Some time back I complained about the absence of an affordable Chaikovsky 3rd Symphony at the iTunes Music Store. Happily that omission has been rectified. But there are still some pricing problems. (Prices for the individual tracks and albums are, of course, set by the music companies, not Apple.)
For instance, I was looking for a recording of Schmidt's Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln and found this, a recording priced at $19.98. Alas, it didn't include a libretto or I might have purchased it without thinking. But lack a libretto it did, so I went searching at Amazon and found the exact same Franz Welser-Möst recording for only $11.98!
EMI, you've really got to get your pricing priorities sorted out. Idiots!
Austin Cline asks Do People Follow the Ten Commandments?
The second commandment, at least according to Protestants, is a prohibition against “any graven image, or any likeness of any thing.“ The more literally one reads this, the more that would have to be forbidden: crosses, crucifixes, statues of Jesus, status of saints, icons of any sort, even photographs and realistic paintings. Muslims adhere to such a rule strictly, and as a consequence, artistic decoration consists of abstract design rather than the human figures that one typically sees in many churches.
Most Christians today, if they accept this commandment at all (it’s not included on Catholic lists), don’t interpret it literally. At most they read it to mean that one shouldn’t make any idols designed to represent God (although statues of Jesus, who is also God, are somehow exempt from even this [...] mildest of readings). Once we allow this commandment to be interpreted mildly or metaphorically, however, what’s to stop us from doing the same with the others? Should the commands not to kill or steal be read metaphorically?
Even more significant is the breaking of the Sabbath. The Ten Commandments require that people work for six days and then rest on the seventh, which is Saturday. This is what Jews and some small Christian groups do. Almost all contemporary Christian denominations have placed their sabbath on a Sunday, however, which is the first day of the week.
This might not seem like such a huge issue — after all, Christians are still working six days and resting one, which is one of the points of this commandment. Another point of the commandment, however, is to commemorate God who worked six days and rested on the seventh; Christians who don’t rest on the final day of the week are quite simply getting things backwards. God certainly didn’t start off the grand task of creating the universe by taking a coffee break.
Furthermore, Christians today don’t adhere to the prohibition on working as strictly as orthodox Jews. Christian may go to church services and they may not go to the office, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t work. On the contrary, most do quite a bit of work on their sabbath: yard work, house work, school work, etc. Very few Christians actually refrain from any work whatsoever, and I doubt that you will find many who go to the same lengths as orthodox Jews who refuse to drive, turn on lights, light stoves, etc.
As it happens, the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is broadcast around the time that I'm preparing and eating my noon meal, so I've been watching it rather more often than I might otherwise. In probably half the games, I know the correct answers and would do much better than the contestant, but in the other half, there is some inconvenient question that I either don't know or, worse, think I know but get it wrong.
Contrary to what Meredith and the contestants keep claiming, doing well on that show has little to do with being "smart", but all to do with knowing and being able to recall certain specific facts. It often boils down to you either know it or you don't.
But sometimes there are questions to which you can apply a bit of reason to arrive at the correct answer. Case in point, today one of the questions involved the meaning of "petrology", a word that off-hand I didn't recall. But I reasoned like so: "Hmmm, petrology sounds like it comes from the Greek word for rock, as in "petrified forest" or "Peter". Ah, one of the proposed answers is the study of "rocks", so...oh, wait. One of the other answers is "forests", could it...? No, rocks. It's the study of rocks. Final answer."
Interestingly, the contestant went through a similar mental exercise, and via a slightly different path wound up with the same answer. "Petrology must refer to petrol which is oil and that comes from rocks. Rocks. Oh, wait. I'm not sure. I think I'll do a 50/50." The computer removed two answers leaving "rocks" and "sunshine". The contestant smiled and said, "Rocks. Final answer."
If you missed Jon Stewart's smackdown of conservative glutton Bill Bennett last night, you can catch part of it at Crooks and Liars. Topic is gay marriage.
I've just finished re-reading James Watson's The Double Helix, his somewhat gossipy narrative of the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, one of the most important events in the history of mankind.
It's filled with delightful asides, such as
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
and, speaking of Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA's structure:
[R]eligion...was clearly an error of past generations, which Francis saw no reason to perpetuate.
Watson shows how science is actually done, revealing all the petty jealousies and intrigues among scientists that are familiar to us from just about any endeavor, and he captures the dismay that they feel when it briefly looks like Linus Pauling may have beaten them to the punch.
But woven throughout the narrative is the darkly mysterious figure of Rosalind Franklin. Her work in crystallography was to prove essential to the unveiling of DNA's true character, but she is presented from the start as a cold, uncooperative, unsympathetic person. In fact, she is one of the few people that Watson even attempts to describe physically:
By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.
"Rosy", as they "called her from a distance", simply could not be dealt with rationally. At one point it even seemed that she was about to attack Watson physically.
It's only at the end that Watson finally realizes the truth:
...we both came to appreciate greatly her personal honesty and generosity, realizing years too late the struggles that the intelligent woman faces to be accepted by a scientific world which often regards women as mere diversions from serious thinking. Rosalind's exemplary courage and integrity were apparent to all when, knowing that she was mortally ill, she did not complain but continued working on a high level until a few weeks before her death.
She died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of thirty-seven, and thus was denied the Nobel Prize that was awarded to her colleagues in 1962, because that prize is never awarded post-humously.
Her story is told in Rosalind Franklin : The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox.
...or Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?
Here's the Fresh Air interview with Al Gore. Transcript is here.
GROSS: Let me mention a study that you cite in your documentary and your book, "An Inconvenient Truth." This is a study from the University of California at San Diego. A scientist there named Dr. Naomi Oreskes published in Science magazine a study of every peer-reviewed journal article on global warming from the previous 10 years, and then in her random sample of 928 articles, she found that no articles disagreed with the scientific consensus on global warming. Then another study on articles on global warming that were published in the previous 14 years in the press, specifically published in The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal found that more than half of those stories gave equal weight to the scientific consensus and to the view that human beings played no role in global warming.
So just to sum up the scientific journals, the scientists agreed about global warming, but in these four, you know, major American newspapers, equal weight was given in half the articles to the opposing view that human beings are not causing global warming. So what does that say to you? How do you interpret that?
Vice Pres. GORE: Well, it's astonishing. And that image in the movie and in the slide show that has preceded the movie is probably the one slide that has evoked more post-presentation commentary when people come up afterwards and ask questions than any other. And it does highlight the gulf between science and popular culture. C.P. Snow wrote years ago about the two cultures. I guess that gap is even wider now. But I think it illustrates something else in this instance. It illustrates the vulnerability of our marketplace of ideas, our public conversation, if you will, to manipulation by the kinds of techniques that were innovated early in the 20th century and were labeled propaganda. They're more sophisticated now, they're part of corporate PR strategies, they have been refined, and the nature of the news media has also changed, not in all media but in a lot. And, as a result, I think we're vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. I think we've seen it in other areas as well.
Hmmm, looks like I won't be eating any Geno's cheese steaks anytime soon...
It seems that Joseph Vento, Geno's owner, feels strongly that everyone in this country ought to speak English - even if they're tourists from faraway climes looking for that fabled Philly cheesesteak fix.
Vento insists his customers order in English. No pointing at the menu items. Speak English, a sign at Vento's popular, curbside counter reads.
This comes from a man whose Italian-born grandparents spoke limited English. Talk about irony thicker than Cheez Whiz.
In the heated debate over immigration, many native-born Americans who are proud of their immigrant ancestors' struggle to become citizens - and, yes, their willingness to learn English - ask this question: Why can't this new wave play by the rules? Well, for one thing, in decades long ago, the rules of the game were different.
As historians note, the nation welcomed just about any European immigrant up until the early 20th century. No excusing those who arrive illegally today, but newcomers back then faced fewer legal hurdles.
Were the nation to "go back to the 19th century, and play by those rules," as Vento suggests, citizenship would be within easier reach for many of those whom some Americans are now so eager to deport.
As for that language barrier, no matter how halting a recent immigrant's command, the usual progression is that their children will be able someday to order a Geno's steak-with in fluent English.
That is, if boneheaded policies don't drive Geno's out of business first.
First spotted via Atrios...
It's good to see that Wen Ho Lee has settled his suit against the organizations that have wronged him for a reported 1.6 million dollars.
The New York Times famously apologized for their part in unjustly defaming him, although congenital liar William Safire never did.
Just got back from seeing "An Inconvenient Truth."
The ninety minutes just flew by. It's basically a patched-together series of Al Gore's lectures on global warming interspersed with a few separate interviews with Gore. It's funny and scary in about equal parts, and it lays out the case for global warming and the moral necessity for doing something about it more clearly (and entertainingly) than anything else I've seen or read.
A note in the end titles encourages viewers to urge other people to go see the movie. That's something I would have done anyway. Consider yourself urged. If you only see one movie this year, this is the one you should see.
And while you are at it, go visit the web site.
Just saw Hobart for the first time this year. I was down in the basement and out of the corner of my eye noticed some movement outside. It was Hobart trying to sneak past. So I tried to hide, and he came sneaking back, this time right up against the glass door, trying to see if anyone was at home. He didn't see me, so he kept right on walking, looking like he was going to lie down and sun himself on my patio. But then I made a mistake and got too close to the door and he spotted me and moved on.
Anyway, at least I know he's still around.