Happy New Year 2023!

It is a new year, 2023. Happy New Year!

It may be a wild ride, but let's hang in there!

Note: I do know that we are already somewhat into the new year ... but I didn't find time (or willpower, perhaps) to put a new post together, so the timing is a bit weird ...

In 2022, the scary Covid-19 pandemic became mostly an epidemic and is on its way to end up as an unpleasant endemic.

The scary Russian imperialism became even scarier Russian imperialism,

now mostly focused around the Black Sea but with more nuclear sabre rattling and genocidal flair.

(I hope they lose.)

The unreasonably low inflation and interest rates

became an unreasonably high inflation (with interest rates somewhat catching up).

As always, each year the dictionary people present their "word of the year", best expressing that year's zeitgeist (look it up 😉).

Year 2022 was no different.

After vax in 2021, Oxford English Dictionary chose goblin mode 🔗, which means behaviour "unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy".

Merriam-Webster went a somewhat similar route: after vaccine in 2021, it chose gaslighting 🔗 for 2022. It means - roughly - "grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage", but can be interpreted in a more sinister or more benign light (hehe), depending on whom you ask.

Note: The 1938 novel Gas Light was set in 1880's London. To drive his wife insane, the bad guy in that story kept dimming the lights in their gas lit house while pretending that he didn't.

Collins chose permacrisis 🔗, which means "extended period of insecurity and instability".

There were also new words made "official" in 2022, too, like copypasta, deplatform, whataboutism or amirite (which mean "data copied & spread online", "taking communication platform away", "responding to accusations by pointing at someone's else flaws" and conversational/humorous "am I right"). They, too, can tell you about the zeitgeist of our times.

Note: when you are looking up the term zeitgeist and its origins, don't get stuck too much on Hegel, because thinking about the dichotomy of his dialectic dualism could lead you to Cartesian anxiety - and that would be no bueno...

But it would express the zeitgeist of our world well, dare I say 😉.

And what did the year bring in math and science?

In mathematics, the 19-th century Riemann hypothesis still remains unsolved, but its simpler analogue, subconvexity, has just been solved 🔗.

AI was applied to improving ways of matrix multiplication 🔗 and geometry got new ways of interpolation 🔗.

Topology and graph theory improved their ways, too. (But let's be honest: how many people really care?)

The world of physics observed crazy things, like tetraneutrons 🔗

and meddled into other disciplines, like ultra-cold chemistry or new medicine (with flash proton therapy 🔗).

NASA showed that one can change an asteroid orbit.

Fermilab showed that W boson is heavier 🔗 than it should be, which could potentially break some of the modern physics.

Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) achieved fusion ignition 🔗.

In biology, an "immortal" jellyfish was found that can reset 🔗 into a younger self.

Others noticed that rodents stop aging 🔗 in hibernation and fertility researchers noticed 🔗 that bull sperm fares much better if travelling in groups.

In Australia, they grew brain cells 🔗 in a lab and taught them play "Pong".

In Finland, they found evidence 🔗 that men age faster than women.

In the world of chemistry, 2022 was full of excitement. People talked about sodium batteries 🔗 (a better alternative to the ubiquitous lithium ones), nanomaterials and nanozymes 🔗,

aerogels 🔗 , textile displays,

SNA vaccines 🔗 , VR modelling and all that jazz ...

And finally, the long awaited James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its destination, L2 Lagrange point, unfolded and cooled itself

and started snapping pictures

from the beginning of the Universe. Cool! Now we'll know more about what we don't know...

JWST started looking at closer unknowns, too. For example, the "nearby" TRAPPIST-1 system 🔗 might have habitable worlds - we don't know; JWST is currently the only tool that can sort that out. (Well, by "nearby" I meant 39 light years.) 😲

By the way, it was Lagrange, who was instrumental in decimalization of everything possible, including the metric system for units.

I'm not a fan: the duodecimal (base 12) system proposed by his colleagues would have been better... But, as the head of the commission, Lagrange fought hard against it.

His predecessor, Lavoisier - the "father of modern chemistry",