Wednesday, September 25, 2002

Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments George Johnson of the New York Times writes: When Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time, the 10 winners were largely solo performances, involving at most a few assistants. Most of the experiments — which are listed in this month's Physics World — took place on tabletops and none required more computational power than that of a slide rule or calculator. What they have in common is that they epitomize the elusive quality scientists call beauty. This is beauty in the classical sense: the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical simplicity of the analysis, seems as inevitable and pure as the lines of a Greek monument. Confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside, and something new about nature becomes clear. (09/25/02) It Shall Be a Jubilee Unto You Michael Hudson writes: Throughout the ancient Near East a tradition of clean-slate edicts, which “proclaimed justice” or decreed “economic order” and “righteousness” by canceling debts and restoring forfeited land to farmers. Clean-slate proclamations date from almost as early as the first interest-bearing debt, starting in Sumer around 2400 years BCE. Eventually, the tradition became known as the Jubilee Year, but by that time it was taken out of the hands of kings and placed at the core of Mosaic law. Radical as the idea of the Jubilee seems to modern eyes, these “restorations of order” were a conservative tradition in Bronze Age Mesopotamia for 2,000 years. What was conserved was self-sufficiency for the rural family-heads who made up the infantry as well as the productive base of Near Eastern economies. Conversely, what was radically disturbing in archaic times was the idea of unrestrained wealth-seeking. It took thousands of years for the idea of progress to become inverted, to connote irreversible freedom for the wealthy to deprive the peasantry of their lands and personal liberty. ... Rome was the first society not to cancel its debts. And we all know what happened to it. Classical historians such as Plutarch, Livy, and Diodorus attributed Rome’s decline and fall to the fact that creditors got the entire economy in their debt, expropriated the land and public domain, and strangled the economy. (09/25/02) America's Four Hundred Richest Forbes.com -- Still number one, Bill Gates lost lost $42 billion in the past three years and $11 billion in the past 12 months alone. The 46-year-old Microsoft mogul has been top every year since 1994 - when he overtook investment genius Warren Buffett - but the collapse of the technology boom has forced his fortune down to only $43 billion. (09/25/02) Poverty Rate Rose to 11.7 Percent New York Times -- The U.S. poverty rate rose for the first time in eight years and household income fell last year, a double dose of bad economic news that coincided with the first recession in a decade, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. There were 32.9 million Americans living in poverty last year, up from 31.6 million in 2000. ... The median household income in 2001 declined 2.2 percent to $42,228, the second straight drop, according to the bureau. The poverty threshold differs by the size of the household. The bureau calculated that for a family of four, the level in 2001 was $18,104. (09/25/02) Looking for Fresh Air, Don't Go to a National Park New York Times -- KNOXVILLE, Tenn., Sept. 23 (AP) — The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the nation's most polluted, with air quality rivaling that of Los Angeles, environmental groups found in a survey released today. ... Using Park Service data, the National Parks Conservation Association and two other environmental groups, Appalachian Voices and Our Children's Earth, rated the Smokies as the country's most polluted park. Shenandoah National Park in Virginia was second, followed by Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California and Acadia National Park in Maine. The Smokies, on the Tennessee-North Carolina line, draw more than nine million visitors a year. (09/25/02) UK Releases Military Dossier on Iraq CNN -- LONDON: Tony Blair speaks, "Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons ... he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and ... has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme ... Saddam will now do his utmost to try to conceal his weapons from U.N. inspectors. The threat posed to international peace and security, when WMD (weapons of mass destruction) are in the hands of a brutal and aggressive regime like Saddam's, is real. Unless we face up to the threat, not only do we risk undermining the authority of the U.N., whose resolutions he defies, but more importantly and in the longer term, we place at risk the lives and prosperity of our own people."  (09/25/02) 6:33:29 AM

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