science, magic, madness

Mon Apr 22 05:09:52 CDT 2013

Viereck attached himself to many important people of his time, conducting
interviews with such notable figures as Albert Einstein, Teddy Roosevelt
and even Adolf Hitler. As a German-American living in New York, Viereck was
a rather notorious propagandist for the Nazi regime and was tried and
imprisoned in 1942 for failing to register with the U.S. government as
such. He was released from prison in 1947, a few years after Tesla’s death
in 1943. It’s not clear if they had remained friends after the government
started to become concerned about Viereck’s activities in the late 1930s
and early 1940s.

Tesla had interesting theories on religion, science and the nature of
humanity which we’ll look at in a future post, but for the time being I’ve
pulled some of the more interesting (and often accurate) predictions Tesla
had for the future of the world.

Read more:
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2013/04/nikola-teslas-amazing-predictions-for-the-21st-century/#ixzz2RBZBDNqH
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on
Twitter<http://ec.tynt.com/b/rw?id=cd5NqsI_0r3Qffab7jrHtB&u=SmithsonianMag>

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2013/04/nikola-teslas-amazing-predictions-for-the-21st-century/

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 6:07 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> In its first issue, dated Thursday, August 28, 1845, under the elaborate
> woodcut illustrating its logo, *Scientific American* summed up its
> mission: “The Advocate of Industry and Enterprise, and Journal of
> Mechanical and Other Improvements.”
>
>
> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=making-future-manufacturing-advances
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 6:02 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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