August 30, 2010 – 12:29 pm
We are still “off the grid” on the Outer Cape, paying the least possible attention to events in the news, and switching on our electronic gadgets as infrequently as possible. (If Hurricane Earl pays us a visit this weekend, we likely won’t be switching them on at all.) It all comes to an end sometime [...]
August 27, 2010 – 12:30 am
I’ve been too busy relaxing to have any time for writing, so for tonight here’s another interesting item for you to watch: Philip Zimbardo on The Secret Powers of Time. Related content from Sphere
August 24, 2010 – 11:01 pm
For tonight, two videos. The first shows you the state of the art of autonomous walking robots; I think you’ll agree that they are coming along nicely. The second is a live-in-the-studio performance by the Fab Faux. If you haven’t heard of them, they are five of New York’s top session players (including the ubiquitous [...]
August 22, 2010 – 10:10 pm
We’ll be on a reduced schedule here until a day or two after Labor Day. I’m sure the world will still be going to hell, but I’m not going to pay any attention for a couple of weeks, and will only be posting sporadically, if at all. As always, please feel free to browse our [...]
August 20, 2010 – 8:53 pm
Last January, we remarked on some odd doings in the sky over Norway. The Pakistan Times did too. Well, now the sky over Pakistan itself has been acting up a bit, and the PT sees a pattern emerging. Here. Related content from Sphere
August 16, 2010 – 11:22 pm
As Christopher Hitchens publicly stares death in the face, Bill Vallicella offers an excellent meditation on the man, on men such as he, and on mortality. Hitchens will live on, in some sense, in his writing, but as Bill points out, that is cold comfort. Woody Allen summed it up: “I don’t want to achieve [...]
August 14, 2010 – 8:17 pm
We’re in Wellfleet for a few weeks. Yesterday was a beautiful day out here — not too hot, with low humidity and a cloudless sky, an indescribably welcome relief from the sweltering summer we’ve had in New York City. By ten or eleven in the evening the temperature was down in the lower sixties, and [...]
August 13, 2010 – 8:48 pm
Here is the latest dispatch from Christopher Hitchens, who, as I’m sure you know by now, is up against metastatic esophageal cancer.
August 11, 2010 – 10:14 pm
I’ve been awfully busy the past couple of days, and haven’t had much time for writing. (If all goes well, however, I won’t have to be a wage-slave much longer: I’m working on a brand-new idea that’s sure to be a gold mine. It’s a social-networking site for gay Christians; I’m going to call it [...]
As I expect you already know, Christopher Hitchens is battling esophageal cancer — a fight that very few people win. He recently gave an interview to Anderson Cooper. Watch it here. Related content from Sphere
August 5, 2010 – 10:25 pm
This has been a historically brutal summer here in New York; July was the second-hottest on record, missing top honors by a mere fraction of a degree. Stoical Scot that I am, I haven’t complained much in these pages, but I have lived at the edge of despair for weeks now, and several times recently [...]
The other day I read an article about an extraordinarily gifted seven-year-old painter. Prodigies come and go, and often don’t live up to their early promise, but I have to say this young lad — Keiron Williamson, of Norfolk, England — is just astonishingly talented. See for yourself, below. Related content from Sphere
August 1, 2010 – 10:39 pm
We are drinking more lately, it seems. (I’ve been doing my part, but certainly can’t take all the credit.) It’s not hard to understand why, with the shape things are in (I will spare you an enumeration of all the things that are wrong with the US and the world just now; it’s late, and [...]
A few years ago I wrote a brief item about my mother-in-law, Lily, who is really rather an extraordinary woman. There is now an article about her in Newsweek. Here. Related content from Sphere
I’ve written before about the A-10 Thunderbolt (AKA “Warthog), the nastiest aircraft ever built. Sure, others may fly higher, or faster, or do a lot of high-tech parlor tricks — but when it comes to sheer pugnaciousness, this snarling airborne Rottweiler is in a class by itself. Here’s another look. Related content from Sphere
How they made the bed rock in Bedrock.
In a heartening development, the lower house of France’s parliament has voted 335 to 1 to ban the burqa. The measure, which is overwhelmingly supported by the French people, will go to the Senat in September. Reaction was swift, and predictable. “A complete ban on the covering of the face would violate the rights to [...]
Reader JK calls our attention to a post over at InfoDiss: an animated rendering of nuclear detonations around the world from 1945 to 1998. It’s 14 minutes long, and very simply done, but I couldn’t pull away. Here. Related content from Sphere
We’re back in Gotham, where, as it does every July (though somewhat tardily last year), the Hell-mouth has opened once again. It will be about 100° tomorrow, with suffocating, hope-crushing humidity. As always, I have begun to panic, to despair, to long to sleep at last in the cold, cold ground. That said, it was [...]
We’re sequestered in Wellfleet, taking a breather for the holiday weekend. Things will probably be quiet in this space till sometime early next week, though you never know. As usual — thanks as always for visiting, and feel free to give our “View a Random Post” link a try. Related content from Sphere
I am startled, and terribly sorry, to hear that Christopher Hitchens appears to have esophageal cancer. Story here.
Which way is she spinning? Are you able to get yourself to see her going the other way? This thing drives me crazy. Sometimes I can reverse it at will, other times it seems quite impossible. Forgive me if you’ve seen it before; it’s been around for a while. I just ran into it again, [...]
What will become of Stanley McChrystal now that he has been relieved of his command? How did this sort of thing play out in a different era? Here are a few thoughts on the matter, courtesy of the Churchill Centre. [This item filed under category "General", of course.] Related content from Sphere
Kevin Kim continues his discussion of theodicy, here and here.
I’ll confess I’ve always had a soft spot for the A-10 Thunderbolt. Slow and ugly, loud as hell — they’re about as far from “stealthy” as a 747. But they are the last thing you want to see coming at you on the battlefield, because in just about every case “the last thing you’ll see” [...]
Having got fed up with official press releases, oleaginous presidential puffery, and melodramatic news items, I decided to do a little spadework to find out what the experts are saying about this leaking oil well. I’ve found out, and it isn’t pretty. What I came across was an fantastically long and detailed comment, fairly bristling [...]
I hate to pile on, but I just had to post this. It’s a 2007 clip of Nobelist Steven Chu (now Energy Secretary), speaking, um, gushingly, about how he and BP were going to “save the world”. Related content from Sphere
June 1940 was one of the darkest moments in Britain’s long history. The Germans had overrun Western Europe, mighty France had just fallen, and the over-matched Allied forces had barely managed, only a fortnight earlier, to flee the Continent in the panicky and humiliating evacuation at Dunkirk. The Nazi juggernaut seemed unstoppable, and all in [...]
What with working all day, and class in the evening, I keep running out of gas on Thursdays. For tonight, then, a closer look at the dynamics of starling flocks, with video. Here. Related content from Sphere
Traffic has been creeping up around here lately, and now is more than double what it was a month or two ago. I was glad to see it at first, thinking my humble star was ascending, but then I realized it was due to the World Cup’s official theme song, whose title is roughly congruent [...]
I stand corrected. Following on our gloomy post on the Gulf oil leak, here, thanks to the most steady and stalwart of our Southern sources, is a story about a prior spill that still holds the lead. There are at least two mitigating factors, however. First, the Ixtoc I spill described in the article happened [...]
Too pooped to post tonight, so here’s a dismal item by John Derbyshire on the absurdities of our educational system.
For weeks now, boffins examining the BP well-head videos with such techniques as particle image velocimetry have insisted that the rate of flow has been a good deal greater than the official estimates. Now the U.S. Geological Survey has joined them, saying that prior to the latest cap-and-suction manoeuvre the rate was probably in the [...]
Here’s a conversation-starter: the National D-Day Memorial is planning to add a bust of Josef Stalin, to go with the ones it already has of FDR, Truman, and Churchill. Obviously whoever makes these decisions wishes to acknowledge the Soviet Union’s key role in defeating the Nazis, but Stalin was arguably even viler than Hitler himself, [...]
Blogging can be a dispiriting business, and most of us scribble away in near-perfect (and perhaps well-deserved) obscurity. Existentially speaking, it can feel rather like shouting up a drainpipe. So it’s encouraging to see a hard-working blogger’s voice rise suddenly above the din, particularly when it’s a voice that was deserving of wider attention all [...]
It appears that our good name (which, along with our tag-line, owes its derivation not to Pac-Man, nor to the Muppets, but to the song Coffin for Head of State, by the remarkable Fela Kuti) has now taken on a somewhat unsavory connotation in our deteriorating popular culture. Oh well, between this and Shakira, maybe [...]
Think you’re a good speller? Well then, give this a go.
A reader sends along the widely circulated image below, with which the U.S. continues to burnish its gleaming international reputation for the education and intellectual engagement of its citizenry: (I see the predicted low temperature was 49°. How I wish; we’re sweltering here.) Related content from Sphere
Just got this email bulletin from the Washington Post: ——————– News Alert: Gulf Coast oil cap in place over blown-out well 09:55 PM EDT Thursday, June 3, 2010 ——————– A cap is in place over the Gulf of Mexico gusher, live video footage provided by the company showed Thursday night, but the spewing oil made [...]
Paul McCartney was honored with the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song at the White House yesterday. He is only the third person to receive it, and he certainly deserves it. (The first was Stevie Wonder, and the second was Paul Simon, who by the way performed at our son’s commencement exercises two [...]
To those of you who send me comments and other tidbits by email: I’ve been having technical problems, since Wednesday morning, that prevent me from accessing my main email account from my network at the office. So far I have resisted acquiring an email-equipped cell-phone, but these corporate-firewall issues may push me over the brink, [...]
National Review has just reposted a fine, and scathing, editorial published on May 6, 1961, in the aftermath of the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion — which failure NR editors Buckley et al. ascribed to a “failure of will”, and a reluctance to offend “World Opinion”: Have we learned? There is always reason to hope. [...]
From my friend Jess Kaplan (not to be confused with commenter JK) comes a very interesting item about just what’s painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here. Related content from Sphere
It’s a busy stretch just now: I’ve been putting in long days at work, and will be traveling tomorrow evening. So for tonight, here’s a timely piece by Wellfleet resident John Stossel about the realities of “green energy”. He reminds us that it is unrealistic to imagine that there is anything in prospect anytime soon [...]
I was saddened to learn today that the great Martin Gardner had died on Saturday at a rest home in Norman, Oklahoma. He was 95. For those of you who didn’t know him, Martin Gardner was universally regarded by those who did as one of the brightest lamps of the 20th century. He was best [...]
We’ll be away all weekend, joining our son at his college graduation. Back in a few days.
Here’s a pungent edition of Radio Derb, starting with an poignant obituary for England.
Readers, what do you make of this?
Stopping by Gates Of Vienna today, I read an item about yet another “interfaith dialogue” conference, this time in Macedonia. Given that religious acrimony has been such a mighty engine of sanguinary conflict throughout all of recorded history, people generally take a hopeful view of these little pow-wows, and their participants, for rising above the [...]
We direct you to an intriguing item at Mangan’s, about a “slow-aging” subpopulation that had previously been masked by youthful deisease and trauma. Here.