Newsletter

11.16.2004

"Since supermassive black holes were first discovered, astronomers have been wondering if the hole was created first, and then the galaxy formed around it, or if these monsters tend to form at the heart of galaxies over time. Astronomers using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array have discovered a distant galaxy that's less than a billion years old, but seems to have a supermassive black hole - but no massive bulge of stars. The black hole is 1 billion solar masses, so it should be surrounded by several trillion solar masses in stars. This provides evidence that it's the black hole that forms first, then the galaxy." link

"How humans evolve, what specific change triggers our evolution to become a world dominant species, remains a mystery. What makes us human is equally unknowable (precluding religious explanations). 2001 suggests, not unlike most religions, that our humanity comes with a burden that we cannot ignore or escape. Or at least we cannot escape it without confronting how we became what we are and to what extent we are limited. The film is directed toward western man in particular, and its “solution” comes with an understanding that we cannot escape this burden. Our technological trap can never be dodged, because we are too many and have been too long dependent on these progresses, but there may be a way to change the terms by which we contend within this trap." link

"All her life Kael wrote as a brilliant schoolgirl, straining for 'insights' and exulting over 'nuances' that no one else noticed (because they weren’t there). She had to be deeper, more profound, and more shocking than anyone else, which led her into the same sort of pretentiousness she ridiculed in others. She had a particular weakness for the hoariest and falsest of all journalistic clichés, the “trend.” In piece after piece, she strings together quotations from idiot reviewers, idiot producers, and idiot bystanders, commentary on various films she’s seen, and her own musings to somehow prove that we’re all going to hell and that poor Pauline is left as the only decent human being on the face of the planet!" link

"To construct musicality through expressionism, or to express musicality through constructivism?" link

"The notion that da Vinci was some sort of proto-computer geek is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In a 1996 article in the journal Achademia Leonardi Vinci, Rosheim offered compelling historical and mechanical evidence that da Vinci had designed - and perhaps built - automata. Rosheim pointed to da Vinci's so-called Robot Knight, a cable-and-pulley-driven artificial man, which had been thought to be a simple suit of arms. Citing drawings discovered decades earlier by Italian scholar Carlo Pedretti, Rosheim explained how the figure 'sat up, waved its arms, moved its head via a flexible neck, and opened and closed its anatomically correct jaw - possibly emitting sound while accompanied by automated musical instruments such as drums.'" link

"Recently, amid much publicity, astrophysicists have discovered that there is roughly three times more of some other stuff, which is not matter, but which has pressure (it pushes, gravity pulls). This "dark energy" took control of the future of the universe around the time the sun and Earth were formed, and started accelerating the cosmic expansion. The universe today is expanding faster and faster, leading to a future that remains to be understood, but which may well be very lonely indeed. Exciting times." link

"Saturn's magnificent ring system - a huge disc resembling an old gramophone record - turns out to share another property with the LP: it constantly emits a melodic series of musical notes." link

"Since supermassive black holes were first discovered, astronomers have been wondering if the hole was created first, and then the galaxy formed around it, or if these monsters tend to form at the heart of galaxies over time. Astronomers using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array have discovered a distant galaxy that's less than a billion years old, but seems to have a supermassive black hole - but no massive bulge of stars. The black hole is 1 billion solar masses, so it should be surrounded by several trillion solar masses in stars. This provides evidence that it's the black hole that forms first, then the galaxy." link

"'Films are born as poems are born in the heart of a poet. Words, images, concepts present themselves to the mind, they are all mixed together, and the result is the poem. I believe it is the same for films.' Michelangelo Antonioni." link

"The intellectual was once seen as a solitary, driven being, searching passionately and single-mindedly for the truth. But what happens when there is no truth? Or, at least, when nobody believes that there is any such thing as 'one truth'?" link

"Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of those writers who has passed so deeply into the fabric of our thought that we probably acknowledge him every day without realising it. He put the idea of the self at the centre of our understanding and he made the cultivation of sensibility an objective in education. He argued that if the ultimate authority is within ourselves, we can acknowledge no other master - and so produced one of the great rallying cries of the French Revolution and democracy itself: 'Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains'. The chains were not only the chains of archaic political authority, but also of the social conventions that inhibit the development of nature within us. Our relationship to external nature is crucial too." link

"For anyone who has toured campus, a favorite comic question is “What is the most popular major?” The answer? Why, “undecided,” of course.

" The runner-up seems to be psychology, which anyone who takes the 700-student-plus intro class will likely agree with. This, quite frankly, is startling. Not because we already have enough “experts” telling us precisely how messed up society is. What concerns me is much of psychology is stuck somewhere between World War I and Woodstock, with a sprinkling of Dr. Phil." link

"The old-fashioned morality of US voters that swept George Bush back to power has its roots in a British tradition we have cast aside, says Gertrude Himmelfarb." link

"The richness and variety of early intellectual relations between China and India have long been obscured. This neglect is now reinforced by the contemporary tendency to classify the world's population into distinct 'civilizations' defined largely by religion (for example Samuel Huntington's partitioning of the world into such categories as 'Western civilization,' 'Islamic civilization,' and 'Hindu civilization'). There is, as a result, a widespread inclination to understand people mainly through their religious beliefs, even if this misses much that is important about them. The limitations of this perspective have already done significant harm to our understanding of other aspects of the global history of ideas. Many are now predisposed to see the history of Muslims as quintessentially Islamic history, ignoring the flowering of science, mathematics, and literature that was made possible by Muslim intellectuals, particularly between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries. One result of such a narrow emphasis on religion is that a disaffected Arab activist today is encouraged to take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the diversity and richness of Arab history. In India too, there are frequent attempts to portray the broad civilization of India as 'Hindu civilization'—to use the phrase favored both by theorists like Samuel Huntington and by Hindu political activists." link

"Postmodernism, which became the dominant philosophy in the academy, holds that there is no such thing as truth. It is elitist to value one type of experience over any other--and what has been called 'truth' over the years is just the white European male's idea of truth. The idea that there is a single reality that intellectuals aim to discover is outdated. Furedi furnishes example after outrageous example: 'A bit dodgy' is how Charles Clarke, the British Secretary of State for Education, has described the idea of education for its own sake, while asserting that his government has no interest in supporting 'the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth.'" link

"Division is sometimes necessary for a culture to progress." link