How to Have Hope: Musings on How to Achieve Cooperation and Peace Using Law, Math, and Physics

              Cats or dogs? This is an obvious question with an equally obvious answer: Clearly cats. I’ve explained why cats are better   from the perspective of physics   but now let me explain to explain from the perspective of economics. (This blog is partly humorous and an outlet for some of my zany ideas that probably could never be published in a mainstream journal.) But the “cats versus dogs” debate has existed since, well actually I don’t know how long, but presumably since ancient Egypt, where   pharaohs almost literally worshipped cats  and idolized them and turned them into statues. Whereas  some societies have killed dogs and eaten them . I’m unaware of anyone eating cats, but readers alert me if I’m wrong or leave a comment. My intuition says cats wouldn’t taste very good, but I’m a quasi-vegan animal lover and would never eat either a cat or a dog. Occasionally, once in a  “blue moon”  I have sushi, but...

                I have told the story of when I knew I was going to commit my life to social justice – as a   kindergartener when my teacher collectively punished the entire class   and I recognized in my heart and soul that this was wrong. But it was not always my idea to be a lawyer, in fact it was an accident because in middle school, I was deeply into the arts. I was the lead in my 8th grade play, and sung in   a professional children’s choir , and I had intended to try out for the performing arts program at my high school. But I never even made it to the try outs. The school distributed a form about extracurricular activities, and it listed debate. I checked the box, and the rest was history. I went on to finish third in the country at the   Tournament of Champions in high school , and was recruited by multiple colleges, but picked Dartmouth for both debate and academics. (Also, why did my high sch...

                  Although my scholarship on the Prisoner’s Dilemma stands for “turning the other cheek” (in a pre-print I’m still working on where I need help with a boundary condition, physicists who are interested in game theory and cosmology please contact me) in a symmetric 2-player, 3-player, or 4-player game or over time, I don’t want to generalize beyond my findings. While I personally believe in forgiveness, that doesn’t make it easy, and it’s especially not easy if the wrongdoer fails to take accountability. Should the people of the United States forgive Trump absent Trump doing the right thing? In my “Hollywood” world – or in the view of any dreamer like Dr. King – there are still “limits” on forgiveness.  Even Dr. King himself was stabbed by a woman who claimed she was, in effect, a #MeToo victim before there was a movement, and the Southern Leadership Conference had wronged her . Now, I have no idea if she was telling ...

  Yesterday, I posted an essay explaining how I had become a “how” person in addition to a “why” person . I posted this essay on LinkedIn, and mentioned it on the LinkedIn page for  Fermat’s library , an incredible math and physics resource that informed me that yesterday was the anniversary of  Hermann Minkowski’s inventing the four-dimensional spacetime matrix  that allegedly helped Einstein , which seemed a lovely synchronicity.  I’m privileged to be able to think mathematically in 3D, and I’m working on thinking in 4D and 5D.  In any event, in response to this essay, I was cyberbullied by a male engineer who mocked my math and feminism and posted an actual skull, which I took as a death threat. (Notably, he did so in direct response to my LinkedIn comment on this math and science forum.) This essay is just to show the extent women who want to do math and science do, in fact, face a “ steep conical hill,”  from some men who seemingly think it s...

Many years ago, I was a “why” person. In fact, I’m still a “why” person and I always want to know why things are the way they are because if the reason isn’t good, then something (like rules) may have to change. I used to pester my parents, and ask “why, why, why” about basically anything in any subject, and my parents, who were educated, my Dad at the University of Chicago, and my Mom at Oberlin with an actual PhD at UC Berkeley, did their best to answer my questions. However, in the end, my tiny five-year-old self stumped them routinely and they would eventually run out of answers. Asking “why” is one of my favorite techniques, not to disrespect boundaries because obviously “no” in many contexts is a full and complete answer and no one has to justify, for example, not requiting romantic interest. But if the legal system is built on making sense, then laws  ought  to have sound justifications for why rules or laws exist.  My life’s work actually started well before I was...

Today's blog is an official commitment: from henceforth, my academic scholarship will only consist of two problems: a) proving John Nash wrong in every way I can, and b) if I have time and I'm lucky, I will prove Stephen Hawking right. And while I may not have a PhD in physics, thus no degree, I have raw smarts, and my math and physics speaks for itself, and have a whole lot in common with the eccentric scientist Dr. Kary Mullis, who lived in the Midwest and worked at Kansas University  ( check out his bio) .   Freeman Dyson, the Nobel-caliber physicist whose work I’m vindicating didn’t have a PhD either , though I want one to be taken seriously.    Both/and.   There are many roads or paths for me to do this, and much of math and physics are free or largely inexpensive, and even if I never do experimental physics (which is incredibly expensive,  ask NSF)  I can do theoretical physics with a pen and paper and textbooks anywhere, anytime ...