Mathematicians are known for their electric writing style, but even in this tough competition, I think the opening sentence of the 1985 monograph by T. B. Burton stands out:

“To a reader who is unacquainted with differential equations, an overview such as this can be quite meaningless.”

[27 December 2015]

I just spent six weeks in an apartment at NYU, and in the corner was a table with the television and telephone on it.  There were five remote controllers supplied to control these devices in their numerous capabilities, with a total of 188 buttons.

Teenagers find this stuff obvious.  Me, I can just about figure out what I need when I need it.  Older people?  I think a lot of them are shut out, just as my aunt Jane lost the ability to communicate with me and Gwyned when her keyboard was upgraded to a tablet.  Phones and TVs were so much simpler in the old days!  It cannot be beyond our ability to make them simple again for the tens of millions of people who would like that.  I predict this will happen within a few years.

188 buttons.

[12 October 2015]

There’s a point of view one hears that puzzles me.  Paul Krugman put in the New York Times last week:

“Terrorism can’t and won’t destroy our civilization, but global warming could and might.”

What mechanism of destruction do these people have in mind? Lately I’ve asked colleagues what they think and found no consensus. One proposes that if the temperature rises 2 degrees, that might tip us into a regime where it rises 20 degrees. Another says even 3 degrees might make us unable to farm and we would starve.  Some think the point is that drought or famine might lead to war or mass migration. But then, so did World War II, without destroying our civilization.

My opinion is that global warming is extremely serious and may cause us all kinds of trouble. But I suspect the present mood, in which people elevate this threat above all others, will change when a city is destroyed by a nuclear bomb, or a war starts with Russia or China, or machines grow more capable than humans, or a global information collapse destroys the world’s financial system, or Crispr and the like unleash unimaginable horrors of biology.

[26 November 2015]

Twice in the past 500 years, England has been attacked by a foreign navy. First was the Spanish Armada, with 130 ships, and that invasion failed. Everyone in England knows this great story of English resolve and victory.

The second was William of Orange a century later, a bigger and better-planned operation with 463 ships. This time the invasion succeeded. William landed in Devon in November with his tens of thousands of men and horses and by December was in London running the country. Nobody in England knows this story of English irresolution and defeat — maybe one in a hundred? Luckily, just as before, it was all for the best, and we’ve all heard of an event called the Glorious Revolution.

[29 November 2015]