Boydstun

Key themes of content and methods of mathematics in the 20th Century– An overview, in 2002. —by Michael Atiyah.

Correct, Monart. This got to be a longer road than I had in mind at the beginning, but that is giving it full due weight. And I'm going to get to each promised component.

Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α’ How did Newton (1687) show that the force that causes unsupported objects to fall here on the surface of the earth is the same force that causes earth to orbit the sun? Not as the schoolman Theodoric of Freiberg (d. c.1310), nor as Descartes (1637), scientifically comprehended the formation of rainbows in the sky. Theirs was physical science contributing to understanding in their problem area. But no, Newton’s effective method for showing expanse of gravitation beyond the earth, his most important problem area, was by bringing geometry and limit-process thought into the service of quantitative representation of force exerted by the sun on its orbiting planets and exact forms of orbits that would result from the various strengths of various candidate central forces specified by their various mathematical forms (Brackenridge 1995 and Harper 2011). Newton’s method on this problem laid the foundation for all subsequent methods of theoretical physics. Newton’s achievement will be the kickoff caught by Kant which, together with Kant’s reception of the old gold of Euclidean geometry, will set in motion a locomotive of thought on to the analytic-synthetic sharp distinction I shall trace and dismantle in §B. Rand refused the conceptions of science and its relation to philosophy put forth by the early moderns, the rationalists and the empiricists. She maintained that science under the rationalists’ picture of reason and its relation of mind to the world had “indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform” (1961, 28). She understood rationalists as maintaining that “man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts” (1961, 30; see Descartes’s fourth Meditation). That is not how Descartes discovered how the rainbow comes about nor how he thought reason should proceed in such an inquiry (Garber 2001, 94–110; Dika 2023). We should notice that Rand did not recommend as remedy for rationalism and its alleged purport for physical science a reintroduction of such things as Aristotle-inspired substantial forms in natural philosophy down from Aquinas and Suarez, against which Descartes had rebelled and had replaced with mechanism (Garber 1992; Garber 2001; Garber and Roux 2013). From the time of Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Leibniz, philosophy of nature and physical science were not sharply distinguished as we think of them today. Edward Grant concludes that without the high development of natural philosophy attained between 1200 and 1600, the scientific revolution would not have come about (2007, 329). William A. Wallace (1923–2015) argued that Thomist Aristotelianism in logic and natural philosophy was the best frame fitting the natural world and the advance of modern science. He embedded the scientific advance of Theodoric on theory of the rainbow into Aristotle’s four causes, stressing the continuity between Aristotelian science by qualitative natures and Theodoric’s quantitative methods and conferring absolute certainty of the scientific results by their rendition into Aristotelian demonstrative form of science. From Rand’s outlook on the relationship of philosophy and physical science, such would be a smothering and hand-maid casting of science by overblown (and faulty) metaphysics (ITOE 273). On the side of consonance with Wallace, however, Rand’s view, in which the import of metaphysics to physics is modest, would not entail a whole dismissiveness up front of Wallace’s 1992 (Chps. 4–6) intellectual archeology of Galileo’s methodological connections, logical and historical, with the Aristotelian epistemological template for science. Rand’s epistemology and metaphysics, to be sure, are in considerable opposition to that template, by her departures from Aristotle on essence, form, causation, universals, and definition. Galileo’s philosophical framework was not Rand’s more modern one, but he famously freed himself of much encumbrance from Aristotelian natural philosophy and got some new and true science crucial for Newton. I have noted the radical opposition between, on the one hand, conception of science under Rand’s general metaphysics and epistemology and, on the other hand, what she thought to be the rationalist method for science (see also Rand 1970). One difference between Descartes’ actual method from standard scientific method today, with which latter, Rand’s theoretical philosophy is aligned: for Descartes, observations and experiments serve only to illustrate and reinforce implications of scientific theory bound up with natural philosophy, and first-philosophy, which has already settled that the scientific theory is true. An observation at odds with the rationalist scientific theory would be suspected of error by the rationalist inquirer of those days. Results from the laboratory were not tests against which the theory stands or falls. Rand saw the classical modern empiricists as “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts” (1961, 30). She saw them as clinging to reality by abandoning their mind. She thought her own theory of concepts filled the large gaps in the rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge (1970, 89–90), by her tie of concepts (and reason, I might add) to concrete particulars. I hope some day to uncover whether what is distinctive to her theory of concepts—its cast in terms of magnitude structure among particulars subsumed under a concept—solidifies the tie Rand thought she had attained and its rescue of knowledge, ordinary and scientific, from rationalism and empiricism, classical and modern (Logical Empiricism). Rand maintained that failures of modern philosophy to mount an adequate defense of rational knowledge, including science, against Cartesian and Humean skepticism needed (i) a correct theory of universals and concepts, (ii) a defense of the validity of the deliverances of the senses, and (iii) a validation of inductive inference.[1] The first as provided by Rand can correct rationalist and empiricist failures in adequately accounting for modern scientific knowledge provided someone yet-to-come can develop further the measurement structure in empirical concepts and show how Rand’s theory of concepts in its true distinctiveness can be extended to mathematical knowledge. Knapp 2014 advertised the latter, but failed to deliver. The second was accomplished in Kelley 1986. The third was attempted within Harriman 2010, which advertised, but failed delivery in the same way as Knapp 2014. Both the Harriman book and the Knapp one did not make central, deep connection between the nature of modern science and what is Rand’s truly distinctive aspect of concepts in general: its structuring of concepts by measurement ommisions along concepts’ dimensions capturing concretes and their world-given relations. Still, these books are profitable reads as among contemporary realist casts of modern science and mathematics. These two informative Objectivist books, of course, are written in an era in which science and mathematics have become sharply distinct from philosophy and in which much more science and mathematics has been established than at the time of Theodoric, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. To those Objectivist works should be joined the Objectivist-neighbor realism of Franklin 2014 and Dougherty 2013 from the Aquinas-Aristotelian framework.[2] In the next installment (§B), we’ll travel the road: Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Logical Empiricism to Carnap v. Quine on the analytic-synthetic distinction to Peikoff’s tackle of ASD and to my own. (To be continued.) Notes [1] To succeed in accounting for mathematical knowledge, Rand’s theoretical philosophy actually needs a renovation in her general ontology, specifically, a renovation (not possible since Rand is deceased and her philosophy is handily taken as in stasis—identifiably what philosophy she made, just that, as-is) that lands as my own layout of the divisions of Existence (2021). Within my layout, pure mathematics is study of the formalities of situation, some such forms belong to concretes given in perception, and the fundamental contrast of the concrete is not the abstract, but the forms belonging to concretes. [2] Some additional contemporary work on the relations of metaphysics to science and on realism in science: Maudlin 2007; Chakravarttty 2007; Mumford and Tugby 2013; Morganti 2013; Ross, Ladyman, and Kincaid 2013. References Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104. Brackenridge, J.B. 1995. The Key to Newton’s Dynamics – The Kepler Problem and the Principia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakravartty, A. 2007. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. 1637. The World and Other Writings, Appendix 2. S. Gaukroger, translator. 1998. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dougherty, J.P. The Nature of Scientific Explanation. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Franklin, J. 2014. An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics – Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garber, D. 1992. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2001. Descartes Embodied. New York: Cambridge University Press. Garber, D. and S. Roux, editors, 2013. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. Grant, E. 2007. A History of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harper, W.L. 2011. Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method. New York: Oxford University Press. Harriman, D. 2010. The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. New York: New American Library. Knapp, R.E. 2014. Mathematics Is about the World. Lexington, KY. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Maudlin, T. 2007. The Metaphysics within Physics. New York: Oxford University Press. Morganti, M. 2013. Combining Science and Metaphysics – Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mumford, S. and M. Tugby, editors, 2013. Metaphysics and Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Newton, I. 1687 (1713, 1725). Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and System of the World. 3rd edition. A. Motte (1729) and F. Cajori (1934), translators. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. Title essay. New York: Signet. ——. 1970. Kand versus Sullivan. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Neds It. New York: Signet. ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE). Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. Ross, D.J., J. Ladyman, and H. Kincaid, editors, 2013. Scientific Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, W.A. 1959. The Scientific Methodology of Theodoric of Freiberg. Fribourg: Fribourg University Press. ——. 1992. Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

I spent more than an hour composing a post for y'all, summarizing episode 8 "Moscow Will Not Be Silent", which covers from the Russian baton passing from Yeltsin to Putin up to Putin's attack on Ukraine. I think posters and readers here would really appreciate the detail and integration attained in this Netflix documentary. But I goofed, apparently by not clicking "Submit Reply" and just logged out. I don't have time to recompose that long post, to which I appended remark on poking fun at dictator elections, and since the Biden-Trump contest was mentioned, elaborated on what I thought about that off-topic issue as it relates to preservation of our constitutional democratic republic. I've got a minute to at least repeat the last sentence of that long, long post now gone to wherever they go when you fail to actually post them: After Obama was elected, in '08 or '12, some commenter at Rebirth of Reason said there would be no more US elections. Wrong.

Saddam Hussein has bested Vladimir Putin in Dictator Elections VP came out of the election in Russia just ended with only 87%. SH in 2002 got 100% with all 11,445,638 registered voters turning out. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We have been learning a great deal from the Netflix documentary Turning Point – The Bomb and the Cold War, even in the parts we had lived through.

David's remark got me thinking that the way we found the house we wanted to buy was probably pretty good from the competition factor. We were buying in 2009 which was good for buyers, as housing transactions had fallen (also, since we were first-time buyers, we were able to get a federal tax advantage at that time). We had been renters in Chicago throughout adult life. By retirement time, we had saved enough money to by a house, provided we moved to a less expensive part of the country. Using sites like Zillow, we had spotted about 30 places in the mid-South we wanted to explore. We had no agent. We rented a car and drove down to look at those houses only from the outside. All but 7 could be eliminated by the surroundings of the house. I wrote down the agents with whom the 7 homes were listed at the property, and after we returned to Chicago, I called each of them and made an appointment to see the interior. They knew I was looking at a number of definite houses, and perhaps that was to our advantage. When I came to the house that was calling "home," it turned out that (in Virginia) that agent could be also our agent, so that is what we did, and it was very convenient for us. I'm pleased to hear his commission may well have been 6% from us—I never knew—and really that seems like a bargain for us.

Doug, I had imagined our agent would be getting about 10% (we came to own real estate only once, late in life), so I was surprised that people consider 6% or so high. I've seen some dramatic data given for the thesis that if one is a seller, one will get about 1.5 times for your home using an agent than doing a "for sale by owner." Whether one is a seller or buyer, I think most of us would not want to do it ourself if the other party had an agent.

War Powers War Authorization Clinton – Bosnia Nuclear Launch

I'm inclined to side with Gus in opposing such a law as is coming about in Utah, and my concern, as in the example Gus mentioned, is the ability of children to find things out about the world, going around the controls of their parents. It is good to be able to learn more truth. The internet offers that, even if it has also the ability to convey the social-gang emotional damaging that goes on among teenagers. Parents do indeed need to be on the lookout for what their children are encountering, whether their children are in pains over social relations with their peers, whether their children are using drugs, shoplifting, becoming depressed, or getting suicidal. But parents can be on the lookout for those things without the lazy turnkey of controlling, not just monitoring, but upfront blindering of children to wider truth of the world and wider truths being discovered of nature beyond what parents wish them to learn. Preparation of a child for independent life is enhanced, as far as I've observed, by wider and argued views of what the world and we consist of, not by deprivation of that information.

SIDEBAR In his 2016, Greg Salmieri notes that it is curious that Peikoff 1967 does not mention Quine’s “Two Dogmas.” Salmeiri points out some ways the Rand-Peikoff diagnoses of and remedies for the errors in analytic-versus-synthetic doctrines differ from Quine’s. Salmieri understands the later challenge of AvS from Kripke and Putnam to have more in common with the Objectivist challenge, though Putnam differs importantly from Rand on definitions and essences, which looms large in the Objectivist challenge (2016, 304n34, 311n87). Salmieri points to the book-review article, in JARS in 2005, by Roderick Long for thoughts on some relations between Randian theory of meaning and those of Kripke and Putnam. Long’s 2005 review of Greg Browne’s book Necessary Factual Truth was followed a year later by a substantial reply from Browne and rejoinder by Long (JARS V7N1). From May to September of 2007, Prof. Browne engaged in a very generous exchange (his own words coming to about 19,000) in a thread at Objectivist Living* defending the rejection by Peikoff of AvS and defending his own kindred rejection of AvS. Browne had in his arsenal the Kripke-Putnam developments that had been savaging AvS in the years since Peikoff 1967. Browne vigorously countered, in that thread, devotees of Logical Empiricism (and of Popper) who criticized (and poorly understood the revolution afoot, such as in) Peikoff 1967. Late in that thread, Robert Campbell entered it to ask Browne if he had any thoughts on why Peikoff had not addressed the famous Quine paper in his (Peikoff’s) dissertation, which Campbell had lately acquired. Browne had not seen the dissertation and had not much to conjecture on that peculiarity. (Remember, Peikoff 1964 is not written as a champion of Ayn Rand’s philosophic views, but, in an even-handed way, by an author acknowledging his background preference for some rehabilitated sort of logical ontologism and pointing near the end of the dissertation to some of that rehabilitation, such as fresh thinking on the nature of definitions and essence; distance between Quine’s views on logic and on AvS and Randian Peikoff views would not be the reason for no Quine in Peikoff 1964.) I should suggest that Quine, Carnap, Russell, and Wittgenstein raise such a briar patch of technicalities that it was better (and enough for deserving a Ph.D.) to stick with the more accessible and manageable Ayer, Nagel, Dewey, and Lewis to get the dissertation (already more than an armful in history assimilated) finally completed. I'll be digging through the Carnap-Quine briar patch in the next installment of the present study (along with Neo-Kantianism, Logical Empiricism, and of course Kant). *I stopped posting at that site a year ago, when the owner covertly deleted a post of mine partly critical of Donald Trump. ~References~ Browne, G. M. 2001. Necessary Factual Truth. Lanham: University Press of America. Gotthelf, A. and G. Salmieri, editors, 2016. A Companion to Ayn Rand. Wiley Blackwell. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Long, R. T. 2005. Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis? —Review of Brown 2001. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7(1):209–28. Quine, W. V. O. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In From a Logical Point of View. 1953. Harvard. Rand, A. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. Meridian. Salmieri, G. 2016. The Objectivist Epistemology. In Gotthelf and Salmieri 2016.

Part 1 Part 2 I expect to complete this study later this year. The result I expect at this point is that evolutionary biology with vegetative teleological causation exhibited as Harry Binswanger does, in physical terms and with that teleological causal cycle framing[1] the efficient causes within the organism, yields for the first time in the history of philosophy, a sound physical basis for Aristotle's final causation in the case of the vegetative actions of living things. This accomplishment renders lost-in-the-woods the persistent criticisms of modern molecular, evolutionary biology as being an eliminative reductionism of quintessential living activity to physical (biochemical) reactions. Those criticisms need to loosen their concept of the physical. Concerning the ramifications for Rand's theory of value, which will come at the end of this paper, I'll have to wait until I've completed the study herein of the full complement of causal mechanisms of life. ([1] "Scaffold" – PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE [2023], 90[5]:1224–33.) This study is of importance to Rand's biocentric theory of value, although I had originally undertaken this work for the sake of getting a good grip on brain computational explanation addressed in Milkowski's EXPLAINING THE COMPUTATIONAL MIND, which had become important to completing my up-to-date assessment of David Kelley's realist theory of perception in THE EVIDENCE OF THE SENSES (1986).* ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INTERLUDE “The seeker comes to the great guru in his mountain fastness and pleads ‘What is Life?’ The sage answers, ‘Life is a fountain’. The supplicant, not surprisingly, is annoyed: ‘I have traveled halfway around the world, spent a fortune, risked my life, and all you can tell me is that life is a fountain?’ ‘All right, my son’, says the guru, ‘for you, Life is not a fountain’.” –The Way of the Cell by F.M. Harold (2001)

Earliest Sub-Canopy Tree – Another Summary – Original Paper

Correction to preceding post: as I understand so far, angiosperms are NOT the types of tree whose fossils are showing the oldest forests. Perhaps pertinent focus should be on Tree Fern, which were earlier than fruit trees (angiosperm) talked of in the Garden of Eden story.

Tad, the picture I'm getting is that when something petrified comes to mind at the word "fossil", it is only by typicality. Like when one thinks of a mouse or rat at the word "rodent". "Fossil" seems to really mean merely the product of minerals replacing living tissue. My Encyclopedia Britannica says that fossilization is process by which the remains or traces of plants or animals are preserved in the earth's crust. I notice that fossils are always sources of information on earlier life forms or sources of energy to people with appropriate background knowledge. However, that does not seem to be part of the definition (by use). On emergence of angiosperms: A, B

@tadmjones Here is an intellectual high-altitude perspective on possibility of superluminal signals, in flat spacetime, without getting into conflict with special relativity in its confines to E-M fields, etc. Although, the paper points to no known physical fields whose differential equations imply causal cones that do not coincide with light speed: Faster than Light? by Robert Geroch (at 13 minutes in this lecture, he speaks of a theorem which, if I understand correctly, rules out the possibility of negative mass in GR which I gather is the situation under which Alcubierre drive would be possible.)

The Brits Are Claiming 390 Million Years Ago, Topping the US 385 Million Years Ago.

Likewise. The great difference in standard of living between rich and middle/poor from the times of Carnegie to our times of Bezos is much publicized. But the rise in standard of living, in market economies, of middle/poor over that interval is where the attention should be, I'd say. I did not like that in Elysium yet another recent futuristic dystopian background for the story was being predicated on overpopulation of the earth. In the first place, it is false that there is not land in the economic sense to support a population 100 times today's were rights-respecting minds left free to investigate and trade. And secondly, it is most galling that stories continue to use overpopulation of earth as fulcrum to the story, when the worried human population growth projections of several decades ago have not occurred. Since 1970 the world population doubled. But with the growth rate now, it is not projected to double again until 200 years from now have passed.

Sight of Superlative Achievement Stephen Boydstun (2007) My favorite character in Atlas Shrugged is John Galt. One of the crucial traits of this character is his extraordinary technical ability. I can adore a fictional character, and part of the reason I adore this one is his possession of that trait. Adoration is one thing, admiration is another. Galt’s technical genius is admirable only in the derivative sense that I would admire that trait in a real person. I cannot admire a fictional character. I can admire the character’s creator as creator, but not the character. Fortunately, there are in our time many individuals whose mathematical and scientific accomplishments are at the high level of the fictional character John Galt. They are not well known to the general public. I want to tell you about one such man. Eli Yablonovitch invented the concept of a photonic band gap. He arrived at this concept in 1987 while doing research on making telecommunication lasers more efficient. Another physicist Sajeev John arrived at the concept independently that same year. John came to the concept in the course of pure research attempting to create light localization. Four years later, Yablonovitch was the first to create a successful photonic band-gap crystal. He used a variant of the crystal structure of diamond, a variant now called yablonovite. The structure was formed by drilling three intersecting arrays of holes, 400 nanometers in diameter, into a block of ceramic material. This structure, at this scale, was able to eliminate the propagation of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range. Photonic band-gap crystals are yielding a new generation of optical fibers capable of carrying much more information, and they are contributing to the realization of nanoscopic lasers and photonic integrated circuits. The name photonic crystal sounds like a crystal made of light. That is incorrect. A photonic crystal is an artificial crystal (or quasicrystal) made usually of solids such as dielectrics or semiconductors. The electrical properties of a semiconductor are intermediate between a dielectric (an insulator) and a conductor. In a dielectric material, the valence electrons of the atoms are tightly bound to them. They are confined to energy levels within the band of levels called the valence band. Above that band of levels is a broad band of energies inaccessible to the electrons under the laws of quantum mechanics. That forbidden band is called the band gap. Above the band gap is a band in which electrons could move freely in the material if only enough energy were applied to them to raise them to that band of energy levels. This band is called the conduction band. In a semiconductor, the valence electrons are less tightly bound to atoms than they are in a dielectric. The band gap is smaller. A smaller boost of energy is needed to induce the flow of electrons, a current. The degree of electrical conductivity of a semiconductor can be precisely controlled by doping one semiconductor chemical element with small amounts of another. When an electron is promoted across the band gap, an effective positive charge called a hole is created in the valence levels below the gap. The holes, like the electrons, can be entrained into currents. By controlling the supply of electrons and holes above and below the band gap, carefully designed semiconductors are able to perform electronic switching, modulating, and logic functions. They can also be contrived to serve as media for photo detectors, solid-state lasers, light-emitting diodes, thermistors, and solar cells. The properties of an electronic band gap depend on the type of atoms and their crystal structure in the solid semiconductor. To comprehend and manipulate the electronic properties of matter, electrons and their alterations must be treated not only in their character as particles, but in their character as quantum-mechanical waves. The interatomic spacing of the atoms in matter is right for wave-interference effects among electrons. This circumstance yields the electronic band gaps in semiconductors as well as the conductive ability of conductors. A photonic band gap is a range of energies of electromagnetic waves for which their propagation through the crystal is forbidden in every direction. The interatomic spacing in semiconductors are on the order of a few tenths of a nanometer, and that is too small for effecting photonic band gaps in the visible, infrared, microwave, or radio ranges of the spectrum. Creation of photonic band gaps for these very useful wavelengths requires spatial organizations in matter at scales on the order of a few hundred nanometers and above. In the 70’s and 80’s, researchers had been forming, in semiconductors, structures called superlattices. These were periodic variations in semiconductor composition in which repetitions were at scales a few times larger than the repetitions in the atomic lattice. The variations could consist of alternating layers of two types of semiconductors or in cyclic variations in the amount of selected impurities in a single type of semiconductor. These artificial lattices allowed designers, guided by the quantum theory of solids, to create new types of electronic band gaps and new opticoelectronic properties in semiconductors. Photonic crystals are superlattices in which the repeating variation is a variation in the refractive index of the medium. It is by refractions and internal partial reflections that photonic band gaps are created. The array of holes that Yablonovitch and his associates drilled for the first photonic crystal formed a superlattice of air in the surrounding dielectric solid. Additional workable forms of photonic-crystal superlattice have been demonstrated since that first one. Costas Soukoulis and colleagues created a crystal of crisscrossed rods, and it has yielded photonic band gaps in the infrared part of the spectrum. Photonic crystals have been created mostly in dielectric or semiconductor media, but Shawn Yu Lin and associates have created them in tungsten. These may prove useful in telecommunications and in the conversion of infrared radiation into electricity. In 2001 Eli Yablonovitch co-founded the company Luxtera, which is now a leading commercial developer of silicon photonic products. Photonic crystals, manipulators of light, they are alive “because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power—of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form.” –AR 1957 (re diesel-electric) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Scientific American 1983 (Nov) “Solid-State Superlattices” –G.H. Dohler 1984 (Aug) “Quasicrystals” –D.R. Nelson 1986 (Oct) “Photonic Materials” –J.M. Rowell 1991 (Nov) “Microlasers” –J.L. Jewell, J.P. Harbison, and A. Scherer 1998 (Mar) “Nanolasers” –P.L. Gourley 2001 (Dec) “Photonic Crystals: Semiconductors of Light” –E. Yablonovitch 2007 (Feb) “Making Silicon Lase” –B. Jalali Science News 1991 (Nov 2) “Drilling Holes to Keep Photons in the Dark” –I. Peterson 1993 (Sep 25) “A Novel Architecture for Excluding Photons” –I. Peterson 1996 (Nov 16) “Light Gets the Bends in a Photonic Crystal” –C. Wu 1998 (Oct 24) “Crystal Bends Light Hard, Saves Space” –P. Weiss 2003 (Oct 4) “Hot Crystal” –P. Weiss 2005 (Nov 5) “Light Pedaling” –P. Weiss Nature Photonics 2007 (1:91–92) “Bandgap Engineering: Quasicrystals Enter Third Dimension” –C.T. Chan Fundamental Papers – Physical Review Letters 1987 (May 18) “Inhibited Spontaneous Emission in Solid-State Physics and Electronics” –E. Yablonovitch 1987 (Jun 8 ) “Strong Localization of Photons in Certain Disordered Dielectric Superlattices” –S. John 1989 (Oct 30) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case” –E. Yablonovitch and T.M. Gmitter 1990 (Nov 19) “Full Vector Wave Calculation of Photonic Band Structures in Face-Centered-Cubic Dielectric Media” –K.M. Leung and Y.F. Liu 1990 (Nov 19) “Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures: Bloch Wave Solution of Maxwell’s Equations” –Z. Zhang and S. Satpathy 1990 (Dec 17) “Existence of a Photonic Gap in Periodic Dielectric Structures” –K.M. Ho, C.T. Chan, and C.M. Soukoulis 1991 (Oct 21) “Photonic Band Structure: The Face-Centered-Cubic Case Employing Non-Spherical Atoms” –E. Yablonovitch, T.J. Gmitter, and K.M. Leung

Even were your accomplishments (not to be confused with your general drifts and aspirations) what you claim and presumably what you think you know, why ever would one want to leave this glorious earth and companion life here. The trush were singing out back waking me this morning. Human steps right on earth can travel unlimited roads if we love these steps and don't pretend we can get around them. I've had a much better quality of life than King Henry VIII. Not due to "recreational drugs," but the regular, amazing medicines of today. Also, due to music on CD's and the internal combustion engine and this electronic means of communication. Yes, there is still human failure, such as those who do not love their mind (and life and the lives of others) enough to stay away from recreational drugs. Leave them, not Earth and the glory on it. The humans going away with you are going to have none of what you want to get away from here on earth? Seek out the good here (e.g. next post).

Emigration of Belarusian and Russian Academics and Institutions

Elysium

Deutsche Welle If Assange is extradited to the US, I predict that if he dies before trial, it will be by natural causes, not by the Devil or the Deep State. Should he live and go on trial, I think the arguments on both sides of the case will be extremely important. If convicted, the case might well be appealed for constitutional issues. If convicted, as was Manning, the President could then, as with Manning, commute the sentence if the Administration thought the penalty too harsh. Perhaps there is worth to the US for cooperation from Assange (I don't know if there is any), and by that route also the sentence of Assange could be lenient. Compassionate release from prison is also a possibility if convicted and sentenced to prison. But cf. Madoff. Afghanistan "War Logs"

On 25 July 2010, WikiLeaks released to The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel over 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009. The documents detail individual incidents including friendly fire and civilian casualties. The scale of the leak was described by Julian Assange as comparable to that of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s. The documents were released to the public on 25 July 2010. On 29 July 2010 WikiLeaks added a 1.4 GB "insurance file" to the Afghan War Diary page, whose decryption details some speculation would be released if WikiLeaks or Assange were harmed. About 15,000 of the 92,000 documents have not yet been released on WikiLeaks, as the group is currently reviewing the documents to remove some of the sources of the information. Speaking to a group in London in August 2010, Assange said that the group will "absolutely" release the remaining documents. He stated that WikiLeaks has requested help from the Pentagon and human-rights groups to help redact the names, but has not received any assistance. He also stated that WikiLeaks is "not obligated to protect other people's sources...unless it is from unjust retribution." WikiLeaks' leaking of classified U.S. intelligence has been described by commentator of The Wall Street Journal as having "endangered the lives of Afghan informants" and "the dozens of Afghan civilians named in the document dump as U.S. military informants. Their lives, as well as those of their entire families, are now at terrible risk of Taliban reprisal." When interviewed, Assange stated that WikiLeaks has withheld some 15,000 documents that identify informants to avoid putting their lives at risk. Specifically, Voice of America reported in August 2010 that Assange, responding to such criticisms, stated that the 15,000 still held documents are being reviewed "line by line," and that the names of "innocent parties who are under reasonable threat" will be removed. Greg Gutfeld of Fox News described the leaking as "WikiLeaks' Crusade Against the U.S. Military." ACLU urges DOJ to drop charges.

I have decided to not write additional poems beyond what I have made and gathered in the collection linked in the preceding post. I am contented with those, and I'll work only on completing my essays for the duration. I read the final two poems I wrote here.

As opposed to slow-walking the decision to hear the appeal on absolute immunity for ex-presidents, the Supreme Court could very well have been in an interval of trying get enough Justices to agree to hear the appeal from the appellate court decision and opinion, with some Justices initially undecided and open to persuasion. We don't know. But Gus neglects comparison of the speed of the Supreme Court (and them slowing things down by earlier throwing the appeal back to the DC appellate court for decision) with the Supreme Court speed in the Nixon case* and in the Bush v. Gore case. Unless the Court gives their decision in this coming week, it will look very like the political-party alignment of the Court in Bush v. Gore. Delaying until end of June to give their decision and opinions could very well say all Yes to the lengthy opinion of the lower appellate court, say that ex-Presidents are not immune from criminal prosecution, while, having slow-walked the time-sensitive case, made the ruling de facto inapplicable to the one case that has ever come up. (Although, I must admit, it is not clear that most American voters would not vote for Trump even knowing that he was convicted in the pending criminal cases. I've apparently in the past credited the American people with too much valuation that America be a constitutional democratic republic. Now they just deny it ever was such a thing, rationalizing their own instigation of its downfall.) On the slowness of the prosecution bringing the DC case and the Georgia case, that could easily be a matter of the time needed to gather sufficient evidence to have a high chance for conviction, even when the accused is a rich litigant and a former President.