Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently:

• Does philosophy have a future?

  by Mark English

  One of (the) problems with philosophy is that -- unlike in science -- virtually nothing within the discipline is ever definitively resolved. Old approaches are routinely exposed as logically flawed or inadequate. But the usual pattern is that someone then comes along and finds that the original view can be salvaged with some small modifications and/or that the critique is also flawed.
  ... The general belief within philosophy is that the process of collegial debate, discussion and review leads to a refinement or clarification of views and so to a progress of sorts. Refinement, yes. Clarification, I'm not so sure.
  Often this process can all too plausibly be interpreted in one of two ways (or both -- the ideas are not mutually exclusive): it can be seen as a cover for what is essentially an ideological battle; or merely as a competitive game, self-perpetuating and futile.
  ... The view that much philosophy is self-perpetuating and futile, a game of sorts which ends not when some kind of "truth" or resolution is finally arrived at but when people just get tired of that particular game and move on to another, has often been more or less acknowledged by philosophers.

• Clapper Denies Lying, Announces New Ethics Policy

  Why isn't this guy in jail?

  Clapper flat-out lied to Sen. Ron Wyden during a Senate hearing in March when he said the NSA does not wittingly "collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans."
  Clapper has previously said he "responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no."
  On Thursday, he said he had been falsely accused of lying "because of a mistake and trying to answer on the spot a question about a specific classified program in an unclassified setting."

  Even though it was a friendly setting, was there not at least a giggle from the audience?

• No, Snowden's Leaks Didn't Help The Terrorists

  "Well prior to Edward Snowden, online jihadists were already aware that law enforcement and intelligence agencies were attempting to monitor them."

  "...Flashpoint Global Partners, a private security firm, examined the frequency of releases and updates of encryption software by jihadi groups... It found no correlation in either measure to Snowden's leaks about the NSA's surveillance techniques, which became public beginning June 5, 2013."

• Schizophrenia not a single disease but multiple genetically distinct disorders

  About 80 percent of the risk for schizophrenia is known to be inherited, but scientists have struggled to identify specific genes for the condition. Now, in a novel approach analyzing genetic influences on more than 4,000 people with schizophrenia, the research team has identified distinct gene clusters that contribute to eight different classes of schizophrenia.

• Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota

  Collectively, our results link NAS (Non-caloric artificial sweeteners) consumption, dysbiosis and metabolic abnormalities, thereby calling for a reassessment of massive NAS usage.

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics

  Now, anyone with internet access and a web browser can enjoy reading a high quality up-to-date copy of Feynman's legendary lectures.

  Volume     I: mainly mechanics, radiation and heat
  Volume   II: mainly electromagnetism and matter
  Volume III: quantum mechanics

• How big telecom smothers city-run broadband

  AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable use statehouses to curb public Internet service

  The companies have succeeded in getting laws passed in 20 states that ban or restrict municipalities from offering Internet to residents.

Why I never took a history course in college.

• Does It Help to Know History?

  Adam Gopnik, August 28, 2014 The New Yorker daily comment

  
  

  But the best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out.

  ...
  What history actually shows is that nothing works out as planned, and that everything has unintentional consequences. History doesn't show that we should never go to war -- sometimes there's no better alternative. But it does show that the results are entirely uncontrollable, and that we are far more likely to be made by history than to make it. History is past, and singular, and the same year never comes round twice.

In the summer after I graduated high school I read War and Peace. It was just after I had taken a calculus course and the analogies made by Tolstoy between history and calculus made a lasting impression on me. Adam Gopnik's blog posting reminded me of this and here are two links that give more details about Tolstoy's comments related to calculus in War and Peace.

• MathFiction: War and Peace
  (quoted from War and Peace)

  The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous. To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history. But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all those human wills, man's mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected units. The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another.
  
  The second method is to consider the actions of some one man- a king or a commander- as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of a single historic personage.
  
  Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth continually takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others, or to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of many men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is in itself false.
  
  It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any deductions drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select some larger or smaller unit as the subject of observation- as criticism has every right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes must always be arbitrarily selected. Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.

• Tolstoy's Calculus

  "Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind. Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements."
  
  "By adopting smaller and smaller elements we only approach a solution of the problem, but never reach it," Tolstoy declared. "Only when we have admitted the conception of the infinitely small, and the resulting geometrical progression with a common ratio of one tenth, and have found the sum of this progression to infinity, do we reach the solution of the problem." Building on this analogy, Tolstoy turned to the calculus as a model of how to apprehend history. "A modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of motion which used to appear insoluble," he wrote.