Futurist and business strategist Peter Schwartz, and mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein pointed out that no forecasts for large scale disruption of air travel because of volcanic ash clouds had been made, and so Eyjafjallajökull was a true Black Swan event.
Emanuel Derman simply said, "more efficient, more vulnerable."
But there was one very human point to be made.
"James Cameron’s new movie Avatar depicts a gas giant with a habitable moon around it, and the MarketSaw editors are interested in whether such a planet could exist around one of the Centauri stars."
Posting parts of an interview with Yale astronomer Debra Fischer, Paul Gilster connects popular entertainment and the search for planets around our closest stellar neighbor. MarketSaw is a blog that reviews 3D motion pictures and recently interviewed Fischer. The stellar companions are of course the triple Centauri system, a mere four light years away from our star.
Wayne
Cross-posted from Kentucky Space blog
Fortunately, there will not be an exam following this lecture.
Great works are never static, and the spinoffs many. "Shakespeare makes modern culture, and modern culture makes Shakespeare." It's this crossing between the two halves that sums up for her the whole of her comments today.
His plays are not timeless, but "are always adapted to the current moment and its concerns."
In one of many, many specific examples that follow, she points out that Macbeth was Abraham Lincoln's favorite play; it was the work he read on his entrance, figuratively and literally, into Washington, the place that would eventually take his life.
She notes broadly that theatre-about-theatre has extends beyond the film of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, for example. This meta-narrative is correlative to a pervasive modern feeling by many that we are stuck in a play from which there is no exit.
Using the character of Shylock and many others, she illustrates how we all too often read back into Shakespeare what we would have him say. The retelling of the tragedies, for example, are politically advantageous, not historically accurate.
"We have a cultural compulsion to repeat" what captures the moment.
Leadership institutes and business books now use his plays as veritable case studies, to which she responds rhetorically, "how can something be simultaneously a case study and a singular example?"
She also recounts how the young schoolboy Shakespeare profited from a moment in English history that was rediscovering classic texts, and he could, thanks to the press, get his hands on those texts - as well as the Bible - for reading.
It's perhaps appropriate then that in responding to a question about the authorship question, she does not dwell on who else might have been the author, but on the intense fascination with question itself. But no matter, she concludes. It is the plays themselves that are ultimately the thing. They are not injured.
Wayne
Addressing an audience familiar with basketball, Princeton Astrophysicist and Kentucky native, J. Richard Gott, gets right to the point. How much time might be on the clock?
Copernican Principle
He explains the Copernican Principle, derived from the discovery by Nicolaus Copernicus that our solar system is heliocentric rather than Earth-centered. The essential idea is that there is nothing special about this human time in history or this physical vantage point.
And as if what Copernicus discovered wasn't enough, the ordinariness of our place in the universe has been spectacularly confirmed by the discovery and distribution of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which has proved the Copernican principle on the largest of scales.
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