Bookraft

I used to consider Discover magazine like Psychology Today or CNN Headline News - getting creepingly close to infotainment or truthiness. Both trends blend fact and styling (read exaggeration or downright fiction)in a mix that is designed to amuse or entertain as much as inform. So I tended to approach Discover with in-built skepticism. Well I had it wrong.

Somebody Moved in the Heavens

As an atheist I should have no interest in religion. As an advocate of Teilhard des Chardin I should have a broad vision and be willing to accommodate the world's religions and their shortfalls - secure in the belief that inevitably a universal improvement will occur. As a secularist I should be confident that the separation between Church and State, hard won in various countries around the globe, will continue to expand and be adopted worldwide.

Summer Pregnant Shower

The weather has been seriously disturbing -
and it seems to have crept into some of my poems:

Summer Sumac

Sumac greens scarred with crimson pyramids

The fundamental problem confronting the US is that the executive team in power is devoted to one task and one task only - achieving and holding power over all other considerations including go

Brent Staples has written a guest piece on Science education at the New York Times that deserves wider reading - here is the URL. This is a problem that the great Bill Gates has taken on ... and as Business Week in its June 26th 2006 issue point out - with mixed success. But it is an important problem because India and China among others are displacing the US as the leaders in Post Industrial Capitalism based on their ability to turn out quality engineers and scientists at double if not treble the US rate.

In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel - Norton, $30US

At the University of Michigan's Mary Markley Hall, probably like all university freshman dorms, there was an almost nightly debate during the course of the first term that asked the following question - What were the great unsolved problems of knowledge ?

Descartes Error by Antonio Damasio Avon Books, $12.50

This book which I found at a second hand book store marks a return to an area of science that has always fascinated me - how the brain works on a biological basis. What makes Damasio so interesting is that he takes cases that appear like Oliver Sack's stories - bizarre behavior, at the fringe of normal but often induced by heredity or serious brain injury - and Damasio who as resident neurologist at Iowa State University Hospital, must treat thee conditions.

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National Geographic September 2004 issue Global Warning: Signs from Earth

Time Magazine April 3, 2006 Special Report Global Warming

Within the past 18 months two distinguished publications, National Geographic and Time Magazine have devoted special reports to the Topic of Global Warming. Now other publications have taken up this topic as well such as New Scientist with excellent coverage of pro and contra cycles, Wikipedia with its host of good references, while PBS has covered the issue from many viewpoints.