Sunday, April 04, 2004

Posted here Sunday, April 04, 2004 at 3:35:45 PM     This should be read for the details. How the Department of Homeland Security is becoming a big man on campus htt.Tv//www lawppklv pnm/ink/nrintme.Dhp?eid=52335 Only the Manhattan Project or America's space program can compare to the commitment of federal resources and political will that have been lavished on the Department of Homeland Security, .... all, if nine rural Minnesota fire departments could receive $600,517 in grants from a DHS division and the Little League World Series land $250,000 from the Pennsylvania Commonwealth's own homelandsecurity office, why shouldn't higher education get a little of the runoff? Not surprisingly, then, nearly every college today offers some homeland-security and terror-themed courses, while many major universities have established homeland-security departments — DC Berkeley's Lawrence Laboratory has a homeland-security office; UCLA's Extension school offers homeland-security courses; and there are homeland sub-departments at Johns Hopkins, MIT and Ohio State University. Likewise, high-profile conferences and symposia on homeland-security issues have become staples for public-policy institutes, strategic-studies think tanks and engineering schools. .... Even if George W. Bush were to be turned out of office in November the  Department of Homeland Security is here to stay. It is already too big and too self-perpetuating to go away, and every day its presence on American campuses grows. The Cold War showed how even hardscience research is affected by political climate, and, of course, the Bush White House has displayed a whimsical attitude in selecting which science is "real" and which is "pagan" when it comes to matters like global warming and birth control. The impulse to return to the time before 9/11 is natural, but .... ********

Posted here Sunday, April 04, 2004 at 1:25:54 PM     This I think can be seen, should be seen, as part of the cost of the Bush policy, which makes international cooperation - and pressure - more useless because no longer legitimate. Sources: Brazil blocks nuclear inspectors CNN - 2 hours ago (CNN) -- The Brazilian government and UN nuclear inspectors are at odds over inspections of an under-construction, uranium-enrichment facility near Rio de Janeiro, sources close to the International Atomic Energy Agency said Sunday. Iran Warns EU Any Demands Outside Agreements Damage Confidence-Building Moves Tehran Times Brazil Shielding Uranium Facility Washington Post from Google news. ********

Posted here Sunday, April 04, 2004 at 10:04:06 AM     This is just beautiful. Feynman was active at caltech when i was an undergrad, and he had a major influence on my life, hinting that science was a commited way of seeeing the world,for its intrinsic beauty, , not a career. Which end is nearer to God, if I may use a religious metaphor, beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing; and that all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavor to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use making believe that we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy.             And I do not think either end is nearer to God. To stand at either end, and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to stand with evil and beauty and hope, or to stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world, with that aspect alone, is a mistake. It is not sensible for the ones who specialize at the other end, to have such disregard for each other. (They don't actually, but people say they do.) The great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working in the middle, and in that way we are gradually understanding this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies. http://www.southerncrossreview.org/33/feynman.htm ********