via ny times:
obama and the war on brains
Perhaps John Kennedy was the last president who was unapologetic about his intellect and about luring the best minds to his cabinet. More recently, we’ve had some smart and well-educated presidents who scrambled to hide it. Richard Nixon was a self-loathing intellectual, and Bill Clinton camouflaged a fulgent brain behind folksy Arkansas aphorisms about hogs.
As for President Bush, he adopted anti-intellectualism as administration policy, repeatedly rejecting expertise (from Middle East experts, climate scientists and reproductive health specialists). Mr. Bush is smart in the sense of remembering facts and faces, yet I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever interviewed who appeared so uninterested in ideas.
generation o gets its hopes up
Many baby boomers are unlikely to be comfortable with this generation’s technological boosterism and ease with blurred identities and mixed ethnicities. Peter Wolson, a psychoanalyst and former dean of the Los Angeles of Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, said the crucible of the 1960s helped give baby boomers a deep suspicion of “the other.” Their world was bifurcated: pro-war versus antiwar; communist versus capitalist.
“There is a fear of intimacy and merging because of the sense that you’ll be taken over by the other,” Mr. Wolson said. “The fear is: ‘We’ll get the wool pulled over our eyes. We’ll get taken advantage of.’ ”
--
the part of my brain that basks in dismantling irony really will miss this kind of thing.
--
astronomy picture of the day features a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe...along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
The two bright sources at the center of this composite x-ray (blue)/ radio (pink) image are co-orbiting supermassive black holes powering the giant radio source 3C 75. Surrounded by multimillion degree x-ray emitting gas, and blasting out jets of relativistic particles the supermassive black holes are separated by 25,000 light-years...they speed through the hot cluster gas at 1200 kilometers per second [745 mps, 2.68 million mph].
When galaxies collide, they pass through each other -- their individual stars rarely come into contact. Clouds of interstellar gas and dust become condensed, causing a wave of star formation to move out from the impact point like a ripple across the surface of a pond.
At left, the Butterfly Nebula (IC 1318), lies near bright star Gamma Cygni. The Butterfly's expansive, glowing, wing-shaped gas clouds are divided by a dark dust lane. Near center, the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888) is more compact, a cosmic bubble with a bright edge blown by winds from a massive Wolf-Rayet star. On the right is the Tulip Nebula (Sh2-101), a small emission region shaped like a blossoming flower viewed from the side. All are within a few thousand light-years of the Sun in the Orion spiral arm of our galaxy.
Imagine a pipe as wide as a state and as long as half the Earth. Now imagine that this pipe is filled with hot gas moving 50,000 kilometers per hour. Further imagine that this pipe is not made of metal but a transparent magnetic field. You are envisioning just one of thousands of young spicules on the active Sun.
--
the online etymology dictionary is a comprehensive public list of the words we use every day -- words like the and day -- that told what they used to be before we got them.
--
A Family Guy’s Perspective on Prop 8
I keep thinking of the future, being out in the garage working on the car in a cliché, PSA type moment, and my son approaches me to come out. It would kill me, but not the way it would have a generation ago. It would kill me because he would be living in a world that would not allow him to experience the joy that came to me with marrying his mother, struggling in LA as husband and wife, raising him, and growing old together as one, lovingly and legally. It hit me hard after viewing a piece a friend of mine put together recently. We grew up together here in Southern California, were friends and neighbors, were educated in the state’s universities, and have transitioned into adulthood. However, I’m married and he’s not allowed.
No comments:
Post a Comment