November readlogs
No analysis this time. Very tired and wrote this in 30 mins
Liked:
Chapter 8 from Hormone Hunters: The discovery of Adrenaline (highly rated); Winners don’t use costly punishment; Why is cognitive effort experienced as costly? talks about opportunity costs, large information shifts and searching through rare brain states.
A friend and I were playing a Song dynasty simulator and we noticed coal was often but not always the limiting factor. Coal also shows up in:
1st industrial revolution. The James Watt steam engines burn coal with a magnificent thermal efficiency of 3%…
2nd industrial revolution. Steam engines are stacked with dynamos that convert mechanical energy into electrical energy in Pearl station in Manhattan. A 162x jump from steam engines. So I just placed them on a Kardashev scale. Vibes:
Nuclear. More steam engines, but replace coal with Uranium 235, keep water and add spinning turbines afterwards. The computer system “СКАЛА”--система контроля аппарата Ленинградской Атомной” lit. “rock”. is literally between Scylla (Xe-135 poisoning) and Charybdis (positive void coefficients) 🤔 Xe-135 started to accumulate in the fuel rods and the power decreased to 30 MW. So the control rods were removed in order to have more power, which surged to 200 MW. However at this point, there were so many steam bubbles that the reactor exploded. During the disaster it was estimated that reactor 4 surged to 3e10 W. Modernization, more production for raised standards in quality of life—health, education, welfare.
Prolegomena to Omnipotence. Roles in science.
The learner; The explainer. “A reader of a popular book is not going to take part in resolving them anyway, while an expert in a given theoretical discipline must first of all get to know its weapons and the configuration of its battlefield before he can himself participate in scientific councils of war, once he has learned the basics of muster and tactics.”
The benevolent observers, featuring the local babushka and the philosopher. “The elderly lady has much life experience, and she advises the girl, on the basis of [statistics] to dump the reckless boy. The philosopher knows the history of science and advises the physicists to give up on their theory because this theory is ‘betraying’ them.”
The designer, distinct from the babushka: “he becomes involved in action—as have the physicists… He is not a narrow pragmatist, like a builder who is constructing his house from bricks, uninterested in where these bricks came from and what they are, as long as the house gets built. The designer [knows and is interested about their] bricks—except for what they look like when no one is looking at them. He knows that properties belong to situations, not things.”
30 years of dolphin research in shark bay! Dolphins form duos/trios, first order and second order alliances, partially because they have no consistent social group it is difficult to estimate a stranger dolphin’s reputation.
Ontology of Childhood. Protagonist grows up, and slowly realizes they’re in a prison. “But so what? The fact is that the world was not invented by people—no matter how clever they try to be, they are not capable of making the life of the last convict even slightly different from the life of the head of the supply unit. And what difference does the reason make, if the happiness produced by souls is identical? There is a quota of happiness allocated to a person in life, and whatever happens, this happiness cannot be taken away.”
Uhlenbeck interview; When math branched from physics in history and came together. Theory-builders, thinking in linear guaranteed steps collaborating with intuitive people who reverse fill in the blanks backtracking in textbooks to understand lemmas. Powerspace and the bulk theorem!
Shing-Tung Yau biography excerpt
I gladly accepted, planning to make several stops in Europe before going to Cambridge, as I’d also been invited to Paris, Rome, and Finland, where I’d be giving a talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki. Travel was difficult, however, because the British Consulate had recently taken my Hong Kong resident card, maintaining that I could not keep it now that I had a U.S. green card. In the process, I had become stateless. I was no longer a citizen of any country, although I was a legal resident of the United States. For this period of time, until I became a U.S. citizen in 1990, I was literally a man without a state, stuck between two countries and between two cultures. Traveling abroad, as a result, became a real nuisance. I had to use my “white card” to apply in advance to leave the United States, and if I did not follow the proper steps, I would not be allowed back in.
I could not secure a visa to get into Italy, so I had to cross Rome off my list this time, even though I paid an extra “fee” to the Italian consul, who said he’d take care of it (and didn’t). The same thing happened the next time I was invited to Italy; I again paid the consul an extra fee, but still got no visa. On another occasion, Michael Atiyah invited me to give a talk in Wales before the London Mathematical Society. When I showed my white card at immigration control in London, they gave me a hard time.
“What is the purpose of your visit in the United Kingdom?” I was asked. I told them I was there for tourism. “Where do you plan to go?” I was then asked. Wales, I replied. “Why are you going to Wales,” the border agent persisted, “since it’s clearly not a good place for tourism?” The questions finally ceased when I explained that I was going to Wales with my good friend Nigel Hitchin, an esteemed professor at Oxford. That did the trick this time, though traveling with a white card caused me no shortage of headaches.
Misc:
Spartacist uprising and the bottom-up creation of the Twelve tables in Roman empire; No Spartacist uprisings in Spring and Autumn periods, evolved from morality to law creating top-down《法经》。 崤山大战 where some people escape on a boat. Qin official brought forth a yellow horse, but ran just as well as the black horses. Archery competitions to show social status. Reminds me of duck hunting in Shogun Era. Vietnamese History “a princess fell in love with a foreign king, spilled national secrets, and country fell to China” mythos in 2nd century BCE. French colonization. Japanese colonization. The red scare. Vietnamese tunnels—do those residents not get insomnia—and snake tubes used in Vietnam war. Triumph of the villages networks. Credits to Minerva classmates.
East Japan Earthquake. Failure modes being normalcy bias, sometimes people think they’re okay and don’t evacuate. Other times sensors malfunctioned and predicted a 3 meter wave rather than a 10 meter one. Encountering a magnitude 6.8 Earthquake while studying Earthquakes is dizzyfying.
Introduction chapter from China the industrial revolution book is nice, goes from rational self-interest theories to industrial revolutions to Soviet technocracy; People in control were technical. “there is no such thing as ethos over physics in an industrial setting.”
Grothendieck exile. This translation is better “looking at things with your own eyes”. Shifting between masculine and feminine selves (2.18 The child and the Mother from a more rambley translation that keeps the gender discussion). Ovid invents Iphis, born as a girl, becomes a boy, marries the woman he loves. Remember? he’s the not-so-epic exile in history. Christine de Pisan’s dysphoria speedrun and reinterprets the story as pro-woman in the Book of the City of Ladies. Other writers don’t endorse androgyny as fusion.