and delay catastrophic failure | Arpeggios in Music (mysid’s track) | Uncompressed audio |
  7. Amazon Future Engineers program arrives in UK | Machine learning in maths education (Sparx) |


#275 – September Collection
September 23th, 2021

  1. Brain interface using tiny needles
  2. Microfliers from Northwestern University, smaller than a grain of sand, with microchips containing wifi, battery, dataloggers. Opens up computing on the scale of smart dust, pollen, seed dispersal for atmospheric, pollution, population, smart dust, in situ monitoring.
  3. Autobiography of Shahid Kamal, council estate, 80s Britain, who taught himself programming and bootstrapped his way to being a programmer.
  4. Neat Hacks: NFC data transfer on low-power MSP430 uC (7 years battery life on a 3V button cell battery) | AY-3-8910 chiptune hacks | Overwriting AVR bootloader | SD Card bootloader | Rocketry | Oskitone – 3D printed synth kit hackaday scout Poly555 hackaday poly555 poly1 |
  5. Fever in the US body politic continues: Donald Trump is doubling-down on his coup attempt on Jan 6th 2020
  6. Post-pandemic: Cost of childcare unsustainable — to expensive for families that need it, not enough to raise the wages of those providing it
  7. “Common prosperity”: the new emphasis in China, now that President Xi has cleared the way for remaining in power indefinitely.


#274 – Interesting Articles for August
August 27th, 2021

  1. Afghanistan: American Power – Economist Series on America’s changing geopolitical status and implications | The Afghanistan Papers – the secret history of wilful delusion and indirection in the 20 year war
  2. American civil fracture: The entrenchment of opposition to Biden | Trump to DOJ: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me…” | Trump and Trumpism have infected the bloodstream of the American body politic – the fever is not going to pass anytime soon
  3. Explaining Consciousness: Quantum explanations
  4. Artificial Intelligence: Deep Mind puts 20,000 protein folding structures online for free
  5. Society: The Working Homeless of the Pandemic
  6. Pandemic: RNA Pandemics occurred in ancient human evolution as well | Delta Variant spreads like wildfire (evolutionary effectiveness)
  7. Music: Alex Ribchester demo’s how to build a rollicking 4-bar groove | 4 bar theory | Deconstructing a Song | Musical Escher sequences – can Ears lie just like eyes? | Music Streaming changes the nature of music creation/competition -it’s good for catalogue artists, tougher for new/breakout artists who are competing with all music ever released, as for many listeners most of the back catalogue stuff is new to them!
  8. Olympics Tokyo 2020: Final Medal Count table, US nudges China out 1 more gold, GB pips Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) by 2 golds to take 4th place.
  9. Electronics: Home fabrication of a 4004 IC
  10. Nature: Biological Algorithms and the Complexity of Ant Underground Cities – ants as tiny robotic diggers are programmed to with an understanding of the physics of inclines


#273 – Anti-Aging and Reduced Sleep Needs
July 18th, 2021

MetroBiotech is producing a nutraceutical product providing NAD+ supplementation. NAD+ is a small molecule used by mitochondria, which are present in all cells in our bodies. Since NAD+ levels reduce with age, the claim is that supplementation boosts human performance. True? Unclear, but the US military is preparing a large scale trial in 2022.

This follows several recent developments on anti-aging therapies:

  1. Osteocalcin – a protein produced by our bones that regulates ageing and memory
  2. Altering the Insulin Signalling (IIS) and Target of Rapamycin (TOR) pathways to increase longevity by up to 5x
  3. Genetic senescence programming that activates in humans and animals, but does not activate e.g. in Gingko Biloba trees
  4. Fountain of Youth? David Sinclair, NAD, and the chemical basis of Aging (#161) (2017-2018)

Sleep is another area in which our understanding has advanced:

  1. WIRED article – sleep shortening mutations | Sleep shortening mutations – rested with less than 6 hours of sleep. | AP article
  2. Four hours a night and short sleepers sleep less even during weekends and holidays
  3. Example: Dolly Parton’s day begins at 3am


#272 – COVID resurgent in UK right before Lockdown restrictions are due to be removed
July 16th, 2021

A look at the COVID metrics three days before the UK Government removes all pandemic related national protection measures (minimum physical distancing rules, mandatory mask wearing, prohibition on large gatherings, etc.) While clearly the vaccines are helping dampen the severity of illness (lower hospitalization and even lower death rates), the virus is already resurgent and spreading fast. The autumn/winter situation now rests on citizen and business good sense.

COVID in UK – July 2021, 16 months after the start of UK lockdown, and 3 days before the abolishment of all pandemic related national protection measures.

Article: COVID hospitalization numbers could get scary again


#271 – Interesting Articles for July
July 15th, 2021

  1. Long COVID – healthy people can get it and it is not a disease to underestimate. Current view is that it can scramble the way the brain interacts with the body, in the same way that a computer virus can corrupt the code in a microcontroller causing glitches.
  2. The moon, amplified tides, climate change, and flooding. The moon controls tides through its gravitational tug on the earth. This much is commonly known. What may not be known is that there is an 18 year cycle in which the angle of the moon’s rotation causes stronger or weaker pulls. NASA modeling suggests that sometime in the mid 2030’s, the expected higher sea levels due to climate change, combined with the amplifying cycle of the moon, is expected to cause major and persistent flooding in a large number of cities in the US (and around the world).


#270 – Outstanding Curving Goals in Football Match Play
July 4th, 2021

Tennis players apply spin to deliver serves, lobs, and slices.
Baseball pitchers apply spin to create dips in the flight.
Cricket pitches apply spin to create left/right bounce.
Table tennis players apply spin to hit arcing smashes — the heavy spin allows hitting harder while still ensuring the ball stays on the table.
The same theory applies to footballs struck hard with spin. These football curving shots are incredible (video). These are additional outstanding football moments (video)


#269 – Dual Mode Air/Ground Car — aka Flying Car – completes 35 minute test flight in Slovakia
July 1st, 2021

Slovakian company Klein Vision has demonstrated the first successful inter-city journey using AirCar, the first flying car. The trip from Nita to Bratislava took 35 minutes, half the time it would typically take by road alone (59min to 1h13 min according to Google). What’s unclear is what the door-to-door journey time took, and what checks the driver/pilot/car would have had to pass through to receive clearance to use the runway. But the success (see the short video of the flight) is a towering achievement and a tribute to the engineering excellence of Klein. The hybrid car includes ability to automatically transform between flight and road modes in 3 minutes. Impressive!


#268 – May/June 2021 interesting articles
June 20th, 2021

  1. Death by Autotune – by Rick Beato — insightful video with examples of auto-tuned pop (Cher, Lenny Kravitz), compared to non auto-tuned singers (Freddy Mercury, Joni Mitchel, etc.), especially the creation of a perfectly in tune 3-part harmony from a single out of tune repeated note. “Autotune creates a synthesized pitch” that borrows the human singer’s voice for its texture.
  2. What are the variants of Covid so far? COVID had three types (Asia, Europe, X). Then the variants of CONCERN: Alpha (B.1.1.7, UK/Kent, from Sep 2020, 50% more transmissible than base COVID), Beta (B.1.351, South Africa, from May 2020), Gamma (P1, Brazil, from Nov 2020), Delta (B.1.617.2, India, from Oct 2020). Note: the alphanumeric numbering system above is the Pango system. There are also variants of interest.
  3. Should international travel / arrivals be more strongly regulated to reduce the import/export of new COVID variants?
  4. Relative effectiveness of the 5 COVID vaccines Pfizer (95%), Moderna (94%), Novavax (90%), AstraZeneca (79%), and Johnson&Johnson (67%).
  5. An Ode to Procrastination – is there a virtuous circle, can the urge to procrastinate be harnessed? A short, humourous, but provocative article from The Atlantic.
  6. Prime
  7. The autonomous improvement of SARS-COVID-19
  8. The new more effective COVID variants require governments to reboot their thinking on societal defenses
  9. Will the furlough scheme in the UK accelerate the move toward a universal basic income?
  10. Vegan spider-silk as a viable alternative to single-use plastics
  11. How Emoji’s have inundated the standardization body for all the world’s languages
  12. An Analysis of Colonialism and the effect of British Imperialism in the case of India, by Amartya Sen


#267 – April/May 2021 interesting articles
May 20th, 2021

    Science, Technology, Innovation

  1. World’s smallest chip can now be INJECTED into the body
    Meta discussions

  2. Should I automate this? Payoff chart for automation.
  3. How Climate change has already caused the Earth’s axis of rotation to shift

    4. Society, Economics, Social Justice

  4. Crowdfunded investments for social good equivalent to bonds – Tim Sibley’s example to create low-cost sustainable housing in California
  5. The lie of plastic recycling in Western nations – it is just shipped to countries where it is burned, buried, or dumped.

    6. Governance: Good, Bad, Corrupt

  6. Trump post-2020 – the continued move to authoritarian fascism through the hijacked Republican party
  7. The next destructor of the 20th century economy – online eating causes mayhem in the restaurant business, and dark kitchens (making food preparation a commodity). Other disruptors (e-commerce, ride-hailing app)
  8. Runaway COVID crisis in India. The impact on the world from the runaway COVID crisis in India. View from India: Everyone is getting it.
  9. Advanced corruption – how in Mexico, warfare and political assisinations among rival drug operations is a pre-amble to election season, with the high stakes of installing a candidate to suborn an entire government to ally with a criminal operation
  10. Trump was the poster child of corruption in Western democracies and how it takes root through the complicity of major parties that enable the election of an anti-democratic premier, who is selected on the ability to win over enough of an electorate. An analysis of Boris Johnson and the UK

    11. COVID

  11. Obesity and Covid – correlation on severity of infection


#266 – Human activities contribute to human illness
April 18th, 2021

This is nothing new. Examples continue to come up. And be debated. Tragically, the US Food and Drug Administration seems the slowest of the western nations to intervene on behalf of health and safety (vs. EU, Canada, UK). The most recent is the avoidable chemical connection to Parkinsons.

  1. Drycleaning/carpet cleaning chemical associated with Parkinson’s disease – the latest in the ongoing stream of research
  2. Ingested aluminum associated with Alzheimers and other brain degenerative diseases
  3. Chinese rivers turn blue from the blue dye wastewater output from the stonewashed jeans manufacturing process
  4. Sugar additives to all processed foods (including garlic paste, ginger paste, and frozen chicken breasts) driving calorie intake/obesity
  5. Sugar affects the brain and causes addiction similarly to the effect of addictive hard drugs
  6. Fast food triad: Oil, Sugar, Salt — hits a natural human craving response overriding normal fullness mechanism
  7. Rise in allergies
  8. Increase in cancers
  9. Smoking and Alcohol, Soft and hard drugs
  10. Growth hormones in cows and chickens leading to heavier/larger humans (in US)
  11. Pesticides/Insectisides have been frequently called out for harmful side effects. Agent Orange. DDT.


#265 – The Difference Between Science and Engineering
April 5th, 2021

Science asks questions of “why”, “how”, and “whether” (possibility): do humans need to stay warm to live? (A: not necessarily – think cryofreeze). Is it possible for Pluto to be habitable? (A: Yes, interestingly Pluto has an internal heat generating source at its center that has sustained a subsurface ocean for billions of years).

Engineering poses challenges: let’s demonstrate cryo technology. Let’s create a quantum computer. Let’s put a human on Mars. Let’s build a bridge to span that river. Let’s build a suit that can allow a human to survive in space.

There is frequent interplay between engineering and science. Engineering challenges lead to asking scientific questions. Answers to scientific questions lead the way to imagining new engineering challenges and approachs to implementing them.


#264 – Settling Space: Human Habitability, Life origins, and Inter-planetary travel
April 5th, 2021

  1. Mars terraforming
    a feasible approach using silica aerogels to insulate the surface using heat from the Sun. (Robin Wordsworth, Harvard, Scientific American, Aug 2019)

  2. Could life have existed in the Early Universe? Avi Loeb shares – latest research efforts to determine if liquids other than water (ethanol, propane, methanol, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide) could chemically sustain life – (Avi Loeb, Scientific America, Apr 4, 2021)
  3. What are the candidates for habitability in our solar systems? After Earth, the list is Mars
  4. the dwarf planet Pluto
  5. Europa (the 6th largest moon of Jupiter)
  6. Titan and Enceladus (moons of Saturn).
  7. Pluto has a heat generating planetary core that has kept a liquid subsurface ocean existing for billions of years. Europa is a watery/icy moon with ocean composition that appears similar to Earth’s oceans. Titan has a dense atmosphere similar to Earth’s and a global sea surface level indicating a pan-planetary connected ocean system, though it is of hydrocarbons such as methane, not water. Mars is not too cold, has the right size/gravitational pull, and can support liquid water beneath the surface, and an insulating process (using eg silica aerogel) could terraform the planet.
  8. How fast can we travel in space? – The fastest spacecraft New Horizons can travel 30k miles/hr, or 1 million miles a day.
  9. How far away are the solar system objects? 9 months to Mars, 1 year to Jupiter, 9.5 years to Pluto (3 billion miles away)
  10. How fast for light to travel to solar system objects? – 5 hours Sun to Pluto, 8 minutes Sun to Earth.
  11. What would be needed to terraform the non-habitable planets? – Venus would need temperature reduction (from 424*C), atmosphere thinning (from 91 atm) and injection of oxygen.
  12. Irrigating rocky planets remotely? Not so far-fetched given the recent discovery that hydrogen-rich solar wind and oxygen-rich dust in the solar system combine with irradiation from the sun to create flowing water that could have streamed onto early barren earth.
  13. Origins of Life: Greenhouse gases – this might have been what made the early earth habitable when the early sun was too faint to warm it (faint sun paradox) | Do the ammonia clouds of Venus hold life? |


#263 – The Antikythera, the world’s earliest computer, at 100 BCE (mathematics)
Mar 27th, 2021

Antikythera, 100 BCE, the world’s earliest computer – staggering conclusion


#262 – The Power of Classical Music, done differently
Mar 27th, 2021

The following are exquisite introductions to the variety and singularly captivating beauty of classical music imagined and reimagined.

And here are connections between classical and pop music:

  • Eric Carmen’s All By Myself (Celine Dion performing), is based upon Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Analysis video here


#261 – Innovation in Transportation – can we do away with cars except for long haul/load carrier?
Mar 27th, 2021

The Swytch bike mechanism converting any bike to an e-bike appears to be a transformational capability. Combined with the pandemic’s heightened awareness of health, concern for damage to the planet, and impracticalities of conventional mass transit in an enduring pandemic, I expect this will take off.


#260 – Bacteria in Space
Mar 27th, 2021

Three new species of bacteria found on International Space Station. Concern but also opportunity


#259 – The next phase of the COVID pandemic – 2021
Mar 27th, 2021

  • The pandemic is here to stay, so we must plan for permanent changes (Japan Times)
  • Game theory and the sad story of the EU/UK/US vaccine wars: the EU behaved true to an ideal of a global response and Western support of free trade principles continuing to underpin movement of all goods, including vaccines. Sadly, the US imposed a ban on exports of any vaccine made on US soil (US First) and UK enforced a secret UK First clause in its contract with Oxford University, and forced a British pharma company (AstraZeneca) as the partner instead of a US company Pfizer or Merck. The anglo world has shown the its principles are self-interested. The EU has been left holding the bag, and supplying millions of vaccines to Mexico, Canada, India, Israel, UK, and even US, while its citizen vaccine programs are behind these others. This is real-life version of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory.
  • Will mass transit return?
  • The 2021 chip shortage. Supply disruptions during COVID, demand drop for cars and a demand surge for consumer electronics during lockdown, with a fire at a major chip fabrication plan. The result is a chip shortage that looks to persist through 2021. The world’s largest fabrication plant TSMC in Taiwan is in a good place, supplying c.25% of the world’s chips. Europe and the US are scrambling to secure production facilities onshore to protect against inevitable disruptions.
  • NHS may face a million long-COVID patients after the pandemic


#258 – A true radical is one who wins power and uses it for good.
Mar 27th, 2021

Quietly, Joe Biden is delivering change to small c-conservative American society. If he succeeds, he will be a transformational president, and the left / centre-left will have learnt a valuable lesson. To do good requires winning power. Winning power requires reassuring the opposition. A true radical is one who wins power and uses it for good. Good benefits all humanity, including the opposition.

Why is this important now? Because the past 4 years taught the right / centre-right its own valuable lesson. Democracy rewards those who can command votes. Fear and hatred touch the nerve of a privileged majority and create an identity politics that is able to win elections. Apologies are weakness. There is no shame in being shameless. On the contrary, strength is admired. Gaslighting works. The 24-hr media cycle erases the good, the bad, the ugly with something new. Keep the spotlight, stick to the message, and that will be the only consistent thing. Consistency wins support. Simple, raw, unashamed, privilege, fear, hate, reward, loyalty.

It seemed a minor miracle that Biden won. The pandemic in the US created an opening that did not appear to exist before 2020.

And the good news is that Biden appears to be trying something new. And if he succeeds, we will see if the left/centre left can unify the nation.

But the battle for power in America is just beginning.
And Georgia is leading the way in rewriting the laws for voting.


#257 – Premier Problems in Modern Maths (mathematics)
Mar 6th, 2021

  1. Hilbert’s problems: 1900
  2. Landau problems: 1912
  3. Weil conjectures: 1949
  4. Smale problems: 1998
  5. Simon problems: 2000
  6. Millenium prize problems: 2000


#256 – Experiments in Robotics
Mar 6th, 2021
One of the challenging apsects of experimenting with robotics is putting together the mechanical / dynamical systems cheaply in a robust enough way. Lego advanced kits are one option, but I prefer the higher priced but better engineered FischerTechnik modules

  1. Motor module set
  2. Racing modules


#255 – Forth hardware experiments
Mar 6th, 2021

  1. Forth in a Breadboard
  2. Forth for ESP8266 chip
  3. PunyForth for ESP8266
  4. qForth for MARC4 4-bit chips. Google list. 4-bit computing
  5. All the Arduinos. Atmega 328 vs. 32, also this
  6. Arduino Chiptune MIDI music synthesizer using AY-3-8910. Other chiptune chip setups with the software, to interface
  7. Programming the Attiny family of chips: Attiny 84/85 | 2313. Using the Tiny AVR Programmer. Using the old Arduino IDE to program ATtiny


#254 – Interesting articles for Feb 2021
Mar 4th, 2021


#253 – COVID – the next phase
Feb 20, 2021

  1. In UK, 1 in 4 (or 15m people) have still been going to work every day because they have to. And that proportion is more like 1 in 2-3 considering it’s 15m people of working age going to work (ignoring children and retirees). For most, it’s that their jobs can’t be done from home. Most of these jobs are lower income jobs, which translates to higher risk of COVID exposure and reinforces the income related inequity in COVID risk. Article
  2. Low income is correlated with larger household sizes and higher living density, which translates to faster transmission once the disease is contracted, reinforcing income related inequity in COVID risk.
  3. Mapping super-spreader events. Evidence shows the “Eat out to help out” plan increased COVID transmission. Evidence shows over-croweded beaches and other outdoor parks did not lead to super-spreader events. What is clear is that INDOOR congregation is high risk. Policy that bans outdoor activity drives activity indoors, with higher transmission risk.
  4. Merging of COVID mutations – UK and California mutations merge.
  5. With COVID lockdowns, UK rediscovered the joys of birdsong.
  6. South Africa mutation rips through Port Elizabeth leaving a town with no adults, only orphans


#252 – What COVID may be able to teach: no one is really safe unless we all are (this tenet so far the world has not wanted to adopt)
Feb 19, 2021

When the first highly infectious COVID variant surfaced in UK (Kent variant) was followed by the South African variant and then the Brazilian variant, the writing was on the wall: either we continue tribal/nationalist policies and never get out of the grip of COVID, or we finally understand that the entire human race must be protected, i.e. we can no accept that there are large numbers of “the forgotten” (whether Iraq, Gaza, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Congo).

Mainstream politicians (Boris Johnson in this case) are now finally voicing this reality: no one is really safe unless we all are. Let’s see how far forward it goes. And how much it changes the willingness to allow large segments of the domestic population to remain impoverished (this on UK’s Oldham, now one of UK’s poorest town, once the location of the world’s most productive cotton mill)

There has now for some time been enough wealth/resource in the world to make COVID disappear, just as was with malaria, polio, and as there is also with food supply and clean water. The question is whether there is enough will (there was with polio, there is no with basic food supplies and clean water, or access to quality education, or the internet, or one laptop per child).


#251 – Economic, Trade, and Legal warfare: the battleground of trade and other sanctions
Feb 17, 2021

Speak softly and carry a big stick. This was the Roosevelt (and US) doctrine in the early 1900s. There are many reasons to fear a powerful adversary that is willing to use all available mechanisms to achieve its goals. The below partial list considers some of the overt mechanisms used in the past 150 years. No doubt there are plenty of covert methods (use of Facebook to influence elections, think Cambridge Analytica scandal; funding of dissident groups; electoral funding support; hacking/spying; assasinations; sabotage of industrial equipment; bombing of sites). There are many overt mechanisms and which have been effective. Ground invasion is not one of them: since the World Wars this is pretty much a recipe for disaster for a nation-state (with the possible exception of Gulf War I, and the additional exception of proxy invasions using paramilitary forces, as Russia’s invasion of Georgia showed, or the use of proxy fighters in the Syrian and Libyan civil wars). Below a few examples to consider:

  • In Vietnam, the US went in with a big stick militarily with ground troops and it was a disaster. Same in Afghanistan. Same in Iraq post 9/11.
  • In Serbia, Clinton ran an air bombing campaign that forced Serbia to end its aggression on neighboring Kosovo (Albania). In Georgia, there was no such campaign when Russia took over.
  • In Cuba, the US waged a different kind of war against communism: ravage farming through introducing illness to afflict livestock, suppress the economy through travel sanctions and trade sanctions.
  • In Iran, the US designated individuals and groups as terrorist entities, pursued worldwide sanctions, and introduced unilateral banking sanctions that meant any individual or company or even bank that traded with Iran would be subject to US banking sanctions. Even the Europeans blinked.
  • In North Korea, the US has led progressive more restrictive trade sanctions till essentially North Korea is completely isolated.
  • Against oil-producing nations (Libya, Iraq) that suggested paying for oil through anything but petrodollars, retaliation come quickly and personally (Gaddafi, Saddam).
  • With China, Trump targeted Huawei specifically, introducing sanctions directly on this Chinese government supported telecomms company, crashing their sales by up to 47%, and forcing them to focus on pig farming technology. There are plenty of western supported big businesses that do not receive the same treatment: Airbus, Boeing to name two.
  • On human rights, the US has withdrawn funding from the world human rights body. Same when it withdrew from the Paris treaty on climate change under Trump. Same when it withdrew from the world body on international law. Same when it withdrew from the WHO (world health organization) due to claims the WHO was not tough enough in declaring China culpable for the COVID pandemic.
  • On the legal front, the rulings on the Libya Lockerbie bombing meant Gaddafi’s government was tied down in proceedings for a number of years.


#250 – Visualize 1 billion years of Plate Tectonic movements that configured the earth’s surface as we know it today
Feb 15, 2021

This is a fascinating video. Notice how India migrates a long way to slot into the south of Asia. Watching this looks like someone moving around the pieces of a puzzle.

Article with embedded video


#249 – How Immunocompromised Humans become Mutation Accelerating Labs for COVID, and implications for the control of the Pandemic
Feb 11, 2021

COVID-19 (SARS-COV-2) mutates more slowly than many other pandemic causing viruses (Polio, etc.).
And due to its short life-cycle, there are usually not more than one or two mutations in each successive generation of viruses, and the vast majority do not enhance its fitness, and so die off as human immune systems eliminate the virus, and so these do not propagate further.
But with immuno-compromised sufferers, it is different. Their weaker immune systems can at best only partially eliminate the virus, which creates a perptual evolutionary situation: more vulnerable viruses will be eliminated, and more hardy versions will remain and multiply.
Because there is no disruption in virus generations, mutations can accumulate.
With a much larger number of mutations able to be explored, many more combinations are tested, and those that enhance the virus’ ability to infect, survive, reproduce, are favored.
In this way, the jump from SARS-COV-2 to the Kent variation that is 70% more infectious and up to 30% more lethal, involved not one mutation, but 17 mutations that appeared from one infected human host.
The most sophisticated mutations are being traced, around the world, to immuno-compromised individuals.
The conclusion? There is no need of for conspiracy theories around which nations may or may not be working covertly on COVID as a weapon.
Within every human society, we have individuals that are, unintionally and through no intended malice, the incubators and R&D centres for Coronavirus to perfect its ability to kill us.

Insightful article from WIRED.


#248 – Noteworthy Articles from Jan/Feb
Feb 8, 2021


#247 – Society and Politics, Noteworthy Articles from Jan/Feb
Jan 31, 2021


#246 – A Government for Mars?
Jan 20, 2021
When (not if) humans get to Mars, who will lead them? What laws/rules will govern them? What accountabilities will constrain the worst of their impulses? Elon Musk has started thinking about this. And a new term of service for his StarLink communication service, lays down some groundwork (none of it actually legal though). See article.


#245 – Earnestness
Jan 15, 2021

Paul Graham has written an outstanding piece on the importance of earnestness. A must read for everyone trying to get ahead in a competitive world. Focus on doing your job, your piece, doing it the best you can, and thinking big. Don’t worry about making an impression. If your ideas are solid, and your work is strong, that is the best impression you can make.


#244 – Society and Politics – Noteworthy articles from December/January –
Jan 11, 2021

  1. Corruption in the US – How Trump has pulled back the covers on who has been in the bed of convenience between big business and the Conservatives in the US. (April 2021)
  2. Corruption in the UK – Conservatives and the Chumocracy that leads to the Greensill scandal
  3. How Boris Johnson, Brexit, and instability in Northern Ireland are connected (April 2021)
  4. An insightful look at the rot, incompetence, yet extraordinary sense of entitlement at the heart of the British project of national governance, and how it continues to take the UK through its current travails.
  5. An historic 2nd impeachment for Trump – the authors of the articles of impeachment write about their rationale for why it is necessary, to mark the boundaries of unacceptable anti-democratic behaviour. See article
  6. The case not to impeach. Article
  7. Business will work with whomever is in power. This article shows behind the scenes how business walked away from Trump during his four years in office. Article
  8. The systematic testing of the U.S. Constitution, institutions and safeguards. Trump’s time in office has been a combination of large scale undermining, erosion, and dismantling of the safeguards and operating machinery of the U.S. government. His final days been the testing of the judiciary and the scrutiny of every aspect of the Constitution governing electoral certification. He has tried intimidation, threats, coersion, and bullying. He has tried dangling a carrot to the military. He has tried mob uprisings. It is frightening to watch. And despite the (for now) resistance of the U.S. democratic process, this systematic pressure on every facet of the American process has also shown the extent to which individual corruption, greed, and self-interest are indeed the keys to enabling and, given a critical mass, sufficient to overcome even the most vaunted of politically safeguarded systems. No country, no society is safe from the rotting effects of wide-scale corruption. Thanks to Trump we have now seen it all too clearly. Article 1: Testing the Electoral Process
  9. How the baying mob was betrayed by their demagogue. Shock jock Howard Sten told some home truths when he tried to reason with his demographic audience: Trump doesn’t love you, he wrote, he actual looks down on you, he looks down on poverty, ill-education, and thinks you’re losers. And if you elect this man you will be. That message, while heart felt, did not change 70m peoples’ minds. The events of Jan 6 and its aftermath have shown how true this insight from Stern was. Trump used his supporters, and then, when he could not defend the indefensible, he turned on them, and condemned what they did in his name, at his instigation, and on his (and their own) behalf. Privately, his greatest criticism was that they looked low-class, and made his MAGA brand look bad. Not a few noticed and were furious. See article.


#243 – Is it possible to responsibly deploy $1B a month for the common good?
December 15, 2020

The common response from philanthropic wealth is that it is just not possible to do a good job quickly. Mackenzie Scott has shown that where there is a will, there is a way to do just that. She has deployed $4B in 4 months to drive social programs in the U.S. and around the world, funds which have been gratefully received by organizations on the front line of attempting to care for the struggling, the disadvantaged, the forgotten. See article, Dec 15

Update: April 2022 – Mackenzie Scott, inventing a new road for philanthropy through determined giving


#242 – Noteworthy computing tech & physics advancements in Dec/Jan
December 10, 2020

  1. Samsung’s new HandyBot demonstrates a highly dextrous home robot that can load dirty dishes into a dishwasher, and tidy up a room! That is a remarkable feat of mechatronics, sensor integration, and software intelligence! See video.
  2. Quantum computing – China becomes the 2nd country (after US through Google’s achievement) to achieve quantum computing capability. See Article, Dec 2020
  3. Tiny Robots the size of cockroaches, working together, can pull a car. Cooperative behavioural robotics has the potential to literally move mountains, in the same way that many tiny hard-working ants can terraform a landscape. Article, Dec 2020
  4. Atomic scale nano-wires are approaching viability. See article, Dec 24, for breakthrough at Tokyo University.
  5. Fusion power is one step closer, following 20 second run-time of a fusion reactor generating plasma at 180-million degrees F, approaching the power of the sun! See article, Dec


#241b – QRNG – A quantum random number generator using COTS technology has just been certified — fast cryptography is now within reach. (mathematics)
Dec 4th, 2020

Article, Dec 9th


#241 – Deep Learning AI has figured out how to predict the shape that proteins will take – breaking through a critically important unsolved problem to unlock next generation medical advances
Dec 3, 2020

DeepMind, the London-based lab that was acquired by Google a few years ago, has demonstrated the capabilities of its new AlphaFold system for predicting the 3-D shape of proteins. See article for more.


#240 – The practical business of breathing on Mars
Dec 2, 2020

With the appetite for Mars colonization, present for some years in NASA, and accelerated by Elon Musk, and the MarsOne program, there are a few practical issues to be worked out. One is how to manufacture sufficient oxygen to allow humans to breath. The other is how to generate enough fuel for a return journey. This article looks at possibilities for both. For humans, there is MOXIE, a small toaster sized device, that can convert atmospheric CO2 into oxygen, enough for a human. For fueling a rocket device, there is the possibility of tapping a percholate brine believed to be beneath the Martian surface and chemically extracting sufficient oxygen.


#239 – Instruction Sets should be Free! The Case for RISC-V as the foundation for system on chip computing systems
December 1, 2020
Instruction Sets should be Free! – RISC-V – is the first open standard chip instruction set that has been incarnated in silicon and integrated into a competitive real product: a top-end server class machine running at 5 GHz yet drawing just 1W of power at 1.1V (or 900mA) or the equivalent of 10x Arduino Nanos drawing 200mA ea at 5V. To put this in context, a closed standard Intel server chip Xeon E7 runs at 3.2 GHz and draws over 100W of power. The brainchild of co-creators David Patterson of UC Berkeley, co-creator of the RISC-V standard, is articulated in their 5-page 2014 paper (PDF) which makes the case for an open-standard instruction set architecture, and for RISC-V as the best candidate from amongst three existing choices. RISC-V has 40 base instruction sets, provides 32-, 64-, and 128-bit variants, and has an optional expanded instruction set, as well as allowing space to extend for applications requiring specific accelerating instructions.

Target application? System on chips that are the core of Internet of Things computing, but also the massive servers powering data centres, and the smartphones and tablets in the middle. Economic fallout? Companies whose business models are built on licensing IP (eg ARM computing), whose chips are likely to be outperformed (Intel). This move enables innovation at the silicon level powering the next wave of computing and intelligent/ubiquitous devices. Watch this space!

March 13, 2021
The applications/innovations are coming in:

  1. ESP8266 popular 32-bit microcontroller with integrated TCP/IP stack for full ethernet/wireless 802.11 connectivity. Model ESP32-C3 using a RISC-V open-source firmware chip” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>ESP32-C3 with RISC-V uC
  2. University of Michigan’s Morpheus RISC-V chip has emerged unscathed from a 3-month hacking challenge due to its integrated “churn” unit that uses 1% of the chip’s processing power to continuously randomize the externally observable interfaces to the chip, ensuring that even if an exploit were found, it would disappear within milliseconds, and therefore be unable to be used.


#238 – Little kids
November 7th, 2020

If you’ve had more than one child, you’ll likely recognize this one:

“Adults are sophisticated enough to see 2 year olds for the fascinatingly complex characters they are, whereas to most 6 year olds, 2 year olds are just defective 6 year olds.”

Paul Graham


#237 – Jetpack Paramedics for rapid rescue? Jetpack Special Forces? The capability is here.
November 7th, 2020

Richard Browning has perfected a portable cluster of thrusters weighing 10-15 kg that provide sufficient lift to transport a human flyer at up to 85 mph, able to cover 2-3 miles in 10 seconds.

Browning’s Jetpack

More on Revolutionizing Transportation…


#236 – Trumpism – an infection in the US body politic? Parsing the state of the US electorate through Exit Polls
November 4th, 2020

Nate Silver’s forecasting site fivethiryeight.com has a fascinating page with detailed exit poll data pivoted on every conceivable voter parameter. Turns out that race has been a much greater driver of support for Trump than age, gender, or even college education. Race and religion. And nationalism.

Social psychology provides an academic explanation for Trumpism. Note the correlation in followers of Trump (and those holding Trumpist views worldwide) and both Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). Studies in Europe have correlated the rise of nationalism with a shift towards illiberal democracy.

For the U.S., the question is how America can heal given the bitter rhetoric on both sides of the culture war, and the myriad real challenges facing the country still in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the West, the question is how can the prolonged economic stagnation since the Bear-Sterns crash of 2008 (twelve years ago!) be overcome to breathe new economic vitality into western society. The observation by Hanauer (2014) is that long periods of economic stagnation of the middle-classes unleashes the pitchforks of social upheaval.


#235 – Biomimetics (mimicking nature) and the secrets of the diabolical ironclad beetle
October 23, 2020

Researchers are using the diabolical ironclad beetle to inspire engineering advancements in how to join different materials while increasing ability to withstand crushing forces. The bettle is able to withstand a crushing force of 150N, or 1.5x the downward force of a car’s tire, but more significantly, this is 39,000x the beatle’s own body weight.

Article


#234 – Robotic Arm – 6 Degrees of Freedom – £140
October 1st, 2020

Wow, check this out! 🙂

6 Degrees of Freedom – Robotic Arm £140, with 6-channel wireless bluetooth controller for each motor separately


#233 – Calculating Total Mass/Energy in the Universe
September 29th, 2020

Astronomers at UC Riverside have succeeded in calculating the total mass/energy in the universe. They have found that 69% is dark energy, with the rest (31%) being matter. But of this matter, 80% is dark matter of which we don’t know very much, and only 20% is regular (baryonic) matter What this really says is that we only know about 6% of the entire content of the universe (=0.31*0.20). The remaining 94% is as yet unknown. So much for the progress of mankind and science. While we may have come a long way from Prehistoric sensibilities, we have as yet only just scratched the surface of what there is to know.

Representation of all matter/energy in the universe per the latest calculations from the UC Riverside team.


#232 – September’s highlights
September 23rd, 2020


#231 – August thought-provoking articles
August 12th, 2020

    Society, Economics, Social Justice

  • July 31th – Social valuation of job functions has begun to create shortages in early years provision in UK. Article
  • July 26th – The influence of social media on public sentiment is now indisputable, making it a critical instrument in the propaganda wars of post-modern campaigns. It is no longer about truth, but about sound bites, about appealing to a base, about generating a storyline. Today’s campaigns in America look more like WWF set pieces. And the importance of Facebook is not lost on either Trump or Zuckerberg. Article


#230 – July 2020 thought-provoking articles
July 26th, 2020

    Space & Tech

  • July 21st – Elon Musk has formed a constellation of companies with missions that are remarkable for their scale and grandeur. Neuralink is investigating machine/brain interface. The Boring Company creates underground tunneling transportation alternatives. SpaceX is on a mission to populate Mars with human colonists. (Aug 7th) SpaceX wins US Air Force contract in partnership with Lockheed Martin and the Boeing Company (United Launch Alliance), to provide rockets for NASA, breaking the dependence on Russian RD-180 rockets that has been the case for the past 20-30 years. The new rockets will use Bezos’s Blue Origin BE-4 high-power methane-oxygen engine amongst other components. More details on the contract and launch missions.
  • July 8th – Can something as apparently sacred as lab science be automaticed by a robot? The answer is yes, Article: University of Liverpool

    In the first published example, the robot conducts 688 experiments over 8 days, working for 172 out of 192 hours. To do this, it makes 319 moves, completes 6,500 manipulations, and travels a total distance of 2.17 km.

    • Health

  • July 15th – Smokers quitting in large numbers never seen before, as statistics show that smokers are more likely to need hospitalization and suffer additional complications than non-smokers, due to COVID. Article

    • Society, Economics, Social Justice

  • Fertility rates are dropping around the world, due mainly to choice and not biology. At this rate, many industrialized nations (Spain, Japan) will see their populations halve (not US or UK). The changes will be far-reaching for age profile (more older), economics, taxation, labor/capital, immigration, and technology. Article
  • July 6th – A critical junction is approaching in UK: widespread financial damage of unknown scale and duration, or a one-time wealth tax that would give 1-3 years of breathing space for the UK government to get ahead of the situation. Article
  • July 2nd – Has America lost its ability to do great things? The current penchant for “independence” (don’t tell me what to do) is perhaps a symptom of the unwillingness to even do easy things, amidst a polarization in society that is tribalism on a national scale. article in the Independent

    • COVID

  • COVID is a full body disease, doing damage to organs throughout the body. Article
  • July 7th – Could COVID become airborne? 30+ scientists are challenging the WHO to be more candid about the evidence that has emerged on this. Article in Reuters


#229b – A New Proof in Number Theory goes into the fundamental nature of numbers and the nature of approximations to numbers like pi. (mathematics)
July 6th, 2020
article in Quanta Magazine


#229 – Our Bones are living cells that, as we use them, secrete osteocalcin, a protein that apparently regulates our ageing and memory
July 5th, 2020

This article describes the newer understanding of how our bones are in fact living tissues that communicate with the rest of our bodies and play a part in overall body regulation like other primary organs. The bone research by Gerard Karsenty and a few others has highlighted in particular osteocalcin, a protein that appears to regulate muscle tone, memory, glucose use in the body, and cognitive function. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: an active lifestyle stimulates the bones to indicate to the muscles that they are needed, and to the brain to stay sharp — safety, hunting, predation. What becomes interesting is that artificial increase of osteocalcin levels in old mice caused restoration of muscle tone and cognitive function to the levels seen in younger mice, i.e. apparently reversing the observed effects of aging. The challenge now is how to boost such levels in humans — proteins are not easy to turn into therapies. For the moment then, use those bones! And watch for bone-research derivative therapies.

Article: The Guardian


#228 – Work-as-Refuge: Mathematicians and Poets, perhaps Programmers and Hobbyists too?
July 4, 2020 (mathematics)

I like this. I think captures some truth. 🙂

“Of all common ground shared by mathematicians and poets, work-as-refuge may be the most compelling. In both mathematics and poetry, ‘You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong,’ to borrow words from F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mathematicians and poets practice looking past artificial boundaries. In return, they are rewarded with essential, if sometimes fleeting, beauty.” – Susan D’Agostino, from How to Free your Inner Mathematician: Notes on Mathematics & Life, 2020

Article


#227 – Thoughts on Computing, by Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth (1969), but still as relevant today
June 21, 2020

Who in the computing world are exemplary thought leaders? While there are many luminaries, for me that honor goes to Chuck Moore, known by specialists as the inventor of the esoteric language of Forth, but in reality, one who espoused a philosophy of computing based on simplicity and made this the central theme of his life’s work, in language design, software, and hardware. Among giants in the field of computing, my top 10 list is: 1. Chuck Moore (simplicity, interview), 2. Edsger Dijkstra (rigor, collection), 3. Don Knuth (algorithms, works), 4. Bill Gates (Microsoft), 5. Sergey Brin/Larry Page (Google), 6. Jeff Bezos (Amazon/AWS), 7. Ken Thompson (UNIX, interview), 8. Dennis Ritchie (C, shoulders), 9. John Chambers (R & S languages for Stats, numerical computing), 10. Joel Spolsky (StackOverflow, JoelOnSoftware), 11. The “Traiterous 8” – founders of Silicon Valley computing: William Shockley (transistor), Gordon Moore (semiconductors, Moore’s Law, Intel), Robert Noyce (silicon integrated circuit, Intel, Wayne Pickette and 4004), Federico Faggin (Intel 4004, Zilog)

The quotes: most of these are from the Moore’s interview 1x Forth (1999).

  1. “The whole point of Forth was that you didn’t write programs in Forth, you wrote vocabularies in Forth. When you devised an application you wrote a hundred words or so that discussed the application and you used those hundred words to write a one line definition to solve the application. It is not easy to find those hundred words, but they exist, they always exist.”
  2. “About a thousand instructions seems about right to me to do about anything.” [AE: At one instruction per byte, that means most programs need not be more than 1000 bytes or 1KB.]
  3. “As to stack parameters, the stacks should be shallow. On the i21 we have an on-chip stack 18 deep. This size was chosen as a number effectively infinite.”
  4. “On i21 the return stack is only 17 deep. People who are used to nesting indefinitely might get into trouble here. You shouldn’t nest too deeply. It makes programs impossible to follow. You can have spaghetti code with calls just a you can with GOTOs. You have got to keep it simple.”
  5. “I have found that teaching someone Forth does not mean that he is going to be a good Forth programmer. There is something more than the formalism and syntax of Forth that has got to be embedded in your brain before you’re going to be effective at what you do.”

    Chuck Moore on computing.“My contention is that every application that I have seen that I didn’t code has ten times as much code in it as it needs. How big should a program be? About a thousand instructions seems about right to me to do about anything. How do you get there? What is the magic? How can you make applications small? (1) No Hooks. (2) Don’t Complexify. (3) Factor. You factor. You factor, you factor, you factor and you throw away everything that isn’t being used, that isn’t justified. The whole point of Forth was that you didn’t write programs in Forth you wrote vocabularies in Forth. When you devised an application you wrote a hundred words or so that discussed the application and you used those hundred words to write a one line definition to solve the application. It is not easy to find those hundred words, but they exist, they always exist.”- From a 1999 talk by Chuck Moore to the Silicon Valley FIG, titled “1x Forth”

  6. Chuck Moore’s motivation for Forth was to solve the problem of writing application programs.
    (1957 first exposure to computers are MIT/Harvard, SAO, Astronomical Observatory, FORTRAN?, 1969 first Forth at Mohasco, then NRAO Forths, then Forth Inc., then FIG-Forths starting from 1979). By 1984, Forth had solved that problem.
  7. “It was easy to write applications, trivial to write applications. All the problems lay in the hardware.”
    [See Chuck’s personal history of Forth, and the official HOPL article by collaborator Elizabeth Rather]
  8. “Forth doesn’t need to be complicated. Classic Forth started out simple, it gradually accreted layers of complexity. At Forth Inc. that kind of became the company culture. We had this package and we were selling it and we were exploiting it and we were stuck with it. When I left Forth Inc. I had a chance to simplify and cmForth was the result.”
  9. What is Forth? Forth is highly factored code. I don’t know anything else to say except that Forth is definitions. If you have a lot of small definitions you are writing Forth. In order to write a lot of small definitions you have to have a stack
    Forth = Definitions + Stacks
    But the definitions can accept parameters
  10. “That is in my mind one of the keystones of Forth, you factor and you factor and you factor until most of your definitions are one or two lines long.”
  11. “And that is a problem with programmers, perhaps a problem with all programmers; too many input parameters to a routine. Look at some ‘C’ programs and it gets ludicrous. Everything in the program is passed through the calling sequence and that is dumb. A Forth word should not have more than one or two arguments. This stack which people have so much trouble manipulating should never be more than three or four deep.”Moore on Hardware
    Moore entered the hardware problem to see what he could do to address the situation:
  12. “The goal was very simple: to minimize the complexity of the hardware software combination. As far as I can see no-one else is doing that. Some lip service perhaps, but no-one is trying to minimize the complexity of anything and that is a great concern to me.”
    [cf. Dijkstra]
  13. “We are building a culture which can not survive as trivial an incident as Y2K. Once we lose the billion dollar fabrication plants and once we lose the thousand man programming teams how do we rebuild them? Would be bother to rebuild them? Are computers worth enough to demand the social investment that we put into them. It could be a lot simpler. If it were a lot simpler I would have a lot more confidence that the technology would endure into the indefinite future.”

For more on the Forth way of thinking, see Forth & Domain Specific Languages, and the Forth Page.


#226 – “Please Sir! I’ve lost my moon…”
June 10th, 2020
A 10-year study has concluded that Saturn’s moon Titan is moving away from it 100x faster than previously thought, and almost 3x faster than our moon is moving away from the Earth. Note that the “speed” of these effects is on the geological scale, i.e. 11cm/yr for Titan, and almost 4cm/yr for our Moon. On the other hand, these effects have been occurring since the formation of the solar system ~4.5 billion years ago, so that Titan’s moon has travelled approx. 500,000 km away from Saturn during this period vs. the 5,000 km estimated previously, and now sits about twice as far (1.2 million km away from Saturn) as it may have done orginally, or about 3x further away than our Moon is from Earth (386,000 km). To put this in perspective, Earth is 150 million km away from the Sun, so Titan’s orbit is less than 1% of the distance from Titan as our Earth is from the sun.

Leaving aside the arithmetic, why do moons try to leave their parent planet? The analogy for a satellite in rotation is that of an object captured by lasso from the parent planet, the lasso being gravity. The tug between the two works both ways, but as expected, with the larger object exerting most of the pull. However, every weakenening, wavering, of the parent’s pull, relaxes the lasso, and allows the captured moon to move fractionally further away. The surprise in the case of Titan and Saturn is that it appears that the orbit of Titan gravitationally “squeezes” Saturn, creating gravitational oscillations the allow it to escape faster. What is the end state of moons? Ever longer orbital periods (lengthening sidereal months), as we know of no planet that can increase its mass relative to that of its moon, fast enough to “reel” its moon back in.

Article: Space.com


#225 – Mass Extinctions in History, parallels to the present
Jun 4th, 2020
During the c.3 billions years of life on this planet, there is in theory a large data set from which to extract attributes associated with previous mass extinctions: similarities, differences, precursors, aftermaths. One interesting parallel is mass extinction caused by increased UV radiation reaching Earth’s surface through ozone depletion in the atmosphere.


#224 – Deploying Machine Learning in the fight for kindness
May 29th, 2020

“It’s harder to be kind than to be clever. It’s the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift. Kindness is a choice.” Bezos, in a commencement address in 2010 to the graduates at Princeton (his and Mackenzie’s alma mater). Sources: 1 (speech full text), 2 (reflection), 3 (article CNBC)

Enter machine learning algorithm UR-V2 (Unfriendly Robot, version 2) deployed by the widely used professional coding forum Stack Overflow. What does it do? For those who are clever but who don’t chose kindness, or, who are, shall we say, in the early stages of their kindness development journey, UR-V2 is an artificial intelligence to help clever folks be a better version of themselves. Think of UR-V2 as your little kindness angel, or in the console metaphor of emotional intelligence provide by Inside Out, we may need to add Kindness as a new sixth member to the crew of Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust.

The UX stats from Stack Overflow following deployment of UR-V2 are interesting. After the initial, expected, and quite passionate debate over free speech vs. appropriate environment, the code was deployed, and the latest survey shows a 15% improvement in site atmosphere perceived by its users. Is it any worse off for false positives? Not as far as the data can tell. Is there a risk that over-zealous policing makes clever contributors turn away from the site? This will be the point to watch as UR-V2 evolves and logs more time “on the beat”.

In the meantime, it is worth a moment of reflection for those who are clever, in every profession and walk of life, who are resistant to making the effort to be kind, that they may find themselves gradually replaced by those who are BOTH clever AND kind, a guided social evolution that makes Stack Overflow a notable exception to other social media platforms.

In the resurgent debate around fact checking, censorship, and free speech that is current in the Twitter-sphere and US politics, this action by Joel Spolsky/Jeff Atwood and the smart folks at Stack Overflow is a pioneering experiment hopefully gets the attention of Jack Dempsey (Twitter) and Marc Zuckerberg (Facebook). It is perhaps the next obvious step in what we have already tacitly accepted in rather successful machine learning policing of our inboxes from spam.


#223 – Interplanetary Colonization: Getting There, Staying There, Getting Back
May 28th, 2020

One of the many fascinating grand challenges underway currently is the colonization of a moon, asteroid, or planet. This requires (1) getting cargo there, (2) as part of the cargo, robots capable of (semi-)autonomously building shelters and setting things up, (3) getting humans there, (4) staying there, (5) getting back (the the implications for goods exchange, i.e. trade).

The capabilities for this are getting closer:

  1. The overall program. Elon Musk’s view
  2. Getting cargo there.
    • Launching spacecraft relies on a tremendous amount of thrust, currently achievable using fuelled explosions. But with the reduced frictional resistance space, it is possible to harness ambient directed energy (streaming photons, starlight) or non-fuel reliant thrust (lasers).
    • It takes a long time to travel to Mars. Longer to get to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. Far too long to get to the nearest solar system outside ours. And the nearest exoplanet resembling ours is even further (Proxima Centauri b is 4.2 light years away, and would take 73,000 human years to get to with current thruster technology). We will need a way to travel closer to the speed of light.
    • Spacecraft with graphene sails powerered by starlight and lasers addresses both needs.
    • While suspended animation is intriguing, it cannot be the answer for traveling light years with current durations. Even a 50 human-year journey would be frought with difficulty, but a 73,000 year journey (e.g. to Proxima Centauri b) would essentially mean launching a future-time capsule that would need to be entirely self-sustaining, marooned in a future which denies the possibility of two-way communication and iteration with feedback. By the time the craft arrived, assuming it can self-power and navigate and survive the possibility of random collisions, Earth would have gone through 14x the entire period of human civilization, including the possibility than in the meantime faster craft were invented that would overtake the now obsolete slow-freighter.
  3. For the remaining topics (2-5), see #205 “How Close are we to Settlement on Mars?” here.


#222 – Revolutionizing Transportation
May 28th, 2020

We covered recent progress in Electric Flying Taxis (#199) and a single-passenger Jet Hoverboard (#185), ten years after the first article on Driverless Technology and Autonomous Vehicles on this site (2010). Ten years later, the technology is (still) ripe for disruptive innovation. It is likely that ground will still come before air.


#221 – Mathematician awarded “Top Job” spot in the Wall Street Journal in 2009 and 2014
May 20th, 2020 (mathematics)

Mathematician takes the top spot in Best Jobs (Wall Street Journal, 2009, 2014).

What does being a mathematician entail? This lovely talk by Fields Medalist Cedric Villani in 2010 for a non-mathematical audience does an excellent job of talking about mathematics.

Cedric Villani himself is a lucid and entertaining speaker, sometimes called the Lady Gaga of Mathematics (New Yorker) for his flamboyant style and persona. His narratives are gripping – I recall listening with fascination, from start to finish, to an audio book by Villani, “Birth of a Theorem“, on a flight between London and Seattle a few years ago. If you want to know the delights of mathematical discovery and live glimpse into what it’s like to be a professional mathematician, let Villani’s talk and book be your introduction.


#220 – Tribute to Mariam Mirzakhani, mathematician, first female (and first Iranian) Fields Medalist
May 20th, 2020 (mathematics)
Miriam Mirzakhani passed away on Friday May 15th, 2020, after a battle with cancer for several years. In 2014, at the age of 40, she won mathematics’ highest award, the Fields Medal, for her work in the geometry of curves spaces. She leaves a daughter of 12 years, and her husband. The New York times gives a fitting tribute Mariam. Rest in Peace.


#219 – Thomas Picketty: A New Look at Inquality in the 21st century
May 18th, 2020
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and Capital and Ideology are the labors of French / former MIT economist Thomas Picketty who, over the two decades since he began studying economics, has gone from centre-left to radical-left as he built the world’s first and most detailed Wealth Inequality Database (WID). What he has learned on the Economics of Inequality will ring especially loudly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic that has ripped aside the curtain hiding what has been quietly facing us all – that the world is now more unequal, and accelerating this inequality, than ever before.

Article: Wired.


#218 – Quantum Computing – from initial demonstration to harnessing the capability (mathematics)
May 18th, 2020
In 2019 a team at Google demonstrated “quantum supremacy”, the term used to describe the situation where a quantum computer can compute in seconds what would take thousands of years for a classic computer, even a supercomputer. But that was a very specific problem, using very particular and finicky particles called “superconducting qubits” whose time in an entangled state is tiny fractions of a second, working in a cryosat cooled to temperatures colder than in outerspace (milliKelvin). For large scale quantum computing, both the quantum particles, the hardware machinery and the algorithms will need to be refined, something which may take 5 years or it may take 50 years. Or we may discover a new law of nature in the process and find it is in fact not possible. But for now the dream is alive, at Google, Microsoft, IBM, and several other tech giants racing for computations Grand Challenge.

Article: Wired magazine.


#217 – Best of the Latest research in Computer Science
May 11th, 2020
The publisher Elsevier, long reviled in academic publications for its draconian pricing policies, has opened some of its archives to make freely available its curated “best of” collections in computer science research. Previous years are 2018, 2019. 2020 “best of” is free until Aug 20th.


#216 – COVID-19 Endgames
Apr 8th, 2020

  • What if asymptomatic carriers of COVID is indeed 81%? This is the number estimated from the first study of a completely enclosed population, the passengers aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship. It should make it easier for the virus to continue to be transmitted as lockdown measures are eased, but also hasten unplanned “herd immunity” as more are likely to have had it than we currently realize.
  • Must Read: How the Pandemic will end., by Ed Yong, Mar 25th, 2020, Atlantic. This is grim reading but it seems well within the range of possibility.
    Update: June 30th – Dr. Fauci predicts US daily new cases will rise to 100,000/day (currently new case rate of 40k/day, with 2.6M cases already recorded, and 127k deaths). A damning quote: “There is a general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling among some people in this country – an alarmingly large percentage of people, relatively speaking.” The implication is mind-blowing. Fauci: The US is unlikely to achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus even with a vaccine, given a third of Americans say they would not receive it.
  • The pace of economic recovery is going to be super slow. Consider the survey of key service sectors in the US in May:

    The recovery of US economic activity vs. normal levels for a sample of service sectors in May.

    Source

  • Coronavirus is a whole body disease impacting the lungs, heart, blood vessels, liver, kidneys, gut, brain, and eyes.
  • Evidence that Vitamin D deficiency increases susceptibility to COVID-19
  • The 6 weeks Nov 17th – Dec 31st
  • The first 100 days – Dec 31st (27 cases, 0 dead) to April 8th (1,426,096 cases, 82,020 dead) (CNN timeline)
    1. Dec 31st, 2019 China informs WHO of a new illness that had infected 27 with 7 critically ill.
    2. Jan 9th – first death in China (9 days from WHO report) of a 61 year old man with severe underlying health conditions.
    3. Jan 21st first case in US (Washington State)
    4. Jan 22nd Wuhan travel lockdown [lasts 11 weeks to April 2nd].
    5. Jan 31st first cases in UK.
    6. Feb 19th first death in Iran
    7. Feb 20th first death in South Korea
    8. Feb 22nd first death in Italy and lockdown in Lombardy (N. Italy) [11 weeks later is May 9th]
    9. Feb 29th first US death.
    10. Mar 5th first UK death.
    11. Mar 8th Italy expands lockdown to 14 northern states.
    12. Mar 17th France goes into nationwide lockdown
    13. Mar 22nd first two cases in Gaza Strip
    14. Mar 23rd UK goes into lockdown [11 weeks later is Jun 8th].
    15. Mar 24th India ges into lockdown [11 weeks later is Jun 9th].
    16. Mar 27th Boris Johnson gets COVID-19
    17. Mar 30th US states issue stay-at-home directives.
    18. April 2nd Wuhan lockdown eased [10 weeks later].
    19. April 2nd UK enters 21 consecutive day period with than 1,000 daily deaths (retrospective data)
    20. April 5th Boris Johnson enters hospital (9 days later)
    21. April 7th Wuhan travel lockdown ends [11 weeks later]. Wuhan/Hubei emerges from lockdown 76 days late (11 weeks, 2.5 months, Wed Jan 22 – Wed 8 Apr) It can end!
    22. April 8th, 2020 – 1,426,096 confirmed, 82,020 dead, epicenter moving from China to Italy to Europe to US. UK (retrospective data) hits peak with 1445 daily deaths
    23. April 23rd, 2020 – UK daily deaths fall below 1000, ending 21 consecutive days above 1,000, or 21,000 deaths in three weeks.
    24. April 30th, 2020 – UK announces it has passed the peak.
    25. May 6th, 2020 – Europe starts emerging from lockdown, led by Italy, approx. 2.5 months from first lockdowns.
    26. May 10th, 2020 – UK begins easing lockdown rules 8 weeks after introducing them.
    27. May 31st, 2020 – UK legislates lockdown easing after 10 weeks of lockdown (since March 23rd), with approx 200 daily deaths.
    28. Jun 9th, 2020 – New Zealand announces it is COVID-free with 0 active cases!
    29. Jun 15th, 2020 – UK non-essential shops re-open provided 2m social distancing guidelines are maintained
    30. Jun 16th, 2020 – New Zealand announces 2 cases and 400 contacts due to allowing inbound traveler quarantine rules to be broken on compassionate grounds!
    31. June 20th, 2020 – World wide cases hits 8.6M, with 4.2M recovered (4.4M active cases!) and 459K *hospital deaths* (overall deaths under-reported excluding care home and home deaths). Approx. 90% recovery, 10% death rate (=459K/4.2M).
  • The lag in metrics — it takes at least 30 days from catching coronavirus to a resulting death to be reported (best case).

    UK has seen 52,161 through June 5th, worst in Europe (30% in care homes)


    #215 – COVID-19 Preparedness Pack
    Mar 22nd, 2020

    1. Must View: COVID-19 Metrics Deck – Financial Times
    2. Roundup News: Guardian Live
    3. Johns Hopkins: COVID-19 Dashboard, Johns Hopkins University, latest numbers & interactive map by country & region, Professor Lauren Gardner, et.al..
      Worldwide Summary43,141 worldwide cases 23rd Jan, 307,278 cases 22nd Mar, 2.4M cases 20th April — notice the acceleration: 7x growth in first two months, 7x growth in past month. Prediction: 8M infected by May 20th best case if world does not slow spread. Good news — lockdowns did slow the spread: May 25th, worldwide cases are 5.5M. Bad news — worldwide cases still growing June 20th worldwide cases are 8.6M although rate of spread is decreasing: 50%-63% month-on-month (June est. total vs. May) down from +129% May vs. April, and 670% April vs. Mar. Of Concern: Latin America, India, and Africa have not yet peaked. China and Germany are seeing a second wave. New Zealand goes from COVID free to 2 cases and 400 contacts by allowing inbound travel quarantine rules to be broken on compassionate grounds.
    4. Must Read: Imperial College of London’s paper (PDF, 20 pages, 1 page excellent summary), Impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand, Neil M. Ferguson, et.al., Mar 16, 2020
    5. Coping: Getting along with family and elderly parents during lockdown.
    6. Coping: Make your own hand sanitizer
    7. Must Skim: Summaries of all 10 Report findings from the MRC Centre for Infectious Disease Analysis (CIDA) at Imperial College London, from 17th January (Report #1) when there were only 3 known cases outside Wuhan and an upper estimate of 4000 cases in Wuhan, to 20th March (Report #10) when the pandemic is worldwide, several countries are in lockdown (Italy, Spain, France), with many more countries within and outside Europe having already launched harsh suppression measures (social distancing and home restrictions, mandatory closure of schools, universities, and non-essential services such as restaurants, bars, pubs, public transportation). Current known mortality rates: 1% under 50 years, up to 15% 80 years+.
    8. Must Read: Timeline – what happened and when, Johns Hopkins University
    9. Must Read: COVID-19 Basics, from Johns Hopkins University (how it is spread, how long it lasts on surfaces, more about social distancing measures)
    10. Must Read: In younger infected, death can come through a blood clot inducing a stroke. Treatment is possible if the clot is removed within 6-24h. Do not delay calling an ambulance if this affects you or a loved one.

    With the additional time indoors, what are you watching? If a little gut-punchingly relevant cinema is to your taste, here are a few titles:

    1. World War Z (2013), Brad Pitt
    2. Last Days on Mars (2013), Liev Schrieber. (And then heck, for a trip further away, Passengers (2016), Jennifer Lawrence, Laurence Fishburne)
    3. I am Legend (2007), Will Smith
    4. This list by Vulture, shares 68 pandemic movies. Binge away!


    #214 – Coronavirus – When things change and can never go back
    Mar 20th, 2020

    There are pivotal moments in history when things change after which we cannot easily go back. the aftermath is often unimaginable, and alters the arc of history. Here are a few in the last 20 years: (1) September 11th, 2001. Airline travel was one of many things that changed permanently. The decision of George W. Bush’s U.S. to pursue Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (that fateful yellow cake mobilization at the UN) set in motion a series of destabilizing events that led ultimately to demise of Iraqi control of large areas of its territory and the rise of Islamic State. (2) The collapse of Bear Sterns in 2008 as part of the sub-prime mortgage driven financial collapse was another. The Great Recession that followed arrested growth and brought an austerity to the West that has laid heavily on millions, sowing in turn the economic discontent that, among other drivers, has fueled the rise of nationalism, the Tea Party, Donald Trump, and Brexit. (3) And now we have COVID-19 that began quietly in December 2019 and has exploded into a global pandemic from February 2020. We cannot tell the story of the aftermath now, but there are a few possibilities if the self-isolation is prolonged, and if infection returns for second and third waves in countries where the first wave subsided.

    This may force:

    (A) change in how we value societal contributions and wealth inequality. The person milking the cows, packing and delivering packages, the teller at the grocery store, the dock worker unloading bags of grain, teachers holding the line in schools, garbage collection workers picking up rubbish so we don’t get diseased neighborhoods — all of these less visible contributors to our society that in the old system were less valued, these are the ones that will be keeping our civilization propped up. Will this lead to a restructuring of the economic system? There will for sure be opposition, but this may be the moment that forces the issue.
    The inadequacy of the social safety net in Britain
    Poverty kills people
    How the wealthy stand to win again in the post-COVID crisis, Gary Stevenson

    (B) change in how we create and supply food. Each person with a garden may well need/be required to cultivate a basic local food supply: grains, legumes, herbs, vegetables, fruits, perhaps supplemented with chickens (for eggs). Instead of moving lawns and fields, and putting the grass into mulch, we may switch to goats that at least convert grass into milk and cheese. Instead of processed foods, we may opt for local processing, e.g. home milling machines for turning dry rations into flour in 60 seconds or less.
    UK panic food buying puts £1B of extra food in British homes, but creates shortages across the nation.
    3M people in UK are part of households where someone is forced to skip at least one meal because of insufficient access to food.
    Famine and hunger epidemic predicted for developing countries that are unable to maintain food supply chain and do not get sufficient aid, 250m at risk of death due to starvation. This made worse for South Asia and East Africa by the most severe threat from locusts in decades.
    Mountains of food waste in corporate farms in the US even as food bank lines get longer

    (C) change in how we think about finances, freedoms, and government responses to crises.

    (D) change in how we work and care for children. With the suspension of schools for possibly several months, and widespread self-isolation, families with young children and two working parents are facing the realities of managing it all.

    (E) deceleration in global warming as economic activity crashes during cities in lockdown, leading to almost immediate drops in air pollutants and emissions, the results of which were visible within 1-2 weeks from satellites in the sky.
    Emissions fall as cities go into lockdown, Matt McGrath, BBC News, Mar 19th,2 020

    (F) people turning on each other
    Racial profiling against Muslims in India risks targeting 200m people.
    In the E.U., despite the coming together of individuals and local communities, the European Union has been unable to show institutional solidarity and a common unity.
    In the U.S., federalism is under pressure as the central government trades accusations with states about “stockpiling” needed supplies and withholding these from worst hit states.
    Across the world, domestic violence is increasing as relations fray in families thrown together for extended periods of time. Coping skills, emotional resilience, and the ability to communicate effectively and get along has never been greater within family units.

    (G) change in rights to privacy and surveillance technology
    Testing and contract tracing are the two known ways of combatting coronavirus spread. But with that comes the conundrum of avoiding surveillance while yet being able to rapidly contact all known contacts of anyone who tests positive. Singapore launched and open-sourced TraceTogether. Goole, Apple, and European governments have found it harder to agree on how to do this.

    (H) will there be a change in how we view competence in our politicians? This one I am not so sure of.

    Whether one, all, or more strands form the aftermath, one thing seems clear already. 2020 will likely join 2001 and 2008 as the year when everything changed.


    #213 – Flour self-sufficiency — Milling your own grains, whole meal baking, and healthy biscuits and cakes
    Mar 9th, 2020

    Totally thrilled! Having been studying the mathematics of the ancient Sumerians, and their late Neolithic survival technologies (article forthcoming), and now seeing the impending COVID-19 crisis creating food shortages, I bought two days ago this amazing home grain milling machine (£72.90, Amazon UK).

    Home Milling Machine, or commercial grade fine power grinder, £72.90 (amazon.co.uk)

    Stocked up subsequently on dried rations as they keep longer than cans or fresh food. Quite varied stuff: barley grains, red kidney beans, dried lentils, popcorn kernels, brown rice, almonds. All of these grind up into fine flour in 60 seconds or lesss.

    Flours (L-R) barley, corn, red kidney beans

    Since then have been having a blast baking very simple nutritious biscuits for my family (2 young children and me.

    Recipes so far (watch this space for more!)

    1. barley-almond cookies combining almond and barley flours (Sun Mar 8th)
    2. corn, kidney bean, and barley cookies (Mon Mar 9th)
    3. coconut and barley macaroons (Sun Mar 15th)
    4. chicky-choco-oaty-boaties, combining equal parts chick-pea flour (gram flour) and oatmeal, with cocoa and orange essence for (Fri Mar 20th)
    5. spelt and oat (Fri Apr 10th)
    6. atta (wholemeal wheat) and oat (Sat Apr 11th)
    7. atta, oat, and cocoa (Sat Apr 18th)
    8. sweet atta (Mon Apr 27th) – 1/2 cup of sugar (same
    9. cinammon atta (Fri May 1st) – 3 cups of flour, 1/3 cup of sugar, 3 eggs, 1 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of corn oil, plenty of cinammon (3-4 tablespoons) This forms a dough that can be rolled and cookies cut out and put on baking tray: 15 min at 170 deg.
    10. chocolate atta (Wed May 6th) – note, 1/6th cup of cocoa requires an extra 1/4 cup of sugar to offset the inherent bitterness of cocoa
    11. coconut macaroon filling (Sun May 3rd) – coconut flour, 1 egg, sugar, milk. Mix well. Leave it in the fridge for 2 days. Forms a delicious macaroon filling.
    12. oatmeal, cinammon, raisin atta (Thu May 21st)
    13. atta pizza base (Fri May 22nd)
    14. cocoa ginger snaps (Fri May 29th)

    Corn, Barley, Red Kidney Bean Cookies

    From grain to (60) biscuits in (30) minutes

    Chicky-Choco-Oaty-Boaties

    Basic cookie recipe has just 5 natural ingredients:
    2.5 cups of flour (mix whatever kinds you like, I typically use 2 cups of a basic grain, and 0.5 cup of exotic stuff)
    0.25 to 0.5 cups of sugar (I use less where the flours are basic and more with the exotics which have a stronger less child friendly taste)
    2-3 eggs (more eggs, yummier)
    0.5 cups of oil (I use sunflower or corn oil)
    0.5 cups of milk (I use soya as it has a thicker texture)
    0.2 cups of baking cocoa (unsweetened) optional
    1-2 tablespoons of extract (e.g. orange, almond, lemon, etc.) optional, I use this only with high exotic blends like 50% chickpea flour due to mask their strong taste and make the results more appealing for little palattes

    Mix the dry goods first in a mixing bowl. Add the wet stuff. Mix with a fork into a batter. Adjust ingredients to get the texture to a scoop-and-blob consistency, and blob onto baking tray with baking paper. Over pre-heated to 170*C. Bake for 10-15 minutes depending on how crispy vs. soft you like the insides.

    Bakes about 60 small and nutritious cookies, which in my family, then last 4-5 days, as they become part of breakfast and snack times.

    The grinder is easy to set up, a snap to use, and easy to clean with the brush (I have not felt the need to clean it with water).


    #212 – Coronavirus may be the first serious decelerant to globalization
    Mar 3rd, 2020

    Globalization has been accelerating for almost 50 years, since 1976, when the last ties to the gold standard were removed, freeing monetary policy from commodity restrictions. In those c.50 years, gold pricing has gone from c.$40 per troy ounce to over $1000, a 25x increase reflecting the expansion of capital.
    Governments across the world have established free trade agreements and reduced tariffs and other barriers to the movement of goods and people.
    At the same time, transportation and telecommunications advances have shrunk the globe meaning that now people and products can go from one side to the other in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months previously.
    This combination of capital expansion, free movement, and technological advance has powered a businesses juggernaut, aligned primarily toward a global, just-in-time supply chain, and optimized on the assumption that it is stable.

    Coronavirus is the first real challenge to the global order. Containment measures that involve shutting down cities are having an immediate and devastating impact on economic productivity, sector by sector. Satellite imagery shows that pollution above China has become almost non-existent in the past two months as economic activity has been forcefully restricted.

    But what happens now to the grind of the economic clock: millions of people will have bills come due, payments to make, debts to pay, rents to pay, food to buy. If containment measures spread across the globe (as many expect they will), the economic toll will start to drive large numbers of people into bankruptcy and create financial upheaval.

    What happens next will be eye-opening. Some options: companies without sufficient product flows will reduce advertising, impacting revenues in advertisers, manufacturers will see slowdowns in order pipelines and not need as many workers, retailers seeing slowdowns in inventory, footfall, and willingness/ability for consumers to spend, will start to contract, and may also reduce staff. The rise in unemployment and general wage insecurity will lead to constricting of demand, further impacting orders, purchasing, and contributing to a vicious cycle.

    Related reading:
    1. Coronavirus and the disperate dilemna
    2. History of Globalization
    3. Globalization examples through history
    4. Bubonic plague, the best known example of a global pandemic spread by trade. First in c576 AD killing 50 million people over 2 centuries, second c.1375 AD killing 50 million people, third in the mid 1800s with more limited deaths (est. ~200k).
    5. History of the Gold Standard
    6. Why the US abandoned the gold standard.


    #211 – Antibiotics effective on drug-resistant bacteria have been found using computer-aided drug discovery running machine learning/AI search algorithms on databases of pharmaceutical compounds
    Feb 21st, 2020
    Researchers at MIT trained a deep learning algorithm using 2,500 compounds that were effective at killing bacteria. They then turned the algorithm loose on 6000 compounds under investigation and found “halicin”. They then expanded the search space of the algorithm to 107 million (~7%) of a massive database of 1.5 billion known pharma compounds. In a few hours, the algorithm had identified 23 promising candidates, of which two, in addition to halicin, have been found to be highly effective in lab trials on almost all known drug-resistant bacteria.

    This is good news for medical science, and great news for the potency of deep machine learning.

    [1] Discovering novel super antibiotics using machine learning


    #210 – How Coronavirus was fanned into an epidemic by the desire to maintain the facade that nothing was wrong
    Feb 11th, 2020

    The highly visible writhings of western democracy (Trump impeachment, Brexit, Berlusconi trial, Salvini’s succession), provides a sharp contrast with the disciplined progress-oriented Chinese political system. The rise and spread of Coronavirus shows the “Achilles heel” of the Chinese system: an overriding obsession with maintaining stability.

    This article [1] is grim reading, showing:

    • how the epidemic started, like Sars and Ebola, in an illegal wildlife trading market,
    • how warnings from medical authorities were ignored and the same medical staff were reprimanded for spreading illegal rumours,
    • how, despite reporting the situation to the World Health Organization (WHO), Chinese officials allowed three separate mass gatherings to occur in the outbreak region of Wuhan, including a state sponsored government banquet for 5 million
    • how, in the continued attempt to maintain normalcy, this stream of infected humanity was allowed to disperse back to their communities across China and around the world, after which officials quarantined and shutdown a nearly empty city

    Reading:
    [1] Coronavirus: China and the virus that threatens everything (Feb 11, 2020)

    [2] (#59) Ebola: how culture and politics affect this deadly disease (Sep 11, 2014)

    [3] Italy: the rise of Coronavirus in Italy(Mar 11, 2020) The problem is that we see the infection curve follow a similar pattern in Italy, suggesting the mathematics of interaction and infection rate dominated the spread, and was much less disrupted by Italy’s actions than we thought.

    [4] US: how capitalism and the threadbare welfare state may make the U.S. much the vulnerable country in the world to Coronavirus. Deductibles and co-pays may discourage Americans from getting checked, no illness pay in 39 states may discourage Americans from self-quarantining, limited testing kits in hospitals and a decentralized for-profit health care system may mean the U.S. is unable to contain the early spread even if it would like to, Trump’s attempt to maintain the facade of normalcy is as opposed to the facts as China’s was.

    [5] How China and Singapore have been able to cap the further spread of COVID-19 (Mar 15, 2020) Since the early reluctance to admit the problem, China has since mustered all its muscle to slow and stop transmission growth – quarantining of cities (57M people), forced closure of schools, factories, workplaces, public transport, mandatory temperature testing upon entering a building, mandatory use of a face mask, building of two new hospitals in a week, bolstering of 5G internet to facilitate remote working, forced changes in banking to remove financial penalties associated with payment delays.


    #209 – Cancer-killing immune cells offer hope of a universal cancer therapy
    21st January, 2020
    Scientists from UK’s Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales have identified a method to enhance the ability for the body’s naturally occurring immune system T-cells to distinguish cancer cells from healthy cells. By adapting them to express a certain kind of T-cell reception (TCR), these killer T-cells are able to seek out and bind to cancer cells, and then destroy them. Previously, T-cell directed destruction of cancer cells was known but was limited to very specific cells and specific cancers. The modification now discovered has been shown in lab tests to work on a wide variety of human cancers. Effectiveness has been confirmed on mice. This puts hope for a universal cancer therapy on the horizon.

    [1] Article: Remarkable New T-cell therapy

    [2] Article: Killer Immune cells.


    #208 – Xenobots – programmable robots made of living cells created in biology/computer-science collaboration
    15th January, 2020

    Research biologist Michael Levin (Tufts), computer scientist Josh Bongard (U.Vermont) and a team of specialists have created a new type of microscopic living robot: the xenobot. This is a tiny creature smaller than a pin-head created through microsurgery from stem cells of a particular species of frog. The design of the xenobot is selected to exhibit a certain behaviour, from amongst a catalog of designs created by simulation algorithms. For example, the combination of skin cells (passive) and heart cells (that contract) allow shapes with active beating cells. Placing these heart cells in specific locations on the xenobot give it locomotion. Altering placement and quantity of beating cells and geometry of the whole, allows the robots to be pre-programmed before fabrication to perform desired movements.

    Envisioned applications include swimming through the body to deliver medicine to certain locations, or gathering microplastics in the ocean.

    “In the past several decades, humankind has made staggering advances in robotics. Machines can now master difficult board games [e.g. AlphaZero using deep learning artificial intelligence [4]], and navigate tough terrain [e.g. AntBot using simple environmental cues [5]]; they can steer themselves as autonomous vehicles [e.g. autonomous bicycle using neuromorphic AI chips [6]], and search for survivors in the wake of disaster [e.g. all-terrain snake robots with cameras [7]]. But many of the basic functions that living things accomplish still flummox devices built by human hands. Even in their most creative configurations, metals and plastics simply can’t live up to cells.”[1]

    Reading List:

    [1] Smithsonian (Katherine Wu) – Xenobot

    [2] Wired (Matt Simon) Xenobot

    [3] The Scientist (Emma Yasinkski) – Xenobot

    [4] AlphaZero, Google’s new deep learning algorithm that can master complex strategy games in a few hours, to beat traditional AI algorithms.

    [4b] AutoML Zero, Google’s new self-learning algorithm that can allow AI programs to be developed with effectively zero human input. This is work that is intended to allow AI to evolve.

    [5] AntBot, developed by a French biomimetic research team integrating the navigation strategies of a desert ant into a robot.

    [6] Neuromorphic chips combine standard AI algorithms on a chip design modeled around thousands of neurons that fire when reaching a certain threshold, mimicking human brain’s learning mechanisms. Chinese researchers demonstrate a bicycle that can ride by itself using such a chip.

    [7] Snake-inspired biomimetic robotics creates all-terrain capabilities from inside the body (surgical applications) to search-and-rescue, to climbing, and space exploration.

    [8] Could living robots be nourished by a bloodstream? Blood perfusion technology can now keep livers alive outside the body for up to a week.


    #207 – Human Brain-computer interfaces allow thought controlled typing speeds of up to 4-8 words per minute
    13th January, 2020

    The technology is getting accurate and responsive enough to offer a way forward to make communication easier for thousands of people who have musculo-skeletal disorders that make speech, writing, or finger typing infeasible.

    [1] Scientific American: Brain Computer interface to assisted typing

    [2] Video: Illustrating the implanted sensors

    [3] Research Paper: From thoughts to Text (Xiang Zhang, Sep 26th, 2017)

    [4] #195 – Mind Controlled Robotics


    #206 – Living five times (5x) longer (400-500 years) may no longer be science fiction
    Thursday 9th January, 2020

    I recently read an article that claimed, anyone who could just hang on in decent health until 2050, had a very good chance of being able to live in the same good state of health essentially indefinitely.

    Now US and Chinese scientists have discovered genetic pathways that can be altered to “naturally” extend human life by as much as five times, and at the same time, slowing the onset of age-related diseases. Their work has established the viability of this genetic pathway using nematode worms, which shares many of its genes with humans.

    The route to the increased longevity is by altering the IIS (insulin signalling) and TOR pathways, which, when done together, produce the 5x longevity increase as a surprising nonlinear effect (indiviually the maximum is 2x), in what is called “combination therapy”.

    The research is published in Cell Reports.

    Recommended Reading:

    [1] Article: Phys.org: Genetic Pathways for Aging

    [2] Chemical Basis for Aging, article #161: Fountain of Youth discovered – Chemical basis of Aging (02 Sep, 2018)

    [3] Long-lived Gingko Biloba trees (c.1000 years old) continue to produce anti-aging and anti-infection chemicals throught their lives. The function does not decrease with age due to lack of a genetic senescence program that activates in humans and other animals.


    #205 – How close are we to settlement on Mars?
    Thursday 26th December, 2019

    In 2011, Mars One announced its program to work toward settlement of Mars, receiving funding from a consortium of space companies. It ran out of funds in 2016. This year (2019), NASA has announced its program for a similar aim. As we start the new decade (2020-2030), this article by Mary Ann Russon (BBC, Dec 25, 2019) sums up where we are, how we would get there, how all of the heavy and light industry would get there that would be required to bootstrap a viable frontier society, whether there would need to be back-and-forth travel, or is it one-way?

    Progress is needed along several dimensions: (1) faster space travel (currently 9 months with chemical propulsaion when Mars and Eart are at their mutual closest point), (2) sending cargo, (3) complete recycling cycle, (4) robotic workforce, (5) radiation protection for the crew during the journey, (6) psychological and physiological effects of long distance space travel, and more. See below for more on these:

    Selected Reading:

    1. This article: State of the Enterprise, Dec 2019 – Faster Space Propulsion Systems (including Solar electric propulsion)
    2. Towards Human settlement of Mars: The Mars One Program, and other relevant advancements (#30)
    3. Space sailing on the solar wind (#189)
    4. Quantum Thrusters (QVPT) and EmDrive technologies (#43)
    5. Dot Space: the new space entrepreneurial activity in Seattle (#75)
    6. Photonic propulsion using lasers for space travel at roughly the speed of light (#91)
    7. Suspended Animation Technology (#204)
    8. Extremophile Creatures and Space Colonization (#194)
    9. Property Rights in Space: US and Luxembourg pave the way (#173)


    #204 – Are we close to Suspended Animation technology? – the latest medical breakthrough has moved to human trials
    Wednesday 20th November, 2019

    Surgeries on pigs have shown that suspended animation through replacing blood with ultra-cooled fluid (EPR = emergency preservation and resuscitation) can in some cases be successful, with the pig’s blood being replaced and the pig being warmed up and resuscitated following completion of the surgery.

    Now the same EPR technique is being trialed on humans who have suffered catastrophic injury and whose changes of living without this approach are judged to be less than 5%.

    But if this works, what’s really interesting is the potential in several directions:

    1. Suspended animation for long-distance space travel, though the current research for this is medically induced torpor, not suspended animation.
    2. Cryonics, or the indefinite suspended animation of a subject with a medical condition that cannot be cured with current technology, in the hope that they can be reanimated at a future date when the condition can be cured, and then healed following resuscitation.
    3. Cryopreservation in which body tissues are preserved at dry ice temperatures (-80*C) or the boiling point of liquid nitrogen temperatures (-196*C)

    Article: Guardian – Humans put into suspended animation


    #203 – The 21st Century “Great Challenge”: How to distribute wealth and opportunity beyond privileged places and people
    Sunday 10th November, 2019

    The recent history of Milan (Italy) is the story of mega-cities across Europe (London, Paris, Munich, Barcelona, Madrid) US (Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, Houston) and around the world (Istanbul, Rio, Moscow, Beijing, Mumbai, Bangalore, Dubai).

    Between 2000 and 2016, Milan increased its share of Italy’s GDP by 17.7% compared to the next largest growth city Rome at 4.4%, while almost everywhere else in Italy growth reversed as the Italian economy flatlined. There are are similar statistics in the rest of Europe. Prosperity has continued without much change but limited to a few mega-cities.

    But the majority of people in Europe (and the world) are not in mega-cities. What happens is the broad disenfranchisement of liberal policies in the majority of the population that cannot see the advantages of these policies, where growth is in decline, services are crumbling, where there is a flight of youth, labor and capital, and no replacement for the industrial productivity that may have provided jobs and wage security in the 20th century.

    Roberto Camagni, Professor of Urban Economics in Milan, summarizes the essence of the problem of the past 20 years (emphasis mine):

    “It was big cities like Milan, not nation states, which benefited most from the great wave of integration that came with the European single market. The city provides financiers, lawyers, designers, artists, culture, everything required to be a modern international hub. It has a monopoly on the high-end services that command the highest prices, [but] the rest of Italy has to pay those prices. The problem is that this miracle in Milan only really involves the million or so people at its very heart. The city has shaken off the industrial hinterland that made it great in the 20th century. In the end this creates a problem of dignity for other places..”

    The above quote is eye-opening, and explains why Brexit, Johnson, Trump, and other nationalist policies are now at the height of their power. The people are angry. Wealth creation and opportunity are no longer serving them as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. The middle classes are aging and increasingly abandoned. These are structural problems in education, transportation, housing, and access to social services, that have been decades in the making, and that keep opportunity away from the disadvantaged. These problems are amplified by out-of-touch behaviour of elites, the place of individualism above social consciousness, societal preoccupation with materiality, and a media driven culture of self-focus that raises concerns of narcissism.

    Inequality in US and UK tops Western World

    Inequality in US and UK tops Western World, BBC, May 14, 2019

    Further Reading: The ten articles below, selected from the past five years (2014-2019) provide food for thought.

    (1) How the mega-cities of Europe stole a continent’s wealth, Julian Coman, Nov 10th, 2019, The Guardian

    (2) The Pitchforks are Coming – How the Economic Order will Fall, Nick Hanauer, July/Aug 2014, Politico Magazine (#35, June 27th, 2014)

    (3) People Vote Mainly on Identify, not Policy (#200), Thu 31st October, 2019

    (4) The disproportionate impact of public policy decisions on UK North and South: a case study of the Beeching Report of the 1960s on UK National Rail (#196), Sun 6th October, 2019

    (5) The stagnation of educational attainment (in the US) over the last 30 years (#12), 23rd April, 2014

    (6) Rising Economic Inequality in the U.S. – the facts from the Federal Reserve (#60), 17th Oct, 2014

    (7) In Bad Faith: the Effects of Austerity on Britains’s Brexit Vote (#192), 17th September 2019, and The Debate on the integrity of the IMF’s position when Greece voted against Austerity (#77), 5th July, 2015

    (8) Those who get left behind: Homelessness and Indifference (#127), 6th November, 2017, Low Pay Culture Traps People in Poorly Paid Jobs (#124), Oct 19th, 2017, and The Bard Prison Initiative (#82), 7th October, 2015

    Solutions?
    (9) Mission-oriented state investment as an alternative economic narrative to entrepreneurial capitalism (#201), Thu 31st October, 2019

    (10) What happens to attempts at rival economic narratives? They will likely be vilified by proponents of entrepreneurial capitalism. Example 1: Mission-oriented state investment in Cuba or the Exploitation of doctors?

    Related Reading


    #202 – Mission-oriented state investment in Cuba or the Exploitation of doctors?
    Sun 10th Nov, 2019

    Cuba funds the full education of all its citizens including doctors, no loan debt to repay, and then takes a large % of their overseas salary should they choose to work overseas, where there they earn 10-15x more than what they would make locally. Is it a smart way for Cuba to distribute wealth and opportunity widely through its society, or is it exploitation?

    Quote 1: “I don’t believe that they are being exploited. They are earning significantly more than they would earn at home. They have been trained in a socialist system, have paid nothing for their medical training, and understand that the superior amount paid to the Cuban government is used to subsidise the healthcare system back in Cuba.” – John Kirk, professor of Spanish and Latin American studies, Dalhousie University, Canada.

    Quote 2: “I believe we should help everybody. Based on that, yes it is fair, because I know that the other amount is used to support our health and education system … but if you think only of yourself, of course it’s not fair.” – Cuban doctor at the Cuban hospital in Qatar

    Quote 3: “I felt like a slave” on discovering that other doctors in the country were being paid more than him. “We were doing the same thing and earning far less than them.” – A Cuban doctor who defected from the Cuban program.

    Article: Mission-oriented state investment in Cuba or the Exploitation of doctors? – The Guardian, Fri 8th November, 2019


    #201 – Mission-oriented institutions, and state investment, a rival narrative to entrepreneurial capitalism?
    Thu 31st October, 2019

    Mariana Mazzucato is an economist who has traced the origins of the greatest innovations in the West, and found that they (iPhone, Internet, Touchscreen, Windows, Google search), almost entirely, have their origins in state investment (National Science Foundation grants, Small Business Innovation Research funds, DARPA grants, etc.) The Entrepreneurial Engine narrative, she finds, is an ahistorical account promoted by businesses to lobby for lower taxes and regulation. But the real engine for growth is state-investment through mission-oriented institutions.

    Wired Magazine article, 8th Oct 2019


    #200 – People vote mainly on identity not policy
    Thu 31st October, 2019

    Looking back on British electoral politics, I am struck by an observation on identity politics made by Tony Blair made ahead of the 1997 election that saw New Labour winning a record majority in Parliament. He said (Blackpool, 1996):

    “I can vividly recall the exact moment that I knew the last election was lost. I was canvassing in the Midlands on an ordinary suburban estate. I met a man polishing his Ford Sierra, self-employed electrician, Dad always voted Labour. He used to vote Labour, he said, but he bought his own home, he had set up his own business, he was doing quite nicely, so he said I’ve become a Tory. He was not rich but he was doing better than he did, and as far as he was concerned, being better off meant being Tory too.

    In that moment the basis of our failure – the reason why a whole generation has grown up under the Tories – became plain to me. You see, people judge us on their instincts about what they believe our instincts to be. And that man polishing his car was clear: his instincts were to get on in life, and he thought our instincts were to stop him. But that was never our history or our purpose.”

    (Tony Blair, 1996, Blackpool campaign speech)

    He went on, of course, to describe why New Labour was about helping people to get on in life. But the memorable point was made. It is the instinctive perception of what a person or party is after that pulls peoples’ votes.

    This December’s election in Britain will be the second in which the politics of identity is radically different from the usual Left/Right split.

    Go to Articles # 1 – 199

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