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...

Today's DRLR post is a lengthy ode to Euler, the Bridges problem, and women in math and physics. I am a fan of the science magazine  Quanta Magazine , and recently I heard  a podcast  with an amazing woman mathematician named  Maria Chudnovsky  of Princeton (I mention her gender because women are really underrepresented in math and in STEM, and  women are discouraged from doing math  and pushed out) whose career is dedicated to the study of  “graph theory.”  Graph theory emerged from a Russian town located on an island where the townspeople would take weekend strolls to see if they could cross seven bridges and not cross any bridge twice.        Now, when I first answered, I knew nothing about the layout of the town, or where the bridges are located, but apparently the math supergenius Euler thought (initially) this problem was silly. So did I. In fact, the solution came to me in about two seconds: the numbe...

              I had a lovely conservation two days ago with an interlocutor who caused me to think more deeply about “what does it mean to be an altruist?” I’ve discussed altruism in a post where I showed the psychological literature indicates that   most adult humans risk their lives to save a child who is drowning instinctively . I hypothesize these individuals don’t even think at all, but if they failed to act, and the child died, they’d be stuck with an incredibly guilty conscience. And ignoring someone who is in pain should strike those   Catholic pangs of guilt , and I know every time I walk by a homeless person and am unable to give money or food. I do volunteer when I have time for the homeless, or I have in the past.             But is altruism so straightforward? Take my career for example. Although neither one of my parents is a lawyer, my Dad was an enrolled actuary and r...

I just posted an ode to Bill Gates , noting the similarities I share with him, and particularly his love of games and math. But I equally love Melinda French Gates – who is an incredible badass feminist icon and who knows how to code (I haven’t learned yet and I still need to learn Python, which I fully intend to do). Melinda French Gates’ book  is about life “transitions” and letting go of persons or situations that are no longer right, even if this means a messy divorce. Melinda French Gates discusses in her autobiography how she heard an “inner whisper” – in the sense of  Rumi’s inner whisper  or maybe  Oprah  – and it just started gnawing at her to leave Bill Gates and getting progressively louder, and louder, and louder until she could no longer contain or deny it. I myself have also been guided by an “inner voice” during my spiritual awaking and I have not always obeyed it, and that sometimes saved me from giving into impulses that would have shattered my ...

              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...