Apologies for going silent for the last couple of months. I am getting back to posting regularly and should have some great material coming up in the next few weeks. For now, here are some links I’ve found interesting.
Confidence Level: Hard to judge because they’re not my ideas.
Some new equipment is becoming available to study life in the ocean. Deep-See will focus on the twilight zone: between the sunlit surface waters and the dark abyss.
A “sled”, in this context, is a collection of scientific instruments that are designed to be towed along behind a boat on a long cabel. It’s sort of like an unmanned scientific submarine, but without its own propulsion and navigation. This article seems to assume that everyone knows this.
Deep-See will operate out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a world leader in oceanography, and an interesting example of a different way to organize science. I have spent one summer there and it was great.
A brief description of how Athenian democracy worked:
https://peoplingthepast.com/2021/10/20/video-18-chandra-giroux/
Peopling the Past is a collection of graduate students / early career ancient historians who each give a short description of their expertise. It is worth reading / watching.
Iraq had an election in October. Here is a good summary of the results:
I’m also including this because it has good infographics showing what happened, even though Iraqi politics is extremely fragmented and most of their readers know nothing about it.
Math produces weird shapes sometimes. Here is the Enneper surface:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneper_surface
I don’t remember why I ran into this, but the connection was probably interesting too.
If you think mathematical surfaces are weird, wait until you meet mathematicians. Or at least Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907). His family is the most unusual collection of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Howard_Hinton
Charles’s father James Hinton was a surgeon and a prominent advocate for polygamy. “Christ was the saviour of Men but I am the saviour of Women and I don’t envy him a bit.” He was notorious enough to be included in novels about Jack the Ripper.
Charles’s main work was in the intuitive understanding of the Fourth Dimension. Hinton wrote both articles for mathematicians and for the general public, interacting extensively with Edwin Abbott, the author of Flatland. His most famous contribution is the term “tesseract”, for the 4-dimensional analogue of a cube.
Charles was also a polygamist, which cost him three days in prison and his job. He and his first wife, Mary Ellen, moved from England to Japan and later the United States as a result.
Mary Ellen was the daughter of George Boole, the founder of abstract logic and the algebra of 1s and 0s. Her mother was Mary Everest, another mathematician, educator, and niece of the surveyor George Everest (who the mountain is named after). All of the children of George & Mary Boole were notable individuals, although with less broad interests than the Hintons: most were scientists of some sort.
While Charles and Mary Ellen were at Princeton, Charles invented the first automatic baseball pitching machine, using gunpowder.
Their son Sebastian Hinton invented the jungle gym.
Sebastian’s daughter Joan Hinton worked on the Manhattan Project as a nuclear engineer. She and her brother William were both devoted Maoists, so they moved to China in 1949 to become farmers. Both Joan and William were also Olympic level downhill skiers.
And that’s the story of the family of polygamy, tesseracts, jungle gyms, and Maoism.
This article claims to have identified the most important political theorist in China, Wang Huning:
https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/
If you want information on how global poverty has declined over the last few decades, Our World In Data has some good, easily accessible information:
https://ourworldindata.org/no-matter-what-global-poverty-line
This is especially true in China. The 4th percentile of China today is wealthier than the 99th percentile of China in 1980.
It turns out that Deng’s market reforms worked a lot better than Maoism.
Fusion !
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-systems-closes-1-8-billion-series-b-round
Commonwealth Fusion is a trying-to-get-fusion startup associated with the MIT plasma physics group. They are working towards building a tokamak, SPARC, over the next four years.
I think that SPARC is most likely to win the race to fusion.[1]“Get fusion” means $Q > 5$ for this prediction. I will talk more about them, and fusion more generally, in the near future.
It’s good to see them getting the venture capital that they need.
References
| ↑1 | “Get fusion” means $Q > 5$ for this prediction. |
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啥也不说了，希望疫情早点结束吧！