Undocumented Migrants as New (and Peaceful) American Revolutionaries

This essay situates undocumented migrants in the history of the American revolutionary period. The lawbreaking of both groups produced constructive legal and social change. For example, the masses of American revolutionaries and many of their leading men fought to rid the colonies of hereditary aristocracy. Colonists had come to cherish the proto-meritocracy that had bloomed on colonial shores and rankled at local evidence of aristocratic privilege, like the Crown’s grant of landed estates to absentee English aristocrats. Today’s equivalent hereditary aristocracy is the citizenry of wealthy democracies like the United States. Hereditary citizens use immigration restrictions to reserve the wealth and privilege of rich-world citizenship for themselves and invited guests. The undocumented peacefully challenge this status quo by migrating and remaining in the United States without permission, securing citizenship for their American-born children, and protesting that “no one is illegal.” In these ways the undocumented seize some of the aristocratic privileges of American citizenship and fight for others. For this and other reasons, the undocumented are contemporary heirs to the revolutionary moment—the true tea partiers of the twenty-first century

Triangular curves and cyclotomic Zariski tuples

The purpose of this paper is to exhibit infinite families of conjugate projective curves in a number field whose complement have the same abelian fundamental group, but are non-homeomorphic. In particular, for any $d>3$ we find Zariski tuples parametrized by the $d$-roots of unity up to complex conjugation. As a consequence, for any divisor $m$ of $d$, $m\neq 1,2,3,4,6$, we find arithmetic Zariski $\frac{\phi(m)}{2}$-tuples with coefficients in the corresponding cyclotomic field. These curves have abelian fundamental group and they are distinguished using a linking invariant.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures. To appear in Collectanea Mathematic

Limits to Transits of the Neptune-mass planet orbiting Gl 581

We have monitored the Neptune-mass exoplanet-hosting M-dwarf Gl 581 with the 1m Swope Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory over two predicted transit epochs. A neutral density filter centered at 550nm was used during the first epoch, yielding 6.33 hours of continuous light curve coverage with an average photometric precision of 1.6 mmags and a cadence of 2.85 min. The second epoch was monitored in B-band over 5.85 hours, with an average photometric precision of 1.2 mmags and 4.28 min cadence. No transits are apparent on either night, indicating that the orbital inclination is less than 88.1 deg for all planets with radius larger than 0.38 R_Nep = 1.48 R_Earth. Because planets of most reasonable interior composition have radii larger than 1.55 R_Earth we place an inclination limit for the system of 88.1 deg. The corresponding minimum mass of Gl 581b remains 0.97 M_Nep = 16.6 M_Earth.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, to appear in PAS