Knox, Ronald, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, University of Notre Dame Press 1994 Amazon customer review: 'Hard not to be very enthusiastic about this magnum opus of Msgr Ronald Knox. . . . This has been one of my favorite books over the years; read and re-read for the sheer joy of reading! Knox takes us on a marvellous journey through history, unveiling some of the mystical and "enthusiastic" movements, going back to Corinth and Montanism, and some of the "enthusiastic" personalities behind these movements. . . . ' gerard77 
Amazon   back

Chaitin, Gregory J, "Randomness and Mathematical Proof", Scientific American, 232, 5, May 1975, page 47-52. 'Although randomness can be precisely defined and can even be measured, a given number cannot be proved random. This enigma establishes a limit in what is possible in mathematics'. back

Henzler-Wildman, Katherine, Dorothee Kern, "Dynamic Personalities of Proteins", Nature, 450, 7172, 13 December 2007, page 964-972. Abstract: 'Because proteins are central to cellular function, researchers have sought to uncover the secrets of how these complex macromolecules execute such a fascinating variety of functions. Although static structures are known for many proteins, the functions of proteins are governed ultimately by their dynamic character (or 'personality'). The dream is to 'watch' proteins in action in real time at atomic resolution. This requires addition of a fourth dimension, time, to structural biology so that the positions in space and time of all atoms in a protein can be described in detail.' . back

AAP, Faith is a target, Sydney Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher says, ' The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney has used his annual Christmas message to condemn the perceived erosion of religious freedoms in Australia. Archbishop Anthony Fisher took aim at “hard-edged secularism” which excludes faith from the public domain.' back

Adam Vaughan, UK nuclear power station plans scrapped as Toshiba pulls out, ' Plans for a new nuclear power station in Cumbria have been scrapped after the Japanese conglomerate Toshiba announced it was winding up the UK unit behind the project. . . . The decision represents a major blow to the government’s ambitions for new nuclear and leaves a huge hole in energy policy. The plant would have provided about 7% of UK electricity.' back

Alison Krauss, Down in the River to Pray,
' As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way!

O sisters, let's go down,
Let's go down, come on down
O sisters, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way!

O brothers, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
Come on, brothers, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way!

O fathers, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
O fathers, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way!

O mothers, let's go down
Let's go down; don't you want to go down?
Come on, mothers, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way!

O sinners, let's go down
Let's go down, come on down
O sinners, let's go down
Down in the river to pray

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way!

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way!

back

Ancient Egypt - Wikipedia, Ancient Egypt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia , 'Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. It is one of six civilizations to arise independently. Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3150 BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology) with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh Narmer (commonly referred to as Menes). back

Associated Press, Trump Capitulated, Shocking Bolton and Erdogan: How Syria Withdrawal Call Unfolded, ' U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was made hastily, without consulting his national security team or allies, and over strong objections from virtually everyone involved in the fight against ISIS, according to U.S. and Turkish officials. back

Australian Government, Department of Human Services, 'We deliver social and health-related payments and services.' back

Avi Steinberg, After More Than Two Decades of Work, a New Hebrew Bible to Rival the King James, ' . . . Just how did the Song of Songs, a racy pop album that was possibly sung in ancient taverns, arrive in Holy Writ? “It’s the language,” Alter told me. “The artistry of the Hebrew Bible, whose full colors and intricate patterns and designs we can never see in full, especially as they have faded under the accumulations of theological and historical readings. And the task of restoring those original colors and shadings — their nuances — is, I believe, still incomplete.” back

Blood - Wikipedia, Blood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Blood is a body fluid in humans and other animals that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells. In vertebrates, it is composed of blood cells suspended in blood plasma. Plasma, which constitutes 55% of blood fluid, is mostly water (92% by volume), and contains proteins, glucose, mineral ions, hormones, carbon dioxide (plasma being the main medium for excretory product transportation), and blood cells themselves.' back

Bohr model - Wikipedia, Bohr model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In atomic physics, the Rutherford–Bohr model or Bohr model, introduced by Niels Bohr in 1913, depicts the atom as a small, positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons that travel in circular orbits around the nucleus—similar in structure to the solar system, but with attraction provided by electrostatic forces rather than gravity' back

Born rule - Wikipedia, Born rule - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Born rule (also called the Born law, Born's rule, or Born's law) is a law of quantum mechanics which gives the probability that a measurement on a quantum system will yield a given result. It is named after its originator, the physicist Max Born. The Born rule is one of the key principles of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. There have been many attempts to derive the Born rule from the other assumptions of quantum mechanics, with inconclusive results. . . . The Born rule states that if an observable corresponding to a Hermitian operator A with discrete spectrum is measured in a system with normalized wave function (see bra-ket notation), then the measured result will be one of the eigenvalues λ of A, and the probability of measuring a given eigenvalue λ_i will equal <ψ|P_i|ψ> where P_i is the projection onto the eigenspace of A corresponding to λ_i'. back

Candida Moss, The Catholic Church's Own Complicated History of Suicide, ' After her rape Lucretia had taken her own life. Augustine’s response was to develop the notion that by committing suicide Lucretia had committed a greater sin, a sin against God. This was a central turning point in the history of Christian thought about all kinds of things: rape, volition, the relationship between the mind and the body, and, of course, suicide. But before Augustine decried suicide as a sin most Romans considered it a respectable way to exit the mortal coil. And many Christians were hailed as martyrs for deaths that we today might call suicide.' back

Charles Duhigg, The Real Roots of American Rage, ' . . . “Everyone basically thought anger was something that mature people and societies ought to suppress,” Averill told me. “There was this attitude that if you were an angry person, you ought to be a bit embarrassed.” In journal articles and at symposia, academics described anger as a problem to be solved, an instinct with little social benefit. “But that didn’t really make any sense to me,” he said.. . .Anger, Averill concluded, is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion. And it does an excellent job of forcing us to listen to and confront problems we might otherwise avoid.' back

Eigenvalues and eigenvectors - Wikipedia, Eigenvalues and eigenvectors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'An eigenvector of a square matrix A is a non-zero vector vthat, when the matrix multiplies yields a constant multiple of v, the latter multiplier being commonly denoted by λ. That is: Av = λv' back

Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band, Whistle Test 1977,
0:00 Intro
0:21 Feelin' Single - Seein' Double [I Really Had A Ball Last Night]
2:54 I'll Be Your San Antone Rose
6:41 Pancho & Lefty
11:43 Making Believe
16:03 C'est La Vie [You Never Can tell]
20:17 Band Intros
21:07 Tulsa Queen
25:39 Together Again
29:46 Luxury Liner
34:34 Ooh Las Vegas
back

Feynman, Leighton & Sands FLP III:08, Chapter 8: The Hamiltonian Matrix, 'One problem then in describing nature is to find a suitable representation for the base states. But that’s only the beginning. We still want to be able to say what “happens.” If we know the “condition” of the world at one moment, we would like to know the condition at a later moment. So we also have to find the laws that determine how things change with time. We now address ourselves to this second part of the framework of quantum mechanics—how states change with time.' back

H. L. Mencken, 'But when a candidate for public office . . . , ' But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or count himself lost. … All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. — H.L. Mencken, 1920. back

James Mann, The Dick Cheney of "Vice" just craves power. The reality was worse, ' By disregarding his views and ideology (and several important historical moments that helped form them), “Vice” suggests that Cheney’s legacy is a soulless quest for power, rather than the advancement of fallacious beliefs that seriously damaged our nation: his unilateral approach to foreign policy, his preference for military force over diplomacy, his considerable overestimation of American strength and his desire to reshape the Middle East.' back

Juan Yin et al, Bounding the speed of 'spooky action at a distance', 'In the well-known EPR paper, Einstein et al. called the nonlocal correlation in quantum entanglement as `spooky action at a distance'. If the spooky action does exist, what is its speed? All previous experiments along this direction have locality loopholes and thus can be explained without having to invoke any `spooky action' at all. Here, we strictly closed the locality loopholes by observing a 12-hour continuous violation of Bell inequality and concluded that the lower bound speed of `spooky action' was four orders of magnitude of the speed of light if the Earth's speed in any inertial reference frame was less than 10^(-3) times of the speed of light.' back

Leslie Jamison, I Used to Insist I Didn't Get Angry. Not Anymore, ' . . . a few years ago, I started to get a knot in my gut at the canned cadences of my own refrain: I don’t get angry. I get sad. At the shrillest moments of our own self-declarations — I am X, I am not Y — we often hear in that tinny register another truth, lurking expectantly, and begin to realize there are things about ourselves we don’t yet know. By which I mean that at a certain point, I started to suspect I was angrier than I thought.' back

Lost Highway: the story of Country Music, Episode I: Down from the Mountain, The Carter Family back

Louis de Broglie - Wikipedia, Louis de Broglie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie . . . 15 August 1892 – 19 March 1987) was a French physicist who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave-particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.' back

Louise Loveluck & Zakaria Zakaria, syria's once-teeming prison cells being emptied by mss murder, ' In interviews, more than two dozen Syrians recently released from the Sednaya military prison in Damascus described a government campaign to clear the decks of political detainees. The former inmates said prisoners are being transferred from jails across Syria to join death-row detainees in Sednaya’s basement and then be executed in pre-dawn hangings. Yet despite these transfers, the population of Sednaya’s once-packed cells — which at their peak held an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 inmates — has dwindled largely because of the unyielding executions, and at least one section of the prison is almost entirely empty, the former detainees said. back

Mach's principle - Wikipedia, Mach's principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In theoretical physics, particularly in discussions of gravitation theories, Mach's principle (or Mach's conjecture) is the name given by Einstein to an imprecise hypothesis often credited to the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. The idea is that the local motion of a rotating reference frame is determined by the large scale distribution of matter, as exemplified by this anecdote: You are standing in a field looking at the stars. Your arms are resting freely at your side, and you see that the distant stars are not moving. Now start spinning. The stars are whirling around you and your arms are pulled away from your body. Why should your arms be pulled away when the stars are whirling? Why should they be dangling freely when the stars don't move?' back

Massimo Faggioli, Trunp & the 'Constitutional Agnosicism' of the Bishops, back

Michael Weiss, Russia's Secret Weapon? America's Idiocracy, ' What the Russian security services have deftly done, and will continue to do, is tap into pre-existing pathologies in our society and simply encourage them, as an enabler might do a drug addict or alcoholic. The extent to which active measures work is the extent to which our society is already falling apart, which is the only conclusion to draw from two recent Senate-commissioned studies into Russian disinformation and propaganda efforts online in the lead-up to and aftermath of the last U.S. presidential election.' back

P versus NP problem - Wikipedia, P versus NP problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in computer science. It asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified (technically, verified in polynomial time) can also be solved quickly (again, in polynomial time). The underlying issues were first discussed in the 1950s, in letters from John Forbes Nash Jr. to the National Security Agency, and from Kurt Gödel to John von Neumann. The precise statement of the P versus NP problem was introduced in 1971 by Stephen Cook in his seminal paper "The complexity of theorem proving procedures" and is considered by many to be the most important open problem in the field.' back

Robin McKie, 'For 30 years I've been obsessed by why children get leukemia. Now we have the answer', ' For full leukaemia to occur, another biological event must take place and this involves the immune system. “For an immune system to work properly, it needs to be confronted by an infection in the first year of life,” says Greaves. Without that confrontation with an infection, the system is left unprimed and will not work properly.” And this issue is becoming an increasingly worrying problem. Parents, for laudable reasons, are raising children in homes where antiseptic wipes, antibacterial soaps and disinfected floorwashes are the norm. Dirt is banished for the good of the household.' back

Ted Widmer, What Did Plato Think the World Looked Like, back

Thomas L. Friedman, Time for the G.O.P. to Threaten to Fire Trump, ' . . . last week was a watershed moment for me, and I think for many Americans, including some Republicans. It was the moment when you had to ask whether we really can survive two more years of Trump as president, whether this man and his demented behavior — which will get only worse as the Mueller investigation concludes — are going to destabilize our country, our markets, our key institutions and, by extension, the world. And therefore his removal from office now has to be on the table.' back

Vice (2018 film) - Wikipedia, Vice (2018 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Vice is a 2018 American biographical comedy-drama film written and directed by Adam McKay. The film stars Christian Bale as Dick Cheney,[4] with Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe and Tyler Perry in supporting roles. The plot follows Cheney in his desire to become the most powerful Vice President in America's history.' back

W. F. McGrew et al, Atomic clock performance enabling geodesy below the centimetre level, ' The passage of time is tracked by counting oscillations of a frequency reference, such as Earth’s revolutions or swings of a pendulum. By referencing atomic transitions, frequency (and thus time) can be measured more precisely than any other physical quantity, with the current generation of optical atomic clocks reporting fractional performance below the 10−17 level. However, the theory of relativity prescribes that the passage of time is not absolute, but is affected by an observer’s reference frame. Consequently, clock measurements exhibit sensitivity to relative velocity, acceleration and gravity potential. Here we demonstrate local optical clock measurements that surpass the current ability to account for the gravitational distortion of space-time across the surface of Earth. In two independent ytterbium optical lattice clocks, we demonstrate unprecedented values of three fundamental benchmarks of clock performance. In units of the clock frequency, we report systematic uncertainty of 1.4 × 10−18, measurement instability of 3.2 × 10−19 and reproducibility characterized by ten blinded frequency comparisons, yielding a frequency difference of [−7 ± (5)stat ± (8)sys] × 10−19, where ‘stat’ and ‘sys’ indicate statistical and systematic uncertainty, respectively. Although sensitivity to differences in gravity potential could degrade the performance of the clocks as terrestrial standards of time, this same sensitivity can be used as a very sensitive probe of geopotential. Near the surface of Earth, clock comparisons at the 1 × 10−18 level provide a resolution of one centimetre along the direction of gravity, so the performance of these clocks should enable geodesy beyond the state-of-the-art level. These optical clocks could further be used to explore geophysical phenomena, detect gravitational waves, test general relativity and search for dark matter.' back