Product of the Day

This quote made my week because I had never thought formally about processes as products of sequential steps. This approach is, among other things, consistent with Deleuze's idea of desiring-machines and his model of reductionist [techno]science. It also explains why we make trade-offs in the production process of value creation.

Multiplication often appears in the guise of independent choices. Here is an example. Some restaurants have a list of options for the first course and another list for the second course; a ‘meal’ involves one item from each list. First courses: soup, pasta, salad. Second courses: steak, veal, chicken, fish.



This scheme with three ‘objects’ and two ‘maps’ or ‘processes’ is the right picture of multiplication of objects, and it applies to a surprising variety of situations.

--- Lawvere, Schanuel. 2009.

(no subject)

Recent elections show that people think of Reality TV as a product (Reality x TV), rather than a coproduct (Reality ∐ TV).

TIL: Slavery, Confederation and Science of racism

via rsokolov.
The tradition of using science to justify state racism in the US goes back to the 1860s. It used to be "in the blood", now it's "in the genes." I wonder where it is going to be in 150 years from now.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Constitution

Equal justice and equal taxation

"" (Watch on YouTube)

upd: The idea that law is not all-encompassing (31:00) is non-trivial at all. How did Hobbes arrive at the conclusion?

Real science and medicine

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00895-3

Sorge and his adviser at McGill University, pain researcher Jeffrey Mogil, would go on to determine that this kind of pain hypersensitivity results from remarkably different pathways in male and female mice, with distinct immune-cell types contributing to discomfort2.

... no other field of science [besides pain research] has identified this type of sex difference.

some 20% of people worldwide experience chronic pain — and the majority are women. Today, the pharmaceutical market offers the same pain drugs to everyone. But if the roots of pain are different, some drugs might work better in some people than in others.

This is excellent news for one of our startups.