Friday, June 01, 2007
One Week's Investigations
(1)
The links below represent, more or less in order, my web activity since Monday. Enjoy.
Women in art. Awesome. This will have you smiling. (via walkthisway)
The God Business is booming in Kentucky nowadays, a very counter-intuitive cultural development given the rise of Science and Technology in the 20th century, and a scary one.
I like this lecture by Neil deGrasse Tyson which points to the end of the golden age of Arab Science (and its resulting technology) back in the late 11th century. Seems the culprit in that debacle was a religious nutcake named Al Ghazali. Arab science never recovered. The lesson for modern America is obvious of course, and interestingly, one of our greatest fears seems to be the revival of Arab Science, especially in Iran: Science and religion do not mix well either over here or over there.
Other good stuff by Tyson: The Cosmic Perspective, and The Perimeter of Ignorance (which is the subject of the above video).
An excerpt from Al Gore's The Assault on Reason.
I would replace one of the c-words with 'circumcision.' In fact I would rate 'circumcision' as one of the top ten 'must know' words. And at the risk of TMI, I knew the definitions of 74, didn't have a clue about 9, and 'sorta knew' the definitions of 17. ('sorta' means that I would recognize the definitions - more or less - in the context of a sentence.)
Very funny, especially considering that 'they' really do zap me day and night! Barf.
