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Newsletter for 03-08-2005 For previous newsletters, please visit this page. Note: You may need to register (for free) to access some of these articles. If the link is not accessible, try entering the address using the Internet Archive Wayback Engine. Resources Encyclopedia of Diderot and Alembert The Great War (PBS) Mousetrap: The Physics Detective Articles For years brain researchers shied away from exotic experiences such as hallucinations, near-death experiences or “intimations of the divine”, on the grounds that there was no way to study them scientifically. But as consciousness has become an academically respectable topic, it has become harder to ignore “altered states”. If memory and imagination can be linked to the activity of groups of neurons, couldn ’t the experience of being “at one with the universe” just be the result of brain cells firing? The 77th Academy Awards ceremony was a largely dreary affair. What stood out? The wealth and privilege of those involved, their self-importance and the essentially trivial character, for the most part, of what they do. So why do so many people believe? And why has belief proved so resilient as scientific progress unravels the mysteries of plagues, floods, earthquakes and our understanding of the universe? By injecting nuns with radioactive chemicals, by scanning the brains of people with epilepsy and studying naughty children, scientists are now working out why. When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe. Learning more about species unique to whale falls may also teach us more about the extremes of life, which increases our understanding of the range and limits of life on Earth—and possibly on other planets. Few visitors to the Giza plateau are aware that the pyramids, Egypt's Old Kingdom treasures and testaments to early pharaonic history, were almost dismantled about 170 years ago. It is hard to imagine that these ancient structures, the most popular tourist sights in Egypt, were nearly sacrificed as part of the plan to modernize that country. Yet, shocking as the idea now seems, Egypt's absolute ruler at the time seriously envisioned and nearly executed the project. Reason has been taking a beating recently, and it's not hard to see why. If Americans are flocking to religious faith, to revealed dogma, to creationism, to a place where no one pays any heed to a logic based on if x then y, it's because reason gave us a world that hardly makes sense anymore. Experts say it is no longer a case of if but when a pandemic of bird flu hits the human population. To mark World Book Day, our hunt for the most popular book club book is over and voting is closed. Universally acclaimed as a performer, revered as a saint by some, M.S. Subbulakshmi epitomized Hindu virtues. For generations of Indians, the sound of dawn was the sound of the music of M.S. Subbulakshmi, who died Dec. 11 at the age of 88. Even today, her mellifluous voice, chanting the Venkateswara Suprabadam, the Sanskrit wake-up call to Lord Vishnu, is heard not only in temples all over India but by the Indian diaspora everywhere. Just as blowing up a bubble leads to a pop, so can shrinking it. Rapidly collapsing bubbles have long been known to reach astonishing temperatures. Now scientists have measured just how hot. And they're surprised. It has only been discovered very recently that there are two main features of brain maturation that happen to coincide with puberty. Previously it was believed that the brain was pretty well set by adolescence but only in the last couple of years, and to everyone's surprise, it has been realised that maturation is not completed until late teens or even early 20s. In the 1980s some pretty prominent scientists, such as Stephen Jay Gould, had claimed that the opposite was the case--namely, that language was merely a side effect of other evolutionary forces, such as an increase in brain size. Pinker and Bloom argued that the features of language show that Gould must be wrong. Instead, they maintained, language shows all the classic hallmarks of an adaptation produced by natural selection. Completely tragically, Edsa I and II have not only failed to carry out a revolution, notwithstanding that "revolution" is a word that has been hitched to "Edsa" like a carriage to a horse, at least in the sense that Narciso Reyes proposed it-they have delivered the country into the hands of the most reactionary elements in society. The "spectacular divide" between rich and poor, which Ninoy Aquino and others fulminated against before martial law, has not narrowed, it has widened. The social volcano roils with volatile magma more than ever. But lest we see this as a failure of Edsa alone, history should disabuse us of the thought. It is a failure of all our revolutions, violent or peaceful, from the Philippine Revolution or revolutions of 1896 and 1899, against the Spanish and Americans respectively, to the Huk uprising during the Japanese Occupation, to the last two Edsas. All these events tell the story of an elite, torn by strife, coming together to meet a threat of sweeping change. All these events tell the story of an elite either thwarting a popular uprising or hijacking it, and re-imposing its will on the society. And these events tell of a widening gap afterward between rich and poor as the emerging power attempts to chart a path to progress that precludes changing the status quo. All these events tell of why we remain backward even as our neighbors have gone where the developed countries have gone before. Last week the nation was shocked by a violent, mysterious crime involving a prominent Chicago judge, a defenseless family and the suspicion of a revenge hit. If your first thought was, "My God, that sounds just like an episode of 'Law & Order'! " are you an insensitive clod? Are you a monster if you found yourself comparing real-life tragedy to a TV show? Ancient man saved the world from a new Ice Age. That is the startling conclusion of climate researchers who say man-made global warming is not a modern phenomenon and has been going on for thousands of years. America's cultural professionals have lost their confidence. Faced with pre-emptive, Internet-driven attacks on what they might do or say at any given moment -- and self-fulfilling prophesizing as to whom they surely will offend -- movie stars, comedians, even news anchors, increasingly spend their time in reactive mode. Good art -- and lively entertainment -- sets agendas. Defensive art typically is unwatchable. Exhibit A: the Academy Awards last week. Is love worth dying for? Berlin-based composer Mayako Kubo poses this question in her latest opera, Osan, which will premiere at the New National Theatre, Tokyo, on Friday [February 25]. By 2015, the Philippines would have become merely a "geographic location"; at best, a virtual nation. Home would be nothing but a staging ground for an overseas career, an issuing authority for passports. When the string orchestra began to play beside the church altar and the youth choir joined in, it seemed as if they belonged in a European cathedral. Instead, they were 30 children in shorts and sandals, and they were practicing Baroque music in a simple adobe church in a remote tropical village without any paved roads. Porongo is the 11th — and most recent — community in this region of eastern Bolivia to create a school of classical music for poor children who had never before picked up violins or had singing lessons. SEVERAL of the corporate scandals that took place in the early years of this decade are currently being replayed in courtrooms from New York to Alabama. The trials of top executives at HealthSouth, Tyco International and WorldCom are reminding the public how unethical was the behaviour of some of the nation's top managers only a few short years ago. The finger of blame for this behaviour is sometimes pointed at the MBA, the degree offered by business schools from Harvard to Hawaii. Perhaps this is not as odd as it sounds. After all, MBAs lay as thick on the ground at Enron as managerial hubris, and disinterested outsiders are not alone in asking whether there might have been some connection. Scientists have confirmed that the diminutive creature dubbed the hobbit discovered on the remote Indonesian island of Flores was most likely a new species of human. Teachers circle the room in an experiment that could change the shape of education. And the pupils love it. In the course of his long life, French philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) adopted a series of different political positions while remaining consistent in his philosophical theology. What is one to do with an intellectual whose political engagement ranged from an early flirtation with the authoritarian Action Française to a leading role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and who both helped to inspire the Second Vatican Council and caustically catalogued its allegedly pernicious cultural side effects? Ralph McInerny offers an image of a saintly savant almost bereft of practical wisdom: “He careened from right to left and back again; his gyroscope only worked when he was in his study or on his knees.” I would like to provide another interpretation. This week saw the discovery of the biggest prime number yet. Big deal? Yes, says Simon Singh, because of primes the internet works, our emails are secure, and the world is a safer place. Giant space clouds of gas may have changed the climate or atmosphere on Earth and fueled mass extinctions millions of years ago, scientists said Thursday. Art licenses us to stare -- in museums, at the theater, the ballet, especially at the movies. But there's also something in our puritan constitution that makes us skeptical, suspicious, even a little ashamed of our bedazzlement. Shouldn't we value deeper and more lasting things and regard appearance as a fleeting, transitory apparition? Beauty may be truth (and vice versa), as Keats famously said. But when it shows up too clearly in human form, we don't really trust it, or our responses. If, as Socrates claimed, the unexamined life is not worth living, the overexamined life may leave little time for living. Joakim's Garff's brilliant but exhaustively detailed biography of 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard makes this doubly clear. The US military is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away. Intended for use against rioters, it is meant to leave victims unharmed. But pain researchers are furious that work aimed at controlling pain has been used to develop a weapon. And they fear that the technology will be used for torture. John Locke, Original Hipster SCOTLAND'S scientific heritage is rich. This small country of only five million has repeatedly punched above its weight, giving the world inventions including the telephone and the television, and the first anaesthetic. HAS 300 years passed just for Scotland to evolve from the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of the Power Card? Has it taken three centuries for Scots to dispense with larks' tongues in aspic with a decent claret and replace them with the deep-fried Mars bar and a robust Buckfast? And how has the Scotland that was the Thinking Man of Europe in the eighteenth century become The Sick Man of Europe in the 21st? Nineteenth-century English social scientist Herbert Spencer made this prescient observation: "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." Well over a century later nothing has changed. When I debate creationists, they present not one fact in favor of creation and instead demand "just one transitional fossil" that proves evolution. When I do offer evidence (for example, Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between ancient land mammals and modern whales), they respond that there are now two gaps in the fossil record. This is a clever debate retort, but it reveals a profound error that I call the Fossil Fallacy: the belief that a "single fossil"--one bit of data--constitutes proof of a multifarious process or historical sequence. In fact, proof is derived through a convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry--multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to an unmistakable conclusion. Some of the things kids have to do just beggars belief. For instance, last year in English my son had to take The Crucible (which he loves, and thoroughly responded to) and compare it to an ad for some weight-lifting gym. If it wasn't horrible, it would be hilarious, and in fact it's both. As a writer as much as a reader I was outraged by this stupid, insulting and utterly irrelevant attempt to equate these two things. Never mind saying Shakespeare is the same as Neighbours, this was of a level of magnitude of idiocy - and of, I believe, subsconscious hate and envy of writers themselves - that is simply mind-boggling. I have no objection to people looking at ads as part of English, though I think this is considered of much more “subversive” world-shattering importance to the middle-aged people who construct the curriculum, than to young people for whom such things are ho-hum, and that they can perfectly deconstruct all on their own thank you very much. But to compare The Crucible with an ad - what possible use does this serve, if not to say that they are the same, as they can be compared? There are times when what we journalists see and intend to write about dispassionately sends a shiver down the spine, shaking us from our neutrality. This has been happening to me frequently of late as one story after another drives home the fact that the delusional is no longer marginal but has come in from the fringe to influence the seats of power. We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges. ...it's not up to us to say who's great. Posterity will supply that answer, possibly identifying names who feature nowhere on the radar of literary fashion. Our job is to locate the writers we believe to be good and let them take their chance in the marketplace. Too many writers? Are we seriously going to argue that ordinary people should be denied the right to self-expression? Milton wrote a little book about this in 1644, in defence of 'the liberty of unlicenc'd printing'. Areopagitica says all that needs to be said about people who propose the limitation of print freedom. No, the barbarians are not at the gate. It's an age of awesome variety we are living in. English in all its thrilling, international forms, from romance to rap, is finding more colour and expression than at any time since Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson. The meaning of Ice Age art has been endlessly debated, but evidence is increasing that some was religiously motivated. Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood’s new film about a female boxer, has been met with virtually universal acclaim, including from “left” critics. In my opinion, the acclaim is entirely undeserved; the film’s rancid individualism will prove no help to anyone. There is something foul at the heart of Million Dollar Baby that no one wants to talk about. We live in an insane world. Today we see, more than ever, incalculable wealth standing opposed to unspeakable misery. Millions die of curable or preventable diseases while the United States government wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on arms production. Half the world’s working population makes $2 a day or less. In the US there has been a 20 percent fall in living standards for 80 percent of the population since 1973, with one third of the work force stuck in temp and part-time jobs as the eight-hour workday becomes a thing of the past, and a predominantly Black and Latino prison population which may hit 5 million by the year 2010. The gap between what could be accomplished with the talents of the world’s population and what actually happens is wider than ever. Astronomers have detected the brightest ever event from outside our Solar System. The event occurred on 27 December last year and was so powerful that it was seen over a wide range of wavelengths by a number of space-based and ground-based telescopes. The event was brightest at gamma-ray wavelengths and has been linked to a magnetar - a spinning neutron star with a strong magnetic field - called SGR 1806-20 in the constellation Sagittarius about 50,000 light years away. The mystery of an ancient Mesopotamian city has finally been lifted after 25 years of meticulous work by a French archaeologist who has revealed it was one of the first "modern cities," purpose-built in the desert for the manufacture of copper arms and tools. "Natural selection almost always builds on what went before.... It is the resulting complexity that makes biological organisms so hard to unscramble. The basic laws of physics can usually be expressed in simple mathematical form, and they are probably the same throughout the universe. The laws of biology, by contrast, are often only broad generalizations, since they describe rather elaborate (chemical) mechanisms that natural selection has evolved over millions of years.... I myself knew very little biology, except in a rather general way, till I was over thirty...my first degree was in physics. It took me a little time to adjust to the rather different way of thinking necessary in biology. It was almost as if one had to be born again." A decade after arriving in Princeton, Einstein acquired a walking companion, a much younger man who, next to the rumpled Einstein, cut a dapper figure in a white linen suit and matching fedora. The two would talk animatedly in German on their morning amble to the institute and again, later in the day, on their way homeward. The man in the suit may not have been recognized by many townspeople, but Einstein addressed him as a peer, someone who, like him, had single-handedly launched a conceptual revolution. If Einstein had upended our everyday notions about the physical world with his theory of relativity, the younger man, Kurt Gödel, had had a similarly subversive effect on our understanding of the abstract world of mathematics. What is a narrator but a kind of ghost haunting the text? Doesn't Nick Carraway at the end of Gatsby sound as ghostly as possible? Is the poignancy of elegy sharpened if it's voiced by the literally dead? To this last question, at least, the fiction of postmortality responds directly: elegy's over. A list of global bestsellers reveals that the French are patriotic, the Americans political and the British ‘celebrity-crazy’. A century after his death, novelist Jules Verne, who imagined Moon flight and deep-sea voyages, looks more prophetic than ever. A team of European astronomers have discovered a highly structured cluster of thousands of galaxies at an incredible 9 billion light-years away. In other words, this structure was highly evolved only a few billion years after the Big Bang; a situation that should be impossible, according to current theories. Incredibly, some of the galaxies in the cluster are red and elliptical, which would indicate that they were already quite old at only a few billion years old. This week, Africa is holding its version of the Cannes Film Festival here in the capital of Burkina Faso, one of the world's poorest countries. Le Festival Panafricain du Cinéma de Ouagadougou (FESPACO) screens nearly 200 films, many of them made on budgets no more than the cost of the Versace dress that Halle Berry wore on Sunday. FESPACO is the biggest and most prestigious film festival in Africa, but it faces a problem moviemakers here would like to solve: a distinct lack of participation from African-Americans in Hollywood.
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