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Please read this page for an explanation of changes to the delivery of the newsletter. See the help page for newsletter-related questions. 12-14-2004 Resources Guardian Charlotte Bronte Resource Articles of Interest "The Sun may have captured thousands or even millions of asteroids from another planetary system during an encounter more than four billion years ago, astronomers are reporting today. "Such an interstellar ballet would explain many mysteries of the outer solar system - including the strange behavior of the recently discovered Sedna, the system's most distant known object, which occupies a strange elongated orbit far beyond Pluto." Go to story "At the Boston Museum of Science, one exhibit in particular attracted long lines of children: 'Face Aging.' Access to the open booth was forbidden to people over fifteen, so I watched from just outside. After standing for long periods with remarkable patience, the youngsters sat down inside under bright illumination, faced forward trustingly—'frontality also implies in the most vivid way the subject's cooperation'—and had their portrait taken by an automatic camera. After another wait, their digitized bust appeared on a TV monitor. Then, tapping a button like a VCR remote, each child could rapidly call up simulations of what she or he would look like at one-year intervals up to age sixty-nine. Flipped as fast as a Victorian zoetrope, the stills became a 'movie.' In seconds the computer added grotesque pouches, reddish skin, and blotches to their familiar features; the faces became elongated and then wider and then saggy; lines became more heavily rutted. Boys lost hair. Hair turned gray. The heads of both boys and girls grew and then shrank." Go to story "Grillparzer knew the composer and had even planned an opera with him, but their aesthetic differences went deep. It would not be Grillparzer who would portray Beethoven for posterity but, rather, romantic writers like E. T. A. Hoffmann or Bettina von Arnim, the latter of whom was to write: 'In everything that concerned his art, [Beethoven] is so true and so sovereign that no artist dares approach him. In the rest of his life, however, he is so naive that you can do anything you like with him.'" Go to story "Merely to open The Stranger alongside Nausea is to be struck by the contrast between Meursault/Camus's dazzling physicality and Roquentin/Sartre's famous disgust for the physical. Camus reveled in the sensuous world of North Africa, as in Nuptials, and his reader can hardly ignore its intensity and its pleasures. Sartre's writing never embraced the physical world or the body in the direct, unquestioning, and often joyous way so natural to Camus." Go to story "The human heart has symbolized love and passion since ancient times, but only during the Middle Ages did it acquire the familiar shape and meaning it still has today as the universal logo of love that appears everywhere from Valentine cards and candy boxes to bumper stickers and popular songs. Medieval poets enshrined the heart as a symbol of human passion and popularized many romantic metaphors that we now think of as clichés—the 'wounded' heart, the 'broken' heart, the 'stolen' heart, and so forth. By about 1400, artists had given the heart its now-familiar form as a symmetrical red emblem (quite different from the actual physical organ), depicting the 'heart' in paintings and other visual art as a gift or token exchanged between lovers." Go to story "What is reading anyway? Descriptions of the experience of reading—the physiological and psychological processes—vary from time to time. In the Renaissance, physicians and philosophers appealed to magic, theology, and anatomy to explain the effects of reading. Nowadays we have recourse to psychology. Either way, the explanations reach to the deepest recesses of the psyche. We cannot simply assume, when we sit down to read, that we are replicating the responses of men, women, and children in the past. Keep that in mind as you read a literary classic. " Go to story "Friedrich Nietzsche was acutely sensitive to place: to the taste of sea air, to the sweep of wind across the coast, to the narrow confines of medieval walls or the tumbling breadth of an Alpine vista framed by the window near his writing desk. He was convinced that the effects of environment, climate, and terrain on one's life and thought were both tangible and profound." Go to story "It may be that mirrors increase the intensity of human sight in other ways as well. Seeing is a dynamic process. If we stare directly at an object for a long time, we cease to see it. Only if we change our angle of vision, sweeping the eye across the object, do we continue to see it. Mirrors help us to see clearly for, whether held in the hand or altered by the movement of the person who gazes into them, they increase the amount of movement which is projected onto the eye. Furthermore, they are often inside dark rooms, reflecting the brightness of the outside world. The eye that has compensated for the dark surroundings sees the world all the more intensely in the mirror, just as a television set is much more effective in a darkened room." Go to story "We are survival machines built by mindless replicators—the result of an algorithm called natural selection. And we will not escape the horror by looking away from it, by turning our heads, by hoping the monster will go away like little children. We will only escape the horror—or find a way to mitigate it—by inquiring of cognitive science and neuroscience just what kind of survival machine a human is." Go to story "''In an information age,'' writes Charles Baxter in a collection of essays called 'The Business of Memory,' 'forgetfulness is a sign of debility and incompetence. It is taken as weakness, an emblem of losing one's grip. For anyone who works with quantities of data, a single note of forgetfulness can sound like a death knell. To remember is to triumph over loss and death; to forget is to form a partnership with oblivion.'" Go to story "For the first time, a study ties human-influenced global warming to the likelihood of extreme summers." Go to story "'People are shaped by what they eat, by the air and light in which they move, by the work they do or do not do, and also by the peculiar ideology of their class. One can learn more about these ideologies—perhaps more than could be learnt from long-winded reports or accusing comments—merely by glancing at the pictures of the wealthy middle class and their children. The tensions of our time become clear when we compare the photograph of the working students with that of the professor and his so peaceful family, nestling contentedly and still unsuspecting.'" Go to story "Modern memory leaps too fast from the steam age to the information age. In between, at the end of the 19th century, was a spectacular epoch of light and power inventions which shaped the modern world. And the story of electric light illustrates the close entanglement of science, technology and commerce." Go to story "The dust clouds drifting from Africa to the Caribbean have a dangerous secret - bacteria and microbes that leave a trail of disease in their wake." Go to story "The search for life in the universe begins with a deep question: what is life? Astrobiologists will tell you honestly that this question has no simple or generally accepted answer." Go to story "Tristan and Isolde could not understand how their moment of nonpareil bliss, which Wagner renders in the most sensually rapturous music ever written, might sustain a lifetime’s happiness in the everyday world. After peerless union such as theirs, death seems to offer the sole noble alternative to a gradual deterioration of their love. Tolstoy understood something essential that Wagner and Nietzsche did not: that the greatest part of love can survive and surpass even the most intense passion, and that what modern man most needs is not sublime myth but living truth." Go to story "There is sometimes a story in the smallest thing, in the long unraveling scratch of a needle on vinyl, for instance, a sound once so common that we learned to hear right past it, brushing it off as a kind of audial lint, nothing to be bothered by—until we got the idea of clean digital sound and started wondering how we had managed to enjoy our music as much as we had, all that fur on our pleasure." Go to story "We insist on having our options in every other sphere of life, super-sizing this and soy-substituting that, but variety is precisely what is at risk here. If we strip our literary culture of its cranks and eccentrics, its mandarins and its visionaries, we dry up the whole vast irrigation system of Imagination. The potential consequences are unnerving. The inertial force of the status quo is enormous (and growing), and change of the sort thinking people hope for depends on innumerable acts of independent volition--on acts of daring and Imagination. These do not flourish in a void, and they are not, at root, non-fictional." Go to story "It is difficult for English-speakers to know how to approach Goethe. Little of his major work resembles the forms and values we are comfortable with in our own literatures. The Man of Fifty is a cool, almost dispassionate tale, whose tone is hard to characterise. There is a suggestion of deeper meanings beneath its urbanity, but it is hard to construe them. It is sad and comic, and like Goethe's great novel Wahlverwandtschaften, it has an offputting coldness in its moral machinery. Like that strange novel, it turns out to be unforgettable because of its economical precision. The title gives us a clue - it is the tale, not of an individual exactly, but of an example, a fable, about what it means to be a man of 50 years." Go to story "The city of Safed in northern Israel, high in the mountains above the Sea of Galilee, is a quiet, cobble-stoned town where ultra-orthodox synagogues coexist with offbeat artists' studios and galleries. Five centuries ago, when eminent Jewish mystics and scholars found refuge here after the Spanish Inquisition, Safed was considered the spiritual centre of the Jewish world. Jewish mysticism, also known as Kabbalah, flourished here in the 16th century, and the Kabbalistic writings of Safed rabbis on the meaning of Torah (Jewish law) remain influential to this day. One of the great Kabbalists of that period was Rabbi Isaac Luria, whose tomb is a revered landmark - visited by Madonna during her recent pilgrimage to holy Kabbalah sites in Israel." Go to story "For our age of anxiety, Sleeping Beauty is the perfect fairy tale. The spectre at the feast comes in many guises: we may call her Carabosse, or Maleficent, or terrorist, paedophile or serial killer, but the threat - real or simply a product of our over-fevered imaginations - makes us want to lock our children away behind a protecting briar of thorns and keep them safe from harm." Go to story "Everybody who is interested in Keats knows that his poetry sold very badly in his lifetime, probably no more than a few hundred copies. What is less well known is that a large number of his poems weren't published at all while he was alive. Looked at together, these fugitive poems, along with some of his lesser-known pieces from his letters and private papers, allow us to trace the arc of his development." Go to story "If I were asked to defend Richard Wagner as a human being, I could not, and what's more I wouldn't want to. He certainly spent enough of his time knitting a fairly hideous shroud for his personal reputation: he was the only major composer and dramatist to have written more aesthetic tracts and neo-philosophical diatribes than stage works, many of them containing strongly anti-semitic sentiments. "This, like all prejudice, may be seen as a failure of the imagination, or the triumph of an irrational fear, which may lead us to be suspicious of his operas themselves. But when was it that we began to subscribe to this very romantic notion that great artists must somehow be great human beings?" Go to story "We are in a period of history in which the assimilation of the insights of universal Darwinism will have many destabilizing effects on cultural life. Over the centuries, we have constructed many myths about human origins and the nature of the human mind. We have been making up stories about who we are and why we exist. Now, in a break with this historical trend, we may at last be on the threshold of a factual understanding of humankind's place within nature. However, attaining such an understanding requires first the explosion of the myths we have created, an explosion that will surely cause us some cognitive distress. This is because the only escape route from the untoward implications of Darwinism is through science itself—by adopting an unflinching view about what the theory of natural selection means. Once we adopt such an unflinching attitude, however, the major thesis of this book is heartening. It is that certain underdeveloped implications of findings in the human sciences of cognitive psychology, decision theory, and neuroscience can reveal coherent ways to reconcile the human need for meaning with the Darwinian view of life." Go to story "'The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour,' he wrote from the country. 'Things have been far worse than we have been told.... We are today not far from a disaster.' "The author was Lt. Col. T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. And his letters are getting a fresh airing as US commanders in Iraq, military historians, and journalists reach for understanding as to the challenges the US is facing in the country." Go to story "The question of what constitutes 'art,' and what distinguishes good from less good art, is an old one. We can be certain that humanity was creating what we call art long before the word or the concept existed. And—a further complication—how is it that we all accept that some Paleolithic paintings are among the best of their kind and excel by any standards? Well, not all; there are presumably those who are beyond such acceptance. And in considering the paintings of Lascaux, Altamira, and elsewhere, the question arises: What did their creators think they were doing?" Go to story "These days, there's hardly a mission statement that doesn't herald it, or a CEO who doesn't laud it. And yet despite all of the attention that business creativity has won over the past few years, maddeningly little is known about day-to-day innovation in the workplace. Where do breakthrough ideas come from? What kind of work environment allows them to flourish? What can leaders do to sustain the stimulants to creativity -- and break through the barriers? "Teresa Amabile has been grappling with those questions for nearly 30 years. Amabile, who heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and is the only tenured professor at a top B-school to devote her entire research program to the study of creativity, is one of the country's foremost explorers of business innovation." Go to story "...the deepest reason for the outrage it has excited is that film is just too explicit about expansionist war. Alexander was, after all, in the end defeated by the rains of India, the heat of Middle Eastern deserts, by his sullen and mutinous troops. This is a film about imperial over-stretch. At its end Stone, for all his enthused worship, shows us a ruler who is half-psychotic - deranged by dreams of destiny that out-strip his capacity. In the age of Rumsfeld and Bush that is a brave and accurate call." Go to story "Improvisation is America's greatest contribution to art, Jonathan Jones argues. And its unquestioned masters were actor Marlon Brando, painter Jackson Pollock and alto sax player Charlie Parker - giants whose legacy is the spirit of true democracy." Go to story "What's the largest number of pennies that you can pack inside a circular tray to form a carpet of non-overlapping coins? What about inside a square or triangular tray? What if you could expand or contract the size of all your pennies to fit a required number of them snugly in a given tray? " Mathematicians have long pondered the problem of packing identical circles inside a variety of geometric shapes. Indeed, 'the optimal packing of equal disks . . . is an ancient and extremely difficult problem,' says mathematician Ronald L. Graham of the University of California, San Diego. 'Some of these very simple problems—like how you pack 27 disks in a triangle, square, or circle—are very stubborn.'" Go to story "Surprising new research shows that crowds are often smarter than individuals." Go to story "That was supposed to be the deal. Aguinaldo's army dug fourteen miles of trenches around Manila, effectively blocking a Spanish escape. While they waited for Dewey's signal to commence the attack, the Filipinos selected a provisional government and drafted a constitution. What they could not have known is that Dewey had made a secret pact with the Spanish commander: Dewey would fire a few token shots, and then accept Spanish surrender with his promise not to turn them over to the Filipinos. He'd heard the statement so often repeated in Washington power circles, 'No nigger Filipino is going to run those islands.'" Go to story "Peter Bogdanovich, one of the most iconic directors in Hollywood, has said modern film-making has ceased to be a 'craft' with movies dominated by computer graphics and little else." Go to story "H]istorical films often are more about the period in which they're made than the period they depict." Go to story "In 1576, El Greco was hounded out of town (or so we are told) for suggesting that Michelangelo, though a great sculptor, could not paint. But when Caravaggio arrived 16 years later, he did not simply thumb his nose at the worshippers of Michelangelo; he took on the whole premise of Renaissance painting. His bohemian, quasi-criminal life style - late nights in taverns and frequent brawls - seemed a head-on attack on the social status that artists had fought so hard to gain. And by rejecting the hierarchies that prized figurative painting over landscape and still life, and the beau ideal over naturalism, he called into question the very basis of Renaissance poetics." Go to story "A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God -- more or less -- based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday." Go to story; and here. "[B]y showing that the universe did not necessarily have a beginning, we can counter another common theist line of argument used whenever the claim is made that a spontaneous 'creation' violates no known physics. The theist will say, "Where did physics come from?" If their imagined God did not have to come from something, because she had no beginning, then neither did physics." Go to story Also, "Galileo, Newton, Bentley, and Leibniz chat on the Internet" Go to story (PDF) "If other forms of energy exist beyond those recognized by physics, these should still be detectable in controlled experiments by the observation of apparent violation of energy conservation. This includes the psychic energy associated with paranormal phenomena, the vital energies supposedly manipulated in alternative medicine, and even supernatural or spiritual energy. So far all the data are consistent with conservation of the known forms of energy. Furthermore, observations indicate that the total energy of the universe is zero, and so no outside energy was necessary to bring it about." Go to story (PDF) "The latest claim of evidence for divine cosmic plan with humans in mind is based on the fact that earthly life is so sensitive to the values of the fundamental physical constants and properties of its environment that even the tiniest changes in any of these would mean that life, as we see it around us, would not exist. This is said to reveal a universe in which physics is exquisitely fine tuned—delicately balanced for the production of life." Go to story (PDF) "The ancient argument from design for the existence of God is based on the common intuition that "The anthropic coincidences are widely claimed to provide evidence for intelligent creation in the
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