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editor
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 Posted: Sun Dec 21, 2008 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Hardcover
By Julian Barnes
| Quote: | | Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God - an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin - at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can't do the same with death. Death can't be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. It doesn't have to pretend to be Vengeful or Merciful, or even Infinitely Merciless. It is impervious to insult, complaint or condescension. 'Death is not an artist': no, and would never claim to be one. Artists are unreliable; whereas death never lets you down, remains on call seven days a week, and is happy to work three consecutive eight-hour shifts. You would buy shares in death, if they were available; you would bet on it, however poor the odds. When my brother and I were growing up, there was a minor celbrity called Dr Barbara Moore, a long-distance walker and propagandizing vegetarian who thought she could outface nature; she once told a newspaper, a little ambitiously, that she would have a baby at 100 and live to be 150. She didn't get even halfway there. She died at seventy-three, and not at the hands of an anxious bookmaker either. Oddly, she did death's work for it, starving herself into extinction. That was a fine day on the exchange for death. (-- pgs. 69-70) |
| Quote: | | ... We are indeed all going to die, and death is absolute and God a delusion, but even so, that makes us the lucky ones. Most 'people' - the vast majority of potential people - don't even get born, and their numbers are greater than all the grains of sand in all the deserts of Araby. 'The set of possible people allowed by our DNA ... massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.' Why do I find this such thin consolation? No, worse than that, such a disconsolation? Because look at all the evolutionary work, all the unrecorded pieces of cosmic luck, all the decision-making, all the generations of family care, all the thissing-and-thatting which have ended up producing me and my uniqueness. My ordinariness, too, and yours, and that of Richard Dawkins, yet a unique ordinariness, a staggeringly against-the-odds ordinariness. This makes it harder, not easier, to give a shrug and say philosophically, Oh well, might never have been here anyway, so may as well get on enjoying this little window of opportunity not granted to others. But then it's also hard, unless you're a biologist, to think of those trillions of unborn, genetically hypothetical others as 'potential people.' I have no difficulty imagining a stillborn or aborted baby as a potential person, but all those possible combinations that never came to pass? My human sympathy can only go so far, I'm afraid - the sands of Araby are beyond me. (-- p. 116) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2009 9:44 am Post subject: |
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The American Way of War
Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril
Hardcover
By Eugene Jarecki, filmmaker of The Trials of Henry Kissinger
| Quote: | THE $2 BILLION QUESTION: WHY DID TRUMAN DO IT?
Speculating on Truman's motives is a risky business. It attempts to apply calm hindsight to a situation that was dizzying in its complexity and that above all, found Truman trying to come up to speed on a program of which he had previously been largely unaware. Still, the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan is so significant that it is necessary to try to understand what forces produced it. Though no such inquiry can produce a single, neat answer, an investigation has much to reveal about the origins and historical implications of Truman's decision.
Proponents of dropping the bomb argue that, however vast its death toll, it seemed a swift and sure way in a bloody wartime situation to end the war with Japan and avoid greater losses. Critics range from those who accuse Truman of having acted rashly, due to his inferior foreign policy skill relative to that of his predecessor, to those who think that the vast summs spent on the Manhattan Project pressured the fledgling president to deliver on its work. This dark suspicion was fueled by Truman
s own words announcing the bombing of Hiroshima. "We have spent," Truman declared proudly, "two billion dollars ont he greatest scientific gamble in history - and won." (footnote omitted)
That Truman included this price tag in his first words of announcement implies that the cost was at least part of his calculation - that had the government gambled and lost, there would have been as much discredit to go around as there was glory for the success. The suspicion that the cost of the Manhattan Project played a role in the decision about the bombing was held not only by critics at the historical fringe but by Truman's secretary of war, Stimson and Adiral Leahy. (From The Arsenal of Democracy, pgs. 65-66) |
About the book and the development of America's military industrial complex now controlling even the Executive branch:
| Quote: | In his now legendary 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of "the disastrous rise of misplaced power" that could result from the increasing influence of what he called the "military industrial complex." Nearly two centuries earlier, another general-turned-president George Washington, had warned that "overgrown military establishments" were antithetical to republican liberties. Today, with an exploding defense budget, millions of Americans employed in the defense sector, and more than eight hundred U.S. military bases in 130 countries, the worst fears of Washington and Eisenhower have come to pass.
Surveying a scorched landscape of America's military adventures and misadventures, Jarecki's groundbreaking account includes interviews with a "who's-who" of leading figures in the Bush administration, Congress, the military, academia, and the defense industry, including Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Colin Powell's former chief of staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and long-time Pentagon reformer Franklin "Chuck" Spinney. Their insights expose the deepest roots of American war-making, revealing how the "Arsenal of Democracy" that crucially secured American victory in WWII also unleashed the tangled web of corruption America now faces. From the republic's earliest episodes of war to the use of the atom bomb against Japan to the passage of the 1947 National Security Act to the Cold War's creation of an elaborate system of military-industrial-congressional collusion, American democracy has drifted perilously from the intent of its founding. As Jarecki powerfully argues, only concerted action by the American people can, and must, compel the nation back on cours. (emphasis added) (From the jacket flaps) |
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| Posted: Thu Apr 23, 2009 1:12 pm Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
BC Business
Magazine Subscription
In the genes
Challenging apartheid, abandoning a job at Harvard, studying rare disorders that others ignore - Michael Hayden has never been one to follow the conventional path. And that's precisely what makes him one of the most successful scientists and biotech entrepreneurs working in the province today.
April, 2008
| Quote: | ... Getting into Harvard wasn't something Hayden had dreamed about; he felt he'd lucked into it and, for that reason, wasn't all that committed.
So when UBC came calling, he accepted, shocking his Harvard colleagues, who thought he would be wasting his life in the boonies. In 1983 Hayden began teaching and practicing at UBC Hospital. "I saw there was space for me to do things," he says. "There was an openness, a perspective about building. I just had this feeling you could do great things here. It was not fully formed. It was nascent. Boston was pretty fixed, where Vancouver was really in flux."
Hayden threw himself into research, publishing his results in prestigious journals such as Cell, Nature, the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. But gradually he grew frustrated with the limitations of being a university scientist. "Many of the discoveries had significant potential for patients, but we were always coming to a place where we had to talk to others," he says. "You never had a chance to be the advocate for your program, to determine the fate of what happened to it."
Even if a drug company wanted to license a discovery, that didn't mean the company would develop it commercially. "It might want the licence to kill it because it didn't want competition in the field," Hayden explains. ...
"For me, this is like a dream," says Hayden. But he's not resting on his laurels - not yet. He'd like to hit a home run with Xenon too. "We're interested in having a thriving company here in Vancouver that becomes a next-generation genetics pharmaceutical company. We have to see whether we can be successful and then resist any advances. My goal would be to maintain a Canadian-run company here." He's optimistic, but cautiously so. "We need a bit of luck, because finally when you make a drug you never know about side effects - not that we have any reason to be worried. Still, you need some blessing, some luck, some feng shui." (-- pgs. 54-57) |
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Last edited by editor on Sun Oct 25, 2009 12:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2009 2:35 pm Post subject: |
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From Famous Four-Flushers:
New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
The Civil Heretic
How did Freeman Dyson, the world-renowned scientist and public intellectual, wind up opposing those who care most about global warming?
By Nicholas Dawidoff
March 26/09
| Quote: | IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.” ...
“The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models,” Dyson was saying. “They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.” Dyson speaks in calm, clear tones that carry simultaneous evidence of his English childhood, the move to the United States after completing his university studies at Cambridge and more than 50 years of marriage to the German-born Imme, but his opinions can be barbed, especially when a conversation turns to climate change. Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. “The biologists have essentially been pushed aside,” he continues. “Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”
Dyson agrees with the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by human activity. To the planet, he suggests, the rising carbon may well be a MacGuffin, a striking yet ultimately benign occurrence in what Dyson says is still “a relatively cool period in the earth’s history.” The warming, he says, is not global but local, “making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.” Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields. “Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now,” he contends, “and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.” Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem. Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend “cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes.” ...
... Dyson has said that it all boils down to “a deeper disagreement about values” between those who think “nature knows best” and that “any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil,” and “humanists,” like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment. ...
Dyson has always been strongly opposed to the idea that there is any such thing as an optimal ecosystem — “life is always changing” — and he abhors the notion that men and women are something apart from nature, that “we must apologize for being human.” Humans, he says, have a duty to restructure nature for their survival.
All this may explain why the same man could write “we live on a shrinking and vulnerable planet which our lack of foresight is rapidly turning into a slum” and yet gently chide the sort of Americans who march against coal in Washington. Dyson has great affection for coal and for one big reason: It is so inexpensive that most of the world can afford it. “There’s a lot of truth to the statement Greens are people who never had to worry about their grocery bills,” he says. (“Many of these people are my friends,” he will also tell you.) To Dyson, “the move of the populations of China and India from poverty to middle-class prosperity should be the great historic achievement of the century. Without coal it cannot happen.” That said, Dyson sees coal as the interim kindling of progress. In “roughly 50 years,” he predicts, solar energy will become cheap and abundant, and “there are many good reasons for preferring it to coal.” (-- pgs. 35-37) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 8:41 am Post subject: |
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A Brief History of Time
From the Big Bang to Black Holes
Paperback
By Stephen W. Hawking
With a tiresome introduction by pompous U.S. pop-science blighter Carl Sagan
| Quote: | | There are other models to explain Cygnus X-1 that do not include a black hole, but they are all rather farfetched. A black hole seems to be the only really natural explanation of the observations. Despite this, I have a bet with Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology that in fact Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole! This is a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consulation of winning my bet, which would bring me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kep will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet, in 1975, we were 89 per cent certain that Cygnus was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95 per cent certain, but the bet has yet to be settled. (-- p. 94) |
| Quote: | | ... It might seem a bit academic to worry about what would happen when the universe collapses again, as it will not start to contract for at least another ten thousand million years. But there is a quicker way to find out what will happen: jump into a black hole. The collapse of a star to form a black hole is rather like the latter stages of the collapse of the whole universe. So if disorder were to decrease in the contracting phase of the universe, one might also expect it to decrease inside a black hole. So perhaps an astronaut who fell into a black hole would be able to make money at roulette by remembering where the ball before he placed his bet. Unfortunately, however, he would not have long to play before he was turned to spaghetti. Nor would he be able to let us know about the reversal of the thermodynamic arrow, or even bank his winnings, because he would be trapped behind the event horizon of the black hole.) (-- pgs. 149-150) |
Listen:
A Brief History of Time
Audio CD
By Stephen Hawking
Narrated by Michael Jackson, who pronounces the p
in Ptolomy - more than once.
| Quote: | | Scare yourself into a math spasm listening to this one. If you're cool with it, try a few of these. |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 2:19 pm Post subject: |
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Chance and Necessity
An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology
Paperback
By Nobel Prize Winner Jacques Monod
Translated from the French by Austyn Wainhouse
| Quote: | The initial elementary events which open the way to evolution in the intensely conservative systems called living beings are microscopic, fortuitous, and utterly without relation to whatever may be their effects upon teleonomic functioning.
But once incorporated in the DNA structure, the accident - essentially unpredictable because always singular - will be mechanically and faithfully replicated and translated: that is to say, both multiplied and transposed into millions or billions of copies. Drawn out of the realm of pure chance, the accident enters into that of necessity, of the most implacable certainties. For natural selection operates at the macroscopic level, the level or organisms.
Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere. In effect natural slection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, and from this domain chance is barred. It is not to chance but to these conditions that evolution owes its generally progressive course, its successive conquests, and the impression it gives of a smooth and steady unfolding. (From VII Evolution, pgs. 118-119) |
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