December 2010
23 posts
Christmas Eve
Going to Evensong service at the church,
Pass a seedy underpass,
A young man with wide eyes and a cardboard sign saying he’s homeless walks back and forth.
Come to the cathedral, its spire pierces the sky, a stained glass window adorns the chapel,
The fresh stone of the new worship center,
Three story parking garage still under construction.
Out of the car, pass row after row
Of...
Empire and Democracy: The Peloponnesian War →
Endogenous Retroviruses →
See, it may be that about 8% of your DNA is endogenous retroviruses - that is, various retroviruses that your ape-like or lemur-like ancestors picked up in the trees or on the forest floor. Some retroviruses inserted itself into that creature’s DNA, or just their germ (reproductive) cells, and once the genetic code was there, natural selection started acting on it.
The occasional accidental...
Dear foreign policy wonks,
China’s rise is not some smooth, unstoppable juggernaut. Yes, they have 1.3 billion people, and yes as such they will eventually become a major world power (they already are becoming one). But to just report on a skyrocketing couple of decades and to extrapolate that into the future indefinitely is… well, stupid. It’s like reading an article from 2006...
Terry Pratchett on Dementia →
The Urgency of Bringing Down Unemployment →
Must-read.
No Great American City
I live in no great American city. Really, in such a large country (300 million) there are so few. There’s the obvious one: the City, New York, the cultural behemoth. Other than that it’s hard to say. Probably San Francisco, a small but dense city with a great deal of culture and history of its own, although much wiped out by the periodic earthquakes. Chicago may also qualify along...
