Rita Ahmadi at Aeon:

Interest in an AI-driven approach to mathematics has been exponential, and many mathematicians have left traditional academic research to explore its potential. Recently, one group of distinguished mathematicians designed 10 active, research-level questions for AI to tackle. At the time of writing, various AI companies and researchers had claimed to find solutions, which were under evaluation by the community.

Sitting in the room in Bloomsbury, I stared at the Hardy plaque and wondered: would Hardy find proofs generated by AI beautiful? I wasn’t sure. He believed there should be a strong aesthetic judgment in mathematics, drawing parallels with poetry, and argued that beauty is the first test of good mathematics. He went as far as to say that there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

If asked, many mathematicians today still talk about the aesthetic appeal of one approach over another.

Yet we live in a different century to Hardy and his Bloomsbury peers, with different technologies and techniques, so perhaps we need a clearer definition of what mathematical beauty actually is.

More here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

The photo above is from the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939. This “battle” lasted four months, and was actually just the main phase of an undeclared war between Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union that effectively began in 1935, four years before the official start of the Second World War. The USSR won the conflict through superior use of tanks, foreshadowing the eventual outcome of WW2 itself.

This example illustrates that although World War 2 officially began when Germany invaded Poland, conflicts that either foreshadowed the final conflagration or eventually merged with it began years earlier, in the mid-1930s. WW2 had foothills. I wrote about this back in 2024:

Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war

It’s possible that the world will avoid a world war in the first half of the 21st century. But if one does occur, I think future historians will see it as having had foothills as well.

More here.

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Samuel Fury Childs Daly at the LARB:

It isn’t a coincidence that two of the most celebrated scholars of Africa in the United States both published books about Idi Amin in the past year. Only Peterson makes the comparison to Trump explicit, but Mahmood Mamdani’s portrait of the general in Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State is hard not to read through the lens of the United States, where Mamdani has lived since the 1990s. Peterson’s book is a social history of the regime, focusing on the people who made it work; Mamdani’s is a personal account of Uganda’s last half century, covering both Amin and the autocrats who followed him. Both depict Amin not as the buffoon that many remember but as a savvy political operator who knew what people wanted and what they feared. Neither Mamdani nor Peterson denies that Amin was violent and cruel, and neither is out to rehabilitate him. While his legacy means different things to them, they both take him more seriously than most who have written about him.

Not all tyrants have some great ideological evil behind them; some are animated by ideas we might find reasonable. Amin’s organizing principle was independence, which he promised his people so often and so loudly that some of them came to believe it was really his to give.

more here.

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Jon Baskin at The Point:

There are understandable reasons why liberal and leftist intellectuals are cautious about discussing the good life. A core tenet of modern liberal theory holds that the job of a just political system is not to tell anyone how to live but rather to give them the freedom and, in its more left-leaning versions, the economic wherewithal, to live as they please. Although there are “perfectionist” strands in the liberal tradition, the most prominent Anglo-American political philosophers over the past half century, from John Rawls and Richard Rorty to Judith Shklar and Martha Nussbaum, have argued for a liberalism that remains rigorously agnostic about ultimate questions, leaving the great spiritual, philosophical and aesthetic projects for the private or semi-private sphere. “Apart from prohibiting interference with the freedom of others,” writes Shklar in her classic 1989 essay “The Liberalism of Fear,” “liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make.”

The logic of this formulation is both hard to dispute and famously unsatisfying. Rawls, Shklar, Rorty and Nussbaum reached the height of their influence in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, when liberal ideals benefited from their contrast with Soviet totalitarianism as well as an unprecedented middle-class prosperity.

more here.

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Annie Roth in Harvard Magazine:

Scientists have long been interested in bonobos, a highly intelligent, socially sophisticated species that, along with chimpanzees, are our closest living relatives. Found only in the jungles of the DRC, they are the smallest living great apes, standing between three and four feet tall when upright and weighing upwards of 86 pounds. They form social groups ranging from eight to 25 adults and engage in complex forms of communication, including the use of symbols, gestures, and vocalizations.

Due to habitat loss and poaching, as well as their smaller population size, bonobos are an endangered species: only between 10,000 and 50,000 of them remain in the wild. Because most studies have focused on groups in captivity, Surbeck’s long-term fieldwork in the DRC stands out for its ability to follow their communities over time. “Bonobos, like us, are a long-lived species, and until recently we had access only to short snippets of individuals’ lives,” he says. “The emergence of long-term data is very exciting, as it allows us to see how individuals change over time…and to modify the picture we have.”

More here.

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Jennie Smith in Science:

Robin Richards Donohoe, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, remembers 2005 as the year her charming, outgoing mother, Alice, “just went mute.”

Alice Richards was a born communicator, a journalism major, and mother of seven who, as her husband’s company helped bring electricity to the rural South, threw her energies into countless civic and philanthropic causes. She could give a stirring speech, her family members recall. But as Alice entered her 70s, her words began to slip away.

Like her father and sister before her, Alice had been struck with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Fast-progressing and fatal, this deterioration in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain is the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease in people younger than 65. About 40% of cases are caused by known inherited genetic mutations. In 2006, mutations in GRN, a gene that codes for a protein called progranulin, were found to be a major cause of familial FTD. Alice and her relatives, it turned out, had one of them.

More here.

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Readings

Things are so hard to figure out when you
live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and
remembering it all. The woods do that to you,
they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of
a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of
forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all
like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood
and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak
that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass
overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity)
to this feeling. I came to a point where I needed solitude
and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’
what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass
and look at the clouds.”

― Jack Kerouac,
from The Dharma Bums

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Dan Friedman at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Generations of soccer supporters thought that the defeat of totalitarianism would mean that people could play and celebrate when, where, and how they wanted. They thought we could finally achieve the exalted vision of early enthusiasts like Jules Rimet, FIFA’s longest-serving president (1921–54), his successor Sir Stanley Rous (1961–74), and those hopeful Uruguayans of 1930, who hosted the first tournament and had to overcome complex logistics of travel and politics to mount the event. They thought that the fall of the Soviet empire would bring the sunshine of rule-of-law democracy to the world, and that the injection of compassionate capital would give people the means to build a more justly competitive global order. Instead, we got parasites thirsting for money, power, and influence, venal creeps like Sepp Blatter and Gianni Infantino, Vladimir Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

With a painstaking attention to detail, Kuper shows that our hopes for the post–Cold War world of soccer were largely misplaced, with the strong implication that we are at least as wrong about everything else. Billions around the world (including me) love soccer passionately, but as with so many things people care for deeply, the sport has been corrupted by money and politics.

More here.

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Farah Jan in The Conversation:

Two and a half millennia ago, Thucydides recorded the Athenian empire at its most confident in his “History of the Peloponnesian War”: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Athens then destroyed Melos and launched the Sicily Expedition with overwhelming force and no coherent theory of governance for what came next. The lesson, then and now, is not that empires cannot destroy. It’s that destruction and governance are entirely different enterprises. And confusing them is how empires exhaust themselves. The U.S. military can destroy the Iranian regime. The question that the Iraq precedent answers – with brutal clarity – is what fills the power vacuum when it does?

…Washington has a preference; it does not have a plan. If the objective is eliminating the nuclear program, then why does Iran still hold an unverified stockpile of weapon-usable uranium eight months after the 2025 strikes? The strikes have not resolved the proliferation question. They have made it more dangerous and less tractable. If the objective is regional stability, why has every round of strikes produced a wider regional war?

Washington has no answer to any of these questions – only a theory of destruction.

More here.

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Edward Chen in Nature:

A species of gut bacteria that proliferates as mice get older plays a part in cognitive decline, a study finds¹. Researchers determined that the bacterium interferes with signalling along sensory nerves that connect to the brain.

Although the experiments were conducted in mice, the gut–brain circuit that the team identified “is likely conserved in humans”, says David Vauzour, a biochemist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. That would need to be confirmed, but if the circuit is present in humans, then this research could reveal a mechanism that explains why people’s memory and ability to learn naturally decreases with age — and offer hope that gut-targeted therapies could reverse the decline.

The effects of the bacteria, which dampens the gut–brain circuit in mice, seem similar to other consequences of ageing. “When we get older, we need things like glasses and hearing aids”, says co-author Christoph Thaiss, an immunologist at Stanford University in California. The study — published today in Nature¹ — shows that, just as ageing causes a decline in sensory perception of the external world, it might also be causing a loss of perception of internal signals, too, he says.

More here.

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Gavin Evans at Aeon:

The Florida peninsula looks like a sore thumb. It juts into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, where the water is getting warmer year on year, prompting fiercer hurricanes that can blow down houses like collapsing decks of cards. Climate scientists are convinced all hell will break loose sooner or later when a monster-sized, property-destroying storm makes a direct hit on Miami or Tampa-St Petersburg. Given three near-misses in the recent past, the experts view such a calamity as inevitable. It’s a huge risk for anyone living there – they stand to lose everything – but also for those bearing the financial side of this risk, the insurance companies. Some in the industry are seeing this as a portent for their future – an impending existential threat with profound implications for the economic system.

There are no easy solutions for people still paying off mortgages and those who want to buy property along the Florida coast, because the potential payout on the back of a mammoth storm is so high that the reinsurers (who insure the insurers against catastrophe) are refusing to underwrite their clients and, with no reinsurance, there’s no insurance; and with no insurance, no mortgages; and with no mortgages, no property market. Insurance protects investments against loss and is therefore a pillar of the economic system. If it goes, economies are destabilised.

More here.

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Peter C. Baker in the New York Times:

In Nick Shirley’s mega-viral YouTube videos alleging social-services fraud in Minnesota, the important piece of evidence was — in a literal sense — the absence of evidence. Shirley and his crew drove around Minneapolis pulling up to Somali-American-owned day cares that had received state funds and knocked to request entry. Notionally, they were trying to see if there were legit child care businesses inside. They were denied entry; what day care, after all, would let a camera-brandishing crew of YouTubers inside?

Once a door was shut in their face, all they could film was the building’s facade. Brick. Covered windows. And crucially, no children: a fact they latched onto with great energy. “Where are the kids?” they asked. “The children are missing!” They took what could easily be viewed as banal — a nondescript business — and transfigured it into evidence of something nefarious.

More here.

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Noga Arikha at Aeon Magazine:

Anthropology could be considered a kind of comparative psychology. The founder of modern American anthropology, Franz Boas (1858-1942) – whose biography I have recently written – declared as much, in his talk ‘Psychological Problems in Anthropology’ (1909):

We are also trying to determine the psychological laws which control the mind of man everywhere, and that may differ in various racial and social groups. In so far as our inquiries relate to the last-named subject, their problems are problems of psychology, though based upon anthropological material.

There was a unity to the human mind, what Boas’s mentor, Adolf Bastian, had called ‘the psychic unity of [hu]mankind’, according to which all peoples shared ‘Elementargedanken’, elemental ideas. Boas studied the immense diversity among human cultures as variations on these universal ‘psychological laws’, showing how cultures arose and developed within specific environmental and historical settings out of the evolved need humans have to coalesce within a group and imitate each other – Tarde influenced Boas. No cultural or national identity was static, nor reducible to mythically ‘pure’ origins.

more here.

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Daniella Shreir at the LRB:

At the age​ of fifteen, Chantal Akerman sneaked into a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou. She was in the habit of skipping school with her friends and the cinema was one of their preferred hangout spots. But until that moment, Akerman had thought of it as a place for flirting and kissing, which were ‘the same thing as dancing’. She hadn’t heard of Godard but liked the film’s title. She discovered something more enticing than flirting: ‘I knew there was someone there in front of me and I had to be present, too. [The film] required me to exist.’ The experience was unrepeatable. Every film to come would be ‘less good than Pierrot le fou’. This is the story Akerman repeated, and was often asked to repeat, throughout her life, as if it might provide the key to understanding how a high school and film school dropout, whose parents had no interest in cinema, might at the age of 24 make Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).

Until recently, most people had their first encounter with Akerman in the classroom. The rise of the women’s movement coincided with that of film studies and Akerman’s films were disseminated and dissected by women film professors.

more here.

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Sneha Khedkar in The Scientist:

As a person of Indian origin, Alka Kanaya saw diabetes and heart disease wreak havoc in her family. As a general internist and physician scientist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Kanaya witnessed a similar trend. “It’s very common to see a young South Asian man present with a heart attack in their thirties and forties, where you don’t see that in other groups,” said Kanaya.

While South Asians make up about a quarter of the world’s population, they bear nearly 60 percent of the global burden of heart disease.¹ They are also more prone to diabetes compared to other ethnic groups.² Some hypotheses attribute these outcomes to insulin resistance, wherein cells do not respond to insulin, and central adiposity, or fat accumulation around the midsection.

More here.

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How To Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors

It’s not rocket surgery.
First, get all your ducks on the same page.
After all, you can’t make an omelette
without breaking stride.

Be sure to watch what you write
with a fine-tuned comb.
Check and re-check until the cows turn blue.
It’s as easy as falling off a piece of cake.

Don’t wory about opening up
a whole hill of beans:
you can burn that bridge when you come to it,
if you follow where I’m coming from.

Concentrate! Keep your door closed.
and your enemies closer.
Finally, don’t take the moral high horse:
if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it.

by Brian Bilston

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