In 1600, Rome's Campo de' Fiori, now a nice plaza lined with cafés, was one of the city's execution grounds, and on Ash Wednesday of that year Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and former priest accused of heresy by the Inquisition, was taken there and burned. The event was carefully timed. Ash Wednesday is the primary day of Christian penance. As for the year, Pope Clement VIII chose it because 1600 was a jubilee for the Church—a festivity that would be enhanced by the execution of an important heretic. Bruno rode to the Campo on a mule, the traditional means of transport for people going to their death. (It was also a practical means. After years in the Inquisition's prisons, many of the condemned could not walk.) Once he arrived and mounted the pyre, a crucifix was held up to his face. According to a witness, he turned away angrily. He could not speak; he had been gagged with a leather bridle. (Or, some say, an iron spike had been driven through his tongue.) He was tied to the stake, and the pyre was lit. When it had burned out, his remains were dumped into the Tiber. As Ingrid Rowland writes in "Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27), the Church thereby made Bruno a martyr. But "a martyr to what?" she asks. That is the question that her book, the first full-scale biography of Bruno in English, tries, with difficulty, to answer

"More than two-thirds of all paid-for downloads are bought from iTunes, and the store is now the biggest music retailer in the US, eclipsing Wal-Mart and other retail chains." But "beleaguered record labels are stepping up their campaign to undermine iTunes, and rumours are swirling about a dramatic U-turn from Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, over the way the iTunes store operates."

"I would say that this has probably been the greatest planning fiasco in the history of the world. Daniel Libeskind's prize-winning design, a flexible, schematic concept that established a framework of achievable, creative possibilities, has been progressively purged by political pandering and economic pragmatism. The Port Authority's own brutally detailed report earlier this year gave some cogent reasons why a strong, unified vision of civic and urban renewal on a plane worthy of a great city could not survive."

Several accessible books detailing the history and the psychology of happiness have landed on bookshelves in the past few years. With limited exceptions, contemporary philosophers have only a small voice in this renewed and well-received discussion of happiness. ‘Positive psychologists’ such as Jonathan Haidt are friendly to ancient Greek philosophical conceptions of happiness, but critical of the later abandonment of happiness by philosophers in the modern period. Other happiness researchers, including Daniel Gilbert and Daniel Nettle, warn that the philosophical tendency to moralize happiness beginning with the Greeks may lead to undue confusion, ambiguity and intellectual bigotry. So how do we mediate between the psychological and the philosophical aspects of happiness? How can we engage in a discussion of what happiness ‘really’ is, and what kind of happiness should be pursued, without dragging in considerations that go beyond empirical facts? And how can we do this without becoming the dreaded happiness-bigots?

Raise a glass and wipe a tear from your eye. Alvin, that intrepid Navy explorer famed for exploring the Titanic with Dr. Robert Ballard's team at Woods Hole, is heading for the great metal front porch. He will be replaced by leaner, meaner, raw cast titanium whipper snapper that is costing some 50 million dollars.

A computer virus is alive and well on the International Space Station (ISS). Nasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG. The worm was first detected on earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games. Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected.

They are challenging their entire profession to take the high design standards usually reserved for elite clients and systematically deliver them to society's most vulnerable: to design hospital rooms that give the chronically ill a sense of control over their lives, libraries that will make children spend hours with a book, or simple structures that grant working immigrants new dignity. In other words, to convince ordinary people and those on the margins that architects don't just make giant, radical shapes. They can make giant, radical change

If you want to register a song at GEMA (RIAA, ASCAP of Germany) you have to fill in a form for each sample you use, even the tiniest bit. On 12 Sept 08, German Avantgarde musician Johannes Kreidler will —as a live performance event—register a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.

[...] Instead of a generic spiritual search that the protagonists were put into, three films stood out as particularly revealing in their willingness to address the specific historical moment of our spiritual crisis as it intersected with the family, with mass media, and with gender roles. In order of their appearance, The Matrix, American Beauty, and Fight Club (released between April and October 1999) all dealt in some way with the following three themes: overmediation, fatherlessness, and homosexuality. These three movies both articulate these themes and present them as intricately but often subtextually interconnected. Ironically, these three films also have something profoundly familiar in them when compared to Roger Water's 1979 classic, Pink Floyd's The Wall, made into a film by Alan Parker in 1982. If cultural texts come and go like fashion, it was almost as if the three authors of the 1999 films produced their most creative work by unintentionally recreating their favorite movie from adolescence. [...]

Twenty-five years ago, U.S. labor activists thought we were enmeshed in a struggle against concessions, fueled by a process of deindustrialization and capital flight. Here in the Midwest, the epicenter of that formation was the Hormel strike of 1985-86, extending from plants in southern Minnesota to Iowa and Nebraska. Hormel management wanted to reorganize everything about the work in their new flagship plant in Austin, from the calculation of wage payments to the sharpening of knives, with the intent of replicating these strategies throughout their plants. They pushed veteran workers to retire, while insisting that remaining workers and new hires had no choice in a competitive industry but to accept management's terms. They made similar demands on Austin city officials -- tax breaks, the construction of infrastructure at public expense, and subsidized access to electric power.

It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the past week have made all too clear. The region may not be much bigger than England and Wales, but its history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people – the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south – and representatives of many Eurasian groups (Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who have settled there over the past 2,000 years.

Some forty mutually unintelligible languages, of which a handful are established literary languages and several others have only a precarious recent literary status, are spoken. Worse for anyone trying to present a coherent narrative, these disparate peoples have very different histories, and only two, the Georgians and Armenians (some would add the Azeris), have a history of statehood consistent enough to be retold as one would retell the history of a West European country. Worst of all, the frequent ravages of invaders, from Arabs in the seventh century, Mongols in the thirteenth, Iranians in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and Russians over the past 300 years, have not only destroyed and driven out whole states and peoples, but burnt the records of their very existence. Even the year of death and the place of burial of the greatest of Caucasian monarchs, the Georgian Queen Tamar, is uncertain. Historians of the Caucasus have on the one hand to have at their command an immeasurable range of expertise, from archaeology to the folklore of dozens of different languages, and on the other the imagination and verve to bridge the gaps in chronology and in any other verifiable sources. It is a task that would daunt even the teams that produce the Cambridge Histories of, say, Russia or India.

Chad laments that we don’t hear that much about the decathlon any more, because Americans aren’t really competitive. I also think it’s a shame, because any sport in which your score can be a complex number deserves more attention.

Yes, it’s true. The decathlon combines ten different track and field events, so to come up with a final score we need some way to tally up all of the scores. You know what that means: an equation. Let’s imagine that you finish the 100 meter dash in 9.9 seconds. Then your score in that event, call it x, is x = 9.9. This corresponds to a number of points, calculated according to the following formulas:

points = α(x₀-x)^β   for track events,

points = α(x-x₀)^β   for field events.

That’s right — power laws! With rather finely-tuned coefficients, although it’s unclear whether they occur naturally in any compactification of string theory. The values of the parameters α, x₀ and β are different for each of the ten events, as this helpful table lifted from Wikipedia shows.

"Now the cement we produce will not make millionaires of some far-away men, it will be used for our houses, our infrastructure, our national development plan," said Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez, charged with overseeing the takeover, before dancing workers clad in red shirts.

Now it's two decades later, and Orson Scott Card has written a strongly anti-gay screed that goes so far as to propose active rebellion to ensure that marriage is legally defined to his liking. Like many others who have read his diatribe, I am utterly repulsed by his words, to the point that they have drastically altered my perception of him as a person, and yes, to some extent, as an author.

So now what do I do with the copies of Card's books: Should I get rid of them?  Should I encourage my kids to read them?  Essentially, does the fact that I find his opinions utterly repugnant invalidate his work somehow?  (We can debate endlessly whether Ender's Game is really a good book, or if it's an apologia for Hitler, or whatever.  I liked it when I was a teenager, and haven't read it since; I don't know if I would like it now.)

Athletes have always sought to gain an edge on their fellow competitors by the use of dietary supplements and other methods. At the first Olympics in 776 BC, the ancient Greeks used oral supplements made from cola plants and hashish, as well as cactus-based stimulants. They also ate sheep's testicles as an early form of testosterone supplementation. Later, Roman athletes opted for sexual abstinence and a more masochistic method of performance-enhancement – they had their servants whip them with rhododendron branches until they bled, thereby preparing them for the pain of competition.

During the 17th century, methods of performance-enhancement were equally bloody, but more invasive, as runners had their spleens removed in the belief that it would increase their speed: the operation sped a fifth of them to early graves. In the late 1800s, athletes experimented with ether-coated sugar cubes and wine laced with cocaine to offset the pain and fatigue of competition.

The growth of international competition gave extra impetus to those seeking an advantage over their fellow athletes. Most famously, America's Thomas Hicks won the 1904 Olympic marathon dosed with raw egg, strychnine and brandy, all administered to him during the race. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he collapsed on crossing the finish line and remained unconscious for several hours - but he still got his gold medal.

Smith's study is the gripping, untold story of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, which first came to public attention in 1950 when the Hungarian-born scientist Leo Szilard made a dramatic announcement on radio: science was on the verge of creating a Doomsday Bomb. For the first time in history, mankind would soon have the ability to destroy all life on the planet. The shockwave from this statement reverberated across the following decade and beyond.

What Szilard had in mind was the third of the "alphabet bombs" that came to characterize an entire age. The first, the A-bomb, had been used to incinerate two Japanese cities. Teller's H-bomb blasted its way into public consciousness a few years later. Finally, there was the ultimate weapon: the C-bomb, a hydrogen bomb that could "transmute" an element such as cobalt into a radioactive element about 320 times as powerful as radium. A deadly radioactive cloud could be released into the atmosphere and carried by the westerly winds across the surface of the earth. Every living thing inhaling it, or even touched by it, would be doomed to certain death. In the autumn of 1950, Szilard's fears were given independent validation by Dr James R. Arnold of the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Chicago. Arnold, slide-rule in hand, had started out to debunk Szilard's arguments. He finished by publishing a set of calculations that showed that a Doomsday device, perhaps two-and-a-half times as heavy as the battleship Missouri, could indeed be built.

In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

When IT was starting to compose software from components 20 years ago, nobody thought that in the future the component lego bricks will be known as services... And: I must confess that I only knew a handful of the services listed here...

"I will also do it in the style of Mel Gibson' Apocalypto... You do it almost like a documentary, but it's a fictional movie, and it will be very brutal." "I enjoyed shooting [Tunnel Rats] in South Africa, so I will shoot there again," he continues, in reference to his most recently completed film about the special U.S. combat unit that was sent into Vietnam to kill the subterranean elements of the enemy. "The title will be Janjaweed, just like the name of the Arab hordes who drive in on horsebacks and camels and kill everyone, raping the women and hacking the babies in pieces." 

Much has been said about the reception of Walt Disney Incorporated's 1993 film Aladdin by Arab-American groups in the United States. However, little has been written concerning the reception of the film in other parts of the world, especially in those nations with significant Muslim populations. Although an investigation into the reception of the film in the Islamic nations of the Middle East seems obvious and appropriate, there are other parts of the world with significant Muslim populations that deserve our attention. This paper, then, is a study of the controversy surrounding the distribution and exhibition of Aladdin in the nations of Southeast Asia with large Muslim populations. These nations include Indonesia (with the largest Muslim population in the world), Brunei, and Malaysia, all of which are predominantly Muslim, and Singapore, in which Muslims constitute a significant minority. Although in the United States the issue may be regarded as primarily one concerning freedom of expression, in other parts of the world the issue is not seen as quite so simple.

Paradoxically, the book is being issued as news photographers complain that they are being ejected from combat areas for depicting dead and wounded Americans.

But efforts to censor the book were overruled by successive Army surgeons general. It can be ordered from the Government Printing Office for $71; Amazon.com lists it as out of stock, but the Borden Institute, the Army medical office that published it, said thousands more copies would be printed.
"I'm ashamed to say that there were folks even in the medical department who said, Over my dead body will American civilians see this," said Dr. David E. Lounsbury, one of the book's three authors. Dr. Lounsbury, 58, an internist and retired colonel, took part in the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq and was the editor of military medicine textbooks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

A strange, metal brew lies buried deep within Jupiter and Saturn, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and in London.

The study, just published the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that metallic helium is less rare than was previously thought and is produced under the kinds of conditions present at the centers of giant, gaseous planets, mixing with metal hydrogen and forming a liquid metal alloy.

Floyd Woods, a retired truck driver from Ardbeg, Ontario, was twelve years old in 1943 when his house was hit. The strike shot through the radio antenna, exploded in the living room intoa blue fireball that roared down the hall, lifting up the linoleum runner by the tacks, ripping the nails out of the floor, splintering the house walls as fine as kindling before it ran off over the bedrock outside and died. Woods’ guitar was hanging on the wall over his bed. Sixty-five years later, he still shakes his head: "That strike burned the guitar strings off, bing, bing, bing, threw me right out of bed and across the room so I ached for a month. Nothin’ will move you faster than lightning. Nothin'."

the project vy2ms gives customs officers, agencies and police forces new labor. it generates documents that can be read, searched and deciphered by otherwise underemployed personal. it challenges them with enigmatic language and mysterious images and diagrams.

each document is unique and has it's own serial number. however you may rest assured that NO access data associated with your download will be stored.
you can print the document or store it on your laptop, mp3-player, digital camera, usb-stick, arduino...

beware: vy2ms might also provoke interesting discussions with officials about artificial linguistics, art and language in general

The scene using robotic dolls is an installation built by artist Steve Powers to criticize waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique the United States has admitted using on terrorism suspects, but that rights group say is torture.

"Waterboard Thrill Ride" beckons a sign along with cartoon character "SpongeBob SquarePants" who appears tied down and exclaiming: "It don't Gitmo better!"

The inspiration for this site comes from the unusual coincidence that I was trained as a clinical geneticist and I have a daughter with an unknown genetic syndrome. The community of clinical geneticists have been diligent and helpful but a definitive diagnosis remains elusive. It is very possible she has a new syndrome but despite my efforts, the molecular (or DNA) variant causing the syndrome is not known with certainty though I have identified a candidate. Were I not a physician trained as a geneticist,  it is likely my daughter’s condition would be lumped together with other patients in a category of heterogeneous but similar clinical conditions. This is the standard and respectable way that physicians deal with novelty.  It is a way station on the path to some greater understanding of human biology.  It takes the trained eye to spot the uniqueness of a case, sometimes a lucky scientific insight, or simply the tincture of time for science to catch up with the human condition.  In all cases, the question at hand -- what does she have --  has to be asked and re-asked and that is best done of everyone. This site allows that open question to hang out in the public begging unapologetically for an answer.

The blast from the atomic bomb detonation above Hiroshima interrupted the game in its third day. It came at 8.15 am and at a point where the players had replayed the position - but had not yet started the game again. There were injuries to some of those there caused by flying glass, and damage to the building. Segoe was blown off his feet. The game wasn't resumed until after lunch. The game was then played to a conclusion, Hashimoto winning by five points with White (there was no komi). This tied the match 1-1.

Pedestrians, used to loud engine noise, have less warning when a car powered by a hybrid or electric motor approaches.

Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series.

"Go Red for China!" was the slogan unveiled on the Chinese mainland by Pepsi-Cola, whose ubiquitous blue can will, "for a limited time," be red. Pepsi is just one of many companies advertising at the Olympics, at a cost of up to $6 billion, in an attempt to tap a largely untouched market of more than 1 billion. "You've never seen the Olympics in a market that has such domestic commercial scale," Michael Wood, chief executive for greater China at advertising firm Leo Burnett, told the New York Times. "When the Olympics were in Los Angeles and Atlanta, the U.S. market was already fully developed."

This is the Olympics the West wanted: games where the grandest prize is not a gold medal but a glittering entree to China's seemingly endless army of potential consumers. This is the reason that George W. Bush will attend the opening ceremonies, the first U.S. President to do so on foreign soil, and that in March, mere days before the crackdown in Tibet, Condoleezza Rice, laughably, took China off the State Department's list of nations that abuse human rights.

Teaching on the part-time staff at Harvard is a little like visiting Disney World. The magic dust induces a light narcosis.

"I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually, it was really great. It was really, really, really great."

That was Andy Warhol after his only visit to China, in 1982.

He loved what he saw. He loved, he said, that everyone here dressed alike. He loved that the Great Wall, the world's biggest Private Property: Do Not Enter sign, was in a Communist country. He loved that Mao Zedong, whose face he had painted because Life magazine called Mao the most famous man in the world, was still a superstar even though he had been dead for six years.

China was Pop. It still is. It's still a nation of uniforms, but of more and more kinds of uniforms. I saw outfits with matching corsages on department store salesgirls, the slate-gray shirts of guards stationed at luxury high-rises and the Chloë Sevigny T-shirts that teenagers wear on Beijing streets.

Mao's image is less conspicuous here than it once was. His status took a dip when the savageries of the Cultural Revolution began to be told. His face doesn’t appear on a new 10-yuan bank note issued for the Olympics, but it's on all other currency above the small-change level. He remains omnipresent, like some Warholian multiple. Look and you'll find him. His star power holds. [...]

You know a science experiment has arrived when a rap song extolling its virtues just hit YouTube. After 14 years, CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva, is getting ready to switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), designed to seek out new particles including the long-awaited Higgs boson and the possible source of dark matter as well as study the differences between matter and antimatter. The lab says it plans to send the first particles through the LHC's 17-mile- (27-kilometer-) diameter ring in early September and gradually bring it up to full speed over two months. In honor of the impending start-up, Alpinekat, aka Kate McAlpine, a science writer for CERN, has produced a five-minute rap video starring herself and friends dancing in the bowels of the machine. McAlpine's rap, written during her 40-minute bus commute from Geneva to CERN, gives a rhythmic tour of the mysteries of modern physics and the workings of the LHC, noting that "the things that it discovers will rock you in the head." It even has a good hook.

After nearly a decade of setbacks and false starts, stem-cell science finally seems to be hitting its stride. Just a year after Japanese scientists first reported that they had generated stem cells by reprogramming adult skin cells — without using embryos — American researchers have managed to use that groundbreaking technique to achieve another scientific milestone. They created the first nerve cells from reprogrammed stem cells — an important demonstration of the potential power of stem-cell-based treatments to cure disease.

If you have ever had a frustrating political discussion with someone, where you just can't see eye to eye because you have completely different preconceptions, then you will know how these discussions can degenerate.

Sick and tired of getting involved in these sorts of discussions on blogs Chris Clarke developed the BlogWarBot an automated opponent to carry on these discussions for him. You can check out some of the resulting discussions here: Blogwars reconsidered And engage in battle yourself here: BlogWarBot.

Hipsterdom is the first 'counterculture' to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

As civilizations bumped into one another in antiquity, they tended to discover that they had many different gods. But since most pantheons break down gods into somewhat similar areas of expertise, the greeks just figured that the barbarians had funny names for their gods, and combined the two. This eventually got to the point where you could slam almost any two gods with similar areas of expertise together to get something subtly new. Some of my favorite gods, like Mithras and Hermes Trismegistus, come from the intercultural mashups (Persio-Roman and Greco-Egyptian, respectively) that were going on at this time.

[...]

So I propose that the international year of Polytheism, in the interest of kick-starting the spread of polytheism, hold an open call for syncretism and de-euhemerism. Combine your favorite gods with modern saints or legendary figures of our times. Let a thousand syncretic gods bloom. Say, for instance, one of those sainted old nuns like Mother Teresa or Mother Cabrini...they might make a good match with a hearth goddess like Demeter, or if you want to push a little farther, with Cybele, mother goddess of the wild earth. Or perhaps Saint Stephen (Istvan) of Hungary, the badass magyar warrior king whose severed hand is a national relic, might well be identified with Labraid Lámh Dhearg (Labraid of the Red Hand), the Celtic sun god whose legecy lives on in the red hand of Ulster.