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Hello, welcome to a new edition of “Cultívate”, the newsletter with the most interesting science and culture of recent days, in addition to our recommended regional panoramas.
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The main thing: next week Puerto de Ideas Biobío starts, which will be held for the first time in Concepción and Talcahuano, and which will focus on the relationship between humanity and nature, with luxury guests, among others, Rashid Sumaila -professor of Nigerian-Canadian ocean economics-, Diego Golombek -Biologist and Argentine scientific popularizer-, marine biologist Camila Fernández and actress Leonor Varela.
In this issue we also review the Salman Rushdie case, Hollywood apologizes to the indigenous people and why quantum pseudotelepathy was right.
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1- PORT OF IDEAS WARNS ABOUT THE OCEAN IN DANGER
A key theme in the event that brings together the best of scientists, artists and intellectuals of the moment in Chile, will be the importance of the sea and the oceans for the planet.
Max Bello, an internationally recognized specialist in ocean policies, will be in charge of opening the event, in a talk where he will refer to the care of the oceans and the importance of generating marine protected areas.
Known for his transversal contacts, his role has been key in the creation of marine parks in Chile, an initiative carried out during the mandates of Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera, which at the Summit of the Americas was also amplified to the rest of the continent, thanks to President Gabriel Boric.
After the embarrassment of what happened in the Senate with the Fisheries Act, it will also be interesting to hear from Rashid Sumaila, a Professor of Nigerian-Canadian Ocean Economics, who is one of the leading experts in the debate on the sustainability of the sector.
The bioeconomist will talk about how to reconcile the economic role of fisheries and ocean conservation. To this newspaper he already commented on a truism: if there are no fish, there is no industry.
In addition to the experts, from August 22, the Dante Theater of Talcahuano will be the stage where the 1st Festival de Cine del Mar will be held, which has the special support of BHP Foundation, within the framework of Puerto de Ideas Biobío, dedicated to documentaries that invite reflection on the sea and the oceans, either addressing its themes from the scientific, cultural or artistic point of view.
This Festival will have an international documentary competition, to which more than 1,000 films from different countries applied. The jury will be chaired by the outstanding actress Leonor Varela and, in addition, will have a billboard that will exhibit various film productions for free.
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2- SALMAN RUSHDIE, THE SCAPEGOAT
Following the cowardly attack by Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie last week in a town in upstate New York, The Conversation published an interesting article about how his case represents the complex relationship between the West and Islam.
Rushdie was in Chautauqua speaking to 2,500 people about the plight of Ukrainian writers, in this case because of the war, something he knows well after being sentenced to death in 1989 by Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for his book The Satanic Verses, published in 1988 and banned that same year in his native country.
Since then, he has had to live in hiding for “blaspheming” the Prophet Muhammad, one of the worst sins in Islamic culture. Its attacker, an American of Lebanese origin, was born after the publication of the book, which demonstrates the power that a text can have.
For the author of the article, Vijay Mishra, a professor at Murdoch University in Australia, the Rushdie case “has exposed lines of fracture between the West and Islam that previously remained hidden. These fracture lines hinted at a radical difference between what constitutes artistic responsibility in the West and in the East.”
“Rushdie’s experience also poses the challenge of how to negotiate that freedom between cultures, especially with cultures governed by moral and religious absolutes.two-defined,” he adds.
We will now have to see how the author recovers, victim of an intolerance that, unfortunately, multiplies in the world on so many fronts and motives.
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3- THE MATHEMATICAL FAILURE IN COLOR THEORY
For more than 100 years, the scientific community has adhered to a paradigm developed by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger and other scientists, such as Bernhard Riemann and Hermann von Helmholtz. And, to this day, this paradigm is used by scientists and industry to describe how the eye distinguishes one color from another.
Now, a novel study has uncovered a major flaw in the three-dimensional mathematical space that underlies the way we understand color perception, which could boost visualizations of scientific data, improve televisions, and recalibrate the textile and paint industry.
“Proving one of them wrong is pretty much a scientist’s dream,” said Roxana Bujack, a computer scientist with a background in mathematics and lead author of the paper published by a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Our research shows that the current mathematical model of how the eye perceives color differences is incorrect,” Bujack said.
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4- “QUANTUM PSEUDOTELEPATHY” WAS RIGHT
A group of Chinese scientists has published a paper on “quantum pseudotelepathy” in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Specifically, using entangled quantum particles, researchers have managed to overcome the limits of classical probability and statistics. As quantum physics explains, things aren’t necessarily there if you don’t look at them.
To illustrate this point, physicists designed a series of theoretical matchmaking games in which two players have a limited probability of winning as long as they cannot communicate with each other – if the measurements are limited to revealing reality as it exists – but which can be systematically conquered using quantum pseudotelepathy.
In other words, the two players, if they take advantage of the quantum effects, can always win. Quite a challenge.
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5- HOLLYWOOD APOLOGIZES TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
I remember that as a child, in The Old West movies, cowboys were always “the civilization”, attacked from time to time by “the savages”, that is, “the Indians”, whether they were Apaches or Sioux, who were hopelessly “the bad guys”. The latter shouted, used feathers and spoke with grammatical errors. No one ever said that in reality the whites were arriving in a territory already inhabited, precisely by those indigenous people.
Well, in 1973, an indigenous woman took the stage at the Oscars to complain about this Hollywood attitude. It was the activist Sacheen Littlefeather, and she did it on behalf of Marlon Brando, who had approached the Amerindian Movement, when it was due to receive its award for best actor for The Godfather.
And while his brief speech was applauded by the audience, he was also greeted with boos, racist gestures and subsequent jokes from gala presenters Raquel Welch and Clint Eastwood.
Well, this week, the Hollywood Academy announced that it sent him a letter of apology.
“When you took the Oscar stage in 1973 not to accept the Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando, in protest of the film industry’s misrepresentation and mistreatment of Native Americans, you made a powerful statement that continues to remind us of the need for respect and the importance of human dignity,” David Rubin said in the letter. current president of the Academy.
“The abuse you endured for that statement was unjustified. The emotional toll you’ve experienced and the damage to your own career in our industry are irreparable. For too long the courage you showed has not been recognized. For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our most sincere admiration,” he added.
She accepted the apology. Not only that: on September 17, Littlefeather will be the protagonist of an event organized at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moment.
Good for Hollywood. Better late than never.
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