This is totally interesting, though I don't understand it very much.  Seems that some physicists have stumbled upon an equation that offers a tremendously simplifying short-cut for measuring something about neutrinos, and the equation also seems to offer a more general solution to a more abstract mathematical problem.  That in itself is really interesting.  (I remember being at the U of Chicago when Andrew Wiles announced the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, and it was just like the articles said--math riots, car fires, anarchy.)  But what's also interesting is that a number of people, working entirely independently, seem to have stumbled upon variants of the same equation, or neighboring equations.  And that provoked this comment by one of the main characters in the article:

“There’s a lot of simultaneous discovery in mathematics,” Tao said. “Somehow the results are almost in the air. And people are just beginning to look in the right places."

That's really interesting for me to think about.  Are discoveries in math also a matter of cultural "atmosphere"?

I think this speaks to large issues of how we all behave on social media.  These authors’  behavior is horrible, but this is not in any simple way due to character defects on their part that the rest of us do not share.  There is something about social media, imho, that makes us simultaneously hyper-sensitive and hyper-aggressive.  Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that those two are related.

Nice piece analyzing the philosophical and statistical complexities of causality.  Good quote:

The Book of Why provides a splendid overview of the state of the art in causal analysis. It forcefully argues that developing well-supported causal hypotheses about the world is both essential and difficult. Difficult, because causal conclusions do not flow from observed statistical regularities alone, no matter how big the data set. Rather, we must use all our clues and imagination to create plausible causal models, and then analyze those models to see whether, and how, they can be tested by data. Just crunching more numbers is not the royal road to causal insight.

Wow.  The Handke Nobel is even worse than was first reported. Here's a quote:

The short version is that two Nobel jurors, responding to global criticism over their selection of the Austrian-born writer, took the unusual step last month of disclosing the sources they consulted while making up their minds. One of the jurors, Henrik Petersen, cited a book by a little-known author, Lothar Struck, who lives in Düsseldorf and contributes to an online literary magazine. Another juror, Eric Runesson, said he relied on a book by an Innsbruck historian named Kurt Gritsch. Neither book has been translated from German, and they have only a handful of citations on the German version of Google Scholar.

The books by Struck and Gritsch defend Handke’s skepticism over the scale of Serb atrocities, and they endorse Handke’s argument that news reports in the 1990s were unfair to Serbs. The books have a confident tone, and apparently the Nobel jurors concluded from them that Handke was justified in his written and gestural sympathy for the Serb side (which included delivering a eulogy at the 2006 funeral of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died of a heart attack while awaiting trial on charges that included genocide).

But these two books have a huge flaw that the Nobel jurors apparently didn’t recognize. Both books support a conspiracy theory that asserts an American publicity firm, Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs, masterminded a campaign to inflate Serb atrocities and thus shifted U.S. opinion against the Serbs. According to the wag-the-dog theory of the Bosnia war that these books adopt, the accepted narrative of immense and one-sided atrocities by Serbs was largely the consequence of a deceptive publicity campaign, rather than actual events on the ground.

Yikes.

Let's keep going with the scary stories, since we're already in so deep.  Why Hindu nationalists are cheering a ruling by the Supreme Court of India that allows them to build a temple on the site of a mosque that they destroyed in 1992. 

Happy Tuesday everyone!  Here it's cool and cloudy.  Maybe we'll have a fire tonight--I hope wherever you are, you find a way to be comfy too.