Been up this far before

Turn on your popup blocker for a look at the LA Times, which reports:

"After a century of study, scientists have unlocked the secrets of a mysterious 2,100-year-old device known as the Antikythera mechanism, showing it to be a complex and uncannily accurate astronomical computer.

The bronze-and-iron mechanism, recovered in more than 80 highly corroded fragments from a sunken Roman ship in 1901, could predict the positions of the sun and planets, show the location of the moon and even forecast eclipses."

It's evidence for that old saw that humanity has been up this far before, which brings to mind the burning of the library at Alexandria. What knowledge was lost with that travesty? I vote the secrets of the great alien-dinosaur war, but Wikipedia says there's some controversy about this event or events.

"Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the destruction of the Library:

1. Caesar's conquest 48 BC
2. the attack of Aurelian in the 3rd century AD
3. the decree of Theophilus in 391 AD, and
4. the Muslim conquest in 642 AD or thereafter."

One thing's sure, the dinos got their ass kicked.

The Library of Babel

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine writer of short stories that had a profound impact on world literature. His stories tended to the essay form with little dialogue. They were highly imaginative, odd, sometimes otherworldly, sometimes academic. Borges served as director for the National Library of Argentina, which likely influenced the following excerpt from the title above, one of the classics from his collection Ficciones:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings. From any hexagon the upper or lower stories are visible, interminably. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves--five long shelves per side--cover all sides except two; their height, which is that of each floor, scarcely exceeds that of an average librarian. One of the free sides gives upon a narrow entrance way, which leads to another gallery, identical to the first and to all the others. To the left and to the right of the entrance way are two miniature rooms. One allows standing room for sleeping; the other, the satisfaction of fecal necessities. Through this section passes the spiral staircase, which plunges down into the abyss and rises up to the heights. In the entrance way hangs a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. People are in the habit of inferring from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that the polished surfaces feign and promise infinity.... [elipsis in original]

Foe

If the greatest living novelist isn't Saramago, then he's surely South Africa's Nobel laureate (2003) J.M. Coetzee. Not all writers must have the Nobel to be considered great. The list of those snubbed includes the giants Joyce, Borges, Proust and, possibly, Nabokov and de Beauvoir.

The following excerpt is from Disgrace, concerning race relations in S. Africa through the eyes of a disgraced professor who flees to the countryside to live with his daughter. But I might give a nod to Foe, a brilliant short novel that takes the themes of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and molds them into a new form, a prose of thoughtful immediacy. Foe uses a postmodern storytelling concern, the question of whose story is the true one. The complexity is not in technique (eg watch me write some difficult prose, man), but in his presentation of characters who can never know one another and in what he the writer chooses to leave out. It's quite a feat and my description does not do it justice.

His books are easy to read and among the richest in modern literature. Now, Disgrace:

The two young sheep are tethered all day beside the stable on a bare patch of ground. Their bleating, steady and monotonous, has begun to annoy him. He strolls over to Petrus, who has his bicycle upside down and is working on it. ‘Those sheep,’ he says – ‘don’t you think we could tie them where they can graze?’
‘They are for the party,’ says Petrus. ‘On Saturday I will slaughter them for the party. You and Lucy must come.’ He wipes his hands clean. ‘I invite you and Lucy to the party.’
‘On Saturday?’
‘Yes, I am giving a party on Saturday. A big party.’
‘Thank you. But even if the sheep are for the party, don’t you think they could graze?’
An hour later the sheep are still tethered, still bleating dolefully. Petrus is nowhere to be seen. Exasperated, he unties them and tugs them over to the damside, where there is abundant grass.
The sheep drink at length, then leisurely begin to graze. They are black-faced Persians, alike in size, in markings, even in their movements. Twins, in all likelihood, destined since birth for the butcher’s knife. Well, nothing remarkable in that. When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.
‘Petrus has invited us to a party,’ he tells Lucy. ‘Why is he throwing a party?’
‘Because of the land transfer, I would guess. It goes through officially on the first of next month. It’s a big day for him. We should at least put in an appearance, take them a present.’
‘He is going to slaughter the two sheep. I wouldn’t have thought two sheep would go very far.’
‘Petrus is a pennypincher. In the old days it would have been an ox.’
‘I’m not sure I like the way he does things – bringing the slaughter-beasts home to acquaint them with the people who are going to eat them.’
‘What would you prefer? That the slaughtering be done in an abattoir, so that you needn’t think about it?
‘Yes.’
‘Wake up, David. This is the country. This is Africa.’

Baltasar and Blimunda

What follows is a passage from Portugese Nobel laureate (1998) Jose Saramago, whom many consider, and I believe I agree, the greatest living novelist. Saramago's prose style is unconventional and requires some work on the part of the reader as he writes in long block paragraphs running the dialogue together with the narration. But what a style it is. The man possesses the lyricism of Spencer with the surgical eye of Dostoevsky. From Memorial do Convento (English title above), set in 1711 Portugal, concerning a peasant couple who become assistants to the monk who builds the first ever flying machine:

Giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up, pretty little donkey, no one could say that of this little donkey, which, unlike the donkey in the refrain, has sores underneath its saddle, but it trots along merrily, the load is light and is carried with ease wherever the ethereal, slender Blimunda goes, sixteen years have passed since first we set eyes on her, but an admirable vigour stems from this maturity, for there is nothing like a secret for preserving youth. No sooner did they reach the marshland than Baltasar set about gathering reeds, while Blimunda collected waterlilies, which she fashioned into a garland and arranged over the donkey's ears, it made a charming picture, and never had such a fuss been made of a humble donkey, it was like a pastoral scene from Arcadia, although this shepherd was disabled and his shepherdess the custodian of wills, donkeys rarely appear in such a setting, but this one had been specially hired by the shepherd, who did not wish his shepherdess to get tired, and anyone who imagines that this is any common hiring is clearly unaware just how often donkeys get irritated when some heavy load is dumped on their back to aggravate their sores and cause the tufts of hair to chafe. Once the willow canes had been bundled and tied, the load became heavier, but any load that is carried willingly is never tiring, and matters improved when Blimunda decided to dismount from the donkey and proceed on foot, they were like a trio out for a stroll, one bearing flowers, the other two providing companionship.

The Underground

Tonight the great poet of Eire, Nobel laureate (1995) Seamus Heaney, must speak for me. This the morning bugle call from his wonderfully evocative collection Station Island:

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flappped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

End users with a better search

A valid criticism of the dominance of capitalism on the world stage is its commodification of people, emotion, land, resources. One of its pluses is the power it grants to conscientious individuals. Two of the richest men in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, are using their vast wealth to bring the party to the people. From their site:

Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation works to reduce inequities and improve lives around the world. In developing countries, it focuses on improving health, reducing extreme poverty, and increasing access to technology in public libraries. In the United States, the foundation seeks to ensure that all people have access to a great education and to technology in public libraries. In its local region, it focuses on improving the lives of low-income families.

...

We support research with the potential to achieve fundamental breakthroughs in the science of global health. We focus our funding in three areas:

1. Science and technologies that could make profound advances in preventing and treating diseases that primarily affect the developing world

2. Technologies that make it possible to develop more accurate and affordable diagnostic tools

3. Studies that apply recent advances in genetics and molecular biology to global health

A splendid human past

Cast your lures with pluck into the thick sediment waters of antiquity and you may get a nibble of birch bark, papyrus, or lime paste. Or, if you're work-week weary, the convenience mart at Nova has a refrigerated case of mankind's great classical manuscripts, with photos, marked down from 6 am to 10 am for the holidays.

Dead Sea Scrolls
Israel
In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd exploring caves near Qumran, a ruin on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in Israel, discovered a collection of jars containing seven parchment scrolls. The shepherd took the scrolls to a Bethlehem antiques dealer, hoping to make a profit. The dealer bought the scrolls and sold them to the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, who collected religious manuscripts on behalf of his church. Within a year of the original find, scholars around the world had heard about the scrolls and flocked to Jerusalem to examine them. When they realized the importance of the collection, they launched an extensive search for more scrolls in the caves surrounding the original find.

Archeologists worked on the Qumran site, which includes 11 caves, until 1956, when the last finds were uncovered there. The parchment scrolls they found, 870 in total, vary in degree of preservation. Some are nearly complete, while only fragments remain of others. Interpreting the scrolls was a painstakingly slow process. Over 40 years passed before scholars made the scrolls' contents available to the public through publications and exhibitions around the world.

Passively, mistakes were made

Garry Wills, winner of two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Pulitzer, and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities, is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University. From his article in the New York Review of Books, A Country Ruled by Faith:

Bush promised his evangelical followers faith-based social services, which he called "compassionate conservatism." He went beyond that to give them a faith-based war, faith-based law enforcement, faith-based education, faith-based medicine, and faith-based science. He could deliver on his promises because he stocked the agencies handling all these problems, in large degree, with born-again Christians of his own variety. The evangelicals had complained for years that they were not able to affect policy because liberals left over from previous administrations were in all the health and education and social service bureaus, at the operational level. They had specific people they objected to, and they had specific people with whom to replace them, and Karl Rove helped them do just that.

It is common knowledge that the Republican White House and Congress let "K Street" lobbyists have a say in the drafting of economic legislation, and on the personnel assigned to carry it out, in matters like oil production, pharmaceutical regulation, medical insurance, and corporate taxes. It is less known that for social services, evangelical organizations were given the same right to draft bills and install the officials who implement them. Karl Rove had cultivated the extensive network of religious right organizations, and they were consulted at every step of the way as the administration set up its policies on gays, AIDS, condoms, abstinence programs, creationism, and other matters that concerned the evangelicals. All the evangelicals' resentments under previous presidents, including Republicans like Reagan and the first Bush, were now being addressed.

...

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush said that "the jury is still out" on the merits of Darwinism. That is true only if the jury is not made up of reputable scientists. Bush meant to place religious figures on the jury, to decide a scientific question. As president, he urged that schools teach "intelligent design" along with Darwinism—that is, teach religion alongside science in science classes. Gary Bauer, like other evangelicals, was delighted when the President said that. Bush's endorsement proves, Bauer observed, that intelligent design "is not some backwater view." An executive at the Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design, chimed in: "President Bush is to be commended for defending free speech on evolution." By that logic, teaching flat-earthism, or the Ptolemaic system alongside the Copernican system, is a defense of "free speech."

Cell gain in the membrane

Alert Grant Morrison: scientists have successfully used nanoparticles to more effectively treat brain tumors, as this writer executes the rare double-split infinitive. From an article in Scientific American, Nanoparticles Home in on Brain Cancer:

Call them laser-guided smart bombs for brain tumors. Researchers at the University of Michigan announced the testing of a drug delivery system that involves drug-toting nanoparticles and a guiding peptide to target cancerous cells in the brain. Their study finds that via this method more of the drug can be delivered to a tumor's general vicinity.

...

Rehemtulla adds that if other FDA-approved chemotherapeutic agents reach their targets as successfully as Photofrin did, "then we will have developed a way to make cancer drugs more 'tumor-specific,' because they will only get into tumor vasculature and not normal vasculature. This will spare patients from normal tissue toxicity that is commonly associated with almost all chemotherapy."

Bill of rights for scientists and engineers

Taken from the website of a science advocacy group.

1. Federal policy shall be made using the best available science and analysis both from within the government and from the rest of society.

2. The federal government shall never intentionally publish false or misleading scientific information nor post such material on federal websites.

3. Scientists conducting research or analysis with federal funding shall be free to discuss and publish the results of unclassified research after a reasonable period of review without fear of intimidation or adverse personnel action.

4. Federal employees reporting what they believe to be manipulation of federal research and analysis for political or ideological reasons should be free to bring this information to the attention of the public and shall be protected from intimidation, retribution or adverse personnel action by effective enforcement of Whistle Blower laws.

5. No scientists should fear reprisals or intimidation because of the results of their research.

6. Appointments to federal scientific advisory committees shall be based on the candidate’s scientific qualifications, not political affiliation or ideology.

7. The federal government shall not support any science education program that includes instruction in concepts that are derived from ideology and not science.

8. While scientists may elect to withhold methods or studies that might be misused there shall be no federal prohibition on publication of basic research results. Decisions made about blocking the release of information about specific applied research and technologies for reasons of national security shall be the result of a transparent process. Classification decisions shall be made by trained professionals using a clear set of published criteria and there shall be a clear process for challenging decisions and a process for remedying mistakes and abuses of the classification system.

From Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (born March 26, 1941) is an eminent British ethologist, evolutionary scientist, and popular science writer who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

* "We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb [our genes and DNA], because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space."

* "You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues."

* "You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me."

* "The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand."

Hubble photos of our universe

Minority education program founder awarded last night

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A reception honoring Roy Peterson, the Kentucky Secretary of Education, Arts and Humanities, for his work in promoting higher education to minority students was held last night.

Peterson founded the Minority College Awareness Program. MCAP is a Saturday session that provides additional training to the education of grade school and high school students.

Students, parents and colleagues of Peterson praised him for his efforts in setting up and maintaining the program. Several students who participate in MCAP spoke briefly about their positive experiences in the program.

Monica Higgins, a fifth-grader at Second Street School in Frankfort, gets up early two Saturdays a month to attend the classes in Lexington.

"MCAP really made me a better person," Higgins said.

Cecil Gardner is a seventh grader at Lexington Traditional Magnet. In addition to the valuable help he receives in mathematics, Gardner appreciates the intangibles that he learns from MCAP.

"Excellence is all of us working together. We seek it with dedication," Gardner said.

The parents of the MCAP students also had the opportunity to speak.

Stuart Buckner, whose son Taylor is involved in the program, compared MCAP to a womb that nurtures children and readies them for life's difficulties.

Gerald Jackson believes in MCAP enough to enroll his three children in it.

"It introduces them to new and innovative ideas not part of the school program," Jackson said.

MCAP itself is run through the hard work of dedicated teachers, one of whom is Felicia Grundy. She is a language arts teacher for fourth through sixth graders.

Her classes include exercises to increase students' vocabulary, circle stories that start and end in the same manner and readings from the works of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Langston Hughes.

"I believe we prepare our children very well for the outside world," Grundy said.

Peterson was presented a number of awards from the parents and participating institutions such as Henderson Community College and Morehead State University.

He also received a congratulatory letter from Gov. Paul Patton, who called Peterson a great educator, leader and human being. Patton added that Peterson was the perfect addition to his cabinet.

Peterson promised to continue to work directly with the kids even though he has taken on more responsibility as a cabinet appointee.

He emphasized the importance of the role of the parents in their children's education.

"Unless we have support at home we can't do nearly as much as we'd like to," Peterson said.