In-depth look at Tulsi Gabbard

Presidential candidate and Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is a bit of an enigma, hard to pin a label on. She has incurred the wrath and venom of the Democratic party establishment for reasons that are not totally clear to me but seem to involve the fact that she does not take an instinctively hostile attitude to the designated enemies of the political establishment, namely Russia, China, Syria, and Iran. Edward Isaac-Devore tried to understand the reasons for this antipathy. He says that the party establishment seems convinced that she has some ulterior motives for running for president even though they cannot articulate what it might be.
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Elizabeth Warren shuts down fossil fuel industry talking points

During the climate change town hall, moderator Chris Cuomo of CNN raised the issue of whether fighting climate change would require forcing people to give up their straws etc. Warren quickly shut down that line of questioning, saying that the fossil fuel industry wants to put the onus of cleaning up the environment on us and for us to be always talking about such things as violating our personal freedoms, in order to distract from their major role in destroying the environment.

42 as the sum of three cubes

In March, I wrote about the successful effort, after 64 years of computational striving, of finding integer solutions to the problem x3+y3+z3=33. This equation, along with x3+y3+z3=42, were the only two equations for which neither a solution nor a proof that no solution exists had been found for the right hand side being below 100. Finding that solution meant that only the 42 problem remained unsolved.

Now 42 problem too has been solved and in a nod to Douglas Adams, Andrew Sutherland (MIT) and Andrew Booker (Bristol), the finders of the solution, announced it on webpages titled Life, the Universe and Everything.

Every cube of a whole number is within one of a multiple of nine, which means that a sum of three cubes must be within three of a multiple of nine. So numbers of the form 9𝑘+49k+4 or 9𝑘+59k+5 cannot be written as the sum of three cubes.

In 1992, Roger Heath-Brown conjectured that every other whole number can be written as the sum of three cubes, in infinitely many different ways. Mathematicians on the whole seem to have been convinced by Heath-Brown’s argument that this ought to be true – but actually finding ways to write any particular number as a sum of three cubes remains a difficult problem.

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Farcical US attempt at bribery

You may recall the Iranian oil tanker that was seized by the British in the Mediterranean and taken to Gibraltar because of suspicions that it was taking its cargo to Syria. It was released later over the protests of the US government that wanted to seize the ship. It has now been revealed that the US government tried to bribe the ship’s captain to take the ship somewhere where the US could seize it but he ignored them.

The US state department has confirmed it offered millions of dollars to the captain of an Iranian oil tanker which is at the centre of a diplomatic row.

Brian Hook, head of the department’s Iran Action Group, emailed the captain of the Adrian Darya 1 about sailing it somewhere the US could seize it.
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According to the Financial Times, Mr Hook sent an email to the Indian captain of the Adrian Darya 1, Akhilesh Kumar, before it imposed sanctions on the ship.

“I am writing with good news,” the email read. The Trump administration was willing to pay the captain several million dollars to take the ship somewhere it could be seized by US authorities.

The emails reportedly carried a state department phone number to make sure the captain – who took over the ship after it was impounded – did not think they were fake.

Mr Hook told the newspaper that the state department was “working very closely with the maritime community to disrupt and deter illicit oil exports”.

Mr Kumar ignored the emails. The US then imposed sanctions on him personally when they blacklisted the Adrian Darya 1.
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A brief history of slavery in the US

In The 1619 Project of the New York Times that I wrote about earlier, the opening piece that frames the rest of the magazine is by Nikole Hannah-Jones. She looks at the history of how slavery became embedded in the very legal fabric of the nation from the very beginning in August 1619 and she argues that it has been the struggle by slaves and their descendants to achieve basic decency that has resulted in so many of us having rights that the original slaves and their descendants were denied.
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Getting bears out of dumpsters

Via Carla Sinclair, I came across this video of police using a ladder to get out a bear cub that had fallen into a dumpster. But I was impressed at the earlier efforts of two other bears to try and rescue the cub themselves, even though they failed.

But this idea of using ladders to rescue cubs is not original. Back in 2012, I linked to a video of a New Mexico couple who used the same ladder idea to get three bear cubs out of a dumpster.

Summary of the Democratic town hall on climate change

Yesterday, CNN hosted a seven-hour climate change marathon where 10 candidates in sequence faced about 40 minutes of questions from the moderators, scientists, and others about their climate change plans. Rolling Stone had a summary of the key points, saying that “We can’t pretend it was fun. But it was historic: This is almost certainly the longest stretch of programming a U.S. news network has ever dedicated to the topic of climate change. We watched all ten of the candidates make their case for their candidacies on the basis of their plans to keep the planet from overheating.”
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Boris Johnson’s terrible, horrible, no-good week continues

Boris Johnson has had a very bad first few days in parliament. In addition to having a 100% loss record in votes, today his own brother Jo Johnson quit the government and said he would not stand in the next election, and a cabinet minister Nick Hurd said the same. In addition, a Labour party MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi took Johnson to task for a 2018 newspaper column where he compared Muslim women covering their faces and bodies to letterboxes and bank-robbers. Watch


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Conan O’Brien goes off to buy Greenland

If there is an unofficial good will ambassador for the US, it may well be late night talk show host and comedian Conan O’Brien. On an occasional series on his show called Conan Without Borders that can be seen on Netflix, he has gone to places that have been demonized by the US over a long period (such as Cuba) as well as those that have been brutally exploited by the US and more recently insulted by Donald Trump (like Haiti and Mexico) and in his interactions with the people and his description of the country shows Americans how mistaken these views are and that we would be a lot better off having good relations with the people of those nations.
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Between Two Ferns: The Movie (2019)

I have long been a fan of comedian Zach Galifianakis’s online sketch show Between Two Ferns where he passive-aggressively, and sometimes outright insultingly, interviews celebrity guests. Here is one sketch where he interviews Ben Stiller.

It appears that they have made a film version of it that will be released on Netflix on September 20.

It is often the case that sketch comedy does not translate well into the long form version, so we’ll have to see how this turns out.

But here’s the trailer.