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

             Today’s post is about a new preliminary answer to the  “Pennies Game.”  Which is a precursor game to the Prisoner’s Dilemma invented by RAND game theorist Merrill Flood. The “Pennies Game” – depicted here by Flood – is an asymmetric game rather than a symmetric game and this is relevant or arguably more relevant to the power dynamics between more powerful players and less powerful players,  such as the game between Trump, Columbia, and Harvard  (although I previously explained that scenario is an asymmetric, multiplayer game).      The Pennies Game has two players with pennies who have to split the pennies, and can opt between splitting these proceeds, or keeping them with one player having more pennies than the other. Here, Flood’s answer (1,2) vindicates  the game theorist John von Neumann  and in real life with two players playing for pennies, the two players choose to have one player ea...

                 Many of my amazing heroes are Black persons—including and especially my Fourth Circuit  Judge Roger L. Gregory,  who embodies grace, decorum, and dignity in addition to brilliance. Judge Gregory long ago reenforced an idea that I already knew and that scholars like  Ibram X. Kendi  have written  eloquent books about —namely that our country (the United States) has never been equal or fair and that white persons (including white women, though mostly white wealthy men) have been the beneficiaries of unfairness.                    A prime example of an aspect of the U.S. Constitution that embodies unfairness is the  3/5 th  clause, which states that slaves are counted as 3/5ths of all other persons under American law. Even though the Constitution was amended after the Civil War to include the...

Today’s blog is for all those who doubt women in math and science: main point, we (women) have to be twice as good to get half as far, and women of color, in particular, have it bad, and beautiful women also have it bad. I’m going to make some humorous remarks about boobs and bras and how to mathematically diagram bras and boobs so if readers find those remarks are offensive, don’t read on. I make them to make a point: which is that women are often objectified and viewed as pieces of “meat” rather than as equals. Which we are or should be,  given we are 50% of the population, but only 8% of senior scientists  published in the journal  Nature  (note this article is about Canada, I assume it’s worse in the United States).  My expertise is game theory, which can be applied to many serious things,  including quantum computing . But game theory methods from one of my favorite think tanks, RAND,  uses advanced calculus  and many  game theorists als...

              Today’s post was inspired   by a new study published by  Nature  out of the University of Wisconsin . It talks about the destruction of science, and how Trump is destroying science. Authoritarianism regimes around the world have famously suppressed science and been anti-science and anti-math. One of my favorite shows on Netflix is the   “Three Body Problem,”   and this show peripherally touches on my research agenda which deals with game theory and problems involving multiple players, including three players. (Though I did accidentally get the square root of three in a lunch with my Dad, and got it without doing calculations off by .01, my favorite number in the universe is   e,  or Euler’s number,   and   e  and the number zero are awesome because they both have incredibly   special, spiritual properties   and can be seen in nature, and I refer readers to my   post on bioph...

Today’s blog entry is for those math lovers out there, and it assumes some mathematical knowledge that I cannot impart to lawyers or readers who haven’t had multivariable calculus. I was brushing up on a part of math called “ordinary differential equations” and I selected the hardest YouTube lecture I could from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  The very first part of the course contained a statement I think is mathematically false . The professor, who I don’t know at all, said that the ODE   contained zero solutions.   I’m sorry, but I have reason to believe this is flat out wrong.   In math, there are three cases. The positive case, the zero case, and the negative case. That means in this equation y can equal the set of positive numbers, the zero case, and the negative case. The same goes for x. X can equal the set of positive numbers, the zero case, and the negative case.  Here, these are independent variables, meaning they do not depend on one and ...

                 Yesterday, for a brief period, the top story wasn’t   DT’s having invaded Los Angeles with marines   or the   near-arrest of a sitting U.S. Senator from California, merely for asking questions at a news conference   (back to  how viewpoint discrimination is illegal,   and it shouldn’t have mattered he was a Senator), before DT was   rebuked on Thursday night by Judge Breyer , but   a tragedy in India   where a plane full of passengers crashed into a medical school killing nearly everyone aboard, and leaving only one survivor. (To those who doubt miracles, how amazing is it that this one guy survived and was able to call his family? The fact that anyone survived is amazing.)             Yet this disaster may have been fully preventable. Why? The airline in question was Boeing. And one of the things that my scholarship ...

I’m new to the wild, wild west of the online platforms, and barely have an online presence. But I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, which is persons holding themselves out to be something they are not – i.e., misstating their qualifications. How is this related to my research?  Well, my research matters to so many things, but one of the most important values I stand for is truth! And I once staked my life on my integrity and promised God that I would die before I violate my integrity. I actually said that I would rather be struck dead than violate my own integrity. I said a bunch of other stuff to God as part of a “bargain” or “promise” I made to God. I believe I’ve held up my end of the bargain, and the jury is still out as to whether God will hold up his/her/their/its end with me, of course over what time frame I couldn’t really say. But I believe in  leading by inspiration , and so I’ll start with the fact that I believe everyone has an obligation to be honest about their rese...