Academics From The United States

"Who is not curious as to how the Jews of India survived for so long in an atmosphere of tolerance when other Jewish communities such as that in China, benefiting from similar toleration, assimilated so thoroughly. Their argument is that India as a host society combined tolerance with culturally enforced diversity which made the difference. Indian society, with its several major religions and further division within Hinduism into four major castes, a fifth of outcasts, and over 3,000 subcastes, tolerates wide diversity but does not permit people born into one group to cross over into another or even to associate with the others beyond the public square, since the food taboos of every religious community, caste and subcaste mean that they cannot eat with one another. Nothing separates more than that. The Jewish community could fit into India as another caste and even developed its own subcastes, as the authors explain, properly denoting this as the Cochin Jews' one great (and sad) departure from halakhic Judaism."

"I think the best artists aren't doing it for the prize, they aren't doing it for the fame or the money. They're doing it because they love the art."

"I worry that we humans will discriminate against AI systems that clearly exhibit consciousness. That we will not allow AI systems to have consciousness. We'll come up with theories about measuring consciousness that will say that this is a lesser being. And I worry about that because maybe we humans will create something that is better than us humans in the way that we find beautiful, which is they have a deeper subjective experience of reality. Not only are they smarter, but they feel deeper. And we humans will hate them for it. As human history have shown, they'll be 'the other'. We'll try to suppress it. It will create conflict. It will create war. All of this. I worry about this too."

"I do think a good conversation requires [a duration of two, three, four, five hours], and I've been thinking a lot about why. I don't think it's just about needing the actual time of three hours to cover all the content. I think the longer form, with a hypothetical skilled conversationalist, relaxes things and allows people to go on tangents and to banter about the details, because I think it's in the details that the beautiful complexity of the person is brough to light."

"I think you have to try to walk in the middle, like, with the empathy and humility. And that's actually what science is about, is the. Is the humility."

"I'm an experimentalist. I like to look at hard data. And there — string theory is a distant second to because it doesn't make any observable predictions. ... As an experimentalist, I like when a theory makes a prediction. My job is to not prove theorists right — it's to disprove everybody else."

"Friedman had suffered health problems over the years. But news of his death stunned friends and colleagues, including UCSD physicist Brian Keating, who recruited him to , and physicist-science fiction author of . The trio made up “The Three Physicists,” an informal group that periodically met to give public talks on science and philosophy. ... With Brin and Keating, he also dove into esoterica, tackling subjects such as the physics of free will."

"We should be agnostic as to what the might be."

"Each year, on December tenth, thousands of worshippers convene in to commemorate the passing of an arms dealt known as the merchant of death. The eschatological ritual features all the rites and incantations befitting a 's funeral. Haunting dirges play as the worshippers, bedecked in mandatory regalia, mourn the merchant. He is eerily present; his visage looms over the congregants as they feast on exotic game, surrounded by fresh-cut flowers imported from the merchant's . The event culminates with the presentation of gilded, graven images bearing his likeness. This ritual is the annual award ceremony, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was an occult sacrament."

"We can see that settler colonialism in Israel — or, in Palestine, is really an extension of settler colonialism in North America."

"We are challenged not just to imagine, but to demand the emancipation of earth from capital. For the earth to live, capitalism must die."

"These states have contentious relations with tribal nations to begin with, right? We didn’t sign treaties with the state governments, but yet the state governments participate in the continued criminalization of indigenous people for trying to uphold our treaty rights. And so, why are we criminals, you know, and activists, who are just trying to protect land and water? And when we go back to the treaties, in like the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which the Keystone XL pipeline contravenes and trespasses through treaty-protected territory of the Great Sioux Reservation, we’re not asking the state of South Dakota to do anything radical. We’re not asking nonindigenous people to do anything radical. All we’re asking them to do is to uphold their own Constitution. Your government signed the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with us. It’s your responsibility to uphold that treaty, as well. And, you know, your own Constitution says that treaties are the supreme law of the land."

"There is also a growing alliance with nonindigenous communities who are seeing value in indigenous rights, and specifically treaty rights. And, to me, that is the most hopeful sort of sign of this current resistance movement, is that indigenous rights are at the forefront, because they protect everybody’s rights."

"The first U.S. invasion, which was Lewis and Clark, who came through—who trespassed through our territory and were stopped by our leadership."

"It’s no coincidence that Indian people are in the same department that manages wildlife and federal lands"

"The first Thanksgiving story is — begins with the Pequot massacre by members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which really marks sort of — in my opinion, marks sort of the mythology of the United States as a settler-colonial country founded on sort of genocide to create, ironically, peace."

"Nick Estes is a forceful writer whose work reflects the defiant spirit of the #NoDAPL movement."

"Estes continues in the legacy of his ancestors, from Black Elk to Vine Deloria: he turns Indigenous history right-side up as a story of self-defense against settler invasion."

"The economics of the famous Chicago core curriculum had taken place during that first quarter. So to make up for my deficiency, I was put in an old-fashioned introductory course in economics. That worked out very well because the teacher was Aaron Director. He was a person who has never published anything important, but he was very influential. He really was the one who converted the first Chicago School of Frank Knight, Jacob Viner and Paul Douglas, which was pretty eclectic, into the second one, with Milton Friedman and so forth. I guess with Gary Becker et al. we’re at the third right now. So there I was, completely by chance, and I discovered the subject that interested me and that I would be good at. Economics is a subject which is quite attractive to somebody who is both interested in statistics, analysis, metrics, but also in people and policies. And so I became a very good student there."

"His books include Our History Is the Future, which tells the history of Indigenous resistance over two centuries, offering a road map for collective liberation and a guide to fighting life-threatening climate change."

"This book is a jewel-history and analysis that reads like the best poetry-certain to be a classic work as well as a study guide for continued and accelerated resistance.""

"Instead of doing to settler society what they did to us — genociding, removing, excluding — there’s a capaciousness to Indigenous resistance movements that welcomes in non-Indigenous peoples into our struggle, because that’s our primary strength, is one of relationality, one of making kin"

"Capitalism is fundamentally a social relation. It’s a profit-driven system, whereas Indigenous sort of ways of relating is one about reciprocity and a mutual sort of respect, not just with the human, but also with the nonhuman world. And we’re undergoing, you know, the sixth mass — sixth massive extinction event, which is caused by not just climate change, but is caused by capitalist sort of systems and the profit-driven sort of motive of our current economic and social system."

"I think when we think about climate change, oftentimes the question of climate change really centers on market-driven solutions, such as, you know, green capitalism, and how do we create markets that sort of incentivize transition to sustainable economies, right? And I think, really, what we’re kind of like beating around the bush is, is that it’s the system of capitalism that led us into this economic crisis to begin with. It’s the sort of designation of certain populations in certain territories as disposable, that has led us into our current epoch of global climate change. And so, when we talk about who’s going to bear the most burden when we transition, you know, out of the carbon economy, it most likely is going to be those populations that have historically been colonized"

"Our History Is the Future establishes Nick Estes as one of the leading scholars of our time."

"for a smooth algebraic curve includes both the Hodge structure (period matrix) on cohomology and the use of that Hodge structure to study the geometry of the curve, via the . extended the theory of the period matrix to smooth algebraic varieties of any dimension, defining in general a Hodge structure on the cohomology of the variety. He gave a few applications to the geometry of the variety, but these did not attain the richness of the Jacobian variety. In recent years, Hodge theory has been successfully extended to arbitrary varieties, and to families of varieties."

"One of the points I have tried to make is that mathematics is extremely useful to our society. If this is true, one would think that we as a society would vigorouly support the research that leads to new uses and that students would be at an all time high. Today that is not the case. The mathematics community has yet to effectvely demonstrate to the public and their elected representatives that our subject is dfferent from the sciences. We do not design widgets or cure diseases, yet our impact on engineering and medicine is enabling and significant. But the community has dwelled so long in splendid isolation that the public poorly understands what we do."

"The theory of s in approximately one century old, although its origin may be traced back much further. As originally formulated by and subsequently used throughout his work, the theory was intended as a tool to be used in the study of geometric problems. After two periods of theoretical development, one in the 1930s and the other in the 1960s, there has recently been a renewed interest in exterior differential systems as providing a systematic framework for the study of geometric problems. It is my opinion that this development is just beginning, and that exterior differential systems should become a standard tool for geometers, especially for questions where the differential equations expressing the problem are overdetermined systems, and for global questions. When used properly, the theory has a marvelous ability to reveal the underlying geometry in a complicated problem."

"But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide."

"Kripal failed to take seriously the duty of the interpreter to question his own suppositions and prejudices and to seek the historical, cultural and linguistic horizon of the texts he interpreted.” Freedholm concurs with several other critics of Kali’s Child, that “it is entirely plausible and probable that Kripal’s interpretation has far more to do with his own ‘life-world and categories’ than it does with that of Ramakrishna.” Adding, “In any case, I don’t think it is possible to appeal to Gadamer as a justification for such a hermeneutical methodology . . . I think Gadamer and any serious student of hermeneutics would find Kripal’s methodology to be seriously flawed.”"

"I find it refreshing that Kripal acknowledges the validity of Ramakrishna’s spiritual experiences, something missing from the traditional Freudian reading of mysticism. I would certainly agree that Ramakrishna was to a considerable extent a Tantric from memories of reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna some fifty years ago. I am not surprised that Vivekananda and other disciples presented him more as a Vedantist given the British colonial/missionary attitudes toward Tantra as the epitome of depravity."

"If you’re talking about the fall of the Soviet Union into pieces, the breaking down of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany, in some way these are sort of child’s play compared to the larger magnitude of changes between our lives today and all of us running around as nomadic foragers for millennia upon millennia. Now here we find ourselves with mobile phones and everything else. The immensity of the changes that have occurred and can take place in the human future is huge."

"The conditions for spacetime supersymmetry of the heterotic in backgrounds with arbitrary metric, torsion, Yang-Mills and dilaton expectation values are determined using the sigma model approach. The resulting equations are explicitly solved for the torsion and dilaton fields, and the remaining equations cast in a simple form. Previously unnoticed topological obstructions to solving these equations are found. The equations are shown to agree to leading order in perturbation theory with those derived in a field theory approach, provided one considers a more general ansatz than in previous analyses by allowing for a warp factor for the metric. Exact solutions with non-zero torsion are found, indicating a new class of finite sigma models."

"Low-energy effective field theories arising from string compactifications are generically inconsistent or ill-defined at the classical level because of conifold singularities in the moduli space. It is shown, given a plausible assumption on the degenaracies of black hole states, that for type II theories this inconsistency can be cured by nonperturbative quantum effects: the singularities are resolved by the appearance of massless Ramond-Ramond black holes."

"It is shown that many of the s of type II string theory and d = 11 supergravity can have boundaries on other p-branes. The rules for when this can and cannot occur are derived from charge conservation. For example it is found that membranes in d = 11 supergravity and IIA string theory can have boundaries on s. The boundary dynamics are governed by the self-dual d = 6 string. A collection of N parallel fivebranes contains 12N(N–1) self-dual strings which become tensionless as the fivebranes approach one another."

"...Across history, in different cultures and space, humans do realize the necessity of cooperating when faced with an external threat. So again, if we can just do a little bit of reframing the narrative, the external threat is not necessarily the Russians or whatever. No, it’s the conditions we’ve made and the conditions we face."

"We would solve so many problems if we could develop that expanded level of identification all the way up to humanity, all the way up to the planet level, and basically think about the Earth also, and all the creatures on it, as being part of the same bio life system. We need to get this, as in Buckminster Fuller’s book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. We’re all on the same spaceship, so we can’t be fouling our nest with pollution and so forth. It’s just foolish to be fighting among ourselves, or as the old saying goes, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to actually be steering the ship away from icebergs."

"...Really, the only way forward for humanity is going to be to pull together and address these common threats to our species survival, or else the future is not looking good."

"In one case that I like, somebody got the idea to examine all of the muskets collected off of the Gettysburg battlefield. I think they collected around 27,000 or so muskets. Many of the muskets were loaded twice, some were loaded thrice and a few were loaded 21 times or something absolutely crazy. Overall, 90 percent of all 27,000 muskets were loaded one or more times. If you work out the statistics around how long it takes to load a musket, and all the time there was a battle going, then if people are loading their musket and firing, you’d expect only about 5 percent to have been loaded. Of course, we don’t have videotapes of what was going on, exactly, but it points to the idea that there was a whole lot of reluctance to actually be shooting at the enemy. Now, that’s just one case from our own U.S. history, and there are others. There is a wonderful, descriptive book written by a military man and historian who served in the U.S. army [during WWII and the Korean War] named S.L.A. Marshall called Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (published in 1947). He did a series of interviews and found out that a vast majority of the combat troops were not firing at the enemy. Some were firing into the air. Some were firing into the bushes. Some were firing over the heads of the enemy. Many weren’t firing at all."

"Much of over the last century has concerned the reductionist quest to uncover the laws of nature at ever shorter distances. In the last decade it has become increasingly clear, from a variety of investigations, that this long march into the has neglected a surprising wealth of uncharted phenomena in the deep (IR). Far from being a boring place where all is trivial and well-understood, the deep IR in four-dimensional Minkowski space has a rich structure which we are only beginning to understand. Applications range from the IR divergence problem in , 𝒩=4 Yang-Mills and color memory in in black hole information and a possible fundamental new perspective on space, time and nature."

"...Let’s take World War II, for instance, there are numerous situations where German troops and U.S. troops understood that the enemy was right nearby, and decided, “We’re not going to shoot at you. You don’t shoot at us. You go your way. We’ll go our way.” There are many of these types of anecdotes, and there is also some more systematic evidence."

"I think anthropology is just a wonderful field… it takes into consideration all the world’s cultures and what it means to be human."

"The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics says that all spacetime positions are slightly uncertain. ... Nothing is immune from the uncertainty principle. ... Applying the uncertainty principle to Einstein's , we find the rug of physics pulled from under our feet."

"We have no idea what science will look in, say, twenty or thirty years. ... Every scientist has to bet. Science is not a science — it's an art and a gamble."

"Why would there be math that had no physical manifestation?"

"What you were preparing against—that never happened! All the best-laid plans could not prevent the disaster against which no plans had been laid."

"If there is a God who made us and we did wrong before His eyes—as George says—at least we did wrong only because we were as God made us, and I do not think that He should set traps. Oh, you should know better than George! Let us not bring all that back into the world again—the angry God, the mean God—the one who does not tell us the rules of the game, and then strikes us when we break them. Let us not bring Him back!"

"In any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under."

"Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization."

"Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and “sleeping on the job” a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm clock were not so much the symbols of man’s dual life as were the punching of the time clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile."