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01-11-2005 Resources The World of Dante (and magnifier) Articles "The sweeping devastation and intense horror wrought by the south Asia tsunami will shake the faith of many 'believers'. How could a God, or some other force for good, have orchestrated a natural disaster with such dreadful consequences? "'If you get a bachelor's degree,' the seasoned student reassured, 'you'll probably be okay. But my professor said that when you get a master's, and definitely if you go beyond that, you can lose your values. He said that college students have to be watchful because if you get too much education, you could turn-LIBERAL. He's seen it happen to a lot of good Christians.'" Go to story "Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, researchshows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior." Go to story "As the forerunner of antiheroes and superheroes, Don Quixote, with his flawed aspirations, may not subdue giants or imaginary enemies like the Knight of the Wood, but he continues to conquer hearts, precisely because he is so ridiculous, inhabiting a universe of his own concoction. He is the ultimate symbol of freedom, a self-made man championing his beliefs against all odds. His is also a story about reaching beyond one's own confinements, a lesson on how to turn poverty and the imagination into assets, and a romance that reaches beyond class and faith." Go to story "I'm an English professor, so of course I enjoy reading. But looking back on my childhood, I am certain that my interest in literature was stimulated not so much by reading books myself as by listening to recordings of other people reading them." Go to story "A new world of personalized — and mobile — news and entertainment is upon us. Digital TV and mobile devices will mean the end of mass programming, the empowerment of viewers, and a shift in the nature of public discourse." Go to story Here's a very interesting article: a college basketball team where no one who tries for the team gets cut. That means everyone gets to play. The result: the team has won a division conference crown in three of the last nine seasons. Want to know more? Go to story Other resources: Arsenault's philosophy, more info on the coach and on the team. Not only is 2005 the 400th anniversary of Cervantes' Don Quixote, it is also Einstein's year and the world year of physics. For more resources, visit this site and this site. "The story of Brownian motion began with experimental confusion and philosophical debate, before Einstein, in one of his least well-known contributions to physics, laid the theoretical groundwork for precision measurements to reveal the reality of atoms." Go to story "Most physicists would be happy to make one discovery that is important enough to be taught to future generations of physics students. Only a very small number manage this in their lifetime, and even fewer make two appearances in the textbooks. But Einstein was different. In little more than eight months in 1905 he completed five papers that would change the world for ever." Go to story "Gravitational physics has become a truly experimental science as tests of the special and general theories of relativity reach new levels of precision." Go to story "The last 30 years of his life were spent on a fruitless search for a unified field theory, but as John Ellis explains, Einstein put this 'holy grail' of modern physics on the theoretical map." Go to story "Ever quickly sized up a situation and just known what action to take - or had a startlingly clear first impression of a stranger that later turned out to be preternaturally astute? " You may have jacked into what Malcolm Gladwell calls "the giant supercomputer in [your] unconscious." To get to know that mental motherboard, you might consider enlisting Gladwell as your IT support man." Go to story "We are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray." Go to story "The first thought of any reviewer, when faced with this volume, must be one of profound humility. Only a biblical scholar is properly able to form a judgment on such an undertaking. Here is an American scholar, Robert Alter, who has translated from the Hebrew the first five books of the Old Testament. That itself would be ambition enough for any writer, and how is the rest of the world supposed to analyse, interpret or criticise the achievement?" Go to story "For a number of years now, I have written about the way repeated exposure to indecent, or obscene things, has the power to wear away one's sensitivity, and I had thought this awareness would keep my own sensibility alive to things that should rightly shock me. But now, as I open the Times, I find myself perfectly capable of glancing at these pictures of devastation one moment and the next reading the weather forecast in the right-hand corner directly above them." Go to story "Charles Darwin spotted it. In The Descent of Man, he wrote: 'The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have developed through a gradual process are clearly the same.' He'd been struck by ideas that William Jones had advanced 50 years earlier, that the similarities between languages as disparate as Sanskrit, Latin, and Old Persian, suggest a common historical ancestry." Go to story "The Divine Comedy is an epic meditation on the human condition. Can it ever be successfully turned into music? Tim Ashley on the composers who have dared." Go to story "The National Security Agency or one of the Federal Reserve banks can now buy a quantum-cryptographic system from two small companies--and more products are on the way. This new method of encryption represents the first major commercial implementation for what has become known as quantum information science, which blends quantum mechanics and information theory. The ultimate technology to emerge from the field may be a quantum computer so powerful that the only way to protect against its prodigious code-breaking capability may be to deploy quantum-cryptographic techniques." Go to story "The mood can be judged from comments in the cafeteria: 'Make the most of it,' and 'There won't be many more like this.' "And what is 'this'? It's a gargantuan, million-dollar recording of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, put together as a now-or-never enterprise for the tenor Plácido Domingo but also as a last, heroic stand from a classical CD industry so crushed by economic pressures that many consider it in terminal decline." Go to story "Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, says that if America doesn't change its ways it'll go the way of the dodo -- no matter what Bill Gates, George Bush or Michael Crichton says." Go to story "Have you ever had the pleasure of reading Dr. Seuss' The Foot Book? I have. A couple of thousand times, actually. "To help alleviate this intolerable cruelty, I occasionally head to the local library with my kids to take out books such as Where Is Baby's Belly Button? or Everybody Poops - basically anything that isn't titled The Foot Book. "It's on these visits that I typically spot an unfortunate soul in his mid-30s checking out a half-dozen episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or some such thing, and instantly I question the function of the library system - and humanity's mental state in general." Go to story "Soar to the skies! Flight is heroic! Its changing perspectives mean a whole new reality and an absolute break with the past! Thus the Italian Futurists in one of their screaming manifestos, declaring war on the poor old art of humdrum earth." Go to story "I've never believed there is anything more than a coincidental relationship between madness and making art. For every self-mutilating van Gogh, there's a sane, mild-mannered Matisse. Artistic creativity arises from a variety of fluid inner equations; the old image of artists producing masterpieces in some sort of possessed frenzy is far more common in movies than in life. In actuality, making art is a respite from inner demons." Go to story "And the best year ever was ... 1905. Theatre director Dominic Dromgoole explains why." Go to story "In the music education of our young, listening—truly active processing and internalizing of sound—is not valued. And we are paying the price for this when audiences—and the composers they all too often come to dread—are not able to hear what is before them. In its passive stead, audiences seem more tuned out than in, experiencing a general wash of comfort or discomfort seemingly tied neither to thought nor feeling, process nor program." Go to story "In the aftermath of a cataclysm, with pictures of parents sobbing over dead infants driven into human consciousness around the globe, faith-shaking questions arise: Where was God? Why does a good and all-powerful deity permit such evil and grief to fall on so many thousands of innocents? What did these people do to deserve such suffering? "After a similar natural disaster wiped out tens of thousands of lives in Lisbon in the 18th century, the philosopher Voltaire wrote Candide, savagely satirizing optimists who still found comfort and hope in God. After last month's Indian Ocean tsunami, the same anguished questioning is in the minds of millions of religious believers. "Turn to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible." Go to story "I came across the following sentence in a term paper recently. The student was about to describe how she had arrived at her conclusions. This is what she wrote: 'The following methodology was utilized.' I see this kind of thing all the time. Not 'the following method was used'; not ever 'this is what I did.' Like nearly all the students I've taught, this young woman has learned to believe that the English language does not have room for her. That it is a secret code known only to the initiated. That the language she speaks is uneducated, inferior and incorrect. Hence the corseted tone, the vocabulary that strains at sophistication, the way she absents herself from her own writing. This is a student who has been taught to worship the volcano god of Correct English." Go to story
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