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August 9, 2020

Diary 2003–2020

Posted by John Baez

I keep putting off organizing my written material, but with coronavirus I’m feeling more mortal than usual, so I’d like get this out into the world now:

Go ahead and grab a copy!

It’s got all my best tweets and Google+ posts, mainly explaining math and physics, but also my travel notes and other things… starting in 2003 with my ruminations on economics and ecology. It’s too big to read all at once, but I think you can dip into it more or less anywhere and pull out something fun.

It goes up to July 2020. It’s 2184 pages long. I fixed a few problems like missing pictures, but there are probably more. If you let me know about them, I’ll fix them (if it’s easy).

Posted at August 9, 2020 1:30 AM UTC

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Re: Diary 2003–2020

I won’t lie: Reading now that first entry from October 2003 is pretty brutal, in a “wow, we learned nothing after all” kind of way.

Flipping to the end, some of the math markup starting on page 2177 isn’t rendering. I see “an S 1S^1 bundle over an S^3 bundle” with the “S^3” in light gray. It looks like this continues for the rest of the document.

Posted by: Blake Stacey on August 9, 2020 7:46 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Diary 2003–2020

And in the entry about the Golomb–Dickman constant, the formula at the bottom of page 2042 is not rendering correctly.

Posted by: Blake Stacey on August 10, 2020 11:20 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Diary 2003–2020

Glitch on page 2062:

Einstein even sent Schrödinger two of his unpublished papers on these ideas!

Posted by: Blake Stacey on August 10, 2020 11:25 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Diary 2003–2020

Blake wrote:

I won’t lie: Reading now that first entry from October 2003 is pretty brutal, in a “wow, we learned nothing after all” kind of way.

Thanks—maybe that will make people read it! Yeah, I started thinking pretty hard about economics and ecology then, and by 2010 it led me to set up the Azimuth project, which focused on ecology because I decided actually doing something to improve economics was hopeless, at least for me. But by now I tend to feel that the hopeless mess of economics and politics thoroughly blocks effective action on ecological issues, so that nothing short of a massive overhaul of society will help.

I actually think there are a lot of people who want what I call a “New Enlightenment”. This is just my personal shorthand, a stopgap in lieu of a better term. What I mean is: a thorough rethinking of government, human rights and economics, a bit reminiscent of the Enlightenment but with new and different ideas, that gets implemented in new governments with new constitutions.

Unfortunately it seems the road to this New Enlightenment leads through hell, and right now we’re entering the hell part.

That’s my optimistic spin on what’s going on this year.

Thanks for pointing out the math-related errors. It was quite an iffy business, taking webpages that contains jsMath and MathJax and having Adobe Acrobat try to automatically turn them into PDF. Amazingly it sometimes works. For example, some of the math on page 2177 worked.

I can also use Firefox to turn webpages into PDFs, which has disadvantages, but may be better at math.

Posted by: John Baez on August 11, 2020 1:02 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Diary 2003–2020

You say “Unfortunately it seems the road to this New Enlightenment leads through hell, and right now we’re entering the hell part.

That’s my optimistic spin on what’s going on this year.”

Well put. Sadly exactly my take on things. After a remarkable DNC convention very much in tune with a “New Enlightenment”, we now get the RNC response, washing all that goodness away in a hurricane of lies, where it seems that one of the main achievements of 4 years of Trump is that so many politicians around the world have learned that they can profitably to emulate him: if you can convince yourself of your own lies, you can get away with it. (This is also known as “the power of positive thining”, see Mary Trump’s book.) And, if you have the power of the Presidency, or have demonstrated sufficient loyalty to our God-Emperor that that power rubs off on you in the form of a pardon, you can even get away with measureless grift and countless felonies. As the Lincoln Project so aptly says, “the choice is clear: America or Trump”, although I think we should modify that to “Trumps”, for it is increasingly clear that his real project is to establish a dynasty. The choice is stark: if Trump loses his children will be among the many to be indicted, convicted and sued for the frauds they have perpetrated, if he wins (which is at this pouint terrifyingly possible) then we have also bought a future line of princes and princesses turning into kings and queens for the indefinite (in all senses) future.

Posted by: Albert on August 27, 2020 10:21 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Diary 2003–2020

Thanks for posting this in one place John!

I’ve been reading your various writings online (This Week’s Finds, Azimuth, your diary, your lectures) since I was a first year undergraduate. Getting a glimpse of all the strange and wonderful worlds that category theory could take you to was one of the things which got me into the subject. I really appreciate all the work you have done to make the field and mathematics in general accessible.

I’m enjoying reading your musings on economics and systems now as much as ever.

Posted by: David Jaz Myers on August 26, 2020 7:23 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Diary 2003–2020

It’s great to hear I helped lure you into your current line of work — you’re doing great stuff.

Right now I’m working with Tim Hosgood to turn all This Week’s Finds into LaTeX so I can put them on the arXiv. He’s doing all the real work. He’s a real demon — in less than two weeks he’s done the first 100!

Posted by: John Baez on August 26, 2020 11:38 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Diary 2003–2020

Wow — that will be convenient! Any idea how big the collection will end up being?

Posted by: Blake Stacey on September 3, 2020 10:26 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: Diary 2003–2020

Tim has made a PDF of weeks 1-50, which is 267 pages long, and one of weeks 51-100, which is 306 pages long.

One great feature is that he’s drawing nicer versions of all the original ASCII art!

Posted by: John Baez on September 3, 2020 11:06 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

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