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01-04-2005 Resources Articles of Interest "This list contains the 'Top 1000' titles owned by OCLC member libraries—the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the "purchase vote" of libraries around the globe." Go to story "Humans have long wondered whether life exists beyond our home planet. In recent years, a host of new technologies are turning speculation into science. We now have the ability to discern the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet so distant we can't even see it, to detect the presence of dozens of new planets circling stars similar to our own sun, and have discovered life in environments on Earth so extreme it's not unreasonable to imagine that microbes -- or more-- may flourish elsewhere in the Universe. To explore this frontier, a new hybrid field called Astrobiology, a combination of astronomy and biology, has sprung up. Given the ability of astronomers to invent ever greater technologies and the recent findings by biologists that life can exist in extraordinarily hostile environments without sunlight, water and oxygen, there's a whole new ballgame out there." Go to story "We tend to think of the Renaissance as a movement confined to a European intellectual elite during the 15th and 16th centuries. Wrong on all counts, according to Professor Steve Hindle, who is to be a leading figure in a research project linking Warwick University with the Newberry Library in Chicago. Over three years, British and American historians, classicists and linguists will seek to re-examine the social depth, the geographical breadth and the historical length of a period that saw the rebirth of classicism in art, philosophy and literature." Go to story "Over the decades, artificial gravity research has been an on-again, off-again proposition. But in the last few years, and propelled by NASA’s new Moon, Mars and beyond exploration mandate, artificial gravity studies are now being developed, this time with a new spin." Go to story "Was God in This Disaster? Turning to both Judaism and Buddhism for solace, the author meditates on God's role in the tsunami tragedy." Go to story "An earthquake does more than shake up the world; it shakes up our worldview. It forces us to ask that most difficult question of all: Why? And not just why me, but why us? "There are three distinct yet interrelated ways of answering these questions: through science, through God, and through the Hindu concept of karma." Go to story "Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety." Go to story "Author Susan Sontag, widely regarded as one of America's leading intellectuals, has died aged 71." Go to story "Between the word 'public' and the word 'intellectual' there falls, or ought to fall, a shadow. The life of the cultivated mind should be private, reticent, discreet: Most of its celebrations will occur with no audience, because there can be no applause for that moment when the solitary reader gets up and paces round the room, having just noticed the hidden image in the sonnet, or the profane joke in the devotional text, or the secret message in the prison diaries. Individual pleasure of this kind is only rivaled when the same reader turns into a writer, and after a long wrestle until daybreak hits on his or her own version of the mot juste, or the unmasking of pretension, or the apt, latent literary connection, or the satire upon tyranny." Go to story Sontag: "A great writer of fiction both creates a new, unique, individual world—through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through commanding forms—and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but that is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds. Call that history, society, what you will. The writers who matter most to us are those who enlarge our consciences and our sympathies and our knowledge." Go to story "On January 1st, trade in clothes and textiles will be free of the quotas that have bound it for the past 30 years. In many poor countries, the industry will have to fight to survive. In rich countries, it will only have to lobby harder." Go to story "Bigger is better, the saying goes, and in the case of evolution, the saying is apparently right." Go to story "New research could throw some light on the unique evolution of the human brain." Go to story "The sophistication of the human brain is not simply the result of steady evolution, according to new research. Instead, humans are truly privileged animals with brains that have developed in a type of extraordinarily fast evolution that is unique to the species." Go to story "In spring 2004 I appeared on KATU TV's AM Northwest in Portland, Ore., with the producers of an improbably named film, What the #$*! Do We Know?! Artfully edited and featuring actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe, the film's central tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics. I never imagined that such a film would succeed, but it has grossed millions. "The film's avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as 'quantum flapdoodle.' University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: 'The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies.' Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground's tendencies." Go to story "It's not often you find the grave of a god. Tim Radford on the mapmakers transforming Egyptology." Go to story "Evan Hoppman loves to read books--mostly science fiction and fantasy. He reads when he’s supposed to be doing his homework. He reads in the car after volunteering to go with his mother on errands. At night at his home in southern Maryland, he reads in bed under the covers, using a flashlight to illuminate the words. "Evan’s reading habits may not seem unusual for a 10-year-old, but if he is still reading fiction by age 18, he will become part of a distinct, and rapidly dwindling, minority: American adults who engage in 'literary reading'--anything from Shakespeare to Stephen King to the eerie stories that Evan devours after his family has gone to bed." Go to story "The absence of intellectual rigor in the study of literature in our public schools is a national disgrace. Students who are willing to read discover, to their chagrin, that soon after finishing a novel or short story, they can remember little of what they've just read--much less identify and understand the central metaphor, archetype, or prime cause. "They don't know how to carry on close reading, to think carefully, to ask questions of the text and answer them. They don't know how to develop an informed intuition that promotes original concepts. They have no way of knowing that decoded metaphor is the source of coherence in literature because they have not been taught to recognize the internal forces that control the structure of the text. "A serious study of imaginative prose is thought to be beyond their scope. We ask so little of students that we have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. They can't do it because we don't believe they can; therefore, we don't attempt to teach them or make it possible for them to learn, thus corroborating and reinforcing the myth of their incapacity. "When we look around, we see the wreckage of this toxic belief system -- readers who refuse to read and teachers who are worn out from trying. Is it any wonder that, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of adult Americans now read literature?" Go to story "Every year more than 10,000 literature scholars gather at the end of December for the convention of the Modern Language Association, the 120th of which begins today in Philadelphia. "Past conventions have yielded papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex, from 'Victorian Buggery' to 'Bambi on Top' and the tragically hip 'Judith Butler Got Me Tenure (but I Owe My Job to K. D. Lang): High Theory, Pop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Queer Studies.'" Go to story "Returning Afghan nomads face an end to a lifestyle that has shaped human evolution. Jared Diamond wonders: After thousands of years of wandering, is the human race coming to a standstill?" Go to story "A fascinating conspiracy about Jesus transformed the cheesy thriller, The Da Vinci Code, into a phenomenal bestseller. Too bad it comes from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," a masterpiece of bogus history." Go to story "When a professor draws a parallel between Dumbo and Detective Monk, you just know you're at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, where no topic is too weird or popular for academic inquiry. "About 9,000 language and literature scholars have been holding their end-of-the-year convention here since Monday, bunking and meeting at the Loews and the Marriott, schmoozing, interviewing for jobs, and picking from a smorgasbord of 750-plus sessions on such worthy subjects as 'Avian Suffering: Cross-Species Empathy in Chaucer's "Squire's Tale"' and 'The Uneatable in Pursuit of the Unspeakable: Psycopathy as Evolutionary Possibility in Naked Lunch.'" Go to story "Why did once flourishing societies collapse and disappear? Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer at UCLA, has spent much of his career wrestling with this profound question. It is not merely a romantic mystery; the answers, he believes, offer us the prospect of self-preservation." Go to story "History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined swiftly? We must expect the answers to be complex, because historical reality is complex: while some societies did indeed collapse spectacularly, others have managed to thrive for thousands of years without major reversal." Go to story "Bronx-born actor Tony Curtis never delivered the famous movie line, 'Yonda lies da castle of my fodda.' We think he did because, like so many other actor-studs outfitted by Hollywood in leather skirts and breastplates, he looked so dumb in such period adventure flicks as The Prince who was a Thief, Son of Ali Baba, and The Vikings. Now we can add Colin Farrell in Alexander to that list." Go to story "Religious belief is now almost never seriously discussed among the kind of people I know and the same is true, I suspect, for most readers of this newspaper. Religion as sociology, religion as history, religion as ethnicity, religion as politics and ethics, religion as art, ritual or good works, religion as the best route to a good C of E primary school: we can and do about talk about these." Go to story "When young people are involved with the arts, something changes in their lives." Go to story "Endings are a catharsis. They give meaning to what comes before, and change us from the way we were." Go to story "Up to nearly the outbreak of the war, the Manila Polo Club, the Manila Golf Club, and the Army Navy Club were still exclusively for whites. 'Even the YMCA had a separate building for Americans and Europeans.' The Polo Club itself would feature in the 'nationalist' struggle when Col. Manolo Nieto applied for membership and was blackballed." Go to story "We have now entered what is being celebrated as the Einstein Year, marking the centenary of the physicist's annus mirabilis in 1905, when he published three landmark papers - those that proved the existence of the atom, showed the validity of quantum physics and, of course, introduced the world to his theory of special relativity. Not bad for a beginner." Go to story "If you're too cool for school, you're probably not very smart. Some of us would rather build rockets than friendships." Go to story "One idea many of us are pursuing is a grander concept of the physical world. Over history we've gone from thinking of our solar system as being the center of the universe, to our galaxy being the center, to the present consensus that our big bang gave rise to zillions of galaxies. Some of us now think that perhaps we have to go a step further -- that the big bang wasn't the only one." Go to story
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