#the ri

[kaylerinarts]

Defiance

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Who else can’t wait to see dark Rey in TRoS??

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[torusdonuts]

I Wish More of My Teachers Had Said "I Don't Know"

I always loved science. My brain is wired analytically, and I always did well enough at anything quantitative. I also crave new knowledge, and I've always been too ambitious for my own good. 

When I had to decide what to "do for the rest of my life" at 16 when I was applying to university, I ended up choosing to go to film school. 

What? But Mich, what about new knowledge? What about analysis and science?

I've asked myself the same things over the years, until I finally came back to it - my first true love, really, was maths. But in school the words "We don't know" or "That has yet to be truly explained" were rarely uttered. In my grade 11 maths class I did a brief project on the history of the Riemann Hypothesis (yeah, overachiever, I know). Where did I hear of Riemann's? Not in school. On a TV show. A crime drama called Numb3rs, to be precise. Not a single teacher mentioned the fun part of maths - about how the Fibonacci sequence appears in flowers, or how the golden ratio can be found in nautilus shells. My physics teacher didn't talk about how we don't understand what 95% of the universe is actually made of - rather they told us that everything was made up of atoms (the honours class got a brief mention of up and down quarks, and a meagre introduction to general relativity at least). Chemistry was fun because there was explosions, but they never bothered to tell us that the Bohr model of molecules/atoms is really not how nature is structured.

They made it seem like the "adults" had it all figured out. Like there wasn't anything new to discover - even though I graduated high school months before the Higgs-Boson particle was discovered at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

I was young, and ambitious, and a little stupid. I chose to start out in the arts because I wanted to create, to pioneer something. I didn't think I'd be able to do that in the sciences because the adults around me made it seem like we understood the world.

Thankfully, I remembered my love of maths and anything quantitative in a finance class of all things, when I went back to school for business. (The artist thing didn't work out, clearly). Fast forward a couple years and I'm studying mathematics (and economics) with the goal of ending up in mathematical physics. 

I didn't get here by accident. My ambitions (and perhaps my youthful stupidity/bravado) haven't abated. Quite the opposite. In pursuing this ambition, I started learning everything I could on my own. Enter the Royal Institution - their Youtube channel to be precise. I don't know what brought me there originally, but I ended up watching a talk by Dr. Harry Cliff - an English particle physicist working with CERN's LHC-b project, among other things - talking about the LHC's role in exploring the standard model of particle physics. In addition to reminding me how much I hungered for understanding of this knowledge, it gave me hope with a single sentence (aside the part about the LHC being around for years, because I know it'll take me years to get there)

"If you hear the word 'dark' in physics, you should get very suspicious because it basically means that we don't know what we're talking about."

If someone had told me something like that in high school, I would have jumped into science wholeheartedly in post-secondary. Maybe that's just me, but the idea of learning new things, teaching new things, and the potential to help define human understanding of a concept are just too tempting to pass up. 

The rise of scientific engagement has been aimed at young people to get them interested in the sciences. We tell them all the cool things that science has done for us, like iPhones, the first photo of a black hole, moon bases and AI. Yes, these things are cool. Yes, they create engagement. But what if, instead of telling them all the things we do know, we tell them what they don't. Because as soon as you tell someone - especially a hungry, ambitious young mind - that there's a mystery out there that no one has found the answer to, you're telling them they have the chance to discover something, that they have the chance to contribute. That they can boldly go and illuminate paths so humanity can tread where it has never been before.

[marchagainsttrump]

Augusto Pinochet, the ring wing brutal dictator of Chile - [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF3CNX052ts ]

[zwischenstadt]

Another of Röpke’s collaborators, sociologist Helmut Schoeck, saw a direct relationship between the outcome of the Second World War and the decolonizing present. He felt that solidarity of Western intellectuals with non-white populations — or “Afrophilia” as he called it — was actually a “tardy and completely misplaced gesture of repentance of those people and groups who are ashamed because they failed to intervene at the right time and with any success in Hitler’s persecution of the Jews.” Seeking to make up for a past error, Schoeck averred in a letter to Röpke, “thanks to a strange inversion in the subconscious of many of our colleagues, the Africans (coloreds) today have been attributed all of the intelligence and cultural potential that Hitler actually did exterminate in the Jews.” This attempt at a conciliatory gesture would actually end by accelerating the literal extinction of the white population, Schoeck believed: “You cannot bring six million Jews back to life,” he cautioned, “by first putting cannibals in their place and then serving approximately the same number of Whites to them as a feast.” The frequent use of the term “cannibal” in Röpke’s circle of conservative correspondents to describe African political actors, along with the call for a “Zambezi line” and the persistent refrain of the “suicide of the West,” suggests that a deeply racialized worldview informed Röpke’s philosophy of society and economy. Particularist talk of “the West” sits uneasily alongside the universal concepts of “liberty,” “freedom,” and “the laws of the market” in the publications and speeches of liberal conservatives. In Röpke’s writings about South Africa, and in the New Right’s hearty approval of them, the intersections of the categories of cultural and economic geography in the early 1960s come to light.  The conservative network described here — including one of the most respected figures of German liberalism — always viewed opposition to the global New Deal and the attack on the Bretton Woods system through the lens of a potentially global race war. For Röpke, the financial translation of the West into a question of interest rates was underwritten by a def ant adherence to racial particularism and an opposition to racial equality.

Quinn Slobodian. “The World Economy and the Color Line: Wilhelm Ropke, Apartheid, and the White Atlantic” from Reimagining the Transatlantic World

The the racialism of post-war European conservative thought, and its diffusion process around the world

[minxchester]

Aight, Asmodeus, you BETTER be half as good a villain as your brother Azazel.

[listeningpractice]

Colour Mixing: The Mystery of Magenta If you're anything like me, then you probably didn't realise there was any mystery to magenta (purple). However, it turns out that there really is. Prepare to change the way you look at purple forever!

[listeningpractice]

Quantum Life: How Physics Can Revolutionise Biology An hour long lecture from Jim Al-Khalili talking about how some of the things investigated and theorised by quantum physicists may be seen in biology.