A polymath and a mathemagician without a math degree,
Martin Gardner turns 95 tomorrow, and he is celebrating by publishing a new book of essays, which joins over 100 he has written on math, philosophy, literature, magic, and skeptical thinking. A
wonderful documentary covering the overlapping circles of math, magic, and science in which he travels is available from Encyclopedia Britannica [
mp4 version here]. His thousands of puzzles and mathematical diversions included
building a learning machine out of matchboxes that could
beat you in a simple game,
science fiction puzzle tales (can you solve the first couple?), many mathematical
tricks, and the first general
introduction to the Game of Life.
A fascinating interview with the man is available from Cambridge University Press.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:26 AM Oct 20 2009 - 46 comments [117 favorites]
From October 1972 to October 1973 a controversy over
Roald Dahl's
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory simmered in the pages of
The Horn Book. It began with an article, "McLuhan, Youth, and Literature", by
Eleanor Cameron, author of the
Mushroom Planet series for children and of
The Green and Burning Tree: On the Writing and Enjoyment of Children's Books. Spread out over the
October,
December, and
February issues, it tied the ideas of
Marshall McLuhan (
The Medium is the Massage) to the confection of
Charlie, calling it "one of the most tasteless books ever written for children":
"The more I think about Charlie and the character of Willy Wonka and his factory, the more I am reminded of McLuhan’s coolness, the basic nature of his observations, and the kinds of things that excite him. Certainly there are several interesting parallels between the point of view of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and McLuhan’s 'theatrical view of experience as a production or stunt,' as well as his enthusiastic conviction that every ill of mankind can easily be solved by subservience to the senses."
What followed was a knock-down, drag-out, letter-writing brouhaha, refereed by
Horn Book editor
Paul Heins, with librarians, parents, teachers,
Ursula K. Le Guin, and
Roald Dahl himself joining in, and it was one of the main causes of the book's
revision that year.
posted by ocherdraco at 5:38 PM Oct 15 2009 - 68 comments [96 favorites]
While evolution is one of the best-supported theories in science, one lay criticism is that it doesn't explain the creation of life from non-life, or
abiogenesis. This is a different problem domain, of course, as survival of the fittest hardly applies if there's nothing alive yet. There have been many guesses over the years: the most commonly accepted is "the primordial soup". That's probably what you learned in school, the Frankenstein's Monster approach to cell creation. Start with a random chemical bath, throw enough lightning at it, and mysterious magic happens, somehow resulting in life.
Dr. William Martin of the University of Düsseldorf, working with geochemist Mike Russell, has presented an actual theory of abiogenesis. It neatly explains both bacteria and
archaea, describes fairly closely why they function the way they do, and shows why we don't see new life being created now. Their suggestion: our original ancestor wasn't lightning-zapped soup, but rather
a proton-powered rock.
posted by Malor at 10:48 PM Oct 19 2009 - 75 comments [83 favorites]
At the dark end of disco and funk in the early 1980s a DJ and crew known as
Afrika Bambaataa had wild, sweaty, drunken sex with the emotionless zombie robot corpse of school-of-Bauhaus German synthpop unit
Kraftwerk and an unholy thousand-headed monster rose from the undead to groove across the land. Its name is
Electro.
posted by loquacious at 1:40 AM Oct 26 2009 - 43 comments [78 favorites]
In the waning days of the Disco era,
Larry Levan crafted a new style of dance music, which, like House music in Chicago, came to be named after the nightclub where it was most played, the
Paradise Garage. Garage music may have started with disco, but over the decades, it's evolved in some surprising ways:
posted by empath at 10:06 PM Oct 27 2009 - 62 comments [77 favorites]
Having previously put together a
post with links to stories from the 2009 edition of Best of American Crime Reporting, I decided to go to earlier editions to gather together what is available on the web. Starting in 2007 with
The Tainted Kidney: Charles Graeber, New York. A serial killer who chooses to donate his kidney has his motives questioned.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 10:39 AM Oct 17 2009 - 18 comments [64 favorites]
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