Ministry of Everything - more troubles ahead

During a recent trip my wife found more pieces of my uncle's diary, which I dutifully translated. This is a continuation of this, this and that.

Deregulation

Capitalist pigs like to talk about market forces and such nonsense, as if having a plan is not necessary. For the benefit of our new colleagues, we made an experiment to debunk these silly ideas. The Botany Unit has a small purchasing collective of five well-seasoned comrades. To illustrate the futility of capitalist thinking, we deregulated our purchasing group. Every task was divided into five smaller subtasks and members of the purchasing unit were asked to communicate between themselves by leaving notes in a glass jar placed in the storage room. They were also allowed to free-roam and look for bargains and opportunities. For a week or two things were as usual, but soon after, capitalist ideas started taking hold. Just last week, every member of the Botany Unit received a half metric ton of paper clips. They were a bargain, because 10% of them were guaranteed to be rust-free. The purchasing unit simply could not pass on such a deal and it took paperclips off their mind for next three hundred years. Soon afterwards we received many gallons of green camouflage paint. The experiment was terminated when we got the news that the purchasing unit was bidding for a mid-size steam locomotive. Other than being stuck with paperclips and paint, it was a good lesson. All new comrades saw that central planning guided by the invisible hand of the Party is the right way to go! 

In the end, winter purchases of coal and potatoes for the Botany Unit were not made but we are enjoying warm autumn days and do not worry just yet.

Stargazers

Ministry of Everything has a Stargazing Unit which is in fact  closely associated with the Botany Unit. Comerades stargazers are good companions and we like to work with them. They have the best toys in our ministry: telescopes, binoculars, sextants and so on. For the long time they were forging ahead without much supervision. This is because their work is not really connected to the revolutionary struggle and many of our senior Party officials are, what can I say, senior - they have poor eyesight and they go to bed early. Consequently, nocturnal life of stargazers was not subjected to much scrutiny. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end and lately stargazers have fallen on bad times. Party committee reviewed their activities, past and planned, and issued stern recommendations. Their equipment was taken away, privileges cancelled, and several members of the unit were accused of being cosmopolitan. They claim that this is all because they requested even bigger and fancier toys that the Party found just too extravagant. But as always the truth is more complicated.

One reason for their downfall are their discoveries. Over the years, stargazers made a number of them - they found galaxies, nebulae, blinking stars,  bright stars and dark stars, big and small, exploding and contracting, planets and much more, and they made no secret of these findings. In summary, they have shown that the Universe is a busy place.  Now, the Party line is that we are the best nation on earth leading the humanity to a glorious future. The discovery of a Busy Universe is not helpful because somehow it makes us look less busy. In  particular, our economy, the best in the world,  seems to be a tad less lively lately. Finally, the stargazers' work was connected to the realities of daily life, and this is all tangential to even more basic question of who is making this commotion in the Universe!

The other problem is even worse. Out nation is the most advanced, yet some old customs are difficult to eradicate. In particular, astrology has a strong foothold in our society. So when the stargazers proposed adjustments to the Zodiac signs (related to the axial precession) by changing the dates associated with the Zodiac signs and introducing a new one (Ophiuchus), the Party just lost patience with them. Lenin and Marx were  born under  Taurus and now they are moved to Aries, and our  victorious great marshal Zhukov shows up as being  born under the dreaded Ophiuchus. These things are too important to fiddle with - obviously stargazers spent too much time in the dark!

 Austerity measures

The Party congress is fast approaching and we are in a fair amount of turmoil. The central committee seems to be considering two ideas. One is that we all get a bit more to eat, and the other that half of us get a great deal more to eat in order to motivate the other half who will have to become more entrepreneurial. Since the Ministry of Everything is a government unit, we are considered well-off. Consequently, our food rations were cut by 30% immediately. Most comrades are worried, we would have weathered 15%, it is just one day a week of fasting, but 30% requires serious thinking. Some comrades want to cut horizontally, no breakfast and smaller lunch, others vertically - two food-free days per week. Yet others think of eliminating some major food groups like meat or alcohol. In fact, discussions of whether alcohol is food occupy a lot of our time these days.

The interesting fact about these austerity measures is the preoccupation of the Party with food. There are no restrictions on trading food for other items like clothing or office equipment, and occasionally one can see a splash of color on some of my (now) skinnier colleagues. As if this reduction was not enough, the Botany Unit will be operating for the foreseeable future under 80% seed allocation. Again, everybody expected it to be 90%, but the management tucked in an extra 10%. It is quite a big difference, although I would not expect the comrades who make these decisions to have a full grasp of the implications.  Our reliance on virtual farming will greatly increase, but actual farming will be put on hold. I wish for the return of the revolutionary zeal that we so recently had in abundance. Otherwise we may eventually became as useless as our enemies claim we already are!   

Fearless leaders

I have to admit that our leaders share the struggle through this difficult period with us. Leadership is harder to quantify and so it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly they are doing when we are working. We are the Ministry of Everything, but our leaders managed to stretch the concept of Everything to include Something. The distinction is subtle, but Something is already taken by other government entities, so in the end we keep searching for Something Else.  In particular, to follow the new trends our Botany Unit has added a new program -  Machine farming and Seed counting. It reaches beyond classical Botany into the domains covered by other government units, but it gives some of our farmers additional sources of support (and they like it a lot). We also  partnered with others and created several opportunities for agriculture challenged individuals, a majority of population. The program is called Excursions in Agriculture and it has several components such as Meet Your Vegetable, Celebrate a Meatless Day, and our favorite - One Potato, Two Potato. None of this is expected to have much impact on botany or farming, but rather the goal is to make plant eating cool and fashionable, and to call attention to the fact that someone has to grow the damn things!

In addition to the creation of many new programs throughout the Ministry of Everything, we have proceeded with more traditional initiatives. Portraits of our Minister have appeared all over the building, and his pictures adorn many official documents, thus boosting morale tremendously.  

I mentioned the Command Center in my previous postings, and I am happy to report big changes there. Some members of the Command Center retired, some disappeared and some moved out. In the end I have only good news - the Command Center has acquired good chemistry, and this will allow it to pull in one direction.  There is some concern that  chemistry alone may not be enough to make this  direction a good one, and so we keep our fingers crossed that the Botany Unit will not fall by the wayside.

Continued here.

Homework

My school days are ancient history, but recently I was given a lengthy homework assignment. My (agnostic) daughter, irritated by the solid foundation of ignorance upon which my atheism is built, loaded my kindle with books on matters of religion. She threw in a few paper copies for a good measure. Little did I know what a wild trip it would be...

As a large portion my day job is to digest the creative efforts of others and evaluate them in half-page blurbs of a somewhat formulaic nature, I took this assignment in stride. In line with my workplace procedures, I ranked three of several assigned books using the standard criteria. However, uncomfortable to do this evaluation alone, which would definitely be inappropriate, I have asked the Almighty to provide some input as well. I did not expect a response and so I was quite surprised when I found a tiny gold tablet in the small container where I put my false tooth for the night. It turned out to be a SIM card with four messages. Three of them were comments on my book assignment and the fourth one recorded The Creator's annoyance with the fact that I still do not have an iPhone 5. Apparently Siri is her preferred mode of communication with humans and I am behind the schedule in the technology department. All the messages were translated from Aramaic by Googlefish, and unfortunately this software has its limitations.

Christopher Hitchens, God is not great, Kindle edition

Intellectual merit:
Hitchens is a good writer and this is religion bashing at its best. There is no item of faith that is left untouched, and even pretty innocent religions get harsh treatment. Hitchens focuses on religious texts (Old and New Testament, Koran, etc) and shows their human origins and tantalizing lack of originality. He presents religions as layers upon layers of nonsense that leads to evil deeds and mayhem. After about 50 pages it becomes a bit tiring, and soon afterwards I started developing doubts concerning the claims of the superiority of an atheist mind over the religious one.
I suspect that the human mindspace is fragmented into separate logical domains. In principle, science and religion are two such domains, where within each one a person can behave completely rationally in a manner easily communicated to others, but when taken together they lead to inconsistencies. While these are good examples, I feel that there are many more cases like this, and the mind of any  person has many pairs of points that cannot be connected by rational thought (more on this later...). 

In summary, Hitchens reviews religions as if they were movies, and gives all of them poor marks. Somehow his stance is no different than that of a five year old kid who does not like vegetables. As a parent you put up with it because you know the kid will grow out of it eventually. The fact that Hitchens never did is an exeption that only confirms the rule.

Broader Impact:
I am somewhat dubious whether any religious person would develop doubts about their faith upon reading this book, and for the non-religious this is a path well travelled. Consequently, the book is not particularly useful for any audience. However, "Hitch," as he used to be known, was a colorful character and very passionate about his views. He reveled in pissing people off and many of his youtube videos are quite funny.

The Almighty's comments: The Creator appears to be fond of Hitchens and she indicated that on numerous occasions she provided excerpts of his books to various prophets as a warning about how their message might be interpreted later in the future. Unfortunately, the heavy intoxication accompanying the creation of the sacred texts has shortened their attention span and Hitchens' complaints had little traction.

Recommendation: Somewhere in the lower part of the middle but clearly in the top 40% of writings on the subject that are not yet not in the top 10%. Got it?

 

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, paper copy (not on my daughter's list)

Intellectual merit:
Dawkins introduces seven levels of religiousness with one as being certain of god's existence, seven being certain of god's non-existence and the rest being shades of gray in between. Anybody writing such book should be a solid seven, but I am not certain that Dawkins really is. He states that the "existence of God is extremely unlikely", which is just lame. Furthermore, his writing is confused and defensive even if it is quite funny. He seems to be unable to detach his thinking from his emotions. All of this lowers the Intellectual Merit factor significantly.

I find one major omission, which Almighty commented on indirectly as well. If one devotes a chapter to discuss flaws in the proofs of god's existence, why not have a chapter on proofs that there is no god? These are much more compelling and easier to come by. Just to illustrate, let me give an example of what he is missing out on.
Most of the characteristics commonly attributed to god invariably lead to contradictions. Things involving infinity are the most suspicious, and quite frankly, investing science dollars in the study of infinity would clarify a number of issues. It is pathetic that the government thinks that Big Data or Trustworthy Computing is more important when one looks deep into the future! Anyway, this is obviously my personal pet peeve, so let's stay focused.
Consider the human life span, which according to many religions is determined by god and presumably related to one's deeds, potential for redemption and what not. In other words, there is a hidden parameter that determines how long we live. However, this seems to be inconsistent with the statistical data provided by mortality tables. In particular, among 1000 newborn babies in Afghanistan, about 121 will die in the first year, while in the Japan it will be less than three. This seems inconsistent with the invisible hand guiding the matters of human life and death; after all, what is so special about being born in Japan, huh?

Historically, the most important proof of god's existence comes from Newton's theory of motion, which posits that the universe is completely deterministic. Personally I was somewhat worried when I first heard about it. Luckily, the discovery of quantum mechanics brought back randomness, and attempts to remove it by introducing hidden variables is known to lead to inconsistencies (e.g. Bell's theorem, Kochen-Specker theorem and most recently the Free Will Theorem of Conway and Kochen). All these indicate that the universe is endowed with true randomness. This is at odds with god's ability to see the future, isn't it? 

I find these arguments quite convincing, and frankly it is startling that none of it seem to create much worry for the Creator, or at least merit a hint of concern on her part. Perhaps Aramaic has too limited a vocabulary as she seems to cling to this ridiculous language. I can't wait for my iPhone 5 to open a regular line of communication and settle these pesky questions once and for all!

Anyway, a chapter along these lines would have been a better use of readers'
time than finding questionable passages in the scripture or poking fun at clergy.

The second omission really points to a serious knowledge gap. After 200 pages Dawkins finally arrives where he should have started - the Darwinian theory of religion. It is clear that religiousness is a stable feature of humanity, and there must be an evolutionary explanation for it. Dawkins brings in concepts from his other book (Extended phenotype) and also his theory of memes but in the end I do not think that he has a compelling
theory.

In fact I am dubious that he has got it right at all. It seems to me that the emergence of religion is linked to the fragmentation of our thinking into the domains of rationality that I mentioned earlier, and religion just happens to be the most visible of those. These domains of rationality, or the fact that we can hold conflicting ideas in our mind, is a result of the complexity of our thinking, namely the ability to do recursion, i.e. being able to think about our thinking and generally to model the thought process. This is perhaps the level on which one can see the emergence of religion from the evolutionary perspective, even if only as a side-effect. 

Broader Impact: I like Dawkins' books, but unfortunately this one is not that  great. Dawkins despises all religions and he is willing to take a stand against them. The book is full of sarcastic remarks on various aspects of religion. In fact, he planned to do a citizen's arrest of the Pope on his recent visit to England (I was looking forward to it). Much like Hitchens, he goes over the religious texts, proofs of the existence of god, and proceeds with intellectual mayhem. Dawkins is a popular writer, visible in the community. The Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype are really great books, where solid science is interspersed with a great ability to explain and visualize things. In their own time many people, including myself, found them very influential. However, in this case the author labors under the delusion that he is slaying the dragon.

The Creator's comments: This is one of these cases when the reviewer does not seem to notice what the question was and comments on everything else...
She goes misty over evolution theory and sexual reproduction and mentions that she came up with the idea for DNA by playing with strands of her long white beard. What? White beard? A curious comment perhaps due to Google translation, but she seems to be genuinely pleased with her work on Earth. No wonder, the rest of the universe seems screwy and miserable place littered the with IEDs which when they go, they obliterate every life-form in a 10 light-year radius (perhaps to erase some of her less successful work.)
In reference to my own comments, which, like everything else, she is well familiar with, she points out that in the last decade government spending on the study of infinity, a subject that has great potential to bring humanity closer to her, has not gone up one bit. Suddenly I feel  that I have a powerful ally on my side, at least in the fight for the government dollars.

As I said, there is not one reference to Dawkins in the whole message. Given  the prominence of the reviewer, it is a mark down, isn't it?

Recommendation: A notch below Hitchens.

Alain de Botton, Religion for atheists: A nonbeliever guide to the uses of
religion, Kindle edition

Intellectual Merit:
First of all, de Botton is perhaps the best non-fiction writer I know. The writing is unbelievably smooth. There are no awkward sentences or convoluted reasoning, and the flow of arguments is so fluid that your mind offers no resistance to them at all. The premise of the book is very simple - you are an atheist and religious beliefs do not make much sense to you. Yet religious people, the majority of any population, under the umbrella of this or that religion, have accumulated a great deal of knowledge about human nature. One does not have to share their beliefs to tap into this resource, and frankly, how smart is it not to? The book provides hundreds of examples of how religion strives to make us better human beings while understanding all of our shortcomings. Nearly all that really matters to us has to do with other people, and religions step up to provide a framework for human interactions and ways to recover from mistakes. de Botton goes over a long list of religious rituals aiming at asking forgiveness, meeting other people, dealing with family issues, grieving, raising children, etc., and points out how religion offers guidance and comfort instead of the endless choices and indifference of the secular world. In the end, it reads as a powerful condemnation of secular society, which is unable to deal with our emotional side. I just loved this book, and it influenced me a great deal. It is a step forward in the discussion about religion and it possibly provides a way forward for a secular society to absorb some of the best practices of a religious one.

Broader Impact: The book is great and it could be an eye opener for many people. Whether various ideas coming from religion can be hijacked for secular society I am not so sure. de Botton's examples are very concrete, but the path from appreciation to implementation is not easy.

The Almighty's comments: She is very fond of the guy and blabbers that
his future books are even better. A solid plus for the Broader Impact!  

Is the price right?

Buoyed by the success of my economic theories, I continue my analysis of the consumer-side aspects of shopping. Unlike my other entries, this one is firmly rooted in  my own knowledge and experience. I am a professional shopper, and in my day job I shop for 40+ hours a week. To hone my professional skills I also shop a lot in my spare time, and for the benefit of my employer I often venture in new directions trying to broaden my horizons and stimulate overlooked parts of the economy.

So let me start with a complaint - shopping is not what it used to be! K-Mart, Walmart, Expedia (the list is long) have made the experience one-dimensional and not exciting. Excessive focus on price and endless bargain hunting is taking away the fun, and the economy takes a beating in the process as well. Needless to say, this is not the way to shop.

To start from the basics - an act of purchase is a complicated interaction. It is  commonly presented as an acquisition, but in reality it is so much more.
It represents a choice on part of a buyer, it rewards someone else's time and effort, it signals one's political leanings, and it can be propagated through social networks. It is the most important way of realizing one's freedom of choice and expressing one's individuality. One can exert a great deal more power through shopping than political participation. Rather then theorize let us consider two specific examples: buying eggs and buying a graduate education. I encounter both on a daily basis and over time I let the synergistic relationship develop.

Eggs

When they ask you "How do you want your eggs?"  you might say "Scrambled" or "Poached" but I want to say  "free-roaming",  "happy", "cage free" and so on.  For close to ten years I have been buying eggs that have been "certifiably humane", "antibiotic free", "from free roaming hens" which are "running on outdoor pastures", and which are  "chicken shit covered". Initially these eggs were hard to find, but after a few years a decent selection emerged and like a russian mogul I was consistently choosing the most expensive kind that met the above conditions. In hindsight, I am glad to report that I did not belong to a measure zero set. Whether it was compassion for comrade hens, longing for the organic and  natural, or simply a search for a better egg - happy eggs took over entire supermarket chains and they are here to stay. They cost as much as three times more than unhappy ones, but so what - how much cholesterol can you take anyway. Is this price right? You bet it is! Are happy eggs better than unhappy ones? Perhaps. Do you feel better eating happy eggs?  A whole lot!
So here is my "Right price" formula

               One third for the egg and two thirds to the hen.

Wow, I know, this suddenly sounds like a lot, even though now the fate of humanity might be hanging on your everyday purchases.  You need a paradigm shift and a great deal of empowerment. You can no longer think of shopping as acquiring  stuff. It is more like planting a tree; a big part of a reward is in being outlasted by the results of your actions.

Pay more to get less - it is exactly the opposite of what they tell you, but exactly what is needed. We want to pay more to get less food, pay more to get cleaner energy, pay more to get veggies grown 50 miles from where we live, and so on.  It may be a hard sell and it might take a while before these ideas take roots.
But if shopping is going to be a guide to a better world then it is bound to be costly.   To implement this plan one desperately needs good role models.


Graduate students

Big Government may be in its death throes, but there is no better shopper than government. There are many things that the government cannot afford, but bargain hunting is never a way to stretch the tax dollar. To the contrary, lavish government spending is a way to offset multitudes of Walmart shoppers who ruin the economy and shop themselves into poverty and unemployment.
More to the point, investing in the education of a graduate student is no different than buying an egg. With eggs we know that some will contribute to a delicious souffle, some will wither in the refrigerator, and some may break on the way to the kitchen. Like it or not, an analogous fate awaits the best minds of our generation. For that reason, when government sponsors a graduate student, the same "Right price" formula applies - one third for the egg and two thirds to the hen. The hen in this case is the university that is in charge of infusing our egg with knowledge.  To be exact, government funding of graduate students comes in three more or less equal pieces: stipend for a student, tuition for the university, and a generous dollop of money for the university called an overhead. The first piece represents the price of an egg, while the remaining two are contribution to the hen. A closer look will reveal that this scheme is based on the XII century crop-rotation system that was developed in Europe and abstractly it has the same nurturing ingredients.
The main point is that government will pay the price no matter what it is in spite of the fact that unlike eggs, the price of education varies a great deal more. Cost of training an ivy-leaguer who is  "free-roaming" and "cage-free" may be an order of magnitude higher than that of a poor sod coming from a cannibal hen who never saw the sun light and spent entire life on seven square inches of the cage bottom inhaling penicillin vapor.

In conclusion, I must admit that my egg buying habits were greatly inspired by  government ways of funding graduate students, and in turn, my unblinking support for the government support of higher education is a result of the transformative power of my egg buying program.

So if the government's shopping ability is greatly compromised it is up to you to pick up the slack and shop smart.  As painful as it may initially feel, let the "Right price" formula be your guide.  Whatever you buy, ask yourself  - how much did  I give to the hen?

Dentistry and Mathematics

In the last couple of weeks I have paid a number of visits to dentists' offices. Extractions, moldings, cleaning and a number of other procedures  led me to the discovery of a curious connection between dentistry and mathematics.

In the late 1800s Austrian dentist Adolph Zsigmondy came up with a simple system that replaced prior schemes involving latin names. This scheme involved three parameters: upper or lower, left or right, and the numbers one though eight. For example UL3 would be the third tooth from the middle in the upper left jaw. In reality, Zsigmondy used graphical symbols instead of the letters, but this is inconsequential. This beautiful coordinate system was simultaneously discovered by the Ohio dentist Corydon Palmer, and an ugly priority fight ensued. The result was the  Zsigmondy-Palmer system.  The symmetry of the human jaw is clearly reflected in the choice of parametrization, and similar teeth have the same numbers - canines are threes, molars are sixes, sevens and eights, incisors are ones and twos, and so on. The mathematical elegance of this system had a devastating effect on European dentistry. Dentists mesmerized by the intrinsic beauty of Zsigmody-Palmer encoding went on to study mathematics and left the population in the hands of blacksmiths and street vendors performing the crudest forms of dental procedures. Simultaneously, mathematical sciences blossomed with group theory, representation theory and  combinatorics, all of which had roots in these simple observations. Former dentists-turned-mathematicians include Arthur Cayley and Felix Klein. Evariste Galois was never a dentist but he was shot by one.

The British Isles have been particularly devastated by what I would not hesitate to call a Copernican revolution, and to this day Brits suffer dearly for their mathematical contributions. This is partly due to Alan Turing who modified Zsigmondy-Palmer into modern FDR (Federation Dentaire Internationale) system. FDR designates each tooth by two digits - the first digit with value one through four denotes the jaw's quadrant and the second digit (one through eight) is the tooth number (counted from the center). Four quadrants with a bite of 8 teeth in each. However, Turing's  slurred speech after a painful extraction led to "bite" becoming "byte", a unit of digital information used today. One can clearly see that modern coding theory, cryptography and digital signal processing are descendants of this basic ideas. And while FDR was officially adopted in 1970, this was only because Turing's work was declassified long after his untimely death and it took some time to make it into the mainstream.  Meanwhile these ideas led to the victory in WWII, while at the same time lack of dental care condemned the Brits to soft and overcooked food.  

On the other side of the Atlantic, the US was watching these developments with trepidation and decided that to become the dental superpower - the explicit goal of several consecutive presidents - it had to dial down the mathematical intricacies of the dental encoding. The resulting Universal system - used only in the US - is mathematically very simple. It was proposed by J. Perreidt in 1882, but the basic idea was pioneered by  Carl Friedrich Gauss a century earlier. Sometime in 1783, a 6-year old Carl was being examined by the school nurse, who was methodically counting his teeth while looking for cavities. She started at the left, counting 16 teeth, and then went down going in the opposite direction all the way to 32. Just before the nurse found a cavity and his brain shut down in terror of what followed, the idle mind of Carl Friedrich quickly noted that the numbers of the opposite teeth add up to 33. When he returned to the classroom, his bored teacher, who was aching to read personals in the Sudetische Beobachter, told the class to add up all the numbers from one to hundred. At this point Gauss, who was still shaken by his dental experience, was thankful that he did not have 100 teeth. However, he did not miss the fact  that if he did have 100 teeth then the numbers of the opposite teeth would add to 101. In seconds he multiplied 50 by 101, handed the answer to the teacher and instantaneously became the most famous mathematician in the history of mankind. 

So this is the Universal system - a simple count from left to right in the upper jaw, which continues from right to left in the lower jaw. This simplicity keeps American dentists glued to their profession. Indeed, over time the US became a dental superpower, while mathematics was often left for foreign talent. However, American teeth are so white and shiny that if their owners could smile a little more, the reflected light would stave of the global warming. To further keep their dental primacy, the US adopted a special scheme to encoding baby teeth. Instead of numbers, only the letters A through T are used. Even the brightest kid would get lost in such an intellectual desert and not be lured into sciences while poking around in their mouth.

And what about Gauss? In spite of simplicity, there was enough math in the Universal system for Gauss to remain interested. His observation that if teeth were counted at the top and bottom in the same direction led to the discovery of modular arithmetic and further solidified his reputation.  Throughout his life he took good care of his teeth, and during visits to dental offices he was always on the lookout for mathematical talent. Sophie Germain and Bernhard Riemann were dental assistants that he took under his wings and trained as mathematicians. Sadly, this alone set back European dentistry by half a century and prolonged the use of pliers and low-speed drills.

Power of One

Washington Enquirer, April 20, 2020

 

When almost a decade ago an obscure government funding agency added the word "One" to its name the concept quickly turned viral.  Soon enough unification became the word of the day. In hindsight, the leading cause for the movement was the collapse of the economy and the paralysis of the political system - one that persists until today.    Additionally, in times of austerity measures and budget cuts being "One" offers a minimum of protection by creating an illusion of indivisibility.  Whatever the reasons,  the forces of unification affected every aspect of life. Here, we will concentrate on science and education, topics that are dear to our readers and areas where our vigilance paid off  on numerous occasions.  

Unification is a uniquely human ability to counter evolutionary trends. Nature tends to mindlessly duplicate and diversify but we can move forward in a more organized fashion. For that reason the first initiative was OneTooMany. It was a gigantic program devoted to tracking unnecessary duplication. In science, it is responsible for the pruning of many branches of the Tree of Knowledge. At first we stopped investing in scientific facilities when it became obvious that others will build them anyway, and that they will report the findings. In early 2013 a french pastry chef from Detroit completed a long standing program of the classification of algebraic varieties, and similar examples of this kind followed. While these discoveries still wait for validation from mathematicians, it became obvious that relying on a single community for making discoveries in any specific area is a fatal mistake.  With scientific disciplines being  like thin fibers in a giant quilt,  research became massively interdisciplinary. The synergy and comraderie of interactions between experts none of which has a full grasp of what are they talking about had a transformative effect on scientific communities.   Under the program "Ask an Engineer" it became mandatory to include engineers and computer scientists in every scientific venture. These turned out to be nice and friendly chaps who could answer every conceivable question using simple simulations, modeling, or, in the case of older folks, a slide rule. In the end, all these initiatives started to converge to the present OneScience program. However, it  soon became obvious that the OneScience  program requires a new type of training. This is how the OneEducation program was born. Both OneScience and One Education are based on the ideas of multidisciplinary work. The premise is very simple: instead of focusing on specifics - a depth-first search that century after century turned out to be frustrating and inefficient, they focus on width-first search - looking for nothing in particular, or trying to learn a little bit of everything. Both programs turned out immensely popular, attracting a wide segment of the population to higher education and scientific research and virtually eliminating unemployment. Indeed, rather than struggling with Calculus, one can be more successful with Icelandic Mythology or Salmon Farming 101, without ruining  the chances of joining the scientific workforce. Depth-first and width-first searches are equivalent, and  there is the additional  bonus of finding more important things first when one uses width-first search. To wit, rather than the commercially useless Higgs boson, we need a faster router or a more competitive passenger car, and OneScience will certainly get there first. 

OneScience and OneEducation programs excel in inclusiveness. With a small slowdown in scientific advances, OneScience projects provide a number of secondary goals that guarantee that the project will be successful under most circumstances. Let us illustrate this with an example. Suppose that we would like to develop methods to predict where the next big earthquake is going to be, an important and timely task if one remembers the events of 2015. However, this is probably quite tricky. OneEarthquake Team  ought to involve a geologist, a mathematician, a chemist, a mandatory engineer, and for a good measure, a social scientist and a psychologist.  Still, as everybody knows,  OneEarthquake Team is unlikely to fully succeed because the task is too concrete and quite difficult. Furthermore, the fact that they all matriculated from OneEducation program may have further eroded the chances for success, since their attention span is greatly diminished. So rather than frustrate the OneEarthquake Team with the unreasonable expectation that they will accomplish their primary objective, OneScience imposes a  set of intermediate and more realistic goals. Membership in OneScience stipulates  that  all members  publish the same number of papers in appropriate journals,  participate equally in community outreach and recruitment of minorities, and that they all plant trees in a local park.  

In spite of unquestionable success in the decade long unification program, there are still lingering questions that remain unresolved. Historically, scientific research was for many centuries in the front line to improve the life of entire societies by  bringing unexpected goods by a way of discovery and furthering understanding. However, sometime in the early XX century we started running an intellectual deficit. This is when we began slipping behind the curve and dealing with questions that should have been solved ahead of time. Similarly to the budget deficit, the intellectual deficit was initially growing slowly but after nearly a century we developed huge blind spots when dealing with climate, internet security, environment, nuclear energy and scads of other issues.

In the end, the very same obscure government agency that gave us the idea of unification a decade ago was asked to maintain the balance of intellectual deficit and periodically request that the ceiling on intellectual deficit be raised accordingly. Luckily, unlike in the case of budget deficits, politicians are willing to go the extra mile to accommodate the growing intellectual deficit. 

Within the maintaining organization, this new assignment is nicknamed OneBigMess program, although it really is not a program in the same sense as OneScience or OneEducation. This is a long and sad laundry list of intellectual challenges that we failed to meet and that are left to future generations to deal with. Unlike the budget deficit, the intellectual deficit is difficult to price but there is a clear indication that non-knowledge can be very costly.  Furthermore, the intellectual deficit accrues interest and is immune to ordinary inflation. On the bright side, Wall Street lately introduced synthetic financial instruments that allow one to buy insurance  from the results of scientific ignorance (CSO - a Collateralized Stupidity Obligation), and this budding financial market seems to be on track to grow in volume.

Harley and Triumph

Several years ago I became a motorcycle enthusiast. On weekends I pull my bike from the garage and cruise around. Zipping on the freeway at eighty miles per hour is very satisfying. There is a touch of danger, a lot of excitement and a temporary illusion of being somebody else. Is it the best one can do? Can such a make believe world blend seamlessly with the reality? Until recently I thought I had it all figured out…

Fast forward to the present day. I am reporting live from Warsaw, Poland where I am attending my mother-in-law's eightieth birthday. It is a grand celebration which coincides with her retiring from teaching at Warsaw University. It is a big deal, a gala attended by her colleagues, friends, family and her fiancee. There is lot to report but I'd rather stay 

with the motorcycle theme. Why? Because if my mother-in-law was a motorcycle she would be a Harley. Let me  explain - Harley is an iconic bike with  stunningly good looks, lots of torque, resulting in an impressive takeoff, and an acoustic footprint recognizable from afar. It may not have the best turning ability but there is no better bike for going straight ahead, and my mother-in-law would not be wasting time on turning figure eights in a parking lot!  If we follow this line of thought then her fiancee would be a Triumph. Now, Trumph is a somewhat different animal. It has solid British roots, is a bit lighter  and more powerful, and on the downside, it is endowed with a carburetor that frequently produces vast quantities of smoke though his pipe. While each bike prides itself on its individuality, what sets them apart is that they leave competition in the dust and they go together so well.

Harley's motto is "Live to ride" and I always thought it is a bit odd. Somehow the phrase implies anticipation, waiting, putting it off - in short, it  resembles my own weekend riding experiences. With these  two it is the other way around. They reversed this slogan and "Ride to Live" is what it is. And what a ride it is! I am talking about going eighty at eighty and doing it 24/7.  I am full of amazement and admiration, but I also yearn to use these metaphors and analogies to better my own understanding. And in the end, I come up with this - when distilled to simple elements we are at most one or two things, and knowing this obliges one to make the best of it. So when you find yourself being a Harley or Triumph  you just run forever into the sunset because that is what you are! 

Perhaps not the deepest thoughts, but it is good enough for me. I do not want to sit in the garage and shine my bits any longer!  I want to go outside, get blasted by the elements and perhaps get a ding or two. I am inspired and supercharged, and the road is endless.

2012: Annus mirabilis

The Hubble telescope is widely considered a pinnacle  of scientific ingenuity in the exploration of cosmos, and political battles to prolong its life and install its successors are long, brutal and not entirely successful.  So it came as a surprise when in the middle of the year an obscure spying agency offered to NASA two of their spare Hubbles. One man's floor is another man's ceiling but it still comes as a shock when one of the most treasured tools of the astronomical community is found in the army's broom closet. Apparently  Hubbles were just a surplus after the already deployed flock of Hubbles was found sufficient to make  an hourly  one-to-one digital copy of  the politically sensitive areas around the globe.
Suddenly, the scientific community was galvanized. Indeed, the military is a black hole swallowing two orders of magnitude more money than the budget of the entire NASA and a possibility that some of the money is spent  for advancing science captivated everybody. The idea that scientific discovery could be something akin to an egg hunt become very real. Show_me_the_money.org was created by underemployed postdocs and graduate students and faculty are joining in en masse. The organization went on a frantic search of  hidden scientific treasures.
It did not take long to wait for the first results, and they were spectacular. In the early summer graduate students from University of West Virginia found a quantum computer in a woodshed of the late senator Robert Byrd. It is a fully functional machine, which judging by the age of the parts, was made in the mid 90's. Apparently, senator Byrd, who was a champion of earmarks for both military and scientific spending, received it as a souvenir. Graduate students who discovered the machine note that it is a 300 qubit model which comfortably factors 150 digit integers under 2 minutes apiece.
Two weeks after this discovery, Google, which turned out to be a civilian arm of NSA announced the Lost File Program. In a simple ad, they promised to return  every computer file lost within the last 50 years, whether it was saved on a 5.25 inch floppy, perforated tape or sent by e-mail. The program got much publicity when Toni Morrison confessed to Oprah that her long lost book manuscript is being considered for a second Nobel prize and she pledged half of the prize to the Department of Defense. On a darker side, a spike in suicides and early retirements among executives and industry leaders was a clear indication that  some files better remain lost.
After that, the events cascaded beyond control. Area 51 was was open to the public in Arizona in early fall and finally the animosity of this state to  aliens became completely clear. This turned out to be a bit of a hoax as the site looks exactly like in the movie Independence Day. But the biggest surprise was related to the global warming. It turned out that the Global Warming is human caused and his name is David  Petraeus. Apparently the Army has the hardware to dial up the climate to any desired setting. Here the story gets a bit murky, but it appears that one of the former first ladies and her astrologist expressed a wish to crank up the heat in Texas. This coincided with the Army's desire to test the equipment and so here we are, no big deal really. The test is over now and in a few years things will be back to normal, but the hostility of the government to the climate community turns out to be well grounded.  This discovery called attention to other cases where the government turned out to be particularly stingy with their science dollars and the scientific community started looking at the gravitational wave detectors (that for years detected absolutely nothing.) After a few weeks of gumshoeing the truth was revealed, the waves and the corresponding technology exists and it is actually quite useful. Levitation and space travel  are clearly identifiable applications. However,  gravity is the only effective force against obesity and since the government declared a war against obesity the discovery of gravitational waves was dropped from the unraveling schedule. To prevent the scientific community from an accidental discovery a shoe-size gravitational wave generators were installed in the proximity of the detectors to obscure the natural phenomena just like the noise cancelling technology.
In the middle of winter, first sombering analyses started to appear. Scientific community was traumatized by the vast discoveries that the Army has made. Suddenly it became clear that the money pumped into the military complex was not wasted as everybody had previously thought. Quite contrary, army loomed as a super academy of sciences where scientists can work undisturbed by the need to publish, teach or participate in senseless faculty meetings.  The centuries old paradigm of combining research and training lay in ruins, partly because of the exponential growth of parasitic university administration that throttled any leftover traces of ingenuity. On the other hand, the Army with its discipline, 16 hour workdays interspersed with intense physical training, and (what is being whispered around) endless hazing and intimidation of weaker scientists, turned out to be an ideal environment for fostering innovation. With the bottomless purse and no accountability it took years where  the civilians took centuries. Thousands of university professors suddenly realized that even their measly salaries are an unjustified burden on the society.  Massive wave of academic retirements ensued. There were big changes in the Army as well.    One and half million of ordinary soldiers  turned out to be a result of an outreach program for minorities and low income  citizens, and an effective cover for  several thousands of super-scientists working anonymously.
In the end, the truth set us all free. By December the stock market doubled, first such case when it happened in just six months, and after the collapse of euro,  Europe started making overtures to join the dollar-zone. Turning on the planetary AC seems to be working and everybody is very happy.

Well, maybe not everybody. As often mathematicians are grumpy and bitter. While the search revealed many wonderful devices, there must be theories and spectacular mathematics hiding behind them. But so far, no paper or equation has  turned up, and Riemann Hypothesis is still not settled. While every sergeant in the army knows that it is true, the mathematical community is clinging to an old concept of a proof and does not have the capacity to move on.