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01-18-2005 Resources "Chris Taylor, a staff writer at Time magazine and a regular game reviewer, said he thinks driving games and first-person shooters are particularly likely to make players lose track of reality. "'I just knew the first time I played Burnout 2, the crash part, that I probably shouldn't get behind the wheel of a car for an hour or so afterwards,' Taylor said, 'because you're expending so much effort on deliberately trying to make your car crash.' "Taylor also said that after reviewing Quake III he had trouble getting his mind out of the game. "'I'd play it, then walk out into the office corridor and realize I was looking at my co-workers as potential targets,' said Taylor. 'I was so used to killing anything that moved.'" Go to story "A new study reveals that the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is loaded with black holes, as astronomers have expected in recent years. "The galactic center is dominated by one supermassive black hole. It packs a mass equal to about 3 million Suns. Around it, scientists have expected to find a high concentration of stellar black holes, the sort that result from the collapse of massive stars. Each can be a few to many times the mass of the Sun." Go to story "Strange objects in faraway space known to astronomers only as Giant Galactic Blobs have, upon close inspection, become a lot weirder." Go to story "The early universe rang with the sound of countless cosmic bells, which filled the primordial darkness with ripples like the surface of a pond pounded by stones. The wave fronts later served as spawning grounds for galaxies, astronomers announced Tuesday." Go to story "Ron Pintier was flying light and low above the northern wilds of the Democratic Republic of Congo when he saw a dark shape racing between two patches of tropical forest. 'It was huge,' says Pontier, a missionary pilot. 'It was black. The skin was kind of bouncing up and down on it.' From its bulk and color, Pontier thought it was a buffalo until he circled down for another look. 'I saw it again just before it went into the forest,' he says. 'It was an ape--and a big one.' Not buffalo size, but big. What Pontier saw was a piece of a primatological puzzle, another splinter of anecdotal evidence for a mysterious ape with characteristics of gorillas and chimpanzees, an animal that has scientists in a furious debate over what it might be. Go to story "Walton and Cockcroft: the names don't carry quite the same historic resonance as Watson and Crick. Yet the most enduring work of Ernest Walton and John Cockcroft -- splitting the nucleus of the atom -- can hold its own with the discovery of DNA's structure among the turning points of 20th-century science, and now, with Brian Cathcart's Fly in the Cathedral, they even get their own 'Double Helix,' sort of." Go to story "What musical geniuses has America produced? From the nineteenth century, the pickings are slim. If the idea of musical genius is defined by Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert , Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky and others in the list of immortals, it can't be appropriate to consider Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin in that category, however remarkable and special their gifts and contributions. In the 20th century, Copland, perhaps, Gershwin, but then when we talk about Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, to pick a few others from a longer list, the term genius seems inapplicable." Go to story "The Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson believes that he has solved a 487-year-old ecological mystery. "In 1518, a spectacular plague of ants devastated some of the earliest Spanish settlements in the New World on the island of Hispaniola. The Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas recorded how entire plantations were wiped out 'as though fire had fallen from the sky and scorched them.' Despite the scale of the destruction, the identity of the plague ants has never been discovered." Go to story "In 1945, Arturo Toscanini told the music critic B.H. Haggin that he preferred Haydn to Mozart. 'I will tell you frankly: sometimes I find Mozart boring,' he said to his astonished interviewer. 'Not G-minor [the G Minor Symphony, K. 550]: that is great tragedy; and not concerti; but other music. Is always beautiful—but is always the same.'" Go to story "The forgotten war -- the Korean war of 1950-53 -- might better be called the unknown war. What was indelible about it was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States' air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons (1), and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. Yet this episode is mostly unknown even to historians, let alone to the average citizen, and it has never been mentioned during the past decade of media analysis of the North Korean nuclear problem." Go to story "Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood peel away the evidence to find an extraordinary hoax at the heart of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel." Go to story "In Apocalypse, a patient study of Christian fundamentalism based on extensive interviews over a five year period with members of apocalyptic communities Charles Strozier identifies four basic beliefs as fundamental to Christian fundamentalism. (1) Inerrancy or biblical literalism, the belief that every word of the Bible is to be taken literally as the word of God; (2) conversion or the experience of being reborn in Christ; (3) evangelicalism or the duty of the saved to spread the gospel; and (4) Apocalypticism or Endism, the belief that The Book of Revelations describes the events that must come to pass for God's plan to be fulfilled. [1] Revelations thus becomes an object of longing as well as the key to understanding contemporary history, to reading the news of the day and keeping a handle on an otherwise overwhelming world. Each of these categories, Strozier adds, must be understood not doctrinally but psychologically. What follows attempts to constitute such an understanding by analyzing each category as the progression of a disorder that finds the end it seeks in Apocalyptic destructiveness." Go to story "Shakespeare’s name usually inspires thoughts of kings, fairies, lovers, wars and poetic genius--not syphilis. However, some passages in his plays and sonnets indicate that the Bard may have suffered from one or more venereal infections, according to an article in the Feb. 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online." Go to story "People often ask me, 'Jared, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the world's future?' I answer, 'I'm a cautious optimist.' I mean that, on the one hand, I acknowledge the seriousness of the problems facing us. If we don't make a determined effort to solve them, and if we don't succeed at that effort, the world as a whole within the next few decades will face a declining standard of living, or perhaps something worse." Go to story "It is not possible to make a serious film about American public life and a personality such as Hughes, who intervened extensively, for better or worse, over a period of decades in that public life, without weighing political events and social processes and drawing conclusions, without knowing something. One cannot make sense of Hughes simply on his own terms, as an individual abstracted from history. The filmmakers have tried to do this and the result is miserable." Go to story "What is true of the television set is also true of its most important accessory, the device that forever altered our viewing habits, transformed television programming itself, and, more broadly, redefined our expectations of mastery over our everyday technologies: the remote control. The creation and near-universal adoption of the remote control arguably marks the beginning of the era of the personalization of technology. The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake—the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod—have created a world where the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books 'on demand.' We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences." Go to story "Researchers have discovered the hidden laboratory used by Leonardo da Vinci for studies of flight and other pioneering scientific work in previously sealed rooms at a monastery next to the Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata, in the heart of Florence." Go to story "Sally Beauman's top 10 novels with a powerful sense of place." Go to story "If our goal is to achieve a multi-cultural society that is both free and peaceful, then what we need is not the multiplication of taboos but the expansion of tolerance. The belief in the value of tolerance is not like a belief in Jesus Christ, the prophet Muhammad, Ahura Mazda or, for that matter, the scientific wisdom of Darwin; it's the belief that alone makes it possible for all other beliefs to coexist." Go to story "For many modern parents, the ideal bedtime story usually involves something short (so they don't fall asleep while reading it), preferably with lots of pictures to keep the number of words to a minimum and with absolutely no necessity to "do voices". For children, of course, the ideal choice is something far more long-winded, in order to put off the moment of bedtime for as long as possible. "So it will be interesting to see the results of an experiment being carried out in two British primary schools, in which the last lesson of every day is devoted to children being read a classic story such as The Wind In The Willows, Aesop's Fables or Arabian Nights. Each reading will be preceded by a one-minute recording of classical music." Go to story "In a recent issue of Stanford Medicine, there is a cartoon with two individuals on different sides of a precipice: one is a scientist in a white lab coat, holding a test tube; the other is a preacher with a Bible, looking up to the heavens. The picture suggests that the embryonic stem cell debate is a clash between religion and science, an irreconcilable conflict between two different conceptions of reality. And indeed, many scientists, religious believers, and policymakers see it this way. Certainly many advocates for embryonic stem cell research see President Bush and his ilk as religious zealots, and see themselves as a thousand persecuted Galileos. And many religious believers worry about “man playing God,” and about scientists usurping the divine order. "But framing the embryo question as a clash between religion and science glosses over many important complexities. It is far too easy to presume that religious opposition to embryo research is not rational, but just sectarian piety. And it is far too easy to presume that the public case for embryo research is the most rational case, grounded in the best scientific evidence." Go to story "The 5th Annual Edge Question reflects the spirit of the Edge motto: 'To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.' "The 2002 Edge Question is: 'WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?'" Go to story "Christianity stands today at a critical point in its long and complex history. Too few Christians realise that humankind is moving into an increasingly global and secular future. Christianity and all other religions must now come to terms with this new global context. Not only are we becoming dependent on a global economy but the many diverse cultures of the past are being drawn into a global cultural maelstrom. In the last four hundred years our view of the universe in which we find ourselves has changed out of all recognition; and so also has our understanding of culture, of religion and of the human condition itself." Go to story "...why does Sweden, although poorer in per capita GDP than Alabama, top the United States in virtually every social indicator and hold its own in economic competitiveness as well? The keys to Sweden's success lie in the social and economic system it has developed since the Great Depression, sometimes called the 'Swedish model,' which has created a stunning degree of equality among its citizens and a physical infrastructure that is the envy of richer countries." Go to story "The sociologist Peter Berger once remarked that if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. Not anymore. With a Jesus lover in the Oval Office and a faith-based party in control of both houses of Congress, the United States is undeniably a nation of believers ruled by the same." Go to story "While rereading the poetry of William Blake recently, I realized very little had changed between the 18th century and today. Of course, the media would like us to believe that the zeitgeist spins madly, producing 'eras' as if they were products being readied for the next marketing season (which is exactly what they are). The media doesn’t want you clinging to any antique notion of 'who we are' any more than the auto industry wants you to cling to your 1990 Civic. And so we have the Sixties, the Me Generation, Reagan’s Yuppies and Gen X. The Cold War, the War Against Terror, the Clash of Civilizations and Globalization. This approach to understanding national identity and history is as dizzying and malevolent as that possessed girl’s spinning head in The Exorcist." Go to story "So, here we are. To steal John Lennon's cheery thoughts on the subject: another year over, a new one just begun. It is the time of year where every newspaper, every magazine and every TV station thinks it has a duty to look back over the last twelve months and nod knowingly about contemporary culture and changing times. "But frankly, what is the point? When popular nostalgia gets as far as the mid-noughties and the beeb gets around to making 'I love 2004', probably some time next March, what will it be getting nostalgic about? What will stand out as the crazy trends that, older and wiser, we will look back on and mutter 'I can't believe we liked that . . ?'" Go to story "Working-class autodidacts read the classics in part because contemporary literature was too expensive. A 1940 survey found that while 55 percent of working-class adults read books, they rarely bought new books. An autodidact could build up an impressive library by haunting used-book stalls, scavenging castoffs, or buying cheap out-of-copyright reprints such as Everyman's Library, but these offered only yesterday's authors. Thus Welsh collier Joseph Keating (b. 1871) was able to immerse himself in Swift, Pope, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, Thackeray, and Greek philosophy. There was one common denominator among these authors: all were dead. 'Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me,' Keating explained, but that did not bother him terribly. 'Our school-books never mentioned living writers; and the impression in my mind was that an author, to be a living author, must be dead; and that his work was all the better if he died of neglect and starvation.'" Go to story "Anti-Americanism has blossomed frantically in recent years. Nearly the whole world seems to be pock-marked with lesions of hate. Some of this hatred focuses on George W. Bush, but much of it goes beyond the President to encompass the supposed evils of America and Americanism in general. In its passionate and unreasoning intensity, anti-Americanism resembles a religion—or a caricature of a religion. And this fact tells us something important about Americanism itself. "By Americanism I do not mean American tastes or style, or American culture—that convenient target of America-haters everywhere. Nor do I mean mere patriotic devotion; many nations command patriotic devotion from their citizens (or used to). By Americanism I mean the set of beliefs that are thought to constitute America’s essence and to set it apart; the beliefs that make Americans positive that their nation is superior to all others—morally superior, closer to God." Go to story "Why don't Christians live what they preach?" Go to story "When I was a teen-ager, I wrote a science-fiction story about Leonardo da Vinci. In it, a young art historian becomes fascinated with Leonardo’s otherworldly paintings, with their strange rocky backgrounds, unplaceable landscapes, and enigmatic not-quite-human saints, their single fingers forever pointing strangely upward. To make a long, and rather shamelessly Rod Serlingish, story short, the art historian eventually discovers, in a previously unknown codex, that Leonardo was an alien, that the rocks were the landscape of his native planet, and that the fingers were pointing longingly back home." Go to story "Bach's final work was a tribute to Frederick the Great. Or so the story goes. If you read between the notes, says James Gaines, you will find a devastating attack on everything the king stood for." Go to story "They flew their rickety aircraft within a few feet of the ground, looped them again and again in dangerous maneuvers and roared earthward in seemingly suicidal dives, pulling out at the very last minute. Some clambered out onto the wings thousands of feet above the ground to do handstands, swung from ropes to transfer from one plane to another, or hung suspended from the struts of their aircraft and dropped onto other vehicles -- planes, speeding boats or automobiles. These were the danger-loving fliers of aviation's early days, widely known as barnstormers." Go to story "One of the most enduring legacies of Cervantes's 400-year-old epic was the creation of the comedy double act. Sean Clarke on why Don Quixote wouldn't have made it out of the stable without his long-suffering retainer, Sancho Panza." Go to story "Marxism, the International Committee, and the science of perspective: an historical analysis of the crisis of American imperialism." Go to story
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