science, magic, madness

[alice wellintown]

Sacro Busto, or Sacrobosco (also called John or Johannes Halifax, Holyfax,
Holywalde, Sacroboscus, Sacrobuschus, de Sacro Bosco, or de Sacro Busto)
was a member of the Order of St. Augustine and a professor of mathematics
and atronomy/astrology at Paris ca. 1230. (There are many places attributed
to be his birthplace, but it seems fairly certain that he at least was
educated at Oxford.) He became a celebrated member of the intelligensia,
with his fame in the later centuries coming via three of his surviving
works, each an elementary textbook on mathematics and astronomy: *De
algorismo*, the *De computo*, and *De sphaera*.

http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/



On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:59 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> There’s never been a better time to be a quantum physicist. The
> foundations of quantum theory were laid a century ago, but the subject is
> currently enjoying a renaissance. Modern experimental techniques make it
> possible to probe fundamental questions that were left hanging by the
> subject’s originators, such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin
> Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. Now, we are not only grappling with the
> supposed weirdness of the quantum world, but also putting its paradoxical
> principles to practical use.
>
> http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blog/quantum-optics-physics-nobel/
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:56 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This twelve-minute record is a montage of sound effects—mostly breaking
>> glass, pouring rain, and thunder. Goldstein had all the right ingredients
>> for myth: brilliant, cool, mysterious. He was hugely influential but ended
>> up living in a trailer in East L.A., selling ice cream from a truck; the
>> ice cream once melted completely when he had to wait in line for methadone,
>> but he refroze it and sold it anyway. He died in 2003, and so his body of
>> work is now, sadly, a bounded set.
>>
>> The first image I pinned up to spark inspiration for what would
>> eventually be my novel_The Flamethrowers_ was of a woman with tape over her
>> mouth. She floated above my desk with a grave, almost murderous look, war
>> paint on her cheeks, blonde braids framing her face, the braids a
>> frolicsome countertone to her intensity. The paint on her cheeks, not
>> frolicsome. The streaks of it, dripping down, were cold, white shards, as
>> if her face were faceted in icicles. I didn’t think much about the tape
>> over her mouth (which is actually Band-Aids over the photograph, and not
>> over her lips themselves). This image ended up on the jacket of *The
>> Flamethrowers*, whose first-person narrator, introduced in this issue,
>> in the story "Blanks" ,   is a young blonde woman. A creature of language,
>> silenced.
>>
>>
>> http://www.theparisreview.org/art-photography/6197/the-flamethrowers-rachel-kushner
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:51 AM, alice wellintown <
>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual
>>> history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European
>>> mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory. Beginning his
>>> story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking
>>> back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the
>>> process by which new developments in the sciences, arts, philosophy, and
>>> philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world,
>>> with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage.
>>> Hazard shows how travelers’ tales and archaeological investigation widened
>>> European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical
>>> rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon’s new historical exegesis of the
>>> Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the
>>> Huguenot Pierre Bayle’s critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for
>>> Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged
>>> a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism.
>>> Hazard’s range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas,
>>> excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of
>>> description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world.
>>> *The Crisis of the European Mind* is the NYRB Classics Book Club
>>> selection for April 2013.
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-crisis-of-the-european-mind/
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:48 AM, alice wellintown <
>>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the
>>>> subject is the *Book of British Birds*, and you have a rough idea of
>>>> what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying
>>>> rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional
>>>> atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least
>>>> well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe
>>>> there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth
>>>> understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures
>>>> of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The
>>>> more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it
>>>> tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the
>>>> geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as
>>>> assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy
>>>> old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the
>>>> sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval
>>>> heyday.
>>>>
>>>> Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed
>>>> eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida
>>>> for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than
>>>> a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively
>>>> charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an
>>>> essay on Hume from a student who had not read his *Treatise of Human
>>>> Nature*.
>>>>
>>>> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:43 AM, alice wellintown <
>>>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> "...* applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science,
>>>>> playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other.
>>>>> The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the freedom
>>>>> of pure science as much as it encourages applied science.*"
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2876.htm
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:40 AM, alice wellintown <
>>>>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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