Existential Problem
"’Existential problem of the philosopher who did not exist,’ says the Times headline, and indeed Bernard-Henri Lévy might be going through an existential crisis after a massive gaffe in his new book ‘On War in Philosophy’. France’s most dashing philosopher took aim at Immanuel Kant, calling him ‘raving mad’ and a ‘fake’ in his new book, and to support his attack, he cited a little-known 20th century thinker: Jean-Baptiste Botul. The problem: Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke. He even has a Wikipedia page which explains that he is a ‘fictional French philosopher.’ Yet Lévy referred to Botul’s faked book ‘The Sex Life of Emmanuel Kant,’ saying the fictitious philosopher had proved once and for all ‘just after the Second World War in his series of lectures to the neo-Kantians of Paraguay that their hero was an abstract fake, a pure spirit of pure appearance.’ Aude Lancelin, a journalist at Le Nouvel Observateur, says that this was a ‘nuclear gaffe that raises questions about Lévy’s methods.’ She said she burst out laughing when she read the extracts from the book. Indeed, it is a particularly embarrassing episode for the prominent thinker, who was a founding member of the ‘nouvelles philosophes’ movement in the 1970s and is a regular guest on French television talk shows.”
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Climate Bailout?
“It's reinventing-the-wheel time. The Obama administration has announced intentions to create a big, fat, shiny, new federal office called the ‘Climate Service’ to track global warming, complete with six regional offices and lots of good intentions. ‘It looks like the [warming] empire strikes back. Obama is attempting to engineer a global warming bailout. This is a classic response of the federal government: Bail out a corrupt and dying industry,’ Marc Morano, editor of the watchdog site ClimateDepot.com, tells Inside the Beltway. ‘What else would you expect of the feds? Man-made global warming has proven itself to be nothing more than sub-prime science, sub-prime economics, and sub-prime politics,’ Mr. Morano adds. ‘This new federal agency will … produce the best science that politics can manufacture.’ But wait a minute. Don't we already have an agency that does all this stuff? Could be: ‘The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The USGCRP began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-606), which called for 'a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the nation and the world to understand, assess, predict and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.'”
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Tarnished Sheen
Lawyers for Brooke Mueller Sheen, the wife of Hollywood actor Charlie Sheen, have said she wants the domestic violence case against him dismissed after the pair were reunited. “Charlie Sheen and his wife were reunited Monday after a judge modified a restraining order and allowed them them to work out their differences following a Christmas Day domestic violence dispute in which the actor allegedly pinned his spouse on a bed with a knife to her throat. The couple hugged in court, and Brooke Mueller Sheen's attorney, Yale Galanter, said they hugged again and kissed in the basement of the 19th century Pitkin County Courthouse after the brief hearing before leaving in separate vehicles. They planned to fly out of Aspen together, and Galanter said he has asked prosecutors to drop the case. ‘I can tell you, Brooke very badly wanted to have contact with Charlie,’ Galanter said. ‘There are many children's issues that she wanted to communicate with him about... They have two gorgeous beautiful babies together. Brooke would like this case to be over and charges dismissed so they can get on with their lives.’”
Malicious Comments
A staggering 95% of user-generated content for the second half of last year was “malicious,” according to a report from security film Websense. “First off: the film, which scans millions on web sites and e-mails a day looking for malicious content, found that 95 per cent of all user-generated content came laced with some kind of spam or malicious link. ‘The notion that the internet could be the great equalizer turned out to be true after all; unfortunately, it’s mostly making suckers out of us all,’ said the wonderful tech web site Ars Technica on the matter. Personally I’m quite startled by this number. It’s like saying that 95 per cent of the comments posted on this blog will have malicious content (and no guys: some comments may be biting, but that doesn’t make them malicious). I’m waiting to hear back from the guys at Websense so they can tell me which types of web sites were the most affected by this trend. I’ll also check with our IT department to see if the Gate had half as many problems last year. I’ll keep you posted.”
Beer Bones
Beer drinkers are toasting a new study which suggests that beer is good for your bones as it is rich in silicon and may help prevent osteoporosis. “These were the findings after researchers tested 100 commercial beers for silicon content and categorized the data according to beer style and source. Previous research has suggested beer contained silicon but little was known about how silicon levels varied with the different types of beer and malting processes. ‘We have examined a wide range of beer styles for their silicon content and have also studied the impact of raw materials and the brewing process on the quantities of silicon that enter wort and beer,’ researcher Charles Bamforth said in a statement. The study, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, found the beers' silicon content ranged from 6.4 milligrams per liter to 56.5 mg per liter. The average person's silicon intake each day is between 20 and 50 mgs. The researchers found there was little change in the silicon content of barley during the malting process as most of the silicon in barley is in the husk, which is not affected greatly during malting. They found pale ales showed the highest silicon content while non-alcoholic beers, light lagers and wheat beers had the least silicon.”
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Body of Water
There now seems “little doubt” that Saturn’s moon Enceladus holds a “large body of liquid water” beneath its icy surface after a probe returned yet more evidence. “The Cassini probe, which periodically sweeps past the little moon, has returned yet more data to back up the idea of a sub-surface sea. This time, it is the detection of negatively charged water molecules in the atmosphere of Enceladus. On Earth, such ions are often seen where liquid water is in motion, such as waterfalls or crashing ocean waves. There are no ‘rollers’ on the moon but it does have a very active region near its south pole where water vapour and ice particles shoot through cracks in the surface and rise high into the Enceladian sky. ‘We see water molecules that have additional electrons added,’ explained Andrew Coates from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. ‘There are two ways they could be added - from the ambient plasma environment, or it could be to do with friction as these water clusters come out of the jets, like rubbing a balloon and sticking it on the ceiling,’ he told BBC News.”
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Moral Atheists
The non-religious know their right from wrong just as well as churchgoers, according to new research revealing a strong moral compass among atheists. “The team behind the research found that most religions were similar and had a moral code which helped to organise society. But people who did not have a religious background still appeared to have intuitive judgments of right and wrong in common with believers, according to the findings, published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Dr Marc Hauser, from Harvard University, one of the co-authors of the research, said that he and his colleagues were interested in the roots of religion and morality. ‘For some, there is no morality without religion, while others see religion as merely one way of expressing one's moral intuitions,’ he said. The team looked at several psychological studies which were designed to test an individual’s morality. Dr Hauser added: ‘The research suggests that intuitive judgments of right and wrong seem to operate independently of explicit religious commitments. However, although it appears as if co-operation is made possible by mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion, religion can play a role in facilitating and stabilising co-operation between groups.’”
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Prodigal Sons
Transsexual film-maker Kimberly Reed has wowed America with new movie “Prodigal Sons” which tells the tale of two young brothers and their battle with sexual identity. “Paul McKerrow was an all-American boy. Raised in Helena, Montana, he was the quarterback for his high-school football team, which is as close to being idolised as many small-town Americans come. He was also his class president, the valedictorian of his year in 1985 and voted most likely to succeed by his classmates. He was tall and ruggedly good-looking. McKerrow, in short, had it made and great things were expected of him. So it was with some trepidation that McKerrow recently attended his 20-year high-school reunion as Kimberly Reed, a lesbian, New York-based film-maker who had had gender reassignment to become a woman. ‘It was very emotional. I wanted it to go smoothly. People get freaked out enough by going to their high-school reunion. But having a new gender is a big surprise for a lot of people,’ Reed said. Yet Reed found that her worries were unfounded. Defying the preconceptions that surround many people's views of small-town America, she was welcomed home with open arms. ‘It has been really great. It really was easy. That became the surprise,’ she said. Reed has now made a documentary about her story, which has become a major hit on the American film festival circuit.”
“Capital of Killing”
Congo has become the “world capital of rape, torture and mutilation” during the brutal war that has killed over 5.4m people and is still raging, writes The New York Times. “It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better. But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million. What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14 — perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up — so she moved in with her uncle.”
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Unfunny Valentine?
The Independent’s Liz Hoggard asks why heterosexual men refuse to emote on paper despite nearly 80 per cent of women desiring love letters. She says: “Why do so few men write love letters? According to a new survey, 78 per cent of women would love to receive a romantic letter or poem. But only half of men have ever penned one. Valentine's Day is doomed to disappoint. As women we splurge out our emotions. Desperate to be understood, our letters are littered with sub-clauses, breathless explanations and lots of brackets. It's like an epistolary novel. Whereas the minute men commit pen to paper, they come over all Victorian. ‘Regards’, ‘soonest’, ‘cheers’. Would it kill them to display a little bit more warmth? For psychoanalyst Darian Leader, the fact that men keep love letters in their correspondence files and women keep theirs among their underwear is telling. Letters are physical, sensual entities for women. For men they're proof (of love, affection, trust). But they might also get you sued – so better keep them locked up. Recently I sent an email. We were on to date No.5. I composed it with care – no woman the wrong side of 35 wants to look desperate – slapped on the sign-off ‘Liz x’, and pressed send. His reply came back short to the point of brutality: ‘Great. Best, Dave’. Very pointedly, there was no kiss.”
