Most tv analysts of the primary results miss the obvious, probably because they prefer to not see it. The following is my comment on Newser re the primaries in Michigan. - Hugh Murray
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Friday, February 23, 2024
ON MATH HISTORY - BUT DID WE LOOK FAR ENOUGH?
The following comes from Newser, and my comment is below it, and also that of Delta.
Hugh Murray
Math Historian Saw Decimals in 1440s Treatise and Freaked Out
Glen Van Brummelen uncovers earliest known use of decimal to indicate base-10 number system
By Arden Dier, Newser Staff Posted Feb 23, 2024 4:15 PM CST |
How old is the decimal? It's a question you've probably never pondered but one that has fascinated certain historians. Fascinated isn't overstating it. When Glen Van Brummelen, a historian of mathematics at Canada's Trinity Western University, spotted a decimal used to indicate tenths of a number in a 15th-century treatise while teaching at a math camp for middle schoolers, "I remember running up and down the hallways of the dorm with my computer trying to find anybody who was awake, shouting 'Look at this, this guy is doing decimal points in the 1440s!'" he tells Nature News. This early appearance of such a decimal, it turns out, is a very big deal to math historians. Science Alert calls "a mind-blowing discovery."
While versions of the decimal have been used as far back as the 900s, German mathematician Christopher Clavius was thought to have been the first to break down whole numbers by tenths, hundredths, and thousandths, in a 1593 treatise on the astrolabe, called Astrolabium. What Van Brummelen had discovered was the same usage in a much older text. In the 1440s, European astronomers made calculations using the sexagesimal numeric system of dividing a 360-degree circle into 60 minutes and dividing minutes into 60 seconds. The system uses 60 as its base in the same way our modern decimal system uses 10 as its base, though this makes multiplication difficult, requiring multiple conversions of values, per Nature News.
Giovanni Bianchini, a Venetian merchant who practiced astrology, found a simpler way—one that marked "a step forward for humanity," José Chabás, a historian of astronomy unconnected with the discovery, tells Live Science. It was while reviewing Bianchini's treastise Tabulae primi mobilis B that Van Brummelen and a colleague noticed he was dividing angles into minutes and seconds but giving the values as numbers with decimals using the base-10 system. Van Brummelen, author of a study published online for Historia Mathematica, believes the method originated with Bianchini, who would've learned calculations using real-world measures through his background in economics. Clavius would've been aware of his work, Chabás says. (More mathematics stories.)
My comment:
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
RUSSIA'S PUTIN FINDS TUCKER CARLSON DANGEROUS
14 Feb, 2024 21:25
Tucker Carlson ‘is dangerous’ – Putin
The American journalist chose an unexpected tactic for his interview, the Russian president has said
Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted on Wednesday that X host Tucker Carlson caught him by surprise during their interview last week.
The final interview was two hours long and has been seen by hundreds of millions of people. Before it, Carlson was criticized for speaking to Putin at all – and afterwards, for not asking the Russian president certain things.
“I think your Carlson – I say yours, since he’s a member of your profession – is a dangerous man,” Putin told journalist Pavel Zarubin on the sidelines of the Future Technologies Forum in Moscow.
“I thought he would be aggressive, ask me sharp questions. I was not just ready for that, I wanted that, so I could give equally sharp answers,” Putin explained. “But he chose a different tactic.”
Carlson ended up patiently sitting through Putin’s lengthy digression into history and “did not give me an occasion to do something I had prepared for,” Putin said. “Frankly speaking, I did not get the full satisfaction from this interview.”
Commenting on reactions to the interview from the West, Putin said it was a good thing that the leaders there watched and listened to what he had to say – but bad that they felt the need to twist his words.
Asked if Carlson could face reprisals in the West, the Russian president pointed out that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange “still sits” in a British prison.
While the US has tried to accuse Assange of revealing state secrets, which is more difficult to pin on Carlson, “anything is possible in today’s US,” Putin said. While this kind of persecution would certainly be a bad thing for Carlson himself, it would be good for the world, because it would reveal the true face of the “liberal-democratic dictatorship” embodied by the ruling class in the US, the president concluded.
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Tuesday, February 13, 2024
COMMENT ON PBS TV PROGRAM ON "THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT"
I watched the PBS hour-long account of the formation an important, though short-lived organization, the Niagara Movement. In begins with discussion of 3 important Negroes of that era: Booker T. Washington, the man who essentially made Tuskegee Institute into a major black university; W. E. B. Du Bois, then a young scholar; and William Monroe Trotter, a Boston journalist. The narrative rightly contrasts the backgrounds of the 3; Washington born into slavery and struggling to gain an education at a newly founded univeristy following the Civil War and Emancipation; while Du Bois and Trotter were raised in New England towns that had few blacks; towns in which they excelled, and both attended Harvard U.
At the Atlanta Exhibition of 1895 Booker Washington presented a speech that would be called the great compromise. He blamed earlier black leaders for attempting to exert their new freedom by beginning at the top, running for political office, orating, becoming senators, representatives, etc. This was wrong-headed. Blacks should have begun at the bottom. The tv program acknowledged it was a major speech, but did not quote it. In that speech, Washington told a story of a ship in distress that comes across a friendly vessel as requsts fresh water, as they were dying of thirst. The other ship urges the distressed vessel to cast your bucket where you are. The captain of the distressed vessel refuses - they cannot drink ocean water. Eventually, they cast they bucket, and it is fresh water, as they have floated near the flow of the Amazon River when it empties into the ocean. He then urges blacks to cast their bucket in the South with their white neighbors; and he urges the whites not to look to foreign immigrants, but to the 8 million Southern blacks whom they know and who are ready to work for them without causing strikes and labor troubles; people who were loyal to them in the past. Moreover, in this way the races could be separate as the fingers on the hand, but united and strong when needed for the power of the hand. This was interpreted as a policy of avoiding politics, and getting basic education for employment in the South.
The highly educated New Englanders may have been somewhat ambivalent, but with continued lynchings and civil rights retreats and violations, eventually they formed the Niagara Movement to promote legal protest against growing white racism. There were divisions in the new NM between Trotter, who opposed female memberships, and Du Bois, and eventually the Niagara Movement was nigh bankrupt. After anti-black pogroms in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's former base, white liberals also saw aneed for an organization to defend black civil rights, and the NAACP was formed with Du Bois on its board, while what was left of the Niagara Movement falls.
The program gives the illusion that protest was basically a New England obscession. No mention on the program of Ida Wells, born a slave in Mississippi, moved to Memphis and writing and part owner of a black newspaper. She had been dragged from the White Ladies car on a train, sued, won a civil rights case, and then lost it. In the 1890s a mob wrecked her press and she had to flee north. In 1898 a fusion ticket won in Wilmington, N C., white Populist and black Republicans, but it was literally overthrow and run out of town by white racists. Not all Southerners were advocates of Washington, but to survive, some had to flee north.
Ida Wells wrote much against lynchings of blacks. But the largest single lynching, of 11 men who had been found innocent in court, occurred in New Orleans in 1891, a lynching of 11 Italians - members of the black hand, probably an earler name for the Mafia. What was different - the newly created nation of Italy protested this act to Washington, and the Federal government tole New Orleans to lay off the Italians. Abyssinia, the only independent black African nation at that time, was not strong enough to protest lynchings of blacks in the US.
When West Indian Marcus Garvey arrived in the US, he planned to visit Booker Washington, and was quite dispppointed to learn of the death of the leader of Tuskegee. Garvey would go on to found the Universal Negro Improvement Assn., which in the 1920s far surpassed the NAACP in memberships. Garvey's black nationalism was om some ways a continuation of the Washington approach and his disdain for the light-skinned Du Bois was mutual. In the 1930s the NAACP would be challenged by a more vigorous protest group, the International Labor Defence (a Communist Party front), but the CPUSA would also play with the black nationalism with its promotion of an Black Belt inside the US.
In 1948 the NAACP was captured by the Democrats and became a Dem. front group, in opposition to the Henry Wallace Progressive Party - which was the civil rights movement in the South of that era. Du Bois supported the Progressives, not Truman, and the NAACP fired Du Bois.
Garvey was deported, but black nationalism rose again with the Black Muslims.
Hugh Murray
Saturday, February 3, 2024
SEASON'S GREETINGS, AND SOME SERIOUS THOUGHTS ABOUT SURGERY
When I was young, I had to wait till I was 21 to vote, but I could buy beer and all the drinks at age 18. Then because so many young people drove recklessly when they were teens, insurance companies pressured politicians to raise the driving age, AND worse, raise the age to purchase alcohol to 21. Perhaps because late teens were so reckless, they lowered the voting age to 18. So instead of wrecking your car, you can vote to wreck the nation.
At my age of 85, I think they should lower the drinking age to 18. If you are old enough to be drafted into the armed services, and shoot people or be shot, surely you are old enough to drink a beer or order a shot. But that does not mean that the late teens have the wisdom to choose the leaders of our nation. For that, we should want a mature electorate. So I suggest the voting age be raised a bit to say 65, when many will retire and have time to follow the political debates. And this way we can have the wisdom of the many old Bidens and Trumps! Or, is this a good idea?
As of now, one must be 21 to order alcohol. However, in some states, a 10-year-old, with encouragement from a teacher or counselor and a medical official, may pressure the child, without the knowledge of his or her parents, into making a life-altering decision. In some places a child can be pushed into getting operations, which are not reversible, which will require a lifetime of different hormones and other medicines. A girl who goes through this will not only have her breast cut off, but will lose the chance later to have a child. A boy will lose his bat and balls. True, he may enter some girl's sports and set new records, but those new records by trans in girls' sports are fraudulent ones, just as the trans are not real girld; and the trans boy, not a real boy. If they desire to join in sports, led there be a 3rd category of trans sports. I strongly believe these operations should be stopped unless it is for an adult, or both parents and the child believe it is a necessary operation.
Instead of trans operations, I suggest a solution This year, Tuesday Feb. 13 is Mardi Gras. Many folks wear costumes, funny, dull, whatever. For a cheap one, I recall young men wearing bathing suits, and then they would glue and cover their exposed skin with Spanish moss, to look something like gorillas. Trouble with that, and other costumes, if it turns cold. you may have to wear a coat atop it, ruining the image. Not many gorillas wear overcoats. As a kid, I wore an Amerindian costume, but it turned cold, and head to wear an overcoat so - well life has its disappointments.
But to those who they are a woman trapped in a man's body, or a man trapped in a woman's, rather than surgery, try Mardi Gras for a day. The boy can wear his dress and catch some beads to wear round his neck. The girl can wear her cowboy outfit. Or go as a Martian, or a Frankenstein monster or whatever. Be someone else for a day, and have fun - after all, it will be Mardi Gras. Return to reality on Ash Wednesday. If you still have the urge to change, you can do it every year, for a day. If you want it permanent, then you should wait till you are an adult. However, whenever a person has such a life altering operation, there will be consequences, some unexpected.
HUGH MURRAY