Public libraries survive despite threats

I love libraries. They are truly egalitarian spaces that are open to everyone and enables anyone free access to information, be it in the form of books, newspapers, magazines, or the internet. I have never met a librarian who did not seem genuinely pleased to be asked to help me find out something or seek out a resource. They are welcoming spaces. The Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire, established in 1833, is reported to be the first documented free, public library in the world, though claims of being the ‘first’ for anything are always ripe for challenge.

One thing to note is that the modern library is far more than a repository for books. It also provides classes, workshops, internet access, resume and tax help, and serves as a meeting space for community events, as community gathering places, and so forth
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Harvard reverses rejection of Israel critic

Kenneth Roth, the outgoing heard of Human Rights Watch, was offered a fellowship by Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy school of government but that offer was vetoed by the school’s dean Doug Elmendorf for what became clear was uneasiness with Roth’s role in HRW’s criticisms of Israel’s human rights record, which included a scathing report that accused Israel of practicing a form of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories. It joined an Amnesty International report that described Israel’s policies in those same terms. That apartheid description has become widely accepted but is opposed by the Israel lobby in the US.
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Media obsession with the British monarchy

I suspect many readers of this blog are as wearied as I am from being bombarded with news headlines about the the Windsor family’s internal fights. It seems like it never ends.

This 11-year-old clip from the Australian sketch comedy team The Chasers pokes well-deserved ridicule at the media’s obsession with the most trivial details about that annoying family. And that was long before the current media binge about whatever the hell is the latest topic in this long-running soap opera.

A puzzling feature of Tesla stock

Today in San Francisco, Elon Musk went on trial because he has been sued by some Tesla shareholders over this Tweet he sent out on August 7, 2017.

This Tweet that he was planning to take Tesla private by purchasing all the shares at $420 and that he had secured the funding to do so caused the stock price to rise sharply but the deal did not materialize and the stock price plunged a week later when it appeared that he did not have the funding deal.
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What is empty space?

We may think that it is easy to imagine empty space. We look around us and remove every item that we can see and that leaves us with empty space. We tend to treat empty space as a cavity of some kind, some region from which all matter and radiation has been removed. And that is fine as long as matter and/or radiation exists in some other part of the universe, so that we can envisage the space between things. But what if there was no matter or radiation anywhere in the universe? Would space still exist?

Albert Einstein in a letter to Karl Schwarzschild on 9 January, 1916 said no.
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Gina Lollobrigida (1927-2023)

The Italian film star has died at the age of 95. She was stunningly beautiful and was constantly being pursued by men including her co-stars. I am sure that I am not the only one of my generation who would go to see her films just to see her.

Mostly famously, rich recluse Howard Hughes, based on some photos that he had seen of her, tried everything in his power to try and persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him, including asking her to come to the US for a screen test.
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Detecting lies and liars

I watch a lot of police procedurals and a standard scene is where an experienced detective interviews someone and then later tells a colleague that the person is lying. They say it confidently, and the viewer is led to believe that their wide experience with people who lie makes them capable of detecting when someone is telling falsehoods, that subtle clues reveal it. I don’t play poker but I am told that good players can tell when someone is bluffing by picking up on subtle indicators. There are also apparently TV shows whose central characters are people who are professional detectors of when people are lying.

But this article says that it is very hard to know when someone is lying.
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Wasting food

I hate to see food wasted. I really, really hate it. I will try and eat everything in the fridge, even if I don’t like it, if the alternative is throwing it away. I will cut out the bits of food that are spoiled and eat the rest. It is not that I am cheap. It is just that I think that throwing food away should be the absolute last resort. It really bothers me that so much food is wasted in the US. Part of it is due to the sheer size and complexity of the food distribution system in which the producer and consumer are separated by such vast distances that some wastage is inevitable in storage and transportation. This is perhaps understandable as an unavoidable consequence of creating complex societies.
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A case study of dogged perseverance in mathematics

It is widely held that mathematics at the highest levels is a young person’s game and that once one hits the age of forty, one has pretty much exhausted one’s potential for any creative contribution to the field. The famous mathematician G. H. Hardy said, “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game… I do not know of an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty.”

This was partly why it was such a shock when in 2015 a paper appeared in the prestigious journal Annals of Mathematics claiming to have solved a major unsolved problem and that the author was the nearly 60-year old Yitang Zhang, an untenured part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who had published only one paper in the past in 2001.
 
So what did Zhang do? He proved a long-standing conjecture in number theory involving prime numbers that dates back to the nineteenth century. Alec Wilkinson wrote a long article in the New Yorker about Zhang, the theorem he proved, and how it came about.
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