Views Archive
The 9/11 Report: A dissent
Judge Richard A. Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit published a stunning indictment of the 9/11 final report in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. You can read it online, for free, for a week…
Text Messaging and the Police Crackdown
Democracy Now discusses how SMS and other forms of text messaging are changing the policing and protesting methods in New York at the RNC.An excerpt:If the police are beating people on a certain corner, within moments, hundreds, or thousands, of…
British Oppose U.N. Cloning Ban
Great Britain’s leading academic institution, the Royal Society, has joined with 67 other national academies to urge the United Nations to ban cloning babies but permit using the technology for medical research, according to The Scotsman. The United States is…
Chocolate is Good for You
In particular, dark chocolate is good for you, according to an article in Reuters that cites research recently completed at the Athens Medical School.According to the article, the heart-protecting properties of dark chocolate, which contains high levels of a kind…
Top Scientists Pick The Best Science Fiction
The London Guardian recently devoted their entire science section to a consideration of the relations between science and science fiction. As the editors explained, “We asked leading scientists from around the world what science fiction meant to them: how they…
Banning the Muslim Martin Luther
Paul Donnelly has written a moving op-ed in today’s Washington Post that discusses Tariq Ramadan — an Islamic schollar of peace who was recently offered a job at Notre Dame University, only to have the Bush Administration revoke his visa…
A Carbide Revolution?
Earlier this week, news broke of a feat that could transform the semiconductor industry. In the August 26 issue of Nature, a Japanese research group announced that it had succeeded in making almost perfect crystals of silicon carbide. (Here’s an…
Java Plan Heats Up Cell Phones
Over the past couple years, mobile games–video games for cell phones and PDAs–have been positioned as a new killer app. Cool games, in theory, would drive people to buy cool phones, and spend buckets on subscriptions and data fees. Today,…
Tiny Telescope Finds New Planet
A telescope no larger than those sold at department stores has found a new planet, a Jupiter-sized gas giant orbiting a star about 500 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Lyra, according to Sky and Telescope magazine’s website. The…
Copyright Victory
JibJab Media, the Web animators behind a popular parody of the Bush-Kerry race, has won its battle to keep distributing the film. Music publisher Ludlow Music backed down Tuesday from its claim that JibJab infringed Ludlow’s copyright on Woody Guthrie’s…