Darwin (1875, 1998), Charles, and Harriet Ritvo (Introduction), The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (Foundations of Natural History), Johns Hopkins University Press 1875, 1998 ' "The Variation, with its thousands of hard-won observations of the facts of variation in domesticated species, is a frustrating, but worthwhile read, for it reveals the Darwin we rarely see -- the embattled Darwin, struggling to keep his project on the road. Sometimes he seems on the verge of being overwhelmed by the problems he is dealing with, but then a curious fact of natural history will engage him (the webbing between water gun-dogs' toes, the absurdly short beak of the pouter pigeon) and his determination to make sense of it rekindles. As he disarmingly declares, 'the whole subject of inheritance is wonderful.'. 
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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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Hughes (1993), Ted, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Faber & Faber 1993 ' Synopsis In this momentous adventure in criticism, one of the leading poets writing in English argues that our profound response to Shakespeare's great late plays is prompted by a mythic, symbolic structure that inheres in each of them, and indeed binds the entire Shakespearean corpus into one huge, complex, ever-evolving work. Ted Hughes sees Shakespeare's early poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece as embodying two great myths of the archaic world, that of the hero who rejects the love of the Goddess and is killed in revenge by a boar; and that of the king, or god, whose crime is rape and whose punishment is banishment. These two complexes merge as Shakespeare's work develops into what Hughes calls the Tragic Equation, a flexible formula through which the poet was able to tap into the innate power of these myths to enliven his own imagination - and through him the imagination of Elizabethan England, in which the conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism in the "living myth" of the English Reformation never lay far from the bloody surface of events. With his characteristic mixture of erudition and immediacy, Ted Hughes traces this idea in a close reading of Shakespeare's entire work. This text originally grew out of correspondence with dramatists, and anyone for whom intimate attention to the plays is important - scholar, student, actor, or common reader - will profit greatly from Hughes's loving, intensive, engrossing, and radical analysis of the greatest writing in the language.' 
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Jaeger (1997), Werner Wilhelm, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the history of his development, Oxford University Press 1997 Jacket: '"Aristotle was the first thinker to set up along with his philosophy a conception of his own position in history; he thereby created a new kind of philosophical consciousness, more responsible and inwardly complex. He was the inventor of the notion of intellectual development in time . . . ." In this classic study, Professor Jaeger profoundly altered the general view of Aristotle among philosophers and classical scholars. He showed that Aristotle was not uncompromisingly opposed to Plato, that he developed gradually, applying step by step his particular genius to the problems of his age.' 
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Nicholls (2025), Jeffrey, Cognitive cosmology: a systematic integration of physics and theology, Austin Macauley 2025 ' More than 60 years ago my spiritual advisors (rightly or wrongly) diagnosed in me a divine call to the Roman Catholic priesthood. As soon as I turned 18 I entered the Dominican Order
I quickly fell on love with their leading theologian, Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1275) and read him voraciously. His Latin is so easy and his ideas quite cosmic.
Aquinas revolutionized theology by harmonizing it with the work of Aristotle, the best science available in the Middle Ages. Since the time of Galileo (1562 - 1642) modern science has travelled far beyond Aristotle. We now have comprehensive knowledge of the Universe. We can now see that it is big enough and beautiful enough to be considered divine. It seems obvious to me that it is time to introduce science to theology once again. Just three steps are required:
First, we must assume that the Universe is divine. This makes God observable, amenable to modern science which is based on observation.
Second, it follows, if this is the case, that physics and theology have the same subject and must therefore be consistent.
Third we need open up a new field of research, repeating Aristotle’s ancient journey from physics to theology. In this book I have tried to trace a quantum theoretical path from the unstoppable omnipotent emptiness of the initial singularity to the exquisite complexity of our world. My only guide is the logical constraint placed on omnipotence by consistency.'  
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Nielsen (2016), Michael A., and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press 2016 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002. 
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Streater (2000), Raymond F, and Arthur S Wightman, PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That, Princeton University Press 2000 Amazon product description: 'PCT, Spin and Statistics, and All That is the classic summary of and introduction to the achievements of Axiomatic Quantum Field Theory. This theory gives precise mathematical responses to questions like: What is a quantized field? What are the physically indispensable attributes of a quantized field? Furthermore, Axiomatic Field Theory shows that a number of physically important predictions of quantum field theory are mathematical consequences of the axioms. Here Raymond Streater and Arthur Wightman treat only results that can be rigorously proved, and these are presented in an elegant style that makes them available to a broad range of physics and theoretical mathematics.' 
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Woolf (1925, 1992), Virginia, and Elaine Showalter (introduction & notes), Mrs Dalloway, Penguin Books 1992 Introduction: Woolf's literary standing has changed drastically over the last thirty years, but the character of Mrs Dalloway remains puxzzling. As Margaret Drabble has pointed out, like her predecessors Jane Austen and George Eliot, Woolf 'chose on the whole to describe women less gifted, intellectually less audacious, more conventional that herself. Indeed, in writing her fourth novel, at a moment that marked her own sense of artistic independence and maturity, Woolf chose as her heroine a London society lady whom even she thought 'too glittery & tinsely.' Woolf's contemporaries found Clarsissa class-bound and slight.'  
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Albert Einstein (1915), The Field Equations of Gravitation, ' In two recently published papers I have shown how to obtain field equations of gravitation that comply with the postulate of general relativity, i.e., which in their general formulation are covariant under arbitrary substitutions of space-time variables. [. . .] With this, we have finally completed the general theory of relativity as a logical structure. The postulate of relativity in its most general formulation (which makes space-time coordinates into physically meaningless parameters) leads with compelling necessity to a very specific theory of gravitation that also explains the movement of the perihelion of Mercury. However, the postulate of general relativity cannot reveal to us anything new and different about the essence of the various processes in nature than what the special theory of relativity taught us already. The opinions I recently voiced here in this regard have been in error. Every physical theory that complies with the special theory of relativity can, by means of the absolute differential calculus, be integrated into the system of general relativity theory — without the latter providing any criteria about the admissibility of such physical theory' back

Alex Lo (2025_07_11), My Take | A warning from the past about the United States of today, ' There is much to be thankful for this year if you are one of the academic bosses who run the University of Toronto. You might especially appreciate the return of Donald Trump to the White House, even as he has threatened to annex your country and make it America’s 51st state. In March, it was revealed that three superstar academics and specialists on fascism at Yale – the historians and couple Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder, and the philosopher Jason Stanley – have taken up senior positions at the premier university in my hometown in an act of self-exile. In an emotional interview with The New York Times titled, “We study fascism, and we’re Leaving the US”, the trio said: “The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later. My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances … [. . .] Richard Cullen, a friend and law lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, has reached a similar conclusion about America. Writing in an Australian publication, he warned: “Washington is savagely attacking its own leading universities to shut down basic operating freedoms; [. . .] The Trump administration now routinely ignores court orders; encourages the domestic brutalisation of undocumented migrants and citizens; threatens foreign friends and foes alike; subverts international law by sanctioning its institutional representatives; and enables ally Israel’s genocide in Palestine and aggression across the Middle East. This is how a fascist police state operates, at home and abroad.' back

Ancient Egyptian Religion - Wikipedia, Ancient Egyptian Religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Ancient Egyptian religion was a complex system of polytheistic beliefs and rituals that formed an integral part of ancient Egyptian culture. It centered on the Egyptians' interactions with many deities believed to be present and in control of the world. About 1,500 deities are known.[1] Rituals such as prayer and offerings were provided to the gods to gain their favor. Formal religious practice centered on the pharaohs, the rulers of Egypt, believed to possess divine powers by virtue of their positions. They acted as intermediaries between their people and the gods, and were obligated to sustain the gods through rituals and offerings so that they could maintain Ma'at, the order of the cosmos, and repel Isfet, which was chaos. The state dedicated enormous resources to religious rituals and to the construction of temples. [. . .] At various times, certain gods became preeminent over the others, including the sun god Ra, the creator god Amun, and the mother goddess Isis. For a brief period, in the theology promulgated by the pharaoh Akhenaten, a single god, the Aten, replaced the traditional pantheon.' back

Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3, Is God omnipotent?, '. . . God is called omnipotent because He can do all things that are possible absolutely; which is the second way of saying a thing is possible. For a thing is said to be possible or impossible absolutely, according to the relation in which the very terms stand to one another, possible if the predicate is not incompatible with the subject, as that Socrates sits; and absolutely impossible when the predicate is altogether incompatible with the subject, as, for instance, that a man is a donkey.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I, 3, 4, Are essence and existence the same in God?, 'I answer that, God is not only His own essence, as shown in the preceding article, but also His own existence. This may be shown in several ways. First, whatever a thing has besides its essence must be caused either by the constituent principles of that essence (like a property that necessarily accompanies the species--as the faculty of laughing is proper to a man--and is caused by the constituent principles of the species), or by some exterior agent--as heat is caused in water by fire. Therefore, if the existence of a thing differs from its essence, this existence must be caused either by some exterior agent or by its essential principles. Now it is impossible for a thing's existence to be caused by its essential constituent principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence, if its existence is caused. Therefore that thing, whose existence differs from its essence, must have its existence caused by another. But this cannot be true of God; because we call God the first efficient cause. Therefore it is impossible that in God His existence should differ from His essence.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I, 3, 7, Is God altogether simple?, 'I answer that, The absolute simplicity of God may be shown in many ways. First, from the previous articles of this question. For there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His "suppositum"; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident. Therefore, it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple. . . . ' back

Aquinas, Summa: I, 2, 3, Does God exist?, 'I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . ' back

Charles Camosy & Mariele Courtois (2025_06_20), The Vatican Knows an ‘Industrial Revolution’ When It Sees One, ' The pope didn’t take long to explain why he picked the name Leo. Two days after his election, he cited his inspiration: the preceding Pope Leo, who led the Church while the West confronted the social and economic disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. The world now faces “another industrial revolution,” Leo XIV said last month, spurred not by mechanized manufacturing but by artificial intelligence. [. . .] Leo XIII insisted in Rerum Novarum that labor is both “personal” and “necessary” for each individual, and that societies should protect the dignity of their workers as they pursue economic growth. Idolizing capital widens inequality, hence the “misery and wretchedness” that many employers inflicted on much of the working class during the Industrial Revolution. The pope stated that socialism was no solution, but that employers must guarantee their workers reasonable hours, just wages, safe workplaces, and the right to unionize. [. . .] Although the Church may not have the same influence in the secular 21st century that it did in the 19th, there are signs of a possible Catholic resurgence—particularly among young people—that could help Leo reach a wider audience. Just as it did during the first Industrial Revolution, the Church has a chance to help safeguard work that is dignified, justly paid, and commensurate with human flourishing. The pope’s new name is a hopeful sign that this responsibility won’t go unmet.' back

Completeness of the real numbers - Wikipedia, Completeness of the real numbers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Intuitively, completeness implies that there are not any “gaps” (in Dedekind's terminology) or “missing points” in the real number line. . . . Depending on the construction of the real numbers used, completeness may take the form of an axiom (the completeness axiom), or may be a theorem proven from the construction. There are many equivalent forms of completeness, the most prominent being Dedekind completeness and Cauchy completeness (completeness as a metric space).' back

David Brooks (2025_04_07), I Should Have Seen This Coming, ' back

David James Troupes (2017), Ted Hughes and Christianity: Constant Revelation of the Sacrificed God, ' Abstract: This study challenges the accepted line that Ted Hughes was an 'anti-Christian' poet. By looking past the superficial 'God'-mocking of Hughes's early collections and focussing instead on his creative deployment of symbols and structures such as the fall, incarnation and crucifixion, I develop a nuanced, theologically informed appreciation of Hughes as a genuine religious poet with strong affinities for Christian thought,' back

Emma Graham-Harrison (2025_07_09), Israeli defence minister’s Gaza proposal marks escalation from incitement of war crimes to official planning for mass forced displacement, ' Defence minister Israel Katz’s plans for an internment camp on the ruins of Rafah mark an escalation beyond incitement to war crimes, already a mainstay of Israel’s political discourse, to operational planning for mass forced displacement. Israeli lawmakers including cabinet ministers have repeatedly called for the “cleansing” of Gaza, in the wake of Hamas’s cross-border attacks on 7 October, backing the forced deportation of Palestinians to other countries and new Israeli settlements in the territory. However, Katz was the first senior cabinet member to lay out, in a briefing on Monday to Israeli media, measures to implement the displacement of Palestinians from most of Gaza. He said he had given orders to plan a “humanitarian city”, to hold Palestinians who would not be allowed to leave. [. . .] Alon Pinkas, an analyst and former top Israeli diplomat, said: “⁠The plan is by definition unviable and impractical, without even getting to the moral depravity of forcing a desolate million people into a de facto internment camp. “Katz has a tendency to make outlandish, unfounded, chaos-stirring remarks (on Gaza, on Iran) that have the life expectancy of a mayfly.” However, it would be foolish to dismiss the plan to turn Rafah into a camp as purely political posturing given reported investment into planning for mass forced transfers, Pinkas added. back

General Covariance - Wikipedia, General covariance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, In theoretical physics, general covariance (also known as diffeomorphism covariance or general invariance) is the invariance of the form of physical laws under arbitrary differentiable coordinate transformations. The essential idea is that coordinates do not exist a priori in nature, but are only artifices used in describing nature, and hence should play no role in the formulation of fundamental physical laws.' back

Hanika Rizo & Jonathan O'Neil (2025_07_06), The oldest rocks on Earth are more than four billion years old, ' Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, during the geological eon known as the Hadean. The name “Hadean” comes from the Greek god of the underworld, reflecting the extreme heat that likely characterized the planet at the time. By 4.35 billion years ago, the Earth might have cooled down enough for the first crust to form and life to emerge. However, very little is known about this early chapter in Earth’s history, as rocks and minerals from that time are extremely rare. This lack of preserved geological records makes it difficult to reconstruct what the Earth looked like during the Hadean Eon, leaving many questions about its earliest evolution unanswered. [. . .] In 2008, a study led by one of us — associate professor Jonathan O'Neil (then a McGill University doctoral student) — proposed that rocks of this ancient crust had been preserved in northern Québec and were the only known vestige of the Hadean. Since then, the age of those rocks — found in the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt — has been controversial and the subject of ongoing scientific debate. [. . . ] In the summer of 2017, we returned to the Nuvvuagittuq belt to take a closer look at the ancient rocks. This time, we collected intrusive rocks — called metagabbros — that cut across the Ujaraaluk rock formation, hoping to obtain independent age constraints. The fact that these newly studied metagabbros are in intrusion in the Ujaraaluk rocks implies that the latter must be older. [. . .] We combined our field observations with petrology, geochemistry, geochronology and applied two independent samarium-neodymium age dating methods, dating techniques used to assess the absolute ages of magmatic rocks, before they became metamorphic rocks. Both assessments yielded the same result: the intrusive rocks are 4.16 billion years old.vuagittuq Greenstone Belt. (H. Rizo), CC BY The oldest rocks Since these metagabbros cut across the Ujaraaluk formation, the Ujaraaluk rocks must be even older, placing them firmly in the Hadean Eon.' back

Hausdorff space - Wikipedia, Hausdorff space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In topology and related branches of mathematics, a Hausdorff space, separated space or T2 space is a topological space where for any two distinct points there exist neighbourhoods of each which are disjoint from each other. Of the many separation axioms that can be imposed on a topological space, the "Hausdorff condition" (T2) is the most frequently used and discussed. It implies the uniqueness of limits of sequences, nets, and filters. Hausdorff spaces are named after Felix Hausdorff, one of the founders of topology. Hausdorff's original definition of a topological space (in 1914) included the Hausdorff condition as an axiom. .' back

Hermitian adjoint - Wikipedia, Hermitian adjoint - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Hermitian operators: A bounded operator A : H → H is called Hermitian or self-adjoint if
A = A*
which is equivalent to
⟨ A x , y ⟩ = ⟨ x, A y ⟩ for all x , y ∈ H.
In some sense, these operators play the role of the real numbers (being equal to their own "complex conjugate") and form a real vector space. They serve as the model of real-valued observables in quantum mechanics. See the article on self-adjoint operators for a full treatment.' back

John von Neumann (2014), Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, ' Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics by John von Neumann translated from the German by Robert T. Beyer (New Edition) edited by Nicholas A. Wheeler. Princeton UP Princeton & Oxford. Preface: ' This book is the realization of my long-held intention to someday use the resources of TEX to produce a more easily read version of Robert T. Beyer’s authorized English translation (Princeton University Press, 1955) of John von Neumann’s classic Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik (Springer, 1932).'This content downloaded from 129.127.145.240 on Sat, 30 May 2020 22:38:31 UTC back

John Whittle (2025_07_11), Does AI actually boost productivity? The evidence is murky, ' There’s been much talk recently – especially among politicians – about productivity. And for good reason: Australia’s labour productivity growth sits at a 60-year low. To address this, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has convened a productivity round table next month. This will coincide with the release of an interim report from the Productivity Commission, which is looking at five pillars of reform. One of these is the role of data and digital technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). This will be music to the ears of the tech and business sectors, which have been enthusiastically promoting the productivity benefits of AI. In fact, the Business Council of Australia also said last month that AI is the single greatest opportunity in a generation to lift productivity. But what do we really know about how AI impacts productivity? What is productivity? Put simply, productivity is how much output (goods and services) we can produce from a given amount of inputs (such as labour and raw materials). It matters because higher productivity typically translates to a higher standard of living. Productivity growth has accounted for 80% of Australia’s income growth over the past three decades. [. . .] Imagine a world in which AI isn’t simply about speeding up tasks but proactively slows us down, to give us space to be more innovative, and more productive. That’s the real untapped opportunity with AI.' back

Liturgy - Wikipedia, Liturgy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Liturgy is the customary public ritual of worship performed by a religious group. [. . .] Technically speaking, liturgy forms a subset of ritual. The word liturgy, sometimes equated in English as "service", refers to a formal ritual enacted by those who understand themselves to be participating in an action with the divine. The word liturgy, derived from the technical term in ancient Greek (Greek: λειτουργία), leitourgia, which means "work or service for the people" is a literal translation of the two affixes λήϊτος, "leitos", derived from the Attic form of λαός ("people, public"), and ἔργον, "ergon", meaning "work, service". In origin, it signified the often expensive offerings wealthy Greeks made in service to the people, and thus to the polis and the state.' back

Mahabharata - Wikipedia, Mahabharata - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Mahābhārata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa. It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and their successors. It also contains philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or puruṣārtha (12.161). Among the principal works and stories in the Mahābhārata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, the story of Shakuntala, the story of Pururava and Urvashi, the story of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Kacha and Devayani, the story of Rishyasringa and an abbreviated version of the Rāmāyaṇa, often considered as works in their own right.' back

Matthew Smith (2025_06_09), Lafayette helped Americans turn the tide in their fight for independence – and 50 years later, he helped forge the growing nation’s sense of identity, ' America is nearing the 250th anniversary of its revolutionary birth, the Declaration of Independence. July 4, 2026, will mark a milestone – and a time for reflection. [. . .] Sadly, in the U.S., the sort of objective historical knowledge once taken for granted now appears to be waning. [. . .] Lafayette’s enrollment in the U.S. military predated the 1778 alliance between his home country and the United States. Eventually, France’s alliance turned the tide against Great Britain on land and at sea. By the war’s end, the French had supplied some 12,000 soldiers, 22,000 sailors and dozens of warships to the American cause, plus huge financial resources. When Lafayette volunteered, however, he was one of just a few foreign volunteers – and the most acclaimed. [. . .] The enthusiasm that welcomed Lafayette 200 years ago was authentic. But like all good history lessons, Lafayette’s legacy is open to interpretation. His grand tour cemented the myth of “the Era of Good Feelings”: a golden age of American political harmony. In reality, the seeds of America’s civil war were already evident. Missouri’s 1820 admission to the union threatened the country’s precarious balance between states that opposed slavery and states that allowed it – a crisis Thomas Jefferson warned was “a fire bell in the night.” Likewise, Lafayette’s lionization in the western United States coincided with the ongoing forced removal of Indigenous people. Ohio, for example, forcibly removed its last Native American tribe in 1843. Despite the uses and abuses of historical memory and the aversion of modern historians toward hero-worship, Lafayette remains a charismatic figure – a “citizen of two worlds” who championed both abolitionism and women’s rights. I believe his fading public memory indicates a troubling amnesia. America’s anniversary offers the opportunity to reconsider his legacy, alongside revolutionary stories of Americans from all walks of life. back

Moustafa Bayoumi (2025_07_06), The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world, ' Israel’s war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other. We are ignoring the collapse of the international system that has defined our lives for generations at our own collective peril This collapse began with the liberal world’s lack of resolve to rein in Israel’s war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel. back

Peter Wehner (2025_07_06), Why Evangelicals Turned Their Back on PEPFAR, ' The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, first authorized by Bush in 2003, was the largest commitment made by any nation to address a single disease. It was, the president said, “a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.” PEPFAR, which received strong bipartisan support, is credited with saving 26 million lives and enabling almost 8 million babies to be born without HIV. [. . .] On the first day of his second term, Trump issued Executive Order 14169, calling for a 90-day pause on all foreign-development and assistance programs pending further review. A subsequent stop-work order froze payments and work already under way, hobbling programs worldwide. The administration dissolved USAID, the main U.S. organization that provides humanitarian aid and the primary implementing agency for PEPFAR. [. . .] More than 75,000 adults and children are now estimated to have died because of the effective shutdown of PEPFAR that began less than six months ago. Another adult life is being lost every three minutes; a child dies every 31 minutes. Ending PEPFAR could result in as many as 11 million additional new HIV infections and nearly 3 million additional AIDS-related deaths by the end of the decade. [. . .] n 2014, World Vision announced that it was willing to hire Christians in same-sex marriages in the United States. The reaction was instantaneous, overwhelming, and ferocious. [. . .] It’s a revealing comparison: A decision by a venerated Christian relief agency to hire Christians in same-sex relationships caused an immediate, angry, and explosive reaction across the evangelical world, while the decision to effectively end a program that has saved more than 25 million lives on the African continent barely registers. [. . .] Jesus knew such people in his time. They were religious figures who, when they saw that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, passed to the other side.. back

Riemannian geometry - Wikipedia, Riemannian geometry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Riemannian geometry is the branch of differential geometry that studies Riemannian manifolds, smooth manifolds with a Riemannian metric, i.e. with an inner product on the tangent space at each point that varies smoothly from point to point. This gives, in particular, local notions of angle, length of curves, surface area, and volume. From those some other global quantities can be derived by integrating local contributions. . . . It enabled Einstein's general relativity theory, made profound impact on group theory and representation theory, as well as analysis, and spurred the development of algebraic and differential topology.' back

Robert Bird (2025_07_02), The rule of law is key to capitalism − eroding it is bad news for American business, ' Something dangerous is happening to the U.S. economy, and it’s not inflation or trade wars. Chaotic deregulation and the selective enforcement of laws have upended markets and investor confidence. At one point, the threat of tariffs and resulting chaos evaporated US$4 trillion in value in the U.S. stock market. This approach isn’t helping the economy, and there are troubling signs it will hurt both the U.S. and the global economy in the short and long term. The rule of law – the idea that legal rules apply to everyone equally, regardless of wealth or political connections − is essential for a thriving economy. Yet globally the respect for the rule of law is slipping, and the U.S. is slipping with it. According to annual rankings from the World Justice Project, the rule of law has declined in more than half of all countries for seven years in a row. The rule of law in the U.S., the most economically powerful nation in the world, is now weaker than the rule of law in Uruguay, Singapore, Latvia and over 20 other countries. back

Rogé Karma (2025_07_03, The Most Perverse Part of the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’, ' Of all the elements of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, perhaps none is as obviously self-defeating as getting rid of tax credits for clean energy. [. . .] Electricity demand in the United States is rising faster than it has in at least two decades. [. . .] Fortunately, the timing of this demand spike coincided with a boom in renewable energy. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, 93 percent of the electricity capacity added to the grid this year will come from a combination of wind, solar, and battery storage. [. . .] The purported justification for these cuts is that renewables are unreliable energy sources pushed by woke environmentalists, and the country would be better served by doubling down on coal and natural gas. “More wind and solar brings us the worst of two worlds: less reliable energy delivery and higher electric bills,” wrote Energy Secretary Chris Wright in an op-ed last week. In fact, renewable energy is cheap and getting cheaper. [. . .] Partisan polarization around clean energy has grown so extreme since the passage of the IRA that Trump and many other Republicans apparently see destroying it as an end in itself. [. . .] The desire to stick it to liberals is so intense that Republicans are evidently willing to inflict disproportionate economic pain on their own voters. [. . .] A separate analysis found that of the 10 states that will lose the most total renewable-energy capacity as a result of the repeal, nine voted for Trump last year.' back

Separable space - Wikipedia, Separable space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics a topological space is called separable if it contains a countable, dense subset; that is, there exists a sequence .x_n [1 < n < ∞] of elements of the space such that every nonempty open subset of the space contains at least one element of the sequence. Like the other axioms of countability, separability is a "limitation on size", not necessarily in terms of cardinality (though, in the presence of the Hausdorff axiom, this does turn out to be the case) but in a more subtle topological sense. In particular, every continuous function on a separable space whose image is a subset of a Hausdorff space is determined by its values on the countable dense subset.' back

Thalia Anthony & Eddie Cubillo, Kumanjayi Walker inquest: racism and violence, but findings too little and too late, ' The inquest findings into the death of 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker are among the most anticipated in the history of deaths in custody. It is almost six years since Walker was shot point blank three times by former Northern Territory (NT) Police constable Zachary Rolfe. These events occurred on the evening of November 9 2019 in a family home of Walker, as Warlpiri people of the remote Central Australian community of Yuendumu listened in fear. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Chief Minister Michael Gunner promised “consequences would flow”. In 2022, Rolfe was tried for murder and the alternate charges of manslaughter and violent act causing death. The first, non-lethal, shot was conceded by the prosecution to be in self-defence. The fatal second and third shots were the basis for the prosecution. The jury, with no Aboriginal representation, decided in March 2022 that self-defence also applied to the subsequent shots, and Rolfe was found not guilty. [. . .] The NT government has stipulated that it decides which coronial recommendations to accept. The implementation of coronial recommendations in the NT has a sordid history. In a climate of expanding police numbers and powers in the NT, with an additional 200 police being recruited to add to the already highest police ratio in the country, Aboriginal deaths in custody will continue to happen. This was the clarion call of the royal commission: more police and police powers will result in more deaths in custody. Walker’s is one of the 598 deaths since the royal commission, and the brutal circumstances of his death show little has changed. The coronial recommendations fall short of calling for the structural overhaul demanded by Aboriginal families and advocates, to eradicate police racial violence from the lives of Aboriginal people in the NT.' back

White Rose eTheses Online, White Rose eTheses Online, Welcome to White Rose eTheses Online, a shared repository of electronic theses from the University of Leeds, the University of Sheffield and the University of York. back

William Trollinger & Susan L. Trollinger (2025_07_01), 1 in 4 Americans reject evolution, a century after the Scopes monkey trial spotlighted the clash between science and religion, ' The 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Dayton, Tennessee, teacher was charged with violating state law by teaching biological evolution, was one of the earliest and most iconic conflicts in America’s ongoing culture war. Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” published in 1859, and subsequent scientific research made the case that humans and other animals evolved from earlier species over millions of years. Many late-19th-century American Protestants had little problem accommodating Darwin’s ideas – which became mainstream biology – with their religious commitments. But that was not the case with all Christians, especially conservative evangelicals, who held that the Bible is inerrant – without error – and factually accurate in all that it has to say, including when it speaks on history and science. [. . .] This nascent fundamentalist movement initiated a campaign to pressure state legislatures to prohibit public schools from teaching evolution. One of these states was Tennessee, which in 1925 passed the Butler Act. [. . .] The American Civil Liberties Union persuaded John Thomas Scopes, a young science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, to challenge the law in court. The WCFA sprang into action, successfully persuading William Jennings Bryan – populist politician and outspoken fundamentalist – to assist the prosecution. In response, the ACLU hired famous attorney Clarence Darrow to serve on the defense team. [. . .] Most significant, Darrow’s questions revealed that, despite Bryan’s’ assertion that he read the Bible literally, Bryan actually understood the six days of Genesis not as 24-hour days, but as six long and indeterminate periods of time. The very next day, the jury found Scopes guilty and fined him US$100. Riley and the fundamentalists cheered the verdict as a triumph for the Bible and morality. [. . .] But as Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan made obvious, it was not easy to square a literal reading of the Bible – including the six-day creation outlined in Genesis – with a scientific belief in an old Earth. What fundamentalists needed was a science that supported the idea of a young Earth. In their 1961 book, “The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications, fundamentalists John Whitcomb, a theologian, and Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer, provided just such a scientific explanation. [. . .] Today, opinion polls reveal that roughly one-quarter of all Americans are adherents of this newer strand of creationism, which rejects both mainstream geology as well as mainstream biology.' 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