Doyle (1981), Sir Arthur Conan, and Christopher Morley (Preface), The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, Book Club Associates 1981 Morley: "The whole Sherlock Holmes saga is a triumphant illustration of art's supremacy over life. Perhaps no fiction character ever created has become so charmingly rel to his readers. It is not that we taske our blessed Sherlock too seriously; if we really wand the painful oddities of criminlogy let us to to Bataille or Roughhead. But Holmes is pure anaesthesia. We read the stroies again and again; perhaos most of all for thr little introductory interiors which give us a glimpse of 221B Baker Street.' 
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Hobbes (1651, 1985), Thomas, Leviathan: The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Penguin Classics 1985 ' Written during the turmoil of the English Civil War, Leviathan is an ambitious and highly original work of political philosophy. Claiming that man's essential nature is competitive and selfish, Hobbes formulates the case for a powerful sovereign—or "Leviathan"—to enforce peace and the law, substituting security for the anarchic freedom he believed human beings would otherwise experience. This worldview shocked many of Hobbes's contemporaries, and his work was publicly burnt for sedition and blasphemy when it was first published. But in his rejection of Aristotle's view of man as a naturally social being, and in his painstaking analysis of the ways in which society can and should function, Hobbes opened up a whole new world of political science. Based on the original 1651 text, this edition incorporates Hobbes's own corrections, while also retaining the original spelling and punctuation, to read with vividness and clarity. C. B. Macpherson's introduction elucidates one of the most fascinating works of modern philosophy for the general reader.' 
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Lonergan (2002), Bernard J, and Michael G Shields, Frederick E Crow (Editors), The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ (Collected Works of BL, vol 7), University of Toronto Press 2002 Book Description 'Bernard Lonergan's De constitutione Christi was written to accompany a course being taught in Latin at the Gregorian University, Rome during the 1950s and 60s. This little-known treatise, volume seven in the series, is presented in English translation, accompanied by the original Latin text. Here, Lonergan tackles the metaphysical and psychological questions raised by the unique makeup of Christ, who is both fully human and fully divine, according to traditional Christian theology. His analysis falls into two parts: ontological and psychological.' 
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Lonergan (2007), Bernard J F, and Michael G Shields (translator), Robert M Doran & H Daniel Monsour (editors), The Triune God: Systematics (Collected Works, volume 12), University of Toronto press 2007 De Deo trino, or The Triune God, is the third great instalment on one particular strand in trinitarian theology, namely, the tradition that appeals to a psychological analogy for understanding trinitarian processions and relations. The analogy dates back to St Augustine but was significantly developed by St Thomas Aquinas. Lonergan advances it to a new level of sophistication by rooting it in his own highly nuanced cognitional theory and in his early position on decision and love. . . . This is truly one of the great masterpieces in the history of systematic theology, perhaps even the greatest of all time.' 
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Popper (1966), Karl Raimund, The Open Society and its Enemies (volume 1) : The Spell of Plato, Routledge 1966 Introduction: 'This book ...attempts to show that [our civilisation] has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth - the transition from tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. ... It further tries to examine the application of the critical and rational methods of science to the problems of the open society.'  
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Total Envrionment Centre, Independent Committee of Inquiry into the Nuclear Weapons and Other Consequences of Australian Uranium Mining: Australia and the Nuclear Choice, Total Environment Centre 1984 Jacket: 'This report of the Independent Inquiry into the consequences of our uranium mining is the first community inquiry of its kind in the world. It considers the nuclear dilemma; the effects of nuclear war; problems of the fuel cycle, including environmental, occupational and waste disposal hazards; the political economy of nuclear energy, and the problem of controlling the build-up of nuclear arsenals.' 
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Afghanistan Conflict (1978–present) - Wikipedia, Afghanistan Conflict (1978–present) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Afghanistan conflict[7] is a series of events and wars that have kept Afghanistan in a continuous state of armed conflict since 1978. The country's instability began during the time of the Republic of Afghanistan in the 1970s, which had been established following the collapse of the Kingdom of Afghanistan in the 1973 coup d'état; with the overthrow of Afghan monarch Mohammed Zahir Shah, who reigned for almost forty years, Afghanistan’s relatively peaceful period in modern history came to an end. The triggering event for the ongoing Afghanistan conflict was the Saur Revolution of 1978, which overthrew the Republic of Afghanistan and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1, Is there procession in God?, 'As God is above all things, we should understand what is said of God, not according to the mode of the lowest creatures, namely bodies, but from the similitude of the highest creatures, the intellectual substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in the representation of divine objects. Procession, therefore, is not to be understood from what it is in bodies, either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to its exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands procession as existing in God.' back

Brian Calley, Opinion: Why are schools submitting kids to this barbaric treatment?, ' Imagine a child with a disability, unable to communicate needs, wants or fears. In frustration or fright, that child might overturn a desk or throw a book. Now, imagine a teacher secluding that child in a dark closet or pinning that child to the floor. Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates This year, thousands of U.S. schools are using these barbaric “restraint and seclusion” practices as go-to strategies to punish or segregate students with disabilities.. . . I have a daughter with autism. When I first heard about this practice, I thought it must be rare. But it is shockingly common, having been used against tens of thousands of U.S. students in recent years. In Michigan alone, where my family resides, restraint and seclusion was used in schools more than 94,000 times from 2017 to 2022.' back

Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide, Professional Standards Office, ' The purpose of the Professional Standards Office (SA PSO) is to encourage and support the Catholic Church in South Australia to regularly review, develop and implement safe and ethical practices and respond professionally and with compassion to disclosures of adult survivors of emotional, physical and child sexual abuse and current incidents of adult boundary violations and misconduct. . . . SA & NT PSO acknowledges the lifelong trauma of those subjected to abuse and their families. We acknowledge the failure of the Catholic Church to protect, believe and respond justly to children and adults subjected to abuse. We are committed to working with and walking alongside people coming forward to seek restitution.' back

David Caldicott, The peculiar history of thornapple, the hallucinogenic weed that ended up in supermarket spinach, ' All of these affects are due to toxins that block the action of an essential neurotransmitter (chemical messenger in the nervous system), acetylcholine and its receptor. These are vital cogs in the autonomic nervous system, the maintenance janitor of our nervous system. Fundamental as it is to our survival, it is hardly a surprise that any disturbance of its function results in fairly dramatic effects. It is also similarly not that surprising that humans have known about plant materials that exert these effects for as long as humans have been interested in using plants for either therapeutic or nefarious purposes.' back

David W. Blight, Was the Civil War Inevitable?, ' Authoritarianism is an American historical tradition, newly energized and threatening our republican existence. In coming elections, we shall see whether our 21st-century democracy will live or die honestly, whether we, too, are heading for collapse or renewal through politics, law or civil conflict. How we answer such challenges will determine whether it is 1857 again in America. Even if it is, we need to remember that antislavery advocates did not merely lay down in front of the juggernaut of Dred Scott; they mobilized and fought back — over race, rights and their future.' back

Fourier analysis - Wikipedia, Fourier analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, Fourier analysis is the study of the way general functions may be represented or approximated by sums of simpler trigonometric functions. Fourier analysis grew from the study of Fourier series, and is named after Joseph Fourier, who showed that representing a function as a sum of trigonometric functions greatly simplifies the study of heat transfer. Today, the subject of Fourier analysis encompasses a vast spectrum of mathematics. In the sciences and engineering, the process of decomposing a function into oscillatory components is often called Fourier analysis, while the operation of rebuilding the function from these pieces is known as Fourier synthesis.' back

Fungibility - Wikipedia, Fungibility - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of whose parts is indistinguishable from any other part. Fungible tokens can be exchanged or replaced; for example, a $100 note can easily be exchanged for twenty $5 bills. In contrast, non-fungible tokens cannot be exchanged in the same manner.' back

Graeme Wood, What ISIS Really Wants, ' Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.' back

Helen Scales, Discovered in the deep: the jaw-dropping gulper eel and its super-stretchy skin, ' A recent study revealed how gulper eels and other deep-sea fish engineer their ultra-black skin. Melanin pigments are arranged in such a way that photons of light bounce between them, like a ball pinging around inside a pinball machine, and few escape. More than 99.7% of the light that falls on the skin gets absorbed, making gulper eels almost as black as the artificial superblack coatings constructed from carbon nanotubes that suck in light and let next to none back out.' back

Holy See, Catechism of the Catholic Church - Mary - Mother of Christ, Mother of the Church 966, ' 966 "Finally the Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all stain of original sin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things, so that she might be the more fully conformed to her Son, the Lord of lords and conqueror of sin and death." The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is a singular participation in her Son's Resurrection and an anticipation of the resurrection of other Christians: . . . ' back

Islamic State - Wikipedia, Islamic State - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Islamic State (IS), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and by its Arabic acronym Daesh (داعش,), is a militant Islamist group and former unrecognized quasi-state that follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam. It was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and gained global prominence in 2014, when it drove Iraqi security forces out of key cities during the Anbar campaign, which was followed by its capture of Mosul[ and the Sinjar massacre.. . . . In a document entitled Women in the Islamic State: Manifesto and Case Study released by the media wing of ISIL's all-female Al-Khanssaa Brigade, emphasis is given to the paramount importance of marriage and motherhood (as early as nine years old). Women should live a life of "sedentariness", fulfilling her "divine duty of motherhood" at home, with a few exceptions like teachers and doctors. Equality for women is opposed, as is education on non-religious subjects, the "worthless worldly sciences".' back

Jacqueline Alemany, Marianna Sotomayor & Josh Dawsey  , Jan. 6 committee refers Trump to Justice Dept. for criminal charges, , The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol unanimously agreed to refer criminal charges against former president Donald Trump to the Justice Department on Monday, concluding an 18-month examination of the insurrection that shook the country’s free and fair election system. The committee recommended that prosecutors pursue four charges against Trump: obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States, inciting or assisting an insurrection, and conspiracy to make a false statement. The Justice Department already has an active investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 vote and his alleged mishandling of government documents. While criminal referrals from the committee hold no legal weight, they set a notable precedent: Congress has never before referred a sitting or former president for prosecution.' back

Jake Meginsky & Neil Young, Milford Graves Full Mantis, ' A portrait of renowned percussionist Milford Graves, exploring his kaleidoscopic creative process and relentless curiosity.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2017), Computing power of a grain of sand: the calculation, Quantum theory has taught us that there is more computing power in a grain of sand than all the computers on the planet. Here is the calculation. We let our grain of sand weigh a microgram. Einstein's formula E = mc² tells us that this is [equivalent to] (10^-9 kilograms) × (3E8 metres per second)² = 9 ×10⁷ Joules, say 100 million. The Planck-Einstein formula f = E/h relates frequency to energy. Filling in the numbers, f = 10⁸ Joule / (6.63×10^-34 Joule-seconds) = ≈ 10⁴¹ cycles per second, that is computations per second. If every one of us, about 10 billion, or 10¹⁰ has a teraflop computer capable of performing 10¹² operations per second the total power is 10²² computations per second, ie about 10¹⁹ times slower than the grain of sand. back

John Palmer (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Parmenides, ' Immediately after welcoming Parmenides to her abode, the goddess describes as follows the content of the revelation he is about to receive:
You must needs learn all things,/ both the unshaken heart of well-rounded reality/ and the notions of mortals, in which there is no genuine trustworthiness./ Nonetheless these things too will you learn, how what they resolved/ had actually to be, all through all pervading. (Fr. 1.28b-32) ' back

Kein Sieff & Whitney Leaming, Destroying Maya treasures to build a tourist train, 'It has come to feel like a perverse reality TV show: Choose which antiquities to eliminate. “Deconstructed,” an internal government map says next to each monument that doesn’t make the cut. So far, there are more than 25,000 of them. Archaeologists have also found more than 600,000 fragments of ancient ceramics and 450 human remains. They’ve discovered more than 900 caves and sinkholes, conduits to the Maya underworld that the train will soon barrel past or over. . . . Around the globe, modern infrastructure has been built atop the ruins of ancient civilizations. Egypt recently finished a highway across the plateau of the Great Pyramids. China dismantled relics of the Qing empire to build a ring road around Beijing. In Colorado, engineers are rerouting the U.S. 550 atop the ancient ruins of the Pueblo tribe.' back

Martin Pengelly, Five key conclusions from the January 6 panel’s final session, ' The House January 6 committee has staged its final public hearing and issued the first sections of its report. . . . Here are some key conclusions after the final session on Capitol Hill. The committee has decided to make four criminal referrals of Trump, his associate John Eastman and others to the justice department. In the hearing, the Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin introduced referrals for obstruction of an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to make a false statement; and inciting, assisting or aiding and comforting an insurrection. The referrals received unanimous support and may not be the last. Raskin said: “Depending on evidence developed by the Department of Justice, the president’s actions could certainly trigger other criminal violations". . . . In messages seen by the Guardian on Monday, former Trump officials acknowledged the strength of the case against Trump. A former administration official said the committee had made “a very solid recommendation” while a former White House official said: “The facts are compelling. These charges are coming".' back

Medieval Inquisition - Wikipedia, Medieval Inquisition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Medieval Inquisition is a series of Inquisitions (Catholic Church bodies charged with suppressing heresy) from around 1184, including the Episcopal Inquisition (1184-1230s) and later the Papal Inquisition (1230s). It was in response to large popular movements throughout Europe considered apostate or heretical to Christianity, in particular Catharism and Waldensians in southern France and northern Italy. These were the first inquisition movements of many that would follow.' back

Michael Westaway, Badger Bates and Sue Jackson, Aboriginal people have spent centuries building in the Darling River. Now there are plans to demolish these important structures, ' Water managers have so far largely ignored the potential for Indigenous knowledge to facilitate the sustainable management of the Baaka. Yet Indigenous people living along the Baaka have known about how its water moves long before scientists did. The NSW government’s proposed infrastructure will not only endanger the remnants of culturally significant fish trap structures, but also impact the river’s ecology. Unless Indigenous people’s experience and knowledge are taken seriously, the Baaka and its precious resources may be depleted beyond the point of saving.' back

Nelly M. Cruz & Richard M.White, Lessons on transparency from the glassfrog, ' How does transparency arise? Generally, transparent substances neither absorb nor scatter light. Thus, one mechanism of opacity is the production of molecules such as melanin or hemoglobin that strongly absorb certain wavelengths of light. These pigments tend to be concentrated in specific cell types: melanin in melanocytes of the skin and hemoglobin in RBCs. Alternatively, light scattering can be attributed to structural proteins such as collagen, which is concentrated in tissues such as the sclera. This accounts for the white part of the eye. Other animals such as fish have reflective cells in their skin called iridophores, which are packed with guanine crystals that scatter light. Lack of these crystals makes the skin transparent, as seen in the zebrafish mutant casper . These two phenomena—absorption and scattering—have been overcome in a distinct way by the glassfrog to allow transparency. The ability to concentrate nearly its entire blood volume while sleeping effectively removes the lightabsorbing hemoglobin from circulation.' back

Nicholas Kristof, Iran Uses Rape to Enforce Women’s Modesty, ' One gauge of the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime is that there are credible reports that it is enforcing its supposedly strict moral code by arresting women and girls accused of advocating immodesty, and then sexually assaulting them. In a searing report about the rape of protesters by security forces, CNN recounted how a 20-year-old woman was arrested for supposedly leading protests and later was brought by the police to a hospital in Karaj, shaking violently, head shaven, her rectum hemorrhaging. The woman is now back in prison. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have independently documented multiple cases of sexual assault. Hadi Ghaemi of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a watchdog organization in New York, told me of a 14-year-old girl from a poor neighborhood in Tehran who protested by taking off her head scarf at school. The girl, Masooumeh, was identified by school cameras and detained; soon afterward, she was taken to the hospital to be treated for severe vaginal tears. The girl died and her mother, after initially saying she wanted to go public, has disappeared.' back

Non-fungible token - Wikipedia, Non-fungible token - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Proponents of NFTs claim that NFTs provide a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership, but the legal rights conveyed by an NFT can be uncertain. The ownership of an NFT as defined by the blockchain has no inherent legal meaning and does not necessarily grant copyright, intellectual property rights, or other legal rights over its associated digital file. An NFT does not restrict the sharing or copying of its associated digital file and does not prevent the creation of NFTs that reference identical files. ' back

Philip C. Almond, Are Christian souls gendered?, ' Within Christianity, the question of the nature of human identity has been a messy and complex one. For its first 200 years, Christianity adopted the Hebrew understanding of human identity as a unity of physical and spiritual parts, not divided into body and soul. There is no concept of the immortal soul in the Hebrew Old Testament nor in the Christian New Testament. But in the late second century, Christianity happily absorbed the doctrine of the soul from the Greek Platonic tradition. From that time on, humans were thought of as hybrids – consisting of an immortal soul united with a mortal body. How body and soul related to each other has been, in Western thought, a never ending matter for philosophical speculation. Clearly, bodies were gendered male or female. But souls were not. They were, after all, non-corporeal, spiritual entities. And thus, there was nothing to differentiate the sexes.'n back

Platonism - Wikipedia, Platonism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it, though contemporary platonists do not necessarily accept all of the doctrines of Plato. Platonism had a profound effect on Western thought. Platonism at least affirms the existence of abstract objects, which are asserted to exist in a third realm distinct from both the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness, and is the opposite of nominalism. This can apply to properties, types, propositions, meanings, numbers, sets, truth values, and so on (see abstract object theory).' back

Rolf Landauer (1999), Information is a Physical Entity, 'Abstract: This paper, associated with a broader conference talk on the fundamental physical limits of information handling, emphasizes the aspects still least appreciated. Information is not an abstract entity but exists only through a physical representation, thus tying it to all the restrictions and possibilities of our real physical universe. The mathematician's vision of an unlimited sequence of totally reliable operations is unlikely to be implementable in this real universe. Speculative remarks about the possible impact of that on the ultimate nature of the laws of physics are included.' back

Sarah Ferguson, ACMA report on Four Corners program 'Fox and the Big Lie' raises questions about its understanding of journalism, ' The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) — the country's media regulator — spent a year investigating Four Corners' coverage of Fox News and its role in legitimising Donald Trump's "big lie" that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen. The overwhelming majority of issues raised by Fox were rejected by the regulator. However, ACMA's final report and its inflammatory press release raise questions about the regulator's understanding of journalism.' back

Supreme Leader of Iran - Wikipedia, Supreme Leader of Iran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Supreme Leader of Iran (Persian: رهبر ایران, romanized: rahbar-e irān) is the head of state of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Supreme Leader directs the executive system and judicial system of the Islamic theocratic government and is the commander-in-chief of the Iranian Armed Forces. The Supreme Leader is the highest-ranking political and religious authority of Iran. . . . . Khamenei also makes the final decisions on the amount of transparency in elections,]and has dismissed and reinstated presidential cabinet appointees. The Supreme Leader is legally considered "inviolable", with Iranians being routinely punished for questioning or insulting him. The Constitution stresses the importance of the clergy in government, with Article 4 stating that all civil, criminal, financial, economic, administrative, cultural, military, political, and all other statutes and regulations (must) be keeping with Islamic measures;…the Islamic legal scholars of the watch council (Shura yi Nigahban) will keep watch over this.' back

Theodore Spencer, The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, ' To be brief, and at the same time panoramic, was the poet’s problem, and a method of indirect allusion, a kind of associative shorthand, was the best means to solving it. back

Triangle of Sadness - Wikipedia, Triangle of Sadness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Triangle of Sadness was announced by the director, Ruben Östlund, in June 2017, after his film The Square won the Palme d'Or at the 70th Cannes Film Festival the previous month. He said the film was to be called Triangle of Sadness, a "wild" satire set against the world of fashion and the uber-rich, with "appearance as capital" and "beauty as currency" as the underlying themes. The English title refers to a term used by plastic surgeons for the worry wrinkle that forms between the eyebrows, which can be fixed with botox in 15 minutes. back

William J. Broad, J. Robert Oppenheimer Cleared of ‘Black Mark’ After 68 Years, ' The Secretary of Energy on Friday nullified a 1954 decision to revoke the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a top government scientist who led the making of the atomic bomb in World War II but fell under suspicion of being a Soviet spy at the height of the McCarthy era. In a statement, the Energy Secretary, Jennifer M. Granholm, said the decision of her predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, to bar Oppenheimer’s clearance was the result of a “flawed process” that violated its own regulations. As time has passed, she added, “more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed".' back