Cornwell (1995), David, and (aka John le Carré), Our Game, Hodder and Stoughton 1995 Jacket: 'At forty-eight, Tim Cranmer is a secret servant in premature retirement in deepest Somerset. His Cold War is fought and won, and he is free to devote himself to his stately manor hoiuse, his vineyard and his beau tiful young mistress Emma. But no man can escape his past, and Tim's past lies twenty miles way, in the chaotic person of Larry Pettifer, bored rsadical, don, philanderer and for twenty years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanquished Communist threat. And between the two men stands Emma, an unresolved rivalry thar dates all the way to their shared boyhood at public school.' 
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Everett III (1973), Hugh, and Bryce S Dewitt, Neill Graham (editors), The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press 1973 Jacket: 'A novel interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed in brief form by Hugh Everett in 1957, forms the nucleus around which this book has developed. The volume contains Dr Everett's short paper from 1957, "'Relative State' formulation of quantum mechanics" and a far longer exposition of his interpretation entitled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function" never before published. In addition other papers by Wheeler, DeWitt, Graham, Cooper and van Vechten provide further discussion of the same theme. Together they constitute virtually the entire world output of scholarly commentary on the Everett interpretation.' 
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Feynman (1988), Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. . . . In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.' 
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Alex Lo (2023_10_24), America is ‘the danger’ and will end up getting us all killed, ' What he actually said in the Oval Office was: “America is a beacon to the world, still, still. We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright said, the indispensable nation … American leadership is what holds the world together.” He said something even more boastful in an earlier interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history – not in the world, in the history of the world,” he said. “The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defence.” . . .. While it may be easy to dismiss Biden’s remarks as the bombast of an ageing leader no longer in full command of his mental faculties, such a belief is actually common “inside the Beltway”, among the US governing elites. . . .. Effectively, America is telling everyone in the Middle East and beyond to stay still and shut the hell up until Israel finishes whatever it wants to do to the Palestinians. That’s not just about repeating America’s mistakes, but adding a few extras with exclusively Israeli features.. . . .. America is the danger. Its self-styled indispensability will end up getting us all killed.' back

Andrew Lok Hang Chan, Opinion: Hong Kong authorities don’t want you to read this story. Here’s why. , ' Every day, I am inundated with news about Hong Kong’s national security law — but I never imagined becoming ensnared in its grasp. That changed when the police arrived at our front door and told my father they would search our apartment without a warrant. Until then, I had naively believed that their focus was on politicians and protesters, never nerds like me. The police’s concern was stranger than fiction: They had taken umbrage at 11 essays submitted to a Cantonese writing competition that I had organized in 2020. The national security law is intended to promote “social harmony” — in large part by stamping out Cantonese, the mother tongue of most Hongkongers, in favor of forcing the widespread use of Mandarin, China’s national language. The essays had violated that “social harmony,” a government official told me, pointing out their “problematic content,” ranging from Cantonese profanities to narratives of emigration, all deemed unlawful.' Andrew Lok Hang Chan is the former president of Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis. back

Ari Chand, Scarygirl: the richly built world of this new Aussie film tells a story of human-nature connection, ' With growing streaming demand for original content, Australia has been going through an animation and VFX industry boom. Scarygirl marks a 3D animated feature film release that incorporates Australian accents, colloquialisms and sensibilities for a global audience. Animation and visual ways of expressing ideas about the world have long been used to share messages with a new generation. Filled with fantastical world-building, character and creature design, the Scarygirl universe mimics our concern for the natural world and the need for human-nature connection. With some darker themes in the story around biodiversity loss, the film introduces a healthy level of cynicism concerning capitalism, technological innovation and progress.' back

Bain Munro Attwood, History and myth: why the Treaty of Waitangi remains such a ‘bloody difficult subject’, ' By seeking to tell more truthful histories, historians might provoke New Zealanders to consider whether there are not intellectually sounder bases than the Treaty/te Tiriti for the political project it stands for. Such histories could also provide – and indeed have provided – accounts that show how differently te Tiriti/the Treaty has been interpreted and understood over time, changing as the present has changed. In performing such a task, historians can demonstrate, in the words of an American historian, “how the horizon of the present is not the horizon of all that is in the world”. In other words, the discipline of history’s primary intellectual justification probably lies in it being able to reveal that, once upon a time, there were ways of seeing things that are different to those that dominate in contemporary society. Works of history should surprise, even astound readers, by retrieving those ways of seeing and acting that are no longer known by most people. In this sense, good history is a comparative exercise, drawing attention to differences and similarities between the past and the present. This could enable us to ask whether, in seeking to redress Māori loss and suffering, something is to be gained by broadening our horizons to include some of those that have largely disappeared from sight. back

Brendan M. Lake & Marco Baroni, Human-like systematic generalization through a meta-learning neural network, ' The power of human language and thought arises from systematic compositionality— the algebraic ability to understand and produce novel combinations from known components. Fodor and Pylyshyn1 famously argued that artificial neural networks lack this capacity and are therefore not viable models of the mind. Neural networks have advanced considerably in the years since, yet the systematicity challenge persists. Here we successfully address Fodor and Pylyshyn’s challenge by providing evidence that neural networks can achieve human-like systematicity when optimized for their compositional skills. To do so, we introduce the meta-learning for compositionality (MLC) approach for guiding training through a dynamic stream of compositional tasks. To compare humans and machines, we conducted human behavioural experiments using an instruction learning paradigm. After considering seven different models, we found that, in contrast to perfectly systematic but rigid probabilistic symbolic models, and perfectly flexible but unsystematic neural networks, only MLC achieves both the systematicity and flexibility needed for human-like generalization. MLC also advances the compositional skills of machine learning systems in several systematic generalization benchmarks. Our results show how a standard neural network architecture, optimized for its compositional skills, can mimic human systematic generalization in a head-to-head comparison. back

David Rothkopf, Opinion | This Was Netanyahu's Most Catastrophic Error, ' Of all the mistakes made by Netanyahu before Hamas' despicable assault, from attacking Israeli democracy to personal corruption, from embracing Putin to promoting extremists, his strategy of shunting the Palestinians aside has been a catastrophe – and has undermined the popular global support Israel might have expected.' back

Debanji Ganguli, ‘Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds’ – the Bhagavad Gita explained, ' The Bhagavad Gita dramatises a meditative exchange between Arjuna and Lord Krishna, who appears as his charioteer during the momentous battle between two clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. The battlefield is located in Kurukshetra, a town close to New Delhi. Each clan stakes its claim to be the mightiest ruling dynasty of erstwhile Bharat (present day India). Poets, philosophers, scientists, public intellectuals and political leaders have been enthralled by the Bhagavad Gita since its first English translation appeared in 1785. Wherein lies Gita’s popular appeal across oral and performative cultures? The Gita is more than just a sacred text of the Hindus. It distils insights from several schools of philosophy in classical India. Wilhelm von Humboldt, the renowned 19th century German scholar and philologist, called the Bhagavad Gita “the most beautiful, presumably the only real philosophical poem of all known literatures.”. . .. The Oxford philosopher and president of India from 1962-1967, Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, once remarked the trauma of the two world wars spurred thinkers to turn to Gita for “its dramatization of a perpetually recurring predicament.” Radhakrishnan’s treatise on the Bhagavad Gita continues to be a revered scholarly source. The “recurring predicament” at the heart of the Bhagavad Gita is this: what constitutes righteous action in the face of moral ambiguity and the inevitability of violence?' back

Eamonn Wooster & Erick Liundgren, From meerkat school to whale-tail slapping and oyster smashing, how clever predators shape their world, ' In the 1980s a single humpback whale in the Gulf of Maine developed the “lobtail feeding method”. This unique hunting method of slapping the water’s surface appears to drive fish into dense schools, making it easier to consume them. Lobtail feeding caught on. Now many humpback whales are doing it. Ecologists have long thought animals acted on instinct alone. But a growing body of evidence shows many animals, much like us, have complex brains and social lives. In our new research, we argue the science of ecology can learn a great deal from the study of animal cognition and culture. Cognition is what goes on in the mind, which determines how animals perceive and respond to the world around them. Culture is the development and spread of socially learned behaviours. These are important – but generally overlooked – mechanisms influencing ecosystems.' back

Eugene Wigner (1960), The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, 'The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. Second, it is just this uncanny usefulness of mathematical concepts that raises the question of the uniqueness of our physical theories.' back

Geoffrey Robinson, There is a path to peace in the Middle East, but neither side is taking it, ' There must be an independent and expert inquiry into the bombing of Al Ahli Arab Hospital, which killed so many children. Whether it came from an incompetently fired Hamas rocket or a malign Israeli attack is not of immediate concern because it was indubitably a crime against humanity in a war that will continue to kill children unless and until there is a ceasefire. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the hospital bombing, the United Nations Security Council, the body entrusted to keep world peace, refused to pass a resolution calling for a cease-fire. It was vetoed by the US and France, in deference to Israel’s desire to keep bombing Gaza to “eliminate Hamas”. . .. Nonetheless, and for all the crimes of Hamas, it is necessary to protest against the cruel destruction of Palestinian lives and homes. An eye for an eye is a brutal philosophy. The Israeli version, two eyes for an eye, leads only to moral blindness in Gaza. The international law solution remains clear, namely that Israel is entitled to exist, to be recognised, and to security, and the Palestinian people are entitled to their territory, to the right of self-determination, and to their own state. Both sides are under a duty to negotiate to achieve this position but neither has been prepared to give peace this chance. It would be over optimistic to predict an international law solution, or any solution at all.' back

Jess Davis & Tyne Logan, Gagged and grief stricken, but not without hope, ' For the past 40 years, Antarctic ecologist Dana Bergstrom has studied one of the wildest places on the planet. “Antarctica gets into your blood,” she says. “For somewhere so cold, it really makes your heart warm.” A woman wearing a yellow and black jacket and red beanie stands in front of a clear blue lake snow behind. Dana Bergstrom visited Antarctica and sub-Antarctica more than 20 times over her career. Supplied: Patti Virtue As a public servant with the Australian Antarctic Division, she operated inside a system where any outside communication about her scientific work was carefully calibrated, crafted and monitored. But eventually that calibration went beyond what Bergstrom thinks can be justified. “I was gagged,” she says. Recently retired, Bergstrom is now speaking out about being silenced. “I went with it, I was a good public servant. “But it was disheartening to not be able to tell the whole story.” And she’s not alone. Ecologists and climate scientists have told the ABC of a widespread culture of suppression and self-censorship. Sometimes it’s insidious, driven by the fear of losing funding or contracts. Sometimes it’s overt, through active gagging or academic careers being threatened. All of that for attempting to “speak the truth” about environmental damage, ecosystem collapse and climate change. And it’s taking a toll, with scientists suffering mental anguish at their research being suppressed instead of being used to help save species on the brink of extinction, to help arrest the rapidly deteriorating state of the natural world. As one says: “It really impacts you, because how can it not? “You can’t look away.” back

Katherine Harry & Emma Rettner, New class of recyclable polymer materials could one day help reduce single-use plastic waste, ' But say you can recycle one of these plastics by a different method, so it doesn’t end up contaminating the recycling stream. When we mixed samples of polypropylene with a polymer we made, we were still able to depolymerize – or break down the material – and regain our building blocks without chemically affecting the polypropylene. This indicated that a contaminated waste stream could still recover its value, and the material in it could go on to be recycled, either mechanically or chemically. . . . .. Connecting two different polymers together multiple times until they form a single, long molecule creates what’s called a multiblock polymer. Just by adjusting how much of each polymer type goes into the multiblock polymer, our team created a wide range of materials with properties that spanned across polyolefin types. But creating these multiblock polymers is easier said than done. . . . .. In our method, the reactive groups are now the same as each other, meaning we didn’t have to worry about pairing the ends of each building block to make polymers that can compete with the polyolefins we already use. Using the same strategy, applied in reverse by adding hydrogen, we could disconnect the polymers back into their building blocks and easily separate them to use again. back

P. A. M. Dirac (1933), The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics, ' . . . there is an alternative formulation [to the Hamiltonian] in classical dynamics, provided by the Lagrangian. This requires one to work in terms of coordinates and velocities instead of coordinates and momenta. The two formulation are closely related but there are reasons for believing that the Lagrangian one is more fundamental. . . . Secondly the lagrangian method can easily be expressed relativistically, on account of the action function being a relativistic invariant; . . .. ' [This article was first published in Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion, Band 3, Heft 1 (1933), pp. 64–72.] 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