Новости за 28.07.2016

What if a mishandled crisis in East Asia triggered an unpremeditated war between the United States and China? “Whereas a clear U.S. victory once seemed probable, it is increasingly likely that a conflict could involve inconclusive fighting with steep losses on both sides. The United States cannot expect to control a conflict it cannot dominate militarily.” The link above goes to a landing page with conclusions of the RAND study, from which the full study can be downloaded as a 116-page PDF

Expert appreciation of “the first modern sci-fi movie”, Stanley Kubrick’s “audacious epic”, 2001. Kubrick dispenses with the clichés of the genre in order to “examine coolly our relationship with technology and the grand mystery of cosmic reality”. He introduces “mythic totems” and “baffling set pieces” at crucial junctures, making the logic of his narrative “intentionally fuzzy and open to innumerable readings”. He is giving us “an origin myth, an alternate history of the universe”

The bones of Jim Thorpe, America’s greatest-ever athlete and a Native American legend, are buried on the edge of a small Pennsylvania town, also called Jim Thorpe, which had no prior connection with the athlete but took his name as part of a deal with his widow to get his remains as a tourist attraction. Thorpe’s sons, now approaching death themselves, want him back in Oklahoma. “His spirit wanders the earth in sorrow because he has never had a proper ceremony for the dead”

Quantum physicist Fotini Markopoulou worked with Lee Smolin “at the vanguard” of discovering quantum gravity. She was acclaimed as “one of the most radical and fiercely creative theoretical physicists alive today”. The she walked away from a brilliant career in hard science to retrain as an industrial designer and join a London tech start-up making a pulsating wristband. What changed? “It’s a devotion thing — your devotion has just gone. It’s not really a loss of faith; I changed”

Notes on President Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, endorsing Hillary Clinton: “On stage a young black man embraced an older white woman. If it had occurred in Mississippi within the lifetime of many of the people who were cheering the moment, the young man might have been beaten, burned, hung, thrown into a river with a cotton fan tied to his neck. But it was not those days any longer. The young man was the President of the United States”

The decade beginning with Angela’s Merkel’s election as chancellor in 2005 comes to look like something of a golden age for Germany. The economy was strong; the country was a fun place to live; Germany’s football team won the World Cup. In the past year everything has changed. The economy is slowing. The Far Right is rising. Fear of immigrants and fear of terrorism dominates the public mood. “Something good has ended — or so it feels — and we don’t know what’s next”

There were 50,000 Apalachee Indians living in Florida when the Spaniards arrived in 1539. Imported diseases and systematic persecution reduced their number to 8,000 by the end of the 17C; of which, all but 200 were barbarously massacred when the British stormed the Florida missions in 1702. A single Apalachee family now survives in Louisiana, led by Chief Gilmer Bennett, who has a bad liver. “Soon enough, of the 50,000 Apalachee farmers and warriors, there at last will be none left”

If you whistle a tune often enough to a starling, the starling will sing it back to you — throwing in a few notes and variations of its own. On May 27th 1784 Mozart bought a starling in Vienna, and called it Vogel Staar. The bird lived with him in the same room for three years, the most productive of his life, during which he completed 60 works, including Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. How many of the phrases in Mozart’s most glorious melodies owe at least something to Vogel Staar’s singing?

A new study of terrorism argues that terrorists are no “more irrational than the rest of us”. There is no “terrorist mind”. Terrorism functions most often as “an effective way of waging war”. But such analysis describes past terrorism by militarised groups in pursuit of political causes. The new terrorism of ISIS is different and more insidious. It is about “bestowing identity and significance on dislocated individuals and enabling them to discharge their resentment against a hated way of life”

Book extract. On the spiritual and magical properties of human hair. In 18C China Buddhist monks were believed to steal pigtails to animate paper golems, using a “stupefying powder” to subdue the victim. “Next the thief snipped off the end of the victim’s queue and recited magical incantations over it, transferring the victim’s soul to the hair. Later the hair would be tied to a paper doll that, animated by the force of the victim’s stolen soul, would be sent out to do the sorcerer’s evil will”