Newsletter

11.09.2004

"'Newton was not the first of the age of reason,' Keynes said. 'He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.' Newton opened a door to our world, sure. But he belonged to the world we have left behind." link

"Scientific knowledge has a vital, if limited, role to play in shaping our moral values and helping us to frame wiser judgments. Ethical values are natural and open to examination in the light of evidence and reason." link

"What is the secret of music's strange power? Seeking an answer, scientists are piecing together a picture of what happens in the brains of listeners and musicians." link

"The discovery of a new species of human poses exciting questions about who we are. How would we treat this close relative if one were found alive today?" link

"Nothing unusual in that: these themed collections are favourites with developers, who usually pick on trees or flowers, but sometimes turn to local heroes or poets. But the curious thing in Wellingborough is that clusters of houses set around greens on Longfellow Road have been given their own Longfellow names: Hiawatha, Excelsior, Hesperus. How many people living in Longfellow Road, I wonder, have ever read any Longfellow? How many who live in Hiawatha have worked their way through that huge rhythmic epic? Not many, I imagine. We honour all these dead poets, but we don't, most of us, read them.

"That's not to say that people don't have a place in their lives for poetry. No funeral after a tragic death, particularly the violent death of a child, seems complete nowadays without one of her classmates reading a verse she has written. Death announcements in local newspapers often have verses attached to them - chosen, I guess from the repetitions, from a catalogue supplied by the newspaper. In moments of trouble, stress or extreme emotion people tend to reach for some form of poetry much as we do for some form of religion." link

"Laureates like Toni Morrison, Dario Fo, and José Saramago cheapen the Nobel Prize. But this year’s laureate, the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946), marks a new low." link

"Is his mysterious three-wheeled cart a proto automobile? A remote-controlled robot? A rolling Renaissance computer? The quest to rebuild Leonardo's 'impossible machine.'" link