Today, November 30, is my last day at The Wire Science and The Wire. I was part of their founding team and the seven years since have made for an exciting and enriching ride.
The two things I’m most grateful for were all the new friends I made in this time and the freedom to imagine a ‘The Wire‘s brand of science journalism’. We published a lot of science, health, environment and spaceflight writing of the very highest standard, and it’s my privilege to count the bylines of several stellar writers on the pages of The Wire Science.
Many of our articles have won awards and, equally importantly, renewed interest in areas of study and work, became books and teaching materials, the starting points for PhD programmes and, perhaps most gratifying of all, prompted people to think about science a bit differently.
Come January 2023, I will be joining The Hindu in a role that I’m quite excited by. I’m especially looking forward to focusing on my own work, which I haven’t been able to do for a while. Running The Wire Science was (and is) an exacting task and at The Hindu I’m also looking forward to lightening some of that load.
Thank you all for reading what The Wire Science has published – and, I hope, will continue to do so. Going ahead, please also divert a little bit of your reading time to The Hindu. 🙂 I’m counting on your constructive criticism, as always.
Recently, a Chinese-American mathematician named Yitang Zhang claimed to have resolved the Landau-Siegel zeroes conjecture, which is related to the Riemann hypothesis. (Specifically, disproving the conjecture brings us a small stop closer to proving the Riemann hypothesis.) His paper hasn’t been validated verified by independent mathematicians yet, but it was newsworthy nonetheless because Zhang has previously claimed to have cracked the problem only to retract it after others found some mistakes in his proof.
It also matters because any step, big or small, towards the Riemann hypothesis is important progress. Georg Bernhard Riemann formulated the hypothesis in 1859, and it is yet to be proved. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute included it in its list of Millennium Problems: solving one will fetch the solver a prize of $1 million. Yet as important as the work of number theorists has been, to inch closer to a solution, the hypothesis itself is a thing of infinite beauty with intriguing parallels to ideas in far-flung fields of study.
Please jump over the next two paragraphs if you’re familiar with the Riemann zeta function and its nontrivial zeroes.
The hypothesis is a statement about the set of possible solutions to the Riemann zeta function. This function, Riemann found, could estimate the number of prime numbers between two points on the real number line. Its zeroes – the inputs for which the function has a value of zero – lie on the complex plane, i.e. they are complex numbers of the form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers. ‘a’ is called the real part and ‘b’ is called the imaginary part. i is of course the imaginary number: i = (-1)1/2 There are two kinds of zeroes, trivial and nontrivial. In trivial zeroes, the value of a is a negative integer (-2, -4, -6, -8, …). The Riemann hypothesis states that the value of a for which ‘a + bi’ is a nontrivial zero of the function is always 1/2.
This is a powerful statement if you think about it. Mathematicians (and for that matter everyone curious) have been keen to understand the pattern in which prime numbers are distributed on the number line. Finding a function that defines this pattern would unlock several mysteries in the annals of number theory, as well as in quantum physics and anywhere else where prime numbers make an appearance. If the Riemann hypothesis is proved, it will mean that a function that can specify the number of prime numbers between any two numbers has a real part that is either 1/2 or a negative integer. This will be predictability where there once was only chaos. More specifically, when the values of the trivial and nontrivial zeroes of the zeta function are plotted on a graph, the values of the real part will prevent the dots from fluctuating all over the place and constrain them within a particular range. And something about the picture that emerges could speak to mathematicians about where the secret pattern to prime-number distribution could be hiding.
Scientists have already found mysterious similarities between the distribution of nontrivial zeroes of the zeta function and quantum physics. I found a particularly evocative example in an article from 2003, entitled The Spectrum of Riemannium, written by Brian Hayes. He compared several one-dimensional distributions collected from mathematics as well as reality. Each distribution was distinguished by the distance between two datapoints. The most straightforward was the periodic distribution: a line drawn every 2 units, say (see image below). For the random distribution, a randomiser would spit out a number and a line would be drawn after those many units. For a jiggled distribution, lines are placed in a periodic pattern and each line is then moved (or “jiggled”) by a small, random amount. The distribution of zeroes of the zeta function arises when a line is drawn at every point on the number line where there is a zero.
Then there are “erbium” and “eigenvalues”. The former distribution shows the possible energy levels of the nucleus of the erbium-166 atom. This is determined by the energies and the electromagnetic properties of the nucleus’s constituent particles (68 protons and 98 neutrons). In the latter half of the 20th century, physicists found that the energy levels of a heavy nucleus were statistically similar to the eigenvalues of a type of matrix called a random Hermitian matrix. Every matrix is associated with a polynomial function. The exact solutions to the polynomial are called the matrix’s eigenvalues. If the matrix has P2 elements, it will have P eigenvalues. In a Hermitian matrix, the values of the elements are mirrored across a diagonal running from the top left to the bottom right. In a random Hermitian matrix, the value of each element is chosen at random. In Hayes’s image, the distribution shows 100 eigenvalues of a random Hermitian matrix with 3002 elements.
With these distributions in front of him, Hayes writes: “In analyzing patterns of this kind, there is seldom much hope of predicting the positions of individual elements in a series. The aim is statistical understanding – a description of a typical pattern rather than a specific one.” One of his measures of choice of statistical similarity is the pair-correlation function. If you specify a distance d, the pair-correlation function will tell you how many pairs of lines in the distribution are separated by d. Not every distribution will have the same function, of course: its form differs varies according to the properties of the distribution it is working on.
As Hayes narrates, in 1972, Hugh Montgomery and Freeman Dyson found that the pair-correlation functions of the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function and the eigenvalues of random Hermitian matrices were an exact match. Given that the distribution of the eigenvalues of the same matrices are statistically similar to the energy levels of heavy nuclei, like that of erbium-166, Hayes writes: “Is it all just a fluke, this apparent link between matrix eigenvalues, nuclear physics and zeta zeros? It could be, although a universe with such chance coincidences in its fabric might be considered even stranger than one with mysterious causal connections.” There are other connections between the Riemann zeta function and quantum physics (such as the representation of the function as a trace equation with applications in the study of quantum chaos) – but just this should suffice, I think, to illustrate how captivating the Riemann hypothesis is.
It is also tempting to imagine that in this day and age of superspecialised mathematics and advanced computing techniques and hardware, any problem that remains unsolved for long enough obviously accrues a kind of legendary status but also implies the existence of roots that run deep into disparate fields of scientific and mathematical inquiry – or its ‘unsolved’ status wouldn’t survive attacks from so many possible angles nor from the wisdom founded on the knowledge of so many concepts and meta-concepts.
I found Hayes’s 2003 article when I was rereading the work of physicist S. Pancharatnam (1934-1969) and wanted to learn more about Michael Berry, who is well-known for his description of the Berry phase. Pancharatnam had originally derived a parameter of polarised light called the geometric phase. To quote from a post I wrote in 2018 about Pancharatnam’s work: “All waves can be described by their phase and amplitude. When the values of both parameters are changed at the same time and in slow-motion, one can observe the wave evolving through different states. In some cases, when the phase and amplitude are cycled through a series of values and brought back to their original, the wave looks different from what it did at the start. The effective shift in phase is called the geometric phase.” In 1986, Berry – who was then unaware of Pancharatnam’s work – provided a generalised description of geometric phases, today called the Berry phase.
The first citation in Hayes’s article is to a 1999 article coauthored by Berry and Jonathan Keating, entitled The Riemann Zeros and Eigenvalue Asymptotics. This was a technical article and beyond my ability to parse, but knowing that Berry had studied the Riemann zeta function, I searched the web for other, more accessible descriptions of his insights – and an equally fascinating article published in 1998. It was entitled A Prime Case of Chaos, written by Barry Cipra as part of his acclaimed ‘What’s Happening in the Mathematical Sciences?’ series. Cipra’s article begins with an image resembling the one above from Hayes’s article. (If you’re interested in its origins, this is the attribution: “‘Chaotic motion and random matrix theories’ by O. Bohigas and M. J. Giannoni in Mathematical and Computational Methods in Nuclear Physics, J. M. Gomez et al., eds., Lecture Notes in Physics, volume 209 (1984), pp. 1–99.”.) In this article, Berry is quoted more extensively – as a “quantum chaologist”.
I hope Cipra won’t mind my reproducing the contents of one particular ‘box’ in full below:
Prime numbers are music to Michael Berry’s ears.
Berry, a theoretical physicist at the University of Bristol, is one of the leading theorists in the study of quantum chaos. And that’s brought him to a keen appreciation of the Riemann zeta function.
Prime numbers are a lot like musical chords, Berry explains. A chord is a combination of notes played simultaneously. Each note is a particular frequency of sound created by a process of resonance in a physical system, say a saxophone. Put together, notes can make a wide variety of music – everything from Chopin to Spice Girls. In number theory, zeroes of the zeta function are the notes, prime numbers are the chords, and theo- rems are the symphonies.
Of course chords need not be concordant; a lot of vibrations are nothing more than noise. The Riemann Hypothesis, however, imposes a pleasing harmony on the number-theoretic, zeta-zero notes. “Loosely speaking, the Riemann Hypothesis states that the primes have music in them,” Berry says.
But Berry is looking for more than a musical analogy; he hopes to find the actual instrument behind the zeta function – a mathematical drum whose natural frequencies line up with the zeroes of the zeta function. The answer, he thinks, lies in quantum mechanics. “There are vibrations in classical physics, too,” he notes, “but quantum mechanics is a richer, more varied source of vibrating systems than any classical oscillators that we know of.”
What if someone finds a counterexample to the Riemann Hypothesis? “It would destroy this idea of mine,” Berry readily admits – one reason he’s a firm believer in Riemann’s remark. A counterexample would effectively end physicists’ interest in the zeta function. But one question would linger, he says: “How could it be that the Riemann zeta function so convincingly mimics a quantum system without being one?”
One of these counterexamples is the Landau-Siegel zeroes conjecture. It states that there could be nontrivial zeroes of the zeta function whose real part is not 1/2. In his new paper, Yitang Zhang has claimed that he has constrained the possibility of this conjecture being true by a significant amount. Even if he hasn’t altogether eliminated the possibility, and if his proof is verified to be valid, Berry can rest easy – or at least as easy as his tantalising question will allow.
(Addendum: Riemann is one of my favourite mathematicians. I wrote a tribute of sorts to his work in 2015.)
Featured image: Georg Bernhard Riemann in 1863. Image: Public domain (edited with Photomosh).
“Of the 1,156 publicly-listed companies, regions and cities that have so far made net-zero pledges … [more than half] are little more than vague commitments or proposals,” according to a new UN report. Even when proper promises to cut emissions are in the picture, “Audi, Volkswagen, Daimler – now Mercedes-Benz – and BMW commissioned Bosch to develop technology which they knew from the beginning violated regulatory compliance, Environmental Action Germany (DUH) said at a press conference, citing internal industry documents leaked to it this summer spanning 2006 to 2015,” Reuters reported two days ago. From cars to cities, one thing is clear: climate commitments are free, the follow-through is what matters. We’re experiencing the same thing with this year’s Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), i.e. COP27. It started off being called the “implementation COP” but looks set to end as a complete disappointment, thanks to developed countries’ reluctance to pony up for a ‘loss and damage’ fund and to adopt a framework to establish the ‘Global Goal on Adaptation’ (not to mention the suffocating conditions in which it physically took place). Within the limited context of COP27 itself, India has scored several brownie points – as it does – by pushing richer countries to up their commitments while the national government has progressively weakened environmental safeguards in India. Yes, economically developing and underdeveloped countries must have a longer runway to reaching net-zero than developed countries, but this doesn’t free any country – developed, developing or underdeveloped – from the responsibility to keep their growth and their green transition just. Many of India’s developmental tendencies are demonstrably not. A good example is its hydroelectric push in the north and the northeast, facilitated by the wilful oversight of public opinion, degrading land, more frequent floods, heightened erosion, disruptions to aquatic species and their combined consequences for the Indigenous people who depend on riparian ecosystems. But at multilateral fora, India cashed in with a 2019 policy change in which it declared large hydropower projects (>25 MW capacity) “as renewable energy sources”. This calculus obviously overlooks the lifecycle emissions of hydroelectric power and its ecological cost, more so when, as in India, the government has gone on a dam-building spree even on individual rivers. We need dams, sure, but why do they always have to be built by degrading their local environments? When the Union environment ministry submitted “India’s Long-Term Low-Carbon Development Strategy” report to the UN FCCC on November 1, India became the cynosure of many eyes at COP27 because fewer than 60 other countries had filed similar plans. Is this India cashing in again? Because, remember, commitments are free.
The actual point I wanted to make through all this was something else: spare a thought for the journalist covering the climate talks and countries’ commitments here. Do they report on announcements of commitments and therefore have lots to write about but also become part of the hype machine, do they ignore the announcements because without action they remain “blah, blah, blah”, or do they interrogate every announcement as such and become submerged in cynical thinking?
In July 2019, when the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched its Chandrayaan 2 mission, the spiritual guru Jaggi Vasudev was present in the control centre, along with other dignitaries, getting a close view of the launch from a balcony. After the launch, he was seen taking photographs with the scientists in the room. Many people (myself included) were irked as to how, of all the people ISRO could have chosen to invite for such an occasion, it picked Jaggi Vasudev, who regularly makes pseudoscientific claims in public and has floated questionable initiatives like ‘Cauvery Calling’ even as his foundation has angered locals for encroaching ecologically sensitive land, damaging water resources and farmland in Tamil Nadu. Surely there were better invitees?
A year or so later, someone who is highly likely to have been aware of the true circumstances of Jaggi’s presence in the control room told me that ISRO didn’t invite him. Jaggi just showed up at ISRO’s doorstep, and they were obligated to let him in and show him around. We had assumed there had been an invitation because it is not possible for the rest of us to simply show up and be let into the control room gallery. After the launch, Jaggi tweeted, “#Chandrayaan2 is the outcome of the brilliance and extraordinary commitment of our scientists of @ISRO and also the political will. This phenomenal achievement is the pride of our nation. Just couldn’t help being there.” The mention of ‘political will’ in that tweet was an important indication. Even if it wasn’t as ostentatious as later tweets by others would be, it didn’t prove anything. It was just of a piece with events two months later.
In September 2019, the Chandrayaan 2 mission’s lander crashed on the lunar surface, leaving only the orbiter part of the mission to succeed. But the then ISRO chairman K. Sivan dubbed the mission a “98% success” (without explaining his calculus) even as the rest of the organisation withdrew into a shell, cutting the information flow into a feeble trickle. We didn’t know that Vikram, the lander, had crashed or the telemetry data based on which ISRO had reached that conclusion, until later.
Today, on November 18, 2022, an Indian company called Skyroot Aerospace launched its first indigenous rocket from ISRO’s spaceport in Sriharikota – an important achievement, a milestone in the country’s reforms to increase private sector involvement in the spaceflight sector. But before and after the launch itself, the telecast was concerned inordinately with the glory of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and of his government. Piyush Goyal called it “an achievement led by PM” – a patently false assertion that also overlooked the scientists and engineers who had worked on the mission.
In December 2021, IIT Kharagpur published a “Vedic calendar” prepared by an Indian Knowledge Systems Centre at the institute of eminence. It was riddled with ahistorical claims, twisted in a way to support, among other things, the idea that the Aryans were the native people of Bharat rather than immigrants from Eastern Europe and that, to borrow historian Meera Nanda’s words, “the well-known “Pashupati seal” found in Mohenjo-Daro in 1928, which depicts a figure seated in a yoga-like posture, wearing a horned head-gear with animals surrounding him, is no “proto-Shiva” but a full-fledged Vedic-Puranic Shiva who is the “column of cosmic light and aeons of time” (whatever that means).” A centre for ‘Indian knowledge systems’ already exists in IIT Gandhinagar as well and, Nanda speculated, IIT Kanpur could be next in line.
Speaking of IIT Kanpur: on November 11, the institute tweeted from its official handle that spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar would conduct a “national induction” on the same day “for the first-year students of all the national institutes of importance” (there are 25). The tweet asked people to visit Ravi Shankar’s “Art of Living’s YouTube channel” to view the talk.
Finally, two days back, the University Grants Commission (UGC) asked universities across the country to hold lectures on November 26, Constitution Day, to push the idea of India as the world’s “mother of democracy” and that ancient India had a democratic government in its Vedic period. The incumbent UGC chairman, M. Jagadesh Kumar, made a name for himself as the Jawaharlal Nehru University vice-chancellor who did nothing as a small mob of miscreants, affiliated with the youth wing of the BJP, went on a rampage through the campus, damaging property and attacking students. Now, Kumar has written to 45 universities, 45 deemed-to-be universities and to the governors of states (who are the chancellors of state universities) to “encourage” these lectures.
This is what the BJP’s ideological programme taking over India’s ostensible centres of scientific research excellence looks like – not by (physical) violence, not by harassing professors and students who oppose their ideology, not by jailing peaceful protestors, but by opening the door in small increments, using the universities’ names and symbols on propaganda material, by adding ‘centres’ and ‘lectures’ to them instead of subtracting their powers, and by taking control of the public narratives of their achievements.
In a new investigation, STAT has reported fresh problems with Covaxin’s approval process in India, including the phase 2 trial dropping its placebo arm in favour of one preordained to make Covaxin look good and Bharat Biotech – the maker – commencing phase 3 trials based on results from animal studies. I’m also filing the report under “yet another instance of a pro-government Indian entity responding to the foreign press but not the local press” (following this). Krishna Mohan, one of the company’s directors, responded to STAT by admitting to a wrongdoing, massaging other similar actions, and pointing a finger at the Indian government.
Is this spine? In response to similar evidence-based allegations of wrongdoing, Bharat Biotech met The Wire Science and The Wire with a defamation suit, a demand of Rs 100 crore and that the two sites not publish articles with “defamatory content” vis-à-vis the company, and obtained an ex parte injunction against 14 articles. This was in addition to the seemingly blanket refusal to respond to our questions for reports we were filing. Other senior Bharat Biotech officials also refused to communicate to anyone else asking probing questions about Covaxin’s clinical trials. No: his quote sounds more like Mohan trying to save Bharat Biotech’s face in front of a western audience (the one our government wants us to believe is inferior) while spinning India’s Bharat’s own take on the vaccine approval process.
Mohan told STAT that they didn’t take any shortcuts – at least not those that weren’t first “vetted” by the Central Drug Standards Control Organisation (CDSCO), a.k.a. the drug regulator. That is to say, the shortcuts were CDSCO-approved, so they weren’t shortcuts. I’m inclined to agree: the rules are after all not based on principles of natural justice but on what the government deems acceptable. /s
Of all the allegations, the one that irks me most is the modification to the phase 2 trial. It compromises our ability to learn anything useful about Covaxin, replacing that knowledge with knowledge of how much better one formulation of Covaxin is from another. The drug regulator should have known this is what the trial would have ended up checking, and if it approved this design anyway, it has engaged in wilful neglect – neglect of science, neglect of integrity, neglect of its mandate to look out for the people. But if we’re to believe Mohan, it’s just “product development” for an unprecedented time, not public health:
“In a classic sense of product development, we would do everything the right way — play by the book and all the rules of the game would be followed. But here was a situation the world didn’t foresee. … Please don’t think there was any issue with the veracity of the data. Yes, it was an unusual approach, but it was dictated by the nature of the pandemic.”
Ah, a classic tactic: Why did you burn down the forest? “It’s the climate crisis, which is unprecedented, and we needed land to erect smog towers.”
Later in the article, in the face of a similar allegation – changing the phase 2 trial protocol – Mohan defends the regulator and blames discrepancies in trial numbers on a company struggling to coordinate multiple teams working separately from each other while being guided by the rule of “let’s get the data out”. I’d buy what he was saying if he was talking about his company HQ installing new air-conditioners and conducting tests of indoor air quality. But he’s talking about a clinical trial for a vaccine, placing misleading data in the public domain and – crucially – implicating a national drug regulator that he claims was in the know but didn’t act.
To STAT, he’s saying they were distracted by the “safety of individuals”, the “ethics of handling subjects” and “manufacturing”, but to Indian journalists, he as well as the regulator have been mum on questions raised by the WHO and ANVISA on manufacturing practices and by almost everyone else about the People’s Hospital death and data.
A (somehow) bigger problem arises soon after when Mohan says:
“Whatever we did was with the clear intention of doing it right. There was no question of reducing sample sizes. … There were not off the cuff or random thoughts. … It was extensively debated with keeping the final objective in mind of getting a vaccine in time and not cutting any corners.”
Getting a vaccine in time and not cutting any corners? It’s baffling that the last sentence is intended as clarification rather than as a potentially tacit admission of wrongdoing. I’m sure you remember when ICMR chief Balram Bhargava called on hospitals around India to complete Covaxin’s phase 3 trials in less than two months, in time for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to avail the vaccine for public use on Independence Day 2020. One independent scientist asked me what I thought Bhargava might have been smoking at the time; it was hard to say.
But what’s tempting to speculate now is that the government realised, based on the backlash to Bhargava’s announcement, that a) a phase 3 trial in six weeks was a bigger problem than it believed, b) it wouldn’t work to have its vaccine development plan in public, c) it could accelerate Covaxin’s clinical trials by forcing Bharat Biotech to do so, and d) approve Covaxin without phase 3 trials by assimilating the drug regulator – all to achieve a similar outcome. Or at least I speculate in the absence of evidence. And until there is, we remain needles in veins.
This article in The Wire, while entirely compelling, also contains an unarticulated tension. Headline: ‘How a Missing Stray Dog Led to the Withdrawal of a Caribbean High Commissioner to India’. Excerpt:
Uploaded on social media, a grainy dimly-lit video apparently shows the night-time confrontation. A man, speaking English with an accent, stands outside the gate of a residential compound and tells a mask-wearing woman, “You want the dog, take it, put it between your legs, you probably want the dog to f… you, that’s what you want.”
Startled, the woman also uses an abuse against him and says he is drunk. “I don’t care who you are,” she said. “F… you,” replied the man, before turning to the person holding the camera – and the video ends.
Speaking to The Wire, Ghosh, an animal rights activist, said she had been feeding a blind, old dog living inside the compound for years. The new tenant of the house, Charrandas Persaud, had only arrived in India in March 2021.
The story describes among other things a government not being able to pursue a harsher course of action against an individual for bringing grave harm to a dog because the individual enjoyed diplomatic immunity – even if it’s the same government that includes Maneka Gandhi, who has doggedly threatened or pursued legal action against those who so much as dream of getting rid of street dogs in one constituency, and whose office has been known to ring up those accused of (as opposed to convicted of) not being considerate enough towards stray dogs (as opposed to being physically violent towards them).
Gandhi is a known dog-lover who has furthered in the country a pro-rights rather than a pro-welfare policy towards dogs – such that these poor creatures have been left to scrounge urban garbage piles and bank on the sympathy of locals for food. In the course of their lives, they are often ravaged by diseases and/or also spread disease-causing agents to other urban fauna and people. They also render public spaces unsafe by chasing after passersby, bicyclists and motorcyclists and by terrorising children. There have been several reports of stray dogs mauling children to death around India.
Despite this miserable reality, however, these dogs continue to enjoy several privileges but lack all guarantees that they won’t be a nuisance to themselves, to others and won’t die in peace. In The Wire article as well, as Devirupa Mitra narrates, the dog that went missing was blind.
Ghosh thought to speak to a man in her neighbourhood because a stray dog used to live thereabout but didn’t turn up one day to be fed at her hand. I don’t claim to know what Ghosh’s circumstances are (the article doesn’t discuss them other than to say she’s a professor of English at the University of Delhi), but while it was good of her to investigate the dog’s fate, eventually exposing a foul-mouthed fellow, they speak to one of the things that keeps stray dogs around in our cities: the attitude of the élite.
Many élites view the act of feeding stray dogs as an exercise of material giving: they have money/food/resources/etc. to spare, so they give. But these places where dogs are fed seldom lie near their own houses, and are often by the roadside. The people feed and leave, and the dogs continue to be a nuisance in that place. (Some people have also tied such acts of ‘giving’ with their religious beliefs, of being tolerant towards other creatures and to donate food, ignoring the systemic issues they maintain and that keep these dogs around in pitiable conditions, including considerable waste generation and their improper disposal.)
Obviously I don’t take the ambassador’s side nor do I condone him having the dog killed. What he did was awful and he deserved what he got. The demand of welfare activists, with which I also agree, is that problem dogs need to be euthanised, without pain, in the interest of their well-being, and not snuffed out with whatever means are available. But there is something to be said about a) some people ‘solving’ short-term problems (the dogs’ hunger) only to prolong a long-term convolution (the dogs’ unrelenting persistence in people’s lived environment), and b) some people not being the ones to suffer the negative consequences of their actions.
