A collection of tidbits from around the web
Wittgensteinians lay stress on the idea that One cannot understand central worldview concepts without living as part of a community that operates with these concepts. The non-Christian cannot understand the Christian concept of the Trinity; the Christian and the atheist cannot understand the Jewish concept of God's absolute unity as understood by Maimonedes; the theist cannot understand the concept of a completely natural world; and the non-Fascist cannot understand the concept of the Volk. It is only...
“As I was going to St. Ives This week: The magic, and science, of puzzles. Science Update RSS Feed Get Science News From The New York Times » Enlarge This Image Craig Frazier The first brain teasers were practical: problems to calculate how efficient a laborer was by how many logs he carried, or to gauge the potency of beer. Enlarge This Image Click on the puzzle to see the answer...
LONDON, United Kingdom — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London this morning. Assange was detained after a European Arrest Warrant was issued by a Swedish prosecutor who wants to question Assange regarding allegations of “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion." During an almost an hour-long appearance at Westminster Magistrates Court, Assange said he would fight the extradition request. He was denied bail and will remain in police custody pending his return to court Dec. 14 for a further...
You've got to hand it to writers who have the hubris to stick a list in your face. There you are happily reading along in a poem or a novel and suddenly a Catalogue, an Inventory, a Phalanx of Facts appears on the page. Don’t writers ever consider the possibility that lists stop the action, that they get in the way of the story? Of course not, writers don’t care about our comfort level, they just like to show off how much they know and their ability to communicate it. If I were to draw up a list of all the poets...
Dr. Steve Strogatz wonders if we've reached the limits of human scientific understanding, and should soon turn the reins of research over to robots. Cold, calculating robots. Then, Dr. Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt walk us through the workings of a revolutionary computer program that they developed--a program that can deduce mathematical relationships in nature, through simple observation. The catch? As Dr. Gurol Suel explains, the program gives answers to complex biological questions that we humans have yet...
NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2 WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW...
I am about two-thirds of the way through Why the West Rules-for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, and I have to agree with Tyler Cowen’s assessment so far. The author is an archaeologist, and though a little less shy in regards to general theory than most in his profession, he still seems to exhibit the tendency to focus on thick-detail without any elegant theoretical scaffolding. In some ways it is an inversion of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of...
From the oldest Hebrew to the newest: the Forward had Judith Shulevitz, "a cultural critic and magazine editor who helped to start both Slate and Lingua Franca," guest-edit a special section on Parsing Israeli Slang. At that page you will find links to Stuart Schoffman on haval al hazman 'It’s a waste of time,' Janet Aviad on ha-matzav 'the situation,' Philologos on Sa l’shalom 'You can go now' (literally 'Go in peace,' a phrase with an ancient pedigree), Gail Hareven on hazui 'weird' (literally 'hallucinated...
Could space have dimensions beyond the three that we all know and love? Some theories in particle physics speculate that it might, although these dimensions would be curled up in loops so small, they could probably be probed only in high-energy particle collisions. Now, however, one theorist suggests that, at least in principle, these hypothesized dimensions might reveal themselves in another subtle way. If there are extra dimensions, then the gravity from the black hole in the center of our galaxy might dramatically...
I study Italian language & literature and applied linguistics @ Pennsylvania State University.
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