Adam Leith Gollner cracks open the history books: Each time technology attains a new paradigm, some of us start imagining we’ll live forever as a result. When Craig Venter created the first synthetic genome in 2010, newspapers claimed science had “officially replaced God.” After CERN’s particle accelerator seemingly established the existence of the Higgs boson in … Continue reading Our Dreams Of Immortality Are Timeless
Virginia Hughes reviews the latest talk over Big Science projects like the BRAIN Initiative (explained above) and other research efforts characterized by “big budgets, big lists of participating institutions, big press coverage, and big pronouncements”: It’s worth talking about why Big Science is popular and why it has the potential, at least, to do good. … Continue reading The Age Of Big Science
Friday on the Dish, Andrew endorsed both Obama’s and Ilya Shapiro’s approaches to marriage equality, wondered why the Voting Rights Act wasn’t left to the legislature, and echoed Kenneth McIntyre’s description of Oakeshott. He agreed with a reader on gluten-free diets as he watched BuzzFeed’s sponsored content spread. In politics, the sequester struck and the public wearied of war, but Boehner exhibited rare bipartisanship in the House. Beinart mulled over the reasons for Obama’s Israel trip, Jeffrey Goldberg … Continue reading The Weekly Wrap
This weekend on the Dish, Andrew continued to think through Buzzfeed’s “sponsored content” model for online ads, pointed to an incisive comment on the issue from Kevin Drum, briefly riffed on the Atlantic’s new guidelines for native ads, offered a theological critique of Zero Dark Thirty, and noted what’s different this time about who will be … Continue reading The Weekend Wrap
Irene Klotz reports on how the discovery of the Higgs boson particle – if it is in fact the “god particle” that accounts for how matter gets its mass – may give us our first idea of the lifespan of the universe. The truly final countdown would thus calculate out to “many tens of billions of … Continue reading The End Of The Universe
In 2005, Yale University Press published, for the first time in English, Ernst Gombrich’s charming children’s book, A Little History of the World. A new companion volume, A Little History of Science was released recently, and Suzanne Klingenstein believes its author, William Bynum, captures something essential for children and adults: He begins his second triad … Continue reading Naming The Little Things
David Barash compares Buddhism to other faiths:
Whereas the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) claim that their god literally created the world and along with it, the natural laws that govern its functioning, Buddhism promotes a very different perspective, namely that the Buddha—emphatically not a god, by his own insistence—didn’t create the Dharma (the way the world wags); rather, he discovered it. Thus, for Buddhists, reality exists prior to any supernatural event; for the Big Three, it exists only because of it.
Barash thinks this allows Buddhism to be more accepting of science:
Today on the Dish we had another busy day of Bain coverage. In this post, Andrew cornered the Romney campaign for being unable to quell two major concerns: why he made a six figure salary for three years while claiming to have no active involvement in Bain and why he told the SEC in 2001 that he remained the CEO. Here we brought more bloggers into the inquiry and asked pro-Romney Catholics if they were comfortable with a candidate who had invested in a company that disposed of dead fetuses. Here and here we clashed with WaPo fact-checker Glenn Kessler over his continued support for Romney's version of events. Here we did the same with Factcheck.org. Here we featured Dish readers with legal expertise and here we highlighted a reader with especially wise words. Late in the day, Andrew took stock of the situation in light of new damning evidence and then reacted to Romney's vehement but vacuous words against Obama. For its part, the Obama ad team made hay of the Bain story.
Zooming out, Obama's slight lead in the Gallup poll came down to an uptick in non-whites, and the president's general likeability endures, in spite of his approval ratings. Readers lent perspective on Romney's NAACP speech with a shudder-worthy roundup of white Democrats pandering to black audiences, Andrew argued that the most offensive thing about Romney's speech was the suggestion that 40 million Americans' access to insurance is "unnecessary," and the rumored Condi-as-veep idea would seriously compromise Romney's pro-life position. Joel Alicia explored Roberts' conservative bona fides, while others wondered whether the liberal love affair with Anthony Kennedy would finally die. And George H W Bush asked "who the hell is Gover Norquist, anyway?"
Readers added nuance to yesterday's discussion about the Mormon enthusiasm for profit and pushed back on Marriott's motivations for abandoning hotel porn. In economic coverage, we saw evidence that outsourcing doesn't kill American jobs, showed how the Olympics brings a mixed bag of economic benefits to host countries, and examined the sale of Digg that went for a fraction of its former worth. Tiny apartments in NYC might see a resurgence soon and it's increasingly illegal to rent out your home.
In assorted coverage, a California ballot measure to ban capital punishment framed it in budgetary terms, a NYC food truck offered a conspicuous consumption-tastic burger, and Margaret Talbot found that sex-segregated classrooms are hard to justify. Andrew, in a video for Big Think, proclaimed that Abraham Lincoln was one of the two greatest gay Americans (the other: Walt Whitman). If the disenfranchisement of felons, which disproportionately hurts African-Americans, ended, Florida would no longer be a swing state. This post explained how liquids tossed at airport security are disposed of, a little perspective on shark attacks here, and 3,000-year-old peat-bog mummies left scientists scratching their heads. We commemorated mad poet John Clare on his birthday. MHB here and VFYW here. Try not to hold your nose at this FOTD.
The rest of the week after the jump:
Today on the Dish, Andrew argued that Romney’s fundamental lack of a likeability thwarts his advantage on the stagnant economy. On that point, Romney has trouble connecting with people different from him, including black people (though Andrew gave him points for showing up to the NAACP). Michael Steele lampooned the RNC for its "outreach" to … Continue reading The Daily Wrap
Today on the Dish, we recorded the reaction of the blogosphere to Obama's decision to let parts of the Bush tax cuts expire. Andrew homed in on the difference between Mitt and George Romney when it comes their Mormonism and transparency and this post further explored the heavy-handed role of LDS leaders. As Andrew considered … Continue reading The Daily Wrap
