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

There is a common phrase:  "Never meet your heroes."   I don't know the exact etymology of this phrase, but presumably this means they will disappoint whoever meets them and they turn out to be highly imperfect and flawed humans who present an amazing public image but if a person really gets to know them, or puts them under a microscope, a person will discover profound flaws.  This happened to me yesterday - though metaphorically, not literally. I adore and love the book  Calculus: Early Transcendentals   by James Stewart. And I even recommended it on LinkedIn yesterday in response to a post about true mathematicians who can't read a math textbook without yelling at it. I guess that means I'm officially a mathematician. I was working through a problem on ordinary differential equations.  This is like the  mistake I caught at MIT.  Forgive the tech issues, blogger refused to load my equations so I had to take a screenshot from Word. And Blogge...

I want to recount an anecdote from my Fourth of July that should indicate the turmoil this country is facing. I live in Oakland, California, one of the most diverse places in all of California. I walked out the door this afternoon before I went to spend the Fourth of July with family, and I noticed one of my neighbors in Rockridge where I live - a peaceful neighborhood that has families and renters of all races - flying an upside U.S. flag. I became instantly distressed, and when the person who picked me up saw me, she immediately noticed. I want to call attention to the origins of the upside down flag, which I didn't know about until the scandal with Justice Alito flying the upside down flag around Trump's election.  This is technically illegal under the U.S. Code, though it's also free speech protected by Cohen v. California , if that case is even still good law. My understanding of the upside down American flag is that it is used as a symbol of white Christian nationali...