soid | Entries tagged with middle east

I've been coding too much lately.
Computer science major asks:

Hey guys, CS major here. So I decided to leave my room today. What is happening on campus?
To my understand, from reading online forms, there’s a war going on in another country. What does that have to do with Columbia? Better question perhaps is: what is the expected outcome of this protest?
Please explain such that a cs major would understand.

Not so long time ago, with the help of the British and Americans, Israelis wrote some code that is buggy, but kind of works and also makes a buck. Not so long time ago, Palestinians tried to throw away and rewrite that code their way; Israelis got pissed and revoked the git repository access for Palestinians, just exposing some poorly documented APIs for them. Last weekend hackers got the system down via the crappy API access. Everyone is shocked that they could even do it. Israelis will stop the crappy API access and let Palestinians go back to reading paper books and play checkers. Now, Palestinians are pissed and demand their own git repository after all. Israelis, then, argue that they will only use that repository for malicious purposes; the hacker will attempt to hack the system again if not completely wipe out the buggy code – hence they don’t deserve their own repository. One group condemns the hacker; the other group demands a git repository.

Хомейни, по неудачной случайности возглавивший Иранскую революцию против режима САВАК к 1979-ому году, видел в Исламе справедливость и ту же свободу, к которой пришел запад:

Ислам — это справедливость, в исламе диктатура — это тягчайший из грехов: фашизм и исламизм находятся в непримиримом противоречии. Фашизм имел место у вас, на западе, а не среди народов исламской культуры.

(цитата из интервью).

Революция стала кульминацией борьбы Иранского народа с различного рода диктатурами 20-ого века. Страну хотели назвать "Демократической Исламской Республикой", но Хомейни пошел дальше говоря, что ислам и так подразумевает демократию:

Для начала, слово "ислам" не нуждается в прилагательных, как, например, в прилагательном "демократический". Просто потому, что ислам - это всё. У нас вызывает печаль постановка другого слова рядом со словом "ислам", которое есть совершенно. Если мы желаем ислам, какой смысл уточнять, что мы хотим демократию? Это все равно, что сказать: хотим ислам и нужно верить в Бога. Потом, эта столь дорогая Вам и ценная для Вас демократия не имеет точного значения. Аристотелева демократия - это одно, советская - совсем другое, капиталистическая - вообще иное.

"По неудачной случайности" это потому, что помимо Хомейни, к 1979 году было несколько оппозиционных лидеров способных возглавить революцию против репрессивной монархии – то, как он возглавил революцию оказалось случайностью. Али Шариати, Иранский социолог до Исламской Революции, писал (цитата из Абрахамиана):

Необходимо пояснить, что мы подразумеваем под исламом. Под этим мы подразумеваем ислам Абу Зарра, а не ислам халифов; ислам справедливости и надлежащего руководства, а не правителей, аристократов и высшего класса; Ислам свободы, прогресса и сознания; а не рабства, неволи и пассивности; Ислам моджахедов [воинов], а не духовенства [священников]; Ислам добродетели, личной ответственности и протеста; а не (религиозного) притворства, (духовного) заступничества и (божественного) вмешательства; ислам борьбы за веру, общество и научное знание; а не за капитуляцию, догматизм и некритическое подражание духовенству.

Такой ислам за справедливость и прогресс получается. Шариати был одним из главных идеологов Исламской революции в Иране, наравне с Хомейни, боролся против диктатуры САВАК аргументируя, что ислам подразумевает свободу, прогресс, демократию, и все то к чему западное общество пришло другим путем – и так подразумевается в исламе. Ну ок, интересные мысли из всего этого могут получится. Можно книжку написать и раздумывать. Но страну на этом строить – как-то страшно. Хотя режим САВАК, кажется, был настолько уродливым, что любые средства хороши. Ведь и западная философия берет свое начало в теологии. Шариати умер 1977-ом и Хомейни возглавил революцию в 79-ом.

Документальные кадры революции из фильма "Radiography of My Family" (2020): массы людей, религиозные, стиляги, левые, правые; портреты Хомейни, Шариати; девятая симфония:

Watch on YouTube

Читая Абрахамиана, кажется Иран действительно в какой-то ограниченной степени был демократический – до совсем недавнего времени, когда среди мировых диктатур пришла мода подтасовывать выборы.

Гельвин сравнивает номинальную позицию высшего руководителя Ирана, которую занимает Хомейни после революции, с позицией Елизаветы II – по конституции у них похожие роли, "надзор за надлежащим исполнением общих законов системы". Все же Гельвин пишет, что духовный лидер Ирана оказывает большое влияние на экономическую политику, иностранные дела, а так же имеет сеть религиозных лидеров, у которых есть большое влияние в исполнительной власти. Это все же не диктатура. Позиция эта, которую занимает Хомейни, называется "вали-е факих" –происходит из исламской философии, на Фарси значит "защитник-богослов", а переводы на другие языки, такие как "высший руководитель Ирана", или "Supreme Leader" на-английском, добавляет Оруэлловской предвзятости, впечатления какого-то абсолютного лидера, каким он не является. В сравнении, Путин был бы гораздо более абсолютный верховный лидер.

( Читать далее про президентов... )

The classes have ended; next is final papers and exams. I've been writing the Middle East paper 3-4 pages per day. Need 16 pages by Friday. It's been going pretty well; perhaps, maintaining consistency of the argument becomes more difficult with more pages. Cross-checking the books, then I find myself reading various passages, finding second meaning. What great books. My paper is about Iran and Saudi Arabia, oil and religion, and how the two sharing so much in common got into so different places. Also, reading Mamdani's "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim" – that is a wow book; I don't really need to read it now, but it's been very inspirational for my writing, so I read a couple of pages from time to time for a break.

Not been thinking much of topology lately. Finished the last homework yesterday, but skipped a proof of one of the steps of Fundamental Theorem of Algebra: that all roots lie within a ball B^2; as opposed to existence of at least one root that lies in the ball; if the sum of absolute coefficients <1. I couldn't figure it out within 30-40 minutes; and one homework score is dropped anyway, and my other homework got above 90%, so that's fine. But still bothers me. Also, somehow, I got above 100% on the second midterm (including extra credit), so this lets me set my mind on other things for the moment. Feeling suspicious about the final exam: that's going to be 3 hours long and might include some head scratching. I'll enjoy it anyway. Still, I wanna sit down and think through what the hell happened in this class this semester – it's all none-trivial – maybe write "a story of topology", a bird's-eye view.

Last thing is the NLG class (Natural Language Generation). That's been neglected despite being a highly interesting (and trendy) topic. The class was low in energy, and part of it was its structure: all the PhDs running their own projects very tangentially related to the papers that we had read. Though it was interesting to read a whole bunch of paper on the topic this semester, and discuss them in class. Another thing is my project being just sucky. I didn't come to love it. So, I'll just have to describe my sucky project in the final paper; not going to try to inflate its importance. That's the plan by Sunday.

What else? Got fever over the weekend, I was sure I caught Covid again during this fun times; but no, got better next day. Not sure what that was. Maybe I just didn't sleep enough. The weather is getting colder, but still no snow. I'm ready for white Christmas, but it seems white Christmas in New York is only in movies. Ukraine on my mind all the time: waking up checking the news, falling asleep – checking the news. And nothing happens, it seems, but still, so much anxiety.

The picture is from Prof. Rashid Khalidi's last class. That's been a great time. No slides; sometimes he would spell some foreign terms on the board; just he, speaking from over the lectern; us, often raising hands and asking questions – there was a lot of energy in this class.

Finished covering Saudi Arabia with the last topic: Wahhabism, which is the Muslim orthodoxy that developed in the 18-19 century, taking its name from an Arabic scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and used by Saudis till today.

Wahhabism emphasizes the unity of the Muslim world, obedience to absolute ruler; discourages excesses in life, set against Sufism. In fact, for the followers "Wahhabi" is an anathema, they call themselves "Muwahhidun" – "unitarians"
Wahhabism becomes the source of Saudi authoritarian legitimation starting from the 1950-60s; used for fighting leftists with support of the US. It is the weapon against democracy, but the US only needed two things from Saudis: oil and the airbase (Dhahran).
Wahhabism is still used by Saudis to legitimize dictatorships, fake democracies like Morocco and Bahrein
In the 1970s, Afghanistan becomes a place of interaction of various forms of Islam. A place of exchanging ideas, including Wahhabism. Deobandi School merges with Wahhabism in Afghanistan.
al-Queda is an offshoot of Wahhabism, but is not exactly Wahhabi. It means "base", or rather a "database" – of militants fighting Soviet colonialism – created by "computer people" with decentralized structure across the world.
Bin Laden was a son of one of the largest real estate magnates in Saudi Arabia, from the capital, Riyadh. In the late 1980s, he disagrees with Saudis over the protection of Kuwait (from Iraq), arguing that holy lands should not be defined by non-muslims (Americans). Somehow this sets him against Americans. Saudi's repressive machine expels him from the country as he becomes an opponent of the regime.
Prof. warns about the literature on the topic, saying there is a million books written by authors barely understanding the issues, not speaking the language, not understanding intricacies of Islamic thought. There is a whole discipline called "terrorology" with many authors "claiming that they know what they are talking about". So, Prof. says to be aware of it.

Then we shifted to a completely different topic: Islamic revolution in Iran.

After British-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, consequential withdrawal of British and later Soviet troops, influence of both in Iran diminishes. Americans step in, with the help of the CIA support a coup d'état in 1953, install a new regime called SAWAK which existed until the revolution in 1979. It was basically a police dictatorship, very repressive, but trying to modernize. In the 1960s the regime starts losing control of various factions: starting with the clerk Ruhollah Khomeini, various leftist movements ("Marxist-Islamist"), somehow that led to the revolution. To be continued...

All day I did this and that and hard to say what exactly I have done. I figured out how to create a VM with 40 gig GPU in GCP – spend an hour reading the docs, then it turned out it was a click away on another tab. I thought maybe I should just buy this GPU, then looked at Amazon: it's priced $12K. Aw, okay, not today. The thing is called Nvidia A100.

It finally got cold outside. 37ºF / 3ºC, but it felt freezing. Still sunny though; crisp air. I love it. I put on my winter jacket. It's puffy; I felt unusually voluminous in it. I put on my winter boots; I felt too tall in it. This usual discomfort of inter-seasonal clothing change. Wearing all the same last year's colors: all dark, black jeans, not much changed from last year; sad. At last, I put on a yellow hat. The hat is new. Yay. I went to the subway and didn't notice anything or anyone remarkable.

House of the Dragon in the evening. The king is still alive. B dislikes him; I find it funny that he always almost dies and never does, hates his job as a king, but sees it as his duty despite being not smart enough for the surrounding him politics.

In the evening, reading Bsheer's "A Counter-Revolution State". She's taking an interesting approach to explaining the state formation of Saudi Arabia in the 1950-60s: by looking at the leftist movements in the country and at how they were suppressed and shutdown by the monarchy with support of first British and later Americans. From this history, I can see how Saudis must be surprised that killing Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 was not okay with Americans this time.

10-11:30am Middle East lecture: Saudi Arabia. Kings: Ibn Saud (1902-1953); King Saud (1953-1964); King Faysal (1964-1975). Americans build the pipelines, oil refineries; many American engineers come for work; expat life is popping. There are many articles in ARAMCO magazine about it. Munif's “Cities of Salt” is a classic Arabic novel about the period. Saudi's become the biggest American ally in the region, but then get mad for being ignored which causes oil price surge in the 1970s. In 1967 Prof. says they become the leaders of Arab world replacing Egypt which suffers from its involvement in Yemen.

2:40-4pm Topology lecture. We looked into examples from Hatcher's Algebraic Topology: two loops (S^1 V S^1) - small space that has a complicated fundamental group, but its covering is a large graph that has trivial fundamental group. It's getting pretty interesting.

Finished reading Khalidi's Sowing Crisis. I started getting into it and liking it. Some points come out quite strongly, like his criticism of shifting US and Israeli policy to far right in the 80s:

Beyond this, the Reagan team sympathized deeply with, and indeed came to share, the Begin [Israeli's] government’s hardline approach, which demonstrated a classical colonial mind-set in choosing to see the problem of Palestine entirely through the prism of terrorism. The Israeli approach over time set the tone for more than two decades of disastrously superficial American approaches to a broad range of complex issues in the Middle East, reducing them all to the mindless shibboleth of terrorism. Aside from this poisoned legacy, the centerpiece of the Reagan administration’s Middle East policy ended up being the disastrous American involvement in Lebanon(...)

The footnote reads:

Whether the term used was “terrorism,” “banditry,” “thuggery,” or “lawless elements,” colonial powers have traditionally denigrated and tried to delegitimize and diminish the responses to their rule of subject peoples. The lack of historical awareness of this background in American public discourse, while not surprising, is deeply depressing.

I don't know what to make out of this yet, but it looks interesting. Need to look more carefully into the definition of "terrorism" and its use in history.

But more generally, I realized his argument aligns with my own intuitive thinking of what's wrong with American foreign policy.

7-10pm We went to the Wicked musical on Broadway. Well, my first musical, besides Rocky Horror Picture Show on TV. It was definitely easier than opera to understand, even though the music was not as interesting. The story was straightforward: we didn't need to research it before the show, like for opera, and it conveyed a nice message in the end. Also not having to read the subtitles makes it more accessible. There was even a division like aria and recitative, like in opera; I don't know if they call it so in musical. Overall, it was like an opera for kids – accessible, sweet, and happy.

Current Location: New York

I woke up at 8:40 without alarm. Too early, closed my eyes – next moment I woke up at 9:15 from the alarm – hardly opening my eyes.

10-11:30am Middle East lecture. Finishing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then moving to Saudi Arabia. Wahhabies, ARAMCO, dynasty legitimizing its rule by religion – everything is still there as of 100 years ago.

2:40-4pm Topology lecture: Brouwer's fixed point theorem and some applications of homotopy groups. A continuous map between two disks has a fixed point (where f(x)=x). The same is easier to see for a map between [0,1] to itself. It won't apply to open disk or open intervals, though. I've seen this used to prove existence of Nash Equilibrium in game theory, but it looks like a quite interesting theorem of its own.

5-6pm Middle East discussion – today it was engaging. Everyone shitted on Schindler's Modern Israel book. Nathan said it was a typical Israeli propaganda (he said it as an Israeli citizen). Ali said calling a chapter "A Road to Beirut" about the war in Lebanon was a strange choice since Lebanon was half in ruins after the war. Lelia pointed out to the chronology in the book that goes as far back as the first Jewish-Roman war in the first century – which highlights Schindler's agenda, establishing the continuity between the Bible and the modern Israel. I didn't expect so much criticism, actually.

I got bored with the book and stopped paying attention to all details, but it turned out thtat there was a lot to talk about if I tried to be more critical.

Then we talked about Gelvin's Modern Middle East book covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: interestingly, it doesn't even mention Holocaust. It's a cliché to relate the establishment of Israeli state to Holocaust.

Worked on the NLG project in the evening. Preparing to run Optimus model which uses both GPT2 and BART for encoder/decoder and runs out of memory on 16G GPU. I'm going to rent a 40G GPU for $3 per hour. But I want to make sure everything is prepared, and I don't waste the money.

Bed by 1am.

I woke up around 9am, hardly. Only 5 hours of sleep, again.

10-11:30am the Middle East lecture. Palestine and Israel, part 1. I could sense in the air the topic was contentious. Well, I think most sensitive people avoided taking this class. We started with rejection of nationalism as a description of reality. “Nationalism is an important phenomenon to understand, it is not reality, however”. It is not an age-old conflict. We covered roots of Zionism as interpreted by different historians (goes back to mid-19th century). Then the Prof argues the crucial moment for Zionism was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British, establishing in the Palestine a “national home” for the Jewish people. At the moment 90% of the Palestinian population were Arabs, Jewish population was less than 10%. Arabs are ignored. The movement starts as a colonial project: at the time, colonialism is seen as a good thing (civilized nations help their uncivilized brothers, etc.). Zionist movement first calls themselves “Jewish colonization project”. In many ways, in the beginning, Jewish leadership acts as a colonial power. Why did British do this? It’s debatable, but it appears they tried to find a way to secure Suez Canal, Egypt properties – Jewish people in the Palestine would always be allies of the British in this. I’m a bit lost overall, so I should read the books more. We’ll continue this topic on Thursday.

Doing my budget till 12:30pm outside of lecture hall. First of November.

Then lunch. I saw Ph. walking by, but he didn’t notice me. He looks more like a woman now; he wore a black dress and looked stylish as usual. Does he still go by “he”? Maybe not. I regret not calling him join my table.

1-2:30pm Then I went to the history of China lecture; Ming period; working on my NLG paper there. Three of the classics of Chinese literature from that period:

The Journey to the West
Luo Guanzhong - The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
The Water Margin - Netflix now making a movie about it
The Plum in the Golden Vase - 18th century, erotic novel

Another interesting artsy looking book from the Ming period is "Elegant life of the Chinese literati". I'll read it when I retire (I never will). Also, Italian jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) created the oldest-known map that shows America. It is called Ten Thousand Countries of the World.

2:40-4pm Topology lecture. We defined the fundamental group, then saw some examples of covering spaces. A complex thing becomes just a group of Z. I love to see groups again.

4-7:30pm working in the science library. Writing my NLG paper: creating LaTeX tables, showing off my sucky results, described related work. Then I got bogged down by setting up Google Cloud, hoping that training would be faster there. Oh, well, user interfaces are not Google’s best thing. Very hard to do anything in the interface without finding a proper guide for it and following it carefully step by step. I was often catching a gaze from a girl from another table. Do I know here? I don’t remember. She would look at me, then jump her eyes elsewhere if I looked at her. She looked busy and tired, though. Maybe I'm a good thing to look at while studying? Some people around were taking naps.

10-12am working on Google Cloud setup. My SSH keys got erased when I just put them on the VM. Turns out I need to setup everything in that sucky user interface. And the like problems. But satisfactory overall: small steps, making progress, getting portions of dopamine from making the thing working.

12-1am reading Khalidi’s “Sowing Crisis”. I got to Israel/Palestine section, besides others. I read it just like a continuation of the lecture this morning; I imagined the same voice when reading it. I was thinking that he’s laying out a pretty complex argument in this book, but if some casual reader picks up the book, they would be lost in there without much background. He’s throwing so many facts around as if the reader were aware with everything what happened and just looking for another interpretation. A lot of it makes sense for me now, but when it touches something I haven’t heard before, it doesn’t explain it. Lebanon in 2008, for example. Was there a civil war at the time? He's very critical of the Bush administration, of course, but the book is written in 2008, so it was not mainstream view at the time as far as I understand.

Bed by 2am.

Woke up at 10, then slept till 11am. A cookie for breakfast, coffee.

Some shallow errands in the morning, tis and tat, and it's time for lunch.

3-5:30pm working on NLG project at Mama's cafe. Improving my annotation tool for an hour, then trying to annotate some references. Jeez, I read in papers that annotation is costly, but in reality I should remember how tedious it is. Good that I just need a few dozens of entities for measuring performance. Unsupervised learning to the rescue.

6-8:30pm watched "Decision to Leave" by Park Chan-wook. It is an alright movie, but I first got confused, then I got bored unable to follow what that all means. A murder story with unusual cuts, jumps in time, and often unexplainable but intriguing actions by the characters – all didn't make into a picture for me by the end. Also, whatever was going on in my mind didn't let me focus on the movie. Later I read that the murder investigation is an allegory to the process of falling in love: "Both are an attempt to understand the motivations behind another person’s actions". Maybe if I read it before the movie I would understand it better.

Dozed off around 10pm then woke up at 11 and couldn't sleep after. I read half of Twitter about the Deez algorithm invented by Ruhal Ligma, and the like news. Putler's yesterday speech about neo-colonialism and today's combat mosquitoes accusations in the UN – I'm afraid it is all targeting developing countries to spread conspiracies and confusion. It reminded me 2012 Putler's articles about democracy – reading them shows him as a pretty reasonable stateman dedicated to democratic principles. Back then he needed to calm down the liberal-leaning (but confused) public after he announced his running for the third term (a sort of today's Xi moment). He told them what they wanted to hear: how democracy is great, how there's no alternative, and, by the way, Roosevelt served three terms too; before he completely cracked down on democratic institutions in the following years. So it often that he speaks reasonable things, but he's actions are opposite of what he says. I hope other countries can see this disconnect between his speeches and his actions, and how whatever he speaks about these days is unrelated to his war crimes.

Perhaps I should count math when I have insomnia, instead of reading Twitter.

Then I read "Sowing Crisis" by Rashid Khalidi (who's our professor for the Middle East class). Many things in the book about the Middle East during the Cold War; many things I didn't know. But his main argument appears to be that the Soviets were not as influential in the region as the US, the role of ideological confrontation in the region is exaggerated (Arabs were anti-communists, but rather allied with power). Consequentially, the US is responsible for what's going on in the region more than the Americans like to think (e.g. radical Islam arising from American support). I'll keep reading.

Bed by 4am, sleeping light and waking up often.

I woke up around 9:15am.

10-11:30am Middle East lecture. WW2 and after. It was quite packed:

Soviets and the British invade Iran in 1941, kicked out Reza Shah. The reasons: it was a strategic passage between the allies and Soviets. Also, the oil.
After the war the Soviets stay in Iran for 9 more months: they support Azerbaijan insurrection, create a puppet Kurdish republic called Mahabad Republic that existed for less than a year; meanwhile searching oil in the north of Iran. Iran quickly realizes that Soviets act just the same as the British did. This alienates Iran; eventually the Soviets withdraw under pressure.
In the 1920-1940 the Soviets and Iran had had good relationship: unlike the British, the Soviets treated Iran on equal terms. This changes after WW2. Stalin suddenly starts dictating the terms, behaves very aggressively. At the same time, Soviets start pressuring Turkey.
The Soviets and Turkey establish a joint control of the Turkish Straits (Bosphorus and Dardanelles)
Stalin alienates both Turkey and Iran. Prof says: "there is a lot of American bias in interpretation of the Cold War, but it’s hard to interpret these events anyhow else. It is really Stalin’s provocative and aggressive behavior that pushes Turkey and Iran Westward". It is not clear why Stalin behaved the way he did. Many archives are still unpublished. In the 1990s, the Professor says he worked with Primakov, Russian Foreign minister at that time, to publish and translate the archives, but the project was barred by President Yeltsin's administration.
In the West, the understanding of Cold War develops. "An iron curtain has descended across the Continent"—Churchill gives his iron curtain speech in March 1946. "Churchill speech is an interesting artifact – a man can express himself beautifully”. Churchill had lost election by the time, a man with no power, gives the speech to an American audience, Truman sitting next to him. American media pickup the speech – it goes everywhere, all newspapers, radios, etc.
Americans and the British are trying to stitch together chains of alliances across the Middle East (Middle East Defense Org - MEDO; Middle East Command 1951; Baghdad Pact CENTO), but this fails miserably. It is done without considerations of local politics. E.g. in Egypt by the time all, all the entire political spectrum wants is to get the British out; any deals with the British are very unpopular.

Then working on Topology homework. That was easier than usual. Is this space compact? Is it complete? And why. And a few proofs. Maybe the Prof wanted to give us an easier time during the midterms. That's appreciated.

1-2pm Office hours with Prof Kh. We talked about some useful theorems for completing a space, then got into more philosophy and whatnot. Humans are functions that take 4 dimensional space and map it to one dimensional text, and reverse. The professor has impressive shelves of English and Russian books in his office all about either math, or physics, or complexity theory and the like. I wonder what my shelves would look like if I had physical copies. Most of my books are in iPad now.

Quick lunch: broccoli cream soup.

2:40-4pm Topology. Starting Algebraic topology. Defined homotopy equivalence classes, containing functions that can be continuously deformed into one another; confirmed the axioms. It is not a group yet, but that's where we are heading, it looks like.

4-6pm finishing topology homework, then submitted. Feeling quite exhausted. How do people even work 5 days a week?

Took a break in the evening. I watched some news, played Humankind, sent messages, looked in Google Maps terrain mode, stayed away from the books.

Bed by 2am.

Woke up around 9:15am, strangely fresh despite sleeping less than 5 hours. Strange thing, I can sleep 8 hours and wake up tired, and 5 hour and wake up fresh. An apricot danish with coffee, shower, and I went to the lecture by 10.

10-11:30am Middle East lecture. Moving on to World War II. Main outcomes: establishing a new world order that lasted until 1990; nation self-determination is a key principle of new order; US leads, Europe fades; the world is dominated by the US and Soviets. At the start of the war in August 1941 the US and Britain set their goals after the war in what is called the Atlantic Charter: no territorial gains after the war, principle of self-determination, and other. These principles laid out the foundation of the Declaration of United Nation, signed by a wider range of allied countries on January 1, 1942. Question: why the same Churchill, who rejected Wilsonian self-determination 20 years earlier, now agreed to it with Roosevelt? Answer: he had no choice, he desperately needed the US to enter the war. Self-determination is explicitly laid out in the charter of the UN. The UN starts deconstructing colonialism – with the help of self-determination principle. However, the action goes on for decades. Some countries gain their independence only in the 1970s.

2pm Office hours with Lelia. I asked about the comparison prompt ("Compare causes and outcome of Iranian and Ottoman constitutional revolutions"), about how to write something meaningful and interesting in this form and not just list differences and commonalities. She said comparison is only a tool, but this tool should be used to deliver a wider message. This message in turn can be found by looking at facts and finding a question about them, then thinking what could be the answer that becomes the message of the paper, use the comparison tool to support this message. Sounds great – I was reading the prompt too literary, as this comparison was the goal by itself. But too late, the paper is due tonight.

2:40-4pm Topology. Peano curve for constructing a surjective continuous function from I to I^2. It's like Hilbert curve, but Peano curve is harder to construct and easer to work with in proofs. Interesting. I've seen Hilbert curve is useful for linearizing a picture, so the same 2D neighborhood is within the same neighborhood on the linearized 1D scale. I think it's used in JPEG. The Peano curve is not injective: some 2D points are mapped from multiple 1D points. The proof of subjectivity uses complete metric spaces and sequences of functions. Interesting proof too – example of when complete metric spaces are useful (compact metric spaces are complete; then Peano curve represented as a sequence of functions is Cauchy, converges to I^2). Song was lecturing instead of the prof. Actually, he's great at explaining things. Students are often better than professors at explaining things.

5-6pm Middle East discussion group. To think about: all the history books that we read in the class are written by men because women are too busy to write books, apparently.

Read another paper for NLG in the evening: Image Captioning (ClipCAP). Instead of glueing image and text neural networks and fine-tuning (most popular approach until last year), they extract latent features from images, run an attention layer to find meaningful features, and then convert it to transformer tokens. Strange feeling about this class. Reading some interesting ideas, but need to practice them. But no way I can practice all of them. Have to focus on a few, and other things don't really matter that much. It's good to see one or two novel ideas in each paper, but I shouldn't worry too much about getting too deep in each of them.

Feeling tired early, bed around 11pm.

Woke up around 8:40am. Feeling tired of the week; alright, I'll sleep more tomorrow. Morning errands, then went to the lecture.

10-11:30am Modern Middle East History lecture. Continuing nationalism development in the region after WW1. Places that had never seen themselves as separate entities each claim thousands years of heritage, establish a lineage to ancient past. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. Professor: "220 years ago no-one thought about themselves as part of Iran, Syria, etc. – that was not something people would have an idea about". State education, history education reenforces the nation building.

In parallel, pan-nationalism develops. It starts with Pan-Slavism – the idea that Slavic language speaking people are somehow all part of a single "thing" (Slavic civilization?). Similarly, develops Pan-Arabism, Pan-Turanism (Turkish speaking), Pan-Islamism (on the ground of religion). If Pan-Slavism was mostly used by Russia as a tool of imperialism, then others, e.g. Pan-Arabism, were not as centralized. It is natural to feel affinity for the people that speak your language, but pan-nationalism presumes also some political alignment – and that's its central point.

The most serious conflict of interwar period is between nation states and Pan-nationalism. Cairo in Egypt becomes the center of Arab cultural life, various intellectual movements develop, Arabism; Egypt becomes the leader of Arab world. The opposition are nationalists that claim the continuity of ancient Egyptian heritage – they eventually prevail.

2:40-4pm Topology lecture. Finishing some less interesting theorems across general topology. Mostly known from analysis: complete metric spaces, Cauchy sequences, etc. The plan is to finish general topology next week and move to algebraic topology after.

6-7:30pm Sergei Guriev gave a talk about his new book "Spin Dictators". His main point is that economists and political scientists expected that economic growth would cause countries to become more democratic – but that didn't happen ("modernization theory"); instead, a new form of "softer" dictatorships developed, that he calls "spin dictators". He says the old-generation dictators "fear dictators" – those rule by fear; the new-generation spin dictators rule by deception. They are characterized by simulating democracy, manufacturing public opinion via propaganda and lies, hiding violence rather than showing it to induce fear; talking about economic development and progress.

Well, that's the book's theory – but it didn't age well. Now Guriev argues spin dictators start shifting back to the ol' good fear dictatorships: Putler this year, Erdogan showing early signs, Chavez to Maduro transition.

As of me, I'm skeptical of all these political theories trying to predict the future. Sure, there's data, there are trends across the world in how autocracies do not just tell people "we have a new tsar for you", but legitimize their rule by simulating democracies and confusing people by misinformation. But it gives us little insight into why and how: why people in autocracies behave the way they do, how dictators think, and what can we do about all that? Guriev is optimistic saying those autocracies are unsustainable, but I remain worried. Well, it's a short talk, maybe the book answer that too. Interesting topic anyway.

Feeling super tired by 10pm, but then suddenly energized again. Bed by 2am.

Woke up around 9:25am. Coffee, Choco Pie cookie, quick shower.

10-11:30am Modern Middle East Lecture. Nationalism in the Middle East after WW1. Atatürk in Turkey builds a “super secular” state, like France: secular there is understood as restriction of religion, not freedom of religion. If Armenians and Greeks are ignored, Kurds are denied its existence – “it’s just the same Turks”.

Reza Shah in Iran builds a modernized but not democratic state: the parliament is still there, but has no political power; Reza Shah kills and imprisons his opponents, creates a propaganda machine, etc as other “good” dictators. If Qajars were weak and decentralized, his policies lead to centralization of the state, spread of Farsi among all kinds of tribes, education aims the sense citizenship.

Then the Prof talked about nationalism in general in modern understanding: “imagined communities” by Benedict Anderson, “invented traditions” by Hobsbawm. I guess the point is that the ethnic/genetic factor of the national identity is very hard to justify. It’s hard to take the continuity assumption like “those people our ancestors lived here 2000 years ago, and we are their descendants” (e.g. ancient Greeks and modern Greeks).

Really: who are we etnically, and where did our ancestors come from, and how do we know that? Take me, for example: a half supposedly Ukrainian, a quoter supposedly Arab, and the other quoter is supposedly Russian, though apparently my grandmother was trying to hide her real ethnicity, and “supposedly” cause I’m assuming my other relatives didn’t try to understand their real ethnical identity, just like me. And so I had lived in Moscow and never talked about my ethnicity, passing as a usual Russian – cause I was born there, spoke the language, don't have dark skin. And so Russians live in Russia, and being not Russian in Russia is suspicious – an invitation for slurs towards self (e.g. “khokhol”), and all kinds of stereotypes. I was interested in other things; why would I try to analyze my ethnical identity only inviting troubles? I’m sure there are many people like that. In any way, the idea that a nation is a social construction sounds like an interesting hypothesis to me. The ideas of "invented tradition" are interesting too. I don't really like these often claimed idea of continuity of the far distant past society and present.

11:30-1pm Working on Topology homework. Compactness. It’s pretty cool property: once we know a set is compact we get a finite cover that is much easier to work with. I find it so amazing that reading math and nodding, and all makes sense and cool while reading it, but then doing homework opens a completely different level of understanding, and I often realize that I read but I didn’t really comprehend. No, just reading math is still cool too, sometimes, but the feeling of understanding is so deceptive; “interacting” with it is crucial. I think the same thing should apply to reading: a read book doesn’t count if you don’t discuss it, or write about it, or reflect in some other way.

1-2:30pm History of China lecture. Not my class, I just sat down in the lecture room and listened to what they talk about while working on my homework. The class has so much less energy than our Modern Middle East history: the Prof’s voice is monotone, the students are young and chatting on their laptops (we have quite a few 60+ year old students in the Middle East class). They covered Tang-Song transition, roughly 800-1200 time frame. I’m not very interested in history older than 1800, but I found a few interesting points. Three dynasties succeeded each other: Khitan, Jurchen Jin, then Mongols. Khitans are proto-mongols, but their name is still used for “China” in many European languages (e.g. “Китай” in Russian, or “Catai” in Spanish). Buddhism was in decline (“The Buddha was a barbarian” by Shi Jie), then neo-confucian revival, some kind of system of philosophy around life, encouragement of study and “investigation of things” (gewu). Then the monotone voice of the Prof made sense, it was removing unnecessary excitement from the study and encouraged deeper thought (I was thinking more of topology though).

2:40-4pm Topology. We took a bit of detour and jumped ahead: the Prof showed us retractions. Many interesting geometrical examples. Disk does not retract on its circumference; if the center point of the disk is removed then it does retract; whaaat? Prof said the proof involves the Fundamental group but we didn’t get to yet.

Then I finished another topology problem in the library.

5-6pm The Middle East seminar. A lot of discussion about coming up paper, then we talked about Reza Shah. Interesting how everyone differently perceives the readings. For me it’s another bloody tyrant, but people were much more careful in judging his legacy.

Then I did some more topology problems in Butler, grabbed food and went home. Hanging out around the house and being a mindless drone for a while. Then an idea for the last topology problem came in my mind, and I finished it. I think I did. It’s like a bunch of steps that seem to follow each other, but the conclusion is a bit surprising. Can’t check it. Mathematical logic is a dark room where I have to really on tactile sense only.

Then read a paper about risks and problems of language models. The ethics part of the class tomorrow. Well, it’s all part of popular science now.

Played some Humankind before bed. I like how your nation is not a single culture, but with progression replaced by new culture. My Egyptian culture was replaced by French. I’m sure a lot of players hate this concept.

Bed after 2am.

Woke up before 9am. Checking the news, on the phone (aka the horror box), then coffee, cottage cheese with granola, maple syrup, grapes; watched Democracy Now! – oh, that's been disappointing. They keep inviting these freaks, calling for negotiations. No, I'm for negotiations too – but after Russia withdraws its forces.

10-11:30am Middle East lecture: Turkey and Iran after WW1. After the war French and British rule the whole world affairs, Americans arrive at the scene, try to participate in negotiations, but lack any expertise, have little to no impact. All 19th century Americans wanted to avoid getting involved in any European wars; it changed with Woodrow Wilson. He picks Lenin's idea of nations' right for self-determination and started promoting it, and the League of Nation, calls it the "war to end all wars". But in the end American senate didn't rectify the League of Nations, Wilson dies. The French and British just divided the Middle East however they wanted. France gets Syria, separates Lebanon as a Christian enclave. Britain gets Iraq (countless troubles keeping it until its formal independence in 1932), and Palestine (divides it, and gives part of it to an allied Arab family to create the country of Jordan).

11:30-1pm some shallow work, then lunch. It was drizzling outside, warm, but moody due to the rain. I grabbed another coffee after lunch, but it kept raining and being moody.

1-2pm Prof Kh's Office Hours. We discussed Cantor set topology (I'm still finding new things about it), compact sets, quotient maps. I tried to bring up the topic of glueing squares and disks, but he said it's later.

2:40-4pm Topology Compact sets and stuff from Analysis, blah blah, theorem lemma theorem, then the Lebesgue number. I got super sleepy.

Then I went downstairs to the math library, opened my laptop, put my head next to it, and dreamed some sunny fields, green grass, blue sky, and whatnot. Yes, I'm one of those strange people taking naps in the library.

Then worked until 7pm. Strange setup, I have 3 primary machines – M1 mac, my old mac mini, and a Win with a good GPU – all different architectures, and then it all synchronizes via Dropbox and runs one different executables. Poor's people parallelization.

Dinner at home: stir-fried yakisoba noodles with cauliflower, mushrooms, garlic, tomato, beef slices. Cauliflower is a good match. Looking into the progress bar, then YouTube, and then back.

B says almost all her family in China is in lockdown now. Sister is locked in her office, and they don't let her go home. Crazy stuff, but I should say no more. The spies are watching. I'm asking if it'll get better after the party conference, she says everyone hopes so.

Running things, seeing them fail in the evening. Bed by 2am.

Woke up without around 7:30am – too early; back to sleep. Strange dreams, very engaging, mind-absorbing; it’s too early to get up. Looking at my phone – what’s on the news? It’s 9:40am and I have the lecture at 10. How do I even remember when I have so realistic dreams? No time for the news. Quick shower, no breakfast, getting a coffee at Uris hall, 15 minutes late to the lecture.

10-11:30am Middle East history lecture. WW1 – complex topic; but we only focused on the Ottoman empire. Basically, the Ottomans were destroyed after WW1, but they also had the highest proportion of population lost, huge devastation, and Armenian genocide – partially due to welcoming Russian invasion, partially because of being too liberal. Still I don’t understand why modern Turkey won’t admit the genocide. It seems very similar to Holodomor and its Russia’s denial – especially since much of Armenian genocide cause by famine – but I should look more carefully into this.

11:30-12:30pm looking over Topology practice problems, definitions. Definitions, definitions, it’s important to remember them right.

12:30-1pm lunch at Barnard. Whoops, I’m not allowed to eat at Barnard; it turns out. So I just grabbed a burritto bowl at Diana.

1-2pm Office Hours with Khovanov. If I had 3 more hours, I would probably figure it out on my own, but it’s good to be able to get some help and speed it up.

Then I lost my jersey cause it was too warm outside and I took it off, and I kept looking for it until 2:40.

2:40-4pm Topology midterm. Khovanov brought my jacket that I was trying to find the past hour. The midterm was not too bad, but I probably made a bunch of pity mistakes. The beginning was harder, then I realized the end was easier, then I was trying to double-check, and the time was over.

4-6pm working in the Math library. On a break I went to the stacks and picked up Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica. I was surprised a lot of it is written in mathematical logic notation (quantifiers, implications, etc), pages after pages, very little English – unlike any other math book I looked into before. I should probably write a more thoughtful post about it.

6-9pm walked home, it was 72 degrees and sunny; last two days of summer, according to the weatherman. Dinner, YouTube news (Noam Chomsky complaining about US refusing to talk with Russia– which makes a bit of sense), then I finished work and decided to watch a movie: The Last Emperor (1987). Seems like an interesting movie. I watched a half; 3 hours movie is a TV show of which episodes you decide.

But watching it I kept thinking of the role of nationalism in the modern society, and how it is an invention of the 18-19th century; how Chinese are identified as Chinese and how separate they are from the western dude – in the movie. I kept thinking how the movie is the history of the West, not the East, – take for example English spoken by the characters in the movie with the stereotypical Asian accent; you can’t find modern movies like that anymore. Truely an document of “barbarianism”. And Nationalism appears to be a product of globalization – given all differences it is “natural” to cling to the like-minded.

Woke up at 8:45am, the first alarm, then one blink of an eye and it was 9:25. I pushed myself to get up. Remember, I was a kid, and I couldn't push myself to get up? Now I'm a grown up.

10-11:30am Modern Middle East lecture. Religion and social trends in the Ottoman Empire. Then some Iran. Iran was more interesting. They are similar to the Ottomans, but also opposed them in many ways. They are Shia (vs Sunni in the Ottoman Empire), politically very decentralized, and weak in many ways – in the 19th century. Also very large, starting from the Russian borders in the North, India to the East (no Pakistan yet), the Ottomans to the West, and the sea to the South. The name Iran came later; they were called Qajars.

Working on Topology homework, then Office Hours with Prof Kh. He seems nice, and we even spoke Russian. We discussed limit points in I^2 and then I asked some more questions about the homework. He asked if I "was from Soviet Union". I didn't hear this question in this form yet. He looked a bit uneasy about speaking Russian when other students were around.

Then I got a quick lunch: tortas from a food truck on the Broadway. Damn it was big. But kind of nicer than in Mexico. There were tomatoes, and even avocados. Not only cabbage, like the 50 cents tortas in Mexico. But too big. I should rather eat sushi or a cup of soup.

2:40-4pm Topology. It starts getting interesting. The homeomorphism between an infinite product of discrete topologies and the Cantor's set is exciting. I should look into it more carefully. Seems like another way of understanding the real numbers (Dedekind cut is my favorite).

4-5pm finishing the homework. Then reading some Hourani about Politics of Notables. Basically, we don't have good sources to write history from. We write a history about notables. Then it goes into who were the notable of the Ottoman Empire. Quite boring reading.

6:30-9pm Screening a Serbian documentary called the Graduates at the Harriman Institute. The creator Dušan Gajić and the film directory introduced the movie, then we watched the film. It turned out pretty engaging, and reminded my dirt poor childhood in the 90s. I guess Russia was not as politically disturbed as Serbia though.

Then we had a lively discussion with the creators. It's a nice movie, and nice form of telling a personal story; inspired. It generated a lot discussion about how dare you tell a story of a country from so personal perspective, how could you not include this and that. I kind of liked it. It's the kind of story you can hear from knowing a Serbian person; you know it's complicated, but you still value it for its personal touch. Serbia is defined more by resentment rather by anything else; like Russia.

Then we went home with B. I cooked a small dinner cause we both overate at lunch. Leftover portion of soup, bit of couscous, a sausage, quick salad. I was telling her about recent Russian news, and mobilization, and then I looked into my military document and it says "soldier; ready for service with limitations". I was thinking I would be freaking out now if I was living in Russia.

Some Valheim: I just died carrying an egg to the mountain, and I was trying to move the portal. Now need to sail to that location. Damn. Turned it off till later.

Bed around 2am.