“Moral compromises don’t stop happening even when everyone involved is trying to do the right thing.”

-Elizabeth Bear

“This is what it means to be human: slaughtering the people we might have been.”

–Quarantine by Greg Egan

“The pathophysiology underlying the relationship between obesity and cancer is complex and incompletely understood. Until now, it has been unclear if excess fat tissue itself affects cancer progression or if this link is predominantly due to diet and lifestyle of obese individuals. Recent studies show that the state of obesity can accelerate tumor growth irrespective of diet. Based on the apparent link between increased adiposity and several cancers (colorectal, endometrial, breast, and prostate), it has been proposed that adipose tissue has a direct effect on tumors. An emerging body of evidence confirms that this cross talk indeed takes place at several levels.

Adipose tissue is composed of adipocytes, as well as vascular and stromal cells, secreting numerous soluble factors collectively termed adipokines. In addition, infiltration of the immune system cells in obesity leads to increased production of a number of inflammatory cytokines by adipose tissue, thus contributing to the establishment of the metabolic syndrome. Endocrine signaling by adipose tissue-derived molecules has been shown to promote cancer in animal models, matching clinical associations. Recent studies have shown that cells from adipose tissue are capable of trafficking to tumors, thus enabling paracrine action of adipokines from within the tumor microenvironment.”

–Adipose Tissue and Cancer, edited by Michael G. Kolonin (2013)

“The long-term effect of such a condition is that gatekeepers (producers/agents/publishers/editors/programmers/critics, etc.) become narrower and narrower in terms of what they are willing to present, living in a state of projected fear of ever presenting anything that could make someone uncomfortable. There is a dialogic relationship with the culture when consumers learn that uncomfortable = bad instead of expansive, they develop an equation of passivity with the art-going experience. In the end, the definition of what is ‘good’ becomes what does not challenge, and the entire endeavor of art-making is undermined.Profit-making institutions then become committed to producing what the Disney-funded design programs call ‘Imagineers,’ the craftsman version of Mouseketeers, workers trained to churn out acceptable product, while thinking of themselves as ‘artists.'”

-Sarah Schulman in The Gentrification of the Mind

To show that the set of all Turing machines is countable, we first observe that the set of all strings Σ∗ is countable for any alphabet Σ. With only finitely many strings of each length, we may form a list of Σ∗ by writing down all strings of length 0, length 1, length 2, and so on.

The set of all Turing machines is countable because each Turing machine M has an encoding into a string ⟨M⟩. If we simply omit those strings that are not legal encodings of Turing machines, we can obtain a list of all Turing machines.

To show that the set of all languages is uncountable, we first observe that the set of all infinite binary sequences is uncountable. An infinite binary sequence is an unending sequence of 0s and 1s. Let B be the set of all infinite binary sequences. We can show that B is uncountable by using a proof by diagonalization similar to the one we used in Theorem 4.17 to show that R is uncountable.

Let L be the set of all languages over alphabet Σ. We show that L is uncountable by giving a correspondence with B, thus showing that the two sets are the same size. Let Σ∗ = {s1, s2, s3, . . .}. Each language A ∈ L has a unique sequence in B.The ith bit of that sequence is a 1 if s_i ∈A and is a 0 if s_i ̸∈A, which is called the characteristic sequence of A. For example, if A were the language of all strings starting with a 0 over the alphabet {0,1}, its characteristic sequence χA would be
Σ∗={ ε, 0, 1, 00, 01, 10, 11, 000,001, ··· } ;
A={ 0, 00, 01, 000,001,···};
χA= 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 ··· .

The function f : L−→B, where f(A) equals the characteristic sequence of A, is one-to-one and onto, and hence is a correspondence. Therefore, as B is uncountable, L is uncountable as well.

Thus we have shown that the set of all languages cannot be put into a correspondence with the set of all Turing machines. We conclude that some languages are not recognized by any Turing machine.

–Introduction to the Theory of Computation. 3e, by Michael Sipser

(Some of the symbols didn’t quite come through correctly. Pasting from a PDF is always iffy. The logic, though, should still be fairly clear I think.)

Heisenberg takes a final step in his concluding chapter, on “the role of modern physics in the present development of human thinking.” His use of the word “development” (Entwicklung) signals a return to the fundamental dimension of reality that is “History”: that is, human mentality as historically unfolding. What Heisenberg now spotlights is the paradoxical recognition that the concepts of daily life or common sense are integrated into a much more comprehensive framework than modern scientific concepts. “One of the most important features of the development and the analysis of modern physics” is the “experience” that “the concepts of ordinary language, vaguely defined as they are, seem to be more stable, in the expansion of knowledge” than are “the precise terms of scientific language.” On reflection, “this is in fact not surprising.” For scientific language is to a much greater degree than ordinary language not only “derives from an idealization,” but, what is more, from an “idealization” that is based on “only limited groups of phenomena.” In sharp contrast, “the concepts of natural language [as Heisenberg now calls the language of common sense] are formed by the immediate connection with the world; the express reality,” in its genuine wholeness–even though, or precisely inasmuch as, the “undergo changes in the course of the centuries, just as reality itself undergoes changes.” As “natural language,” however, “they never lose the immediate connection with reality.” To be sure, the scientific concepts are “idealiziations” with “precise definitions” that make possible the connection with a “mathematical scheme;” but “through this process idealization,” the “immediate tie with reality is lost.” This is the price of scientific concepts must pay for their “very close” correspondence “to reality in that part of reality which had been the object of research.”

That’s all from “On Heisenberg’s Key Statements Concerning Ontology” by Thomas L. Pangle.

In other words, Heisenberg believed something very similar to Nancy Cartwright’s philosophy in How the Laws of Physics Lie. Not only is her work one of the best philosophy books I’ve ever read, Cartwright is obviously correct in her main assertions. STEM absolutists would probably wail uncontrollably if they knew Werner Heisenberg essentially thought the same thing.

“We like to call our human intelligence ‘general purpose,’ because compared with other kinds of minds we have met, it can solve more types of problems, but as we build more and more synthetic minds we’ll come to realize that human thinking is not general at all. It is only one species of thinking.”

-Kevin Kelly

“Women are not by any means to blame when they reject the rules of life, which have been introduced into the world, seeing that it is men who have made them without their consent.”

–Michel de Montaigne, ca. 1588

“Nothing is more useful than the arts, which have no utility.”

-Ovid

“In their transformations, the governments of today’s industrialized countries took an active role, not only in protecting their industries through tariffs, but also in promoting new technologies. In the United States, the first telegraph line was financed by the federal government in 1842, and the burst of productivity in agriculture that provided the basis of industrialization rested on the government’s research, teaching, and extension services.”

-Joseph E. Stiglitz, from his introduction to The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

“Ask five economists and you’ll get five different answers; six if one went to Harvard.”

-Edgar Fiedler

“When I sketched out the rough idea of it to a friend, he listened carefully and then shook his head. ‘I don’t think you’ve got anything new to say about AIDS, Steve.’ He paused and added, ‘Especially as a straight man.’

No. And no. And especially: no.

I hate the assumption that you can’t write about something because you haven’t experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy. The idea is false on the evidence.”

-Stephen King

(That sums up so very well why I despise “only write or make movies about people exactly like you, or you’re irreddeemably evil” line of thought. Funny, it’s like he gets paid to write well or something.)