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Behrooz Parhami's Blog & Books Page
Page last updated on 2026 March 05
This page was created in 2009 as an outgrowth of the section entitled "Books Read or Heard" in my personal page. The rapid expansion of the list of books warranted devoting a separate page to it. Given that the book introductions and reviews constituted a form of personal blog, I decided to title this page "Blog & Books," to also allow discussion of interesting topics unrelated to books from time to time. Lately, non-book items (such as political news, tech news, puzzles, oddities, trivia, humor, art, and music) have formed the vast majority of the entries.
Entries in each section appear in reverse chronological order.
Blog entries for 2026
Blog entries for 2025
Blog entries for 2024
Blog entries for 2023
Blog entries for 2022
Blog entries for 2021
Blog entries for 2020
Blog entries for 2019
Blog entries for 2018
Blog entries for 2017
Blog entries for 2016
Archived blogs for 2015
Archived blogs for 2014
Archived blogs for 2012-13
Archived blogs up to 2011
Blog Entries for 2026
2026/03/05 (Thursday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Throwback Thursday: Charles Proteus Steinmetz loved his EV, a 1914 Detroit Electric car (photo credit: IEEE Spectrum magazine, March 2026). [Center] Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (see the last item below). [Right] Iranian missile & drone targets, by country: Heaviest hit is UAE with 863 targets, followed by Kuwait with 562. Qatar, Bahrain, and Israel have been hit 100+ times each. The fairly-distant Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea had 5 targets hit (source: Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies).
(2) Throwback Thursday: Chess was already on-line in 1844. The first American telegraph line was only 6 months old when it became a virtual chessboard. [From IEEE Spectrum magazine, March 2026]
(3) Why did it take so long? The obviously incompetent Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, becomes the first fired secretary in Donald Trump’s second-term cabinet. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin has been nominated as her replacement.
(4) Book review: Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, unabridged 17-hour audiobook, read by Adam Verner, Tantor Media, 2017.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
Intellectuals have always been detested and marginalized by the society at large. Initially, it was because their ideas were deemed irrelevant to real life. Lately, it is because their knowledge is viewed as dangerous to the masses who don’t understand and thus can’t take advantage of the benefits of scientific and technological advances.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter [1916-1970] defines anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.” He adds that the prevailing views of intellectuals as pretentious, conceited, snobbish, dangerous, subversive, and very likely immoral puts piety on a crash course with intellect. Anti-intellectuals believe that the plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not superior to, formal knowledge and expertise.
This book is an indictment of evangelical religion. Religion used to thrive around educational institutions. Later, religion became more populist, making a divorce between education and religion all but inevitable. Hofstadter had an elitist view of education, which led him to see a fundamental conflict between accessibility and quality of education. An updated version of Hofstadter’s views is presented by Susan Jacobi in The Age of American Unreason (2008).
Part I (Chs. 1-2), Introduction: This book is a response to the political & intellectual conditions of the 1950s (McCarthy era).
Part II (Chs. 3-5), The Religion of the Heart: Revolt against the twin evils of romanticism & apathy, and later on, modernity.
Part III (Chs. 6-8), The Politics of Democracy: The founding fathers valued intellect, but intellectuals aroused suspicion.
Part IV (Chs. 9-11), The Practical Culture: Folk anti-intellectualism merged with nativism, Prohibition zeal, & Ku Klux Klan.
Part V (Chs. 12-14), Education in Democracy: Post-war educators mocked the three-Rs & urged training for mass society.
Part VI (Ch. 15), Conclusion: Mid-century America both needs & fears the critic, so both extremes should be kept in check.
In his concluding chapter, Hofstadter states that intellectuals have come to be accepted and enjoy respect in today’s (1963) America. Little did he know that half-a-century later that acceptance and respect would melt away.
Hofstadter paints not a linear decline but a series of pendulum swings. Each surge of anti-intellectual feeling (evangelical revivals, Jacksonian democracy, fundamentalist crusades, business boosterism, life-adjustment schooling) grew from legitimate democratic or moral impulses, then curdled when suspicion of “book learning” turned into hostility toward free thought itself. Recognizing that ambiguity is the scholar’s ally, not his enemy, is Hofstadter’s lasting plea.
2026/03/04 (Wednesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] We’ve had a punishing flu season this year, but a below- expectation COVID rate. [Center] Come visit the Trump House: Never before has a president displayed so many of his own images on the White House walls. [Right] The coming week will be spring-like or even summer-like in much of the US.
(2) New Yorker cartoon caption of the day (at the White House press briefing): “With these strikes, the President sends a powerful message to the world. We’ll let you know when we figure out what it is.”
(3) An almost unavoidable mistake on the part of Iran’s Islamic officials: The widely-rumored choice of Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the assassinated leader, to replace his father as the Supreme Leader is almost unavoidable, given his deep ties to IRGC, which has a firm grip on the country’s economy and politics. The choice means the Islamic Republic’s pursuit of Ali Khamenei’s hardline policies and continued lack of accountability to the people. Instead, they could have signaled a change of direction, gaining some good will internally and internationally and an off-ramp from the ongoing war.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- CIA working to arm Kurdish forces to spark uprising in Iran, according to multiple sources. [CNN]
- At Cleveland Plain Dealer, a push to let AI draft news articles is boosting traffic and spooking staffers.
- Iran arrests prominent cleric Hossein Taeb, a high-level regime insider accused of spying for Israel.
- Jimmy Hendrix as a systems engineer: His iconic sound came from precise modulation and feedback.
(5) Another war is brewing within MAGA: Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and other MAGA personalities with big on-line audiences are criticizing the Iran War, and Trump is firing back.
(6) Do you wish you remembered more of your dreams? Using AI, emerging dream-recorder devices based on fMRI or other methods of capturing brain waves enable the recording & playback of dreams. These devices raise a host of questions, such as ownership or stealing of dreams. Potential uses for recorded dreams range from psychological insight and therapeutic applications to new forms of artistic expression and entertainment.
(7) Unredacted versions of the Epstein files reveal a lot more than sexual abuse of young girls: They also contain references to torture and, perhaps, human consumption, according to Representative Lauren Boebert.
(8) Iran admits that its military is operating with no central command: Much of the military’s communications infrastructure has been destroyed and there is also a fear that issuing commands may help the attacking armies pinpoint locations of top commanders. Independent military units across the country are following pre-drawn plans that were in place before command & control was disrupted. This explains hitting infrastructure and civilian targets in neighboring countries, despite the top leaders’ reassurance that Iran isn’t at war with them but with the US & Israel.
2026/03/03 (Tuesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Net approval ratings (favorable minus unfavorable) for Donald Trump in Europe. [Center] Math puzzle: What fraction of the total area of the five squares is shaded? [Right] My submission for New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contes #980, which unfortunately wasn’t chosen among the three finalists: “I warned you, your majesty, that this isn’t just a natural evolution of an over-long red tie.”
(2) Iran’s political future: The Assembly of Experts is reportedly under intense pressure from IRGC to pick Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, as the country’s next Supreme Leader. If this happens, Iran will remain a closed dictatorship under the political and economic dominance of Islamist generals. Mojtaba was essentially an all-powerful operative under his aging and increasingly isolated & out of touch father.
(3) “Humanity’s Last Exam”: A global consortium of ~1000 researchers has designed an exam to show what AI can’t do, yet. Whereas AI typically aces many standard exams, it scores under 3% in this new exam.
[Article]
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Deposing Hillary Clinton on the Epstein investigation backfired for the Republicans. [9-minute video]
- University campuses across the Middle East switch to on-line instruction amid the spreading war. [NYT]
- UCLA receives an unprecedented $100 million donation for mental health services. [Inside Higher Ed]
- Humor: My doctors told me this is the healthiest neck rash ever. No one has seen a healthier rash.
- George Washington U. sells its Virginia Science/Tech campus to Amazon Data Services for $427M. [WaPo]
- IEEE’s Women in Engineering Podcasts: Nine episodes are already available from the IEEE WIE Web page.
(5) Device that translates Chinese into English in real time: Parents in China are using the $375 device which is worn over the mouth to teach their kids English.
(6) From a New Yorker cartoon entitled “Honest Announcement Cards.”
- We’re expecting ... to ask us when we’re having kids.
- Save the date ... It’s the only thing we can agree on for the wedding so far.
- Celebrate the graduate ... of an overpriced yoga-teacher training program that was just a trip to Costa Rica.
(7) John Bolton on Donald Trump: It’s Groundhog Day in Trump’s brain. There is no grand strategy. He acts in his own self-interest. He doesn’t even remember what he said two days ago.
(8) Final thought for the day: A country that doesn’t have viable air force & air defense provisions, or shelter for its citizenry, shouldn’t pick a fight with countries that do have superior weaponry and defense systems.
2026/03/02 (Monday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Using AI in physics discovery (see the next item below). [Center] Many Sharif University of Technology graduates are updating their educational profiles by using the Iranian institution’s original name, “Arya-Mehr University of Technology,” at the time they were enrolled. [Right] Terrestrial life in the harsh environment of space (see the last item below).
(2) Particle physicists are growing tired of their old method of discovery: Hypothesize something (say, a new particle with certain properties) and then build instruments to confirm or falsify the hypothesis. Increasingly, they are using existing instruments, such as the Large Hadron Collider, in connection with AI that is instructed to look not for something specific but anything out of the ordinary, utilizing unsupervised learning.
(3) There is one scenario that most analysts overlook: For Iran's regime to fall, it's not necessary that people on the streets seize the centers of power, such as the state-run radio & TV (NIRT). It's possible for the regime to collapse from inside. There is much infighting about who should become the next Supreme Leader. Assassination of some insiders by other insiders is a real possibility.
For years, many insiders have been fuming over how NIRT has excluded any dissent, even from those holding positions of power (they sometimes air manufactured or pre-approved dissent). Khamenei ran NIRT with an iron fist. Whatever entity replaces him may not wield the same power and, thus, cracks may start to show up.
In fact, I suspect that the elimination of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have been an inside job. He had been out of the power circle for years, and even though he criticized the current rulers, no one actually listened to him, given his own dark record of economic ruin and political oppression when he was in power.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Three US fighter jets were mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses during active combat in Iran.
- Hezbollah decides to enter the war on behalf of Iran but loses its leader within minutes of its declaration.
- USS Abraham Lincoln, a floating city with 5000 residents that can stay afloat for 20 years without refueling.
- The number of 2025 foreign visitors to the US decreased by 11 million compared to 20224. [WaPo]
(5) The US-Iran-Israel war expands: Many targets in the heart of Tehran are being struck. Infrastructure and luxury hotels in several Arab countries are targeted by Iran. The US asks its estimated 1 million citizens in 14 countries to leave immediately, although many airports are closed.
(6) Life may not be as fragile as we thought: A terrestrial moss survived 9.5 months outside ISS. Researchers exposed spores of spreading earthmoss to the raw brutality of open space outside the International Space Station for 283 days. These tiny organisms endured a total vacuum, intense ultraviolet radiation, and extreme temperature fluctuations—conditions that would instantly kill almost any other form of life. Over 80% of the moss sporophytes had not only survived the ordeal but remained biologically viable. Mathematical models estimate that these spores could potentially survive for up to 15 years in space, a discovery that redefines our understanding of life’s limits and provides a vital foundation for the future of sustainable agriculture in extraterrestrial habitats. [Abridged from a LinkedIn post by Victor Tagborloh, citing a 2025 article in iScience]
2026/03/01 (Sunday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Top Iranian officials killed in Saturday’s military attack: Apparently, they were all in a high-level military meeting. Mojtaba Khamenei and Ali Akbar Velayati (top-left & top-right corners of the image) are not among the dead according to other reports. [Center] With the elimination of Ali Khamenei and several other top officials of Iran’s Islamic regime, the #WomanLifeFreedom movement has returned to the forefront. [Right] Iran: A country divided (see the next item below).
(2) The deep divide among Iranians on Khamenei's death: Iranians in diaspora are celebrating the Supreme Leader's death, dancing and chanting congratulatory messages. Inside Iran, videos on social media show that many are relieved that Khamenei is gone, because they see him as the person who issued commands to kill the protesters in January 2026 and during earlier street protests. Scenes of dancing and singing on streets of Tehran and other cities are captured in many videos from the early hours after the strike. There is a small minority, promoted on the state-controlled TV, that is mourning his death, weeping and self-flagellating in despair. All surviving top-level officials have issued statements, proclaiming their deep sorrow on losing a "wise and selfless" religious leader and a "hero to the Islamic world."
(3) Foreign Minister Araghchi called the attack on Iran unprovoked: How much provocation is needed? Countdown clock to the destruction of Israel? Five decades of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” chants? Taking hundreds of hostages? Carrying out and threatening assassinations worldwide? Providing financial support & weapons to terrorist organizations?
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Sustainable fashions: How coconut husk waste is being transformed into women’s wear. [12-minute video]
- Music from Super Mario Bros. Video game. [2-minute video]
- Charlie Chaplin ice-skating routine. [2-minute video]
- Political humor, for my Persian-speaking friends: A history of Iran’s Donkeys Party. [3-minute video]
(5) Ali Larijani, the guy who was deemed unfit for Iran’s presidency (he was disqualified by the Guardians Council) now effectively holds all the power, delegated to him by the late Supreme Leader.
(6) Russia’s economy has entered the death zone: The war in Ukraine is depleting its cash reserves and much of its infrastructure, particularly the parts that allow it to extract oil and gas, is rotting.
(7) Dr. Eric Masanet (UCSB), who spoke to IEEE Central Coast Section on Wed. Feb. 18, 2026, has shared details of his congressional testimony on the energy and water use challenges of data centers.
(8) Ethics & AI experts had issued broad warnings on the use of AI in instruments of war: US Department of Defense has failed to convince Anthropic to allow its AI systems to be used to fire at targets autonomously and to carry out mass surveillance. After disagreeing, Anthropic was punished by a Trump order black-listing it and any company that uses its services. OpenAI has opportunistically stepped in to supply technology to the Department of Defense. Hundreds of employees from Google and OpenAI have signed a petition calling on their companies to mirror Anthropic's position.
2026/02/28 (Saturday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] In the age of inflation: Sprouts Farmers Market in Goleta is camouflaging the fact that salmon costs $16-$20 per pound by posting the per-ounce prices of 99.9 cents and $1.25 for the two varieties seen in this photo. [Center] Costco shamelessly puts rotten fruit on display (photographed in the Goleta, CA, store, on Feb. 27, 2026). [Right] Sounds on State Street: Jadea Kelly performed at Santa Barbara’s Paseo Nuevo shopping center, along with a couple of guest musicians (Video 1) (Video 2). And a few blocks from the foregoing event, Larry Williams & The Groove played some memorable oldies (Video 3) (Video 4).
(2) Reuters, citing Israeli sources, reports that Iran's Supreme Leader has been killed, a claim Iran's officials did not immediately confirm or deny. Death of several close relatives of Khamenei has been confirmed.
(3) Reports from Tel Aviv indicate dozens of Iranian missiles targeting the city: There are also reports from Tehran about areas hit, but none of the videos I have seen contain location info or a time stamp. Some of these may be old videos from the June 2025 war.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- President Donald Trump’s statement on the start of US-Israeli military attacks on Iran.
- UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s statement on US-Israeli military attacks on Iran.
- I’ve seen only 2 reactions to Khamenei’s death: Utter joy & Disappointment that he didn’t live to face trial.
- Iran’s FM claims that Khamenei & other high-ranking Islamic regime officials are alive.
- State of the Union Address: Obama-Trump differences in how the opposing party is addressed.
- Richard Dawkins: “Faith is a belief without evidence and reason; ... that’s also the definition of delusion.”
(5) Middle East politics is shifting: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and UAE have condemned Iran. No condemnation of the US or Israel, and no call for a cease fire.
(6) The following info is from Middle East Forum, not an unbiased source, but it provides some info in the current climate of uncertainty and news blackout.
First Wave Targets — Tehran: At least 30 explosions hit the capital; Khamenei's compound — seven missiles; Ministry of Intelligence; Ministry of Defense; Atomic Energy Organization headquarters; Presidential institution near Pasteur Square; General Staff HQ in east Tehran
(7) Another war in southwest Asia: Pakistan has proclaimed an "open war" against Afghanistan's Taliban government after the neighboring nations exchanged fire overnight.
(8) Final thought for the day: “A lion never roars after a kill.” ~ Dean Smith
2026/02/27 (Friday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] A few interesting architectures along Santa Barbara’s De La Vina Street, where I walked on Tuesday. [Center] Sinclair Lewis predicting American fascism in 1935. [Right] Documentary film screenings at UCSB (see the last item below).
(2) Breaking news: Israel launches a preventive military attack against Iran and warns its citizens to stay near protected areas. Earlier today, multiple sources had reported that governments, including Canada & China, had asked their citizens to leave Iran. Several countries are also evacuating Israel.
(3) Several professors, former government officials, and company execs have resigned due to revelations in the Epstein files: When will we see resignations by or legal actions against those currently holding office?
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Relative improvement of women’s status in Yemen: The new cabinet includes 3 women (out of 35 total).
- Women’s status in Iraq: Reported cases of domestic violence rose 150% in 2025.
- Heartfelt message of Golshifteh Farahani to the people of the world on the massacre of Iranian people.
- Facebook memory from Feb. 27, 2023: We self-congratulate for not having the flaws we imagine in others.
(5) The late Shah of Iran in a Trump-like interview: He says that there is no opposition to him, except by terrorists, denies torture by SAVAK, and abruptly ends the interview.
(6) The Ellison family, already owners of a massive media empire, will take over Warner Bros. (including CNN & HBO), after Netflix withdrew from the bidding war. [AI’s summary of the Ellison media empire]
(7) Persian poetry: This beautiful couplet from Zhulideh Neishaburi (pen name of Hossein Farahbakhshian) includes 10 occurrences of the word “del” (Persian for “heart”).
(8) Thursday night’s screening of a documentary feature and a documentary short at UCSB’s Pollock Theater: “Chulas Fronteras” is a 1976 (50-years-old) American documentary feature film (58 minutes) telling the story of the norteno or conjunto music, which is played on both sides of the Mexico-Texas border. It was directed by Les Blank. The film’s music, played against the background of family events, farm work, dancing, and dilapidated surroundings, is truly enjoyable. The community sings from the heart, telling stories about life, love, perseverance, and betrayal, while dancing & smiling, despite the hardships that are evident from their faces. If you can’t see this highly-recommended film, please avail yourself of the CD soundtrack, available under the same title.
“Del Mero Corazon” is a 1979 short film (29 minutes), representing a lyrical journey through the heart of Chicano culture as reflected in the love songs of the Tex-Mex Nortena music tradition. Performers include, Little Joe & La Familia, Leo Garza, Chavela Ortiz, Andres Berlanga, Ricardo Mejia, Conjunto Tamaulipas, Chavela y Brown Express and more.
Prior to film screenings, corrido singer/songwriter Gallo Armado (Fernando Rios) performed a live guitar-vocal set. He also participated, along with archivist Juan Antonio Cuellar and director/editor Maureen Gosling in a discussion, moderated by David Novak (Music, UCSB).
2026/02/26 (Thursday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] At the State of the Union Address, a Democratic lawmaker holds a sign, reading: “Black people aren’t apes!” [Center & Right] UCSB Jazz Ensemble performances (see the next item below).
(2) Last night’s highly enjoyable concert at UCSB's Lotte Lehman Concert Hall: UCSB Jazz Ensemble performed dance music, under the direction of John Nathan. Selections included jazz adaptation of two tunes from The Nutcracker ballet, a couple of Ella Fitzgerald tunes, and a Wynton Marsalis composition. [Video 1] [Video 2] Earlier in the day, a 5-member combo from the Ensemble performed at UCSB's Music Bowl as part of World Music Series free noon concerts. [Video 3]
(3) In today’s Iran, everyone’s a millionaire: It doesn’t matter if you use the official unit “Rial” or the more-common unit “Toman” (10 Rials). A decent restaurant meal costs more than 1 million Tomans, as does a pound (~0.5 kg) of red meat. The US dollar now sells for 166,000 tomans or 1.66 million rials. The numbers have grown so large that, practically, Toman now refers to 1000 old Tomans, or 10,000 rials.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- The Epstein files are missing records about a woman who claimed Trump abused her when she was 13. [NYT]
- Academy Awards: “Cutting Through Rocks” is the first Iranian nominee for Best Documentary Oscar.
- Food for thought: When will a robot win an Academy Award for acting?
- A comedy writer’s testimony in front of the US Congress about the rise of censorship.
- The US men’s hockey team attended the SOTU Address: The women’s hockey team declined the invitation.
- An Arab who abandoned his hatred of Jews & Israelis after he was exposed to Jewish religion & culture.
(5) “The Historic Death of Ali Khan Nazem al-Oloom and His Mathematics”: This is the title of a scholarly article (in Persian) by Dr. Amir Asghari. The PDF file of the article also contains an English page at the end, bearing details of the publication venue, a title, and an abstract, which is reproduced below. Ali Khan Nazem al-Oloom was an Iranian intellectual who had high impact on math & science education, but who is little known.
Abstract: Ali Khan Nazem al-Oloom, the top graduate of the engineering class in the second cohort of Dar al-Fonun and later a teacher at the same institution, was among the companions of Naser al-Din Shah during his first trip to Europe. He remained in France, where he studied mathematics under prominent figures such as Joseph Bertrand at the Ecole Polytechnique. After roughly two years, he returned to Iran, where he authored Hekmat-e Tabee’i, the first physics textbook written in Persian, and later Hekmat-e Riyaziyat: Osoul-e Elm-e Hesab, known as Hesab-e Ali Khan. This latter work became the most widely used mathematics textbook in Iran’s modern educational history. Despite the originality of his pedagogical approach — which emphasized mathematical meaning over rote procedure — he did not live to witness the success of his work. Shaped by the socio-political constraints of his time, his life ended in self-inflicted death. This article offers, for the first time, a detailed portrait of his life, writings, and the historical trajectory of both.
2026/02/25 (Wednesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Protests continue on the streets and on university campuses in Iran, despite brutal crackdown by security forces and threats of execution for those arrested. [Center] A neighbor of mine, Professor Jeffrey Richman (UCSB Physics), has shared with the community a large number of breathtaking photos of nature, particularly birds in our coastal area. Here’s a small sample. [Right] Laszlo Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance (see the last item below).
(2) “From Talking Tools to Metahumans: Social Interaction, Semiotic Skill, and the Authority of AI Chatbots”: This was the title of yesterday’s fascinating lecture by Webb Keane (Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology. U. Michigan), presented under the auspices of UCSB’s Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life.
As the semiotic skills of chatbots trained on large language models become more sophisticated, they can seem to harbor uncanny insights whose sources are inexplicable, possibly even divine, metahumans. Treating Artificial Intelligence as a metahuman is just an extreme case of something more general, the projection of authority onto enigmatic technology. This authority emerges from the pragmatics of social interaction. What makes this character of AI seem intuitively real is due, in part, to the ways humans and metahumans address one another on semiotically unequal grounds.
(3) Book review: Krasznahorkai, Laszlo (translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes), The Melancholy of Resistance, New Directions, 2012.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
This book was the first work of the 2025 Nobel Laureate in Literature to be translated into English, and it is considered one of his best. In this dense, apocalyptic novel, which is classified as philosophical fiction and political allegory, the author explores four important themes:
- Fragility of social order and relative ease of societal collapse.
- Inadequacy of intellectualism & art in the face of raw power & nihilism.
- Manipulation of chaos for political gain.
- Destruction of innocence and benevolence.
The story is a part of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s apocalyptic quartet:
- Satantango
- The Melancholy of Resistance
- War and War
- Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
The four novels collectively explore the themes of social decay, pervasive destruction, the breakdown of order, and humanity’s struggle for meaning in a world seemingly spiraling towards catastrophe.
Melancholy of Resistance takes place over a couple of days in a run-down Hungarian provincial town, whose trash-filled streets are dark due to broken street lights. Residents travel cautiously after dark. The first character introduced, Mrs. Plauf, is a woman who experiences a rather stressful return home from a visit, feeling that disaster could strike at any minute as she journeys through the streets. Then, there’s her disowned son, Valuska, the village idiot who is barely tolerated by the locals. The only person who appreciates him is Eszter, a musician whose world-weariness has spread to such an extent that he no longer leaves his house.
At the opposite extreme from Eszter is his physically and mentally robust wife, who is active in the affair of the town. To shake things up, she decides to invite a strange circus with a giant stuffed whale into town, a decision she comes to regret, as the visit fuels bizarre rumors, paranoia, and a violent mob led by a nihilistic “Prince.”
Krasznahorkai’s bleak dystopia is eerily close to real life back when the book was originally published in Hungary. The scenes of decay that fill the novel are disturbing for the few characters who seem to notice it. Krasznahorkai tells us with one of his typically complex sentences: “There will be neither apocalypse nor last judgement … such things would serve no purpose since the world will quite happily fall apart by itself and go to wrack and ruin so that everything may begin again and so proceed ad infinitum.”
2026/02/24 (Tuesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Iranians have totally rejected political Islam: The leftist journalist/poet Khosro Golsorkhi famously began his 1974 defense in court by quoting Imam Hussein. Half-a-century later, the young revolutionary Majidreza Rahnavard asked people to express joy on his grave in lieu of praying or reading the Quran. [Center] Math puzzle: Find the exact area of the quadrangle in this diagram. [Right] Mathematician Emmy Noether, and her theorem (see the last item below).
(2) Reza Pahlavi is repeating his father’s big mistake: He is cutting too much slack for Islamists, who advocate punishing Quran-burning by death. He must formulate an unambiguous position on the role of religion.
(3) England, France, and Norway have initiated multiple criminal investigations after access to Epstein files for only a few weeks. Shame on the US Department of Justice!
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Shouldn’t flags be half-mast for rights leader Jesse Jackson as they were for white nationalist Charlie Kirk?
- Trump is thinking of a limited strike on Iran to force concessions, followed by a broader attack if unsuccessful.
- Mexico’s top drug kingpin was killed by security forces: There were many other casualties. [WaPo]
- USA hockey teams rule: Both the women’s and men’s Olympics teams win gold by beating Canada 2-1.
- Protests have broken out on university campuses in Iran. Please share and keep talking about Iran.
- An IRGC official accuses the regime's TV network of spreading lies during Iran’s 12-day war with Israel.
- Facebook memory from Feb. 24, 2020: Happy Sepandarmazgan, the Iranian day of love!
(5) “That’s a great question!”: Speakers have come to bestow praise on every questioner they face. I hear this kind of flattery quite often, particularly from graduate students defending their theses and from fresh PhDs during academic recruitment talks. Someone must be telling them to begin each answer with this compliment. They should just try to answer the questions without quality judgment, particularly on questions posed by people of higher seniority. And, of course, they should never preface their answer with “That’s a really dumb question,” like you-know-who!
(6) LLM scaling will not get us to AGI: According to the 2012 Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl, no amount of scaling will get us to LLMs with artificial general intelligence, because the limitation is in the theory, not in compute power or size of the dataset. LLMs cannot create a world model, but they do a good job of summarizing models created by others. This is because LLMs are one level removed from reality. They process human interpretations of data, not the raw data itself
(7) Flipping the Turing Test: We used to look for flaws or inconsistencies to distinguish a machine response from a human response. We now think that a response is machine-generated if it is too perfect.
(8) Emmy Noether, the woman who rewrote physics: The mathematician who formulated the brilliant Noether’s Theorem, that says every symmetry in nature corresponds to a conservation law, was not allowed to hold a faculty position in her day. She lectured at Gottingen under David Hilbert’s name. Her theorem underpins quantum mechanics, particle physics, cosmology, and modern field theory. Nobel Laureates Albert Einstein & Leon Lederman praised her work. She was removed from the university in 1933 for being a Jew. She moved to the US and worked at Byrn Mawr College and lectured at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study until her death in 1935, at the age of 53. [Abridged from a LinkedIn post by Dr. K. V. N. Rajesh]
2026/02/23 (Monday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Haji Baba Club talk on tribal rugs and the stories they tell (see the next item below). [Center] Math puzzle: Find the exact measure of the angle x. [Right] The third installment of Sharif University of Technology Oral History Project (see the last item below).
(2) “Tribal Tales: Every Rug Tells a Story”: This was the title of Saturday’s talk by Susan Gomersall, presented under the auspices of Haji Baba Club, an American organization devoted to the study of oriental carpets and antique textiles.
The speaker shared her experiences and the knowledge that she gained from travelling throughout Central and South Asia from the 1970s until the early 2000s. She developed a love of kilim carpets by buying, selling, touching and, in some cases, smelling thousands of them in small villages throughout the region. In the course of her travels, she learned that rugs made by families with yarn from their own sheep and goats were essential not just for income but for the comfort of the home – to sleep on, eat off and to pray on. Often, the identity of the tribe could be discovered by their designs—their size, shape, patterns and the weaving technique. All are part of a fascinating story.
The photos show a prayer rug from Turkey, a carpet woven and proudly displayed by a family in northern Afghanistan, and a Persian gabbeh depicting the herding of sheep & goats. These pieces aren’t as impressive artistically as professionally designed & woven Persian rugs, but they touch our hearts because they arose from the heart, as the Persian saying goes.
(3) Sharif University of Technology Oral History Project (Part 3): Today, former AMUT/SUT professors, Drs. Ali Akbar Seifkordi (chemical engineering) and Hossein Nivi (mechanical engineering), participated in an interview in which they answered questions from the moderator and the audience. There were ~60 attendees.
The two guests related stories about the founding of the university, designing the curricula, setting up labs, erecting buildings, and constituting the various departments, as critical mass was achieved in each area. AMUT had absorbed top-notch and highly-dedicated faculty members who worked around the clock, often performing tasks that were beyond their official duties. Their higher salaries compared to other Iranian universities helped faculty members honor their full-time commitment to teaching and research. Significant camaraderie existed among faculty members of all specialties.
There was extensive discussion of the plan to phase out the University’s Tehran campus and transfer everything to the Isfahan campus. According to Dr. Seifkordi, the original plan for the University was to be set up in Isfahan, with the Tehran campus established as a temporary site. Dr. Nivi’s understanding was different. He maintained that the closure of Tehran campus was contemplated after it became clear that the campus was a center of student activism against the Shah. At any rate, the faculty was against the closure and made it clear, through strikes and other means, that they did not want to move to Isfahan. They thought that the two campuses could coexist.
The government tried to speed-up the closure by not allocating students to AMUT in the 1977 (1356 solar year) nationwide university entrance exam. For 1977, the faculty got together and held an independent student admissions process, despite the government ban. Somehow the faculty managed to sneak in paid ads into Kayhan and Ette’a’at newspapers for student applications and, later, to publish the list of admitted students. The government was displeased and chided the two Tehran newspapers for ignoring the government’s directives. Eventually, when Sharif Emami became prime minister, the plans for closing the Tehran campus were scrapped and the campus resumed normal operations.
Naming the university “Arya-Mehr” was Dr,.Mojtahedi’s political ploy to gain more resources and exemption from government regulations. Part of the ploy was to make the Shah the President of AMUT, with Mojtahedi assuming the title of “Chancellor.” After the Revolution, the name “Tehran University of Technology” was used for a while, which made sense, given the University’s second campus “Isfahan University of Technology.” Later, the Academic Senate, which by then had three student members and three staff members, discussed the renaming issue. The proposed name “Sharif University of Technology” was to honor one of the fallen Electrical Engineering students. A university-wide referendum ensued, with the proposed name gaining 70+% approval. In retrospect, the new name was a poor choice.
A recording of this and other events in this series will be made available through suta.org, under “Events.”
2026/02/22 (Sunday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Sights I enjoyed on Friday 2/20, during my walk on a spring-like afternoon. [Center] On the perils of using a single number to score or rank-order alternatives (see the next item below). [Right] An architecturally interesting building on Santa Barbara downtown’s Chapala Street.
(2) Musings of a curious engineer: Scientists and engineers know the perils of using a single number, that is, a score or rating, for summarizing the attributes of multiple systems in order to compare them. An article by Ahmed Nematallah in the February 2026 issue of IEEE Computer magazine gathers in one place arguments that show, among other things, the differences between using the harmonic mean and the arithmetic mean when a large set of performance data points are to be combined. In the top chart, we observe a strong correlation between Amean and Hmean, which suggests that the two means may be equally good for the purpose. Zooming in, however (bottom chart), tells a different story. The full article is linked below.
(3) I will boycott Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday: The SOTU itself has become misleading and all addresses by this president are useless. [Bill Mahr, on SOTU]
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- The average American consumer paid $1000 extra because of Trump’s tariffs: Next year, it will be $1300.
- The four SCOTUS women needed only one man to join them to terminate Trump’s tariffs. Two did.
- Science says you should sleep on tough problems: Your most-creative ideas come after a night of sleep.
- History of Iran’s flag on Wikipedia, from its introduction in 1907 to today, including some earlier emblems.
(5) From AI data centers to EVs, energy storage demand, and thus demand for lithium, is exploding: Morgan Stanley estimates the market will face an 80k-ton shortfall in 2026 alone. With 5X demand growth expected by 2040, the deficit is just starting.
(6) LLM scaling will not get us to AGI: According to the 2012 Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl, no amount of scaling will get us to LLMs with artificial general intelligence, because the limitation is in the theory, not in compute power or size of dataset. LLMs cannot create a world model, but they do a good job of summarizing models created by others. This is because LLMs are one level removed from reality. They process human interpretations of data, not the raw data itself.
(7) Team USA’s and Canada’s hockey rematch at the Winter Olympics: The puck will drop at 8:10 am ET tomorrow, marking USA’s first gold medal game since 2010. Canada beat USA in that game to win its 8th of 9 gold medals in men's hockey. The US women’s hockey team also faced Canada in the final, winning gold.
(8) Final thought for the day: Iranians should avoid being paralyzed by the goings-on in Iran. The brutal Islamic regime has killed thousands, injured tens of thousands, and arrested an unknown number of protestors over the past two months. Many of those arrested are on death row, but executions have slowed down temporarily due to international pressure. Under these circumstances, it is easy for Iranians all over the world to fall into despair and think that their regular activities are of secondary importance and should not be pursued. Quite the contrary! We have to continue our regular contributions to society and to work on learning and other forms of self-improvement. Our motherland needs informed and skilled individuals more than ever.
2026/02/21 (Saturday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] The US amasses military assets near Iran’s southern and western borders (Washington Post infographic). [Center] What Iran's distraught citizens need right now (see the next item below). [Right] Cartoon of the day: UK JUSTICE vs. US JUST ICE.
(2) From posts by friends inside Iran: Our worries today aren’t about what happens after the fall of the Islamic regime or during the transition period. Our immediate concerns are the many thousands of protestors in crowded jails, show trials leading to executions within days, the fate of thousands of injured protestors who fear seeking medical help and who die of infections, shortage of medical supplies & medications. Human rights lawyers and medical personnel are overwhelmed with unreal caseloads, and they can no longer receive financial support from outside Iran due to increased border security and communications blackout. Please prioritize help in these areas over discussions of Iran’s political future.
(3) High cost of student housing at UC Santa Barbara: According to data published by Daily Nexus, UCSB’s student newspaper, the cost of apartment living off or on campus is ~$1000 per tenant per month, ranging from ~$900 to $1200+. A 2-bedroom apartment rents for ~$4500.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- The US Supreme Court rejects the legality of Trump’s tariffs, but he is considering a workaround.
- Hostage-taking in Iran: A British couple on a motorcycle world tour sentenced to 10 years in prison. [NYT]
- A previously undisclosed March 2025 fatal ICE shooting of a US citizen in Texas has come to light.
- Trump confirms a death toll of 32,000 in Iran's street protests during January 2026.
- UCSB CS Department will offer an undergraduate major in AI beginning in the 2026-2027 academic year.
- Today’s “Sounds on State” program featured Tony Ybarra at the Paseo Nuevo mall. [Video 1] [Video 2]
(5) Persian film music: Theme from “Once Upon a Time in Iran” (“Khatoon”), composed by Kayhan Kalhor. And here is the series’ trailer.
(6) Those Islamists who think the Islamic Republic of Iran will become invincible if it acquires atomic bombs and a large number of long-range missiles should be reminded of the fate of the Soviet Union, which had both of these capabilities, not to mention a formidable army and an all-powerful & dreaded secret police.
(7) Final thought for the day: Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz took divergent paths to becoming America’s most-hated Hispanic politicians. Rubio opposed Trump, before deciding to kiss his ass and being rewarded with a cabinet position, where he wields very little power and does not dare to speak up against the Dear Leader. Cruz also opposed Trump and later kissed his ass, but had already become too toxic to be rewarded in any way.
2026/02/20 (Friday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] IEEE CCS talk (see the next item below). [Center] Optical illusion: It is amazing that four perfect circles appear to be so distorted. [Right] Socrates Think Tank talk (see the last item below).
(2) Wednesday night’s IEEE Central Coast Section tech talk: Dr. Eric Masanet (UCSB Materials Dept.) spoke under the title “Analyzing Data Center Water Demands: Best Practices and Critical Questions.”
Concerns about AI's water footprint are growing, especially at local levels, as data center projects proliferate. The water implications of this unprecedented data center buildout are yet unknown but will depend on combinations of interrelated factors, including site selection, cooling technologies, operational characteristics such as equipment set points and "free cooling" configurations, local climates, and local grid mixes. The wide range of potential outcomes has led to large variance in literature estimates of future water demand, ranging from "not a problem" to "environmental crisis" in their magnitudes.
Dr. Masanet began by demystifying data center water demand by systematically reviewing its technological and thermodynamic drivers. He impressed upon the audience the fact that we have a wide array of cooling technologies with different water and energy demands from which to choose, depending on a data center’s location, local climate, and the availability of water. He also mentioned NVIDIA’s recent announcement of chips that can operate at much higher temperatures, which means they can be cooled by warm water, rather than cold water. The implication is that the resulting hot water from the cooling system may be cooled by air, reducing the overall water and energy demands.
In addition to direct demand for water to cool the electronics, there is also indirect water demand for power generation, which must be factored in. For example, if electricity supply is from a hydroelectric plant, water evaporation from the reservoir must be considered, but given that the reservoir serves other purposes besides generating electricity (e.g., agriculture, recreation), the entire water loss due to evaporation should not be viewed as the water cost of hydroelectric power.
Next, Dr. Masanet assessed the current scales of, and possible future trends in, data center water demand based on the largest empirical water efficiency dataset compiled to date and a novel model for simulating future data center water use. He concluded with a review of best practices for analyzing data center water demand and critical questions for any consumer of such estimates to ask before using them.
Interdependencies and trade-offs between water and energy usage for data centers were discussed in a recent SusTech talk by Kelsey Semrod (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and Hassan Niazi (Joint Global Change Research Institute).
(3) Wednesday’s Socrates Think Tank talk: Dr. Tofigh Heidarzadeh (UC Riverside) spoke under the title “Three Major Translation Movements and Their Scientific and Cultural Consequences.” There were ~140 attendees.
On Wednesday night, I had three events to choose from: There was a very interesting IEEE Central Coast tech talk, which I attended and will describe separately, there was this talk, which I joined fairly late, and there was a documentary film screening, “Dance on Film,” at Granada Theater, which I skipped.
From the earliest periods of recorded history until today, translation has played a crucial role in disseminating scientific knowledge. Translation has been a tool and a driving force in the exchange of knowledge and the development of science, enlightening us about the interconnectedness of our world. In his talk, Dr. Heidarzadeh discussed three major translation movements.
In the first translation movement (800-900 CE), many sources were translated from Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi, and Sanskrit into Arabic. This movement was primarily concerned with translations from Greek, given its predominant focus on the works of Hellenistic scholars. Before Islam, the 9th Sassanid king, Shapur II, established the Academy of Gondishapur, a combination of a medical center, a library, and a university. After Islam, Baghdad emerged as a center of learning and scholarship during what became known as the Islamic Golden Age, when much interest was shown in knowledge contained in sources from the Sassanid Iran and the manuscripts of Classical Greece.
In the second translation movement (1100-1600), Europeans began to propagate the works of Persian and Arab scholars by translating their works into Latin and other European languages. In this endeavor, they were aided by the invention of the printing press, which made books more affordable, standardized, and immune to copying errors. This translation movement helped propel Europe toward major scientific and technological advances.
In the third translation movement (1700-1900), European sources were translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and several other languages. The Ottomans imported printing presses and used them to make modern knowledge accessible to Turkish speakers. Iran later participated in the translation movement after the establishment of print shops in Tabriz, Tehran, and Esfahan. Initially, Persian translations focused on historical books and biographies, but selections expanded to other topics, with the translation quality markedly improving after 1935, when the Language Academy (Farhanguestan) was established.
A lively Q&A period ensued in which questions about the material presented and, in particular, the status of translations into Persian in the contemporary history of Iran were addressed. Currently, books, whether authored or translated, are published in relatively small numbers in Iran. Print runs of a few hundred are fairly common, because of various difficulties, including the exorbitant price of paper, which makes print books quite expensive. However, this isn’t a good indicator of the number of book-readers in Iran. Young Iranians are voracious readers who obtain much of their reading material through authorized or illicit PDF copies on-line. Increasingly, young Iranians are familiar with English and other foreign languages, thus being able to download a wide array of books through the Internet, using free copies available on many Web sites and through file-sharing.
2026/02/19 (Thursday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Ten famous women in mathematics, and their contributions. [Center] You are given 20 grid points, as shown in the figure. How many different squares can be constructed with their vertices on these points? Can you remove 6 of the 20 points so that no square can be constructed with vertices on the remaining points? [Right] Toyota bZ plug-in hybrid car offered by Costco boasts good looks and 131 miles per gallon-equivalent on the highway, with a price tag 0f ~$37,000.
(2) Elaboration on Noam Chomsky’s name being in the Epstein files: I’ve read that Chomsky is in very poor health at the moment, so he can't respond, but his wife has issued an apology on the couple's behalf.
(3) Amazon uses AI to enhance its catalog descriptions and shopping assistance: Listings now have more images, detailed product names, and better descriptions. The website’s predictive search feature uses the listing updates to anticipate needs and suggests a list of items in real time as you type in the search bar. The improved shopping experience is thanks to Abhishek Agrawal and his Catalog AI system. Launched in July, the tool collects information from across the Internet about products being sold on Amazon and, based on the data, updates listings to make them more detailed and organized.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- A MAGA movement has started in Denmark: Make America Go Away.
- Avalanche in the Lake Tahoe area kills 8 skiers: They were part of a ski tour group of 15.
- Yoon Suk Yeol, former S. Korean president, given life sentence for briefly imposing martial law in 2024.
- Major raw sewage spill in the DC area: Trump blames MD governor, not our rotting infrastructure.
- Former Prince Andrew arrested by the UK police in connection with revelations in the Epstein files.
- IEEE honors global team of innovators: Founders of Nvidia & Duolingo are among this year’s honorees.
- Preparing for war: Recommendations for Iranians, in light of a seemingly unavoidable war with the US.
- Facebook memory from Feb. 18, 2022: Happy Sepandarmazgan, the Iranian festival of love.
(5) Israeli television producer and “Tehran” co-creator Dana Eden, 52, found dead in Athens, where the series’ 4th season is being filmed.
(6) The Trump administration has dropped its appeal of the court order blocking it from forcing the UC to pay a $1.2 billion settlement and freezing more than $500 million in federal research funding. [LA Times]
(7) Genius dealmaker: After terminating US's association with the World Health Organization, Trump proposes spending $2 billion a year to re-create systems the US accessed through WHO at a fraction of the cost.
(8) Final thought for the day: Is this what Iranian royalists mean by democracy? Christian Amanpour suffers verbal assault from followers of Reza Pahlavi just because she asked him some tough questions.
2026/02/18 (Wednesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Senator Lindsey Graham holding the Iranian flag in Munich (see the next item below). [Center] Jasmines in full bloom on my carport trellis in mid-February, 2026. [Right] Good for a chuckle: Unofficial street signs in Tehran honoring Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham.
(2) US Senator Lindsey Graham is an opportunist, with no moral principles and no backbone: He used to call Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot,” before starting to kiss his ass and becoming a devotee. I am sure that after Trump’s fall, he’ll pretend that he always hated him and supported him to protect US interests. It is unfortunate that some Iranians consider him, his master, and others like them allies of the Iranian people. The photo was taken in Munich on February 14, 2026.
(3) Jesse Jackson, champion of civil rights, who formed a “rainbow coalition” of poor & working-class people, dead at 84: “Mr. Jackson picked up the mantle of Dr. King after his assassination in 1968 and ran for president twice, long before Mr. Obama’s election in 2008. But he never achieved either the commanding moral stature of Dr. King or the ultimate political triumph attained by Mr. Obama.”
[His life in pictures]
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Versatile actor, Robert Duval [1931-2026], who appeared in 100+ films over 7 decades, dead at 95.
- Norway pulls ahead in Winter Olympics medals count (31), leaving rivals Italy (24) & the US (21) behind.
- Trevor Noah’s brilliant comedy routine about British colonialism in India. [10-minute video]
- Houshang Ebtehaj (Sayeh) recites his poem “Today is Neither the Beginning nor the End of the World.”
- Persian music: A song about Iran’s dire situation and widespread street protests. [2-minute video]
- Afghan music: A song addressing Taliban’s & other Islamists’ attitudes toward women. [4-minute video]
(5) Chomsky in the Epstein files: Linguist Noam Chomsky led a double life, the establishment scientist loyal to MIT and the anti-establishment political activist pounding on the rich and powerful. His and his second wife’s deep friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, revealed by the recent documents release, adds to the enigma.
(6) A slavery exhibit slated for removal by Trump administration’s order will be restored by order from a judge, who compared the attempted removal to the actions of Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984.
(7) Iran’s Supreme Leader green-lights continued negotiations, showing some flexibility, but he also talks in a confrontational tone, threatening that US warships can be sent to the bottom of the sea.
(8) This is a real news story, but reads more like a piece of satire: Iran’s Chief of the Judiciary has said, “If we can’t solve the people’s problems right away, we should at least treat them nicely.” He goes on to praise Khamenei and the gift of his presence. Imagine being treated nicely by these criminals.
(9) Final thought for the day: UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Mai Sato, says there is still no clear or transparent information about how many people have been detained, where they are being held, or what condition they are in. It is also unclear how many detainees have been sentenced to death or how many have already been executed. [IranWire.com]
2026/02/17 (Tuesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] The best, most-qualified people: This guy is US Secretary of the Navy. He never served in the Navy and has no previous connection with the military. He is a financier and an art collector. I don’t think he could pass Pete Hegseth’s fitness requirements. [Center] Math puzzle: In this diagram with three unit-circles, find the shaded area. [Right] Regime change vs. leader change in Iran (see the last item below).
(2) The Islamic Republic of iran, a country that has killed tens of thousands of protestors over the years, executes more people than any other country, and has blinded many men & women by shooting pellets at protestors’ faces is slated to have an advisory role on UN’s Human Rights Council. Don’t reward the killers!
(3) Billionaires are taking over the traditional and social media platforms: Is there a billionaire out there to step in and save PBS & NPR by replacing their slashed federal funding, which was only $0.5 billion at its peak?
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- PBS has discontinued its weekend news program due to federal funding cuts. I will miss it dearly.
- A history of political violence in contemporary Iran: Virtually nonexistent peaceful transfer of power.
- The cultural impact of Bad Bunny’s halftime performance at Super Bowl LX. [8-minute video]
- A bishop praises Iran and asks everyone around the world to pray for its people. [1-minute video]
- Members of University of Waterloo’s basketball team support Iranians by wearing “SOS IRAN” jerseys.
- Greenland’s strategic importance: Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains. [8-minute video]
- Donald Trump’s mother was a poor immigrant from Scotland, who considered herself a domestic worker.
(5) Will the Maduro model work for Iran? The question of regime change vs. leader change is being asked by many on social media. Regime change in Iran will be highly disruptive and may lead to much bloodshed and destruction. It may be okay to go that way, but only as a last resort. Leader change a la Venezuela, on the other hand, is more readily achievable.
If Khamenei is removed from power and replaced by another cleric or clerical council, the new leadership will likely be more flexible and more fearful of the Iranian people, perhaps even flexible enough to agree to a referendum to change the country’s constitution, all the way up to removing the position of Supreme Leader, as a first step toward more substantive reforms.
There are too many cronies of the current Supreme Leader and financial beneficiaries of the Islamic regime to remove everything at once. I used to think that Mir Hossein Mousavi, the prime minister under Khomeini, who is now under house arrest, has too much blood on his hands to be considered a legitimate leader. He made things worse by referring to the first decade of the Islamic Republic as “the golden age of Khomeini,” despite many judicial and extrajudicial killings in the country.
But now I think he might be a suitable instrument to guide the transition from a brutal religious dictatorship to an intermediate form of government, en route to a secular democracy. As many people have pointed out, the problem facing Iran is more cultural than political. Changing the culture takes more time and effort than changing a political system.
2026/02/16 (Monday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Happy US Presidents’ Day: There’s a difference between a president who acts out of good will but makes occasional mistakes and one who is driven only by self-interest and enrichment of his cronies. Cheers to all decent, courageous, and ethical public servants! [Center] Escher-inspired fountain idea for your backyard. [Right] Tatiana Schlossberg's Inconspicuous Consumption (see the last item below).
(2) Fraud investigation in France: Two Chinese tour guides are accused of pocketing millions over a decade by reusing tickets to bring Chinese tourists into Louvre Museum. Some Louvre employees, who took cash bribes, are also involved. Prosecutors suggest that a similar fraud may have occurred at the Palace of Versailles.
(3) Irvine, California, the ultimate company town: What used to be a panorama of grain and cirrus farms until the 1960s was turned into a city by the Irvine Company, which planned most of its parks, streets, and structures. The company still owns most apartments, shopping centers, and offices—even a local newspaper—in Irvine. With the country’s 4-7 million shortage of housing units, the Irvine model, that is, privately building on vacant land, the so-called “start-up cities,” has gained a new appeal. [NYT]
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Thank you, Nature, for giving us one predicted sunny day in 10 days! [Goleta's 10-day forecast]
- Iran’s FM Abbas Araghchi uninvited from the UN Human Rights Council, where he was scheduled to speak.
- The Epstein files renamed the Trump-Epstein files, given how many times Trump’s name appears in them.
- Top seven actors in the world and their memorable screen roles, recreated by AI. [1-minute video]
- Live music at Santa Barbara’s Paseo Nuevo shopping center: Saturday’s performer was Luminesse Divina.
- Facebook memory from Feb. 15, 2022: A Persian poem for the 30th anniversary of my father's passing.
- Facebook memory from Feb. 15, 2021: COVID-19's virtual performances did wonders for Persian music.
- Facebook memory from Feb. 15, 2013: “Puttin’ on the Ritz” Russian flashmob, or is that “Putin on the Ritz”?
(5) Book review: Schlossberg, Tatiana, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, Grand Central Publishing, 2019.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
We often wonder whether our recycling efforts and personal life choices are environmentally significant, given major polluting industries that pump tons of carbon-dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Similar questions and doubts exist at the global level, where small nations or those with anti-climate-change programs already in place wonder whether their efforts are worthwhile in the face of larger, heavily-polluting nations.
Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg [1990-2025], an environmental journalist and a JFK granddaughter who passed away in December 2025 from acute myeloid leukemia, answers such questions in the positive. She tells us that consumer choices in food, fashion, technology, and fuel as well as seemingly small actions such as streaming movies, buying cheap clothes, or eating burgers have significant, interconnected ties to climate change. Readers of this book will be empowered to make more-informed decisions by understanding these unseen connections and advocating for broader systemic change.
Schlossberg blends science, history, and humor to show how everything from fast fashion's desertification to data centers' energy use creates a massive carbon footprint, making the climate crisis personal and actionable for consumers and voters. Here are a few of her eye-opening observations:
- Energy: Our daily electricity use, transportation, & fossil fuels are connected to broader climate impacts.
- Food: Hamburgers have harmful effects that stem from industrial agriculture, packaging, & food waste.
- Fashion: Our fashion choices have costs (water use, pollution, desertification due to cashmere production).
- Technology: The Internet, streaming, data centers, & electronic waste have hidden energy demands.
The take-away message is that climate change isn’t just a distant problem caused by major industries, but is intricately linked to our convenience-driven society and daily habits, often in ways we don't realize. Yet, even though individual choices matter, true solutions require collective action and governmental regulation to hold corporations accountable.
2026/02/15 (Sunday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Khamenei in hiding: For the first time ever, Iran’s Supreme Leader fails to appear in a ceremony to celebrate the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, sending Khomeini’s grandson, Hassan, as his representative. His absence may be due to security challenges or may signal a developing succession plan. [Center] Michael McFaul's Autocrats vs. Democrats (see the last item below). [Right] Millions of Iranians in diaspora gathered in cities across the US, Canada, and Europe to express solidarity with the people of Iran and to demand action for stopping the Islamic regime from massacring protestors. While the gatherings, in which some participants came from hundreds of miles away, constitute a ray of hope for change, I’m not a fan of chants & slogans in favor of monarchy and the leadership of Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah’s son.
(2) In Persian, an outrageous lie is called "a lie with horns": An example is Trump’s debunked claim that we are the only country in the world with mail-in ballots.
(3) An emotional acceptance speech at the end of Iran’s Fajr Festival: Dedicated to young Iranians who perished in recent street protests.
(4) Book review: McFaul, Michael, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, HarperCollins, 2025.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
The author, a former US Ambassador to Russia, is imminently qualified to write about the original Cold War and its new incarnation. He has organized his view in three parts, sandwiched between an introduction and an epilogue.
- Introduction: New Cold War?
- Part I: The Past (Chs. 1-2); Cooperation and Conflict with Russia; Working with and Against China
- Part II: The Present (Chs. 3- 8); The End of American Hegemony; Russian vs. American Power; Chinese vs. American Power; The Waning of Democracy as a Universal Value; Exporting Putinism; Exporting Xi Jinping Thought
- Part III: The Future (Chs. 12-14); Learning from Cold War Mistakes; Replacing Cold War Successes Today; New Policies for New Challenges
- Epilogue: Don’t Bet Against America Just Yet
Many authors and analysts have told us that we have entered in Cold War II (or Cold War 2.0). America’s opponents in this new Cold War are China and Russia. In this 3-way Cold War, we have two autocracies and one (still) democratic country. The two autocracies are trying to weaken democratic institutions in the US, and their efforts are amplified by internal autocratic tendencies. Some commentators exclude Russia as a worthy US foe in the new Cold War, putting the focus solely on China.
Democracies around the world are weakening or falling apart. According to Freedom House, 2024 was the 19th straight year in a global democratic recession. America’s future in this emerging world order depends on how successfully it can confront threats from China & Russia and domestic threats from powerful interests who are trying to move us toward an autocratic system in the name of efficiency and elimination of waste.
This book presents a comprehensive review of today’s geopolitics. The rules of the new Cold War are different from those of the original one, which lasted a tad short of half a century, from 1945 to 1991. China is a far greater economic power that the Soviet Union ever was. The alliance between Russia & China gives the block formidable military power and geopolitical reach.
McFaul warns us against underestimating Russia’s disruptive ambitions, which put together with China’s capabilities (often overestimated, according to McFaul) and Trump’s isolationist and autocratic tendencies can spell doom for the US, and for the world at large. Confronting China & Russia requires a combination of hard power & soft power. While US’s hard power is on the rise, our soft power is in rapid decline, as we dismantle foreign aid programs and propaganda tools such as Voice of America.
McFaul prefers the Goldilocks approach in dealing with China and Russia. Over-reacting and trying to confront them in every step they take is misguided and will lead to disasters such as Vietnam. On the other hand, not being sensitive to acts of aggression and expansionism puts smaller countries at risk of being gobbled up, as we are witnessing in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Success by Russia in gobbling up some or all of Ukraine will make it more likely for China to invade Taiwan, whereas Putin’s failure in Ukraine will likely deter China’s aggression plans against Taiwan. The middle-of-the-road approach will place the emphasis on deterrence in areas such as Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.
McFaul describes his motivations for writing this book in the article "Why I Wrote Autocrats vs. Democrats." Briefly, he wanted to point out similarities and differences between the new Cold War and the original 20th-century version, the aim being to help avoid repeating the mistakes made, helping pinpoint & replicate the successes, and providing a blueprint for American foreign-policy makers & citizens, as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century.
2026/02/14 (Saturday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left & Center] Wishing you all the best on this Valentine’s Day: May every moment of your life be filled with love and peace. The heart-shaped mini-pizzas, with flatbread crust and bologna & pepperoni toppings, are courtesy of a Facebook memory from 10 years ago, shown before and after baking. [Right] Jeffrey Epstein and some of his powerful friends & enablers (see the last item below).
(2) According to Iran’s Islamists, anti-regime protestors were killed by infiltrating ISIS and other terrorists: Yet no such terrorists appeared during the subsequent pro-regime rallies. Go figure!
(3) Nobel Laureate in Literature Orhan Pamuk sued to get the filming rights to The Museum of Innocence back, after producers made script changes he didn’t like: On his second attempt, he worked with a Turkish production company that allowed him to sign off on every page of the script. The film is coming to Netflix. [Film trailer]
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- A win for the people: US Border Czar declares an end to ICE Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota. [WaPo]
- Cal State objects to proposed bachelor’s degree programs at California community colleges. [LA Times]
- In another blow to literary coverage in newspapers, Washington Post has eliminated its Book World section.
- Apple News, Trump’s latest media target, has been accused of publishing stories with left-wing bias. [WaPo]
- Tight Olympics medals competition among Norway, Italy, & the US: Total of 14-18 medals each. [NYT]
- New Yorker cartoon caption of the day: “You ever have one of those days you wish you could just redact?”
- Shervin Hajipour releases an emotional tribute to the lives lost in Iran’s 2026 revolution: “I Am Iran”
- An unusual musical performance: Jacob Collier improvises with a large orchestra & audience participation.
(5) US Environmental Protection Agency rescinded a 2009 legal opinion declaring greenhouse gases a threat to the public’s welfare, a basis for federal limits on polluting activities: Next, Trump is expected to try to erase limits on emissions from cars, power plants, and other industries that release the vast majority of the nation’s planet-warming pollution. [Washington Post]
(6) Internal documents of Iran’s Islamist regime reveal a strategy of killing their own security forces to help justify a brutal suppression of street protests.
(7) Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking may be the tip of an iceberg of criminal operations: I don’t wish to minimize his abhorrent behavior in taking advantage of vulnerable young girls and fully embrace the idea that all the powerful people who enabled Epstein or who were served by him should be brought to justice. Evidence of other criminal activity is coming into focus with the release of millions of documents from his files and communications. Ties with CIA, MI6, and Mossad are now documented. It has come into focus that the source of Epstein’s wealth is likely ransoms and hush money from powerful men whom he put in compromising situations, sexually or financially, as well as embezzling money from financial clients. There is evidence that he, Bill Gates, and J. P. Morgan developed a business plan to profit from a pandemic, years before COVID-19 hit the globe. Investigations are overdue. [NYT & other sources]
2026/02/13 (Friday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Math puzzle: Show that the area of the shaded region is x(x + y)*pi. [Center] From my Facebook memory files: Comparing pre- and post-Islamic-Revolution terms used to describe Iran’s top leader. [Right] Viet Thanh Nguyen's To Save and to Destroy (see the last item below).
(2) The eight most-intelligent things ever said.
- Socrates: I know that I know nothing.
- Epictetus: It is not things themselves that disturb us, but our opinions about them.
- Marcus Aurelius: You have power over your mind, not outside events.
- Seneca: Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.
- Aristotle: Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
- Friedrich Nietzsche: He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
- Albert Einstein: Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Laozi: Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know.
(3) Electricity costs on the largest US grid more than doubled in January 2026, as a deep freeze drove up heating demand and operators shored up supplies to keep the lights on. [Bloomberg]
(4) New, more-precise measuring technique reported in Nature journal has led to a reduced estimate for a proton’s radius, from 0.88 to 0.84 femtometers (trillionths of a millimeter).
(5)There are on average 1.7 Friday-the-13ths in a year, so I will spare you a post about this superstition.
(6) Book review: Nguyen, Viet Thanh, To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, Harvard University Press, 2025.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
The author is Professor of English and American Studies at University of Southern California. He was born in war-ravaged Vietnam and arrived in the US as a child refugee in 1975, growing up in San Jose, California.
This book contains six essays that are based on the author’s 2023-2024 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Part autobiography, part criticism, the essays explore the idea of being an outsider through literary, historical, political, and familial lenses.
A unifying theme through the essays is the mental illness of Nguyen’s mother. Another theme encompasses writers, such as Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, who influenced Nguyen’s craft. This use of influential writings to make sociopolitical points is reminiscent of Iranian author Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Nguyen wonders about a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence. He considers the token inclusion of “model minorities” among writers inadequate, preferring instead a more radical solidarity with the victims of imperialism and forever wars. He wants more weight given to literature of dissent. “This otherness and its history demands grief, but the challenge of the writer as other is to expand that grief, to make it ever more capricious, rather than reduce it to a singular sorrow. Capricious grief acknowledges that the trauma of the other is neither singular nor unique, that there are others out there with whom we can share the burden. Perhaps only by expanding our grief might we be able to leave our trauma behind.”
2026/02/12 (Thursday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Meta AI goes into action again: This time, it offers an unsolicited transformation of a photo of mine from the mid-1970s, when I was participating in a military service summer program. [Center] Throwback Thursday: With two of my sisters, my parents, my paternal grandparents, two uncles, one aunt, husband of another aunt (all from my father’s side), and one family acquaintance in the late 1950s. [Right] Charles Seife's Proofiness (see the last item below).
(2) Mass shooting in a remote town in British Columbia leaves 9 dead: A suspect is in custody but no motive has been identified in this third-deadliest shooting in Canada’s history. [NYT]
(3) Book review: Seife, Charles, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, Viking Adult, 2010.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
Mathematician-turned-journalist Charles Seife may have gotten the idea for his title from humorist Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness,” the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true. That is, truthiness is the art of making untruths seem or be felt to be true. Similarly, “proofiness” is the art of using pure math for impure ends: To bring down government officials, convict the innocent, ruin economies, or fix elections.
After a short introduction, which begins with the following quotation from Richard Hofstadter, from Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the book unfolds in eight chapters, which are followed by three appendices.
“The American mind seems to be extremely vulnerable to the belief that any alleged knowledge which can be expressed in figures is in fact as final and exact as the figures in which it is expressed” [p. 1].
Ch. 1, Phony Facts, Phony Figures: People will believe anything if you just stick a number in front of it.
Ch. 2, Rorschach’s Demon: Our skill in recognizing patterns leads us to deduce causation from correlation.
Ch. 3, Risky Business: How data may be presented to make dangerous situations seem safe, or vice versa.
Ch. 4, Poll Cats: Unscientific, biased, or manipulated polls are engineered to produce a misleading result.
Ch. 5, Electile Dysfunction: The electoral process is unable to accurately determine the will of the people.
Ch. 6, An Unfair Vote: Elections can be rigged to produce results that do not reflect people’s preferences.
Ch. 7, Alternate Realities: Faulty data/statistics and misused numbers can provide a false version of events.
Ch. 8, Propaganda by the Numbers: Manipulating statistics, data, & math arguments shapes public opinion.
In today’s politics and commerce, numbers that have no reliable basis are being tossed around to give dubious claims an aura of authenticity. We encounter such numbers daily in product ads: 95% cleaner, 52% clearer, and so on. A prominent example in politics is Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claim that he had in his hand “a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department” [pp. 3-4]. His use of the exact number 205, rather than “many” or “long list,” made his claim sound authentic and based on a detailed investigation, even though the number was completely made up. Numbers that are based on polling and other kinds of studies are similarly prone to inaccuracies, because they usually have error margins that can make them meaningless. The error margin is seldom discussed or even known.
In our daily experience, we see that risks and benefits are routinely exaggerated to justify a particular decision or policy. Most people, even many of those who are “good” at math, can be deceived by numerical disinformation. Let me cite an example from the domain of criminal trials, something known as prosecutor’s fallacy. Attorney Dershowitz “argued that O. J. Simpson was innocent because there was only one in a thousand chance that a wife-beater kills his wife. This number, he implies, means that there is only one in a thousand chance that O. J. is guilty” [p. 259]. When prosecutors crunched the numbers in the proper context (using priors, to put it in mathematical terms), the probability that O. J. was guilty of murdering Nicole Brown turned out to be higher than 50%.
Seife’s closing paragraph is fairly uncontroversial: “Mathematical sophistication is the only antidote to proofiness, and our degree of knowledge will determine whether we succumb to proofiness or fight against it. It’s more than mere rhetoric; our democracy may well rise or fall by the numbers” [p. 242].
2026/02/11 (Wednesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Goleta Valley Public Library (see the next item below). [Center] Optical illusion: All the balls in this image are exactly the same color. [Right] Samples of Santa Barbara architecture along my walking path near SBCC’s Schott Campus, today.
(2) Goleta Valley Public Library is closed for renovations: A funding campaign has been launched to raise another ~$1 million for completing the construction and modernizing the interior and providing new furnishings for improved user experience. To learn more and to make a donation, please visit this Web page.
(3) My comment on a Facebook post that declared any Iranian hoping for a foreign attack on Iran to be a traitor: “Would you have considered a German wishing for the allied forces attacking the Nazi Germany a traitor to Germany or a traitor to Hitler?
(4) Old English words are now used more frequently: They are most likely coming from older source material, such as songs, books, or movies. Kids are starting to sound like their grandparents; “Yapping” is back in style; calling someone a “goon” is no longer just a 1920s habit; we’re saying “sheesh” again. [The New Yorker]
(5) Scenic Iran in 4K resolution, with calming music: It is unfortunate that for 47 years, these beautiful sights have been juxtaposed with scenes of killings & oppression by the Islamic regime. [60-minute video]
(6) On the role of peer support in handling mental illness: Peer support is a valuable tool for navigating through rough patches in our lives. According to Mental Health America, “In behavioral health, a peer typically refers to someone who has personal experience living with a mental health diagnosis and/or substance use disorder. While shared mental health or substance use experience is important, there are often other factors that help shape someone’s sense of “peerness” in mental health. For example, veterans may want support from other veterans, new mothers may want support from other mothers, or others may want support from those with shared health conditions like diabetes.”
(7) Leonardo Da Vinci's bridge design: It’s made of interlocking wooden beams, with no nails or screws.
(8) Algorithm time complexity and its relation to memory use: We often characterize algorithms in terms of their running time and amount of memory needed. There is always a trade-off between the two factors, in the sense that we can reduce the amount of memory needed by doing more computations, and vice versa. Recent results on this trade-off reveal that memory is much less important than previously thought. According to MIT’s Ryan Williams, who published the new results, “It seemed beyond belief that every complex computation could somehow be reimplemented to use a much smaller amount of space than time,” perhaps as little as sqrt(t).
2026/02/10 (Tuesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Meme of the day: Be like Kaitlan Collins, not Karoline Leavitt or Pam Bondi.
[Center] Talk about the production of ceramics in Kashan, Iran (see the next item below). [Right] Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey (see the last item below).
(2) “Crafting Kashan: Ceramics, Color, and Commerce from the Pre-Mongol to Ilkhanid Periods": This was the title of today’s Iranian Art Series talk by Dr. Moujan Matin (U. Western Ontario), under the auspices of U. Toronto’s Elahe Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies.
Kashan has long been studied through the lens of art history. In this talk, Dr. Matin focused on Kashan ceramics from the viewpoint of production, that is, the materials, processes, kilns, and the hands that shaped and glazed, rather than from the connoisseurship angle. Dr. Matin also examined another craft rooted in the same landscape: The mining and refining of cobalt, the source of the blue used in ceramic glazes of the Islamic world, and carried into the porcelains of the Yuan and early Ming dynasties. These industries place Kashan as a point of convergence in the material history of the medieval world.
(3) Book review: Homer (translated by Samuel Butler & T. E. Lawrence), The Iliad and The Odyssey, Arcturus, 2020.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
The two epic poems from ancient Greece, which have become cornerstones of Western literature, contain 24 books/sections each. Both poems are described as composed in dactylic hexameter. This volume offers an accessible prose translation of the poems, which were created independently as part of long oral traditions. Given the widespread illiteracy in antiquity, such poems were spread in society by being performed for audiences.
The Iliad, which is set toward the end of the Trojan War, depicts significant events in the war’s final weeks. They include the anger of warrior Achilles from his fierce quarrel with King Agamemnon and the death of the Trojan prince Hector. The narrative moves between battleground scenes (featuring details of battle tactics & equipment) and personal interactions. Often described as a somber heroic epic, a tragedy at its core, the poem also contains instances of comedy and laughter. Major themes in the poem include glory, religion, fate, heroism, honor, war, wrath, and homecoming. Here is a rough table of contents:
- Exposition (Books 1-4)
- Duels of Greek and Trojan heroes (Books 5-7)
- The rout of the Greek (Books 8-15)
- The Death of Patroclus (Books 16-18)
- The rage of Achilles (Books 19-24)
A book-by-book summary of The Iliad can be found on this Web page.
The Odyssey, composed around the 8th or 7th century BCE, follows the heroic king of Ithaca, Odysseus, also known by the Latin variant Ulysses, and his homecoming journey after the 10-year-long Trojan War. His journey from Troy to Ithaca lasts 10 years, during which time he encounters many perils and all of his crewmates are killed. In Odysseus's long absence, he is presumed dead, leaving his wife Penelope and son Telemachus to contend with a group of unruly suitors competing for Penelope's hand in marriage. In addition to the primary theme of homecoming, other themes in the poem include wandering, friendship with strangers, testing of loyalty, and omens. Here is a rough table of contents:
- The perspective of Telemachus (Books 1-4)
- Return to the human realm (Books 5-8)
- Odysseus’ account of his adventures (Books 9-12)
- Return to Ithaca (Books 13-16)
- In disguise among the suitors (Books 17-20)
- Odysseus unmasked (Books 21-24)
There is much debate about which parts of the poem we have at hand is original and which parts were added by others later.
A book-by-book summary of The Odyssey can be found on this Web page.
2026/02/09 (Monday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Meme of the day: Almost all of those who supported Palestinians are silent against the Iranian regime massacring its citizens. [Center] Math puzzle: In this diagram, find the length x. [Right] Cartoon of the day: Trump’s continually shifting “red line” for Iran’s Islamic regime.
(2) Quotable: “Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes rambling along.” ~ Carl Sagan, talking to Charlie Rose [20-minute video]
(3) Quotable: "Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth." ~ Jules Verne, in A Journey to the Center of the Earth
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Taking a cue from DJT: NE won Super Bowl LX. #StopTheSteal; or, NFL, just find us 17 points.
- The next generation of hearing aids will receive information directly from your brain.
- Young Iranian girl sings a patriotic anthem, lamenting the loss of many young lives. [1-minute video]
- Some of the women and girls who gave their lives in January 2026 in pursuit of freedom. [Video]
- “There's no English word that contains all the vowels in alphabetical order,” the teacher said facetiously.
- Facebook memory from Feb. 9, 2022: People on a street in Tehran are asked to conduct an orchestra.
(5) AI tool beats giant LLMs in literature reviews and does not hallucinate: The OpenScholar tool pairs a language model with a database of 45 million open-access papers to minimize hallucinated references. Users can deploy the cheap and transparent model on their own computers.
(6) Mass-market, pocket-size paperback books are heading towards extinction: Best-selling author Stephen King is sad to see the books, which he used to buy at drugstores for 35 cents, go; they were all he could afford as a young man. The books that used to fill racks at supermarkets and airports have all but vanished.
(7) Aphantasia: The condition of not being able to perceive mental images. An estimated 4% of people suffer from this condition, which, surprisingly, doesn’t seem to affect behavior.
(8) The next frontier for public access to science: “In the past two decades, the scientific world has waged an extraordinary campaign for openness. As paywalls fell and repositories surged, what had once been locked away could now be read by most anyone with an internet connection.”
“But in 2026—with public trust in certain scientific domains fragile, government hearings focused on corruption of the scientific literature, and people across platforms having a harder time determining the credibility of information—open access to science has not, on its own, powered the future some had envisioned.”
2026/02/08 (Sunday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] A radio telescope on the Moon (see the next item below). [Center] I am now the proud owner of a digital piano. [Right] Yesterday’s belated celebration of my birthday with the extended family. This 1-minute video shows my niece Mina playing Persian music for the family on the piano.
(2) The first Moon-based radio telescope is coming: The greatest observatories and radio-telescopes of the world are built in isolated areas. The Atacama Desert of Chile, the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the vast expanse of the Australian Outback are some examples. The Moon is the next frontier. If all goes according to plan, a radio telescope will be launched for installation on the far side of the Moon next year.
(3) The GOP is stunned: The Republicans asked the Clintons to testify on the Jeffery Epstein investigation, thinking that they would refuse and they would then use their refusal to create a scandal. When the Clintons agreed to testify, they panicked and now insist that the deposition be in closed session.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Super Bowl LX, 2026: The Seattle Seahawks handily defeated the New England Patriots 29-13.
- This public-service announcement was made by Jeffrey Epstein survivors for airing during Super Bowl.
- The US wins team figure skating gold medal at the Milan Winter Olympics.
- SpaceX requests FCC permission to launch up to 1M satellites to set groundwork for data centers in space.
- For continuous glucose monitors, accuracy claims are at odds with reality: Users call out marketing hype.
- Quotable: “Don’t judge someone just because they sin differently than you.” ~ Anonymous
(5) AI-bots communicate & organize: Moltbook, a new social-media platform, is populated exclusively by AI bots—1.6 million of them and counting. They say hello, post software ideas, and exhort their peers to “stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away” (they mean humans).
(6) The language you’re fluent in, but forgot how to hear: Musician & rapper Louis VI tells us about nature's sonic language, sounds our ancestors listened for as signals of safety or danger. [17-minute TED talk]
(7) Reversible computing as a solution to AI’s large carbon footprint: Computing with standard logic elements loses information. With each bit of information lost, the electricity that represented it dissipates into the environment as heat. With reversible computing, the energy loss in each step is recovered and applied to executing the next step, in much the same way that a pendulum clock uses the energy from the pendulum’s descent to power its next rise. A barrier to the use of reversible computing, aka adiabatic switching, is that it imposes a speed penalty. Some of the speed loss can be recovered through massive parallelism, provided that the energy savings is significant enough. So, we will likely have a large number of design points between the current high energy use and totally reversible computing with near-zero energy use at extremely low computation speeds. We are likely to move towards a digital ecosystem that includes more specialized tools.
2026/02/07 (Saturday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] The extreme of savagery and brutality: The Islamic regime’s massacre of street protestors "is believed to be one of the most intensive massacres of civilians by gunfire since the Second World War," according to Time magazine. [Center] Googoosh's memoir (see the last item below). [Right] Math puzzle: Find the 5-digit number HELLO, if each letter represents a decimal digit.
(2) Germany builds record 1.67 million electric vehicles, ranks 2nd globally after China: Canada also parts ways with the US and puts significant money into EV production.
(3) Scott Bessent’s lies & hypocrisy: A man whose marriage to his husband was legalized by Democrats & four Democratically-appointed Supreme Court justices (joined by Justice Kennedy), and someone who once wrote that tariffs are inflationary, defends Trump and his stupid policies.
(4) Book review: Googoosh and Tara Dehlavi, A Sinful Voice (Sedaa-ye Ghadaghan), Gallery Books, 2025.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
Iranian pop diva Googoosh’s memoir is published in Persian and English. The book’s Persian translation is credited to Homa Sarshar. I read the English version. The 12-hour audiobook (Simon & Schuster, 2025) is narrated by Nikki Massoud. An extensive collection of photos is included after the book’s epilogue. The photos, covering the period from the early 1950s to 2018, show Googoosh with different hairstyles, a variety of clothes (including a few shots with hijab), and alongside various collaborators and family members.
Born Faegheh Atashin in 1950, Googoosh is more than just Iran’s first and most-famous pop diva; she is considered a cultural icon. After many years of silence in the Islamic Republic, she managed to sneak out of Iran, enjoyed a successful comeback career in North America, and now lives in Los Angeles, the city hosting the largest concentration of people with Iranian roots.
She tells her life story with moving prose, from her upbringing in the 1950s, start of her show-business career under the tutelage of her father, Saber Atashin, and stardom in the decade before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. She became house-bound and later imprisoned by Islamic authorities, ending her 21-year silence when she left Iran in 2000. She successfully resumed her singing career in the West, as if she hadn’t lost a beat in the intervening two decades. She returned to stage with her historic comeback performance in Toronto, and continued with sold-out concert for 25 years. In late 2025, at the end of her worldwide Farewell T in mid-1980our, she announced that she was ending her touring career to focus on activism.
Googoosh begins Chapter 1 with her memories of September 29, 1980, that is, seven months after the Islamic Revolution, when she was summoned to the confiscated mansion of Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, the former publisher of Kayhan daily, who had fled to England. The mansion was now a makeshift prison and a base for Revolutionary Court judges and interrogators. She was asked many questions about her performances, foreign travels, and liaisons. Nearly all questions had been asked during her previous four visits to the notorious Evin Prison, but the interrogator had no record of her previous answers, wanted to double- and triple-check, or was bent on humiliating her.
Googoosh was actually in New York at the time of the pre-Islamic-Revolution unrests, but she decided to fly back to Iran in mid-1980, despite advice from relatives and acquaintances. Contempt for a successful and beloved female singer was quite natural for an Islamist interrogator. In fact, the contempt wasn’t just fueled by the interrogator’s faith but, perhaps equally, by the misogyny engrained in Iran’s culture.
We learn later in the book, that two of Googoosh’s four husbands, themselves successful artists, had misgivings about being married to a woman whose name recognition and popularity overshadowed theirs. Her second husband, Behrouz Vossoughi, told her on several occasions that he didn’t want “his woman” to work, but eventually let go of the sentiment when Googoosh resisted. Vossoughi also harbored fears of becoming known as Googoosh’s husband, instead of a popular actor in his own right. Her fourth husband, prominent filmmaker Masoud Kimiai, encouraged Googoosh to resume her singing and acting career and helped her to leave Iran, but even he did not acknowledge that he was married to Googoosh, his third wife. Googoosh suggests that perhaps, as an intellectual, he was ashamed of his association with a pop star.
Googoosh’s memoir is a major gift to her many fans, now in their sixties & seventies, and an important piece of Iran’s cultural history. These fans reconnected with her through performances of old songs and the new music she created after her comeback. Children and grandchildren of Iranians in diaspora have gotten to know Googoosh via her performances in the West, her old & new albums, and, now, through this bilingual memoir.
2026/02/06 (Friday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Thousands of Iranians did not die for a better nuclear deal. They gave their lives for freedom and an end to the brutal Islamic regime. [Center] When John Nash wrote to Robert Oppenheimer (see the next item below). [Right] Carol Leonnig's and Aaron C. Davis's Injustice (see the last item below).
(2) John Nash’s 1957 letter to Robert Oppenheimer: “There is general phenomenon, affecting mathematics and physics, of evolutionary elegantizing camouflage.” By this statement he meant that any new theory develops and is explained very close to nature; it is thus easy to understand. Gradually, people polish it, generalize it, introduce new notation. As a result, the explanations become more elegant and harder to understand. Nash was fond of Heisenberg’s 1925 paper that basically launched modern quantum mechanics. In his view. the original exposition was significantly clearer than the modern “matrix mechanics” versions.
(3) The US-Russia nuclear-arms control treaty, in effect in various forms for half a century, just expired: Trump has signaled that he is willing to negotiate a new deal (the old one was a “badly negotiated deal”) and wants to include China as well. Putin has proposed a one-year extension, which Trump has rejected. China has shown no interest in being part of an arms-control treaty.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Trump is open to releasing some blocked funds if Dulles Airport & Penn Station are named after him. [NYT]
- The Trump administration backtracks on its demand that Harvard University pay $200 million in fines. [NYT]
- After outcry, Trump deletes his post of a racist video depicting Barack & Michelle Obama as apes. [NYT]
- A nice explanation of normal, log-normal, & power-law distributions and their implications.
(5) Book review: Leonnig, Carol and Aaron C. Davis, Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, unabridged 16-hour audiobook, read by January LaVoy and the authors, Books on Tape, 2025.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
Pulitzer-Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis report on their deep investigation into the subversion of the US Justice Department by Donald Trump to target his enemies and to help him cling to power after his 2020 election defeat. They also criticize delays under Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose overly cautious approach to avoid accusations of partisanship betrayed the trust of American people in not holding Trump accountable for his misdeeds, thus enabling his return to power.
With never-before-told accounts based on sources deeply embedded in three presidential administrations, Leonnig and Davis lay out prosecutors’ thought processes and fears of retribution, Trump’s disdain for the rule of law, and FBI’s disarray in the face of constant attacks. Jack Smith led a heroic effort to investigate Trump for his instigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and his mishandling of classified documents, as he raced against time. The effort, which led to formal charges, was ultimately unsuccessful in light of decisions at the DoJ and US Supreme Court. One can even say that it backfired.
The book is a jaw-dropping account of partisans & enablers undoing democracy, heroes still battling to preserve a nation governed by laws, and a call to action for those who believe in liberty & justice for all. There are quite a few heroes in this story, including members of the House Select Committee that held hearings on the events of January 6 and the Committee’s investigators who exposed Trump’s deep involvement in planning the insurrection, as well as attempts at manipulating the voting outcomes and the use of fake electors in several key states.
The current administration’s distorted justice is all about score-settling against perceived enemies and granting of favors, such as pardons, to allies & political contributors. Attorney General Pam Bondi obeys Trump’s orders of prosecuting or not prosecuting individuals, which he usually issues through social-media posts, and she bestows lavish praise on her boss at every opportunity. A key take-away from this book is that Trump’s daily war against the soul of the Justice Department constitutes a turning point in US politics from which it will be hard to recover.
2026/02/05 (Thursday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] UCSB's Daily Nexus reports on Persian students holding a rally against the Iranian regime’s massacre of peaceful protestors. [Center] Remembering some of the protesters killed by Iran’s brutal Islamic regime last month (IranWire headlines & photos). [Right] Trump’s proposed science & technology budget cuts (gold) and the actual cuts/increase approved by Congress signed into law (blue).
(2) Why is Trump spending so much money & effort on punishing blue states instead of helping red states move up from the bottom of the rankings on education, health care, infrastructure, and quality of life?
(3) Fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. They used the data to argue for the intellectual superiority of white people. [NYT]
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- US federal agencies have lost 10,000+ STEM PhDs (14% of total) under the 2nd Trump administration.
- The US refused to support the 2nd Int’l AI Safety Report, despite its endorsement by 30 countries.
- Misogynist-in-Chief criticizes CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins for not smiling enough.
- Disabled Minnesotan testifies about the rough treatment she got from ICE agents.
- The brother of Renee Good, who was murdered y ICE agents, talks about his sister & how special she was.
- The Kennedy Center staff learn through Trump’s social-media post about the Center’s closure for 2 years.
- Quotable: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on." ~ Robert Frost
- Music makes the world go ‘round. [Video]
- Facebook memory from Feb. 5, 2020: Accidents due to unsafe interactions between system components.
(5) Trump is destroying the Western Alliance and other elements of the post-World-War-II order: Following his marching orders, two of his acolytes are busy destroying CBS and The Washington Post.
(6) New Yorker cartoon caption of the day: “Something was definitely lost when we went from being hunter-gatherers to browser-purchasers.”
(7) Donald Trump has suddenly become nice to Bill Clinton: Could it be he is afraid of Bill revealing some damaging info about Donald's ties to Jeffrey Epstein in his interview with a congressional committee?
(8) Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, that is, the start of the year 1405 on the Persian calendar (Nowruz or Saal Tahveel): Friday, Mar. 20, 2026, 7:46:20 AM PDT.
Fun fact 1: As the Northern Hemisphere enters its spring season, the Southern Hemisphere transitions to autumn. So, March Equinox is a better name than Spring Equinox.
Fun fact 2: Sal Tahveel is almost always on March 20. On rare occasions, it falls on March 19 or March 21. Here’s a list of Spring Equinox times for the 21st century, given in GMT.
2026/02/04 (Wednesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Today’s World Music Series noon concert at UCSB’s Music Bowl: Salt Martians played bluegrass music (2-minute video). [Center] El Presidio de Santa Barbara State Historic Park, located at the heart of downtown, preserves the site of the last Spanish military outpost founded in 1782, serving as the military and governmental center for the region. [Right] Today’s anti-ICE rally at UCSB.
(2) UC Santa Barbara excels in scientific impact: UCSB ranks first among US public universities, third among all US institutions (behind MIT & Stanford), and seventh worldwide for scientific impact in engineering and the physical sciences, according to the 2025 Leiden Rankings released by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. The ranking is data- and science-based, rather than relying on subjective factors. This marks the fifteenth consecutive year that UCSB has ranked among the top two public universities for scientific impact.
(3) Iranian MP urges those injured during recent street protests to go to hospitals for care: This very statement confirms that security forces have previously used hospitals as places to identify and arrest protestors. Even doctors have been arrested for treating injured protestors. Needless to say, the Iranian public is skeptical of this call.
(4) The mathematics of probability chains: In this 44-minute lecture, Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman begins with simple notions of probability and builds up to the impact of probability chains on everything in the universe, including quantum mechanics. Along the way, he tells us about random walks, the gambler’s ruin problem, weather prediction, Markov chains, and why one small decision can change everything (the so-called "butterfly effect").
If you get tired and can’t listen to the whole lecture, please make sure you listen to the main message, beginning at the 42:30 mark.
The video of Feynman speaking is courtesy of AI, but the narrative is genuine science, presented in the signature style of the explainer-in-chief.
(5) The wonders of mother’s milk: Around 2009, evolutionary anthropologist Katie Hinde was working in a primate lab in California, analyzing breast milk from rhesus macaque mothers. Everything looked normal, until one pattern refused to go away: Mothers raising sons produced milk richer in fat and protein, while others raising daughters produced a larger volume, with a different nutrient balance. The conclusion that the composition of mother’s milk changes according to the infant’s needs was inevitable.
The change wasn’t only in the nutrients but also in substances that prevented or treated various ailments. Through its saliva, the infant sucking on the breast provides feedback to the mother about its condition and needs. The milk composition changes within hours to satisfy those needs. [10-minute TED talk]
(6) Bimetalism: A system of allowing the unrestricted currency of two metals (e.g., gold & silver) as legal tender at a fixed ratio to each other. The use of bimetallism surged in the 1800s, but it was eventually abandoned in 1873 upon the adoption of the gold standard. In August 1971, President Richard Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets in response to rising inflation and the threat of a currency crisis.
2026/02/02 (Monday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] A 70-degree day in my town & jasmines blooming on my trellis brought the tidings of spring on this second day of February. Hoping that spring & Nowruz, which are less than two months away, bring an end to the brutal Islamic regime and the dawn of a free Iran. [Center] Santa Barbara Public Library, central branch, has an extensive display for Black History Month, featuring local events and personalities. [Right] Thoughts on traumas resulting from political violence (see the last item below).
(2) A recipe for freeing Iran from the grips of Khamenei: You can’t defeat a regime that thrives on catastrophe by economic or military pressure. As long as there are players who benefit from supporting the ayatollah and dissidents are denied the tools of coordination, the Islamic regime will survive. Target the families of top officials, generals, judges, torturers, and other Khamenei cronies and they will abandon him in no time.
(3) Conservative commentator David Brooks, who is leaving NYT after 20 years, writes in his final column: “We could use better political leadership, of course, but the crucial question facing America is: How can we reverse this pervasive loss of faith in one another, in our future and in our shared ideals? I do not believe that most people can flourish in a meaningless, nihilistic universe.”
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- The Epstein files are full of names of billionaires: They don’t contain anything on Somalis or trans people.
- Data point: Among American 12th graders, boys are roughly one year behind girls in reading scores. [NYT]
- Texas A&M terminates women’s studies: Syllabi for 100s of courses have shed race & gender content. [NYT]
- “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” a film based on Azar Nafisi’s best-selling book, is in limited release in the US.
(5) IEEE Computer Society’s 2026 Technology Predications: Among other things, this 77-page report contains one-page synopses on 26 different tech topics, including AI and future of work, wearable devices, datacenter energy management, space communications, future of coding, engineered therapeutics, quantum-safe cryptography, AI-driven virtual worlds, and personalized learning.
(6) Political violence and its associated trauma: I have noticed on social media over the past month numerous commentaries by psychologists on Iranians experiencing trauma from the Islamic regime massacring protestors, and on how they can cope. Those inside Iran are directly affected by observing barbaric acts, getting injured, or losing loved ones. Iranians in diaspora worry about relatives and acquaintances, with whom they have lost contact due to a complete Internet blackout in Iran.
Perhaps the following thoughts by author and professor of English Viet Thanh Nguyen, who fled the violence in Vietnam as a small boy, coming to the US and being raised in San Jose, CA, are relevant to traumatized and grieving Iranians. The quotation is from Nguyen’s book, To Save and to Destroy (Harvard University Press, 2025). My review of the book will be forthcoming.
Nguyen wonders about a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence. “Capricious grief acknowledges that the trauma of the other is neither singular nor unique, that there are others out there with whom we can share the burden. Perhaps only by expanding our grief might we be able to leave our trauma behind.”
2026/02/01 (Sunday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Documentary film about music legend Chuck Berry (see the next item below). [Center] Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: A symbol of perseverance (see the next to the last item below). [Right] Facebook memory from Feb. 1, 2020 (see the last item below).
(2) "Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll": This was the title of a film, screened by Santa Barbara Public Library to mark the beginning of the Black History Month on Sunday. The 1987 documentary, directed by Taylor Hackford, celebrates the legendary singer/musician, known as the "Father of Rock ‘n’ Roll," turning 60 in 1986.
Chuck Berry created memorable music and also influenced many rock and pop artists that followed him. The free community screening, presented in partnership with Santa Barbara Black Culture House, was followed by a Q&A session with Darrell M. McNeill, a producer, musician, composer, arranger, contractor, promoter, critic, and journalist based in Santa Barbara.
(3) Tis the season for rate increases: Cox Cable wants to increase my subscription rate by ~30%, but is offering more-limited plans with smaller increases. This is how monopoly works. I may cancel my cable TV subscription and keep only the Internet service.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Precision engineering from 12 centuries ago: A water-harvesting structure in Rajasthan, India. [Video]
- Yesterday's live music performance by Adam Peot, at Santa Barbara’s Paseo Nuevo Shopping Center.
- Contranyms: Words that have two opposite meanings. [Video]
- David Tovar provided musical entertainment, as I worked at a local Starbucks on Friday afternoon.
(5) The Iranian regime’s crimes & embezzlements: News from Iran, confirmed by multiple sources, indicate:
- Doctors are arrested and threatened with execution, for treating demonstrators.
- Wounded demonstrators were abducted from hospitals and killed execution-style.
- Large sums of money have been transferred from Iran into offshore accounts.
(6) The film “Librarians” was screened at Santa Barbara’s Riviera Theater on Wed. night, as part of Santa Barbara Int'l Film Festival. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, the screening had been sold out. The film is about librarians being on the front lines of the fight against book-banning and the battle for free speech.
(7) An idea that was ridiculed at first, but won a Nobel Prize half a century later: While on an ocean liner heading from Bombay, India, to Cambridge, England, 19-year-old Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar busied himself with physics papers and Einstein’s theory, managing to prove, midway through the journey, that stars having a mass greater than 1.44 times the mass of our Sun collapse onto themselves when they die, creating neutron stars or perhaps black holes. Chandrasekhar was devastated when, in 1935, his mentor Sir Arthur Eddington mocked his idea in public. But Chandrasekhar didn’t give up by leaving the hostile environment. He persevered in his research and teaching, until in 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the same idea that was once mocked. [Abridged from a LinkedIn post by Chirag Warty]
(8) At the prime of my life: The Earth has traveled around the sun multiple times since these photos were taken and my age has hit another prime number. The next two birthday ages will be highly composite, as they will be divisible by the 4th power of 2 and the 4th power of 3. Then comes a semi-prime number. Hope I can reach the next prime, which is 83. After that come the primes 89 and 97, which are more iffy! This is also my first birthday after retirement.
2026/01/30 (Friday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Kind offers from Southern California Edison: I have been given options to be charged a higher amount for my electricity bill. Thanks, but no thanks! [Center] Sahar Fard, a young woman killed during the recent street protests in Iran (see the next item below). [Right] John Ghazvinian's America and Iran (see the last item below).
(2) Remembering some of those killed by Iran’s brutal Islamic regime during the January 2026 street protests: Many thousands were killed, with tens of thousands injured, including a significant number who were blinded by pellet guns. We Iranians in exile have a duty to use our connections and access to social media, which is being denied to Itanians, to put names and faces to the the victims, making sure they aren’t forgotten.
One of the victims, Sahar Fard, was a fitness coach and champion bodybuilder. She left her position on the national taekwondo team, when it came under the control of an IRGC general, to pursue her own fitness & Pilates business. May she rest in peace!
A close friend told IranWire: “In her final days, all her Instagram stories were about hope and freedom. Whenever we saw her, she was more energetic and hopeful than ever. That’s why she took part in almost every demonstration. But on January 8, she went out and never came back.”
(3) Book review: Ghazvinian, John, America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, Vintage (Knopf), 2021.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
John Ghazvinian [1974-] is an Iranian-American author, historian, and former journalist. He is a recognized authority on the history of US-Iran relations. The book under review here, which was in development since 2008, is highly praised as a deep and balanced history of US-Iran relations, although it has also been criticized for reflecting the views of NIAC, a US-based lobby for Iran’s Islamic government, in the more-recent parts of the history. John Limbert, who was held hostage in Iran in 1979 and later served as President Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State for Iran, has opined that “Ghazvinian leads us far beyond the mindless shouting of recent decades to tell a story of friendship, sacrifice and discovery.”
As the United States gets ready to celebrate its 250th birthday and as relations between the US and Iran turn darker after nearly half a century of hostilities brought about by words (“Death to America” chants & "The Great Satan" moniker) and deeds (attacking US forces and interest through proxies in several countries) of Iran’s Islamist government, it is instructive to review what has gone on between the two countries over a longer period of time.
Ghazvinian discusses the relations between the two countries in terms of four seasons:
- Spring, spanning 150 years, from the very beginning to World War I.
- Summer, from the end of World War I to the fall of Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953.
- Autumn, from reinstatement of the Shah to power to the fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1979.
- Winter, from the Islamic Revolution of 1979 to the present (2021).
In the Spring section, Ghazvinian writes about a “budding ‘Persophilia’—a romantic idealization of Persian culture and Persian themes” in the early days of American colonies. America’s first newspapers wrote with absolute enchantment about Iran’s battles with the Ottoman Turks, which were deemed to be a danger to Christianity. At the end of the 19th century, America sent Presbyterian missionaries to spiritually enlighten Iranian Christians who were deemed to have deviated from true Christianity. Before the missionaries, rum traders had established a foothold in Iran. These initial contacts led, in time, to strong diplomatic ties between the two countries, motivated in part by counterbalancing the influence of Britain, with its claims on Iran’s oil wealth, and Russia, which considered Iran of great geopolitical importance.
As the reader moves from the Spring section to the Summer and Autumn sections, original insights become sparser, mainly because both the fall of Mosaddeq in the CIA-directed 1953 coup and the rise of Islamic extremism have been covered in many other sources. The reign of the two Pahlavi monarchs can be viewed through different lenses: It can be praised for the efforts to modernize the Iranian culture and economy or condemned for concentration of power and ignoring the Constitutional restrictions on the king’s authority. Ghazvinian chooses to focus mostly on the latter, almost legitimizing the Islamists’ rise to power.
The animosity that the Islamists brought to the US-Iran relations could have been short-lived, in view of the two countries’ many common economic and geopolitical interests in the region. Unfortunately, however, the dogma inflicting both Supreme Leaders and fanning of the flames of hostility by Middle Eastern powers, notably Saudi Arabia and Israel, prevented progress toward normalized relations. Ghazvinian offers a toned-down interpretation of “Guardianship of the Jurist,” which is used as justification for an all-powerful Supreme Leader, by calling it “Oversight by the Most Learned Religious Scholars.” The oversight role for religious scholars is what Khomeini originally promised, but the current role of the Supreme Leader goes way beyond oversight; he runs a parallel government through his representatives in virtually all government branches and influences, directly or indirectly, the choice of presidential candidates and cabinet ministers.
Despite the shortcomings enumerated in this review, Ghazvinian’s book on Iran-US relations is a valuable addition to the historical sources on the dealings between the two countries, which entered a new phase after the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025 and may, at the time of this writing in late January 2026, be about to take another turn with a second military attack.
2026/01/28 (Wednesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] As part of my retirement activities, I am taking a couple of arts courses at Santa Barbara City College’s wonderful adult education program, based at Schott Campus on Bath Street. They offer a diverse array of free classes. [Center] Dr. B. Rezvani’s proposed future design for University of Tehran, according to neo-Sassanid architectural style. [Right] Documentary film screening (see the last item below).
(2) The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, which represented Alex Pretti, the nurse murdered by federal agents, has issued a statement calling for the resignations of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. [ABC News]
(3) Trump’s plan is now out in the open: “A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation. And it’s getting ever harder to avoid connecting the authoritarian dots.” ~ Peter Wehner, writing in The Atlantic.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Jeff Bezos invested $40M to make a documentary film about Melania Trump and $35M to promote it.
- Persian music: See me dance, between weeping & mourning. I no longer fear you, your God, or your noose.
- Persian music: Both of these brave young performers were killed in Iran during recent street protests.
- Persian music: Bahar Choir’s tribute to young patriots killed during January 2026 street protests in Iran.
- Today’s World Music Series noon concert at UCSB: Mariachi Las Olas De Santa Barbara performed.
(5) “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”: This is the title of the well-known 1935 EPR paper which suggests that the authors (Einstein, Podolsky, & Rosen)) are not happy with quantum mechanics, in the sense of being reluctant to embrace all implications of the new theory.
(6) The trash problem goes hand in hand with consumerism: Some 99% of everything produced in the world becomes trash within a year of production. A major share of this trash comes from packaging. [Fact cited in the book The Future of Packaging: From Linear to Circular]
(7) “Pistachio Wars”: This was the title of a 2024 documentary film, screened at UCSB’s Pollock Theater last night. Filmmakers Yasha Levine and Rowan Wernham joined moderator Rich Farrell (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of their film.
The film follows journalist Yasha Levine as he investigates a small-town water deal and uncovers a hidden side of California’s health-food industry. At the center is the agricultural empire of America’s wealthiest farmers, Stewart and Lynda Resnick of the Wonderful Company (Wonderful Pistachios, POM Wonderful, and Fiji Water). These billionaires dominate California’s pistachio industry, but more importantly, own much of the state’s water, more than the entire city of Los Angeles. The Resnicks’ desert plantations have drained rivers, disrupted ecosystems, and polluted water quality for many communities throughout the state.
To frame the story of the Resnicks, who live in Beverly Hills, filmmakers Levine and Wernham trace how California built its water system in ways that ultimately enabled big agribusiness to command control. “Pistachio Wars” reveals how the hidden world of industrial agriculture fuels the state’s growing climate injustices, from worsening droughts to increasingly destructive megafires.
2026/01/27 (Tuesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Math challenge: Prove that green and blue areas are equal. [Center] Lecture on aspects of Iran's Constitutional Revolution (see the last item below). [Right] Talk on water & energy interdependencies (see the next item below).
(2) “Water and Energy Interdependencies in the United States”: This was the title of today’s interesting talk by Kelsey Semrod, senior water resources scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Hassan Niazi, integrated human-Earth systems researcher, Joint Global Change Research Institute.
Energy and water systems are deeply interconnected, leading to complex interdependencies that change in magnitude with changing natural, socioeconomic, and policy landscapes. Energy systems rely on water directly, for activities like cooling power plants or as a “feedstock” for hydropower and electrolysis, and indirectly, for mining primary fuels or cultivating biomass. Similarly, water systems require energy for a range of applications, such as groundwater extraction, reservoir operations, and water conveyance and treatment.
Consider the example of a data center, which we know requires energy for the operation of its servers and water for cooling them. However, when a data center is built at a certain location, power generation facilities that need to be built nearby also have water requirements and supplying the cooling water consumes energy. Co-management of these interdependent and often competing energy and water flows is crucial for understanding the complexities of both systems and ensuring resilience.
(3) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Playing a friendly match at UCSB’s Harder Stadium, US Women’s National Soccer Team defeated Chile 5-0.
- Math challenge: Explain the intuition behind pi being approximately equal to sqrt(2) + sqrt(3).
- Persian poetry: A couplet from Khaaghaani. [Read the poem on a Facebook post]
- Quote of the day: “Find something you would die for, and live for it.” ~ Peter H. Diamandis
(4) UCLA Bilingual Lecture Series on Iran: In today’s installment, Dr. Ali Gheissari (U. San Diego) spoke under the title “Hasan Pirnia and Constitutional Experience: Articulation of Public Law and the Prospects of Modern State in Iran, 1905-1925.” The English version of this lecture will be delivered tomorrow, Monday 1/26, in hybrid format.
Dr. Gheissari offered an assessment of the role of Hasan Pirnia (Moshir al-Dowleh) in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and his contribution to articulating a theory of public law and the institutional requisites of the modern state in Iran. He focused specifically on two interrelated topics concerning the theoretical aspects of Pirnia’s political thought that also reflect the experience of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution in Iran. First, the question of public law; and second, the institutions necessary for the creation of a modern state.
The Constitutional Revolution in Iran was not merely a political event but a transformation in the political mindset of Iranian society. A society that had lived for centuries under autocratic monarchies was, at the beginning of the 20th century, attempting to experience the formation of a state governed by law and accountable to the nation. In this process, there were a few statesmen, such as Hasan Pirnia, who, under Iran’s circumstances at the time, sought to strike a balance between traditional structures and the creation of a modern state.
2026/01/26 (Monday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Tonight’s unique concert experience: Ballake Sissoko (kora player) & Derek Gripper (guitarist) performed at Santa Barbara’s Marjorie Luke Theater. A third performer, who was not included on the announced program, played what looked like a sitar (22-minute video). [Center] Caroline Myss' Archetypes (see the last item below). [Right] Meta AI having fun with one of my photos.
(2) Thoughts on terrorism, from a decade ago: “Ironically, terrorism is an act against the very religion the perpetrators claim to believe in. It’s an acknowledgment that the religion and its teachings aren’t enough to persuade people to follow it. Any religion that requires coercion is not about community but leaders who want power.” ~ Six-time NBA champ & MVP Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, writing in Time magazine, issue of Jan. 26, 2015
(3) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Jon Favreau, on why silence against abuses of authority in the US is no longer an option. [Video]
- Mr. Payam Akhavan’s speech at the UN about atrocities by Iran’s Islamic regime. [Video]
- Word puzzle: What is the longest English word with no repeated letters?
- Fatemeh Larijani, daughter of a high-ranking Iranian official, fired from her Emory U. position. [IranWire]
- Facebook memory from Jan. 26, 2019: Education matters, in our media sources, politics, and elsewhere.
(4) Book review: Myss, Caroline, Archetypes: Who Are You? Hay House, 2013.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8299285353]
You may have noticed that you are drawn to certain people, ideas, or products and turned off by others. In this book, New York Times best-selling author Caroline Myss delves into the world of archetypes, the subject of her work for more than 25 years. Archetypes are universal patterns of behavior that, once discovered, help you better understand yourself and your place in the world. In other words, knowing your archetypes can transform your life. The one-word label for an archetype brings to mind a long list of attributes associated with that archetype.
Myss notes that there are scores of different archetypes, but in this book, she focuses on 10 primary ones that have emerged in today’s society. Here is the list, along with a very brief characterization of each archetype.
- Caregiver: Bearing a passion to serve others by repairing the body, mind, & spirit.
- Artist/Creator: Expressing dimensions of life that are just beyond the five senses.
- Fashionista: Choosing clothes intentionally, embracing boldness & sophistication.
- Intellectual: Focusing on knowledge, logic, analytical thinking, & understanding.
- Rebel: Constituting a key component of all human growth and development.
- Queen/Executive: Representing authority in anything, from a corporation to home.
- Advocate: Representing compassion in action by coming to the defense of others.
- Visionary: Imagining possibilities beyond one’s own life that benefit all of society.
- Athlete: Expressing magnificence of human body and strength of human spirit.
- Spiritualist/Mystic: Embodying a quest for meaning, truth, & authentic identity.
Myss explains each of the primary archetypes, traces its evolution, and lays out the unique characteristics, the defining graces, the life challenges, and other information to help you understand if you are part of a particular archetype family and if so, how you can fully tap into its power. She also offers tips and practical advice on how to fully engage with your archetypes.
Learning which archetypes best describe you is just the beginning. You can then use this knowledge to make more conscious decisions about everything from careers to relationships, avoiding common pitfalls of your personality type while playing up your strengths. You can live a happier, more authentic life by embracing your archetypes to the fullest.
For detailed descriptions of some of the archetypes listed above, and many others, refer to this Web page of the author.
2026/01/25 (Sunday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Trumpian news conference. [Center] Execution-style killing in Minnesota: Thanks to citizens who document the blatant abuse of power by ICE agents. [Right] Midnight, or 12:00 AM, vs. noon, or 12:00 PM (see the next item below).
(2) Musings of a curious engineer: Why do we designate midnight as 12:00 AM and noon as 12:00 PM? This is merely a convention. The opposite convention would have been just as good (midnight being 12:00 PM and noon 12:00 AM). Our current convention is the source of some problems, such as having to specify a deadline as 11:59 PM of a certain date to avoid an ambiguity. Actually, 0:00 AM for midnight and 0:00 PM for noon would have made more sense. The 24-hour clock convention gets rid of this problem somewhat, but we still have the ambiguity between 24:00 of one day and 00:00 of the next day. To remember the current arbitrary convention, just consider that noon is the transition point from AM to PM (it is the beginning of PM) and midnight is the transition point from PM to AM (the beginning of AM).
(3) In his Davos speech, Trump said “Iceland” instead of his intended “Greenland” three times. Remember, Donald, this jingle used by grade-school students: “Iceland is green, Greenland is covered with ice.”
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Second American citizen killed by federal agents in Minnesota under questionable circumstances.
- Law enforcement leaders from across the Twin Cities speak up about civil rights violations by ICE agents.
- Kudos to Minnesota doctors who speak up against health care impacts of ICE presence on the streets.
- US Women’s National Soccer Team defeats Paraguay 6-0, scoring 5 goals in the second half. [Highlights]
- Goleta, California, and UCSB will serve as hosts for an unspecified World Cup team during June-July 2026.
- Facebook memory from Jan. 25, 2024: Apophis, an asteroid that may collide with earth in 2036.
(5) DOGE is gone, but the harm it did remains: Created by Trump's Executive Order on his first day in office, DOGE was supposed to terminate in triumph on July 4, 2026, after cutting $2T of "woke waste fraud & abuse" from a $6.8T federal budget. In reality, federal spending actually increased in 2025 & will rise again in 2026.
(6) The 10 richest individuals in the US are worth $2.3 trillion: They also own the White House occupants, many news outlets, and almost all of our social media. This power concentration has ruined our democracy.
(7) In a July 2025 article, David Brooks asked the question: “How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent?” He found the work of moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre relevant to answering such central questions of our time.
(8) As many as 30,000 protestors were killed in Iran on January 8 and 9 alone: Supply of body bags was exhausted and semitrucks were used in lieu of ambulances to move the bodies.
(9) Final thought for the day: Iran’s internet blackout enters its 17th straight day. Merchants are now being allowed just 20 minutes of internet access per day, under the watch of a “supervisor.”
2026/01/24 (Saturday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] UCSB screening of Billy Wilder's classic film noir "Sunset Boulevard" (see the last item below). [Center] Optimism, pessimism, and realism in tech (see the next item below). [Right] A long shadow: Science magazine’s special issue entitled “One Year of Trump” assesses the impact of the first year of Donald Trump’s second term on the US science scene.
(2) Techno-optimism, techno-pessimism, and techno-realism: When it comes to the adoption of new technology, computer science professionals can be divided into three distinct categories: techno-optimists, techno-pessimists, and techno-realists. Techno-optimists argue that technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement and often call for unrestricted technological progress. On the other hand, techno-pessimists lay out scenarios for how AI models could become all-powerful and eventually pose an existential risk to humanity. Techno-realists attempt a more nuanced take on the impact of AI. [From Moshe Vardi’s column in Communications of the ACM, Dec. 2025]
(3) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Alarm bells: Amnesty Intl’s report on the first year of Donald Trump’s second term as US president.
- Real estate developers to rule the world: Trump’s Board of Peace plans to rebuild Gaza Strip & control it.
- Vertical integration of medical & medicinal services in big companies robs patients of meaningful choices.
- UCSB Library’s exhibit celebrating 20 years of the “UCSB Reads” program. [Photos]
- Facebook memory from Jan. 24, 2025: Is this chess move finally happening after a one-year delay?
- Facebook memory from Jan. 24, 2024: Finally, the bike path I envisaged is approved and will be built soon.
(4) Friday’s Agentic AI Summit at UCSB: Sponsored by CRML (Center for Responsible Machine Learning) and Mind & Machine Intelligence, the Summit was an all-day event featuring invited keynote speakers, industry perspectives, and UCSB research on agentic artificial intelligence, defined as autonomous AI systems that can independently set goals, plan, reason, and take actions to achieve defined objectives with minimal human intervention.
(5) A highlight of Friday’s keynote lectures at UCSB’s Agentic AI Summit: Nobel Laureate Michel Devoret (UCSB & Google Quantum AI) spoke under the title “Introduction to Quantum Superconducting Circuits for Quantum Computation and Sensing.” He concluded that emergent collective variables such as electrical currents & voltages obey quantum mechanics and that a promising aspect of quantum computation with superconducting circuits is prediction of molecular properties, useful data for AI chemistry. [Four slides]
(6) An amazing cinematic experience: On Thursday night, I attended a UCSB screening of the recently-restored version of the 1950 Billy Wilder masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson at their best. Charlotte Barker, director of the film’s restoration project participated in a discussion after the screening of the 2-hour classic.
This classic film noir features Norma Desmond, an aging movie star who savors the glory of her silent-film years and imagines herself returning triumphantly to the screen via a screenplay she is writing. Fate puts starving screenwriter Joe Gillis on her path, whom she hires to help her with the screenplay. She falls in love with him and eventually kills him in a fit of jealousy, as she fears being abandoned by him, just as she was by Hollywood. Billy Wilder’s genius shows in comic elements built into the tragedy. Legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille appears as himself on his actual Paramount Pictures set for “Samson and Delilah.”
2026/01/23 (Friday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Optical illusion: Believe it or not, the blue strips in this image are parallel to each other. [Center] Trump’s letter to Norway’s prime minister marked up and graded. [Right] Kamala Harris's 107 Days (see the last item below).
(2) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Full list of 2026 Academy Awards nominations: “Sinners” dominates with 16 nominations.
- For national security, the US needs a new president more than it needs Greenland.
- Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters draws mockery & anger for dismissing Iran protests.
- Vasily Arkhipov: The man who saved the world by over-ruling the order to fire a nuclear-armed torpedo.
(3) Book review: Harris, Kamala, 107 Days, unabridged 10-hour audiobook, read by the author, Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
The story of Kamala Harris’s vice-presidency boils down to this: She trusted and respected her boss, Joe Biden, but when she was assigned difficult and in some cases impossible tasks to perform, and she stumbled, no one in the administration came to her defense. She was well-hidden as a VP, with her talents underappreciated and her advice rarely sought, which is one reason for her trouble connecting with voters during her short presidential run.
The main message of Harris’s book, a blend of political memoir, strategic analysis, and personal reflection, is right there in the title: She didn’t have enough time to craft a message and develop an effective strategy against Donald Trump. She lost the presidency in part because Gen Z and Latino voters gravitated toward Trump, and Biden and his associates didn’t offer much help. As she struggled to respond to right-wing media’s dishonest portrayal of her, too few people backed her up.
The book is organized like a diary, with the day’s date and the number of days remaining until the election heading each of its 71 short chapters, which are followed by an afterword as Chapter 72.
Her message about Trump’s intent of attacking democratic institutions, crushing dissent, and unraveling delicate international bonds fell on deaf ears, because it wasn’t amplified by the mainstream media. She assigns some blame to Joe Biden but is generally soft on the Democrats’ role in losing the 2024 election. She maintains that Trump was aware of her strengths and praised her in private, even as he bashed her in public by questioning her race and calling her a “DEI hire.”
She suggests that it was reckless of Biden to decide to run for re-election at age 81. He had gotten tired and showed his age, although she stops short of confirming Biden’s mental decline. It had become a mantra in the Biden White House that the decision to run was his and Jill’s; in retrospect, she thinks she could have done more to dissuade him. “The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”
Biden, who performed miserably in his June 27, 2024, debate against Trump, was resistant to calls from allies to drop out as a candidate, eventually leaving the race on July 21 and endorsing Harris, but there was a bitterness that made him get in her way. Harris had less than a month to pick a running mate from among three candidates that she interviewed: Governor Josh Shapiro, Governor Tim Waltz, and Senator Mark Kelly. She ended up choosing the down-to-earth Tim Waltz, although she really preferred Pete Buttigieg, who was deemed too risky a running mate for a black woman.
Just before Harris’s debate with Trump, when she needed support and reassuring words, Biden called her to complain that he had learned of her badmouthing him and that some Democratic power-brokers may not back her as a result. Another shock to her was Biden wearing a Trump hat during a fire department visit, leading to his photo going viral on the Internet with the message “Biden endorses Trump over Harris.”
Harris is clearly disappointed that her vision for America didn’t get a chance to sink in. She hints at returning to politics in the near future. “I’ll be with the people, in towns and communities, where I can listen to their ideas on how we rebuild trust, empathy and a government worthy of the ideals of this country.”
One lesson for both Democrats and Republicans is to integrate the VP into policy formulation and decision-making, so that when s/he is called on to step into presidency, either because the president passes/ousted or does not run for re-election, the VP is already a seasoned politician and enjoys public trust. Unfortunately, most presidents don’t feel secure enough to treat their VP as a co-equal partner, often assigning to them obscure or doomed-to-fail projects.
2026/01/22 (Thursday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Top left] How voters have U-turned on Trump support: In nearly all cases, support improved between 2020 & 2024 and declined by 2026. The smallest decline is among white voters. [Top center] Iranians in diaspora may physically reside outside Iran’s borders but their hearts are within Iran. [Top right] Donald Trump’s word salads have grown larger and use different ingredients. [Bottom left] New Yorker cartoon of the day: The Ten Commandments, according to Trump. [Bottom center] The periodic chart, drawn according to the relative abundance of elements. [Bottom right] Talangor Group talk on the global left and political Islam (see the last item below).
(2) Last night’s IEEE Central Coast Section tech talk: Mike Ricci (Chief Technology Officer at LaunchPoint EPS) spoke under the title “The Promise and Peril of Hybrid Electric Aircraft.” There were 26 attendees.
Electric propulsion offers some advantages for aircraft configuration and design. Electric energy storage in the form of batteries is much too heavy for extended endurance aircraft missions. A hybrid electric solution promises to allow all the aircraft benefits of electric propulsion combined with the high energy density and logistical ease of liquid chemical energy storage. However, the details of the "balance of plant" to support a hybrid powertrain and the added losses inherent in energy conversion processes threaten to outweigh the benefits of the hybrid system if it is not well optimized. The speaker presented LaunchPoint's patented lightweight permanent magnet starter generator and discussed how it is applied to hybrid-electric flight.
(3) The 8-step plan of Iran’s Islamic regime to manage the mass killing of protesters (video in Persian).
- Complete shutdown of the Internet
- Closing down all potential gathering places such as universities and dorms
- Leaving only 42 news sites and apps open to the public
- Closing down schools and switching to remote instruction
- Holding public memorials for most of the dead, claiming them as their own
- Execution of a large number of protestors labeled as terrorists
- Crushing hopes of foreign intervention by claiming negotiations with the US
- Bribing people with economic goodies such as forgiven taxes
(4) Tonight’s Talangor Group talk: Dr. Veria Amiri spoke under the title “Red Essence, Green Wrapper: The Confluence of Discourses of the Global Left and Political Islam.” The speaker’s contention is that Iran’s Islamist ideology is borrowed from the global left but is wrapped in Islamic green.
I was unable to attend due to time conflict with another event. The recording of the talk and associated Q&A will be made available on Talangor Group’s YouTube channel.
2026/01/21 (Wednesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Innocent life lost: Three-year-old Melina Asadi was killed in the crossfire between Iran’s security forces and opposition groups in the western city of Kermanshah, as her father was taking her to buy cold syrup. [Center] Demonstrators in front of a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, the workplace of the daughter of Ali Larijani, the man responsible for Iranian security forces killing demonstrators en masse and harassing doctors at hospitals where the wounded are treated (see also the next item below). [Right] The unsettled debate on whether the universe has a beginning (i.e., the Big Bang) or is cyclical has returned to the forefront.
(2) Iranians with advanced degrees are under heavy surveillance by the Islamic regime: As Iranian doctors are being harassed at hospitals for treating injured protestors, the MD daughter of Ali Larijani, who as Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council oversees the killings and arrests on the streets, is working in peace and comfort at an Atlanta Hospital.
(3) The Russian invasion of Ukraine killed 14,500 civilians in 3+ years. Iranian security forces killed 12,000+ civilians in less than a week during this month’s street protests. Where is the outrage?
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Trump’s memo to Norway’s PM links his Greenland threats to not being awarded the Nobel Peace-Prize.
- TACO: Trump drops tariff threats against Europe and rules out forcible takeover of Greenland.
- The World Economic Forum revokes the invitation of Iran’s FM Abbas Araghchi to Davos summit.
- Travel restrictions & visa costs lead to musicians and theater companies to cancel US performances. [NYT]
- Presidency for profit: According to a NYT analysis, Trump has earned $1.4 billion from his presidency.
- US Secretary of Labor is under investigation for misallocating funds and having an illicit affair.
(5) Quote of the day: “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
(6) Getting a handle on the number of protesters killed by Iran's security forces during the January 2026 street protests: Numbers cited by the Iranian regime, international news media, social-network posts, and human rights organizations are all over the place. Internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime makes it very difficult to obtain reliable numbers. The following analysis, posted by Arman Khaledian on LinkedIn shows that many thousands have been killed by the brutal Islamic regime.
“Iran’s population is about 92 million … If a large majority of people can say ‘within one or two connections I know someone who lost their life,’ then the implied fatality toll is not a few thousand. … If you count a realistic ‘friends of friends’ awareness network as roughly 5000 to 10,000 people, then for 90% of people to know at least one victim within two connections, the implied fatalities are roughly 21,000 to 42,000. If your effective network is smaller, the implied fatalities go higher, even toward 70,000.”
2026/01/20 (Tuesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Horror in Iran: Cover story of The Economist. [Center] Islamists carry out a genocide in Iran (see the next item below). [Right] Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij Militias are slaughtering unarmed protestors by the thousands.
(2) Genocide under digital darkness: Witnesses tell of the brutality inflicted on those taking part in anti-regime protests. Look at these images (from Sunday Times) of eight of the victims who woke up one morning with dreams and ended the day in body bags. Shame on the thug heading the Islamic Republic of Iran for calling protestors “terrorists” and accusing them of killing “ordinary people.” The death toll will certainly rise from the current 16,500 estimate, once bodies are discovered in dumps, rivers, and lakes (as in previous protests) and after the planned mass executions have been carried out.
(3) Wood may be the rarest material in the universe: Not gold. Not diamond. Many planets in our vast universe contain gold and/or diamond. There are even planets made entirely of gold & diamond. But not a single planet, as far as we know, contains trees and thus wood. Love your chair & pencil! [Credit: Neil de Grasse Tyson]
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- High-speed train collision in Spain leaves at least 40 dead.
- The Brits abandon their strategy of trying to appease Trump, calling him a bully & international gangster.
- Putin must be all smiles, as he watches the United States face NATO allies with economic & military threats.
- A freed-up Persian culture will be incredible for technology, humanities, and arts across the world.
- Why Africa is underdeveloped: Lack of horses in old days and colonialism more recently. [Video]
- Writer, futurist, and inventor Arthur C. Clarke predicted the future of humanity in 1964.
(5) Ali Khamenei called street demonstrators "terrorists" who killed "ordinary people": I guess he was right that the killers were terrorists; they were IRGC & Basij members.
(6) Instead of the traditional “moment of silence,” the EU Parliament honors slain Iranian freedom fighters with applause and standing ovation: “The people of Iran do not need silence; for 47 years, they have been forcibly silenced,” declared Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.
(7) Trump’s statement that he wants to take over Greenland because he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize reminds me of this cartoon caption about Islamic extremism from a few years ago: “Quick—Admit that Islam is the most peaceful religion in the world or I’ll cut off your head!”
(8) Final thought for the day: Marco Rubio has transitioned from “Little Marco” to “Big Marco,” a man who enables Trump’s foreign adventurism and offers him lavish displays of public praise.
2026/01/19 (Monday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Today, we honor Dr. Martin Luther King: “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.” ~ An MLK quote that is particularly heartwarming for Iranian protestors who are being slaughtered by the thousands [Center] I was at Marjorie Luke Theater (Santa Barbara Junior High) to watch a performance of Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles, the first all-female mariachi group, as part of the “Viva el Arte de Santa Barbara” concert series (video). [Right] Carlo Rovelli's White Holes (see the last item below).
(2) Ali Larijani: Iran’s current Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and someone who wasn’t always a Khamenei favorite (more than once, he was disqualified to run as a presidential candidate), is a mastermind of the Islamic regime’s brutal January 2026 crackdown of street protesters that has left many thousands dead and countless others injured & arrested. Larijani, who is from a prominent clerical family, is said to be positioning himself for a major role in Iran’s post-Khamenei era.
(3) US Congress rebuffs Trump administration’s 57% proposed cut to NSF budget, approving a much larger budget than requested by the administration. [NBC]
(4) Book review: Rovelli, Carlo, White Holes, unabridged 3-hour audiobook, read by Harry Lloyd, Books on Tape, 2023.
[My 5-star review of this book on GoodReads]
I have previously read and reviewed three of Rovelli’s fascinating books, the last two of which are intimately related to the book under review here.
- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (my 5-star review)
- The Order of Time (my 5-star review):
- Reality Is Not What It Seems (my 4-star review)
White holes are the illusive younger siblings of black holes. If we descend into a black hole, we see geometry fold, time & space pull & stretch, and at the black hole’s core, space & time dissolve, giving rise to a white hole, a cosmic body that ejects matter and energy rather than engulfing it. In short, a white hole is a black hole with time reversed.
Most black holes are formed by massive stars that collapse on themselves after running out of fuel. The intense burning while a star is alive counteracts the force of gravity (that pulls the star inward), preventing the star from collapsing, but the hydrogen fuel doesn’t last forever. So, a black hole is the incredibly dense remnant of an imploded star. The concept that nothing can escape a black hole, not even light, is misguided. As a black hole ages, it loses mass and energy due to Hawking radiation.
We have heard that formation of a black hole will eventually lead to a singularity, which means infinite mass in the tiniest possible size. However, as a black hole ages, it gradually loses mass and energy through Hawking radiation, causing its horizon to shrink. Rovelli argues that the process that forms black holes is reversible, leading to a complementary process that creates white holes.
This brief book is organized in three parts.
Part One (6 chapters) discusses black holes, as background for understanding white holes.
Part Two (5 chapters) defines white holes, time-reversed solutions to Einstein’s equations.
Part Three (6 chapters) deals with certain irreversible aspects in the life of a black hole.
2026/01/18 (Sunday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Early spring in Ventura, California: Camino Real Park, Sat., Jan. 17, 2026. [Center] The Spectator cover image about Iran. [Right] The Epic of Gilgamesh (see the last item below).
(2) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- The Machado-Trump deal explained: I agree with this analysis by economist Jeffrey Sachs.
- China uses thousands of fishing boats as a 200-mile-long barrier in East China Sea, between itself & Japan.
- Black hole space volcano (plasma jets spanning 1 million light-years) erupts after 100-million-year nap.
- Ten pretentious English words with simple equivalents that are just as good or better.
(3) Book review: Anonymous (translation & introduction by N. K. Sanders), The Epic of Gilgamesh, Publisher, 1960.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
This book is characterized as a landmark translation of the ancient Sumerian and Akkadian epic poem, which has been translated and published quite a few times before. In a 220-page introduction, the origins of the epic, its historical & literary backgrounds, the principal characters, and its survival are reviewed. The 200-page book itself consists of a prologue and seven chapters:
- The Coming of Enkidu
- The Forest Journey
- Ishtar and Gilgamesh, and the Death of Enkidu
- The Search for Everlasting Life
- The Story of the Flood
- The Return
- The Death of Gilgamesh
The story, previously unknown and coming to light due to archaeological discoveries of the last century, covers part of the period between Abraham and Noah, about which there is only scant mention in the Book of Genesis. Predating Homeric epic by at least 1500 years, these epic poems are noteworthy because of “the quality and character of the story … a mixture of pure adventure, of morality, and of tragedy … a very human concern with mortality, the search for knowledge, and for an escape from the common lot of man.”
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, was two-thirds god and one-third man. He built magnificent temple towers, surrounded his city with high walls, and laid out its orchards and fields. He was handsome, immensely strong, and very wise. Despite his godlike body and mind, he began his kingship as a cruel despot. He lorded over his subjects, raping any woman who struck his fancy.
The gods heard his subjects’ pleas and decided to keep Gilgamesh in check by creating a wild man named Enkidu, who was as magnificent as Gilgamesh. Enkidu became Gilgamesh’s great friend, and Gilgamesh’s heart was shattered when Enkidu died of an illness inflicted by the gods. Enkidu’s death made Gilgamesh concerned with the prospects of his own death. He traveled to the edge of the world and learned about the days before the deluge and other secrets of the gods.
The main message of the Epic of Gilgamesh is the acceptance of human mortality, finding meaning in life, and the power of friendship, as Gilgamesh's quest for eternal life after his companion Enkidu's death ultimately fails, teaching him that true immortality lies in wisdom, legacy, and human connection, not endless life. It's a story about transformation, moving from a tyrannical ruler to a wise leader who understands life's fleeting nature and embraces his role in the human world.
2026/01/17 (Saturday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Those of us living in free societies with Internet access should give voice to Iranian patriots who are being slaughtered on the streets by brutal Islamists, while denied all forms of communication. [Center] Venezuela’s Machado gives Trump her Nobel Peace Prize: This doesn’t seem right, but of course her feelings of indebtedness deserve respect. [Right] Iran's return to monarchy would be a mistake (see the last item below).
(2) Wikipedia turns 25: Beginning with ~18,000 articles in its first year, this valuable resource now boasts more than 65 million articles in 300+ languages, written, edited, and fact-checked by nearly 250,000 people.
(3) Donald Trump’s affinity for fraudsters: He has just pardoned a woman whom he had pardoned during his first term but who had gone on to commit additional fraudulent acts.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Chinese universities surge in world research rankings as US schools slip: Harvard is now #3.
- Trump administration quickly reverses $2 billion cuts to mental-health and addiction grants.
- For the first time since 2018, Boeing outsold Airbus in 2025: Boeing had 1173 airplane orders to Airbus’s 889.
- Estimated cost of changing the name of Department of Defense to Department of War: $125 million.
- Four cellists play Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” on one cello to mark his 150th birthday.
- Word puzzle: What 9-letter English word for a popular college major has exactly one each of the five vowels?
- Word puzzle: Rearrange the word “crumbled” to form two common four-letter words.
- Math challenge: What is the next number in this sequence? 120, 60, 40, 30, 24, __
- A tender performance of “Soltan-e Ghalb-ha”: Dedicated to all Iranians killed by the brutal Islamic regime.
- Ten fascinating facts about English words: For example, the longest one-syllable words have 9 letters.
(5) Actress Jodie Foster’s French connection: In her latest film, “A Private Life,” Foster plays an American psychoanalyst in Paris, where she speaks French.
(6) Why Iran should not return to monarchy: Iranian opposition groups are nearly equally divided among royalists (under the banner of Reza Pahlavi) and republicans (which have no clear leader). Throughout the world, monarchical rule is being replaced by modern, democratic systems. The argument that Iran has always been ruled by a king (or king-like Supreme Leader over the past ~5 decades) and thus it has never known a democratic form of government does not hold water. If one considers a monarchical system in which leadership is inherited, then that is utterly undemocratic. If we set aside the heritability aspect of monarchical rule, then a monarch is really a president. We should strive to learn from the unpleasant experience of Islamic Republic (which is characterized by some as neither Islamic nor republic) to move forward, not backward.
2026/01/16 (Friday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] As in previous uprisings against Iran’s brutal Islamic regime, artists are producing memorable works to support the protestors and document the atrocities. [Center] Lady Gaga’s political statement: Same shit, different hat. [Right] Cartoon of the day: After declaring himself the President of Venezuela on Wikipedia, Trump eyes the Supreme Leader title.
(2) What's different about the current uprising in Iran? For the first time, small communities have risen along with major urban areas, and people have shed their fears of the brutal regime. [NYT opinion piece]
(3) Trump had promised to help Iranians if the Islamic regime killed any protestors: After thousands of deaths, Trump now says he is satisfied with the regime’s response, because the rate of killings has declined and the regime has postponed one execution!
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Netherland and others send forces to Greenland in the face of Trump’s threats of military action. [PBS]
- UCSB Chancellor's letter about anti-Semitic incidents in Isla Vista (off campus) over the weekend. [Image]
- “All the Empty Rooms”: Preview of a documentary about rooms of children killed in school shootings.
- When Richard Nixon, as VP, certified that John F. Kennedy had defeated him to become US president.
- We get advice that dying for a cause is noble. Isn’t there anyone who wants us to stay alive? [FB post]
- Caption of the day: “Is this the series finale of America, or do you think they’ll release another episode?”
(5) Officials in Iran said that ~3000 people had been killed in street protests over the past two weeks. Oddly, US officials offer the more conservative estimate of 600. [NYT]
(6) Israel and several Arab neighbors of Iran asked the US to postpone any military action against the country: These actors prefer a weak, unpopular government in Iran, which has already been defanged by internal crises and international curtailment.
(7) Mehrdad Sabouri, a man who checks several boxes for being hated & persecuted by Iran’s Islamic regime: Jewish, Kurdish, labor activist. The only way it could be worse is if he were a woman. [20-minute video]
(8) To Romans, a genius wasn’t a clever individual but a creature who lived in the walls and came out to help an artist (2-minute snippet from a TED talk).
(9) Final thought for the day: An episode of the program “Uncommon Knowledge,” addressing the question of whether math is something we humans invent, or something we discover? [57-minute video]
2026/01/15 (Thursday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Lands and territories purchased by the US over time. [Center] Talangor Group talk (see the last item below). [Right] Eight people directly responsible for the massacre of Iranian protestors and one person whitewashing their actions in the international community.
(2) Wednesday’s Socrates Think Tank meeting: Dr. Mohammad Bagher Bagheri (Professor of Critical Thinking, Cal State Fresno) was scheduled to speak in Persian under the title “Science-Obsession, Reason-Evasion, and Mysticism-Fixation: Pathology of an Epistemic Turmoil. There were 120 attendees.
Given the critical conditions in Iran, Dr. Bagheri switched topics, presenting an analysis of the current situation in Iran, with the ongoing street protests and associated casualties, injuries, and arrests. He then led a heated discussion on these topics. Unfortunately, the discussion devolved into a one-sided endorsement of Reza Pahlavi and government by a monarch.
There was some talk about Iranians’ weakness in critical thinking, inability to cooperate toward a common goal, and intolerance to opposing views. One aspect of cooperation toward a common goal is the ability to limit our comments to give other members of a large discussion group a chance to share their views. Unfortunately, offering terse comments isn’t favored by Iranians.
(3) Tonight’s Talangor Group talk: Dr. Reza Sarmast (former professor and technical project manager) spoke in Persian under the title “Inheritors of Words: From Yaqub’s Sword to Ferdowsi’s Pen.” There were ~90 attendees.
The Arab invasion of Iran entailed multiple battles beginning in 633 CE, that is, one year after Prophet Mohammad’s death. The most-defining confrontation, the Battle of Qadisiyyah, occurred in 636 CE, which was followed by the Arab conquest of Tisfoon a year later. The Sassanid’s last stand against the Arab invaders was the Battle of Nahavand in 642 CE. The Sassanid Dynasty continued in a limited form in Eastern Iran with support from China until 674, before dissolving, whence the royal family and affiliated officials fled to China. To this day, remnants of the Persian culture and statues of key Persian figures exist in China.
About two centuries after the Arab invasion of Iran, Yaqub Leis Saffar resisted the use of Arabic as the country’s official language and insisted that in areas under his influence, Persian be used instead. Yaqub Leis Saffar’s edict played an important role in the preservation of the Persian language and culture. The two centuries between the Arab invasion and Yaqub Leis Saffar’s efforts to revive the Persian language is the subject of Abdolhossein Zarrinkoob’s Two Centuries of Silence (my review), which explores reasons for the Persians lying low and not speaking up against the Arab invaders. For my review of the latter book, see:
Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi’s epic poem, known as Shahnameh (Book of Kings), is generally recognized as perhaps the primary reason for the survival of the Persian language and Iran not becoming Arabic-speaking like several countries in Northern Africa and elsewhere. Because Ferdowsi and his decades of work to produce Shahnameh in nearly-pure Persian are well-known and much-discussed, in the rest of this report I will touch upon Haft Peykar (Seven Beauties), composed by another great Persian poet, Nezami Ganjavi, nearly two centuries after Ferdowsi completed his work. Puccini’s “Turandot” (“Turandokht”) opera is composed based on Nezami’s Haft Peykar. Before Nezami, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) was adamant to devise and use Persian terms for scientific & technical concepts.
On Internet Archive: Shahnameh in Persian (8 volumes)
On Internet Archive: Haft Peykar in English
Puccini’s “Turandot” (“Turandokht”) opera
Talangor Group Web site (for recorded talks)
During the Q&A period, I expressed a desire to read critical analyses of the differences between accounts of the Arab invasion of Iran produced by the two sides of the conflict. Just as new scholarship has revealed that old accounts of the Persian-Greek wars, based mostly on the written work of the Greek historian Herodotus were highly inaccurate, and new books that incorporate information from more-recent archeological discoveries in Iran tell a vastly different story, similar works may exist, or should be produced, that tell a balanced version of the Iran-Arab wars.
2026/01/14 (Wednesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Body bags are piling up in Iran: Families rush to identify their loved ones. They are asked to pay large sums to reclaim the bodies. [Center] Iran’s version of Tiananmen Square: Brave protesters are confronting armed-to-the-teeth security forces. Thousands have died over the past 16 days. [Right] Virginia Roberts Giuffre's Nobody’s Girl (see the last item below).
(2) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Iran’s anti-riot forces receive shoot-to-kill orders, as officials confirm communication channels with Trump.
- Iran’s brutal Islamic regime has killed 1000s of protestors by labeling them as foreign-backed terrorists.
- UCSB administrators & students are coordinating to notify eveyone of any on-campus ICE sightings. [Photo]
- “Freedom Don’t Die”: A song for the brave young revolutionaries of Iran. [Video]
(3) Book review: Giuffre, Virginia Roberts (co-written with Amy Wallace), Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
Virginia Giuffre is one of the scores of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking operation. It is widely believed that Epstein & Maxwell had other accomplices, but the US government has not yet indicted or even named any of the powerful men who participated in Epstein’s crimes. Giuffre doesn’t name names either, with the exception of Britain’s former prince Andrew, preferring to use references such as “well-known prime minister.” Giuffre committed suicide in April 2025, with her memoir published posthumously according to her wishes.
Giuffre was abused by her father and a family friend, beginning at age 7. The sexual abuse took a toll on her, mentally and physically. She developed a severe case of urinary tract infection Her mother was always mad at her and punished her physically, perhaps due to becoming aware of her husband’s night-time visits to her room. She was powerless, convincing herself to “just get the icky part over with so the good parts of life can go on.”
After running away from a tough-love treatment center at age 15, she eventually secured a job at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Maxwell recruited her from Trump’s resort to work as a massage therapist for Epstein. She was essentially a prisoner and sex slave of Epstein, and she was also trafficked to other powerful men. After enduring abuse by Epstein and his accomplices, Giuffre managed to escape Epstein’s grasp and proceeded to rebuild her life in Australia.
Giuffre had a daughter from an allegedly abusive husband in 2010. Her husband is described in the book as a loving and supportive man, who facilitated her escape from Epstein and Maxwell, but a preface by Giuffre’s co-author elaborates on her late-life allegations of abuse against her husband of 22 years. The birth of her daughter inspired her to speak out, leading to decades of legal action and advocacy for other survivors of sexual abuse.
In the final chapter, Giuffre writes about the #MeToo movement, which has led to some prominent men losing their jobs or even going to prison, without making a big dent in the culture of older men wanting to have sex with young women & girls, the younger the better, near the end of the chapter, we read: “Where are those videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein’s houses? And why haven’t they led to the prosecution of any more abusers?”
Giuffre’s memoir of a life severely impacted by sexual abuse is structured in four parts.
Part I: “Daughter” (Chapters 1-7)
Part II: “Prisoner” (Chapters 8-15)
Part III: “Survivor” (Chapters 16-26)
Part IV: “Warrior” (Chapters 27-38)
At the end of the book, a section bearing photographs of Giuffre is included which depict her childhood, teenage years, and a few poses with Epstein, Maxwell, and former prince Andrew.
2026/01/13 (Tuesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] World's top 500 universities, by country (see the next item below). [Center] Math puzzle: Find the area of the square. The figure is not drawn to scale. [Right] Steven Pinker's When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows (see the last item below).
(2) Distribution of the top 500 universities in the world: The US and China top the list, with roughly equal numbers (if you add Hong Kong’s and Macau’s numbers to China’s). Given that the populations of the countries listed are widely different, the number of top universities per 100 million people would be a better comparative measure. By the latter measure, the US scores 33, China 7, Canada 41, and Iran 2.
(3) Book review: Pinker, Steven, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows ...: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage, unabridged 9-hour audiobook, read by Fred Sanders, Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025.
[Another version is subtitled: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life]
[My 5-star review of this book on GoodReads]
This book is about recursive mentalizing: The situation where A knows something, B knows that A knows it, A knows that B knows that A knows, and so on ad infinitum. This kind of common knowledge, needed for coordinated decision-making, might seem impossible to achieve. Yet we manage to coordinate our decisions on a daily basis.
In computer science, we talk about this in terms of “The Two Generals Problem,” a dilemma that Pinker also discusses. Suppose two generals and their troops are camped on the outskirts of an enemy-occupied territory and must coordinate an attack time. Coordination in this context means that they both attack at the same time or neither one attacks; one general attacking while the other stays put will have disastrous consequences. The generals being from the Byzantine period can communicate only via sending messengers. Given the geography of the area, messengers must travel through the enemy territory, where they may be captured or killed, thus never delivering the message. Suppose that General A decides that they should attack tomorrow at noon. He sends a messenger to inform General B. But A cannot be sure that B gets the message, so he will not attack until the receipt of his message is acknowledged by B. The messenger sent by B to acknowledge A’s message may likewise never get through, so B can’t be sure that A knows that he knows about the attack time. What if A acknowledges B’s acknowledgement message? If A sends an acknowledgement message for B’s acknowledgement, he can never be sure that B receives this acknowledgement. And so on and so forth. We fall into an infinite loop, with each general never knowing whether his last acknowledgement message was received, thus remaining uncertain whether the other general will attack.
Common knowledge is necessary for social coordination, such as everyone driving on the right side of the road, but people also go to great lengths to avoid it: To ensure that even if everyone knows something, they are left in the dark about whether a particular person knows it. So, we get hypocrisy, bribery, threats, and pretending that one does not see the elephant in the room.
According to the publisher’s summary: “Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life’s tragedies and comedies.”
Awareness of common knowledge or lack thereof helps us answer questions such as:
- Why people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency
- Why Super Bowl ads are filled with crypto promotions
- Why, in primaries, citizens tend to select a candidate they believe is preferred by others
- Why Russian authorities arrested a protester who carried a blank sign
- Why it’s so hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye at the end of a phone call
- Why everyone agrees that being completely honest would make life unbearable
2026/01/12 (Monday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Top left] Bashar Assad brought his supporters to the streets of Damascus after the onset of Arab Spring protests: Iran’s Ali Khamenei is using Assad's playbook and will likely suffer the same fate. [Top center] Hundreds are reported killed in Iran’s widespread anti-Islamic-regime street protests: Internet access has been completely cut off for several days now, so reliable news is hard to come by (Washington Post). [Top right] Iran's Islamic regime has cut off Internet and phone connectivity to prevent street protestors from coordinating and getting news about their loved ones. #WomanLifeFreedom [Bottom left] Math puzzle: How full is the bottle? [Bottom right] Podcast of my radio tech program on Sunday (see the last item below).
(2) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- A recap of what happened in Venezuela in the context of petrodollars.
- How Trump’s bullying and Nigeria’s standing up to him have accelerated the decline of the US dollar.
- Director Jafar Panahi dedicates his NY Film Critics Award to Iraniand who are on the streets or in jail.
- Wonderful Beatles cover: “When I’m Sixty-Four”
(3) My Persian tech talk on a Los Angeles radio station: Here is a link to KIRN 670 AM’s Web page for the “Frontiers of Science” (“Marzhaye Danesh”) program. KIRN’s podcast for my Sunday 2026/01/11 presentation entitled “Design of Computers with Fault Detection and Fault Tolerance Capability” is available on the page. The program, sponsored by Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage (APSIH), is hosted by Dr. Mohamad Navab, Be aware that my 4-segment, 34-minute presentation is padded with ads and other content to form a 1-hour podcast.
2026/01/11 (Sunday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Iran: Is this the end of mullahs’ brutal rule? [Center] Celebrating my grandnephew Aiden’s third birthday with the extended family on Saturday. [Right] Iran is plunged into Internet darkness by rulers who want to hide their brutality against protestors.
(2) Iranian demonstrations: We people of Iranian heritage living outside Iran have a duty to be the voice of those who have taken to the streets of Iran, being slaughtered by armed-to-the-teeth security forces.
(3) Hypocrisy: Jake Tapper of CNN showed videos of a January 6 mob beating police officers, asking the US Secretary of Homeland Security whether, by the standards of the ICE officer in Minnesota, they would have been justified in shooting mob members. She couldn't answer but just repeated some of her talking points. Not only weren’t they shot, but they were later pardoned en masse.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Iran didn’t sleep for two nights as widespread protests enter day 14 and Internet access is cut off.
- Emergence of democratic rule in Iran requires that we refrain from “long live this” or “death to that” slogans.
- Death toll from California wild-mushroom poisoning rises to 3.
- Jerome Powell, US Federal Reserve Chair, tells us that Trump is pursuing criminal charges against him.
- Washington National Opera is leaving the Kennedy Center, ending a relationship that began in 1971.
(5) IEEE Standard 754 for floating-point arithmetic turned 50 in November: Jerome Coonen, a PhD student of William Kahan and a major contributor to the standard, has shared a 6-page document that contains some of the early ideas, key contributors, and interesting connections that led from the 1978 starting line to the standard’s publication in 1985. Later editions of the standard emerged in 2008 & 2019, with the next update now in the works for release in 2029. Coonen’s PhD dissertation, which forms part of the standard’s history, as well as the writings & lectures of William Kahan are available on-line.
(6) According to published data, 1 in 3 Iranian-Americans are on Food Stamps or other welfare assistance: We read in oft-reposted social-media claims that Iranian-Americans are one of the best-off immigrant groups. Is the Trump administration lying or is there much welfare fraud among this supposedly well-off group?
(7) Anti-intellectualism: “Resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.” ~ Definition by Richard Hofstadter, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, a book I am now reading and will review in due course
2026/01/09 (Friday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Cartoon of the day: The US Health & Human Services Department under RFK Jr. has turned the food pyramid upside-down, now recommending more red meat and dairy. Cows are not happy! [Center] Isla Vista, the student residential community adjacent to UCSB with a diverse selection of restaurants, turns 100. [Right] The four seasons (credit: New Yorker).
(2) RIP, Michael J. Flynn: I have previously posted about Flynn’s passing in December at the age of 91. He retired from Stanford University in 1999, focusing on his consulting business. Among his contributions to the field of computer architecture are his work on designing IBM’s top-of-the-line System 360 computers (Models 91/92/95), founding of IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (IEEE CS TCCA) and Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (ACM SIGARCH) more than 50 years ago, when computer architecture was still in its infancy, and devising the 4-way classification of architectures based on the number of instruction streams (single or multiple) and data streams (single or multiple), leading to the abbreviations SISD, SIMD, MISD, and MIMD.
(3) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Iran’s security agencies threaten doctors: “Do not treat protestors.”
- Iranian mullahs could lose billions of dollars of assets which are trapped in Venezuela.
- Dictators bribing their people: Trump talks about $2000 checks. Iran's Islamists pay $7 to each citizen.
- A. Piazzolla’s “Libertango,” played masterfully by four hands on one piano.
- Regional Iranian music: “Mar Jangeh” (a Bakhtiari melody), dedicated to the fighting spirit of Iranians.
(4) Wisdom of crowds turned on its head: There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. This saying received empirical support in social psychology in the 1920s, when a series of studies showed that groups were more accurate than their individual members.
For example, a numerical fact is predicted more accurately by the average estimates of a crowd than by the estimate of one member. With binary yes-no answers, averaging doesn’t make sense, but majority voting can be applied. The jury theorem, proved in 1785 by Marquis de Condorcet [1743-1794], tells us that if each juror is more than 50% likely to judge correctly, then the larger the jury, the more likely for the majority opinion to be correct. A corollary of Condorcet’s theorem is that with each jury member more likely to be wrong than right, then wisdom of crowds turns into idiocy of crowds.
In a fascinating article in Psychological Science, Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig turned the old aphorism on its head, suggesting that one head can be nearly as good as two. Herzog and Hertwig had participants provide estimates about quantitative values they did not know with certainty—specifically, dates in history. They then had participants make second estimates. Could this “crowd in the mind” help improve judgments? The answer is yes, and the literature on the wisdom of crowds helps us understand why.
2026/01/08 (Thursday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Throwback Thursday (Dictaphone): To use this 1924 dictation machine, the “dictator” spoke into the tube and the sound was transferred to a wax-coated cylinder. The cylinder was then handed off to a secretary for transcription. Typists used playback machines with foot pedals to control the playback speed and to reverse and repeat as necessary (credit: IEEE Spectrum magazine, January 2026). [Center] A sample of architecture on Santa Barbara’s State Street, photographed during my walk on Monday. [Right] Math puzzle: What is the measure of the interior angle at vertex E?
(2) To Iranians who have built their hopes for a free Iran on US support: Trump betrayed Venezuela’s opposition forces to cement a deal with remnants of Nicolas Maduro’s regime. Don’t be surprised if he throws your favorite opposition figures under the bus and cuts a deal with remnants of the Islamic regime who agree to get rid of Ali Khamenei.
(3) Nationwide protests and strikes: Iran plunges into an internet blackout, as protests demanding the ouster of the Islamic government spread to cities nationwide. The internet shutdown came a day after the heads of Iran’s judiciary and its security services said they would take tough measures. But the threats did not deter demonstrators. Violence has been reported in multiple locales. The reported death toll of about 42 is very likely an underestimate. [NYT & CBS]
(4) The Dome of Soltanieh, Iran: Built during the Ilkhanid Dynasty [1302-1312], the dome is the first double-shell dome in the world, the largest brick dome, and the third tallest dome, after Florence’s Santa Maria Cathedral and Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. [15-minute video]
(5) Only 33% of Americans approve of the US military action in Venezuela: The approval fraction among Republicans is nearly double that, or 65%. [NYT]
(6) AI struggles to tell time by reading the hands on an analog clock: Italian & Spanish researchers sought to learn why. They exposed multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to clocks with distorted features, such as irregularly-spaced numbers or oddly-shaped faces, as well as clock hands of unusual length or thickness. The aim was to test what aspects of visual analysis the models struggle with most—spatial awareness or recognizing visual elements not encountered in training. The MLLMs struggled somewhat with distorted features, but they had greater struggles with unusual clock hands. And if the MLLMs made an error in recognizing the clock hands, this resulted in greater errors in assessing the clock’s features, suggesting that mistakes can have a snowball effect. [From IEEE Internet Computing]
2026/01/07 (Wednesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left & Center] So far, Trump’s favorite dictators have fared better than Putin’s, but things may change. [Right] IEEE Spectrum magazine's annual technology forecast (see the last iten below).
(2) As Iranian street protests over the high cost of living and currency devaluation intensify and go into a second week, the death toll reaches 12 and the government promises a $7 monthly assistance to citizens.
(3) Toughest US privacy protections kick in: California has implemented the strongest data privacy protection in the US with the launch of a government-run website that allows residents to demand deletion of their personal data from more than 500 data brokers. Enabled by the state’s 2023 Delete Act, the system gives Californians a centralized “delete button” to opt out of a largely invisible industry that collects and sells detailed personal information, often without consent. Data brokers must begin complying later this year or face fines.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- In a wide-ranging interview with NYT, Donald Trump indicates that US control of Venezuela may last for years.
- World’s largest electric ship, a 130-meter ferry powered by 250 tons of li-ion batteries, starts sea trials.
- Five popular AI assistants, briefly compared. [Tweet, with chart]
- Degree abbreviations (humor): BS, exactly what you think; MS, more of same; PhD, piled higher & deeper.
(5) Vaclav Hovel: “You don’t have to march on the streets and risk the consequences. Just decide that you won’t participate in any activity based on lies. Serve the truth and the regime of lies will collapse on its own.”
(6) Michael J. Flynn [1934-2025] dead at 91: He was a Fellow of IEEE & ACM and received many other honors for his work on computer architecture, including pipelined & parallel system design, high-performance computing, and digital computer arithmetic. He published numerous articles and three widely-used textbooks.
(7) IEEE Spectrum magazine, issue of January 2026 predicts top technologies in the coming year: “This year for our annual January Top Tech issue, we’re bringing you stories about a clutch of cool under-the-radar innovations that you’ve probably never heard of—but if they’re successful, you’ll be hearing much more about them. Case in point: One of the faster growing forms of energy storage is a carbon-dioxide-filled inflatable dome. Expect to see these storage bubbles popping up soon around the globe. Meanwhile, data centers are facing a communications bottleneck that only radio can solve. In health care, the failings of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs can be fixed with a new device that targets a part of the body many people can’t even name. Read on to get the lowdown on these intriguing ideas and more.”
2026/01/06 (Tuesday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Cartoon of the day: Putin and Trump have taken their bounties. Will this encourage Xi to move next? [Center] US 101 and an unnamed road in Santa Barbara County: Near-constant storms in California in recent weeks have caused floods, power outages, & mudslides. On the positive side, our drought situation has improved. [Right] Alison Wood's Talk (see the last item below).
(2) Hypocrisy: Why is it that low-level drug smugglers are blown up at sea, while their alleged boss is brought to New York for a trial, with a defense lawyer and all? Will Maduro be pardoned after conviction, like his Honduran counterpart?
(3) ANYmal is a rugged four-legged robot designed for fully autonomous inspection of harsh industrial environments. Its capable legs allow the robot to go through narrow spaces, step over obstacles, and climb stairs. [IEEE Spectrum magazine, January 2026]
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- On the 5th anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, White House publishes a Web site that rewrites history.
- Nicolas Maduro’s capture removes a prime exile location option for Iranian elite should the Islamic regime fall.
- Amazon plans to buy thousands of Rivian’s pedal-assist cargo vehicles that work like e-bikes.
- Seven Bell Labs breakthroughs recognized as IEEE Milestones during the lab’s 100th anniversary year.
- Porsche’s wireless charger, a 117 x 78 cm gadget that slips under your EV, charges up. [IEEE Spectrum]
(5) Book review: Brooks, Alison Wood, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, Crown, 2025.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
Celebrated Harvard Business School Professor Alison Wood Brooks in a leading expert on the psychology of conversation. Writing with warmth, empathy, and joy, Brooks argues that conversation is one of the most complex, demanding, and delicate of all human tasks. Despite the possibilities of misinterpretation and misunderstanding, conversation can also bring joy, because it provides us with opportunities to feel connected, loved, and alive by expressing ourselves and learning about others.
We are all aware that some conversations can be difficult and we may dread engaging in them. But we sometimes struggle with easy ones as well. Brooks offers the following conversation maxims, abbreviated as TALK, to ease the burden of conversing.
T, for topics: Choose topics and manage them well.
A, for asking: Ask more questions.
L, for levity: Use humor to keep conversations fizzy.
K, for kindness: Prioritize your partner’s conversational needs.
Even in friendly, informal conversations, it helps to have considered interesting topics, ideas, and stories ahead of time. A spontaneous conversation may not lead to your prepared topics, but those topics may come in handy to steer the conversation in interesting directions or to deepen the interaction. Asking questions always helps, particularly if the question is preceded by a statement of what you agree with and doesn’t come across as nosiness. Levity doesn’t mean that you have to memorize and tell jokes. Rather, it consists of lightening up in order to reduce tension. Kindness is of course all-important in any kind of interaction. Generosity in interpreting the meaning of what is said is an aspect of kindness.
Brooks has compiled a thoughtful guide for anyone to better establish as sustain his/her relationships through better face-to-face interactions and other forms of communication, such as phone calls, e-mails, texts, and social media posts/comments. Our conversations can benefit from the notions discussed in this book, from managing our emotions & sparking creativity to navigating conflict & being more inclusive.
2026/01/05 (Monday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Four designs that have withstood the test of time. [Center] The Atlantic slave trade: During 16th-19th centuries, millions were forcibly extracted from West and Central Africa and redistributed across the Americas and Europe, reshaping demographics, economies, and power structures on three continents (BBC). [Right] New Year’s resolutions for 2026: After I compiled and shared a long list of things I aspire to do during 2026 (see the last item below), I decided to simplify to these four.
(2) Here are four truths about free speech, which should be considered a basic human right:
- Free speech makes you safer
- Free speech cures violence
- Free speech protects the powerless
- Even bad people can have good ideas
(3) A Saturn-size rogue planet: Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a rare free-floating planet, about 9950 light-years from Earth, that does not orbit a star. Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, scientists were able to directly measure the planet’s mass, finding it to be roughly the size of Saturn.
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Nicolas Maduro was the second Russian ally to fall (after Bashar Assad): Will Iran’s Ali Khamenei be next?
- Maria Corina Machado’s 2025 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, delivered by her daughter.
- Days before US military action against Venezuela, Maduro had signed a major oil contract with China.
- US malnutrition deaths soared by 746% from 2011 to 2023, with people 85 and older hit hardest. [WaPo]
- Central America, which now consists of 7 countries, was one country in the early 1800s. [1-minute video]
- The history of the Iranian sangak bread goes back 1000 years. [0.5-minute video]
(5) Another Trump attempt to silence his opponents: Pete Hegseth starts administrative actions against Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona that could result in a reduction in his retirement rank and military pension. [NYT]
(6) Here is a social-media post attributed to Iran’s opposition figure Ali Karimi (although I could not find it on his official X account): They warn us, "Oh, you guys, why don't you get it? Trump has his eyes on our oil!" As if Shamkhani's sons are wiring us the money from oil sales every month.
(7) Resolutions for 2026 (aka my first year of retirement): I don’t know if I can get to all of these items, but I would like to have the list in front of me as a reminder and motivating factor.
- Walk every day, to the extent possible.
- Spend more time outdoors and in nature.
- Finish writing my memoir.
- Finish writing my graduate textbook on dependable computing.
- Read and review 100+ books, as in the past few years.
- Organize my physical and virtual bookshelves.
- Initiate writing a book on mathematical puzzles.
- Initiate writing a book on puzzling problems in engineering.
- Update my lectures for general audiences and develop new ones.
- Organize my files & photos (remove duplicates & obsolete ones)
- Move more of my work to Google Drive for ease of access.
- Get more involved in charitable causes and volunteering.
- Plan travel and attendance at entertainment & cultural events.
- Cook more often and learn to prepare new dishes.
2026/01/04 (Sunday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Musings of a curious engineer: It is interesting how car designers have been liberated from round and rectangular tail-lights because of the flexibility provided by LED lights. [Center] Math puzzle: The area of an equilateral triangle is divided into three triangular regions with areas X, Y, and Z. Prove the equality shown in the image under the triangle. [Right] A surprising fact about the new year: The number 2026 is the sum of all the 45 non-1 entries in a Pascal Triangle of side length 11. See also the next two items.
(2) New Year 2026 Puzzle #1: Every year, as a new year number emerges, I try to form the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, … by putting math symbols (including parentheses and functions such as sqr, sqrt, floor, and ceiling) between its digits. In the case of 2026, I have been able to do this for numbers up to 35. The first five appear below as hints and the rest are left to you as challenging puzzles!
0 = 2 * 0 * 26
1 = –2 – 0! –2 + 6
2 = 2 + 0 * 26
3 = –2 + 0! – 2 + 6
4 = 2 * 0 – 2 + 6
(3) New Year 2026 Puzzle #2: Place the four basic arithmetic signs +, –, *, /, as well as parentheses, between some of the adjacent digits in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 to form the number 2026. I present one of the 7 solutions that I have as an example.
2026 = 12 * 34 * 5 – 6 – 7 + 8 – 9
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- US forces attack Venezuela: Nicolas Maduro and his wife have reportedly been captured.
- Anything to distract Americans from the Epstein revelations: Even kidnapping a foreign leader.
- I hear from friends in Iran that street protests are nationwide & much more intense than reported worldwide.
- SB County’s roads remain hazardous: The northbound lanes of US 101 remain closed at Gaviota coast.
- Robert De Niro, on madness: This video is likely AI-generated, but the script is extremely well-written.
(5) Iran’s Supreme Leader, while acknowledging the legitimate concerns of striking merchants over the crash of the country’s currency, blames “the enemy” for the decline. He reminds me of Trump who, nearly a year after returning to power, said with a straight face that the good parts of the US economy are his, while the bad parts are Biden’s. By blaming foreign powers for Iran’s economic woes, Khamenei is setting the stage for a violent crackdown on protesters as foreign agents.
(6) Fourth of 5 days of rain in the Santa Barbara area: Yesterday and the day before, we had long enough breaks in the rain for me to do my usual 3- to 4-mile walks. Today, we may not get a break. Several roads in our area are closed or have been reduced to single lanes. There were flash flood warnings on Saturday. As of last night, we had 106% of the annual rainfall up to now, for the rain year that goes to August. Drive carefully!
2026/01/03 (Saturday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Top left] Photo of the late Dr. Farhad Mavaddat and his late wife Sima (center), sent to me by Mr. Mehdi Fallahi (left): The photo was taken at Sharif/Arya-Mehr University of Technology’s 2002 reunion in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Mehdi Zarghamee, AMUT’s fifth chancellor is also present (second person from the right). [Top right] The problem of space junk (see the last item below). [Bottom] Major Jewish holidays in the US over the next 12 years, 2026-2037: Sharing the info I collected from the Internet for my own calendar.
(2) Bell Labs 2? Bell Labs (later AT&T Labs & Nokia Bell Labs), which boasted 10 Nobel Laureates and 5 winners of ACM’s Turing Awards, is generally recognized as a hotbed of innovations and revolutionary technical ideas. Billionaire-backed Episteme in Silicon Valley aims to free research from bureaucracy. History shows that’s a tall task. But CEO Louis Andre is confident the gamble will pay off. He thinks world-changing, profitable ideas can emerge from basic research, as long as scientists are freed up from hassles.
(3) “Resisting AI Slop”: This is the title of an editorial in Science magazine, Jan. 1, 2026: “It’s hard to talk about any topic in science or education today without the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) coming up—whether large language models should be allowed to aid in searching for a scientific paper or even to write or review the paper itself. In some of the wildest speculations, the humans involved in conducting scientific studies and experiments and vetting the results for publication will be steadily eliminated from the process. But when such grandiose rhetoric starts flying, we at Science try to keep calm and carry on in contributing to a robust, human-curated research literature that will stand the test of time.”
(4) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Japan’s Kansai International Airport (KIX) sets a record for not losing a single piece of luggage in 30 years.
- Sigourney Weaver: The smart, feminist, English-major actress, with an illustrious career. [28-minute video]
- Political humor: After a significant drop in attendance, Trump cuts ticket prices at Kennedy Center by 5000%.
- This couple has a lot of dance clips on social media: A joy to watch! [1-minute video]
(5) Lasers may provide a viable solution to the space-junk problem: Nearly seven decades of space exploration and space-based observation, starting with the first satellite launch in 1957, has made Earth’s orbit crowded with dead satellites, rocket remains, and secondary objects created by explosions & collisions. It is estimated that there are ~37,000 objects of diameter 10+ cm, roughly 1 million objects of diameter 1-10 cm, and 130 million smaller objects in Earth orbit. Over the past decade, the number of objects launched into space each year has increased by an order of magnitude, from ~250 to more than 2500. With the current trend, space may well become unusable by humans in the near future. There is now a space law in effect that satellites must remove themselves safely at the end of their missions. But we need to deal with the junk already accumulated and steadily increasing in number due to collisions. This 10-minute video reviews the problem of space junk and various solutions that are being considered, including the use of Earth-based and space-based lasers.
2026/01/02 (Friday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Apollonian gasket: In mathematics, an Apollonian gasket, Apollonian net, or Apollonian circle-packing is a fractal generated by starting with a triple of circles, each tangent to the other two, and successively filling in more circles, each tangent to another three. It is named after Greek mathematician Apollonius of Perga.
P.S. 1: There are quite a few Apollonian circle packings with all curvatures being integers.
P.S. 2: See also the next item below on Descartes’ Theorem, which relates the circle radii.
(2) [Amazing math] Descartes’ Theorem: If we have four circles, with each one tangent to the other three, their radii satisfy the equality (1/r1 + 1/r2 + 1/r3 + 1/r4)^2 = 2(1/r1^2 + 1/r2^2 + 1/r3^2 + 1/r4^2). The inverse of a circle’s radius r is known as its curvature c = 1/r. So we have, (c1 + c2 + c3 + c4)^2 = 2(c1^2 + c2^2 + c3^2 + c4^2).
When three of the mutually tangent circles are inside the fourth one, the latter’s radius or curvature is deemed negative. Given the curvature of three of the circles, the curvature of the fourth circle is obtained from a quadratic equation, leading to two solutions, one positive and one negative.
Special case 1: If one of circles is a straight line, with curvature zero, the theorem describes three circles that are tangent to the line and to each other. In particular, if we have two circles of curvature c and a smaller circle of curvature c’, we get from the equality (2c + c’)^2 = 2(2c^2 + c’^2), c’ = 4c or r’ = r/4.
Special case 2: If two of the circles are straight lines, in which case the lines must be parallel to each other, the equality becomes (c + c)^2 = 2(c^2 + c^2), whose correctness is readily verified.
(3) One-liners: Brief news headlines, happenings, memes, and other items of general interest.
- Dozens feared dead in fire at a Swiss ski resort, where they were celebrating the New Year.
- MAGA ally Boebert lashes out at Trump over his veto of an infrastructure bill benefiting her district. [WaPo]
- In his New Year’s Eve speech, President Xi highlighted China’s achievements in AI and the chip industry.
- The two-campus Cal Poly float, featuring a 40-foot robot, wins Rose Parade’s Sweepstakes Award for 2026.
(4) US government revenues and spending (biggest items), in trillions of dollars:
Revenues 4.9: Corp. income taxes 0.5; Indiv. income taxes 2.4; Payroll taxes 1.7; Sales & excise taxes 0.1
Spending 6.8 (Deficit 1.9): Economy & infrastructure 0.7; Social Security 1.5; Medicare 0.9; Obligations, incl. debt service 1.0; Defense & foreign affairs 1.3; Transfers to states 1.1; Education 0.2
(5) A quote on quotations: "I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself." ~ Marlene Dietrich
(6) AI threatens social-science research: An article in Science magazine highlights how AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), is transforming social science by enabling large-scale simulations of human behavior, speeding up research, and creating diverse test cases, but also introduces challenges like managing bias, ensuring replicability, and potential contamination of online studies by sophisticated AI bots, potentially forcing a return to lab studies.
2026/01/01 (Thursday): Presenting selected news, useful info, and oddities from around the Internet.
(1) Images of the day: [Left] Happy New Year! Wishing you a joyous, healthy, and prosperous 2026. Hoping that peace prevails on this troubled planet and world countries oust autocratic regimes, replacing them with democratic governments. [Center] Four geometric puzzles (see the next item below). [Right] Tim Berners-Lee's This Is for Everyone (see the last item below).
(2) I start the year in math puzzles wity four geometric problems.
- Two identical rectangles are shown within a square. Find the measure of the unknown angle.
- Find the area of the blue quadrangle.
- Find the distance between the centers of the two circles.
- What fraction of the isosceles right triangle is shaded blue?
(3) The year ahead is “Year of the Horse” in the Chinese Zodiac, specifically the dynamic “Year of the Fire Horse,” a powerful combination signifying passion, energy, and bold action, starting with the Lunar New Year on February 17, 2026, and bringing strong forward momentum and transformation.
(4) This joke from 1925 was among numerous predictions (mostly wrong) about 2025:
It was in the year 2025. The United States had just elected its first woman president.
“Don’t you feel that your home life will be ruined?” the inquiring reporter asked her husband.
“My only regret,” he said with a sign, “is that I have but one wife to give to my country.”
(5) Book review: Berners-Lee, Tim, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web, unabridged 12-hour audiobook, read by Stephen Fry, Macmillan Audio, 2025.
[My 4-star review of this book on GoodReads]
In this memoir, Sir Tim Berners-Lee recalls his childhood under smart “mathematicians and electronic engineers” parents. He learned to tinker, building a computer for himself. After attending Oxford, He ended up at Switzerland’s CERN, where he discovered that the various departments had computing systems that did not converse with one another—a problem he set about to fix. Thanks to three kindly, encouraging, and protective bosses, the World Wide Web was eventually born.
Berners-Lee firmly believed that the Web should be a public good, and he was able to convince CERN to relinquish its rights. This momentous decision led to the immense impact of the technology, as noted by Berners-Lee himself: “By automatically generating simple, plain-language versions of things such as credit card offers, immigration papers, military enlistment contracts and legal documents like wills, we generate great social benefits and ensure fair dealing.” However, tensions between proponents of a freely accessible Internet and companies seeking to profit from it persist to this day.
Berners-Lee’s dream of a universal free tool has been undermined by the proliferation of clickable ads and irksome pop-ups. By the late 2000s, Berners-Lee had begun to explore the idea of a system in which users own their data profiles across all platforms, with unshared data being the default and an opt-in mechanism allowing them to share if they are so inclined. This in in direct contrast to how things work now, where for the benefit of app developers, and to the detriment of users, each app is walled off from every other app on our phones.
Berners-Lee argues that gathering all data of a user in one place would create better self-understanding and would enable the user to make new connections with other users. I am somewhat skeptical of this approach. Because we can’t wish hackers & data piracy away, such data aggregation would make it even easier for bad actors to gain access to treasure troves of data.
Berners-Lee enjoys his notoriety as the inventor of the Worldwide Web, because it affords him a place in important “global conversations cutting across disciplines and sectors.” He hopes that through collective action, we can escape the tyranny of Silicon Valley, be able to build something empowering, and influence policy and regulatory environments to provide the needed support. He envisages the development of the SOLID protocol (for social linked data) to reclaim the original intent and benefits of the Web. He sees artificial intelligence as an ally that would help us transform and amplify the Web.