toucana

I found an amusing video where a guy asked DeepSeek R1 to solve Lagarias’s Elementary Version of the Riemann Hypothesis - one the seven unsolved Millenium Prize Problems - which the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a prize of one million dollars for a solution to, back in the year 2000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQsQaORVhfA

A new Chinese AI app called ‘DeepSeek R1’ (深度求索 - shēndù qiúsuǒ ) has roiled the AI stockmarket sector to the tune of $1 Trillion, and has taken the #1 position in Apple’s App Store, ahead of ChatGPT and other competing AI products. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/27/tech-shares-asia-europe-fall-china-ai-deepseek What has attracted so much attention from analysts and investors is that the Hangzhou-based startup who created DeepSeek claim to have spent little more than $6 Million in developing the product, and they did so without the help of Nvidia’s most advanced H100 chips which have been banned by USA from export to China since September 2022. DeepSeek was created using the less powerful H800 chips developed by Nvidia for the Chinese market (which were subsequently also banned from export to China last October).

I should perhaps have mentioned the astonishing ‘auto-tables’ or automatic Riichi Mahjong playing tables which became very popular in Japan from 1988 onwards and feature extensively in the Saki anime series. These contraptions will delight and bemuse any mechanical engineer trying to figure out exactly how they work. (Hint - optical sensors, beam counters, logic circuits, and magnets embedded in tiles). They are not cheap - deluxe tables from the principal Japanese manufacturer AMOS can cost up to $4000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmDNvqS9QPk

One reason is because of some extreme failings in the American education system. A particularly good example is the almost total absence of Geography as an academic discipline or curruclum subject within American schools and universities. It is usually lumped in together with History in a package called ’Social Studies’ in many US schools. The American author Ambrose Bierce who was himself a military cartographer once joked that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans Geography”. The stunning ignorance that has ensued was epitomised by anecdotal accounts of educational surveys which found that some 40% of students questioned couldn’t accurately locate either the Canadian or Mexican borders on a map of North America. Others couldn’t even locate the USA on a world map. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/geography-survey-illiteracy Other academic disciplines that might promote critical thinking such as Philosophy fare equally badly in the American educational system. Philosophy degrees in the USA for example are not only comparatively expensive, but the salaries that students are likely to receive on graduation are about 6% below average compared to other undergraduate degrees. https://www.careerexplorer.com/degrees/philosophy-degree/tuition/ Back in November 2015 Senator Marco Rubio (who has recently been appointed Secretary of State) said during a Presidential debate on Fox News that “Welders make more money than philosophers; we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers”: https://theweek.com/speedreads/588149/marco-rubio-wants-more-welders-less-philosophers Which rather epitomises the problem.

Rep. Sarah McBride the first transgender Congresswoman made this very point after Trump announced his anti-transgender executive order on Tuesday evening. Legally speaking, Trump has just declared everyone in the USA - including himself and his own sons - to be female. Yes folks, the ‘Proud Boys’ are now all ‘Proud Girls’ ! https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/sarah-mcbride-trump-executive-order-trans-b2683936.html A more charitable explanation is that this order was written with the help of AI.

If you are interested in the gender distribution of recent Congressional committee appointments then you might want to check out the stats listed here: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/republican-women-chosen-lead-house-committees-time-decades/story?id=116764680 According to this, Virginia Foxx (R-NC) aged 81 is the only woman to be named by House Speaker Mike Johnson to lead a House Committee in the 119th Congress, as the chairwoman of the powerful House Rules Committee. The chairs of another 17 standing committees announced so far are entirely populated by white men. https://scalise.house.gov/press-releases/Scalise-Applauds-Committee-Chairs-for-119th-Congress As Swansont pointed out, Trump isn’t directly responsible for any of these appointments, but House Speaker Mike Johnson who does make these decisions is basically a ventriloquist’s dummy who enacts Trump’s will at every turn - case in point - last week when Mike Johnson dismissed the widely respected Republican Mike Turner (R-Ohio) from his position atop the House Intelligence Committee - and did so directly on orders from Mar-a-Lago according to multiple sources. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mike-johnson-removes-mike-turner-house-intelligence-chairman/ Trump has a long history of demonstrating extreme hostility towards empowered and intelligent women, especially if they dare to criticise or contradict him. This was seen on the Inauguration day earlier this week when Trump had a meltdown after hearing a sermon by the female Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde at the National Cathedral Prayer service in which she called on him to have mercy on transgender children and immigrant families. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5099730-donald-trump-criticizes-bishop-transgender-migrants/ You can read Trump’s subsequent tirade against her on his Truth Social platform here: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113870397327465225 Trump is a malignant narcissist and conceited fool who cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny or contradiction from anyone - especially women - which de facto makes him a misogynist - “a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women” (NOA Dictionary)

Every new US president since Harry Truman in 1945 has faced an unforeseen crisis during their inaugural term which tested their abilities to the limit - and beyond in the cases of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Trump’s first presidency was ended by the abject failure and utter imbecility of his administration’s response to the global COVID pandemic. What will it be this time I wonder ? The San Andreas fault shifting ? Another INES Level 7 nuclear accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima? Or perhaps the collapse of the United States into anarchy and civil war - if Trump tries to order the US military into California or New York to carry out his mass deportation program against the will of the state Governors. As a footnote: The 14 year reign of the Roman emperor Nero came to an abrupt end when he committed suicide in 68 AD. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, Nero deliberately started the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD in order to clear land for his pet ‘Golden House’ palace project (another property developer) and subsequently blamed and persecuted the Christians for the destruction that ensued. His avarice, cruelty, and high taxation policies finally provoked the aristocracy into rebellion against a man they already despised as a panem et circenses (‘bread and circuses’) crowd pleaser, and malignant narcissist.

Andrew Coyne a columnist for leading Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail had this to say on the eve of Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration - (quoted in full because of a paywall): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/.../article-trumps.../

This was conservative writer Bethany Mandel who had just published a new book on the subject, attempting to explain what ‘woke’ means to interviewer Briahna Joy Gray on 14 March 2023. Her new book was called "Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation". https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W7iWEEcPKoQ

I used to play Contract Bridge in a competitive Duplicate tournament format while at University (after learning it at school), but have hardly touched the game in almost 40 years. When the global pandemic took hold a few years ago in 2020, and many people turned to online games, I took up Riichi (Japanese Mahjong) instead. There are some interesting parallels between the two games which may help explain why attempts to promote digital forms of Contract Bridge in particular have not been very successful. - Both games became highly popular in their respective countries (Japan and USA) in the early 1930s, and again after the war in the 1950s, but both slumped dramatically in popularity towards the end of the 1970s. - By the mid-1980s, Riichi Mahjong had become something of a joke in Japan. It was seen as a game that your parents or grandparents used to play, and of no conceivable interest to younger people. - Much the same was true of Contract Bridge which was by now seen as a dowdy game played by seniors in retirement homes, or social clubs for the elderly - (my nearest Bridge group meets in a local Croquet club). What changed in the case of Riichi Mahjong in Japan was the advent of networked digital gaming and the internet from the mid-90s onwards, which was boosted by the very rapid growth of highly popular Mahjong themed Manga comic and Anime film brands such as Saki (咲) and Akagi (アカギ). The re-awakening of interest in Riichi these aroused among younger players in Japan was quite explosive. Nowadays there are said to be about ten times as many Mahjong players as there are Poker players in the world - the vast majority of them in Asia of course - but with many more beginning to play in Europe and USA too. One reason for the recent popularity of Riichi Mahjong outside of Asia was the advent of two truly excellent global online Mahjong playing platforms called Tenhou (2000) and Mahjong Soul (2018) respectively. https://osamuko.com/a-history-of-tenhou/ There aren’t really any comparable platforms for playing Contract Bridge online. Those that do exist such as Bridge Base Online charge money to play, and are quite restrictive too - (Tenhou and Mahjong Soul are free to play, and open to all). From an engineering point of view, one large problem is that Contract Bridge is a *partnership* game (Riichi Mahjong is not). There are significant practical dificulties in managing partnership play in any form of digital version of Contract Bridge. One problem is that of random network disconnection. When it happens on Tenhou or Mahjong Soul, automata can intervene to enable the game to continue. You simply can’t do this effectively in a partnership game like Contract Bridge. Then there is the social overhead of practising and timetabling partnership arrangements across timezones. It’s so much simpler and rewarding to play Riichi 😉

In the case of the recent disaster at Muan airport Korea on Sunday 29 December 2024 (involving Jeju Air Flight 2216) it would appear that the starboard engine *did* survive the initial bird strike, and was still developing some thrust as the plane made a wheels up landing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgzprprlyeo Video taken from the ground on the plane’s initial approach shows a large puff of white smoke and flame from the #2 engine which was evidence of a compressor stall caused by bird ingestion. Another video taken a couple of minutes later as the plane made a belly landing shows a heat haze from the #2 engine and the thrust reverser cowl deployed as well, whereas the port #1 engine is dead. What seems to have happened is that the crew inadvertently shut down the wrong engine while responding to the initial bird-strike, which left them flying with only the damaged starboard engine still developing any thrust, and with no time or height to restart the port engine. As the crew had already retracted the landing gear and flaps to fly a go-around, shutting down the wrong engine also had the disastrous effect of taking out the hydraulic pump driven by the port engine which powers the landing gear. They couldn’t get the gear down again ! The plane type was a Boeing 737-8AS fitted with two CFM International CFM56-7B engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_Air_Flight_2216 These are high-bypass turbofan engines.

One of the more delightful occupations first recorded in the English language from the early 14th century period onwards was that of a ‘Gong Farmer’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gong_farmer Cesspits normally had to be dug out by these 'Gong Farmers' every two years or so, and in the late 15th century they charged two shillings per ton of waste removed. The waste was usually carted out of town and spread as fertiliser on common land, or dumped in areas known as ‘laystalls’ such as the appropriately named ‘Dung Wharf’ on the banks of the river Thames .