Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art? Bernard Chazelle — Discovering the Cosmology of Bach. Vi Hart. Twelve Tones. Mourning the Parisian Journalists Yet Noticing the Hypocrisy | Rabbi Michael Lerner. As the editor of a progressive Jewish and interfaith magazine that has often articulated views that have prompted condemnation from both Right and Left, I had good reason to be scared by the murders of fellow journalists in Paris. Having won the 2014 "Magazine of the Year" Award from the Religion Newswriters Association, and having been critical of Hamas' attempts to bomb Israeli cities this past summer (even while being equally critical of Israel's rampage against civilians in Gaza), I have good reason to worry if this prominence raises the chances of being a target for Islamic extremists.
But then again, I had to wonder about the way the massacre in Paris is being depicted and framed by the Western media as a horrendous threat to Western civilization, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, I wondered about the over-heated nature of this description. It didn't take me long to understand how problematic that framing really is. Wait But Why.
What Are Those Strange Things You See Floating In Your Eye? Too much education is bad. Don't over-educate the young: Nassim Taleb - Opinion More Opinion Stories ST Editorial - The Straits Times. An interview with author and thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a somewhat nerve wracking affair. He famously reserves his scorn for certain professions - journalists, for instance, to which this writer belongs - as well as economists, bankers and academics. That is, anyone who has no "skin in the game"; opinion makers who prognosticate or make forecasts and are not held to account for their views.
Those who invest on the views of this hapless group take on all the risk and downside. On the opposite end are "heroes" who bear the disadvantages and risks for others' sake; they have "soul in the game". Entrepreneurs, soldiers and investigative journalists rank high in his world view. His model for "soul in the game" is his father. In his latest book Antifragile, he recounts an incident during the Lebanese civil war when a militiaman insulted his father, who refused to obey the soldier's orders. Not so, says Mr Taleb. "School success is predictive of future school success.
The Multiverse’s ‘Measure Problem’ If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up either of these constants even a little would render the universe unlivable. To account for our incredible luck, leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and Stephen Hawking envision our universe as one of countless bubbles in an eternally frothing sea. This infinite “multiverse” would contain universes with constants tuned to any and all possible values, including some outliers, like ours, that have just the right properties to support life.
The problem remains how to test the hypothesis. Eternal Inflation. Physicists achieve superconductivity at room temperature. Medical scientists have developed a new chemical compound that’s been shown to treat spinal cord injuries of 80 percent of the animals it was tested on. The compound, which they’re calling intracellular sigma peptide (ISP), was tested on 26 animals who were paralysed due to a spinal cord injury - and in 21 cases the animals were able to urinate, move, or both after seven weeks of treatment. "This recovery is unprecedented," said neuroscientist Jerry Silver from Case Western Reserve University, who led the research, in a press release.
"Each of the 21 animals got something back in terms of function. For any spinal cord-injured patient today, it would be considered extraordinary to regain even one of these functions, especially bladder function. After a spinal cord injury, people become paralysed as a result of scar tissue that builds up and stops nerve cells from connecting with each other. Currently there are no drugs available to help undo this damage. "It was amazing. What Will Happen When the Earth’s Magnetic Field Switches.