Naive Questions on Degrowth

We try to find geometric reasons for KAM theorems and such.

What are the keys to succeeding as a computational biologist in today's research climate?

Under the pressure of applicability of research and a problem-solving approach, contemporary scientific practices often fail to define their “object of knowledge” and to reflect upon their own work. It may therefore be good to ask a naive question: What is culture? In the art world, the arts often function as the last ideological fortress. In scientific research, an analogous role is played by the notion of culture as a gradual “process of civilisation” that moves people by the means of self-restraint and refinement towards civilisation and away from barbarism. The historical and contemporary cases examined in the article show that there is no transtemporal culture with an a priori positive and “progressive” social role. The concept of culture cannot be separated from: (1) the establishment of financial institutions in the Renaissance, when patronage of the arts helped to “legalise” the most profitable and then-forbidden practice of usury; (2) the transformation of class war into cultural difference via the refinement of the Renaissance carnival; (3) the establishment of general access to education in the 20th century, which, in itself, could not abolish social inequalities, but to the contrary integrated educated people into the reproduction of social inequalities; (4) the establishment of the world art system in the 21st century, when the “capitalist welfare state” replaced the “social welfare state.” From these examples we can draw the conclusion that culture is rather a “Trojan Horse” that can at times work as a destructive social force.

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Introduction I spent three wonderful years in Professor Sir Andrew Huxley's laboratory at University College, London. When I arrived, I was very surprised and glad to find that he not only could understand my broken and poorly pronounced English, but that he was always extremely patient and calm with my ignorance, and with my naive questions. Thus, very soon he made me feel as if I were at home in a warm, friendly, and productive atmosphere. His kindness, superb knowledge, intelligence, and memory were continuously evident as a marvelous deep fountain from which to learn and acquire education. This education went beyond the walls of the laboratory into many areas of life and was soon complemented by the deep mark that Richenda Huxley also made on my outlook and education. I will never forget one day when Professor Huxley and I were discussing some of my experiments on isotonic recorded contractures, he very soon said something like, “Well, if you have an isotonic lever with such a spring and friction, then the sarcomere length that will be reached during the contracture would be . . . 2.4 μm”. It took him around two seconds to figure out that sarcomere length! After he left I measured the sarcomere length reached during one of such experiments, and it was 2.41 μm! It took me three days to arrive at the same figure he computed in those few seconds in his brain. As we used to say in the laboratory, “His brain goes click, click, click, and the right answer from these elaborate calculations comes out within seconds”.

The basics about arynes and their applications in synthetic organic chemistry are briefly presented, and the concept of atropisomerism is defined, highlighting that it is a time-dependent form of isomerism and chirality. It is remembered that racemization is a macroscopic and statistical irreversible process, while enantiomerization is a nanoscopic reversible process that occurs at the molecular scale, with racemization being twice as fast as enantiomerization. The concept of aryne atropisomers is introduced with a naive question: Can synthetically useful nonracemic aryne atropisomers having a triple bond ortho to the stereogenic single bond exist in solution? It was found that such aryne atropisomers can be generated in solution from easily available ortho-iodoaryl triflate precursors and excess trimethylsilylmethylmagnesium chloride. Analysis of the barriers to enantiomerization of some aryne atropisomers by computational modeling revealed the key contribution to the configurational stability of the H atom in tris-ortho-substituted biphenyl-based atropisomers. Using a specially designed prototype of aryne atropisomer, for which the barrier to enantiomerization was accurately evaluated by advanced computational modeling, the kinetic parameters of its reaction with furan were experimentally determined. From these measurements, it was concluded that any aryne atropisomer with a barrier to enantiomerization ΔGenant⧧ equal to or higher than 50 kJ mol-1 would lead to fully enantiospecific reactions. The synthetic applications of two structurally distinct aryne atropisomers built on a 1-phenylnaphthalene platform are described: one has the aryne triple bond embedded in the naphthyl moiety, and the other has the aryne triple bond embedded in the phenyl moiety. Both aryne atropisomers allowed for the fully enantiospecific, and possibly overall enantioselective, syntheses of original atropisomers based on standard aryne chemistry. For instance, reactions with anthracene and perylene afforded triptycene and nanographene atropisomers, respectively, in high enantiomeric excesses. A bis(aryne) atropisomer synthetic equivalent prepared from either enantiomer of BINOL is described for 3D bidirectional reactions with a single handedness. Its 2-fold reactions with anthracene and perylene afforded the corresponding severely congested bis(benzotriptycene) (99% ee) nanocarbon atropisomer and bis(anthra[1,2,3,4-ghi]perylene) (98% ee) nanographene atropisomer, respectively. This allowed the discovery of bis(twistacene) atropisomers as a new class of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) with multiple stereogenicities. Cross reactions with the bis(aryne) atropisomer synthetic equivalent and two different arynophiles proved feasible, providing a nanographene atropisomer with a benzotriptycene unit and an anthra[1,2,3,4-ghi]perylene unit assembled around a stereogenic axis as a unique chiral PAH (99% ee). Overall, because the concept is simple and its implementation is easy, aryne atropisomers is an attractive approach to the synthesis of atropisomers in a broad meaning. Applications to the synthesis of large PAH atropisomers with single handedness are particularly promising.

This paper aims to question anew the popular and supposedly self-evident affirmation of education, in its modern incarnation as in its historical notion. The “naive” questions suggest that we have recently taken for granted that education ought to be for the masses, that it ought to be upbringing, and that it is better than ignorance. Drawing on the tradition that calls such an understanding of education into question, the author shows that the hidden costs of disregarding such reflection end up, camouflaged and smuggled, taxing the current debates regarding generally accepted education strategies. The characteristic feeling of the currently accepted model of education being in chronic crisis is less a testament to an absence of alternative approaches than to a lack of thorough self-reflection.

Reaction–diffusion modelling of bacterial colony patterns

D_ actually comprehend our music? Have you brought a geisha back with you? Do Japanese girls wear a boyish bob? Were you not killed during the earthquake? Did you see the Mikado? What does a Taifun look like? I was overwhelmed with naive questions of this sort when, after a stay of eighteen years in Japan I returned, to use Schumann's phrase, From foreign lands to sit By the Fireside. In the following pages I shall try to cast a fleeting gleam of light on but a few among them. Japan, musically speaking, is a most interesting country, when we observe how three different types of music, old Korean, neo-Japanese and Occidental (or better said, European) music are cultivated side by side. The battle for supremacy also rages in Nippon, though unseen by the majority. More recently, it is true, the struggle between Japanese and Occidental music has become unpleasantly evident in the radio offerings-a matter to which we will return. It may be said in passing that to this day the old Korean music remains the music actually used for the court and temple ceremonial of the imperial household; the Occidental music of the court orchestra exists only for the purpose of firing off various selections and overtures of all nations at occasional banquets and lawn-parties to which foreign guests have been invited. The Korean music, in any event, is the choicest it is possible to hear. During all the years of my residence I had but one opportunity of attending a so-called rehearsal of a court concert of this kind. The principal instrument, which-in contra-distinction to Japanese music-lends the Korean a harmonic foundation, is the Sho (of late called the Chinese flute). It is a bundle of fourteen or fifteen small bamboo flutes of varying lengths (organ-pipes in miniature), grouped with a single mouthpiece; by stopping holes in the flutes various chords are produced. The timbre is that of the soft organtones. The manipulation of the instrument is especially difficult since it must always be warmed in order to respond without constraint. One might almost be justified in speaking of a welltempered Sho. Other instruments include flutes large and small,

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, novelist, poet, essayist and political journalist, was a major spokesman for French fascism in the late 1930s, a propagandist for Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire FranCais which had some 100,000 members in 1937 (the French Communist Party had only 80,000 members). Drieu was also a Nazi collaborator during the Second World War. His novel Gilles (1939) was undoubtedly the most famous French fascist novel written during the 1930s, a work which Drieu had hoped would rival the leftwing novel, L'Espoir [Man's Hope] written by his close friend Andre Malraux. Drieu is only one example among many in the 1930s of a superior writer, steeped in the riches of European literature, who was attracted to fascism.' One of the questions that caused me to study Drieu in the first place, a naive question no doubt but one which still think worth asking, is how could an intelligent, cultivated writer like Drieu, who once declared I am above all an artist, have succumbed to an ideology so full of ugliness? This question, with which have dealt at length elsewhere, is present as well in this brief examination of Drieu's aesthetic thought.2 Part of the answer is this: Drieu sought a spiritual regeneration of France that was fundamentally ascetic at base, an asceticism that was culturally rooted in both Catholic and military values.3 On a deeper, more personal level, Drieu also practiced an emotional asceticism or an affective puritanism, especially where women were concerned, an asceticism that condoned moral indifference at best and physical violence at worst toward those he considered decadent in French society, including decadent women. Various kinds of asceticism, in other words, permeated his political, social and economic thought-and his aesthetic thought as well. Proust's comment that tout se relate, that everything relates to everthing else, is particularly applicable in Drieu's case. Drieu's politics and aesthetics were part of a consistent vision, a coherent totality, that affected all aspects of his thought, the basic undertow being Drieu's obsession with what he repeatedly called decadence and his own ardent (and guilt-ridden) desire to combat it. The great sin, in his eyes, was the non-spiritualized hedonism that pervaded French culture and that doomed the French soldier, unlike the Nazi storm trooper, to feminine weakness. Drieu was something of an expert on the subject since he felt

For an Ulrich ideal in a Gorenstein local ring, the quotient ring is again Gorenstein. Aiming to further develop the theory of Ulrich ideals, this paper investigates a naive question of how many non-principal ideals whose quotient rings are Gorenstein exist in a given Gorenstein ring. The main result provides that the number of such graded ideals in a symmetric numerical semigroup ring R R coincides with the conductor of the semigroup. We furthermore provide a complete list of non-principal graded ideals I I in R R whose quotient rings R / I R/I are Gorenstein.

New Synthesis: Chemical Ecology and Sustainable Food Production

Graph search, the process of visiting vertices in a graph in a specific order, has demonstrated magical powers in many important algorithms. But a systematic study was only initiated by Corneil et al. a decade ago, and only by then we started to realize how little we understand it. Even the apparently naive question vertex can be the last visited by a graph search algorithm, known as the end vertex problem, turns out to be quite elusive. We give a full picture of all maximum cardinality searches on chordal graphs, which implies a polynomial-time algorithm for the end vertex problem of maximum cardinality search. It is complemented by a proof of NP-completeness of the same problem on weakly chordal graphs. We also show linear-time algorithms for deciding end vertices of breadth-first searches on interval graphs, and end vertices of lexicographic depth-first searches on chordal graphs. Finally, we present 2^n * n^O(1)-time algorithms for deciding the end vertices of breadth-first searches, depth-first searches, and maximum cardinality searches on general graphs.