Higgs Boson Buzz

It's buzzing in the media, on Twitter, everywhere. It will be announced tomorrow. The God Particle. It exists after all...

Here is a great animation about how the Higgs Boson particle works.

Fujitsu Cracks Next-Gen Cryptography Standard

Fujitsu and its Japanese partners have taken 148 days to carry out a cryptanalysis that had been estimated to take hundreds of thousands of years.

Source: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/fujitsu-cryptography-standard-83185

What surprises me here is that they had the estimates =completely= wrong. Development in all sectors is getting faster and faster. Maybe it is going so fast that predictions have become useless, became impossible.

Why mathematics should be mandatory for History students.

#mathematics# #history# #holocaust# #conspiracies#

Since I woke up to the truth behind 9/11 thanks to Dylan Avery's Loose Change, I began to question EVERYTHING.

Only a few years ago the math skills of elementary school teachers were tested in The Netherlands. They were so poor that the results made the national news headlines. The requirements changed since then. If you want to become an elementary school teacher in The Netherlands you have to pass an additional test in mathematics. Period. When I was in high school there were roughly two groups of students. Those that could do math, and those that couldn't. The first group could study everything they wanted and the second group could only continue their studies in areas where math wasn't required. A popular study in the second group was history. Think about that for a minute. A person with a Ph.D. in History likely has the math skills of a second year high school drop-out. Functions, Trigonometry, Elementary Calculus, Combinatorics and Elementary Linear Algebra are high school subjects they did not do. They can basically add and multiply, with a calculator. They ( the history Ph.Ds ) can't do simple questions like how much is 4 divided by a third, or how much is 27^2, without a calculator.

An example. I learned in high school that there were 4,000,000 people killed in Auschwitz ( a concentration camp ) during the second world war. From 1945 to 1990 that was the official number. In 1989 historians however had to revise this number. They revised it down to 1.3 million, they sliced two thirds off the original estimate. It is very important to understand that people questioning this number prior to 1990 were considered 'conspiracy theorists' or 'Holocaust Denialists'. ( I also found out that from 1945 onwards to the early fifties it was said that there were more than 20 concentration camps with gas chambers. This number was brought down to three in the early fifties. )

How is it possible that an official statistical figure can be revised from 4,000,000 back to one-third? This is a very complicated and sensitive (!) issue I can't completely answer but that the math skills of historians are an issue I am certain. I would like to plead for adding mathematics to the requirements for studying history.

Another example. Even today there is a group of historians who are still questioning the official figures of the Holocaust. ( They are of course execrated because they are questioning the official party line. ) Now look at a video where a historian completely breaks down a fact in the official literature using elementary mathematics. In my opinion these kinds of grave errors in the scientific literature are possible because few scientists in the history community can do their maths. But as we have seen historians can 'revise' their figures. ( In any other science this would be a grave embarrassment of course. )

The video: " Treblinka Burial Space." What do you think?

Happy Pi Day

If you haven't seen =the= classic mathematics movie yet: Pi, do so today. It has a 7/5/10 rating from 76K+ users on IMDB, what more can I add?

Because it's Pi day:

The following proof is simple. = Therefore I provide only the shortest possible and encrypted version of it.

This text is self contained. = The reader is assumed to have a Ph.D. in the field.

Notation. = To disguise the fact that most of this work is copied from the standard text in this subject I have used a different notation.

The last one may seem cynical but the amount of ( literal ) overlap in mathematics books is noteworthy.

Publishers - Continued

From a forum who SWIM regularly visits:

Last Thursday, I purchased an international version of a textbook for a course that I'm about to take. The list price is USD 233.33. Amazon has it for USD 180.40. That's a lot of money. After shopping around online, I found it for USD 48.98, shipped, which was the version that I bought. I sent that amount through PayPal to the seller, who appears to be in Hong Kong, although the book, itself, came from Germany.

When the book arrived, I found the following sidebar on the back cover:

This is a special edition of an established title widely used by colleges and universities throughout the world. Pearson published this exclusive edition for the benefit of students outside the United States and Canada. If you purchased this book within the United States of Canada you should be aware that it has been imported without the approval of the Publisher or the Author.

Person International Edition

There are three aspects to this note that are interesting. First, only barristers would capitalise 'publisher' and 'author'. That's the way that it's done in legal agreements (i.e. contracts). Second, how is an 'exclusive edition' with the identical text beneficial to students outside, but not inside, the United States and Canada? What, exactly, is the nature of this 'exclusive' edition that gives it such a remarkable property? Perhaps it's that this version is softcover, as opposed to hardcover. However, frankly, I don't feel like paying USD140 more for a hardcover book. Third, what is the significance of the importation of this 'exclusive' edition not being approved by the publisher or author? Pearson seem to be saying, 'You may think that you're getting away with it, but we are going to track you down, sue your arse, and take your money by force, thief!'

The 'Publisher' and 'Author' should be aware that I do not approve of paying USD180.40 plus tax and shipping costs unnecessarily for a book for which I could--and did--pay USD48.98, quite legally. While I'm quite confident that the 'Publisher' and 'Author'--or, let's be honest, just the 'Publisher'--would love to pocket $130 for giving me nothing in return, I do not consent to such parasitism.

Copyright infringement is a serious crime. If you doubt this, read the bottom of this page, written by a barrister:

http://www.justanswer.com/intellectual-property-law/1z9qm-friend-in-ny-imports-sells-international-edition-textbooks.html

It's a shame that the decent people who go to the trouble of writing books hardly make any money, if at all, while publishers hold them hostage and make a fortune. Even worse, publishers are trying to control second-hand sales. When I buy a paper book, I've obviously purchased it. It's mine. I can sell it to you, if I wish, and in doing so, the publisher isn't entitled to make money on that second sale. Yet that's exactly what they're trying to do. They're fighting very hard to prevent the importation of international books, but the US Supreme Court has ruled that that's perfectly legal.

Why, exactly, would it cost USD 48.98 to purchase a book in Singapore, for instance, but USD 180.40 in the United States?

Something smells fishy to me, ...

Draw your own conclusions.

Campaign to officially pardon Alan Turing

In the UK a campaign has started to officially pardon Alan Turing, ( probably ) the greatest mathematician of the 20th century and a war hero who literally saved Great Britain.

From the Guardian:

... In 2009, Gordon Brown issued an official apology for Turing's treatment by the British government, a signed copy of which is including in the exhibition. However, a campaign to have Turing officially pardoned was rejected by justice minister Lord McNally last month.
"I think it's enormously regrettable – he ought to be pardoned," said former culture secretary Chris Smith at the launch of the exhibition. "This country treated him outrageously and we should be honouring him by removing any stain from his record, his character, his history and saying that we got it wrong – he didn't." ...

Despite Gordon Brown's official apology in 2009 there are still people who don't get it. Unbelievable, isn't it?

Secondary school mathematics books

#Publishers #Freedom #Internet

How many secondary school mathematics books have been written since, say 1900 ? I don't know but I am sure there are many. I wonder what the authors of these books had in mind when they wrote these books. Were it the results of students? Orders of their (publisher-)employers? Or plain greed? Mathematics does not change because time passes. And what was the role of the department of education? How are they linked to the publishing industry in your country?

I am sure that everyone agrees that Gauss and Riemann received an excellent secondary school education, and neither were born in a rich family, to the contrary in fact. They had genius minds of course, but mathematics was flourishing in these days. What books did they study, I wonder? I am not sure, but for geometry they must have studied the works of Euclid, and for algebra and number theory they likely studied works of Euler.

Almost everything high school students have to learn for algebra is in Euler's books, really. All these books need is a modern e-book look and feel and you are done. And Euler starts really at the beginning, it's all there. A 10 year old can start studying maths from one of Euler's books. We don't need more books of the same. Do we? Have I mentioned that Euler's books are free? Does that ring a bell?

Euler's Elements of Algebra.

Euler

Publishers and the trebling of Open University fees

#OpenUniversity

In the UK fees for Open University courses trebled. In the USA students take mortgage size loans to get a basic college education. The Open University terminated the employment of all continental European staff. ( ... ) The list is endless. - In the mean time there is one party in the field of education that keeps raking in profits, the publishers. Publishers are about as evil as bankers.

In this first post about the evil publishers I want to share some sounds with you that I picked up from the BlogoSphere.

The so-called publishing houses are the mafia. They're parasites on society and care solely about profit. They don't care one bit about human betterment so long as they can live in mansions and not have to work. It's well established that academics don't make any money for publishing, yet we're the ones doing all the work! And then, we're forced to pay for it (again) through massive licensing fees paid to publishing houses in exchange for having access to journals that our colleagues are forced to publish in. The entire system is rigged.

A lot of people really believe that library.nu/iFile.it was about stealing books and defrauding authors. No. It was about making vitally important information available to promote human flourishing. It is in everyone's best interest to have a highly educated population. As for the ridiculous argument that creators of creative works were being robbed, I've got to ask: Where did the ideas for a mathematical theorem come from--an individual genius working in isolation, bereft of many years of training by academic mentors? I think not. How do songs get created? Is it from the imagination of a single artist? Or does it entail a filtering of massive quantities of information from experiences in the environment through an individual brain? If it's the latter, why should we give so much credit to an individual where we should all take credit? We don't achieve in isolation. We're in this life together, and it seems extraordinarily unfair and cruel to me that a small group of individuals should profit at everyone else's expense under the mythology of "capitalism" (a facade for economic fascism) and "copyright."

The very idea of copyright is a scam from the get-go. It's merely a thinly veiled ploy to prevent others from gaining access to a work. And why would one want to do that? Status, power, and profit. "I'm better than you." "I deserve more than you." "My Porsche in Los Angeles is more important than you, over there in Africa, dying of hunger." It's really quite an arrogant and destructive idea. If I had a MacBook, and you took it from me without my permission, that would be stealing. But if you copy an ebook, you're merely replicating digital bits. It essentially costs nothing, and it doesn't deprive anyone of anything. To the contrary, it's a benefit because it increases the probability that someone along the line will read that ebook, learn something from it, and contribute to society. library.nu wasn't a cunning method of making money. It was a morally heroic effort to make the world better, and it was succeeding until the Nazis attacked it from a German court.

If a U.S. company developed a drug that victims of AIDS could take for one year and be cured, at a cost of 100,000 USD, yet millions of Africans were dying of AIDS, would it be morally right for the Africans to break the U.S. company's patent on the drug, manufacture it, and distribute it to everyone who needed it? I claim that that would be the morally right thing to do. Shockingly, a large number of people disagrees!

Dostoyevsky is dead, yet publishing houses are making millions of dollars on his books. Something has gone terribly wrong in our society. Contrary to the rhetoric of the media companies who sway public opinion by throwing money at it, pirates are needed to prevent the fascism and parasitism that has historically been the norm for the aggressive Homo sapiens sapiens species. Human progress, and what we call culture, are precarious and can disappear very quickly if the circumstances are right. Against the threat of descent into barbarism is education, to which library.nu contributed immensely on a global scale.

We must fight for freedom and progress.

Wasn't it Homer who somewhere wrote, "...for he was excellent above all men in theft and perjury?"

What an apt description of the plutarchs who run the publishing, music, film, and every other industry, and prey upon the rest of us who actually work and create.

Phil ( address of publication known by me )

From a post of Gowers's Weblog

The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Combinatorics, Historia Mathematica, Journal of Algebra, Journal of Approximation Theory, Journal of Combinatorics Series A, Journal of Functional Analysis, Journal of Geometry and Physics, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, Journal of Number Theory, Topology, and Topology and its Applications. For many years, it has also been heavily criticized for its business practices. Let me briefly summarize these criticisms.

1. It charges very high prices — so far above the average that it seems quite extraordinary that they can get away with it.

... More at Gowers's weblog

To be continued.

Planet Math servers crashed

From Planet Math:

After many months of instability culminating in a major crash, we have decided to imply migrate to the next version of our content management software, Noosphere 1.5. As of now all data since late 2011-10-23 has been lost, and some functionality is broken or missing. Please be patient and report problems.

I sincerely hope PlanetMath survives this setback. Oh, and Noospere 1.5 looks great!

The paradox of abundance

The number of people connected to the Internet is still growing. Is Planet Earth becoming like The Borg in Star Trek? Technology is changing the world into a better place. I am not sure if I agree though. Have to think about it.

NeoCube

I have missed out on a game, I suppose. The NeoCube. Must-have for math(s)-geeks, if you ask me. I don't watch television and I don't go out shopping anymore so it's rather obvious that I missed it. But I haven't seen any people playing with it either. Shopping, buying books, I loved it. The Internet took that away. What I do like about Internet is that people bring their laptop to the cafe. Have coffee while you read the online papers, that's nice. - Anyway, this is the NeoCube I mentioned.



Symmetry, symmetry!

Higgs boson and the Euro

Yesterday CERN announced in a press release that 'they almost found the Higgs boson particle'. To me that sounds like a programmer telling me that his code is almost finished. 'It's 99% done'. ( The worst thing I ever heard was 'I'll finish the design when I am done coding.'. ) Anyway, they must get really nervous at CERN for budget cuts in these terrible economic times. - People at CERN rather don't communicate with common people. Unfortunately they depend upon our tax money to fund their expensive toy, the LHC. That's why they are always close to finding something, or they -think- that something exceeded the speed of light. As long as we pay their toy while everywhere else people are bleeding.

[News] - London student protests revisited

Students from all over the UK ( i.e. Scotland ) came to London today to protest.





Why?
- Fees are trebling from GBP 3,000 to GBP 9,000.
- The privatization of education will start.
- Entire faculties will be closed.
- And more.


Maybe the people behind these measures think that people will do anything to obtain a descent education including taking loans to finance university. From the USA we know that this means lifelong enslavement to the bank...


And that's just what they are protesting against at Occupy London ( and in zillions of other cities around the world ). So maybe the two will meet and join forces.


See also:
- [News] - London: More student protests

Du Sautoy on CERN's speed of light result

I missed a Marcus du Sautoy ( pronounce: desoto ) documentary on CERN's issues on the speed of light. I watched it yesterday though. Another quality documentary by the BBC. I think there was a one-minute babble by the home expert on everything on Dutch tv. I have heard that the BBC receives hundreds if not thousands of complaints every week, well maybe that's what keeps them sharp.

To the point.

Faster than the speed of light could be made so fast due to the rich catalog of the BBC. A lot of material in this episode came from the catalog, no doubt. The struggles scientists had with light are explained up to the point that Einstein entered the scene and explained it all. Einstein said that the speed of light is the same everywhere and independent of how it is measured so time became variable which is hard to understand but true. Later Einstein said that time is the limit of speed in the universe. Nothing can travel faster than light. Voila $E=mc^2$.

Well, a neutrino traveled faster than light There are 16 types of fundamental particles, three of which are a neutrino. Pauli predicted neutrinos in 1930 but he thought it wouldn't be possible to ever find one. We are crossed by billions of neutrinos every second which is possible because everything, including us, is built up from atoms which are mostly empty. Neutrinos are extremely small and have no charge. But they still have a tiny mass so their speed is limited to the speed of light according to Einstein's laws. The amazing result from CERN is about neutrinos traveling faster than light.

For me, as a non-physicist, I find it unbelievable that it is possible to make such precise measurements. If the neutrinos and light were athletes running the 100m they would have beaten light only by a few millimeters.

Scientists are skeptical because time travel would become possible and it contradicts with previous results in the late 80s when it was measured that light and neutrinos emitted by a supernova reached us at almost the same time. But in favor of CERN is a previous result measured in Chicago which at the time was considered an error.

I lost it when Du Sautoy began about tachyons. Theoretical particles with imaginary or negative mass which could travel faster than light, mathematically of course, but so did anti-matter which was predicted through mathematics. There are also circumstances where an absolute speed limit doesn't make sense like black holes and the first second after the big-bang. And of course Einstein's theory and quantum-mechanics are incompatible.

String theory might have an explanation which satisfies everyone though. In their multi-dimensional bulk we live on a 3D membrane. It could be that the neutrinos left our membrane into the 4th dimension and so appeared faster. I bet a lot of SF fans could have come up with a similar explanation. String theorists are actually paid to talk about the fourth up to the 10th or eleventh dimension.

If you haven't seen the documentary yet, you'll be able to find it somewhere, I did.

Social Media for mathematicians

The places 'to be' for mathematicians are -not- Twitter and facebook, although they are both great places to socialize, chit-chat you know what I mean, they basically steal your valuable time.

Mathematicians hang out at:
- http://math.stackexchange.com/
- http://www.reddit.com/r/math
- http://www.stumbleupon.com/to/stumble/topic:247
- http://mathoverflow.net/
- http://mathblogging.org/
- http://arxiv.org/

Thanks to Gaurav Tiwari, read his review at his own site My Digital Notebook

The mathematics of revolution

The Occupy Wall Street movement is spreading. It reminds me of Conway's Life game. It could spread enormously and still die out soon, or it could cause permanent change without real massive demonstrations. Nobody knows, nobody can predict this. Still, I think it will be very interesting to find mathematical patterns in global, Internet connected, demonstrations like this. I am sure mathematicians of government agencies are working on it.

If a government does not educate even one generation it is lost. It is in their own interest, it is in the interest of the ruling elite to give all citizens a good education. I think that rule fits all political systems. In the US however they use education to enslave people for the rest of their life to the bankers. Paying back student loans turns out to be very difficult. On top of that teachers get fired or are underpaid. - That does not seem right to me.

Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (4-4)

What a totally insane day this is. Everybody knows that the official 9/11 story is a lie and the mainstream media are repeating that same lie. The US government is criminal, period.

People that have been very important to 9-11 truth are:
- Alex Jones,
- Dr. Stephen Jones,
- David Ray Griffin,
- Prof. James H. Fetzer,
- Dr. Judy Wood
- and many others
I deeply respect their courage to come forward and tell the truth.

I say no more.

Visit
- Scholars for 9/11 Truth
- Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth


Previous posts:
- Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (1)
- Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (2)
- Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (3)

Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (3)

What have -you- seen on 9/11? Are you sure that what you saw on TV really happened?

Ten years, what does that mean? A first year math student of 18 was only 8 in 2001. The story must be told and re-told because 9/11 is an important part of the history of -the world-. - Anyone older than, say 28, probably remembers 9/11 as if it was yesterday. I do, definitely, I can't forget 9/11. Especially in periods like this, with the 10th anniversary and so forth, it keeps going through my mind. Why?! I have asked that question many, many times. Because I have seen things on TV that are scientifically impossible but everybody accepted it as the truth. That brought me in a condition of doubt. Therefore the following video came as a relief to me. Things that I thought to have seen were finally confirmed.

This is the video that confirmed what I thought to have seen. ( Three parts, part 2 and part 3 on YouTube ).



Previous posts:
- Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (1)
- Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (2)

Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (2)

I am a big fan of the BBC because of its documentaries, Sherlock, Doctor Who, Torchwood and even EastEnders ( although I am 'clean' these days ). For many years I looked at the BBC as -the- independent source of world news, but 9/11 changed that, unfortunately. Reading the following below may shatter your trust in the BBC.

Links:
- The BBC’s Instrument of 9/11 Misinformation ( from: VetaransToday by prof. Jim Fetzer )
- Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (1)

Off-topic: 9/11 Revisited (1)

My blog is about mathematics and in particular studying mathematics. I have kept the blog ad-free and I have avoided posts about politics and/or religion ( with one exception, a one-time post about 9/11 ). In little over a week it will be ten years ago since the 9/11 attacks. These attacks defined the major events in the last decade and shaped the world as we know it today. Counting down to the 9/11 memorial I'll make a few posts about 9/11. I hope you don't mind.

The first 9/11 post is a link to VT Veterans Today, the Military & Foreign Affairs Journal. The VT article is called 9/11: Video of Missile Hitting Pentagon Leaked.

It concerns the following video.