A FEW weeks ago, an asteroid almost 30 feet across and zipping along at 38,000 miles per hour flew 28,000 miles above Singapore. Why, you might reasonably ask, should non-astronomy buffs care about a near miss from such a tiny rock? Well, I can give you one very good reason: asteroids don’t always miss. If [...]
Archive for October, 2010
Humans to Asteroids: Watch Out!
Posted in Space on October 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Unpopular Science
Posted in Other on October 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Whether we like it or not, human life is subject to the universal laws of physics. My day, for example, starts with a demonstration of Newton’s First Law of Motion. It states, “Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line…” “…unless it is compelled to change that [...]
No Second Thoughts
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on October 26, 2010 | Comments Off
When times get tough, it’s really important to believe in yourself. This is something the Democrats have done splendidly this year. The polls have been terrible, and the party may be heading for a historic defeat, but Democrats have done a magnificent job of maintaining their own self-esteem. This is vital, because even if the [...]
Serving Two Masters: Shariah Law and the Secular State
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on October 26, 2010 | Comments Off
A few weeks ago, the Cardozo School of Law mounted a conference marking the 20th anniversary of Employment Division v. Smith (1990), a case in which the Supreme Court asked what happens when a form of behavior demanded by one’s religion runs up against a generally applicable law — a law not targeted at any [...]
Testosterone Put to the Test
Posted in Living on October 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Men today—wimpy or exploited or both? Do today’s men need to man up? Yes, absolutely, Peter McAllister says in “Manthropology,” viewing contemporary males as faint shadows of their shaggy forebears. Modern man, Mr. McAllister declares, is “the worst man in history,” though not every reader will be convinced by the evidence presented. Certainly the guys [...]
Study Highlights German Foreign Ministry’s Role in Holocaust
Posted in History on October 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Historians Deliver Damning Verdict A camera man films the Foreign Ministry building in Berlin. A panel of historians is due to present a study of the ministry’s history during and after the Nazi era. Historians have found that the German Foreign Ministry was far more deeply involved in the Holocaust than had been thought. A [...]
Seeking Proof in Near-Death Claims
Posted in Health on October 26, 2010 | Comments Off
At 18 hospitals in the U.S. and U.K., researchers have suspended pictures, face up, from the ceilings in emergency-care areas. The reason: to test whether patients brought back to life after cardiac arrest can recall seeing the images during an out-of-body experience. People who have these near-death experiences often describe leaving their bodies and watching [...]
Chilean President Wrote ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ in German Guest Book
Posted in Other on October 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Diplomatic Gaffe “Deutschland Über Alles:” Chilean President Sebastian Pinera wrote his controversial dedication into the official guest book of German President Christian Wulff (left). In a gesture of thanks for Germany’s help in rescuing the 33 Chilean miners, President Sebastián Piñera wrote the historically charged slogan ’Deutschland Über Alles’ into the guest book of German President Christian [...]
The Proto-Surrealist
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on October 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Arcimboldo’s ‘Vertumnus’ (c. 1590). The late, legendary S. Lane Faison Jr., professor emeritus of art history at Williams College, responded to over-the-top works of art with a vigorous “Hoo boy! Whoops a daisy!” He tended to reserve this evocative phrase for High Baroque extravaganzas and the apses of 18th-century Austrian churches, but I suspect he [...]
Goodbye Basil, Hello Pumpkin Seeds
Posted in Living on October 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Ten—no, 11!—delicious, beyond-the-obvious pestos to add to your arsenal Clockwise from left: Lardo and rosemary, cherry tomato and almond, walnut, arugula and pistachio pestos Pesto is a gift from summer—a nutty, herby distillation of a sweet-smelling, sunshine-loving herb. But fall doesn’t have to mean giving it up altogether. The classic basil version is just one [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on October 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Poem by John Cornford The heartless world’ … Madrid during the Spanish civil war. _____ John Cornford was one of the first British volunteers for the Spanish civil war. Born in 1915, he was the son of the classicist, Francis Cornford and the poet, Frances Cornford. They christened him Rupert John in memory of [...]
Stories vs. Statistics
Posted in Other on October 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Half a century ago the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow bemoaned the estrangement of what he termed the “two cultures” in modern society — the literary and the scientific. These days, there is some reason to celebrate better communication between these domains, if only because of the increasingly visible salience of scientific ideas. [...]
Ten of the best balls in literature
Posted in Literature on October 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Roxana by Daniel Defoe The high point for Defoe’s high-class courtesan is her “little ball” in her swanky London apartments. Even the king turns up, and she makes her grand entrance in Turkish dress, prompting all the Restoration beaux to chant “Roxana! Roxana!” (an exotic beauty popular from the Restoration stage). “My dress was the [...]
Uncommon knowledge
Posted in Uncommon knowledge, tagged October 24 2010 on October 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Do you swear to tell the truth? Getting kids to tell the truth can be challenging. Most parents likely think that talking with their kids about the morality of lying is the best approach, but new work suggests another way. Researchers asked kids between the ages of 8 and 16 to take a trivia test [...]
Disconnected
Posted in Other on October 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Attention passengers: It’s perfectly safe to use your cellphones With more than 28,000 commercial flights in the skies over the United States every day, there are probably few sentences in the English language that are spoken more often and insistently than this: “Please turn off all electronic devices.” Asking why passengers must turn off their [...]
I could care less
Posted in The Word, tagged October 24 3010 on October 24, 2010 | Comments Off
A loathed phrase turns 50 It was 50 years ago this month — Oct. 20, 1960 — that one of America’s favorite language disputes showed up in print, in the form of a letter to Ann Landers. A reader wanted Ann to settle a dispute with his girlfriend: “You know that common expression: ‘I couldn’t [...]
Johnny has two mommies – and four dads
Posted in Living on October 24, 2010 | Comments Off
As complex families proliferate, the law considers: Can a child have more than two parents? “To an unconventional family.” That’s what Paul, the roguish restaurateur and sperm donor, raises his glass to in this summer’s movie “The Kids Are All Right.” Paul is, he has recently discovered, the biological father of two teenage children, one [...]
Countless
Posted in On Language, tagged October 24 2010 on October 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Should the word be used for things we can actually count? McKay Stangler e-mails: ‘‘I was curious about your thoughts on the modern usage of ‘countless.’ The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘that cannot be counted’; in other words, too many of something to count. I’ve noticed, however, that it has very nearly become [...]
In the mid-1980s, Meredith Maran, a thirtysomething wife and mother of two young boys, came to believe that, when she was a little girl, her father had molested her. She wasn’t absolutely certain. She didn’t remember any such heinous act, nor did she have any evidence, outside of vague nightmares, strange “flashbacks” and intensely complicated [...]
Block That Adjective!
Posted in Literature on October 23, 2010 | Comments Off
I am not at all sure—convinced, certain, persuaded—that creative-writing courses are a good idea unless they prevent people from writing sentences like this one, where adjectives—useful, helpful, intensely descriptive words—are stacked upon one another as Pelion used to be piled upon Ossa. Phew! That sentence took some writing and ended, you will have noticed, with [...]
Inspiration Revised
Posted in Literature on October 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Mining the unconscious can be dull. Get me rewrite When I was a 14-year-old aspiring writer, I wished more than anything for a book explaining the alchemy that transformed words to gold. How did poets cast such a spell? How did novelists spin their silk? My biology text diagramed the Krebs cycle. My social studies [...]
What He Saw at the Revolution
Posted in History on October 23, 2010 | Comments Off
A firebrand as opposed to a strong national government as he was to British tyranny. ‘I know not what course others may take, but as for me,” Patrick Henry famously declared at a revolutionary convention of his fellow Virginians on March 23, 1775, “give me liberty, or give me death!” The war for independence was [...]
The Mastery of Georges Simenon
Posted in Literature on October 23, 2010 | Comments Off
He created a world that you can smell and taste, that you enter in riveted fascination “I was born in the dark and in the rain and I got away. The crimes I write about are the crimes I would have committed if I had not got away.” In this celebrated statement—from an interview with [...]
Still Under Cleopatra’s Spell
Posted in History on October 23, 2010 | Comments Off
The Romans were the first, but hardly the last, to be unnerved by female ambition, authority and allure How is it possible that Cleopatra continues to enchant, 2,000 years after her sensational death? It helps that, with her suicide in 30 B.C., she brought down two worlds; with her went both the 400-year-old Roman Republic [...]
The Seafarer
Posted in Other on October 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Rescue ship: Joshua Slocum (at left), his wife and sons Victor and Garfield aboard the Liberdade, the 35-foot ‘sailing canoe’ he built to get them home after they were shipwrecked on the coast of Brazil in 1888. Joshua Slocum is remembered for two things—being the first person to sail single-handedly around the world and writing [...]
Eisenhower’s Pit Bull
Posted in History on October 22, 2010 | Comments Off
There have been countless biographies of the generals of World War II, and many are excellent. This biography of Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, is one of the best. Smith has never received the attention and the credit that he deserves. A chief of staff is perhaps bound to be an unsung hero, [...]
We the People
Posted in Law on October 22, 2010 | Comments Off
It seems that they are on the news programs every night: Americans dressed as 18th-century Founders, waving placards saying “Don’t Tread On Me” and complaining that members of Congress pass legislation without regard for the Constitution. Perhaps never before have so many citizens invested so much of their political energy in the proposition that we [...]
The Other ‘G’ Spot
Posted in Other on October 22, 2010 | Comments Off
At the beginning of the 20th century the British psychologist Charles Spearman “discovered” the idea of general intelligence. Spearman observed that students’ grades in different subjects, and their scores on various tests, were all positively correlated. He then showed that this pattern could be explained mathematically by assuming that people vary in special abilities for [...]
Five Best Books on Animal Survival
Posted in Literature, Natural sciences on October 22, 2010 | Comments Off
To Know a Fly By Vincent G. Dethier (1962) Vincent Dethier spent a lifetime researching the senses, in particular those of insects. His “To Know a Fly” (not an easy task—there are more than 50,000 species) is an exuberant investigation of such matters as taste, hunger and satiation and their role in the survival of [...]
In Praise of the Mediocre Mother
Posted in Living on October 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Elisabeth Badinter’s bestselling book champions France’s so-so moms as the secret to high Gallic birth rates. For all their hand-wringing over Gallic cultural decline, the French are the European champions of childbirth. With a consistently solid birth rate of two babies per woman, France is a both a puzzle and a model for demographers and [...]
