By JIM MANZI [City Journal] – The missing ingredient is controlled experimentation, which is what allows science positively to settle certain kinds of debates. How do we know that our physical theories concerning the wing are true? In the end, not because of equations on blackboards or compelling speeches by famous physicists but because airplanes stay up. Continue reading “Noted: The science of ignorance.” »
Thursday, August 12, 2010
By LUCAS LAURSEN [Nature] –The Perseid shower still manages to surprise scientists despite its annual appearance. “Five to ten years ago, the main idea about these particles is that they were homogeneous,” recalls Pavel Spurný of the Ondřejov Observatory in the Czech Republic. To investigate that theory, he and his team compared the observed paths of meteoroids through the atmosphere with the light curves predicted by a physical model of homogeneous particles, and found that they didn’t match. “We proved that meteoroids are composed of two main parts — a grain and glue,” explains Spurný. Continue reading “Noted: The annual shower of grain and glue.” »
By ROBERT McCRUM [The Guardian] – As a champion of “difficulty”, albeit in an American mode, [DeLillo] is an heir of modernism and says that he sees himself as “part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce”. Unlike his friend Paul Auster, there’s no part of his creative make-up that owes much to the 19th-century American masters. “I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.” Instead, he listens to jazz: “Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, the same music I listened to when I was 20.”
Continue reading “Noted: Start with Joyce and go straight to DeLillo.” »
By SIMON CRITCHLEY [New York Times] – The rigor of Christianity is a conception of love based on radical inequality, namely the absolute difference between the human and the divine. Continue reading “Noted: Tough love.” »
By COLUM LYNCH [Foreign Policy] – After months of negotiations, a compromise was reached and the bike racks were moved to a more convenient, and covered, location near the main entrance to the U.N. headquarters. Charbonneau praised a small group of U.N. officials who worked hard to accommodate the bicyclists. But the peace didn’t last.
Continue reading “Noted: Strife in the land of peacemakers.” »
By TONY JUDT [New York Times] – For many decades after the war, no one in France wanted to be reminded of its treatment of the Jews. Survivors wanted only to melt back into the democratic Republic. The Gaullists found it useful to depict Vichy and its collaborators as the work of a handful of extremists, with most of the French silently or actively supporting the Resistance.
Intellectuals, so prominent in postwar France, might have been expected to force the issue. Yet people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault were curiously silent. One reason was their near-obsession with Communism. While proclaiming the need to “engage,” to take a stand, two generations of intellectuals avoided any ethical issue that could not advance or, in some cases, retard the Marxist cause.
Continue reading “Noted: An intellectual's first and final flight.” »
by CAROLYN MOYNIHAN [MercatorNet] – Sexual identity, the cyberbubble, obsessions, environmental toxins: these are the four factors driving the current crisis for girls that [Leonard] Sax describes in his latest book, Girls on the Edge
. It could just as easily have been called Girls On The Surface, because that is the cumulative effect of the risks he is concerned about: girls focused on how they look, on performance, on what they do rather than who they are; girls insatiable for the next bit of gossip or the next A grade, and inconsolable when they meet with setbacks and failures.
Continue reading “Noted: Girls could be girls.” »
By JOHN SWEENEY [BBC World Service] – In political jargon it was used to describe Soviet sympathisers in Western countries and the attitude of the Soviet government towards them.
Useful idiots, in a broader sense, refers to Western journalists, travellers and intellectuals who gave their blessing – often with evangelistic fervour – to tyrannies and tyrants, thereby convincing politicians and public that utopias rather than Belsens thrived.
Continue reading “Noted: Idiots and their uses.” »
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
By CHRIS RANDLE [Back to the World] – Occasionally, stylistic changes in an adaptation filter down to the comics themselves. (This happened more often in the days before the film industry hungrily farmed pamphlets for new intellectual properties, and before many cartoonists conceived entire works as pre-storyboarded Hollywood pitches.) When X-men ditched spandex for black leather ten long years ago, the characters did the same on paper. Continue reading “Noted: There's nothing funny about the clothes in comics.” »
By JAMES K. GLASSMAN [Commentary] – Why are taxes so high in Europe? Certainly not to maintain a strong defense but rather to pour money into a welfare state that provides lavish support to retirees, perennial students, and others who aren’t working. In other words, Europeans have chosen to have workers support non-workers in their leisure. Continue reading “Noted: Let them ride in sedan chairs.” »
By JOSEPH BOTTUM [First Things] – You travel the long road of religion in America, and you find the Bible chapels, scattered along the prairie like tumbleweeds that have somehow grown white vinyl siding. You drive past the green-lawn suburban churches with cutesy messages on the brick-framed signs placed out near the street. You pass the exhaust-stained marble fronts of the old city congregations, the yellow taxis inching angrily by. Continue reading “Noted: Sign at the American crossroads.” »
By YOSEF YTIZHAK LIFSHITZ [Azure Online] – More than anything else, the Sabbath in Jewish tradition is characterized by its comprehensive ban on work (isur melacha). The scope of this prohibition, and the theological explanation behind it, have no parallel in the customs surrounding other holy days, either within Judaism or without. Continue reading “Noted: Sabbath: The rest of the story.” »
By ROBERT J. SAMUELSON [Claremont Review of Books] – Broadly defined, the purpose of finance is to provide ways for society to save and invest, to give people and firms a choice between spending now and spending later, to match borrowers and lenders. Without reliable ways to save, societies would remain mostly present-oriented, and investment in new productive capacity and technologies—the foundation of economic growth—would be hamstrung. People would bury their savings. Continue reading “Noted: Why there's no cash under the garden.” »
