John Napier of Merchiston, 1616
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It's Sunday afternoon, September 27, 2026, 14:37, and I've updated this Web page with some graphics,some re-formatting and Pickles of the North's piece about that book she reviewed and how ancient Romans would recognize the Trump Administration. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ The usual mad rush to get this Web page posted, with the storm howling outside. Mornings like this make it nice to not have to struggle into WBAI's Galactic Headquarters in downtown Brooklyn. The bit about math, and logarithms made up the bulk of the program, but there's a bit more. I'll try to get around to adding to this Web page soon.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday October 14, 2026, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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I read a piece in The New York Times by Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend about math needing to be done by humans. They noted that OpenAI put 10,000 A.I. agents against the Navier-Stokes problem, and they claimed that they'd solved it in just 88 hours. Some are saying that the A.I. didn't actually solve it, but just talked around it. They noted that it's important for people to do the math rather than just getting answers from the A.I. agent.
In the Times article Strogatz and Townsend note that 27 winners of the Fields medal, the biggest honor in mathematics, have signed a joint declaration stating that solving famous open problems is not, in itself, the goal. Such problems are
And the A.I. does not give anyone that. If the A.I. gets to landmarks and lighthouses,
they write, whose deeper purpose is to guide mathematicians toward conceptual understanding and insight.hollow out,
as the Fields Medal winners put it, the subject of mathematics then people are not going to learn a lot of things. Often the mistakes and errors made while figuring things out are what really are most important because they give humans the new ideas they need for all sorts of things.
An example of this, among many, would be the struggle of John Napier the 8th Laird of Merchiston who discovered logarithms.
Along with writing a paper about defense of the realm, which seems to have included his idea about a primitive tank, he tackled mathematics. One of the things that people had to struggle with in the old days was plain arithmetic. Adding and subtracting were pretty easy, but some multiplications and divisions were hard to do. All of the calculations had to be done either in your head or on paper or a blackboard or something. So people devised many ways to get numbers multiplied and divided. Some were pretty involved. John Napier figured that by using some numbers as substitutes for others he could get a better result when having to multiply and divide large numbers and numbers with a lot of decimals. Napier worked on this for a while and then discovered that there seemed to be a pattern in what the results were showing. He worked on this and eventually produced his master work Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio in 1614. He had found something new to mathematics. He had found something that wasn't just a faster way to do some arithmetic, but a realm of mathematics that had never been dreamed of before. As it turns out the basis of what are called Natural, or Napierian logarithms is the idea of using exponents to determine numbers. The bottom line is that in order to multiply or divide numbers you just added or subtracted some other numbers. It was a lot easier to do.
An English mathematician named Briggs was very impressed with Napier's book and used the information to create tables of common logarithms, which most people learn in school. The common logarithm used the number 10 as a base and it's how most things get calculated these days. The natural or Napierian logarithms use as a base the irrational, transcendental number 2.718281828459045235360287471.... which goes on to infinity.
A Swiss mathematician named Euler did a lot of work on logarithms and refined the field into something immensely powerful. But to get to all of this Napier had to stumble around for a while, and he, and others, had to learn from their mistakes and the correcting of their misconceptions.
We got a hell of as lot of math from this activity. People understood parts of what they were working on, others understood other parts. Logarithms created new fields of endeavor for mathematics. And the practical things that came out of the invention, or discovery, of logarithms has produced much of what we see in the world today.
So just chucking big math problems into an A.I. and letting it spit out a final answer will get you the answer but you may end up not understanding a whole hell of a lot more. It's like the kid who cheats on his or her math homework, the kid will get the answer right but he or she will not learn how to get the answer and tackle other math problems.
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Pickles here, with a quote from an ancient historian. The quote was used in a book published in 2026, that we discussed last week, The Lost Voices of Pompeii by Doctor Jess Venner, and said quote was written almost 2,000 years ago by the Roman historian Sallust, who started out as Gaius Sallustius Crispis, a military man and contemporary of Julius Caesar who was at one point given the Governorship of Numidia (present day Libya and Tunisia). He proved to be a corrupt and avaricious governor, ended up disgraced and needing a new field of employment, so he chose historian!
The quote is from his account of Cataline's War,
which is about one of Rome's civil wars. It was translated into English from Latin in 1921, by John C. Rolfe, who at that time was Professor of Latin at the University of Pennsylvania. Sallust really knows what he is talking about from both observation and personal experience, and given what has been happening with this current Administration, things haven't much changed!
Here is the quote from Cataline's War:
Hence the lust for power first, then for money, grew upon them; these were, I may say, the root of all evils. For avarice destroyed honour, integrity, and all other noble qualities; taught in their place insolence, cruelty, to neglect the gods, to set a price on everything. Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue; to value friendships and enmities not on their merits but by the standard of self-interest, and to show a good front rather than a good heart. At first these vices grew slowly, from time to time they were punished; finally, when the disease had spread like a deadly plague, the state was changed and a government second to none in equity and excellence became cruel and intolerable.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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