[gallery] the jewel caterpillar
From her dialect my mother left me one specific word that she used to describe how one felt when one was pulled here and there by contradictory feelings that tore her apart. She said that she had inside a frantumaglia. La frantumaglia (she pronounced it frantum-maglia) depressed her. At times it made her dizzy, caused her a metallic taste in her mouth. It was the word for a discomfort, illness not otherwise definable, manifested out of the throng of heterogenous things in her head, like refuse on turbid water of the brain. La frantumaglia was mysterious, caused mysterious acts, was the origin of all suffering not attributable to a single obvious reason…Often la frantumaglia made her cry, too, and the word remained in my mind from childhood to define first of all the crying that is sudden or without a reason one is aware of: tears of frantumaglia.
Dark matter’s existence perplexes people who find it implausible that the vast majority of matter in the universe would be undetectable by our senses and their technological extensions. Some even wonder if it’s a sort of mistake. To me it would be even more astonishing if the matter we can see with our eyes were all the matter there is. You might have thought such hubristic beliefs were upended by the Copernican Revolution. After all, the history of physics is the history of revealing how much is deceptive, or is hidden from view.
Most people mistake their own perspective, shaped by their subjective and limited perception, for the absolute reality of the external world. Questioning this assumption is what advanced our research on dark matter. It is also the only thing that has ever advanced human empathy.
Different Managers Use Pressing in Different Ways
Different Managers Use Pressing in Different Ways
The Inside Channel is one of the best soccer blogs I know. Jake Meador writes especially clearly, vividly, and informatively about tactics. If you are a soccer fan, and especially if you want to become a more knowledgable one, you should definotely check it out. This post is rather longer than most, but taught me a lot.
Martese Johnson and other UVa black students are in effect complaining about racial profiling, about singling out black students and treating them differently because of their race. It sounds like a principled argument, but it is not. It is wrong for the state to distribute either benefits (such as preferential admission) or burdens (such as racial profiling by police, stopping or arresting blacks disproportionately for the same offenses committed by others) on the basis of race. If treating black applicants to UVa differently because of their race violates no principle, why does it become a violation once they arrive?
The batter has to estimate the necessary position by doing an impressive amount of computation. All a batter has to go on is a view of the unfolding pitch, which you can think of as a series of pictures giving the position of the ball. From the change in position between successive pictures, the batter can estimate the speed and direction of the ball’s motion. That estimate gets refined and updated over the third of a second or so in which the batter gets to track the ball before the swing needs to start.
It’s nearly impossible to overstate how difficult a problem this is– just being able to reliably pick the baseball out of a complicated visual field is an impressive achievement. Human brains are highly optimized for this sort of task, though, which is why so many “citizen science” projects revolve around identifying patterns in images. We’re also programmed to make the necessary on-the-fly calculations to estimate the current velocity and future position of the approaching ball. While professional baseball players have honed this skill to just about the highest level possible, the basic ability seems to be wired into our brains at a pretty deep level– my three-year-old son can catch a gently tossed ball more often than not, and his failures are more a matter of imperfect coordination of his motion than a failure to correctly predict where the ball will be.
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17524”]
The construction noise almost drove me out of my mind, but in the end they did a nice job.
[gallery] houghtonlib:
Two circular images from our Instagram account, a compass rose from a map of Siberia, and an Islamic prayer calendar from a Turkish manuscript.Houghton Library, Harvard University
On Not Saying What You Mean
I’ve had a few snarky things to say on Twitter about the Douthat Kerfuffle, and I’d like to say more, but I’m struggling with the evasiveness of some of the key participants. Consider the letter of protest that some … well, wait: Is “protest” the right word? Look at the letter and see if you can tell what it’s asking for. Some of the signatories have denied that they’re asking the Times to discipline or silence Douthat, but if they’re not asking for that what are they asking for? “We just want to inform you that this is not what we expect of the Times but we’re not asking you to do anything about that”? It’s impossible to tell, when you give the letter some scrutiny, what its actual purpose is.
Cloudy evasineness seems to be characteristic of the Douthat critics. For instance, Katie Grimes says, “I signed the letter because I believe he has uttered several factual errors” — but she doesn’t say what any of those errors are. (Nor does the letter.) Similarly, Brian Flanagan claims that Douthat misuses the term “doctrine,” but gives no examples, so it’s impossible to tell which statements by Douthat he believes to be erroneous, or how they might be corrected.
Most troubling of all, in the screed that I called attention to yesterday, Fr. James Martin says that “Mr. Douthat can rightly be held accountable” for inciting hatred, without ever distinguishing between the points Douthat makes that he deems illegitimate and those he thinks are within bounds. (Surely he thinks that some of Douthat’s criticisms are acceptable.) But the questions I have here are: “held accountable” by whom? In what way? Martin doesn’t say simply that Douthat should be criticized; being “held accountable” is clearly more substantial — but because of the lack of specificity, also a little ominous. What would count as being held accountable in this context? Having his salary cut? Being forbidden to write for the Times about theology? Assigned penance by his confessor? What?
It’s hard for me not to see this incessant vagueness as endemic to post-Vatican II liberal theology, a tradition in which so many priests and theologians can’t simply reject magisterial teaching but don’t really want to endorse it either, and so take refuge in a cloudy verbal world which they claim to be working within the “spirit” if not the actual “letter” of Church teaching. But maybe the current vagueness has other causes that I’m not aware of. In any case, I think Douthat’s critics owe it to him and to their readers to make an effort to say what they mean.
[gallery] Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of a Woman (Agnes Dürer)
