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Misquoting Jesus - The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) is an outstanding book. It is a scholarly delineation of the history of the Bible as a book - who wrote it, how the books were compiled, how it was transcribed, and how variations were introduced into the text during the transcriptions and compilations.
link: TYWKIWDBI: Misquoting Jesus
Over the past century, violent images from World War II concentration camps, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, and many other times and places have been seared into our collective consciousness. These images have led to a common belief that technology, centralized nation-states, and modern values have brought about unprecedented violence.
Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like, for example, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who argued that "war is not an instinct but an invention."
But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.
Long before NASA was founded, the ABCs of sci-fi (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke) and others of their profession had been chronicling the exploration of the universe in works of imaginative fiction. The moon landing was their shining moment, and the public recognized it as much as did the writers themselves. When the TV networks sought out talking heads for their coverage, science fiction writers were on the top of their list.
At the moment that Eagle landed, Arthur C. Clarke was sitting next to Walter Cronkite. Earlier that day, the writer told millions of viewers, during an interview with Harry Reasoner, that the space mission was a “down payment on the future of mankind.” After the moonwalk, Cronkite engaged Clarke and Robert Heinlein in their favorite activity— speculation about the future. The sci-fi veterans could hardly have been more optimistic. Heinlein refused to put limits on where space travel might lead. “We’re going out indefinitely,” he proclaimed.
ABC countered with Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl, pulp fiction veterans, interviewed by Rod Serling. Ray Bradbury, for his part, had always been more partial to Mars than the moon in his writings, and he proved to be the spoilsport of the day. Bradbury walked out on David Frost’s Moon Party, a peculiar British TV concoction which countered the news coverage of the historic events with strange entertainment, featuring everything from Englebert Humperdink to a discussion on the ethics of the lunar landing involving A. J. P. Taylor and Sammy Davis, Jr. Bradbury was so moved by the Apollo landing that he was in tears. The irreverence of Frost’s coverage was more than he could bear.
link: Curse You, Neil Armstrong!
[Click over and read the whole piece: it's terrific.]
Ian Millhiser writes:
In a story that has become so common that it is almost passé, yet another conservative official has been busted sending racist e-mails. This time, the culprit is Atwater, CA Councilman Gary Frago, who sent at least half-a-dozen racist, anti-Obama e-mails to Atwater staff and community members:
Some compared Obama to O.J. Simpson while others suggested that “n[*****] rigs” should now be called “presidential solutions.”
Perhaps the most overboard e-mail was sent on Jan. 15. It read: “Breaking News Playboy just offered Sarah Palin $1 million to pose nude in the January issue. Michelle Obama got the same offer from National Geographic.”
Frago admitted sending the e-mails, but showed no regret. “If they’re from me, then I sent them,” he said. “I have no disrespect for the president or anybody, they weren’t meant in any bad way or harm.”
When given an opportunity to explain himself, Frago somehow managed to dig himself a deeper hole by saying: “I don’t see where there’s a story, I’m not the only one that does it. … I didn’t originate them, they came to me and I just passed them on.”
link: Think Progress » Home Page
Casey Kazan writes:
Neil deGrasse Tyson believes that BIG question of the 21st century is will we discover life somewhere other than on Earth? He views it as an "unimpeachable first goal" in our exploration of the cosmos.
And what most fascinating is the question of whether that life has DNA. It's fascinating, Tyson says, because either DNA is inevitable as the foundation for the coding of life, or life started with DNA in only one place in the solar system and then spread among the livable habitats through panspermia. Microbial life can land on and seed another planet, thereby not requiring that you have to create life from scratch multiple times and in multiple places.
Another totally intriguing possibility, one of many that deGrasse Tyson Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and host PBS's NOVA scienceNOW., describes in Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, is that there is life that has encoding that has nothing to do with DNA.
It is the relentless shifting and mutating of DNA, says Dennis Overbye in a brilliant essay in The New York Times, that generates the raw material for evolution to act on and ensures the success of life on Earth (and perhaps beyond). Dr.Paul Davies co-director of the Arizona State University Cosmology Initiative said that he had been encouraged by the discovery a few years ago "that some sections of junk DNA seem to be markedly resistant to change, and have remained identical in humans, rats, mice, chickens and dogs for at least 300 million years."
But Dr. Gill Bejerano, Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology and of Computer Science at Stanford, one of the discoverers of these “ultraconserved” strings of the genome, said that many of them had turned out to be playing important command and control functions.
“Why they need to be so conserved remains a mystery,” Berjerano said, noting that even regular genes with known functions undergo more change over time. Most junk bits of DNA that neither help nor annoy an organism mutate even more rapidly, Overbye points out.
What's your guess: Is the DNA the cosmic code for life in the universe, or is it possible that there's are alien, unknown foundations? At the Galaxy, we place our chips on DNA.
link: Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Will DNA Prove to be the Life Code Throughout the Universe?"
Alex Dalenberg writes:
Walter Cronkite didn't just lend his name to the journalism school at Arizona State University. He let the dean raid his desk.
An entire wall filled with memorabilia from the iconic news anchor's career is on display in a gallery at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in downtown Phoenix.
The collection is the centerpiece of the Marguerite and Jack Clifford Gallery, a journalism museum on the second floor of the Cronkite School, 555 N. Central Ave.
With Cronkite central to the school's identity, Dean Christopher Callahan asked the longtime CBS news anchor if the school might have some souvenirs for the gallery. To Callahan's delight, Cronkite invited the dean to take his pick from the newsman's personal collection last summer.
"Walter told Dean Callahan, 'Come out to New York and take whatever you want.' So, Chris had a very fun day," said Kristin Gilger, an assistant dean at the Cronkite School.
The Cronkite wall contains a little bit of everything: books from the anchor's personal collection, historic newspapers the anchor socked away and a few of his trademark pipes.
"WALTER CRONKITE" is even written in bold marker on a few weathered copies of books from his personal library.
The museum is also filled with other artifacts from journalism's past: an Associated Press teletype machine, camera equipment that was operated by broadcast pioneers and a microphone used by Edward R. Murrow to broadcast radio reports from Europe in the late 1930s.
link: Cronkite let ASU dean raid closet for trove of memorabilia
John McPhaul and Ana Isabel Martinez write:
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) - Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya agreed on Saturday to give his enemies a share of power if he is allowed to return to office, but they rejected any deal that puts him back in the presidency.
Zelaya, who was toppled in a military coup on June 28 and is in exile in neighboring Nicaragua, backed the proposal for a government of national reconciliation put forward by the mediator in talks aimed at ending Honduras' political crisis.
Zelaya also said in an interview with a Honduran radio station that he would return to Honduras in the coming days despite warnings by the de facto government that he would be arrested.
Costa Rica's Nobel Peace Prize-winning president, Oscar Arias, is trying to broker a compromise deal between Zelaya and interim president Roberto Micheletti, the former speaker of Congress who replaced him in a June 28 military coup.
link: Honduras' Zelaya accepts unity government proposal | International | Reuters
« 1000 Frames of Hitchcock » is an attempt to reduce each of the 52 available major Hitchcock films down to just 1000 frames. The aim of the project is to create a library of images which can be used to illustrate blog posts, web articles and reviews, etc.
link: 1000 Frames of Hitchcock
