Thursday, August 25, 2022
Friday, August 12, 2022
Grandfathers and their Daughters
By
Madeleine KandoMy family is originally from Hungary. That is where I was born, but soon my parents moved to France. Then, when my brother, twin sister and I were in our early teens, we moved again, this time to Holland. We quickly forgot how to speak Hungarian, but never lost our French.
We adapted well to our Dutch life. My mother had divorced her second husband and tried to make a living on her own. We entered puberty with a vengeance and partied day and night. One week-end blurred into another, all ending up in the bathroom, vomiting our guts out.
Decades later, when I was already a grandmother myself, I found an old letter, written by my grandfather. It was written after one of his infrequent visits to the West, infrequent enough for us kids to see him as a quaint old man, speaking perfect French, with a Hungarian accent. The letter has no date, but it was addressed to us and must have been written during that period, when we were partying as if there was no tomorrow. My mother, a photographer, was trying to work on the third floor of our flat, an impossible feat considering the loud music and drinking that was going on downstairs.
The letter is written in French, but not just your daily variety. It is clear that the writer is a highly educated man. He not only spoke and wrote French, but translated hundreds of works from Greek, Latin, Russian, German and English. Behind his highly stylized prose, the sadness and desperation of an old man is as clear as a bell.
It is a lamentation of a concerned father, trying to talk some sense into three semi-delinquent teenagers, who were literally abusing their mother. It is a plea that obviously fell on deaf ears. ‘Grand-père’ as we used to call him, knew this even as he was writing it. He knew he was fighting a lost battle. I don’t think any of us read the letter at the time. Many years later, as I read this letter, the helplessness of a father trying to protect his daughter is palpable.
Read more...
We adapted well to our Dutch life. My mother had divorced her second husband and tried to make a living on her own. We entered puberty with a vengeance and partied day and night. One week-end blurred into another, all ending up in the bathroom, vomiting our guts out.
Decades later, when I was already a grandmother myself, I found an old letter, written by my grandfather. It was written after one of his infrequent visits to the West, infrequent enough for us kids to see him as a quaint old man, speaking perfect French, with a Hungarian accent. The letter has no date, but it was addressed to us and must have been written during that period, when we were partying as if there was no tomorrow. My mother, a photographer, was trying to work on the third floor of our flat, an impossible feat considering the loud music and drinking that was going on downstairs.
The letter is written in French, but not just your daily variety. It is clear that the writer is a highly educated man. He not only spoke and wrote French, but translated hundreds of works from Greek, Latin, Russian, German and English. Behind his highly stylized prose, the sadness and desperation of an old man is as clear as a bell.
It is a lamentation of a concerned father, trying to talk some sense into three semi-delinquent teenagers, who were literally abusing their mother. It is a plea that obviously fell on deaf ears. ‘Grand-père’ as we used to call him, knew this even as he was writing it. He knew he was fighting a lost battle. I don’t think any of us read the letter at the time. Many years later, as I read this letter, the helplessness of a father trying to protect his daughter is palpable.
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
Pi
Tom Kando My previous post began a discussion of some interesting mathematical problems which I want to share with you. I am fully aware that I am a novice in this field. Last time, I wrote about prime numbers. Today, I want to talk about another fascinating topic, namely Pi (π).
You have heard of the expression “squaring the circle,” right? It means doing (or trying to do) the impossible.
In order to construct a square with the same area as a given circle, you must first determine the area of the circle, using the following steps:
1. measure the circle’s circumference.
2. measure the diameter, that is the distance across the circle between the two halfway points of the circumference.
3. determine the radius, which is half the diameter.
4. Square the radius and multiply this number by 3.14 (π).
In other words A (Area) = π x r 2 (r is radius)
Then, you simply compute the square root of the circle’s area. This gives you the length of the square’s side.
Example. You want to square a circle which has a circumference of 1,000 meters.
Using the π approximation of 3.14, The circle’s diameter is therefore about 318.5 meters, and the radius is half of that - 159.25 meters. The circle’s area is therefore 3.14 x 159.25 2 = 79,582 square meters.
The square’s side is the square root of this (√79,582) i.e. approximately 282.1 meters.
For practical purposes, this procedure will do. However, the problem is that π is a transcendental number.
Transcendental numbers are non-algebraic and irrational: They are NOT the solution of an algebraic equation.
They cannot be expressed as the ratio of two numbers. They have a non-terminating decimal.
22/7 is often used as an approximation of π. It is about 3.14. Since it is a fraction, it is a rational number. Like π,, it has an infinite, non-terminating number of decimals.
However,UNLIKE π,, the decimals consist of a six-digit repetend. . For example, if you divide 22 by 7 to 24 decimals, you get 3,142857 142857 142857 142857.
“142857" is called a “repetend,” and it repeats ad infinitum.
Read more...
Sunday, July 17, 2022
SOME INTERESTING MATHEMATICAL TOPICS
Tom Kando
Most of my recent posts have been negative. There are so many wrong things these days. The third year of Covid, 5th month of war in Ukraine, the Supreme Court abolishing our constitutional rights, the proliferation of weapons and therefore of mass murder, no progress on the environmental front, the rightward political drift toward fascism in many countries, etc.
So how about something not depressing, for once?
A field which has long piqued my curiosity is mathematics, if only because I am not well versed in that area. Incidentally, some of my ancestors were eminent mathematicians and scientists. They include my great-grandfather Beke Mano, who was a pioneer in differential equations and my grand-uncle
Kalman Kando who invented the phase converter.
My secondary school education was stellar on the humanities side, but mediocre on the quantitative side: At the gymnasium, we had six years of six languages - Dutch, English, French, German, Latin and Greek! However, our quantitative training did not go beyond algebra, trigonometry, analytic geometry and stereometry. Later, obtaining my PhD at the University of Minnesota required a strong quantitative component in the form of advanced statistics. However, most of my quantitative skills, limited to begin with, have atrophied. I remain fascinated by fields about which I know little, wondering sometimes if I might chose the direction of the exact sciences if I were to do things all over again.
Take prime numbers, for instance. You can check out a previous post of mine about this:
A prime number is a whole number that can only be divided by 1 and by itself. Or put differently, prime numbers cannot be divided by any other whole number without leaving a fraction. The smallest twenty-five prime numbers (those under 100) are:
Read more...
Friday, July 15, 2022
Friday, July 8, 2022
Thank God for the Vaccine (From my Coronavirus Diary)
By
Madeleine KandoDay 1
Now, it is time to fly back home. Squeezed in the window seat, my glasses fogging up above a n95 mask, I am ready to zone out and pretend I am somewhere else for the next 6 hours. Long gone are the days when I fully enjoyed flying cross-country. The window shade is partially open, symbolic of my ambivalence about an experience that I used to find absolutely thrilling. Most of us think nothing of propelling ourselves at 500 miles an hour, at an altitude that only two bird species on earth are known to reach, but I was born two years before the first transatlantic commercial flights began, and there is still this sense of wonder in me. I open the window shade and endure the dirty looks from my co-passengers who are trying to sleep. I cannot get myself to be completely indifferent to this wonder of aviation.
That evening I collapse on my king-size bed and realize how exhausted I am. My throat doesn’t feel good, but I don’t give it a second thought. Home sweet home…
We install chicken wire around everything that we assume would go on a groundhog menu: Marigolds, nasturtiums, pansies.. I sprinkle ‘deer repellant’ around the raised beds, which is a terrible mistake. Its odor is so repulsive, that even I cannot go in the garden.
I crawl back in bed. An hour later, I look through our French doors and see a fat groundhog, probably the mother, blissfully eating away at a clover patch. She stares straight at me, her jaws working a mile a minute. A smaller version has materialized and follows in her footsteps. Like two efficient lawnmowers, they quickly decimate half of the clover patch.
Read more...
What a wonderful time we had in San Francisco. Aside from the joy of being with my 10 year old grandson, there was the city with its parks, its architecture and its museums. Even without any of that, it would have felt like a get out of jail free card after so much time being cooped up in our own universe, back in Boston. For almost two years, we steered clear of the claws of this ruthless monster called Covid. We didn’t go to restaurants, we had friends over one at a time, no parties, no movies, no nothing.
Now, it is time to fly back home. Squeezed in the window seat, my glasses fogging up above a n95 mask, I am ready to zone out and pretend I am somewhere else for the next 6 hours. Long gone are the days when I fully enjoyed flying cross-country. The window shade is partially open, symbolic of my ambivalence about an experience that I used to find absolutely thrilling. Most of us think nothing of propelling ourselves at 500 miles an hour, at an altitude that only two bird species on earth are known to reach, but I was born two years before the first transatlantic commercial flights began, and there is still this sense of wonder in me. I open the window shade and endure the dirty looks from my co-passengers who are trying to sleep. I cannot get myself to be completely indifferent to this wonder of aviation.
That evening I collapse on my king-size bed and realize how exhausted I am. My throat doesn’t feel good, but I don’t give it a second thought. Home sweet home…
Day 2
The next day, my throat is painful. I can barely swallow. I have intense body aches and a great desire to stay in bed. I test myself for Covid, but I am negative. I go outside to inspect the vegetable garden and notice that little bites have been taken out of all the seedlings. Cukes, beans, peas, all rendered inedible. ‘Oh I forgot to tell you about the groundhogs, mom’, my daughter says.
We install chicken wire around everything that we assume would go on a groundhog menu: Marigolds, nasturtiums, pansies.. I sprinkle ‘deer repellant’ around the raised beds, which is a terrible mistake. Its odor is so repulsive, that even I cannot go in the garden.
I crawl back in bed. An hour later, I look through our French doors and see a fat groundhog, probably the mother, blissfully eating away at a clover patch. She stares straight at me, her jaws working a mile a minute. A smaller version has materialized and follows in her footsteps. Like two efficient lawnmowers, they quickly decimate half of the clover patch.
Day 3
My symptoms are worse. The lozenges are pretty much all I can tolerate. Having the flu is no picnic.
Tuesday, June 21, 2022
Guns and Murders
Tom Kando
My previous post's title was: It's the Guns, Stupid.
I subsequently thought: There is a simple way to prove this: Just draw up a list of places, list two variables for each place, namely (1) per capita gun ownership and (2) per capita murders, and see if there is a correlation between the two. For example, one could use a list of our 50 states for this or a list of the world's roughly 200 countries.
There
is anecdotal and journalistic evidence
that states and countries with high rates of gun ownership also have high murder
rates (e.g. Texas vs. Massachusetts, or the US vs, Holland). But I can't think of any systematic attempt to correlate the two
variables, using a list of states or countries. So I did it myself. It was
quite simple. I chose to list countries rather than US states. To make it
easier on myself I reduced the population to 45 Aimportant@ countries. I then listed each country's
rate of gun ownership and its murder rate. This produced a bi-variate 2x2 table, on
which I did a Chi Square significance test.
Of the 45 countries in my sample, 25 were Ahigh gun ownership@ and 20 were Alow gun ownership@ Of the same 45 countries, 17 were Ahigh murder rate@ and 28 were Alow murder rate. The table below gives the distribution of the 45 countries into 4 cells, as indicated:
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Monday, May 30, 2022
A Twin’s Perspective on Friendship
By
Madeleine KandoIt is difficult to define friendship, but like many other indefinable things in life, ‘you know it when it’s there’. It is more like beauty or art, something that you value for its own sake. As soon as you try to exploit it for personal gain, it vanishes. It’s like trying to catch your own shadow.
I am not talking about the Facebook kind of ‘friend’. I am talking about the bond that is created between two people who decide to devote their time and energy to a mutually agreed upon relationship that is completely voluntary. Unlike other types of relationships like family ties, romantic ties or business ties, where you have some kind of ‘obligation’ to each other, friendship survives on the complete absence of rules. It is literally the stuff of dreams. A friendship is like a dream that you have with another person. And just like a dream, friendship is fragile.
The root word for friend is fréon (to love), which is connected to freo (not in bondage, acting of one's own will). It describes friendship to a T. It is one of the most democratic arrangements in social interactions. And just like a Democratic arrangement, if you don’t work at maintaining a friendship, it just disappears, without complaining or throwing a tantrum.
One factor that has influenced my view of friendship, is the fact that I am a twin. My sister is actually not at all like me. She is uninhibited and blunt and she acts out her frustrations by lashing out. I am self-conscious, reserved and eat up all my anger. But we were never really ‘alone’. There was always this other you that wasn’t you.
We were close growing up, since people couldn’t tell us apart, but for years, we were compelled to create conflict to prove that we were really two people. Especially after my father left and we had to vie for our only parent’s attention.
We have come full circle, however. With the help of distance and time (my twin in Spain, me in the States), we are finally able to meet each other as equals, like two branches on an old tree with a common base. We can talk to each other, accept each other and let bygones be bygones.
I had several friends, on my way to old age, most of them women. There was Marijke in high school, back in Holland. She lived in a beautiful, old style Dutch house with a thatched roof and a large garden with cherry trees. Why we were friends, I don’t remember. She actually decided that we should be, not me. Then, there was Barbara. Beautiful, tall, intoxicating Barbara. We were friends too, to the point of embarking on a secret correspondence based on a semi-pornographic series of teenage books called ‘the thousand and one nights’. Barbara sometimes gave me a ride home on her bike. I sat on the rack behind her, holding her narrow waist, her long skirts brushing against my legs. Her long pony tail reminded me of a beautiful, shiny race horse.
Saturday, April 9, 2022
POWER!
by Madeleine KandoThe information in this essay is based on Bertrand Russell’s: Power, A New Social Analysis, published in 1938.
The book is very much a product of its time; a time when war with Germany was about to begin. The Western world was divided between democracies and countries led by successful revolutionary dictators. Similar to what is happening now.
What is power? Is it good or bad? Or is it neutral, like a hammer when you need to put a nail in a wall? The origin of the word ‘power’ comes from the Latin word ‘potere’, which means ‘to be able’. In French the word ‘pouvoir’, both means ‘power’ and ‘to be able to’.
Let’s face it, without power, nothing would get done. My husband needs muscle power to mow the lawn. I need fine-motor power to move my fingers on the keyboard.
But that kind of power is self-contained, it’s neutral. The problem starts when someone wants to have power over other things or beings. Power over humans, non-humans, land etc. There is a difference between the amount of power you need to have enough to eat and pay for a roof over your head, and the kind of power that has caused problems for our species ever since we grew frontal lobes.
There are people who crave power more than others. I myself want power over my cat. I won’t let her pee wherever she likes and when I was a young mother, I had power over my children. I told them when to go to bed, what time to get up, etc. My husband was a CFO and had decision making power over a small staff. We all have some degree of power, if only to control our own thoughts.
But that kind of power is barely worth the name. It is the power of men that lead nations that we should be talking about. Good and bad leaders alike: Mahatma Gandhi, Hitler, Putin and George Washington, to name a few.
Marx had an economic explanation for what drives human behavior, and Freud said it was all about sex. But according to famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, the pursuit of power is fundamental to understanding human nature. ‘Power is a fundamental concept in Social Science, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics’. (From: Power, A New Social Analysis, by Bertrand Russell)
In other words, power stems from an infinite desire for something that will never be satisfied. ‘The Boa constrictor, when he has had his meal, sleeps until appetite revives’. He is content until he is hungry again. But with Man it is different. ‘Imagination is the goad that forces human beings into restless exertion after their primary needs have been satisfied.’
Read more...
What is power? Is it good or bad? Or is it neutral, like a hammer when you need to put a nail in a wall? The origin of the word ‘power’ comes from the Latin word ‘potere’, which means ‘to be able’. In French the word ‘pouvoir’, both means ‘power’ and ‘to be able to’.
Let’s face it, without power, nothing would get done. My husband needs muscle power to mow the lawn. I need fine-motor power to move my fingers on the keyboard.
But that kind of power is self-contained, it’s neutral. The problem starts when someone wants to have power over other things or beings. Power over humans, non-humans, land etc. There is a difference between the amount of power you need to have enough to eat and pay for a roof over your head, and the kind of power that has caused problems for our species ever since we grew frontal lobes.
There are people who crave power more than others. I myself want power over my cat. I won’t let her pee wherever she likes and when I was a young mother, I had power over my children. I told them when to go to bed, what time to get up, etc. My husband was a CFO and had decision making power over a small staff. We all have some degree of power, if only to control our own thoughts.
But that kind of power is barely worth the name. It is the power of men that lead nations that we should be talking about. Good and bad leaders alike: Mahatma Gandhi, Hitler, Putin and George Washington, to name a few.
Marx had an economic explanation for what drives human behavior, and Freud said it was all about sex. But according to famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, the pursuit of power is fundamental to understanding human nature. ‘Power is a fundamental concept in Social Science, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics’. (From: Power, A New Social Analysis, by Bertrand Russell)
In other words, power stems from an infinite desire for something that will never be satisfied. ‘The Boa constrictor, when he has had his meal, sleeps until appetite revives’. He is content until he is hungry again. But with Man it is different. ‘Imagination is the goad that forces human beings into restless exertion after their primary needs have been satisfied.’
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
The War in Ukraine Could Affect the Whole World
Tom Kando I just listened to a fascinating interview of Yuval Noah Harari. He is the Israeli historian who wrote the brilliant Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, among others.
The professor’s first and obvious point is that this war should stop ASAP. The longer it goes on, the more EVERYONE will suffer, not just the Ukrainians, even if there is no global conflagration. The longer the war lasts, the worse the situation becomes. The more hatred is created among the Ukrainians. And no one wants this war, not the Russian people, not the Russian oligarchs.
Unfortunately, it’s been over a month since this interview took place, and things are going in the wrong direction. I see no imminent peace on the horizon.
The interview occurred when the Russian peaceniks were still marching in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. By now, Putin’s brainwashing machine has done a superb job in rallying a majority of Russians to supporting the war enthusiastically. Dictatorships are often very efficient at creating Orwellian group think within their borders. In Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan and elsewhere, large majorities continued to happily kill and die for their governments to the bitter end.
Harari explains that Putin’s attack on Ukraine is not based on a coherent ideology, as for example the Soviet Union was. Instead, it is based on Putin’s own fantasy, not on facts. It is based on Putin’s single-minded desire to re-establish the Russian empire. It is based on the erroneous belief that the Ukrainians are Russians, that they want to be part of Russia. They do not. Ukraine has a thousand-year old history of national identity. Kyiv was a major cultural metropolis long before Moscow. President Zelensky’s and the Ukrainian people’s heroic resistance can be an inspiration to the world.
No war since 1945 has been as much of a threat to the entire world as the current conflict in Ukraine. For the past seventy-seven years, the world has been largely at peace. Authors such as Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) (https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature) have documented the decline of war. Since 1945, there have been no wars aimed at obliterating entire countries from the map. By and large, borders have been sacred (or at least the product of negotiations). Countries have ceased ANNEXING each other. No superpower has gone to war in order to aggrandize its empire. Read more...
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