Surprising as it may seem, there are people who can smell sounds, see smells or hear colors. Actually, all of as, at some point in our lives, have had this skill (some authors affirm that it is common in newborns). [click link for full article]
Some People Can Hear A Color Or Smell A Sound
It is not a matter of revving ourselves up to experience again the wonder of the Christ Mass. There is no point in trying to recapitulate Christmas as you knew it when you were, say, seven years old. That way lies sentimentalities unbounded. The alternative is the way of contemplation, of demanding of oneself the disciplined [...]
The Real Presence of Christmas
Reprinted with permission of World War II Magazine In late September 1944, three of the U.S. Navy’s top admirals met in San Francisco to discuss the next phase of operations in the Central Pacific theater. Adm. Chester W. Nimitz recommended the capture of Okinawa in Ryukyu Islands. It had both the land area and [...]
What If the Marines Had Bypassed Iwo Jima?
Before radio and TV dethroned the book, social reformers warned about reading too much, not too little.
You Are What You Read
When Hollywood comes knocking, that’s probably a clue the time has come to open the door. And the secretive, centuries-old order of Freemasonry seems to be picking up its cue.
Freemasonry, Eager to Step From Cultural Shadows
Mr. Sippy was an Indian filmmaker whose 1975 blockbuster “Sholay” (“Embers”) remains the most famous Hindi movie and the biggest commercial success for Bollywood.
G. P. Sippy, Indian Filmmaker Whose ‘Sholay’ Was a Bollywood Hit, Dies at 93
In the title essay of a collection published this year, the novelist and critic David Lodge declared 2004 to have been “The Year of Henry James.”
In search of the real Henry James
Carmontelle’s 18th-century transparent drawings are a precursor to modern cinema.
Experimenting with cinema in 18th-century France
Dec 22: Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, the largest collection of drawings and writings by the Renaissance master, has been infiltrated by mould, officials said yesterday
Mould threatens Leonardo works
Julien Gracq, who was considered one of France’s leading writers of the 20th century and was known for his surrealist style, has died at 97.
Acclaimed French writer Julien Gracq dies
NASA research scientist on peak oil and climate change
Tucked Between the Covers, 2007 Snoozes Into History – washingtonpost.com
A survivor’s tale of fear and starvation in Ukrainian famine of 1930s – International Herald Tribune
Culture Change – Now we are human commodities
The First Thing We Do, Let’s Get Rid of All the Astrologers (Skeptical Briefs June 2007)
God and Rev. Bayes (Skeptical Briefs June 2007)
Peter Gay’s Modernism: So boring, so necessary. By Morgan Meis
The Death of Modernism
Theologian John Haught explains why science and God are not at odds, why Mike Huckabee worries him, and why Richard Dawkins and other “new atheists” are ignorant about religion.
The atheist delusion
Settled in 1790 by mutineers from the storied H.M.S. Bounty, Pitcairn Island is one of the British Empire’s most isolated remnants, a mystical hunk of rock that was largely ignored until 1996. Then Pitcairn’s secret was exposed: generations of rape and child molestation as a way of life.
Trouble in Paradise
Moral insight “is a matter of imagining a better future, and observing the results of attempts to bring that future into existence”. Richard Rorty, who died on June 8, was one of the most public of public intellectuals. In the recent ten-year anniversary edition of “Kritika & Kontext”, he outlined the anti-foundationalist premise of his philosophy. [Belarusian and Slovenian versions added]
Democracy and philosophy
In a non-philosophical age, Richard Rorty offered a fast and easy solution to a fundamental philosophical question. Rorty’s critique of universalism constituted a liberation but left no alternative to moral ethnocentrism. [Slovenian version added.]
The afternoon of a pragmatist faun
Europe is taking not just a post-national but also a post-western shape. The relation between the inside and the outside is complex and ambivalent; while often exclusionary, the periphery can also be viewed as the site of cosmopolitan forms of negotiation. [Slovenian version added.]
Peripheries and borders in a post-western Europe
Girls Gone Mild by Wendy Shalit
Don’t blame OPEC. The major factors are a weak dollar and speculation.
Why oil is so expensive
Michael Moore slammed Wolf Blitzer, the Simpsons mocked Fox and a cartoon about Mormons caused a big fuss.
Top Ten Hottest Videos of 2007
Culture Change – How we’ve made ourselves into abstractions
Hollywood has the moral compass of the Taleban or al-Qaeda, according to one of Britain’s best known film actors.
Rupert Everett: acting in Hollywood is like living in Afghanistan
I was watching American football, televised from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the other night with my wife, Elize, when a long-lost memory came to mind. “If a boy really loved a girl, he’d kiss her in the middle of the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.” I was all for it, provided I could be teleported without leaving the settee.
From robot to Romy: Ken Russell’s top ten characters
New study shows studying late at night doesn’t help
All-nighters do not improve grades
In Britain, fundamental physics is in a pickle
ISAAC NEWTON, besides being the founder of modern physics, was also master of Britain’s mint. That is a precedent which many British physicists must surely wish had become traditional. At the moment, money for physics is in short supply in Britain. Having spent a lot of cash in recent years, physicists and astronomers are now finding they do not have enough money to use the very facilities they paid to have built.
On December 14th, for example, the British delegation to CERN, Europe’s biggest particle-physics laboratory, abstained from a vote to increase the budget to make best use of the Large Hadron Collider (see article). A vote for a rise, British delegates said, would be a vote for job losses elsewhere in physics. The budget was carried nonetheless and Britain is obliged to pay up. Perhaps not coincidentally, the country’s government had announced a few days earlier that it would withdraw from the International Linear Collider (ILC), an $8 billion project to build the successor to CERN’s new toy. Since America seems almost certain to cut its ILC budget, too, this project looks to be in trouble. ...
Newton’s law of funding
How Genghis Khan’s armies created the modern world
HISTORY is famously about “maps and chaps” while economics has become obsessed with graphs and Greek letters. In a splendidly ambitious new book, two economists, one at Columbia University and the other at Trinity College, Dublin, attempt to link the two, in a 1,000-year history of world trade.
For much of the past millennium, they argue, “the pattern of trade can only be understood as being the outcome of some military or political equilibrium between contending powers.” This was as true of Genghis Khan, whose rampages across the steppes led to the pax Mongolica that allowed Eurasian trade to flourish in the 13th century, as it was of the British empire which imposed free trade on large parts of Asia and Africa. Trade expansion has tended to come “from the barrel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scimitar, or the ferocity of nomadic horsemen”. ...
Genghis the globaliser
SHAKESPEARE UNBOUND Decoding a Hidden Life By René Weis Henry Holt. 479 pp. $35 “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” Maybe, just maybe, a decent number of Americans could identify the author of those lines as William Shakespeare. But how many know tha…
The Inner Bard
Allan Mallinson reviews Band of Brigands by Christy Campbell
The birth of the tank
The most pertinent element to consider at Christmas is just what we are spending our hard earned on.
The economics of Christmas
While theologians have interrogated their beliefs for millennia, secular humanists have yet to question their simple creed.
The empty myths peddled by evangelists of unbelief
At the Movies · Michael Wood on the gangster movie
On the morning of July 8, 1980, Raymond Carver wrote an impassioned letter to Gordon Lish, his friend and editor at Alfred A. Knopf, begging his forgiveness but insisting that Lish “stop production” of Carver’s forthcoming collection of stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Carver had . . .
Rough Crossings
In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had . . .
Twilight of the Books
BBC NEWS | Health | Lasting genetic legacy of environment
A debt culture gone awry – International Herald Tribune
FT.com / Home UK / UK – The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy
World food stocks dwindling rapidly, UN warns – International Herald Tribune
Dobrynin-Kissinger “Back Channel” Meetings
The Nuclear Vault: The United States and Taiwan’s Nuclear Program, 1976-1980
The INF Treaty and the Washington Summit: 20 Years Later
Operación Cóndor en el Archivo del Terror
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered a gene in plants that disrupts fertilization only when mutations in the gene are present in both the female and male reproductive cells.
Biologists find unusual plant gene: abstinence by mutual consent
The drive for profit seems to have left the West vulnerable to the superior strategies and subtleties of Confucian administrators.
The passion and enthusiasm of Confucian Asia
Last love of a piano legend
American Scientist Online – Racing Toward Armageddon
Where does “old” music end and “new” music begin?
The New Line Between Now and Then
On December 5, H. Wiley Hitchcock, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Andrew Imbrie all gave up their mortal forms, but they left us with their minds— signified by their corpuses of works, each of which was extensive.
und am achten Tag
How could any student enrolled in a reputable conservatory need to be persuaded to be interested in the great legacy of past composers?
The Newest Philistinism: History-Phobic Composers
There has been an outpouring of reactions to the recent passing of avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. La Scena Musicale has created a Stockhausen Spotlight at scena.org to cover the tributes and reactions. Our February 2008 issue will discuss why Stockhausen was a major composer. We welcome your comments, some of which will be published in the article.
Stockhausen Spotlight Page
A novel 3-D imaging technique provides a first look at the internal structure of human skin cells.
The Guts of a Cell, Frozen in Time
‘Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?Â’ Tony Hancock – Ted Vallance examines the issues around a controversial sale
Magna Carta for sale
By Peter Goodchild
Most people in modern industrial society get their food mainly from supermarkets. As a result of declining hydrocarbon resources, however, it is unlikely that such food will always be available. The present world population is nearly 7 billion, but food supplies per capita have been shrinking for years. Food production will have to become more localized, and it will be necessary to reconsider less-advanced forms of technology that might be called subsistence gardening.
Growing Food When The Oil Runs out
Model prisons: What could the Victorians tell us about prison design?
The Armani of Italian literature – Books – Entertainment – smh.com.au
Australia forgives Lawrence of Arabia’s history | UK | Reuters
Ancient Greenland mystery has a simple answer, it seems | csmonitor.com
Hot on the trail of Genghis Khan :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Metro & Tri-State
Read the full story now.
Sherman Reaches Savannah—Leaving a Swath of Destruction Behind Him
Human evolution has speeded up over the past 80,000 years. That raises awkward questions about the concept of “race”
PROBABLY, more bad science has been conducted on the concept of human race than on any other field of biology. The reason is that an awful lot of research into race has been motivated by preconceived ideas that one lot of people are somehow “better” than another lot, rather than being a disinterested investigation of regional variations in a single species and the evolutionary pressures that have created them.
Contrariwise, even well constructed studies, if they do find racial differences, risk opposition from those who deny that people from different parts of the world could ever differ genetically from one another in important ways. As a result, only the foolish or the daring rush in to add to the carnage. It remains to be seen which category the authors of two papers in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences fall into. ...
Darwin’s children
‘We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,” the Russian critic Belinsky once shouted across the table at Turgenev, “and you want to eat!” Charles Taylor would prefer that we feast upon the 874 pages of his new book “A Secular Age,” which offers musings and perceptions from every field of knowledge except knowledge of God, which he leaves off the menu. Taylor’s quarrel is with secularism – the idea that as modernity, science and democracy have advanced, concern with God and spirituality has retreated to the margins of life. Calling this thesis “very unconvincing,” Taylor seeks to prove that God is still very much present in the world, if only we look at the right places and allow the mind to open itself to moral inquiry and aesthetic sensibility rather than traditional theology as the gateway to religion.
Resurrecting a belief in God
As tough as Freud’s paintings are, his etchings are somehow even starker, more raw and brutal. They bring the violence of his rendering style closer to the surface.
Lucian Freud stripped bare
Numerous illustrations–absorbing, beautiful ones–of both the Vulgate Bible and the Divine Comedy by the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí are now on view (and for sale) at Manhattan’s William Bennett Gallery. “The Spiritual Art of Salvador Dalí” runs through January 9, 2008, and is not easily reconciled with prevailing notions of a supposedly secular century’s art. At [...]
The book version of The Golden Compass begins with a bang. The movie version with a lecture. The film opens with the camera panning across a sea of computer-generated galaxies, and a narrative voice tells us of the underpinnings of Philip Pullman’s world. We learn that many universes lie parallel to each other, and that, [...]
Watching The Golden Compass
The unsubtle atheism of Philip Pullman’s books.
His Dark Material
For more details, please click on the link to read the article.
CIA destroyed torture tapes
Early this morning, after reading the text of Al Gore’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the web, I was puzzling over the comments section of that particular site, where several of the scientific equivalent of Holocaust deniers had weighed in. Still wondering what to make of it, I decided it was time to hit the front stoop and tackle the daily ordeal of reading my rather conservative hometown newspaper. There to greet me was the lead story headline, “Melting of Arctic’s ice speeds up.” The (no doubt liberal) AP story went on to say:
“Greenland’s ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer’s end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data. . . .
read more
And the Band Played On: On Al Gore, the Nobel Prize, and Holocaust Deniers
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – There already is enough carbon in Earth’s atmosphere to ensure that sea levels will rise several feet (meters) in coming decades and that summertime ice will vanish from the North Pole, scientists warned on Thursday.
Carbon cuts a must to halt warming : scientists
The world’s leading scientists are predicting climate change to cause water wars and mass migrations from rural to urban areas.
Environment: From Oil Wars to Water Wars
The Canadian wilderness is set to be invaded by BP in an oil exploration project dubbed ‘the biggest global warming crime’ in history.
Environment: The Biggest Global Warming Crime in History
SOME 98 per cent of our vegetable varieties have disappeared over the past century and regulations are hastening the decline, an organic charity warned.
98% of veg varieties have disappeared
Despite appearances, scientists and literary authors have spent centuries mirroring each other, albeit indirectly
Of Dickens and Darwin
Self-Righting Object, The
What is the purpose of the “gift” if the composer doesn’t follow his muse?
The Audience is Not the Only Arbiter
Rising incomes in Asia and ethanol subsidies in America have put an end to a long era of falling food prices
ONE of the odder features of last weekend’s vote in Venezuela was that staple foods were in short supply. Something similar happened in Russia before its parliamentary election. Governments in both oil-rich countries had imposed controls on food prices, with the usual consequences. Such controls have been surprisingly widespread—a knee-jerk response to one of the most remarkable changes that food markets, indeed any markets, have seen for years: the end of cheap food.
In early September the world price of wheat rose to over $400 a tonne, the highest ever recorded. In May it had been around $200. Though in real terms its price is far below the heights it scaled in 1974, it is still twice the average of the past 25 years. Earlier this year the price of maize (corn) exceeded $175 a tonne, again a world record. It has fallen from its peak, as has that of wheat, but at $150 a tonne is still 50% above the average for 2006. ...
Cheap no more
After half a millenium, Machiavellianism remains characteristic of our political practice
Machiavelli’s legacy
2007 / gcb / surveysindices / policyresearch / home – Transparency International
Why do Protestants remain separated from the Roman Catholic Church after most of the reasons for their separation have disappeared?
The failure of Protestantism
In the film, directed by Julian Schnabel, Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor played by Mathieu Amalric, suffers a stroke and with it an affliction that leaves all but one eye paralyzed. Condemned to live in an eternal present, Jean-Dominique was also freed from the tyranny of time.
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”: A body unwilling, a mind’s flight to freedom
What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?
If the copy is an artwork, then what’s the original?
Gregory Clark’s new book suggests an intriguing, even startling answer to what brought about the new technology: natural selection. Specifically, the families that propagated themselves were the rich.
‘Farewell to Alms’: Darwin’s part in the Industrial Revolution
TheHistoryNet | MHQ | Peyton C. March: Greatest Unsung American General of World War I
Studio 54 invitations, coffee sachets, Caroline Kennedy’s birthday cake – Andy Warhol’s ‘time capsules’ are finally opened
Warhol’s weird world
Patrick Symmes constructs a portrait of Cuba and its dictator through the stories of Fidel Castro’s prep-school classmates.
Children of the Revolution
Does natural selection favor the rise of capitalist economies?
Industrial Evolution
For 150 years, John Stuart Mill has been the intellectual icon of the British left – but his ideas address few of the problems we face today.
Accidental hero
Julian Bell has written a tremendous history of world art, one that will inevitably be compared with Gombrich’s The Story of Art, published nearly sixty years ago. Since then image-making technologies that seemed mature have changed and expanded their reach. In 1950 we lived in an image flood. We are now, as Bell puts it, in an image jam. As you turn the pages of Mirror of the World and skip from illustration to illustration you feel the jostle of hundreds of other images that could equally well have been chosen as landing places, while thousands more that make no claim to be works of art still demand attention. The very persistence of art objects can seem a burden. Of a New Ireland mask Bell writes: ‘the mask, like the malanggans, New Ireland’s giant funerary complexes of carving, would probably on principle have been consigned to the fire. That is, until European collectors created a market for “primitive” exotica.’ The plate of available art is piled higher and higher. Will appetite fail?
Global Moods · Peter Campbell: Art, Past and Present
Literary Review – John Gray, The Death of Sigmund Freud, Mark Edmundson
Last night Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the ‘inanities’ of the internet
Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for her Nobel Prize for Literature
You know—mysticism, the Kabbalah, alchemy, Paracelsianism.
The “Old” Evangelicalism
The balance-sheet for Christianity.
Making Trade-Offs
Jane Austen, whose sharp tongue barely left her cheek during her short lifetime, and, whose caustic satire survived the intervening centuries of industrialization, through revolution and war, as well as the whirligig of literary fashions (whose onslaught took down others as great) may finally be deflated or drowned in the crazy waves of idiot’s delights!
Murdering Miss Austen
DEVELOPMENT: Food Prices Climbing, With No End in Sight