Einstein (1916, 2005), Albert, and Robert W Lawson (translator) Roger Penrose (Introduction), Robert Geroch (Commentary), David C Cassidy (Historical Essay), Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Pi Press 1916, 2005 Preface: 'The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics. ... The author has spared himself no pains in his endeavour to present the main ideas in the simplest and most intelligible form, and on the whole, in the sequence and connection in which they actually originated.' page 3  
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Veltman (1994), Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...' 
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Al Jazeera, Israel imposing ‘apartheid’ on Palestinians: Amnesty, ' Israel is carrying out “the crime of apartheid against Palestinians” and must be held accountable for treating them as “an inferior racial group”, Amnesty International says in a new report, joining the assessment of other rights groups. Released on Tuesday, the 280-page report [PDF] by the leading rights group details how Israeli authorities enforce a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinians.' back

Amnesty international, Irael's Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity, back

Aquinas, Summa I, 50, 4, Is every angel a different species?, ' . . . such things as agree in species but differ in number, agree in form, but are distinguished materially. If, therefore, the angels be not composed of matter and form, as was said above (Article 2), it follows that it is impossible for two angels to be of one species; just as it would be impossible for there to be several whitenesses apart, or several humanities, since whitenesses are not several, except in so far as they are in several substances.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I, 14, 8, Is the knowledge of God the cause of things?, 'Now it is manifest that God causes things by His intellect, since His being is His act of understanding; and hence His knowledge must be the cause of things, in so far as His will is joined to it. Hence the knowledge of God as the cause of things is usually called the "knowledge of approbation".' back

Aquinas, Summa: I, 14, 1, Is there knowledge in God?, ' I answer that, In God there exists the most perfect knowledge. . . . it is clear that the immateriality of a thing is the reason why it is cognitive; and according to the mode of immateriality is the mode of knowledge. Hence it is said in De Anima ii that plants do not know, because they are wholly material. But sense is cognitive because it can receive images free from matter, and the intellect is still further cognitive, because it is more separated from matter and unmixed, as said in De Anima iii. Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality as stated above (Question 7, Article 1), it follows that He occupies the highest place in knowledge.' back

Bergman & Mazzetti, The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon, ' In June 2019, three Israeli computer engineers arrived at a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. They unpacked dozens of computer servers, arranging them on tall racks in an isolated room. . . . Then, with their equipment in place, they began testing. The F.B.I. had bought a version of Pegasus, NSO’s premier spying tool. For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone.' back

Cannon, Piovesan & Munne-Bosch, Old and ancient trees are life history lottery winners and vital evolutionary resources for long-term adaptive capacity, Trees can live for many centuries with sustained fecundity and death is largely stochastic. We use a neutral stochastic model to examine tree demographic patterns that emerge over time, across a range of population sizes and empirically observed mortality rates. A small proportion of trees (~1% at 1.5% mortality) are life-history ‘lottery winners’, achieving ages >10–20× the median age. Maximum age increases with bigger populations and lower mortality rates. One-quarter of trees (~24%) achieve ages that are three to four times greater than the median age. Three age classes (mature, old and ancient) contribute unique evolutionary diversity across complex environmental cycles. Ancient trees are an emergent property of forests that requires many centuries to generate. They radically change variance in generation time and population fitness, bridging centennial environmental cycles. These life-history ‘lottery’ winners are vital to long-term forest adaptive capacity and provide invaluable data about environmental history and individual longevity. Old and ancient trees cannot be replaced through restoration or regeneration for many centuries. They must be protected to preserve their invaluable diversity. back

Christopher Shields (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), The Active Mind of De Anima III 5 , ' After characterizing the mind (nous) and its activities in De Animaiii 4, Aristotle takes a surprising turn. In De Anima iii 5, he introduces an obscure and hotly disputed subject: the active mind or active intellect (nous poiêtikos). Controversy surrounds almost every aspect of De Anima iii 5, not least because in it Aristotle characterizes the active mind—a topic mentioned nowhere else in his entire corpus—as ‘separate and unaffected and unmixed, being in its essence actuality’ (chôristos kai apathês kai amigês, tê ousia energeia; DA iii 5, 430a17–18) and then also as ‘deathless and everlasting’ (athanaton kai aidion; DA iii 5, 430a23). This comes as no small surprise to readers of De Anima, because Aristotle had earlier in the same work treated the mind (nous) as but one faculty (dunamis) of the soul (psuchê), and he had contended that the soul as a whole is not separable from the body (DA ii 1, 413a3–5). back

Claude Shannon (1949), Communication in the Presence of Noise, 'A method is developed for representing any communication system geometrically. Messages and the corresponding signals are points in two “function spaces,” and the modulation process is a mapping of one space into the other. Using this representation, a number of results in communication theory are deduced concerning expansion and compression of bandwidth and the threshold effect. Formulas are found for the maximum rate of transmission of binary digits over a system when the signal is perturbed by various types of noise. Some of the properties of “ideal” systems which transmit at this maximum rate are discussed. The equivalent number of binary digits per second for certain information sources is calculated.' [C. E. Shannon , “Communication in the presence of noise,” Proc. IRE, vol. 37, pp. 10–21, Jan. 1949.] back

David Allen, ‘There’s Nothing Quite as Distressing as This Piece’, ' But his most recent album takes us to the end of the 19th century — indeed, to music that in its aphoristic brevity and experimental chromaticism anticipates the innovations of the 20th: the four groups of short pieces, Op. 116-119, that Brahms wrote in 1892 and 1893, not long before his death in 1897. These works of desperate sadness distill Brahms’s typical ambiguity into the most concentrated of forms. They also have an unsparing emotional directness — albeit one that Brahms reveals with characteristic, uneasy ambivalence.' back

David Gibson, ' Pope Benedict faulted over sex abuse claims: New report is just one chapter in his – and Catholic Church’s – fraught record , back

Don Quixote - Wikipedia, Don Quixote - Wikipedia, the dree encyclopedia, ' Don Quixote . . . is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. Its full title is The Ingenious Gentleman Sir Quixote of La Mancha . . .. It was originally published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. A founding work of Western literature, it is often labeled as the first modern novel and is considered one of the greatest works ever written. . . .. The plot revolves around the adventures of a member of the very lowest nobility or hidalgo ("Son of Someone") from La Mancha named Alonso Quixano, who reads so many chivalric romances that he either loses or pretends to have lost his mind in order to become a knight-errant (caballero andante) to revive chivalry and serve his nation, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha.' back

George F. Kennan (1987), Containment: 40 Years Later, back

George Kennan (1947), The Long Telegram, ' ' Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb. 3,11 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of oversimplification. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts, subjects of which will be roughly as follows: (1) Basic features of postwar Soviet outlook. (2) Background of this outlook. (3) Its projection in practical policy on official level. (4) Its projection on unofficial level. (5) Practical deductions from standpoint of US policy. I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel; but questions involved are of such urgent importance, particularly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve attention at all, seem to me to deserve it at once.' back

Google Earth engine, How Google is helping fight climate change, illegal logging, flooding in Africa and a lot more with a service you haven’t heard of, ' Google Earth Engine offers its trove of satellite imagery and analysis tools for free, helping groups around the world monitor changes in the environment. back

Google Earth Engine, A planetary-scale platform for Earth science data & analysis, ' Google Earth Engine combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities. Scientists, researchers, and developers use Earth Engine to detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth's surface. Earth Engine is now available for commercial use, and remains free for academic and research use. back

Grenville Cross, Judges handling national security cases in Hong Kong remain true to their judicial oath, defying critics, ' As the national security law incorporates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, with its basic protections, and recognises the rights of suspects, its drafters obviously envisaged that criminal proceedings brought under it would be no less fair than any other trials. This should more than satisfy objective observers, as also should Cheung’s assurance that the Hong Kong judiciary is “fully committed to maintaining an independent, impartial and efficient judicial system which upholds the rule of law”.' back

Gretchen Vogel, Malaria-preventing bed nets save children’s lives—with impacts that can last for decades, ' Since the 1990s, bed nets impregnated with insecticides have been an invaluable tool for malaria prevention. Babies and young children who sleep under them are far less likely to die of the disease. But some scientists have worried this might increase the risk of contracting malaria later in life by preventing development of the immunity that protects older children and adults in areas where malaria is common. Now, an ambitious new study allays those fears. Thousands of people who slept under bed nets as youngsters in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Tanzania still have a significant survival advantage through young adulthood over peers who did not.' back

Jack Schafer, Opinion | The Dangerous Appeal of Neil Young’s Righteous Censorship , ' The thing about bunk is that often it’s a demand-side phenomenon, not just a supply-side one. The standard human appetite for convenient, reductionist theories tends to soar during times of crisis as people seek easy explanations for the hard problems. Why anybody at this late date would still reject the vaccine is beyond me, but vaccine resistance would persist even if Rogan vanished.' back

James Martin, How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid?, ' When it comes to schadenfreude, a line from Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” is apposite. The dotty father of Charles Ryder, the protagonist, is hosting a meal at home. The father mentions someone whose business has failed, and another guest chuckles. “You find his misfortune the subject of mirth?” Charles’s father retorts. It’s a lighthearted scene, probably not meant to carry as much weight as other scenes in Waugh’s novel about moral choices. But it has always stuck with me. Don’t find another person’s misery the subject of mirth, glee or satisfaction. Doing so is mean. It’s immoral. And one day you may be the unfortunate one.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2010), Essay 13: On modelling the world, ' Over the last few centuries, science has provided us with a quite comprehensive picture of our habitat that begins with the initial singularity predicted by general relativity and traces the evolution of the Universe to its present state. To physicists, this work is an approach to a ‘theory of everything’. It provides a good foundation for practical technologies like computers, power grids, space vehicles and medicine, but has little to say about human spiritual issues. The purpose of this article is to extend the physical model into the spiritual realm, rather as Aristotle generated metaphysics out of physics. Traditionally the majority of philosophers and theologians have postulated a very real and sharp distinction between such categories of being as spiritual and material, living and non-living, intelligent and not-intelligent, eternal and ephemeral and so on. Here I propose a model that embraces these and all other distinctions in the world in a single consistent picture.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2019), A prolegomenon to scientific theology, ' This thesis is an attempt to carry speculative theology beyond the apogee it reached in the medieval work of Thomas Aquinas into the world of empirical science. Since the time of Aquinas, our understanding of the Universe has increased enormously. The ancient theologians not only conceived a perfect God, but they also saw the world as a very imperfect place. Their reaction was to place God outside the world. I will argue that we live in a Universe which approaches infinity in size and complexity, is as perfect as can be, and fulfils all the roles traditionally attributed to God, creator, lawmaker and judge.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2019a), Entropy and Metaethics, ' If we reject divine revelation as the foundation for morality we must find our grounds within the universe, which is tantamount to the naturalization of morality. So the question becomes 'how does nature embrace spirit as the sovereign ground for moral value?' . . . I propose an answer in terms of what Einstein considered to be the most fundamental and irrefutable law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, which expresses the fact that entropy almost never decreases. In a more morally relevant frame, this law expresses the fact that the universe is inherently creative. Human spirituality, whatever it may be, has emerged from the natural world.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2021), Essay 30: Cognitive cosmology, ' A path to cognitive cosmology is relatively clear: we begin with the initial singularity and identify it as the primordial quantum of action, identical to the traditional God described by Aristotle and Aquinas. We then examine the ancient Christian theological and psychological doctrine of the Trinity devised by Augustine and Aquinas to explain how one God can become three. The next step is to identify the features of this theological structure that we find in the universe back near the very beginning when energy, quantum mechanics, spacetime and gravitation first emerged within the initial singularity.' back

Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky, ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

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Matt Johnson, Opinion | Forget NATO: Ukraine's Problem Is Russian Imperialism , ' Moscow refuses to accept Ukrainian independence today for a simple reason: because Vladimir Putin believes the two countries should be one. This is why Russia has positioned more than 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border and demanded that NATO formally declare it will never allow Kyiv to join the alliance – the most brazen act of imperial coercion this century. Don’t blame NATO expansion for this pointless and terrifying crisis. Don’t blame the post-Cold War hubris of the West. Blame Russian imperialism and the monumental sense of historical grievance that animates every decision the Kremlin makes.' back

Visual system - Wikipedia, Visual system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The visual system is the part of the central nervous system which gives organisms the ability to process visual detail, as well as enabling the formation of several non-image photo response functions. It detects and interprets information from visible light to build a representation of the surrounding environment.' back

Wojciech Hubert Zurek (2008), Quantum origin of quantum jumps: breaking of unitary symmetry induced by information transfer and the transition from quantum to classical, 'Submitted on 17 Mar 2007 (v1), last revised 18 Mar 2008 (this version, v3)) Measurements transfer information about a system to the apparatus, and then further on – to observers and (often inadvertently) to the environment. I show that even imperfect copying essential in such situations restricts possible unperturbed outcomes to an orthogonal subset of all possible states of the system, thus breaking the unitary symmetry of its Hilbert space implied by the quantum superposition principle. Preferred outcome states emerge as a result. They provide framework for the “wavepacket collapse”, designating terminal points of quantum jumps, and defining the measured observable by specifying its eigenstates.' back