Babur (2020), Zahiru'd-din Mohammad, and Annette Susannah Beveridge (Translator) and William Dalrymple (Introduction), The Babur Nama, Knopf / Penguin Random House 2020 Jacket: 'Zahiru'd-din Mohammad Babu (1485-1530) a poet-prince from central Asia, was the first Mughal emperor and author of one of the most remarkable autobiographies in world Literature. The Babur Nama reveals its author as not only a military genius but also a ruler unusually magnanimous for his time, cultured, witty and possessing a talent for poetry, an adventurous spirit and an acute eye for natural beauty.' 
Amazon   back

Jones (2020), David Albert, Angels: A History, Oxford University Press 2010 What are angels? Where were they first encountered? Can we distinguish angels from gods, faeries, ghosts, and aliens? And why do they remain so popular? In this introduction to the history of angels, David Albert Jones outlines some of the more prominent stories and speculations about angels in Judaism, Islam, Christianity and post-Christian spiritualities. He reflects on the way angels are portrayed in art, whether as young men in the Hebrew Scriptures, androgynous winged creatures of the pre-Raphaelites, or the masculine statue of the Angel of the North. He also considers angels in films such as Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, as well as angels in literature. From the idea of the angel as a messenger, through to the image of angels sent to protect and help those in need, this is an examination of the implications of angels. It asks why people find the idea of them so attractive, helpful or consoling, and why they remain so powerful in modern culture. In this thought-provoking introduction, Jones considers the view that reflecting on angels can teach us something about human existence. Whether or not we believe that they exist in their own right, angels can still illuminate our thoughts.  
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Whitehead (1910, 1962), Alfred North, and Bertrand Arthur Russell, Principia Mathematica (Cambridge Mathematical Library), Cambridge University Press 1910, 1962 The great three-volume Principia Mathematica is deservedly the most famous work ever written on the foundations of mathematics. Its aim is to deduce all the fundamental propositions of logic and mathematics from a small number of logical premisses and primitive ideas, and so to prove that mathematics is a development of logic. Not long after it was published, Gödel showed that the project could not completely succeed, but that in any system, such as arithmetic, there were true propositions that could not be proved.  
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Amy Qin & Flávio Pessoa (2026_08_18) , Trump 2.0 has deleted or altered nearly 400 US datasets, endangering public health, education and more, ' A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world.
These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.
Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data.
“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”
The tracker includes detailed information about deleted or altered datasets from more than 60 federal agencies that span the environment, labor, law enforcement and other topics. But datasets on health appear to be the most affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown, comprising about 40% of the total number of terminated or altered data collections tracked by dataindex.us [. . .]
One of the main changes to these health datasets is that they no longer collect information on queer and trans people – as part of Donald Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”.' back

André Gagné & Jason Piché , Donald Trump’s dilemma: Ending the Iran war to appease Americans will anger his evangelical base, back

ARTF, Australian Research Theology Foundation, 'Hi, my name is Howard Munro and I am the chairperson of the Australian Research Theology Foundation Inc. (known in shorthand as "ARTFinc"). The Foundation was established by the late Rev'd Robert Houghton in 1973 from private funds to promote theological research and education with an Australian orientation. The Foundation is independent and not part of any official church structure. It funds and promotes research scholars, studies, experimental projects, conferences or other possibilities that further its purposes. We welcome applications from anyone or group with a creative idea consistent with the Foundation's objects.' back

Australian Music Centre, Eumeralla, a war requiem for peace (multiple choirs with full orchestra) nby Deborah Cheetham Fraillon (2018, this version: 2019), ' Eumeralla, a war requiem for peace is a large scale composition for Indigenous and non-indigenous performers, sung entirely in the ancient dialects of the Gunditjmara people.
Original text by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO expands on the structure of the traditional Requiem Mass, was translated into the Dhuawurd Wurrung and related dialects by Gunditjmara language custodian Vicki Couzens and Victorian based linguist Kris Eira.
"The name Eumeralla is unlikely to be among the theatres of war that you could name. The history of battles fought and the lives that were lost is almost unknown to anyone outside the Aboriginal community. It is more than 170 years since the last shots rang out in the country of the Gunditjmara but the land is not silent. The voices of those who lost their lives in defence of their country ring in your ears when you stand amongst the lava flow of south west country of Victoria. Unlike other theatres of war such as Anzac Cove and the Somme, where peace was declared and relationships restored with the Turks and Germans, no such peace was declared in the resistance wars, no such restoration. Whilst the Gunditjmara uphold the memory of their warriors slain, most Australians have been denied access to this history and denied resolution - and so the land remains haunted.
Eumeralla was written in recognition of one of the most brutal resistance wars fought on this continent and is designed for non-Indigenous Choirs to perform along-side Indigenous musicians. It is my hope that this war requiem will help the spirits of those who fell - those who resisted and their aggressors, to find a lasting peace and that we their descendants might find our way to deeper understanding of the legacy of these battles." Deborah Cheetham AO back

Boltzmann distribution - Wikipedia, Boltzmann distribution - Wikipedia, the fee encyclopedia, ' In statistical mechanics and mathematics, a Boltzmann distribution (also called Gibbs distribution) is a probability distribution or probability measure that gives the probability that a system will be in a certain state as a function of that state's energy and the temperature of the system. The distribution is expressed in the form: p_i = exp (ε_i / kT) where p_{i is the probability of the system being in state i exp is the exponential function, εi is the energy of that state, and a constant kBT of the distribution is the product of the Boltzmann constant kB and thermodynamic temperature T. The symbol ∝ denotes proportionality (see § The distribution for the proportionality constant). The term system here has a wide meaning; it can range from a collection of "sufficient number" of atoms or a single atom to a macroscopic system such as a natural-gas storage tank. Therefore, the Boltzmann distribution can be used to solve a wide variety of problems. The distribution shows that states with lower energy will always have a higher probability of being occupied. ' back}

Deborah Cheetham Fraillon (2019), Eumeralla, A War Requiem For Peace, ' Written and composed by Yorta Yorta soprano, composer and Artistic Director of Short Black Opera, Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO, this requiem for peace, is sung entirely in the ancient dialects of the Gunditjmara people.] back

Erin Doherty & Alec Hernandez (2026_08_18), Ossoff just went viral again. That was probably the point., ' Some battleground candidates are going viral for shooting from the hip. Jon Ossoff is doing it from a carefully controlled script.
Ossoff drew attention Sunday for calling out a little-known aide to President Donald Trump by first name on a Midtown Atlanta rally stage. It was part of a larger prepared speech that hammered Trump over the war in Iran — and part of a larger strategy to raise his profile in a critical Senate race, all while some national Democrats openly question whether he will mount a 2028 presidential run.
“He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar,” Ossoff said, referencing Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant. The comment, though just a brief remark in a 30-minute speech, drew over 5 million views on X and swift backlash from Republicans — including the president himself, who shot back Monday calling Ossoff a “Pee Wee Herman lookalike.” [. . .]
Ossoff’s campaign declined to comment. In an interview with MS NOW on Monday evening, when asked why he chose to invoke the president’s aide Harp by name, Ossoff said that Trump has “mired” the country in a “geopolitical disaster” and “retreats into this bubble of West Wing aides who are his security blanket to make him feel good about himself".' back

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, Jones: Angels back

French Wars of Religion - Wikipedia, French Wars of Religion - Wikipedia, the free ncyclopedia, back

George Chidi (2026_08_18), Jon Ossoff calls Trump’s handling of Iran war ‘uniquely despicable’ in excoriating speech, ' Democratic senator Jon Ossoff has attacked Donald Trump’s “uniquely despicable” handling of the US-Israel war on Iran, accusing the US president of “re-rigging” a corrupt system for himself in an excoriating speech.
Ossoff, who is running for re-election in Georgia in November, has repeatedly stoked speculation that he is laying the ground for a bid for the US presidency in 2028 by delivering a series of stinging attacks on Trump and his administration.
“They made you pay more for everything, and took us to war on lies, and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile while the crook president and his crook family raked in billions while your tax dollars were put to work backing Trump’s businesses,” Ossoff said at a rally in midtown Atlanta on Sunday afternoon.[. . .]
Ossoff also highlighted the vast increase in Trump’s personal wealth since he returned to office in January 2025.
“When he first announced the tariffs, you remember that? He called it liberation day and it crashed the markets because it was clown policy,” Ossoff said, noting how the president then purchased stock a week after the markets fell. “And then the very next morning, April 9th, he posts on Truth Social. ‘This is a great time to buy.’ Three exclamation marks.
“OK, now listen to this. Three hours and 41 minutes after that post, one day after he bought millions in stock, he cancelled the tariffs and triggered one of the biggest same day rebound rallies in market history. He’s trying to get money.”
Trump launched a subscription service on 1 August charging up to $100,000 a month for early access to his posts on his Truth Social platform. The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation have launched a suit against Trump, two of his aides and the executive office of the president over the service.
Ossoff attacked the president over the offering. “Just understand what’s for sale here,” he said. “The sitting president’s pronouncements on war and peace and economic policy delivered first to paying customers. What an absolute crook.” back

He Huifeng (2026_08_21), In China first, project breathes new life into ageing wind turbines, China has launched its first batch-scale remanufacturing project for retired wind turbines in Jiuquan, Gansu province, as an ageing fleet enters a new phase of its life cycle and Beijing seeks to encourage recycling in its massive renewable-energy sector.
China Resources Recycling Group (CRRG) – a state-owned enterprise established in 2024 with backing from China’s State Council and several industrial giants with the aim of bolstering national resource security – said on its website that its Xinyuan Jiuquan subsidiary had begun remanufacturing an initial batch of 25 wind turbines that had been in service for more than 15 years early this month.' back

Ingmar Bergman (1957), The Seventh Seal, If you have not seen this movie, you should. It is one of the greatest achievements of all time. I still haunts me, 55 years after first seeing it, and seeing it more than once. Ingmar Bergman was a genius. back

Ingmar Bergman (1966), Persona, ' Persona is a 1966 Swedish avant-garde psychological drama film[ written, directed, and produced by Ingmar Bergman and starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. The story revolves around a young nurse named Alma (Andersson) and her patient, well-known stage actress Elisabet Vogler (Ullmann), who has suddenly stopped speaking. They move to a cottage, where Alma cares for Elisabet, confides in her, and begins having trouble distinguishing herself from her patient.[Wikipdia- back

Intifar Chowdhury (2026_08_14), Friday essay: we’re all ‘political’ now – but can that lead to real change?, Review: Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger (Verso Books)
Hyperpolitics names a world in which everything is political, yet politics is rarely durable. Private life comes with public meanings attached: the cola you drink, the person you date, the family member you cut ties with, the school your child attends, the vaccine you take (or refuse).
Jäger names the atmosphere of our time with real force. What he does less well is explain who has been formed by this atmosphere.
The young eyelash artist in Carindale was not apolitical or disengaged. She had read enough, watched enough, absorbed enough, distrusted enough to assemble a complete worldview.
But she was also saturated with causes, enemies, instincts and explanations. What she lacked was any durable institution – the parties, unions, churches or civic associations past generations turned to – through which all that political energy could become power.
So, politics is everywhere. Power is nowhere in particular. That is the condition Hyperpolitics captures ]. . .]
Hyperpolitics then arrived around the Trump-Brexit moment, argues Jäger. Politics re-invaded everyday life, in a world of weaker social and political organisations. [. . .]
As a self-proclaimed Marxist, Jäger was never going to treat neoliberalism as a neutral background condition. Nor should he. Neoliberalism hovers all over the book. It explains the hollowed-out state in the Western world, featuring the weakened major parties, the marketised citizen, and the low-trust public sphere. But Jäger never quite makes it carry the full causal weight. It’s a missed opportunity.[. . .] My reading of Hayek’s Bastards, by Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian, helps sharpen what Jäger leaves blurred.
Slobodian argues younger generations of neoliberal leaders did not merely protect markets from democracy. Many came to view democratic demands – for things like economic redistribution, civil rights, feminism, environmental regulation and social equality – as threats to the competitive order they valued.
In response, they sought intellectual and institutional ways to shield markets from popular pressure: through international economic rules, or hard monetary constraints, or appeals to supposedly natural biological differences between people. [. . .]
The question is what comes next. What happens when a generation socialised in hyperpolitics goes looking for structure? What happens when distrust of institutions meets a craving for authority? What happens when belonging travels through platforms before it reaches parties, churches, unions or states? What happens when the loneliness of post-political consumer life meets the moral intensity of permanent crisis? We are already finding out. back

J. S. Bach - Mass in B Minor, Monteverdi Choir, ' Filmed in April 2023 in the exceptional setting of the Royal Chapel of Versailles, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor is perhaps the most accomplished masterpiece of Baroque sacred music—an intoxicating work of choral beauty, enriched with dazzling arias. Sir John Eliot Gardiner presented a new interpretation with his English Baroque Soloists and the renowned Monteverdi Choir, which was widely recognized at the time for its performances of the sacred Baroque repertoire.
The origins of this legendary Mass in B Minor are fascinating. Finalized by Bach in Leipzig around 1748, two years before his death, it was assembled from his Missa Brevis of 1733—a Kyrie and Gloria dedicated to the Elector of Saxony and the brilliant Catholic Court of Dresden—along with various pre-existing pieces, such as the Sanctus from Christmas 1724, as well as newly composed sections. The result was what his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach referred to as the “Great Catholic Mass.” In essence, this is a theoretical work, not composed for a specific liturgical occasion. Instead, Bach may have intended it as his greatest musical testament, a sacred synthesis after fifty years devoted to composing cantatas and passions.' back

Katherine Bourzac (2026_08_19), How do people live beyond 110? Abundance of cancer-killing cells might be key, ' People who live to 110 years and older have large populations of a rare type of immune cell that can kill cancer1, finds a study published today in Cell Reports. It is possible that such cells, called killer T cells, might help people to live to extraordinarily long ages by fighting off cancer — although the authors of the study acknowledge that this has yet to be proved, and so far, they aren’t sure exactly what these cells do.
Supercentenarians — people aged 110 and older — not only enjoy unusually long lives but they also seem to fend off diseases of old age including heart disease, dementia and cancer. Researchers hope that studies of supercentenarians’ immune systems might help them to understand why these rare individuals live such healthy lives, and provide clues to help everyone stay healthy longer.' back

Kim Sharp (2025_02_11), Origin of the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics and its Role in Statistical Mechanics, ' Abstract 'In statistical mechanics the zeroth law of thermodynamics is taken as a postulate which, as its name indicates, logically precedes the first and second laws. Treating it as a postulate has consequences for how temperature is introduced into statistical mechanics and for the molecu- lar interpretation of temperature. One can, however, derive the zeroth law from first principles tarting from a classical Hamiltonian using basic mechanics and a geometric representation of the phase space of kinetic energy configurations - the velocity hypersphere. In this approach there is no difficulty in providing a molecular interpretation of temperature, nor in deriving equality of temperature as the condition of thermal equilibrium. The approach to the macroscopic limit as a function of the number of atoms is easily determined. One also obtains with little difficulty the Boltzmann probability distribution, the statistical mechanical definition of entropy and the configuration partition function. These relations, along with the zeroth law, emerge as straightforwardconsequences of atoms in random motion. back

Kim Sharp & Franz Matschinsky (Boltzmann 1877), Translation of Ludwig Boltzmann’s Paper “On the Relationship between the Second Fundamental Theorem of the Mechanical Theory of Heat and Probability Calculations Regarding the Conditions for Thermal Equilibrium” , 1. Introduction Barely any of Boltzmann’s original scientific work is available in translation. This is remarkable given his central role in the development of both equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, his statistical mechanical explanation of entropy, and our understanding of the Second Law of thermodynamics. What Boltzmann actually wrote on these subjects is rarely quoted directly, his methods are not fully appreciated, and key concepts have been misinterpreted. Yet his work remains relevant today. Witness, for example, the recent debate about Gibbs entropy vs. Boltzmann entropy [1–4]. The paper translated here (LB1877) occupies the high middle ground of his work, and was a key step in developing the fully probabilistic basis of entropy and the Second Law.' back

Li Yuan (2026_08_17), China Hunts for Scientific Talent. The U.S. Is Making It Easier., ' The biggest change in China’s recruiting power is money, said Dong Jielin, who researches Chinese science and technology policy. Two decades ago, she said, scientists returning from abroad were expected to sacrifice financially in the name of serving the country. Now Chinese universities can offer salaries that are competitive with those in Europe, along with generous relocation packages. [. . .]
In a video posted by the Simons Foundation after the Fields Medals were announced, she said she felt “a little discouraged” but found professors in France and the United States who helped her gain confidence. Ms. Wang was not criticizing Peking University, but her remark resonated widely in China, where many people treated “discouraged” as shorthand for their own experiences in a highly competitive education system shaped by punishment and shame. The hashtag “discouraged” remains censored on the social media platform Weibo.
“If they had not left China at 20, would they still be standing on that prize stage today?” asked a YouTube commentator who goes by Laozhou Hengmei. China’s scientific achievements, he argued, still did not match its economic size and abundance of talent.
China can increasingly match the funding and infrastructure that attract prominent scientists. What it has more difficulty reproducing are the freedom, trust and institutional stability that allow young talent to flourish. Those remain among America’s strongest advantages, and the very advantages its current policies are putting at risk.
“The U.S. used to be sort of the default, the no-brainer option,” Terence Tao, an Australian-born Fields medalist who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a video.
Last year, the Trump administration’s suspension of federal funding to U.C.L.A. affected both his personal grant and an institute he helps lead. The funding was reinstated after a successful lawsuit. But he has warned that abrupt funding disruptions can derail multiyear projects and damage researchers’ trust in the system.
“The best and brightest may not automatically come to the U.S. as they have for decades,” he said.' back

Ludwig Boltzmann - Wikipedia, Ludwig Boltzmann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (February 20, 1844 – September 5, 1906) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher whose greatest achievement was in the development of statistical mechanics, which explains and predicts how the properties of atoms (such as mass, charge, and structure) determine the physical properties of matter (such as viscosity, thermal conductivity, and diffusion). back

Ludwig Boltzmann (1899), "Über die Entwicklung der Methoden der Physik in neuerer Zeit" (On the Development of the Methods of Science in Recent Times), Lecture given at the Munich Meeting of Natural Scientists, Friday, September 22, 1899. Summary: In earlier centuries, science progressed steadily but slowly through the work of the most distinguished minds, much like an old city constantly growing through the new buildings constructed by industrious and enterprising citizens. In contrast, the present century of steam and telegraphy has imprinted its character of nervous, hasty activity on the progress of science as well. The development of natural science in recent times, in particular, more closely resembles that of a modern American city, which transforms from a village into a metropolis in just a few decades. back

Mohana Basu, A particle made of force: physicists say they’ve found mysterious ‘glueball’, After almost two decades of searching, a team of physicists in China says it has observed strong evidence of a mysterious particle called a glueball, which is made entirely of force-carrying particles. Researchers at the Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) Collaboration, an international particle-physics experiment, presented their results at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Natal, Brazil, last week. They say that a particle known as X(2370) — which was discovered in 2011 — is mostly made up of glueballs. These are clusters of gluons, the elementary particles that bind quarks to form protons and neutrons and hold them inside the nucleus of an atom. There is no single smoking gun that proves that this particle is made of glueballs, says Bruce Yabsley, a particle physicist at the University of Sydney in Australia, who has reviewed the results from BESIII. But looking at the cumulative evidence tbuilt over decades makes the current findings “quite persuasive”, he adds. “It is quite convincing evidence,” adds Ulrik Egede, an experimental particle physicist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who saw the conference presentation. The discovery of glueballs would provide direct evidence that gluons can interact with themselves, researchers say. This is a key prediction of quantum chromodynamics — the theory describing quarks and gluons. Observation of glueballs can also improve physicists’ understanding of the origin of mass itself, says Yabsley. Although protons are made of quarks, the sum of the masses of those quarks does not add up to the total mass of a proton. Gluons are massless, but strong interactions between them must create mass, he says. Hunting for glueballs BESIII, which runs at the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider II at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, is uniquely placed to observe glueballs. The experiment started in 2008 and is designed to study collisions between electrons and positrons, which can create short-lived particles that are predicted to decay into glueballs. Yanhping Huang, a particle physicist at the IHEP, says she identified X(2370) when she was a PhD student. “At that time it was quite exciting for us,” Huang says. X(2370) was suspected to contain glueballs because it was the first particle with a mass that is consistent with a specific type of glueball predicted by quantum chromodynamics, she adds. It was also notable that X(2370) was detected when a heavier particle known as a J/ψ meson broke down. Theory has suggested that the decay of a J/ψ particle is the golden place to search for glueballs, says Shan Jin, a particle physicist at Nanjing University in China, who presented the results at the conference. BESIII can produce vast numbers of J/ψ particles, enabling researchers to study their decays. But that evidence was not enough to rule out X(2370) being made of other types of particle, says Yabsley. For 13 years, Huang and other scientists at the BESIII Collaboration have been poring over data from nearly ten billion J/ψ decays. Finally, in 2024, they determined the particle’s spin parity, a quantum number that describes how a particle behaves1. That result showed that X(2370) is a ‘pseudoscalar’ particle, with a spin parity of 0−+, which was consistent with predictions of the lightest glueball. But it still wasn’t enough. Many particles can have similar properties, says Jin. Over the past two years, the BESIII Collaboration has conducted more measurements of X(2370) decay, which were reported in a preprint2 in July ahead of the conference in Brazil. The research team describes X(2370) as behaving as a flavour singlet. This is a key hallmark of a pure glueball and means that it does not have any quark ‘flavour’, such as up, down or strange. X(2370) itself is not a pure glueball, but a mixture of a glueball with quarks, says Jin. Experimental observations confirm that it is composed mainly of glueballs, he adds. Quantum mechanics suggests that a particle can be two things at the same time, says Egede. “So this new particle can be 80% glueball and 20% quark–antiquark. That’s perfectly possible.” The researchers compared properties of X(2370) with a range of theoretical models and particles and concluded that those alternatives cannot account for all of their observed data2. The focus now, Jin says, is to measure properties of X(2370) in more detail. Yabsley suggests that this is the beginning of the road to understanding glueballs. Several other candidates are being studied for evidence of them, he adds. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02498-1 back

Schffer, Oremus & Tiki (2026_01_27), Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books, ' In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot, Claude.
Details of Project Panama, which have not been previously reported, emerged in more than 4,000 pages of documents in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against Anthropic, which has been valued by investors at $183 billion. The company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the case in August, but a district judge’s decision last week to unseal a slew of documents in the case more fully revealed Anthropic’s zealous pursuit of books.
The new documents, along with earlier filings in other copyright cases against AI companies, show the lengths to which tech firms such as Anthropic, Meta, Google and OpenAI went to obtain colossal troves of data with which to “train” their software.
The Anthropic case was part of a wave of lawsuits brought against AI companies by authors, artists, photographers and news outlets. Filings in the cases show top tech firms in a frantic, sometimes clandestine race to acquire the collected works of humanity.
Books were viewed by the companies as a crucial prize, the court records show. In a January 2023 document, one Anthropic co-founder theorized that training AI models on books could teach them “how to write well” instead of mimicking “low quality internet speak.” A 2024 email inside Meta described accessing a digital trove of books as “essential” to being competitive with its AI rivals.' back

St. Bartholomew's Day massacre - Wikipedia, St. Bartholomew's Day massacre - Wikipedia, the fre encyclopdia, ' The Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre (French: Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy) in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence directed against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) during the French Wars of Religion. Traditionally believed to have been instigated by Queen Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX,[ the massacre started a few days after the marriage on 18 August of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant King Henry III of Navarre. Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding.' back

Stirling's approximation - Wikipedia, Stirling's approximation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, Stirling's approximation (or Stirling's formula) is an approximation for large factorials. It is named in honour of James Stirling.' back

Vincenzo Manca (2017), An Informational Proof of H-Theorem, ' ABSTRACT: After a historical reconstruction of the main Boltzmann’s ideas on mechanical statistics, a discrete version of Boltzmann’s H-theorem is proved, by using basic concepts of information theory. Namely, H-theorem follows from the central limit theorem, acting inside a closed physical system, and from the maximum entropy law for normal probability distributions, which is a consequence of Kullback-Leibler entropic divergence positivity. Finally, the relevance of discreteness and probability, for a deep comprehension of the relationship between physical and informational entropy, is analyzed and discussed in the light of new perspectives emerging in computational genomics. back

von Hippel, Sagdeev & Cockran (2026_07_31), How Soviet and US scientists helped end the Cold War nuclear arms race, ' Significant changes in global policy are generally achieved only after long-fought struggles by coalitions of key players and advocates. In the case of nuclear arms control, scientists—especially physicists—have made important contributions both to the public debate and as government advisers. The three of us had the good fortune to participate in such an opening 40 years ago. We are sharing our story here in the hope of encouraging our fellow scientists to be alert to opportunities to network and brainstorm internationally about global problems. The freeze movement
Our engagement in international dialogue about nuclear arms control began in the early 1980s. At that time, Cold War tensions were at the highest they had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Reagan administration came into office in 1981 convinced that the Soviet Union was seeking the capability to fight and win a nuclear war, and it backed the development of a new generation of ballistic and cruise missiles accurate enough to destroy a large fraction of the Soviet strategic nuclear forces. [. . .]
The resulting “megatons-to-megawatts” deal blended down 500 tons of Soviet weapons-grade uranium from approximately 20 000 warheads to provide about half the fuel used by US nuclear power reactors over two decades, from 1993 to 2013. A related agreement, facilitated in large part by Paine—who arranged for Mikhailov to meet with key US senators—saw the US fund the construction of a secure storage facility for the plutonium recovered from the Soviet warheads. Both the proceeds from the nuclear fuel sales, which totaled roughly $17 billion, and the secure storage facility may have forestalled the nightmare of loose nukes available on the black market. [. . .]
We hope a new generation of physicists will get involved in preventing a new three-way nuclear arms buildup between the US, China, and Russia. It is true that the current governments in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington have not welcomed ideas from independent scientists. But that may change: When Gorbachev took power in 1985, few predicted the reforms he would make in the Soviet Union. In the meantime, we encourage young scientists to join or help create international networks that can brainstorm how to deal with existential challenges. back

Zvi Bar'el (2026_08_19), Bibi Cried Wolf? Americans' Trust in Israeli Intelligence Is Stooping to Irreparable Lows, ' U.S. President Donald Trump's magnificent ruse – switching planes before flying out of Turkey after last month's NATO summit, in the wake of intelligence about an Iranian plot to assassinate him – was executed with impressive success. Less impressive was the criticism of the source that transmitted the critical information.
About 10 days ago, The Washington Post published an investigation into the affair. According to one source, "The assassination threat was relayed by the Israeli government to the CIA, where analysts did not view the intelligence as compelling and conveyed that skepticism to Trump administration officials."
Sources who spoke with the Post assessed this as a pattern: Israel shares intelligence designed to influence the president's decisions as much as to inform him. U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, was somewhat more blunt, saying: "I'm very curious about the extent to which the Israeli-provided intelligence was not only credible, but also independently verifiable. I have no doubt that Iran would like to see the president gone, but this all seems a little fantastical".' back