someoneToU

ll श्री सूर्य नमस्कार मंत्रं ll

ॐ ध्यायेस्सदा सवितृमंडलमध्यवर्ती

नारायणस्सरसिजासन सन्निविष्टः

केयूरवान् मकरकुंडलवान् किरीटी

हारी हिरण्मयवपुः धृतशंखचक्रः

ॐ मित्राय नमः

ॐ रवये नमः

ॐ सूर्याय नमः

ॐ भानवे नमः

ॐ खगाय नमः

ॐ पूष्णे नमः

ॐ हिरण्यगर्भाय नमः

ॐ मरीचये नमः

ॐ आदित्याय नमः

ॐ सवित्रे नमः

ॐ अर्काय नमः

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ॐ श्रीसवितृसूर्यनारायणाय नमः

आदित्यस्य नमस्कारान् ये कुर्वंति दिने दिने

Forsythia, Chionadoxa, Hellebore and Crocus

A Bird on a Hazel Branch (1651).

Miniature by Shafi’ Abbasi (1628–1674).

David Collection

Sunflower

This impressionistic bloom was “a beautiful mistake,” according to Chia-Chien Kao, an undergaduate student in Che-Jen Lin’s group at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. Kao was recrystallizing a chromophore from dichloromethane and accidentally let all the solvent evaporate from the flask. As the contents of the flask dried out, they arranged themselves into a ring of “petals” that looked like it came straight out of a van Gogh painting. The flower was even more striking under ultraviolet light: the crystals near the center emitted green light while the powdery petals glowed yellow.

The chromophore Kao was using is based on the chromophore from green fluorescent protein, a popular fluorescent label used by scientists to examine cells’ inner workings. Kao is researching how its emission colors change with stimuli such as hydrogen bonding or acid-base interactions, and how those changes could be used for sensing biomolecules. —Brianna Barbu  

Submitted by Chia-Chien Kao

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In the 1960s, the Soviet mathematician Victor Glushkov proposed a nationwide computer network to help planners allocate resources. With the help of the English cybernetician Stafford Beer, Salvador Allende’s administration in Chile tried something similar in  the 1970s, called Cybersyn. Neither project got very far. Glushkov’s idea ran into resistance from the Soviet leadership, while Pinochet’s coup ended Cybersyn before it was fully implemented. However, the dream lives on.

Today, digital socialism could obviously do much more. The internet would make it possible to funnel large quantities of information from all over the world into planning systems, almost instantaneously. Gigantic leaps in computer power would make it possible to process all of this data rapidly. Meanwhile, machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence could sift through it, to discover emergent patterns and adjust resource allocations appropriately. In The People’s Republic of Walmart, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue that large companies like Walmart and Amazon already use these digital tools for internal planning—and that they now need only be adapted for socialist use.

While there are certainly emancipatory potentials here, they are far from adequate to the task of planning production in a post-capitalist world. The digital socialist focus on algorithms presents a serious problem. It risks constraining the decision-making processes of a future socialist society to focus narrowly on optimization: producing as much as possible using the fewest resources. To travel down this road is to ignore and discard vast amounts of qualitative information, which remains crucial to achieving many of the ends and goals of a socialist society.