By P.J. O’ROURKE [The Weekly Standard] – I have an idea for a brand new type of newspaper feature. And gosh do newspapers need one. No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism. You can still buy a buggy whip, which is more than can be said for a copy of the Rocky Mountain News, Cincinnati Post, or Seattle Post-Intelligencer. One would think that a business in such dire condition would be—for desperation’s sake—wildly innovative. But newspapers exhibit a fossilization of form and content that’s been preserved in sedimentary rock since the early 1970s when the “Women’s Pages” were converted to the “Leisure Section.” General Motors itself showed more inventive originality on its way to Chapter 11, as the two people who bought Pontiac Azteks can attest.
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Not dead yet.” »
Large ferrules on an Edw. Barder rod.
By PHIL MONAHAN [MidCurrent] – In the old days (20 or 30 years ago), before advances in materials and design technologies, the main problem with sleeve-over ferrules was that they didn’t allow a continuous diameter or taper in the blank. The upper section had to flare dramatically to fit over the lower section and still have enough strength to withstand flexing, so there was often a significant difference in rod diameter from one inch below the ferrule to one inch above it. This led to some sloppy rod action and breakage problems. The internal ferrule, on the other hand, while more labor-intensive to build, allowed for a continuous diameter from below the ferrule to above because the upper section didn’t have to fit over the entire diameter of the section below it. With more consistent diameters and tapers, internal-ferrule rods provided smoother action.
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Which fly rod ferrule is best?” »
Martin Gardner, 1914-2010.
By STEFAN KANFER [City Journal] – ‘The first time I encountered a column in Scientific American entitled “Mathematical Games,” I thought it was a contradiction in terms. Along with most English majors, I equated math with drudgery, not diversion. Then I read the piece. Its author, Martin Gardner, showed me how wrong I was. Over the years, he also showed me (and a few million others) how to understand topics that ranged from the left-handedness of molecules to the devious origins of Scientology to the secrets of sleight-of-hand artists to the in-jokes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. So it came as no surprise that when Gardner died last week at 95, he was mourned not only by mathematicians and physicists but by magicians, literary scholars, theologians, crossword-puzzle fans, writers, and editors. Indeed, the author of some 80 books was a classic example of the polymath (according to Webster’s: “From the Greek polymathēs, ‘having learned much’; a person, with superior intelligence, whose expertise spans a significant number of subject areas”).
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: The Mathemagician.” »
By MARK MAZOWER [The New Republic] – The effects of a great financial crisis ripple in many directions and last long. After a decade of expansion, for example, austere times lie ahead for British universities, with deep cuts on the horizon. There will be consequences for British scholarship and British culture. Richard Evans’s new study of the historical profession in Britain serves as a timely reminder both of what Britain’s historians have achieved over the past half-century, and what may be lost if their legacy is squandered. In particular, Evans celebrates his colleagues’ outward-looking mindset and their love-affairs with Europe, an engagement that is striking when compared to the introversion of their peers across the Channel, and—though he does not come out and say so—with the parochialism of contemporary British political and cultural life.
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: History's Isle.” »
J. L. Borges.
An interview by DENIS DUTTON and MICHAEL PALENCIA-ROTH [Denis Dutton] – Denis Dutton: Why don’t you tell us about some of the philosophers who have influenced your work, in whom you’ve been the most interested?
Jorge Luis Borges: Well, I think that’s an easy one. I think you might talk in terms of two: those would be Berkeley and Schopenhauer. But I suppose Hume might be worked in also, because, after all, of course Hume refutes Berkeley. But really, he comes from Berkeley — even if Berkeley comes from Locke. You might think of Locke, of Berkeley, and of Hume as being three links in an argument. But when somebody refutes somebody else in philosophy, he’s carrying on the argument.
Michael Palencia-Roth: Where would Schopenhauer come in?
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Jorge Luis Borges: an interview.” »
By MARTYN DRAKARD [MercatorNet] – Though overshadowed by Nairobi, the current regional hub of eastern Africa, Kampala is catching up fast, thanks to the mobile phone (which reached here several years before Kenya) and the wheel. While it is normal to take two hours to cross downtown Nairobi, longer when it rains, Kampala has the “boda-boda”, the motorcycle taxis, which move you around fast. In Nairobi they hardly exist.
“Boda” – the word is said twice for the sake of euphony — is a corruption and local pronunciation of the word “border”, the Kenya-Uganda border where the service originated many years ago, both as a means of goods transport and smuggling and for passengers. The boda-boda has many advantages: it takes you exactly where you want to go; it is a refreshing ride under the tropical sun; it is not bound by the same rules as heavier vehicles, except at traffic lights; it can carry as many as can fit safely; it is fast and efficient, and not expensive. It can also be hair-raising, as it weaves in and out of jams, measuring its way carefully between parked cars, its side mirrors skillfully missing the vehicles it brushes past.
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Swerve with verve.” »
By EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J. [First Things] – The British cosmologist Fred Hoyle coined the term “the Big Bang” as a term of derision, but it quickly caught on with the public. He had handed his opponents the most vivid (if somewhat misleading) image for the theory that our universe began as an infinitely small and infinitely dense “singularity,” which then “exploded” into the ever-expanding and ever-thinning cosmic matrix in which all of us pathetic earthlings now find ourselves.
Although by 1965 Hoyle found himself in the distinct minority among cosmologists, he never abandoned his criticism of the Big Bang theory or his advocacy of his steady-state” theory of a universe that was without beginning and will never end. He agreed with the Belgian priest-physicist Msgr. Georges Lemaître that the universe was expanding. But he rejected Lemaître’s interpretation of that fact.
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Atheism’s Just So Scenarios.” »
WE HAVE ADDED A second table of major paradigms to Prof. Alan Macfarlane’s remarkable (and remarkably popular) ‘fragment’: Concepts of time and the world we live in. The addition brings the paradigms of theoretical structures in the social sciences up to the present. Continue reading “Occ. Notes: An addition to Alan Macfarlane's 'Fragment'” »
JIM COLLINS quoted in Nature.com – on the announcement by the Craig Venter Institute that a synthesized genome had been assembled, modified and implanted into a DNA-free bacterial shell to make a self-replicating bacterium, an event the press has greeted with lurid headlines and romantic hyperbole (e.g., the Financial Times: ‘Beyond Evolution: The idea of breathing life into inanimate matter has been an enduring theme in fiction for centuries. Now it is fact as well.’):
Relax — media reports hyping this as a significant, alarming step forward in the creation of artificial forms of life can be discounted. The work reported by Venter and his colleagues is an important advance in our ability to re-engineer organisms; it does not represent the making of new life from scratch.
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Sizing up the 'synthetic cell'.” »
By Denis Boyles.
FOR ONE THING, IT makes revolutions less necessary.
Not quite kefi.
In American politics, the influence of the ‘tea party’ movement, the nation’s latest populist phenomenon, has been on the rise as more and more people gather – and vote – to give voice to their irritation at those who represent one of the most entrenched special interests in the United States of America: The government.
While polls and surveys suggest the tea party movement is broad-based, traditional American media – which itself has become an entrenched special interest – continues to attempt to defend the Establishment by manufacturing outrage against dissenters. Continue reading “The uses for populism.” »
A Discussion: JEFFREY GOLDBERG and PETER BEINART [The Atlantic] – Jeffrey Goldberg: You write about the shift away from Israel by young American Jewish liberals, and you attribute their discomfort with Israel to unhappiness about settlements, the occupation and their perception that Israel does not want to make peace with the Palestinians, or grant them dignity. I, too, sense this discomfort, but with a caveat: I’m not sure they are completely, empirically right. Which is to say: Settlements are wrong, and various Israeli policies are discriminatory, but aren’t liberal-minded American Jews being naive when they think that the Palestinians are blameless in this morass? Why should their Israeli cousins believe in the possibility of peace, after the debacle at Camp David in 2000, and after the Gaza settlement withdrawal was met not by the rise of moderation on the Palestinian side, but by the rise of Hamas?
Peter Beinart: I never said the Palestinians were blameless. They’re obviously not. But Abbas and Fayyad (especially the latter) are the Palestinian leaders most reconciled to Israeli statehood we’ve ever had. Yes, they’re weak, but has Israel done all it could to strengthen them–to show that it’s possible to halt settlement growth without an intifada? Hamas killed a friend of mine, so i’m not a fan. But Israel decided to let it run in the election, and I think after it won the best response would have to been to support a Palestinian unity government, perhaps with the proviso that we deal with the non-Hamas ministers, as we do with the government in Lebanon in Hezbollah. Instead we stupidly pushed Fatah to try to take power violently in Gaza, which backfired because they lost the contest of arms (and made us look incredibly hypocritical after Bush’s democracy rhetoric). I’d have insisted that Hamas stop rocket fire but allowed them to fudge recognition of Israel for now and not to demand they abide by past peace agreements (that was the stupidest condition, I think, because various Israeli governments have failed it). Yes, Hamas’ victory was tragic, but I don’t think it was inevitable that we had to get to where we were in December 2008. I understand that wars like the one in Gaza always inflict a terrible human toll, but it’s important that you’ve exhausted other options first, and I don’t think the US, or Israel, did.
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Beinart” »
By JAMES WOOD [The New Yorker] – Last month, Nadia Bloom, an eleven-year-old girl who had been missing for four days, was found, unhurt, in alligator-infested Florida swampland. A local church congregation had mobilized teams of searchers, but the man who discovered her, James King, was on his own. Well, not quite, because he had divine assistance. Armed with a machete, a G.P.S.-equipped BlackBerry, trail mix, and a Bible, the devout father of five let the Lord guide him to Nadia. As he slogged through the marshes, quoting Scripture and calling out Nadia’s name, he wonderfully heard a response. “God sent me and pointed me directly to her,” he said later. The local police chief told reporters that if he had not believed before in miracles he certainly did now.
Setting aside the always troublesome exceptionalism of such “miracles” (their logic dictates that every missing girl not so fortunate was being either punished or neglected by the Lord), what was remarkable was how very American the happy story was, as if James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Cormac McCarthy had collaborated. A European observer would probably be struck by the unpeopled landscape and the alligators, the intense local and voluntary involvement (a congregation, a united small community), but also by the defiant individualism—the solitary seeker rigged up as if for nineteenth-century missionary work—and, of course, the slightly insane theological certainties. These are the same American peculiarities that Alexis de Tocqueville noticed when he journeyed here in 1831, at the age of twenty-five.
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Tocqueville in America.” »
By MICHAEL WEISS [Arma Virumque | New Criterion] – Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals
may only recapitulate much of what’s been said and screamed over the Western intelligentsia’s embrace of the charismatic Islamist Tariq Ramadan and and its wincing alienation of the atheist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but if that’s all it does, it’ll be enough. Friendships and intellectual alliances are still being broken over which side a certain novelist or poet or essayist took during the Cold War. Ours is nothing if not a century of acceleration that, not a decade in, we’re already tallying up the scorecard for les clercs when it comes to the new ideological struggle.
Continue reading “Noted Elsewhere: The Ramadan complex.” »
By MANO SINGHAM [The Chronicle of Higher Education] – There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the anti-evolution forces in the 2005 “intelligent design” trial. The new war concerns questions that are more profound than whether or not to teach evolution. Unlike the old science-religion war, this battle is going to be fought not in the courts but in the arena of public opinion. The new war pits those who argue that science and “moderate” forms of religion are compatible worldviews against those who think they are not.
The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the origin of the universe—allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected using the methods of science. Some accommodationists, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights.
Prestigious organizations like the National Academy of Sciences have come down squarely on the side of the accommodationists….Those of us who disagree—sometimes called “new atheists”—point out that historically, the scope of science has always expanded, steadily replacing supernatural explanations with scientific ones.
Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: The new war between science and religion.” »
By GIDEON RACHMAN [Financial Times] – Most of the European Union is living beyond its means. Government deficits are out of control and public-sector debt is rising. If European governments do not use their new breathing space to control spending, financial markets will get dangerously restless again. Unfortunately, European voters and politicians are simply unprepared for the age of austerity that lies ahead.
I used to think Europe had got it right. Let the US be a military superpower; let China be an economic superpower – Europe would be the lifestyle superpower. The days when European empires dominated the globe had gone. But that was just fine. Europe could still be the place with the most beautiful cities, the best food and wine, the richest cultural history, the longest holidays, the best football teams. Life for most ordinary Europeans has never been more comfortable. Continue reading “Noted elsewhere: Europe is unprepared for austerity.” »
