Ghosh (2024), Amitav , Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories, John Murray Press 2024 Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and a history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire's financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself. 
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Hawking (2007), Stephen , God Created the Integers, Running Press 2007 ' Bestselling author and physicist Stephen Hawking explores the "masterpieces" of mathematics, 25 landmarks spanning 2,500 years and representing the work of 15 mathematicians, including Augustin Cauchy, Bernard Riemann, and Alan Turing. This extensive anthology allows readers to peer into the mind of genius by providing them with excerpts from the original mathematical proofs and results. It also helps them understand the progression of mathematical thought, and the very foundations of our present-day technologies. Each chapter begins with a biography of the featured mathematician, clearly explaining the significance of the result, followed by the full proof of the work, reproduced from the original publication. 
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Crusades - Wikipedia, Crusades - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Crusades were a series of intermittent military campaigns in the years from 1096 to 1487, sanctioned by various Popes. In 1095 the Byzantine Emperor, Alexios I, sent an ambassador to Pope Urban II requesting military support in the Byzantines' conflict with the westward migrating Turks in Anatolia. The Pope responded by calling Catholics to join what later became known as the First Crusade. One of Urban's stated aims was to guarantee pilgrims access to the holy sites in the Holy Land that were under Muslim control while his wider strategy was to reunite the Eastern and Western branches of Christendom, divided after their split in 1054, and establish himself as head of the united Church. This initiated a complex 200-year struggle in the region.' back

Douglas R. Papke (2015), Karl Marx on Religion, ' Religious people sometimes express disdain for Karl Marx and his philosophies because he supposedly characterized religion as “the opiate of the masses.” It turns out that this isn’t exactly what Marx said. Furthermore, he wasn’t necessarily negative about religion and its role in social life. Appearing in Marx’s projected but never completed A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy, Marx’s words on religion are of course in German. He uses the German word “Volk,” which usually translates as “the people” rather than “the masses” as his detractors choose to claim. Then, too, it’s important to remember that opium and opium derivatives were for the most part legal during the period in which Marx wrote and that they were thought of largely as medicinal. Any suggestion that Marx was equating religion to an illegal, addictive narcotic is therefore off-target. Marx’s actual words regarding religion deserve reflection. My best translation of those words is as follows: “Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions.” Overall, Marx is speaking not as a man of faith but rather as a secular humanist. However, he does appear to suggest a largely positive role religion could play in an exploitative and alienating society. Human beings have the distressing habit of killing one another because of religious differences, and some of our most religious citizens wear the biggest of blinders. But Marx is right that our society can use a “heart” and a “soul” wherever we might find it.' back

Galton board - Wikipedia, Galton board - Wikipedia, ther free encyclopedia, ' The Galton board, also known as the Galton box or quincunx or bean machine, is a device invented by Francis Galton to demonstrate the central limit theorem, in particular that with sufficient sample size the binomial distribution approximates a normal distribution. Among its applications, it afforded insight into regression to the mean or "reversion to mediocrity". back

Gemma Ware & Indrajit Roy, Moments of hope: how Indians keep pushing back against the hollowing out of democracy , 'After six weeks of voting in the world’s largest democracy, on June 4, Indians will learn who is to be their next prime minister. Narendra Modi, standing for a third term, is the frontrunner. Critics of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) warn that India’s democracy has been hollowed out during his premiership, including through its treatment of religious minorities, most notably Muslims, the targeting of political adversaries, and by pushing through laws with little debate in the Lok Sabha, India’s parliament. Thousands of Indians have taken to the streets to protest against Modi’s policies. And for Indrajit Roy, professor of global development at the University of York in the UK, this pushback by Indians against threats to their democracy is an example of an audacious type of hope. He talks to The Conversation Weekly podcast about what it means to be living in hope, and where he sees examples of that in India. back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1992), An essay on the divinity of money , ' The rise of science questioned revelation and the churches as sources of truth, but they have remained in existence because science still lacks the power to ask or answer the fundamental questions of life and death that concern theology. Here I outline a new scientific theology whose model of god derives not from ancient text but from the mathematical theory of text and communication itself. I propose that this model describes the universe of our experience, which is therefore fittingly called god. I then interpret this model using elements of current physical theory. These ideas are then applied to money. The movement of money is an abstract representation of the the activity of society as a whole, just as the flow of momentum in space-time is an abstract representation of the physical universe. My hypothesis is that proper understanding and political control of public cashflows is necessary and sufficient to obtain peaceful civilisation.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2024), Cognitive Cosmology, ' Is the universe divine? My hope is to inspire our lives with a theology that identifies God and the Universe. If the Universe is divine, all our experiences are experiences of God. Theology can therefore become a discipline founded on evidence. Since we see just one consistent Universe, the scientific approach will lead theology toward unity as it has unified mathematics, physics and biology. The unification of theology is a step toward conscious global cooperation. Global human cooperation is a step toward respecting and caring for ourselves and Earth, our common home. This website is a tribute to Aristotle. He created a path from the matter and form of his Physics to the potency and act he applied to explain knowledge in De Anima and divinity in Metaphysics.' back

Leonardo Iasi et al, , Neandertal ancestry through time: Insights from genomes of ancient andpresent-day humans, ' Abstract: Gene flow from Neandertals has shaped the landscape of genetic and phenotypic variation in modern humans. We identify the location and size of introgressed Neandertal ancestry segments in more than 300 genomes spanning the last 50,000 years. We study how Neandertal ancestry is shared among individuals to infer the time and duration of the Neandertal gene flow. We find the correlation of Neandertal segment locations across individuals and their divergence to sequenced Neandertals, both support a model of single major Neandertal gene flow. Our catalog of introgressed segments through time confirms that most natural selection–positive and negative–on Neandertal ancestry variants occurred immediately after the gene flow, and provides new insights into how the contact with Neandertals shaped human origins and adaptation.' back

Normal distribution - Wikipedia, Normal distribution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Normal distributions are extremely important in statistics, and are often used in the natural and social sciences for real-valued random variables whose distributions are not known. One reason for their popularity is the central limit theorem, which states that, under mild conditions, the mean of a large number of random variables independently drawn from the same distribution is distributed approximately normally, irrespective of the form of the original distribution.' back

Yuanyue Dang (2024), What lesson does Stalin’s Cold War ‘mistake’ have for Russia, China and the US today? A Chinese historian [Shen Zhihua] weighs in, ' History cannot be unlived. But I believe that the Cold War was not inevitable. According to my research, every step that led to the Cold War had a chance of being reversed, but the US and the Soviet Union still fell into the abyss of the Cold War. In terms of the causal relationship between changes in diplomatic and economic policy, the hardening of the US diplomatic approach towards the Soviet Union was a prerequisite for a complete change in economic policy, while the overall shift in the Soviet Union’s diplomatic approach towards the US was the result of a complete disappointment with the US in economic policy. Henry Kissinger dies at 100, leaves indelible mark on US foreign policy Thus, looking at the process of the Cold War, it was undoubtedly the US that started the “engine”. But the Soviet Union was not innocent. On the one hand, it is often said that the US misinterpreted the motives of the Soviet Union, and while there was certainly an ideological bias inherent in US policymakers, in many cases it was Moscow’s inappropriate or aggressive behaviour that triggered the misinterpretation and provided Washington with the tools to change its policy and mobilise public opinion. Returning to today’s US-China relations with the lessons of this history, we can conclude that every detail matters.' back