Newbie
vitalst...@my-deja.com
of deeds that accompanied the thoughts, one would expect babble.
Anyway, I was wondering about what happened since (1996). Think of me
as someone who slept through the last 3 years. Are there counter-
arguments to this manifesto ? I do a search through the web and there
are tons of answers and I am not particularly interested in browsing
through crap to get to the stuff. I did find a reasearch thesis
presented on the subject and I am half way through reading it. Check
this website
http://highwire.stanford.edu/~jimr/thesis/html/thesis.html
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Scott Corey & Mary Foley
Since 1996? Well, the short version, as I would edit it, is not very
short, but here goes:
Very substantial evidence was found in TK's cabin, linking him to
unique aspects of the Unabomber explosive devices. Also, there were
22,000 pages of documents (one article, much later, puts it at 44,000,
but that may be a mistake). The prosecution divided the bulk of these
into three categories: notebooks, journals, and notes (the latter
including, essentially, research notes on bomb development and testing).
Some of these included self-incriminating statements about the crimes,
although few details were of the sort "known only to the perpetrator."
Motions to declare the search of TK's cabin and to find he could not
get a fair trial anywhere (due to pre-trial publicity) were refused. An
appeal of the former claim was still pending when jury selection began
in TK's trial in Sacramento.
During jury selection and preliminary motions, TK found himself
cornered between the judge and the defense team. Apparently the lawyers
had told him they would raise the question of his mental state, but
would accept his desire for a political trial that would grandstand his
views. He specifically told them he was willing to die rather than go to
prison for life. Instead, they planned to ignore his wishes, and claim
he was schizophrenic. Perhaps ironically, TK's position was aligned with
that of the prosecutors on the question of whether a "mental status"
defense could be used.
The jury was chosen, and the trial was about to begin, but was delayed
several times. First, TK tried to force his team to accept his strategy,
but was denied by the judge. Next, he tried to get a different lawyer,
but was denied. He attempted suicide, then demanded to represent himself
in court. His lawyers were moved to admit in court that their client
could not bear to face having his life and thoughts denounced as
insanity by his own attorneys. They suggested that his insistence upon
risking death by trying to represent himself was a sign of incompetence
to stand trial.
In order to establish his competence and take control of his defense,
TK acceded to psychiatric evaluation. Heretofore, he had taken the view
that psychiatrists were, "the enemy." The clinician declared him
competent to defend himself under current standards (which are now at a
very low level) despite her diagnosis that he was, indeed, a paranoid
schizophrenic.
The judge asked the defense and prosecution to brief him on whether he
could deny TK's request to defend himself on grounds of "timeliness." In
essence, he wanted to know if he could call it a delaying tactic. Both
sides had notions of why the court should deny the request, but they
agreed it could not be denied on timeliness, especially since TK was
ready to preceed immediately. The judge disagreed with the lawyers, and
denied the request, and did so on "timeliness."
Faced with no way to avoid extended humiliation, TK was willing to
accept a plea bargain, including withdrawing his challenge to the search
of the cabin. The government made the deal, using the removal of the
appeal of the search as their explanation. Clearly, though, they were in
a bad position regarding the defense team. The jury was not what they
would have hoped, and the psychiatric report had been done by someone
from the Bureau of Prisons, who they had hoped would find him sane.
Still, it appears that the decision to endorse a plea bargain was made
in Washington, rather than by the prosecution team.
TK went through a day long sentencing hearing. He said only that the
prosecution had released portions of his private writings in hopes that
insulting him would tar the views of the Unabomber. Many of the
Unabomber victims came forward, and their testimony was extremely
moving, though some openly forgave him (at a personal level, not a legal
one). Then he endorsed a guilty plea to each charge, and "agreed" to the
facts of each. The facts presented consisted entirely of quotes from his
own private writings. There was no "confession" in the sense of him
providing a signed personal account of the crimes.
He was sentenced to several life terms and a very large fine. He went
to the "supermax" facility at Florence, CO. His brother publicly
apologized, on behalf of the family, for all the damage done. Much of
the sympathy TK had enjoyed evaporated in the face of the evidence, and
the emotions of the victims.
Since then, TK has mounted a writing campaign of sorts. He published an
allegorical short story, wrote letters attacking a book written by one
of his former neighbors, and carried on an extended correspondence with
an anarchist cell in Eugene, OR. One of the letters sent to the
anarchists (or, more accurately, to John Zerzan, the central figure)
urged Earth First! to abandon its ways and become a small, tightly
disciplined revolutionary group. The Eugene group adopted several of the
Unabomber views in its literature. They made a splash when the Wall
Street Journal and other papers wrote about them. They made another
spalsh when a fellow anarchist denounced them as the main element
causing the violence at the WTO in Seattle.
Michael Mello, a law professor in Vermont, who has handled high-profile
death penalty cases himself, wrote a book about the TK case. He
concluded that denying the right to self-representation was entirely
unsupportable. TK and he corresponded, and a lawyer was found to help
with the appeal (Mello is not eligible, in his own estimation, since he
lost a friend in an unrelated mailbombing). That lawyer bowed out at the
last minute, and TK wrote his own appeal application, by hand, in
prison.
TK also wrote a book about his trial. Simon and Schuster turned it down
flat, but journalists got a taste of it, so a few summaries were
published. More trickled out after Context Books offered to publish the
book. Apparently, it is a blow-by-blow account of the trial, and has
very little to say about the crimes. It also attacks his family on
various accounts. In the end, the book was actually as the printer when
Context gave up trying to get TK to agree to certain editing decisions.
They pulled the book, explaining that they could not hope to defend
themselves against all the libel suits that would result if TK would not
change his mind on the editing.
A portion of TK's documents have been by him donated to an archive of
anarchist history. Apparently, these are mostly letters sent to him in
jail, but there is a prospect for more deposits in the future. Since the
cabin documents are private writings (and, indeed, some are diaries)
after the trial they revert to his legal control. Even though the
government has physical possession, they are not able to make further
releases without his permission. If there is a new trial, the documents
would again be fair game (although some would dispute the fairness), as
"leaked" evidence.
Aften some hesitation, the 9th Circuit decided to hear TK's appeal. He
filed a brief, and the government has responded. Now we are waiting for
his "reply" brief. After that, the court may decide to hear oral
arguments, but often they do not. If they do, the presentation will be
by a lawyer (if necessary, the court itself can choose one) not by TK.
Then they will issue a decision, though they can delay that for some
time.
I've probably left something vital out, even after all this. Hope it is
sufficiently informative, and not too boring or clipped.
Take care,
Scott
IntenseBeige
you think the chances of Kaczynski actually getting a new trial are?
vitalst...@my-deja.com
modernization and loss of dignity associated with it ("Ideas and
opinions" By A.Einstein).
jum...@my-deja.com
>>> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>>>> I don't recall disputing the fact of Jewish slave-traders,
>>>> however you've been conflating slave-trading with the
>>>> institution of slavery.
>
>> From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
>>> The Jews were among the greatest suppressors of slave revolts in
>>> Latin America in the 17th and 18th century. Cecil Roth, writer of
>>> 30 books and hundreds of articles on Jewish history, wrote in
>>> History of the Marranos: ``The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam]
>>> were also foremost in the suppression of the successive negro
>>> revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely
>>> directed against them, as being the greatest slave-holders of the
>>> region."
>
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> We can recall that the Marranos were "conversos" or Jews forcibly
>> converted to Catholic standards of behavior, so not orthodox Jews.
>> Weren't slave rebellions illegal in the 17th/18th century?
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> Marranos were Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism, but who
> nevertheless practiced Judaism secretly. They did not adopt Catholic
> standards of behavior (at least not privately); and for this reason
> they were called "Marranos," or pigs. Besides, we are talking about
> Jews as an ethnic group.
Do you have evidence that the Marranos practiced Judaism secretly?
How could the Catholics expect to convert an ethnic group?
"Inquisition, Spanish -- ecclesiastical tribunal established
in Spain by the Pope in the latter part of the 15th century
at the request of the Catholic kings to combate apostate
former Jews and Muslims and also the Illuminists (Alumbrados)
and those accused of such crimes as witchcraft and sorcery.
"For centuries, the Jewish community in Spain had flourished
and grown in numbers and influence, though anti-Semitism had
from time to time made itself felt and pressure to convert was
brought to bear on the Jews. Nominal converts from Judaism
were called Marranos. After Aragon and Castile were united
by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella (1469), the Marranos
were denounced as a danger to the existence of Christian Spain,
and a bull of Sixtus IV in 1478 authorized the Catholic kings
to name inquisitors.
"The first Spanish inquisitors, operating in Seville, proved
so severe that Sixtus IV had to interfere. But the Spanish
crown now had in its possession a weapon too precious to give
up, and the efforts of the Pope to limit the powers of the
Inquisition were without avail. In 1483 he was induced to
authorize the naming by the Spanish government of a grand
inquisitor (inquisitor general) for Castile, and during the
same year Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia were placed under
the power of the Inquistion.
"The first grand inquisitor was the Dominican Tomas de
Torquemada, who has become the symbol of the inquisitor who
uses torture and confiscation to terrorize his victims; his
methods, however, were those of a time in which judicial
procedure itself was cruel and designed to inspire terror.
The number of burnings at the stake during his tenure has
been exaggerated, but it was probably about 2,000.
"In general, the procedure of the Spanish Inquisition was much
like the medieval Inquisition (see Inquisition, medieval).
The auto de fe, the public ceremony at which sentences were
pronounced, became and elaborate celebration.
"By the edict of March 31, 1492, Spanish Jews were given the
choice of exile or Baptism. When in 1502 Islam in its turn
was proscribed, the Inquisition began to devote its attention
to the Moriscos, the Spanish Muslims who had accepted Baptism.
When the Protestant Reformation began to penetrate into Spain,
the relatively few Spanish Protestants also were eliminated
by the Inquisition. Nor did Catholics escape its rigors:
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, was twice
arrested on suspicion of heresy, and the archbishop of Toledo,
the Dominican Batholome de Carranza, was imprisoned for almost
17 years.
"Under the inquisitor general and his supreme council were 14
local tribunals in Spain and several in the colonies, among
which those in Mexico and Peru have been particularly attacked.
The Spanish Inquisition was introduced into Sicily in 1517,
but efforts to set it up in Naples and Milan failed. The
emperor Charles V in 1522 introduced it into the Netherlands,
where its efforts to wipe out Protestantism were unsuccessful.
The Inquisition in Spain was suppressed by Joseph Bonaparte
in 1808, restored by Ferdinand VII in 1814, suppressed in
1820, restored in 1823, and finally suppressed in 1834."
(Encycl.Brit., V.v, p.367, c1974)
Torquemada has been awarded the status of Number One Evil Person,
by Cliff Pickover (following posts), above even that of Hitler.
Ending the Inquisition, thereby, was contemporaneous with efforts
to abolish slavery, with that 1808 date simultaneous to planned
termination of trans-Atlantic slave-trading according to the new
Constitution for the United States of America. This was:
"Section 9. The Migration or Importation of such Persons
as any of the States now existing shall think proper to
admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to
the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax
or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding
ten dollars for each Person."
Furthermore, Torquemada was himself of Jewish descent:
"Torquemada, Tomas de (b.1420, Valladolid, Spain d.Sept 16, 1498,
Avila), first grand inquisitor in Spain, whose name has become
synonymous with the Inquisition's horror, religious bigotry,
and cruel fanaticism. He joined the Dominicans and from 1452
to 1474 was prior of Santa Cruz Monastery, Segovia. His belief
that the Marranos (Jewish converts), the Moriscos (Islamic
converts), the Jews, and the Moors threatened Spain's welfare
enabled him to influence and affect the religious policies of
the Catholic monarchs Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand V,
to whom he was confessor and adviser. Torquemada, ironically
of Jewish descent himself, in 1492 persuaded the rulers to
expel all Jews who refused to be baptized, causing about
170,000 Jewish subjects to leave Spain.
"In August 1483 he was appointed grand inquisitor for Castile
and Leon and, on October 17, for Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia,
and Majorca. As grand inquisitor, Torquemada established
local tribunals at Seville, Jaen, Cordoba, Ciudad Real, and
Saragossa. The following year he promulgated 28 articles to
guide inquisitors judging crimes of heresy, apostasy,
witchcraft, bigamy, usury, and blasphemy and authorized
torture to obtain evidence if the accused failed to confess.
The number of burnings at the stake during his tenure has been
estimated at about 2,000. ( agrees with earlier citation )
"Torquemada's health and age, coupled with widespread outrage
and complaints, caused Pope Alexander VI to appoint four
assistant inquisitors in June 1494 to restrain him.
Torquemada's official career as inquisitor was marked by a
harsh intransigence, which, although supported by contemporary
public opinoin, has been judged unjustifiable. E.Lucka's
_Torquemada_und_die_spanische_Inquisition_ appeared in 1926."
(Encycl.Brit., V.x, p.54, c1974)
Note that since the date 1926 for the German account preceeded
Hitler's forays into anti-semitism, Germany could not have been
unapprised of circumstances attendant to Torquemada's virulent
anti-semitism, and of the likely outcome. Again, it is ironic
how that date "June 1494" might be transposed into "June 1944."
"_The_Spanish_Inquisition_. With its large Moorish and
Jewish populations, medieval Spain was the only multiracial
and multireligious country in western Europe, and much of
the development of Spanish civilization in religion,
literature, art, and architecture during the later Middle
Ages stemmed from this fact. The Jews had served Spain
and its monarchs well, providing an active commercial class
and an educated elite for many administrative posts. But,
inevitably, their wealth created jealousy and their hetero-
doxy hatred in a population that traditionally saw itself
as the defender of Christianity against the infidel. The
Catholic Kings, ever good tacticians, profited from this
feeling. In 1478 they first obtained a papal bull from
Sixtux IV setting up the Inquisition to deal with the
supposedly evil influence of the Jews and _conversos_
(converted Jews). Since the Spanish Inquisition was
constituted as a royal court, all appointments were made
by the crown. Too late, Sixtux IV realized the enormous
eccesiastical powers that he had given awayu and the moral
dangers inherent in an institution the proceedings of which
were secret and that did not allow appeals to Rome.
"With its army of lay familiars, who were exempt from normal
jurisdiction and who acted both as bodyguards and as
informers of the inquisitors, and with its combination of
civil and ecclesiastical powers, the Spanish Inquisition
became a formidable weapon in the armoury of royal
absolutism. The Supreme Council of the Inquisition (or
Suprema) was the only formal institution set up by the
Catholic Kings for all their kingdoms together. Nevertheless,
they thought of it primarily in religious and not in
political terms. The Inquisition's secret procedures, its
eagerness to accept denunciations, its use of torture, the
absence of counsel for the accused, the lack of any right
to confront hostile witnesses, and the practice of
confiscating the property of those who were condemned and
sharing it between the Inquisition, the crown, and the
accusers -- all this inspired great terror, as indeed it
was meant to do. The number of those condemned for heresy
was never very large and has often been exaggerated by
Protestant writers. But during the reign of the Catholic
Kings, several thousand _conversos_ were condemned and
burned for Judaizing practices. The whole family of the
philosopher and Humanist Luis Vives as wiped out in this
way. Many more thousands of _conversos_ escaped similar
fates only by fleeing the country. Many Catholics in Spain
opposed the introduction of the Inquisition, and the
Neapolitans and Milanese (who prided themselves on their
Catholicism and who were supported by the popes) later
successfully resisted the attempts by their Spanish rulers
to impose the Spanish Inquisition on them. Even in Spain
itself, it was the smuptuous autos-da-fe, or the ceremonial
sentencings and executions of heretics, rather than the
institution and its members that seem to have been popular.
But most Spaniards never seem to have understood the horror
and revulsion that this institution aroused in the rest of
Europe.
"The first inquisitor general, Tomas de Torquemada, himself
from a _converso_ family, at once started a propaganda
campaign against the Jews. In 1492 he persuaded the
Catholic Kings to expel all Jews who refused to be baptized.
Isabella and most of her contemporraries looked upon this
explusion of about 170,000 of her subjects as a pious duty.
At the moment when Spain needed all its economic resources
to sustain its new European position and its overseas
empire (see below), it was deprived of its economically
most active citizens and laid open to exploitation by
German and Italian financiers.
"_The_conversos_. Nevertheless, the expulsion of 1492 did
not signify the end of Jewish influence on Spanish history,
as used to be thought until quite recently. It is not,
however, easy to establish a clear-cut direction of pattern
of this influence. At the end of the 15th century there
may have been up to 300,000 _conversos_ in Spain, and the
majority of these remained. They had constituted the
educated urban bourgeoisie of Spain, and the richer families
had frequently intermarried with the Spanish aristocracy
and even transmitted their blood to the royal family iteslf.
After 1492 their position remained precarious. Some reacted
by stressing their Christian orthodoxy and denouncing other
_conversos_ to the Inquisition for Jadaizing practices.
Others embraced some form of less conventional, more
spiritualized Christianity. Thus the followers of Sister
Isabel de la Cruz, a Franciscan, organized the centers of
the Illuminists (Alumbrados), mystics who believed that
through inner purification their souls should submit to
God's will and thus enter into direct communication with
him. While they counted some of the high aristocracy among
their numbers, most of the Illuminists seem to have been
_conversos_. AGain, it was among the _conversos_ that
Erasmianism (after Erasmus, a famous Humanists of the time),
a more intellectual form of spiritualized Christianity, had
its greatest successes in Spain. The Erasmians had
powerful supporters at court in the early years of Charles I,
when, as emperor, his policy was directed toward the healing
of the religious schism by a general reform of the church.
But in the 1530s and 1540s, the enemies of the Erasmians,
especially the Dominican Order, launched a systematic
campaign against them. The Inquisition annihilated them
or forced them to flee the country, just as it had done
in the case of the Illuminists as early as the 1520s.
Nevertheless, the influence of Erasmus did not completely
disappear from Spanish intellectual life, and it has been
traced into the latter part of the 16th century.
"But the majority of the _conversos_ and their descendants
probably became and remained orthodox Catholics, playing
a prominent part in every aspect of Spanish religious
and intellectual life. It has now become clear that
without them the `Golden Century' of Spain would be
inconceivable. They ranged from such saints as Teresa of
Avila and St.John of God, one a mystical writer and founder
of convents, the other an organizer of care for the sick,
to Diego Lainez, a friend of St.Ignatius of Loyola and
second general of the Jesuit Order. They included Fernando
de Rojas, author of _La_Celestina_, the first great
literary work of the Spanish Renaissance, and, two
generations later, Mateo Aleman, who wrote a picaresque
novel, the _Guzman_de_Alfarache_; and they could boast
Luis de Leon, a Humanist and poet; a Dominican, Francisco
de Vitoria, perhaps the greatest jurist of any country in
the 16th century; and another famous Dominican, the
defender of the American Indians and historian of the
Indies, Bartolome de Las Casas. ( who, in turn, was the
one first credited with petitioning Charles I, and thereby
the pope, for permission to bring African slaves to the
New World -- indeed this was Spain's `Golden Century' ).
"These, with Luis Vives, mentioned earlier, are only the
most famous among the many distinguished _converso_ names
who played such a central and varied role in creating the
cultural splendours of Spain's `Golden Century.' It is
an extraordinary phenomenon that had no parallel anywhere
else in Europe before the 19th or even 20th century. Any
attempt at an explanation is bound to be speculative, but
the following may be suggested. The Spanish Jews and
_conversos_ formed a comparitively large section of the
relatively small educated elite of Spain who were primarily
responsible for the cultural achievements of the period.
The _conversos_, moreover, having deliberately broken with
the Jewish tradition of Talmudic (from the Talmud, the
body of Jewish civil and canonical law) scholarship, found
the glittering Renaissance world of Christian Spain
ambivalently attractive and repellent but always stimulating.
Their response to this stimulus was probably sharpened, their
need to excel given a double urgency, by the hostility that
they continued to meet from the `old' Christians. For these
latter were very much aware of the ubiquity of the _conversos_,
however much these were assimilated, and many resented it
bitterly. Religious, racial, and even anti-aristocratic
class prejudices combined to create the obsession with
`purity of blood' (_limpieza_de_sangre_), which became
characteristic of the Spaniards in the 16th and 17th
centuries.
"It first crystallized with a statute of _limpieza_, imposed
in 1547 on the cathedral chapter of Toledo, by which purity
of ancestry from the taint both of _converso_ blood and
from any accusations of heresy by the Inquisition was made
a condition of all future ecclesiastical appointments. The
author of this statute was Archbishop Siliceo, a man of
humble and hence, by definition, untainted origins, who had
found himself despised by the aristocratic canons, many of
whom, however, had _converso_ blood in their veins. In 1556
Philip II gave his royal approval to the statute on the
grounds that `all the heresies in Germany, France and Spain
have been sown by descendants of Jews.' As far as Germany
and France were concerned, this remark was sheer fantasy,
and it is especially ironic that, just at this time, Pope
Paul IV, at war with Spain, described Philip II himself
quite correctly as a Marrano, or descendant of Jews.
"But statutes of _limpieza_ now spread rapidly over Spain.
They helped to perpetuate a set of values, the equation of
pure ancestry, orthodoxy, and personal honour, which
certainly helped to prevent the spread of heresies in Spain
but which in the long run had a blighting effect on Spanish
society, the more so as they were linked so closely with
the basically corrupt institution of the Inquisition. For
not only did they encourage the practice of denunciation,
with inevitably corrupting and divisive effects, but they
also educated generations of Spaniards to see their personal
honour as a value depending on a set of circumstances
substantially outside their own control or achievement.
"_The_Conquest_of_Granada_. The impact of the Moors on
Spanish life and traditions had been rather different
from that of the Jews. It was most evident, perhaps, in
the position of women in southern Spain, who for long
remained semi-veiled and in much greater seclusion than
elsewhere in Christian Europe. It was evident also where
Jewish influence was practically nonexistent, in the
visual arts and especially in architecture. Not only
did houses in southern Spain for a long time continue
to be built facing inward, on to a patio, but a whole
style of architecture, the Plateresque, derived from an
imaginative fusion of the Moorish and the Christian:
classical Renaissance structures were decorated with
Gothic or Renaissance motifs but executed in the Moorish
manner, as if a carpet had been hung over the outside
wall of the building. This charming style, which was
invented during the reign of the Catholic Kings, spread
far and wide over Spain and eventually even to the New
World.
"To Ferdinand and Isabella, the Moorish problem presented
itself in the first place in a political and military
form, for the Moors still rules their independent Kingdom
of Granada (Spain's southeast corner). The Catholic Kings
had to concentrate all their miltiary resources and call
on the enthusiastic support of their Castilian subjects
to conquer the kingdom in a long and arduous campaign,
which ended with the capture of Granada (some 130 miles
east of Seville), the capital, in 1492. In this campaign
Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba, the `Great Captain,' developed
the tactics, training, and organization that made Spanish
infantry almost unbeatable for 150 years. The Moors were
granted generous terms and religious freedom. But, against
the advice of the saintly Hernando de Talavera, the
_converso_ archbishop of Granada, who was trying to convert
the Moors by precept and education, the Queen's confessor,
Francisco (later Cardinal) Jimenez de Cisneros, introduced
forced mass conversions. The Moors rebelled (1499-1500) and,
after another defeat, were given the choice of conversion
or expulsion, Jimenez and Isabellas did not regard this new
policy as a punishment of the Moors for rebellion, for
Christian Baptism could never be that. It was rather that
the rebellion released them from their previous undertaking,
which they had entered into only with misgivings. Though
many Moors chose conversion, the problem now became
virtually insoluble. There were never enough Arab-speaking
priests or money for education to make outward conversion
a religious reality. The Moriscos remained an alien
community, suspicious of and suspect to the `old' Christians.
There was with the Moriscos very little of the intermarriage
with Christians and of the deliverate acceptance of Spanish
Christianity that, in spite of all the statutes of _limpieza_,
allowed the _conversos_ to become such an integral part of
Spanish society." (Encycl.Brit., V.17, p.422-423, c1974)
>> From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
>>> You initially de-emphasized the Jewish role by asserting that
>>> Arabs, or Moors, were the "architects" of the trade. Well, one
>>> professor of the University of Chicago disagrees:
>>
>>> Ralph A. Austen, African Studies professor and Jew, wrote in The
>>> Washington Post, "The authors of The Secret Relationship
>>> underestimate the structural importance of the Jews in the early
>>> stages of the New World slave trade."
>>
>>> Here he credits Jews as "architects" of the trade.
>
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> I've tried unsuccessfuly to locate that article, but found a
>> Ralph Austen article in _Tikkun_ about the same subject which is
>> enclosed in the posts following this one. So let's review that
>> Ralph Austen article -YOU- have cited in FULL TEXT, please, and ASAP.
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> I have asked you to present evidence that Arabs were architects of
> New World slavery, and thus far you have failed to do so. I, on
> the other hand, provided a terse quote from a professor of the
> University of Chicago who indicates the "structural importance of
> Jews in the early stages of the New World slave trade."
Yes, quite terse, in fact a misquote as you had failed to read
despite being provided with its FULL TEXT, since publication of
that article occurred in both the Washington Post and _Tikkun_.
Here was that paragraph describing Ralph Austen's observation:
"In fact, because of their poor grasp of the
historical economy of slavery, the authors
underestimate the structural, AS OPPOSED TO
STATISTICAL, importance of the Jews in the early
stages of the New World slave trade. Rather than
toying with the rumors of Columbus's `secret'
identity, the book might better have focused on
the coincidence of the Jewish expulsion from Spain
with the establishment of triangular links between
Europe, Africa, and the Americas. As a result of
this situation, the Sephardim found themselves
dispersed over the critical nodes of the new
( Ralph A. Austen "The Uncomfortable Relationship"
_Tikkun_, March-April 1994, v.9,n.2, p 65(5) ).
Your quote omitted the key phrase "...as opposed to statistical"
since Austen does not attribute evidence of _converso_ participation
to the statistics but to the (structural) fact of "Jewish expulsion"
sending expelled Jews onto the high seas, to include the Atlantic,
in service of those New World economic goals chartered by Charles I,
the Pope, and Bartolome de las Casas. Where else were they to find
employment, having been banished by Torquemada? The employers and
legitimating authorities, not the employees, were those "architects"
of New World slave-trading. Ralph Austen's basic point is that the
statistical observations -obscure- the reason for Jewish involvement.
One cannot criticize yesterday's slave-trading by today's revisions,
but must evaluate historical activity in context to circumstances of
Spain's imperialism at the time of New World economic exploitation.
Likely as not, the planned Jewish expulsion was deliberate, providing
Spain with a perilous servitude of oceanic slave-runners, _conversos_
long recognized as having intelligence, fortitude, and international
connections to enable the safest possible transport of human cargo.
Had Torquemada been instead assigned to slave-running, many more of
the slaves might have died _en_route_, since that was Torquemada's
chief speciality.
I hadn't claimed that Spanish Moors were "architects" of the
slave-trade. I said that Randall Robinson had attributed slavery
to the Spanish Moors, which thereby led to a legitimatization of
the slave-trade under Charles I. According to Randall Robinson,
that made Spanish Moors "architects" of slave-trading, since the
slave-trading stemmed (was derivative) from the institution of
sanctioned slavery. There can be slavery without slave-trading,
but not slave-trading without slavery. You stipulated to prior
evidence of Arab propensity for slavery, and did not dispute the
evidence remaining to this day in parts of North Africa.
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> You are now trying to veer the topic with strawmen, i.e., "Most
> slave traders and owners were non-Jewish."
"...In fact, the British were the leading slave traders,
controlling at least half of the translatlantic trade by the
end of the 18th century..." (Encycl.Brit. V.4, p.892d, c1974)
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> Even as a small fraction of those involved in the trade, or who
> bought slaves, Jews played a major role given the fact that they
> had so much capital. Aaron Lopez, for example, was a Jew who owned
> at least 26 ships!
Once again, from Ralph A. Austen, who is one of your experts:
"It was not the material wealth of the Jews that made
them so crucial to this emerging South Atlantic economy
but rather (as with other ethnic-commercial
diasporas such as the Huguenots, the Quakers, the
overseas Chinese, Muslims in Africa) their ability
to transfer assets and information among
themselves across the entire economic network."
( Ralph A. Austen "The Uncomfortable Relationship"
_Tikkun_, March-April 1994, v.9,n.2, p 65(5) ).
>>> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>>>> This extract was from "The Internet Anti-Fascist" e-journal.
>>>> Note the presence of more hispanic names:
>>>>
>>>> 10) The Second Coming
>>>> 13 Apr 98
>>>> The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 26 June 98
>>>> FTP Supplement #39 (#126): Mumia -- Recent Documents
>>>> ...
>>>> Any true, historical telling of the slave
>>>> trade must include the uncomfortable, yet
>>>> undeniable fact that African royalty (elites)
>>>> sold their people into a hellish bondage. It
>>>> is also a fact that African slavery was far
>>>> different from the perpetual, hereditary,
>>>> racialized slavery of Europe and the
>>>> Americans. In the African context slavery was
>>>> usually reserved for captured prisoners of
>>>> war. In America, slavery was initially an
>>>> Indian imposition, until Bartolome de las
>>>> Casas received papal permission to exploit
>>>> Africans as slaves to replace the Indians who,
>>>> reportedly, died like flies from working in
>>>> the tropical West Indian sun.
>
>> From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
>>> The Internet Anti-Fascist may want to take a stroll through history
>>> courses. Slavery in ancient Rome was (in many cases) hereditary.
>>> Throughout history there have been racialized forms of slavery.
>>> The ancient Egyptians (mostly Mediterranean) were fond of enslaving
>>> Nubians. The Ottomans and Mongols were fond of enslaving Slavs
>>> (whence the word "slavery" derives).
>
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> Piling up some "truth credits" with your irrelevant anecdotes?
>> Stay on topic: New World slavery began with the "papal permission"
>> awarded to Bartolome de las Casas. Those conducting slavery, or in
>> the position of enslavement, cared little or nothing about a rose
>> called by any other name, nor details pertinent to Catholic Popes
>> who were legitimating slavish servitude to Spanish economic causes.
>> Does your argument (above paragraph) want to establish historical
>> justification for slavery? If so, why criticize slave-traders?
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> Jews have been demonizing White people for decades, yet they refuse
> to acknowledge their own atrocities. It's as simple as that.
Guess White people can't be Jewish, eh?
>>> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>>>> Rather than dwell further upon the distractions of a "PC debate"
>>>> why not simply present your social proposals for easing racial
>>>> tension?
>
>> From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
>>> For one thing, Whites should be allowed to preserve their race
>>> without being called "haters."
>
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> I think your argument here would be protesting the same sort
>> of "mogrelization" which has characterized human history from its
>> earliest recorded times. The difficulty today is no longer "race
>> preservation" but throttling-back on a population bomb and maybe
>> applying the brakes a little bit. "Race preservation" makes about
>> as much sense as chasing the tail on a Hale-Bopp comet.
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> What you think is irrelevant. When the White state is established,
> you and "Devious Mevius" will be long gone.
I'll be long gone -before- your "White state" is established.
If you had wished to claim TK favored a "White state" then we would
see how those in favor of a "White state" end up in a Supermax. Yet
TK is not locked away in the Supermax for favoring a "White state."
>>>>> From: jum...@my-deja.com (a)
>>>>>> "Purim stems from 6th-century Persia, whereas I had wished to
>>>>>> identify Persia's zenith during the 12th-13th centuries during
>>>>>> the period which followed the Seljuq Turks prior to the
>>>>>> Mongols and Timurids. This was also approximately
>>>>>> contemporaneous with the time period when 'Jerusalem was
>>>>>> (again) in Christian hands from 1229 to 1239 and from 1243
>>>>>> to 1244, when it was sacked by the Khwarezmian Tartars.'"
>>>>>> (Encycl.Brit. V.10, p140b)
>>>
>>>> From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
>>>>> You are one hell of a bullshitter, Jew-Man-"G". The Persian
>>>>> empire reached its zenith under Darius and Xerxes I (c. 500 B.C.)
>>>>> Under Darius, the Persian empire extended as far east as
>>>>> Afghanistan. Under Xerxes, parts of Greece were taken
>>>>> (temporarily).
>>
>>> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>>>> Interesting that you refer scrappy militarism as a "zenith"
>>>> when to my mind the term should instead embody high
>>>> culture/civilization. Arab conquest of Persia, following
>>>> Mohammedist events of A.D. 632 enabled the flowering of
>>>> Arab/Persian tribal unity, setting forth a linguistics today
>>>> called Modern Standard Arabic for the Arab world, and with
>>>> incalculable influences upon Persia, which expanded into fruition
>>>> during those ensuing years leading up through the 14th-15th
>>>> centuries. Persian intellectuals of a 13th-Century would not have
>>>> preferred cultural "retreat" into the heydays of Darius and
>>>> Xerxes, however glorious you regard that battle and bloodshed.
>
>> From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
>>> We were discussing the zenith of the Persian empire. The empire
>>> collapsed when Alexander the Great defeated Darius III c. 330 B.C.
>
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> YOU were discussing an "empire" whereas I was addressing cultural
>> contributions to World Civilization. Persia fared much better after
>> Arab acquisition than they had on their own previous to Mohammed.
>> Remember, usage of the word "zenith" was by -MY- original invocation
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> I have repeatedly reverted the topic back to the 5th and 6th
> century B.C. because that's where it should be if we are to be
> discussing Persia's "zenith." It is not my fault if you lack a
> fundamental understanding of world history. Once again: Persia's
> peak occured centuries before the birth of Christ. It was not in
> the 12th to 13th century A.D., as you claim. Do you understand
> this? Stop embarrassing yourself further.
>
> From "World History," p. 124:
> "After leaving Egypt, Alexander boldly marched into Mesopotamia to
> confront Darius. The desperate Persian king assembled a vast army
> that included 200,000 men and chariots armed with deadly rotating
> blades. The two armies collided at Guagamela, a small village near
> the ruins of Nineveh. With the outcome still in doubt, Alexander
> launched a cavalry charge, followed by a massive phalanx attack.
> As the Persian lines began to crumble, Darius panicked and fled."
>
> Then:
>
> ->"Alexander's victory at Gaugamela ended Persia's power forever."<-
>
> Read this sentence above.
However the definition of "zenith" is:
1. The point of the celestial sphere that is exactly overhead
and opposite to the nadir.
2. The highest or culminating point: the _zenith_ of one's
career: opposed to _nadir_.
( < OF cenit, ult. < Arabic _samt_ (ar-ras)
the path (over the head) ).
So the term "zenith" refers to something which relates to the
head, and not to power, with an etymology stemming from Old French
and Arabic, not Persian. Power that can be "ended forever" can
hardly be characterized as much of any kind of "zenith." It's not
my fault if you lack a fundamental understanding of word definitions.
Your description of Alexander's conquest illustrates Persia's nadir.
Ask Arab/Persian scholars when their greatest contributions to World
History and Civilization occurred.
Read this definition above.
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> Here's how Plato's philosophers had regarded early Persia (_Laws_):
>>
>> "Ath. And now enough of the Persians, and their
>> present maladministration of their government,
>> which is owing to the excess of slavery and
>> despotism among them.
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> That's funny: in the 400s, one-third of the population in Athens
> were slaves. Talk about excess.
Apparently slaves enjoyed better treatment in Athens than Persia.
There are 61 references to "slave," "slaves," or "slavery" in _Laws_,
concerning just and humane treatment for slaves, and legal recourse.
Socrates educates a -slave- of Meno in the _Meno_ dialogue.
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> Persia's monarchial system of government may have worked
>> temporarily under "good Kings" ( Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes ) but
>> received considerable criticism all around for not evolving into
>> forms of Athenian democracy which fostered many of the greatest
>> cultural contributions to Western Civilization, and was thereby
>> pilloried as unredeemably defective.
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> Its system of government may have had some flaws, but the fact is,
> ancient Persia was culturally rich.
However, insufficiently rich to qualify as their "zenith."
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> Of course, Cambyses also received quite a lot of criticism from
>> Plato's philosophers. Then, the dialogue resumed from point (a),
>> as I had identified alongside the right-margin (above). You admitted
>> Cyrus rubbed elbows with Jews and then called him "Cyrus the Great."
>> That means his friendship with Jews did not render him un-great.
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> This was a political tactic. Cyrus won admiration for his tolerance
> from many peoples. The Babylonians, for example, welcomed him with
> open arms. Cyrus the Great would worship the gods of other kingdoms.
Did Cyrus the Great worship, or revere? It seems that political
tactics of tolerance "won admiration" for your hero Cyrus the Great.
>> From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
>>> It should be a "where and when" question in reference to Arabs and
>>> Jews getting along peaceably through history. In 538 B.C., Cyrus
>>> allowed Jews to rebuild Jerusalem. In Muslim Spain and in the
>>> Balkans under the Ottomans, the Jews held highly favored positions.
>>> This was probably because the Moslems found it more suitable to
>>> make peace with Jews rather than to direct hostility toward them.
>>> After all, in these two regions their grip was more precarious. It
>>> was not until the 14th century that intolerance toward Jews began
>>> to abate in Iran (the region being discussed).
>
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> Intolerance had been abating for quite some time leading up to
>> 14th-century abating, and it is notable that the Renaissance did
>> not begin until the intolerance was more thoroughly abated.
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> Once again you are bullshitting. The fact remains, Jews
> experienced lots of trouble in Iran until the 14th century. That
> it abated in the 14th century carried no implications for the
> Enlightenment. This is a post hoc fallacy on your part. In Muslim
> Spain Jews got along with the Arabs for many centuries. During the
> _reconquista_ hostility toward Jews began to increase, obviously.
> In fact, Many of the Renaissance thinkers were anti-Semitic.
What were the other Renaissance thinkers?
Interesting that you should be claiming what does or does not
carry "implications for the Enlightenment" when we may read of
the Enlightenment's essential anti-clericalism:
"One of the aims of the Enlightenment was to produce a
bourgeois society in which no traditional prejudices
or traditional institutions should limit the pursuit
of private profit -- the foundation of national prosperity.
But in Spain the social base was too narrow. In spite of
economic changes over the century, the bourgeoisie was
limited to the coastal towns, Barcelona and Cadiz in
particular, with branches in Saragossa and the Basque
country. Patriotic societies, organized with government
encouragement from 1765 onward, were meant to provide
the provincial basis for a progressive society and to
familiarize Spaniards with European advances in
technology and agriculture. They did not get much
beyond the status of local reading rooms and debating
societies.
"Traditional Catholic society was still strong, if under
attack from a minority of intellectuals and civil servants.
As the reaction of the countryside after 1808 (remember
this date?) was to show, the church was still a great
social power. The Duke of Wellington observed that `the
real power in Spain is in the clergy. They kept the people
right against France.' To most of the clergy the new ideas
of the Enlightenment were `foreign' and dangerous, and
there could be no such thing as moderate progress
encouraged by the king himself -- the notion of a
`revolution from above' that was to haunt subsequent
Spanish history. Voltaire, Locke, and Rousseau were
quite simply dangerous heretics, though the Inquisition
proved powerless to prevent the clandestine circulation
of their works. It was the clerical attacks on heretics
as much as the subversive works themselves that familiarized
a narrow stratum of society with new ideas. When the
French Revolution exposed the dangers of progressive
thought, the traditionalist cause was immensely
strengthened and the Inquisition appeared to the crown
itself to be a useful instrument to control the spread
of dangerous ideas." (Encycl.Brit., V.17, p.435ij, c1974)
"Dangerous ideas" that is, not unlike those they sought to
repress among Jews through forcible conversion. So all around,
Spain's clergy was anti-Enlightenment and had much to contribute
to Spain's inexplicable but inexorably slow cultural diminution.
>> From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
>>> Whilst you trash the reign of Darius the Great, you seem to miss
>>> that under Darius major roads were constructed, one of which
>>> extended from Persia to Asia Minor. Under Darius, the first coins
>>> became standardized, thus stimulating economic activity throughout
>>> the Western world. No longer did people have to weigh gold and
>>> silver to barter. And of course, Zoroaster's influence on Western
>>> thought has been incalculable: the dualism of heaven and hell in
>>> Christianity was borrowed from Indo-Aryan Zoroastrianism.
>
> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>> Well, ok, hiway construction and money: these are two among many
>> of the factors we may identify today as environmental despoilers.
>> One of the advantages in discussing "heaven and hell" is that we
>> can speak of various alternatives without dwelling upon the alleged
>> <good and evil> of certain individuals, and/or of particular races.
From: <pyro...@my-deja.com>
> Decline in economic activity was one of the factors in the downfall
> of Rome. Road construction allowed people to travel much faster.
>
> Another thing: the ancient Persians preserved much of the recorded
> history of the empires that rose and fell in Southwest Asia.
I suppose it took considerable toil on the part of Persians to
preserve recorded history, or simply to refrain from an impulse
to destroy everything else about them? In conclusion, we may
jum...@my-deja.com
http://www.seattletimes.com/news/nation-
world/html98/moms26_20000326.html
Sunday, March 26, 2000, 03:52 p.m. Pacific
Close-Up
Million Mom March: 'Passion will be our weapon'
by Megan Rosenfeld
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - It had to be mothers who would think of the march, they
believe. Mothers who are passionately, painfully, overpoweringly
angry. Every day, nearly 12 children ages 19 and younger are killed,
they say - shot by one another, by adults, by themselves. Now the
mothers want, no, demand, that something be done about guns.
And to deliver that demand, they are going to Washington, D.C., on
Mother's Day. They're calling it the Million Mom March (MMM). They
talk about the mother lioness syndrome, a sleeping giant of fierce
maternal rage that will spark such convincing passion that lawmakers
will be seduced away from the clutches of the National Rifle
Association and create "sensible gun control." They're predicting the
largest demonstration for gun control ever, most of it here on the
National Mall, but also in 20 cities nationwide.
When they announced the march last Labor Day, the MMM had one
telephone-answering machine in New Jersey, with two grandmothers
transcribing messages. Now there are volunteers nationwide, and a
suite of rented offices in Washington with 15 phone lines.
On Feb. 28, they had 15,000 hits on their Web site; two days later,
there were 76,000.
The moms are coming.
The Million Mom March's demands
Require background checks and "sensible" cooling-off periods.
License handgun owners and register all handguns.
Require safety locks on all handguns.
Limit purchases to one handgun per month.
Step up "no-nonsense" enforcement of gun laws.
Enlist help from corporate America.
Some have cried watching the stories on television. Others have been
the mother on television, stunned with grief and disbelief. Or maybe
worse: mourning a gunshot death that was considered too ordinary, too
commonplace to warrant media attention.
How they got motivated
Donna Dees-Thomases had had enough in August when she saw news footage
of toddlers leaving the Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills,
Calif., after a gunman sprayed it with bullets.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Buford Furrow, a
Washington state white supremacist who spent time in a state mental
hospital and had a fondness for guns, in the wounding of five people
at the center and the subsequent slaying of a Filipino-American postal
worker.
Within days, Dees-Thomases came up with the idea of the Million Mom
March, for "mothers, grandmothers, foster mothers and anyone who has
ever had a mother."
Vicki King got angry - and scared - two years ago when she looked out
the window and saw a high-school student showing a gun to friends on
her suburban Silver Spring, Md., lawn. She imagined a bullet coming
through the window and hitting her 3-year-old, eating lunch in the
kitchen. She thought: There are guns everywhere.
She's now MMM national volunteer coordinator, working mostly out of
her home office.
For Carole Price, the time came on Aug. 20, 1998, when her oldest
child, John, 13, was killed by a 9-year-old friend playing with a gun
in Baltimore County, Md. Eleven guns were found in the house where the
shooting occurred - on closet shelves, in a duffel bag under a bed.
Neither man who lived in the house was held accountable.
"They talk about their Second Amendment rights. Well, my son had a
right to live," says Price, a bartender who quit to volunteer full
time for gun control. In December, she took over as Maryland state
coordinator for the march.
Julie Bond of Hamilton, Va., lost her son Jesse, 18, last June; he
killed himself.
"He was a wonderful, sensitive young man who had the graduation blues
and access to a gun," she wrote on the Web site.
Passion as a weapon
There are other postings:
Joan Peterson, Duluth, Minn.: "I will never forget the phone call on
Aug. 6, 1992, telling me that my sister, Barbara Lund, had been found
shot to death by her estranged husband. . . ."
Leslie Willis-Lowry, Philadelphia: "On February 2, 2000, my son,
Songha Thomas Willis, was fatally shot in a holdup while visiting me .
. . His
senseless killing at 27 years of age has left an unimaginable pain in
my heart. . . ."
Both sides' Web sites and toll-free numbers
Million Mom March: http://www.millionmommarch.com 888-989-MOMS (6667)
The Second Amendment Sisters' Armed Informed Mothers' March:
http://www.sas-aim.org 877-271-6216
Victoria Ballesteros, Los Angeles: "My 8-month-old son has become my
life's inspiration. When he was born, my mother said to me, `Los
quieren tantos que ni quieres que el viento les pegue.' Translation:
You love them so much that you don't even want the wind to hit them.'
She was right. On Mother's Day 2000 I will march with my mother and my
three sisters, along with our husbands and children, to say to
Congress, `Ya basta! Enough is enough!' There is no love like that of
a mother, and our passion will be our `weapon' against intransigent
purveyors of violence and destruction."
Second Amendment Sisters
Of course, they're not the only people who feel passionately about
this issue.
Melinda Gierisch is one face of the Million Moms' opposition. The
30-year-old software designer carries a stylish DeSantis handbag,
inside which is usually a Sig Sauer P245 pistol. Gierisch is one of
the Second Amendment Sisters, a group organizing a
counter-demonstration on the Mall on Mother's Day. (Originally called
Moms 4 Guns, they were persuaded by childless women like Gierisch to
be more inclusive.)
Most Fridays, she and up to 15 friends shoot at a range in Northern
Virginia; afterward they go out to dinner. Under Virginia law, they
cannot carry their pistols in a concealed fashion in a place that
serves alcohol, but they can carry or holster them openly as long as
they don't drink. "People usually think we're cops," she says.
"If you shoot well, there's a meditative feeling about the
experience," says Gierisch, who works for a dealer at weekend gun
shows and goes to hunts and shooting meets. "You have to control your
breathing, and focus your concentration intently. There's a real
feeling of satisfaction when the bullet hits the mark."
Gierisch also owns two hunting rifles (she's bagged two deer), several
pistols of different calibers and an AR-15 semiautomatic, the civilian
version of an M-16. She keeps them all in a locked gun safe bolted to
a wall in her town house.
With each gun purchase, she completed the required state and federal
paperwork and waited a week to be approved. She did not find this
processing onerous but nonetheless opposes any form of gun control
because she believes it opens the door to gun confiscation. The
argument that shooters should be regulated to at least the same extent
as drivers leaves her cold. "Driving is a privilege," she says.
"Shooting a gun is a right."
None of the remedies proposed by the MMM or other gun-control
advocates, starting with licensing and registration, would save
anyone's life, she says. She supports enforcement of federal gun laws
to deter criminal behavior, and points to the successful Project Exile
pilot program in Richmond, Va., which proponents say has reduced the
murder rate there by one-third by increasing enforcement of existing
gun laws.
"It's always been easy to get a gun in this country," she says. "The
question is: What has changed with youth that makes them want to
kill?"
Taking AIMM against MMM
The statistic promoted by the Second Amendment Sisters for their
counter-march - called Armed Informed Mothers' March, or AIMM - is
that "every 13 seconds an American gun owner uses a firearm in defense
against a criminal." The march will feature women who have used a gun
in self-defense.
The AIMM isn't as ambitious or well organized as the MMM. It also has
a Web site and toll-free number, and has about 20,000 "signatures"
posted on an online petition.
AIMM is estimating a crowd of 1,000 to 10,000 and needs to raise about
$14,000, according to organizer Juli Bednarzyk. Requests for
underwriting from the NRA and the Gun Owners of America have been
turned down, Gierisch says. The organizations told her rallies are not
in their programs, she says.
But like the MMM, the members of AIMM want to continue their efforts
after the emotion of Mother's Day has passed. Says Dianne Sawyer of
Columbia, S.C., of the AIMM steering committee, "Women are a
vulnerable part of our society and have a right to self-defense."
Media savvy
A dozen MMM volunteers gathered recently for a big moment: A marcher
mom was going to be on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" - publicity most
causes can only dream about.
It's one thing to think of a catchy title and launch your march.
Actually making it happen is quite another.
The MMM had Dees-Thomases, a mother of two in Short Hills, N.J., who
works part time as a publicist for "Late Show With David Letterman."
She is well connected and well versed in how to pitch an idea and
inject humor into a potentially grim crusade.
She calls gun shows "Tupperware parties for criminals."
She noticed that the date of the march, May 14, was nine months from
its announcement on Labor Day - enough time for Congress to "deliver"
legislation.
Formerly with "CBS News With Dan Rather," she was able to announce the
march on "CBS This Morning." And her sister-in-law is Clinton campaign
veteran Susan Thomases, who gave her excellent advice.
The group got a toll-free number and published a chatty newsletter.
They added features such as a "time-out chair" to their Web site;
occupants have included gun-control opponents Dan Quayle, National
Rifle Association Chairman Wayne LaPierre and House Majority Whip Tom
DeLay, R-Texas.
They feel they're on the verge of making major waves. "This will be
the largest demonstration for gun control in American history,"
predicts Andrew Maguire, director of the Bell Campaign, a gun-control
organization modeled on Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Dees-Thomases asked Bell to be the "fiscal sponsor," and Maguire has
raised about $400,000 of the $800,000 to $1 million needed. Some
$300,000 has come from a collaborative to prevent gun violence funded
by philanthropists Irene Diamond and George Soros. The rest is
trickling in at the rate of $10,000 to $15,000 a week.
The message was carefully honed. The group is seeking "sensible" gun
control, not "strong" gun control, as some factions wanted. And they
are not, as a group, against hunting.
"I do not own a gun," says Carole Price. "But I wouldn't want to live
in a country where somebody told me I could not own a gun. We're not
gun grabbers."
Culture clash
Tension surfaced recently when the largely suburban, white moms began
organizing inner-city black women, who feel suburbanites have ignored
urban casualties for years, getting excited only when white children
began to die.
Says Dees-Thomases: "They're right - shame on us that we haven't been
there earlier."
Hillary Rodham Clinton has announced she will attend. But no
politicians will be allowed to speak at the rally unless they have
suffered personally from gun violence. The speakers will be witnesses,
people whose loved ones have been killed or maimed by guns.
Many marchers will not be in that sorrowful category, but they will no
doubt echo the words of a writer on the MMM Web site, who identified
herself simply as "Margaret of MI."
"I have no story about a gun-related death," she wrote. "I want to
keep it that way."
Copyright © 2000 The Seattle Times Company
==========================================================
Source: Science, April 19, 1985 v228 p314(2).
Title: Doing crystallography in six dimensions.
(icosahedral phase and Penrose tiling pattern)
Author: Arthur L. Robinson
Subjects: Crystallography - Research
Full Text COPYRIGHT American Association for the Advancement of
Science 1985
Doing Crystallography in Six Dimensions.
Even the most precocious child cannot array regular pentagons of the
same size on a table in such a way that they cover the surface with no
gaps showing through. The same problem with objects having fivefold
symmetry persists in three dimensions. As crystallographers discovered
long ago, one cannot fill space with icosahedrons. Hence there are no
crystals with this symmetry.
Or at least there were none until Dan Shechtman and Ilan Blech of the
Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa, Denis Gratias of
the Center for Metallurgical Chemistry (CECM) in Vitry, France, and
John Cahn of the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg,
Maryland, astounded quite a few scientists with their publication last
November describing a metal alloy with just that symmetry, which has
been dubbed the icosahedral phase.*
* D. Shechtman, I. Blech, D. Gratias, J. W. Cahn, Phys. Rev. Lett. 53,
1951 (1984).
The material of composition 86 percent aluminum and 14 percent
manganese differed in another striking way from convention. While it
clearly displayed long-range five-fold orientational order in electron
diffraction patterns, it could have none of the translational symmetry
or periodicity ordinarily required for sharp diffraction spots in the
pattern.
Diffraction patterns exhibiting five-fold symmetry have been seen
before but have been explained in terms of crystallographic defects.
What is true in two and three dimensions, however, need not be so in
higher dimensional spaces. Of the models that take the diffraction
data at face value and try to explain it, one of the most intriguing
is that the observed structure is a projection in three dimensions of
a six-dimensional object that exhibits both fivefold rational symmetry
and translational periodicity. At the APS meeting, Gratias explained
how this might work.
The simplest case is that of modulated structures, which have a
property called quasi-periodicity. In one dimension, the positions of
the points in the structure may appear to occur randomly, but they
actually occur in a predictable way determined by two characteristic
lengths. The two lengths suggest recourse to a two-dimensional space.
In particular, consider a two-dimensional cubic lattice. Draw a line
through the lattice at some arbitrary angle, and retain only those
points within a certain distance of the line. The projections of these
lattice points on the line comprise a quasi-periodic sequence.
Generalizing this procedure to higher dimensions may stretch one's
powers of visualization but is a straightforward application of linear
algebra. To obtain a structure in three dimensions, one simply slices
an n-dimensional object with a three-dimensional hyperplane.
Such a procedure never preserves all the rotational symmetry of the
higher dimensional object, but it can retain a few symmetries that
depend on the direction of the slicing. Recently, three groups (Michel
Duneau and Andr[e Katz of the Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France;
Veit Elser of AT&T Bell Laboratories; and Shechtman, Gratias, Richard
Portier of the CECM, and Cahn) have shown that the icosahedral phase
can be recovered from a simple cubic lattice in six dimensions by
cutting the lattice with a three-dimensional hyperplane.
The main symmetry axes of the icosahedral phase show twofold,
threefold, and fivefold rotational symmetry, and these are all
retained in the cut through the six-dimensional cube, as evidenced by
the agreement between theoretical and experimental diffraction
patterns.
While the six-dimensional cube is translationally periodic, the
projection of it in three dimensions exhibits a three-dimensional
version of the quasi-periodicity known as Penrose tiling, after the
British physicist Roger Penrose, who several years ago devised a way
to cover a flat surface with a pattern having fivefold symmetry.
Recent high-resolution electron microscope images of the icosahedral
phase, such as the one shown, which was made by Les Bursill and Peng
Ju Lin at Arizona State University, dramatically confirm the earlier
diffraction evidence for this kind of quasi-periodicity.
There are models for the icosahedral phase other than this one. But
the prospect that other problems in crystallography may be solvable by
recourse to higher dimensional spaces makes it interesting, indeed.
Photo: Penrose tilling
High-resolution transmission electron micrograph of the Al6Mn
icosahedral phase showing fivefold symmetry and an overlay of a
Penrose tiling pattern. [Source: L. Bursill, Arizona State University]
============================================================
Source: Scientific American, April 1991 v264 n4 p44(8).
Title: The structure of quasicrystals: quasicrystals are neither
uniformly ordered like crystals nor amorphous like glasses.
Many features of quasicrystals can be explained, but their
atomic structure remains a mystery. (includes how to grow a
Penrose tiling)
Author: Peter W. Stephens and Alan I. Goldman
Subjects: Quasicrystals - Structure
Crystals - Models
Crystallography - Research
Full Text COPYRIGHT Scientific American Inc. 1991
The Structure of Quasicrystals
When aluminum, copper and iron are melted together and cooled, they
can solidify to form a grain in the shape of a perfect dodecahedron, a
geometric solid whose 12 faces are regular pentagons. Although this
dodecahedral grain looks like a crystal, it is not. Crystals are
composed of identical building blocks called unit cells, each
containing precisely the same distribution of atoms and each fitting
together with its neighbors in the same way. A dodecahedral grain
cannot be constructed from atoms in unit cells of a single shape
whether they be small cubes or even dodecahedrons. The dodecahedral
grain is a quasicrystal.
Indeed, all probes of atomic-scale structure show that quasicrystals
are not made up of repeated unit cells. It is clear that these exotic
new materials cannot be crystals, but it is not immediately apparent
just what they are. As physicists, chemists and materials scientists
have investigated the structure of quasicrystals, they have come to
realize that periodic crystals, whose atomic structures they have
studied over the past 78 years, are but a subset of the possible types
of ordered solids.
Since 1984, when Dan S. Shechtman and his colleagues at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) discovered the first
quasicrystal, workers have fabricated many different species of
quasicrystalline alloys [see "Quasicrystals," by David R. Nelson;
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, August 1986]. They have learned how to improve
samples to the point that they can quantitatively study issues that
were only idle speculations seven years ago. The study of
quasicrystals has advanced three theories about their structure: the
Penrose, glass and randomtiling models.
The Penrose model--derived from the work of mathematician Roger
Penrose of the University of Oxford--suggests that quasicrystals are
composed of two or more unit cells that fit together according to
specific rules. The model accurately describes some of the basic
properties of quasicrystals, but it has difficulty explaining how
these rules might be related to atomic growth processes.
The glass model, in contrast, relies on local interactions to join
clusters of atoms in a somewhat random way. According to the model,
all the clusters have the same orientation, but because of random
growth, the structure contains many defects.
It now seems that the two models are converging toward a third, the
random-tiling model, which combines some of the best features of its
predecessors. In the past few years the structure of quasicrystals
has been one of the most hotly debated topics in solid state physics.
The resolution of this debate may lead to a theory of quasicrystalline
structure and guide the development of materials with unusual
structural and electrical properties.
To produce the first quasicrystals, Shechtman and his colleagues at
NIST melted together aluminum and manganese and then squirted the
molten metals against a rapidly spinning wheel, thereby achieving a
cooling rate of about one million kelvins per second. This abrupt
cooling process, called quenching, can "shock" the alloy into a
variety of novel structures, or phases. To understand these unusual
phases of matter, one must first have a grasp of some of the
principles of basic crystallography.
A crystal can possess only certain symmetries because there are a
limited number of ways that identical unit cells can be assembled to
make a solid. For instance, a salt crystal is composed of cubic unit
cells that stack to form cubic grains. Consequently, the salt crystal
has fourfold rotational symmetry: when the crystal is simply rotated
through a quarter turn around the appropriate axis, atoms of the
rotated crystal occupy the same positions as those of the unrotated
crystals. Crystals can have only twofold, threefold, fourfold and
sixfold symmetry.
A crystal can never have, say, fivefold symmetry, because a single
unit cell that has fivefold symmetry, such as a dodecahedron, cannot
be assembled to completely fill space. There will always be gaps
between the dodecahedral unit cells.
To determine the structure of a crystal, investigators use an
indirect, but well understood, technique. Atoms in a crystal are
arranged in families of parallel planes. Each such plane acts as a
mirror to incoming X rays, electrons and other rays or particles that
travel through space as a wave. Each plane reflects the incident waves
very weakly. But if the reflected waves from each member of a family
of planes combine in phase, the total intensity of the reflected wave
can become quite strong. This phenomenon is called diffraction; it
occurs whenever any type of wave interacts with an ordered structure
of the appropriate spacing.
When a crystal is bombarded by a beam of X rays or electrons, the
angles through which the waves are diffracted reveal the shape and
dimensions of the unit cells of the crystal. The diffracted waves can
be recorded, for example, on a photographic emulsion, where they
appear as a patter of bright spots.
All the symmetries of a crystal are reproduced in its diffraction
pattern. A crystal with sixfold rotational symmetry will produce a
diffraction pattern that also has sixfold symmetry. Because no
crystal can have a fivefold symmetry axis, one would not expect to see
a diffraction pattern that has fivefold rotational symmetry.
Nevertheless, when Shechtman and his colleagues illuminated a grain of
the aluminum-manganese alloy with electrons, they found a diffraction
pattern that had fivefold rotational symmetry. Indeed by rotating the
sample by the appropriate angles, they deduced that the alloy had six
fivefold symmetry axes. In technical terms, the alloy has icosahedral
symmetry, because an icosahedron is a 20-sided solid that has six
fivefold rotational axes in the same orientation as the alloy.
The icosahedral alloys are only one of many families of quasicrystals
discovered during the past seven years. All these materials have
symmetries that are "forbidden" in conventional crystals. Leonid A.
Bendersky of NIST found that aluminum and manganese can form a
material that is periodic along one direction and has tenfold
rotational symmetry in the perpendicular plane. Workers have also
recently fabricated quasicrystals with eightfold and 12-fold symmetry.
In some sense, these quasicrystals provide a link between
quasicrystalline and crystalline order. They also demonstrate that
the phenomenon of quasicrystallinity extends far beyond ideas about
icosahedral symmetry and the stability of specific icosahedral
clusters of atoms.
The first model for quasicrystals emerged from the mathematics of
tiling--a field advanced by Penrose and others during the 1970s [see
"Mathematical Games," by Martin Gardner; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, January
1977]. Penrose examined how two or more shapes could be assembled in
a quasiperiodic way to tile a plane, that is, to cover it completely
with shapes that do not overlap. Each of these quasiperiodic tilings,
now known as Penrose tilings, could be constructed using a set of
instructions called matching rules [see box on page 51].
In 1982 Alan L. Mackay of the University of London calculated the
diffraction properties of a theoretical quasiperiodic structure. He
demonstrated that if atoms were placed at the corners of each shape in
a Penrose tiling, they would give rise to a diffraction pattern that
had tenfold symmetry. Then, in 1984, Peter Kramer and Reinhardt Neri
of the University of Tubingen extrapolated the concept of
two-dimensional Penrose tilings to three dimensions. Dov Levine and
Paul J. Steinhardt of the University of Pennsylvania had also been
considering the possibility of alternative forms of atomic order based
on Penrose tilings.
Building on this early work, Levine and Steinhardt proposed the
Penrose model for quasicrystals only six weeks after Shechtman and his
colleagues published their famous paper. They put forth a
three-dimensional generalization of the Penrose tiling that described
the structure of the aluminum-manganese alloy, and they showed that
the pattern of diffraction peaks calculated from their model agreed
well with Shechtman's results.
Penrose quasicrystals are constructed from a set of unit cells and
specific matching rules that govern how they fit together. These
rules are more complicated than the identical repetition of identical
unit cells that form a crystal. Three important features distinguish
a Penrose quasicrystal from a crystal.
First, a Penrose quasicrystal contains many regions that explicitly
show forbidden rotational symmetries, that is, fivefold. Second, a
Penrose quasicrystal is built from two or more unit cells rather than
a single unit cell as suffices for period crystals. Third, a Penrose
quasicrystal does not exhibit equally spaced rows of lattice points as
the periodic structures do. Nevertheless, the diffraction pattern
resulting from a Penrose quasicrystal has an array of sharp spots, in
agreement with the experimental observations.
One can elegantly describe the structure of Penrose quasicrystals and
their corresponding diffraction patterns if one thinks of Penrose
structures as resulting from a slice through a higher-dimensional
periodic lattice. This concept is easiest to visualize in two
dimensions.
Imagine a two-dimensional lattice composed of points that sit at the
corners of squares in a grid. A horizontal line of these points is
covered by a strip. If the covered points are projected onto a line
that is parallel to the strip, the projected points will be equally
spaced along the line. Those points define a periodic sequence
because they divide the line into equal-size segments. To produce a
quasiperiodic sequence, the strip must be tilted with respect to the
lattice so that it has a slope equal to an irrational number [see
illustration on page 50]. (A number is irrational if, when expressed
as a decimal, no set of consecutive digits repeats itself
indefinitely, for example, the number [pi], or 3.1415....) If the
points that are covered by the strip are then projected onto a line
parallel to the strip, the projected points will divide the line into
a quasiperiodic sequence of long and short segments.
This sequence serves as a one-dimensional model of a quasicrystal if
one imagines that an atom is placed at each point that divides the
line into long and short segments. Like other quasicrystals, the
quasiperiodic sequence has unusual diffraction properties. One might
guess that the one-dimensional model would generate a blurry
diffraction pattern because the atoms are not periodically spaced.
But careful calculation proves otherwise. In fact, the quasiperiodic
sequence produces a sharp diffraction pattern as a consequence of
periodicity of the two-dimensional parent lattice.
The diffraction pattern derived from a quasiperiodic sequence consists
of a dense set of weak and strong peaks [see illustration on page 50].
In experiments, one detects only the strongest of these peaks. Even
so, one can still show that the quasiperiodic sequence is not a
crystal because of the aperiodic spacing between the observable peaks.
To make quasiperiodic structures in two dimensions, one needs a
lattice in a space of even higher dimension. For example, a plane
that cuts through a stack of cubes at an angle can form a
quasiperiodic two-dimensional structure if the slopes between the
plane and the cube axes are irrational numbers [see illustration
above]. (Indeed, a two-dimensional Penrose tiling that has fivefold
symmetry can be produced by a projection from a five-dimensional
lattice.)
Using similar reasoning, theorists have described icosahedral
quasicrystals as a three-dimensional cut through an abstract
six-dimensional lattice. This kind of cut leads to the type of
quasiperiodic structures proposed in the Penrose model. By describing
quasicrystals in this way, one can understand how quasicrystals can
have unusual symmetries and yet not contradict the precepts of
crystallography. Whereas the possible symmetries of the diffraction
patterns of crystals are limited by the possible symmetries of the
diffraction patterns of crystals are limited by the possible
symmetries of the crystals themselves, the symmetries of quasicrystals
derive from those of a higher-dimensional parent lattice.
In general, a quasiperiodic structure will give rise to a diffraction
pattern that has great order because of the periodic order in the
higher-dimensional parent lattice.
Although the Penrose model is very successful in predicting the
diffraction patterns generated by icosahedral alloys, it gives few
clues about how physical reality is related to multidimensional spaces
and matching rules. In particular, although the Penrose matching
rules are local, a great deal of planning ahead is required to
construct a perfect Penrose quasicrystal. Growing such a quasicrystal
requires that atoms in very distant unit cells would have to interact
in some manner to communicate their positions and relative
orientations. This idea is contrary to all generally accepted notions
about crystal-binding forces, which are relatively short range.
Another objection to the Penrose model is that it fails to account for
the considerable disorder evident in almost all quasicrystals. This
disorder appears in their structural, electrical and diffraction
properties. For instance, one consequence of the Penrose model is
that a perfect quasicrystal should conduct electricity as well as an
ordinary metallic crystal. In fact, all quasicrystals produced in the
laboratory have conducted electricity rather poorly.
A more important sign of disorder is revealed in the X-ray diffraction
patterns from icosahedral alloys. In many cases, these show broadened
peaks in contrast to the perfectly sharp peaks predicted by the
Penrose model. Broadened diffraction peaks are a sign of disorder in
many crystalline materials. Common sources of disorder--such as small
grain size, defects or strain--produce well-known signatures in
diffraction patterns. But none of these signatures seem to match the
peak broadening exhibited by quasicrystals.
The X-ray diffraction results, in fact, point to a new form of
structural disorder called phason disorder, which is unique to
quasicrystals. If one compares a Penrose tiling or a quasiperiodic
sequence with a conventional crystal, one sees that the quasiperiodic
structures have the ability to generate a new form of disorder during
growth: a defect can arise when the wrong kind of unit cell, or line
segment, falls in a particular place. A few isolated mistakes will
not affect the diffraction properties of an entire sample, but if many
such mistakes plague a sample, they will disturb the diffraction
patterns.
An an extreme example, imagine that the long and short segments in the
one-dimensional quasiperiodic sequence are rearranged in a completely
random fashion. Surprisingly, this random sequence gives rise to a
diffraction pattern derived from the original quasiperiodic sequence.
The diffraction peaks of the random sequence are found at the same
positions as those from the quasiperiodic sequence but are broader.
In fact, the widths of these peaks are inversely related to the
strength of the corresponding diffraction peak from the quasiperiodic
sequence, so that only the more intense peaks remain. Nevertheless,
the existence of relatively sharp diffraction peaks from the random
sequence indicates that quasiperiodicity can survive disorder.
Such ideas led the authors to suggest in 1986 that the icosahedral
alloys had an inherently defect-ridden structure. Our proposal became
known as the icosahedral glass model. Randomness is important to the
glass model in two ways. First, it removes the necessity of arcane
matching rules and gives a more plausible explanation for
quasicrystalline growth. Second, the disorder introduced through
randomness closely mimics that evidenced by the peak broadening of the
diffraction patterns. Interestingly, soon after the discovery of
quasicrystals, Shechtman and Ilan Blech of Israel Institute of
Technology-Technion in Haifa suggested that icosahedral quasicrystals
were composed of icosahedral clusters that were randomly connected.
This theory was refined by the authors to the point where we could
reproduce the experimental observation of diffraction peak broadening
[see illustration on page 53].
The attractiveness of the glass model extends beyond its ability to
incorporate disorder. Certain crystalline alloys contain
icosahedrally symmetric atomic clusters, which are plausible building
blocks for the glass model. The size of those clusters is within 1
percent of that required to match the experimental diffraction
patterns.
Is these theoretical ideas were being developed in the late 1980s,
materials scientists and chemists were busy in their laboratories
discovering dozens of new icosahedral alloys. Some of the materials
were variations of the aluminum-manganese alloys, but investigators
also synthesized new families, such as aluminum-zinc-magnesium,
uranium-palladium-silicon and nickel-titanium.
One of the most important results to come from these new materials was
the discovery that quasicrystalline phases could be thermodynamically
stable. The quenching process initially used by Shechtman and others
produced very small grained quasicrystalline phases that, when heated,
transformed irreversibly into common crystalline phases.
Unfortunately, this metastability prevented workers from improving the
quality of samples by heat treatment and other metallurgical
techniques. Hence, the first quasicrystals had grain sizes of only a
few thousandths of a millimeter, making many kinds of experimenting
impossible.
Several materials discovered in the past few years, however, retained
their quasicrystalline structure up to their melting point. Hence,
workers could prepare much larger samples by conventional crystal
growth techniques. In this way, they have recently made alloys that
have single grains as large as 10 millimeters in size.
Astonishingly, when these first stable quasicrystals of aluminum,
lithium and copper were grown slowly enough to form large, faceted
surfaces, they still suffered from the same degree of phason disorder
as did their cousins formed by quenching. The discovery of phason
disorder in these materials seemed to support the icosahedral glass
model.
Although the icosahedral glass model is more successful at predicting
the diffraction patterns, it goes too far in its attempt to
incorporate disorder. It leaves too many gaps or tears in the
structure where icosahedral clusters caNnot fit. These tears are, of
course, absent in the Penrose model. The net effect of the tears is
that the glass model overestimates the degree of broadening in
diffraction patterns.
While the proponents of the Penrose and glass models debated the
importance of local growth and phason disorder, a third group of
investigators devised the random-tiling model, which combines some of
the best concepts from the Penrose and the icosahedral glass models.
The random-tiling model suggests that the strict matching rules of the
Penrose model do not have to be obeyed, as long as there are no gaps
left in the structure. Surprisingly, the random-tiling model predicts
perfectly sharp diffraction peaks, just like its more ordered cousin,
the Penrose model.
The apparent advantage of the random-tilling model is that it requires
only local growth rules. For instance, Michael Widom, Katherine J.
Strandburg and Robert H. Swendsen of Carnegie-Mellon University
demonstrated that they could simulate the growth of these
defect-filled tilings by applying the same computer algorithms used to
simulate the growth of periodic crystals. Furthermore, they found that
under certain circumstances the defect-filled tiling was more
theremodynamically stable than a normal crystal. These investigators
and Christopher L. Henley of Boston University demonstrated that the
disorder associated with errors in a perfect quasiperiodic structure
can actually stabilize quasicrystalline order, at least with respect
to some competing crystalline phase. The relative importance of
disorder increases with temperature, so that the randomtiling model
predits that quasicrystals achieve the stable, equilibrium phase only
at elevated temperatures.
Over the past few years the three competing models for the icosahedral
alloys have been refined to produce closer agreement with experiments
and, in particular, diffraction data. For instance, theorists
introduced mechanisms for producing disorder in ideal quasiperiodic
structures to mimim more closely the broadened diffraction peaks.
They developed algorithms to grow nearly perfect Penrose tillings by
rules that seemed more plausibly local. At about the same time, Veit
Elser, then at AT&T Bell Laboratories, modified the glass model by
incorporating more realistic atomic motions during the simulated
growth of a quasicystalline grain; he found that the calculated
diffraction patterns in such a grain did not exhibit excessive peak
broadening beyond the experimental results. All these models were
converging toward a middle ground incorporating some degree of phason
disorder. To some observers, it seemed as though the differences
between the models were dissolving into semantics.
A series of experiments performed in 1989, however, essentially
narrowed the field of plausible models to two: the Penrose and
random-tiling models. Physicists at Tohoku University in Japan
discovered a new family of icosahedral alloys, including
aluminum-copper-iron and aluminum-copper-ruthenium. Remarkably, when
we took X-ray diffraction patters of these materials, we found that
the peak broadening associated with phason disorder--an effect evident
in all previously studied icosahedral alloys--was absent. Peter
Bancel of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center independently
confirmed these results and showed that as the iron alloy was heated
and cooled, phason peak broadening could be enhanced or diminished.
Is quasicrystalline order produced by the matching rules of the
Penrose model or by the freedowm to scramble local groups of atoms to
allow limited phason disorder? In an attempt to answer this question,
several laboratories, including our own, are continuing that control
the perfection of quasicrystals.
While some investigators have been working to fathom the novel forms
of atomic order displayed by these materials, others have been
developing applications. Yi He, S. Joseph Poon and Gary J. Shiflet of
the University of Virginia have used insights about quasicrystalline
structure to synthesize metallic glasses containing up to 90 percent
aluminum. They hope to exploit the low density and unusually high
strength of these materials. Jean-Marie Dubois and his colleagues at
the National School of Mining Engineering in Nancy, France, have
discovered that certain quasicrystals produce excellent low-friction
coatings.
Quasicrystals continue to pose exciting challenges for condensed
matter scientists. Nearly all the ideas that have been developed to
understand the electronic, thermal and mechanical properties of
crystalline solids are based on the simplifying framework of
periodicity. Now faced with quasiperiodic structures, we must seek
more sophisticated levels of understanding.
FURTHER READING
ICOSAHEDRAL CRYSTALS: WHERE ARE THE ATOMS? Per Bak in Physical Review
Letters, Vol. 56, No. 8, pages 861-864; February 24, 1986.
QUASICRYSTAL EQUILIBRIUM STATE. Michael Widom, Katherine J.
Strandburg and Robert H. Swendsen in Physical Review Letters, Vol. 58,
No. 7, pages 706-709; February 16, 1987.
INTRODUCTION TO QUASICRYSTALS. Edited by Marko V. Jaric. Academic
Press, 1988.
Al-Cu-Ru: AN ICOSAHEDRAL ALLOY WITHOUT PHASON DISORDER. C. A. Guryan,
A. I. Goldman, P. W. Stephens, K. Hiraga, A. P. Tsai, A. Inoue and T.
Masumoto in Physical Review Letters, Vol. 62, No. 20, pages 2409-2412;
May 15, 1989.
DYNAMICAL PHASONS IN A PERFECT QUASICRYSTAL. Peter A. Bancel in
Physical Review Letters, Vol. 63, No. 25, pages 2741-2744; December
18, 1989.
EXTENDED ICOSAHEDRAL STRUCTURES. Edited by Marko V. Jaric and Dennis
Gratias. Academic Press, 1989.
PETER W. STEPHENS and ALAN I. GOLDMAN have collaborated on many
projects during the past 10 years and now share a keen interest in
quasicrystals. Stephens is associate professor of physics at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. He recently spent a year at
Tohoku University in Japan to conduct experiments, some of which are
described in this article. Goldman is associate professor of physics
at Iowa State University and is a physicist at Ames Laboratory. After
receiving his Ph.D. from Stony Brooks in 1984, he worked at Brookhaven
National Laboratory for four years.
========================================================
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/aiwriter0302.html
---------------------------------------------------------------
A Fiction-Writing Computer
Machine Spins Tale of Betrayal
The Computer as Novelist
TECHNOLOGY HEADLINES
BRUTUS.1's "Story of Betrayal"
Writer and editor Susan Mulcahy termed the computer's effort
"amateurish."
The computer scientist behind BRUTUS.1 thinks that one day computers
might be able to write formulaic novels (Betsy Vardell/ABCNEWS.com)
By Michael J. Martinez
ABCNEWS.com
March 2 — About eight years ago, it dawned on Selmer Bringsjord
that playing chess just wasn't a strong enough test of a
computer's capabilities. So the computer scientist and
philosopher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.,
took on a seemingly impossible task—teaching a computer how to
write. Not just any old prose, mind you, but original fiction.
The story of getting this computer to write is rife with
unexpected turns. But finally Bringsjord, colleague Dave Ferucci
and their team at Rensselaer came up with a program that can
write an original story on the theme of betrayal.
BRUTUS.1 is the world's first fiction-writing computer, an
experiment in the development of artificial intelligence. But
before writers and poets the world over turn in their pens and
seek real jobs, take heart.
A Silicon Shakespeare
"It can write, yes, but it can only write what we provide it
with," says Bringsjord, an associate professor. "It took us
eight years to get betrayal down, and that's only one emotional
concept out of dozens."
Originally, Bringsjord thought to create a program that would
define "interestingness." He laughs about it now, but it was a
fool's errand in artificial intelligence terms.
"Interestingness really combines all of the emotions,"
Bringsjord says. "Stories engage people on a number of levels.
Defining that would be like defining all of those emotional
levels."
The single theme of betrayal, however, is a lot simpler to
define in computer terms. In a logical/mathematical sequence, it
goes something like this: Take a character, give him an
expectation of another character's actions, create an event in
which the other character's actions hurts the primary character
in contrast to his expectation. End of story.
The actual computer code that defines betrayal isn't that long,
Bringsjord says. But within that definition, the computer also
has to have codes that describe "character," "expectation,"
"action," and "event." It can get a little complicated.
Can BRUTUS Fool A Human?
So why create a creative computer? Because it's closer to the
concept of human intelligence than, say, a chess-playing
computer like Deep Blue, the now-retired IBM supercomputer that
took on world champion Garry Kasparov and won.
"Playing chess is simply the manipulation of symbols that have
no particular meaning outside of the game," Bringsjord says.
"Narrative and stories are at the heart of human data
structures."
And that could help a computer pass the Turing Test, which
computer scientist consider the holy grail of artificial
intelligence. Named for computer pioneer Alan Turing, a computer
passes if it can fool someone into thinking it's human. Meeting
that criterion can be considered as having a modicum of
intelligence.
For our very own Turing Test, we asked Seattle writer and editor
Susan Mulcahy to give BRUTUS.1's story a read. Without knowing
the author, Mulcahy ripped the piece for word choice and
grammar. She called the overall effort "amateurish," but was in
the end surprised.
"I'm impressed that the writer was a computer, but I'm not
impressed with the writing, so I don't know how impressive it
really is," Mulcahy said.
Definition vs. Understanding
Bringsjord's points out that BRUTUS.1 can only produce what it's
told. It's inflexible in its definitions of character and plot,
and each setting must be coded and downloaded separately. It
cannot, for example, place a story of betrayal on board a ship,
because the computer doesn't "know" what it's like to be at sea.
In fact, Bringsjord doesn't even believe an intelligent computer
is possible. He's a proponent of "weak" artificial intelligence,
a computer that has basic reasoning skill, but is not truly
intelligent or self-aware.
Still, BRUTUS.1 is a step toward a "conversational" computer.
And Bringsjord envisions some day a version of BRUTUS that could
write formulaic fiction that could compete with human authors.
So all of those aspiring authors out there take note: One day a
precocious computer could be gunning for your book deal.
A Story of Betrayal By BRUTUS.1
Dave Striver loved the university. He loved its
ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and
its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. He also
loved the fact that the university is free of the stark
unforgiving trials of the business world—only this isn't a
fact: academia has its own tests, and some are as
merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is
the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a
doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one's
dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart
enjoyed giving.
Dave wanted desperately to be a doctor. But he needed the
signatures of three people on the first page of his
dissertation, the priceless inscriptions which, together,
would certify that he had passed his defense. One of the
signatures had to come from Professor Hart, and Hart had
often said—to others and to himself—that he was honored to
help Dave secure his well-earned dream.
Well before the defense, Striver gave Hart a penultimate
copy of his thesis. Hart read it and told Dave that it was
absolutely first-rate, and that he would gladly sign it at
the defense. They even shook hands in Hart's book-lined
office. Dave noticed that Hart's eyes were bright and
trustful, and his bearing paternal.
At the defense, Dave thought that he eloquently summarized
Chapter 3 of his dissertation. There were two questions,
one from Professor Rogers and one from Dr. Meteer; Dave
answered both, apparently to everyone's satisfaction.
There were no further objections.
Professor Rogers signed. He slid the tome to Meteer; she
too signed, and then slid it in front of Hart. Hart didn't
move.
``Ed?" Rogers said.
Hart still sat motionless. Dave felt slightly dizzy.
``Edward, are you going to sign?"
Later, Hart sat alone in his office, in his big leather
chair, saddened by Dave's failure. He tried to think of
ways he could help Dave achieve his dream.
jum...@my-deja.com
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/good.html
-------------------------------------------------
The Scales of Good and Evil
Cliff Pickover
Copyright 1998, 1999 by Cliff Pickover
If you liked this page, visit Cliff Pickover's main home page for more
lists. "The Scales of Good and Evil" is a trademarked term.
Below is a list of the "Top Ten" evil people of all time followed by a
list of the "Top Ten" good people of all time -- sorted in order of
evilness and goodness. Please add your votes. Who would you like to
see added to the list? What alterations would you make to the list or
the ordering? Do the scales of good and evil balance? If I may have
permission to quote you in a manuscript, please give permission in
your note to me.
Why is it easier to think of evil examples than good ones? Is it much
easier to do something big and bad than it is to do something big and
good.
Developing this list was not an easy task due to the complexity of
human personalities and the fact that goodness and evilness depend on
the perspective of the time. (For example, perhaps many Americans
consider dropping the bomb on Hiroshima "good" whereas many Japanese
consider it "evil.") On the evilness scale, I gave additional weight
to those people who actually enjoyed and personally participated in
the utter horror they produced. When compiling the good list, I also
considered how many people were killed by the followers of a
particular leader during the leader's life time.
For both the good and evil list, I also asked myself the question,
"Who would I least like to be in a room with, and who would I most
like to be in a room with?"
If you are not happy with this list, drop me a line, because the list
changes in response to suggestions from my readers. If you had scales
and put Stalin's massacres on the left side, what could you put on the
right-hand side to balance it? Infinite kindness and trying to
alleviate suffering? Curing cancer? Ending world hunger? Charity?
Elevating the thinking of humankind with respect to human rights?
Perhaps the very best people don't seek publicity for their good
deeds, such as the unknown heroes who work tirelessly with the poor
and the sick. When considering religions leaders, do we need to
consider possible negative results that evolved, such as
fundamentalist groups that suppress women, or the concept of Jihad, or
holy war? If the Inquisition arose out of Christianity, need we
consider this in assessments we make?
The Top Ten Evil
Tomas de Torquemada (pictured here) - Born in Spain in 1420, his
name is synonymous with the Christian Inquisition's horror,
religious bigotry, and cruel fanaticism. He was a fan of various
forms of torture including foot roasting, use of the garrucha, and
suffocation. He was made Grand Inquisitor by Pope Sixtus IV. Popes
and kings alike praised his tireless efforts. The number of burnings
at the stake during Torquemada's tenure has been estimated at about
2,000. Torquemada's hatred of Jews influenced Ferdinand and Isabella
to expel all Jews who had not embraced Christianity.
Vlad Tepes - Vlad the Impaler was a prince known for executing his
enemies by impalement. He was a fan of various forms of torture
including disemboweling and rectal and facial impalement. Vlad the
Impaler tortured thousands while he ate and drunk among the corpses.
He impaled every person in the city of Amlas -- 20,000 men, women
and children. Vlad often ordered people to be skinned, boiled,
decapitated, blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, roasted, hacked,
nailed, buried alive, stabbed, etc. He also liked to cut off noses,
ears, sexual organs and limbs. But his favorite method was
impalement on stakes, hence the surname "Tepes" which means "The
Impaler" in the Romanian language. It is this technique he used in
1457, 1459 and 1460 against Transylvanian merchants who had ignored
his trade laws. He also looked upon the poor, vagrants and beggars
as thieves. Consequently, he invited all the poor and sick of
Wallachia to his princely court in Tirgoviste for a great feast.
After the guests ate and drank, Dracula ordered the hall boarded up
and set on fire. No one survived.
Note: Every Romanian who contacted me said I should remove Vlad from
the list. They said he was not evil and seemed to like him. In an
effort to understand how our views of evil can be so different, I
reproduce an exchange I had with Marius who was born in Romania.
Perhaps this will help us understand more generally how the
perception of evil can differ from person to person.
Adolph Hitler - The dictator of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, was born
on April 20, 1889, at Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary.
Ivan the Terrible - Ivan Vasilyevich, (born Aug. 25, 1530, in
Kolomenskoye, near Moscow) was the grand prince of Moscow (1533-84)
and the first to be proclaimed tsar of Russia (from 1547). His reign
saw the completion of the construction of a centrally administered
Russian state and the creation of an empire that included non-Slav
states. He enjoyed burning 1000s of people in frying pans, and was
fond of impaling people.
Adolph Eichmann - Born in March 19, 1906, Solingen, Germany he was
hanged by the state of Israel for his part in the Nazi extermination
of Jews during World War II. "The death of five million Jews on my
conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction."
Pol Pot - Pol Pot (born in 1925 in the Kompong Thom province of
Cambodia) was the Khmer political leader whose totalitarian regime
(1975-79) imposed severe hardships on the people of Cambodia. His
radical communist government forced the mass evacuations of cities,
killed or displaced millions of people, and left a legacy of disease
and starvation. Under his leadership, his government caused the
deaths of at least one million people from forced labor, starvation,
disease, torture, or execution.
Mao Tse-tung - leader of the Gang of Four, who killed somewhere
between 20 and 67 million (estimates vary) of his countrymen,
including the elderly and intellectuals. His picture still hangs
throughout many homes and businesses. Mao's own personality cult,
encouraged so as to provide momentum to the movement, assumed
religious proportions. The resulting anarchy, terror, and paralysis
completely disrupted the urban economy. Industrial production for
1968 dipped 12 percent below that of 1966.
Idi Amin - Idi Amin Dada Oumee (born in 1924 in Uganda) was the
military officer and president (1971-79) of Uganda. Amin also took
tribalism, a long- standing problem in Uganda, to its extreme by
allegedly ordering the persecution of Acholi, Lango, and other
tribes. Amidst reports of the torture and murder of 100,000 to
300,000 Ugandans during Amin's presidency.
Joseph Stalin - Born in 1879. During the quarter of a century
preceding his death in 1953, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin
probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in
history. In the 1930s, by his orders, millions of peasants were
either killed or permitted to starve to death. Genghis Khan - The
Mongol Temłjin, known to history as Genghis Khan (born 1162) was a
warrior and ruler who, starting from obscure and insignificant
beginnings, brought all the nomadic tribes of Mongolia under the
rule of himself and his family in a rigidly disciplined military
state. Massacres of defeated populations, with the resultant terror,
were weapons he regularly used. His Mongol hordes killed off
countless people in Asia and Europe in the early 1200s. The Mongols'
reputation for ruthlessness often paralyzed their captives, who
allowed themselves to be killed when resistance or flight was not
impossible. Indeed, the Mongols did as they wished. Resistance
brought certain destruction, but at Balkh, now in Afghanistan, the
population was slaughtered in spite of a prompt surrender, for
tactical reasons.
H. H. Holmes - built a hundred-room mansion complete with gas
chambers, trap doors, acid vats, lime pits, fake walls and secret
entrances. During the 1893 World's Fair he rented rooms to visitors.
He then killed most of his lodgers and continued his insurance fraud
scheme. He also lured women to his "torture castle" with the promise
of marriage. Instead, he would force them to sign over their
savings, then throw them down an elevator shaft and gas them to
death. In the basement of the castle he dismembered and skinned his
prey and experimented with their corpses. He killed over 200 people.
Gilles de Rais - A Fifteenth Century French war hero, Gilles was
also one of medieval Europe's worst killers. He enjoyed killing
mostly young boys, whom he would sodomize before and after
decapitation. He enjoyed watching his servants butcher the boys and
masturbated over their entrails. He killed over 140 people.
Some Runners-Up: Nicolae Ceausescu decreed that all women must bear
five children. Due to terrible food shortages, many women were unable
to support their "decree babies." They turned them over to state-run
orphanages. More than 150,000 children were crowded into these
intuitions. Many died of malnutrition and disease. Others ran away
becoming homeless beggars. Ceausecu also forbade testing of the
nation's blood supply for AIDS. Through transfusions and shared
vaccinations needles, thousands of orphans contracted AIDS. Eventually
Romania had over half of Europe's cases of childhood AIDS.
Basil the Bulgar Slayer blinded 14,000 prisoners. Heinrich Himmler
architected the "Final Solution." Tallat Pasha descreed there must be
no Armenians on the Earth. 1.5 Million Armenians were beat, raped,
robbed, and killed.
The Top Ten Good
Buddha - Buddhism, far more than Christianity of Islam, has a very
strong pacifist element. The orientation toward nonviolence has
played a significant role in the political history of Buddhist
countries.
Baha'u'llah - Baha'is believe that all the founders of the world's
great religions have been manifestations of God and agents of a
progressive divine plan for the education of the human race. Despite
their apparent differences, the world's great religions, according
to the Baha'is, teach an identical truth. Baha'is believe that
Baha'ullah (d. 1892) was a manifestation of God, who in His essence
is unknowable. Baha'ullah's special function was to overcome the
disunity of religions and establish a universal faith. Baha'is
believe in the oneness of humanity and devote themselves to the
abolition of racial, class, and religious prejudices. The great bulk
of Baha'i teachings is concerned with social ethics; the faith has
no priesthood and does not observe ritual forms in its worship.
Dalai Lama - head of the dominant Dge-lugs-pa order of Tibetan
Buddhists and, until 1959, both spiritual and temporal ruler of
Tibet. In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in
recognition of his nonviolent campaign to end Chinese domination of
Tibet.
Jesus Christ - for the preaching of love.
Moses - just the idea of "resting on the seventh day" improved the
life of countless people.
Mother Theresa - Once Mother Theresa was asked how she could
continue day after day after day, visiting the terminally ill:
feeding them, wiping their brows, giving them comfort as they lay
dying. And she said, "It's not hard because in each one, I see the
face of Christ in one of His more distressing disguises."
Abraham Lincoln - for freeing the slaves.
Adding to the Evil List
Please send me e-mail if you have ideas for people to add to the evil
list. My goal is to make a list of 100 evil people. Feel free to tell
me why you think your candidates are evil and how to find out more
about your nominated evil person.
Responses from Readers
Reponse from David G.:
Wow, Cliff, you've really ventured into a mine-field here, haven't
you? I think that it will be very difficult to devise such a list,
mainly because no one is entirely good or entirely evil. And, often,
even those with evil means are attempting to carry out good agendas
(although perhaps in the wrong manner). For example, I think most
people would say that Adolph Hitler was the personification of evil.
However, at least, in the beginning, his intentions were good. He was
attempting to rebuild Germany after the collapse caused by the loss of
the first World War, and by the war reparations demanded by the
victors which resulted in the financial collapse of the German
economy. While the means he used to accomplish this were rather
draconian, he did achieve his goal of the reunification of Germany,
restoration of civil order (as opposed to the anarchy which was in
effect), and an improved economy. It was only later that he started
his campaign of military assaults, and his crusade against various
ethnic groups (which, in my personal opinion, is the ultimate evil).
Additionally, in his younger years, he was an aspiring artist, and
some of his paintings were rather interesting. Thus, even in the most
evil person imaginable, it's possible to find good characteristics.
Consider the case of Ivan the Terrible, and the situation in Russia in
the 16th century. Would the fear from such stories be useful in
controlling an unruly and partially barbaric population? Even Tomas de
Torquemada was inspired by religion.
Also, don't forget that we tend to judge people by our own standards.
Thus, good and evil are relative to our environment, our thought
process, our heritage. Consider how someone like Hitler might have
been thought of if Germany had won the war. Would we have thought that
Franklin Roosevelt was a war monger who needlessly sacrificed
soldiers, and caused needless suffering while wrongly attempting to
influence the proper world order? Would the United States have been
thought of as a barbaric country filled with soft-headed idiots? Could
Germany's persecution of the ethnic groups be compared to the
slaughter of the Native Americans by the early Americans?
Personally, I think my own beliefs tend to run close to your own. But,
I think that these issues need to be considered before attempting to
classify people into either the evil or the good category.
Ok, now for some of my own recommendations. Where on the list would
Idi Amin fit (Dictator of Uganda)? Didn't he publicly profess to
cannibalism? Does this automatically qualify someone as evil? Or,
isn't this really a cultural bias? What about Abraham Lincoln? Here
was a man who had an impossible job, the reunification of a country at
civil war, which eventually led to the loss of his life. What about
the various winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor? While these
were typically not leaders, quite a few of them voluntarily sacrificed
their own life to save those of their friends (and, what higher good
can there ever be?). What about Jesus? Isn't he the personification of
goodness? Of course, now we're factoring in various religious
thoughts, so I'm sure this could be considered very controversial.
What about the prophet Mohammed? Going back to the second World War,
what about Schindler (Have you ever seen the movie "Schindler's
List"?). What about Timmothy McVey? He's almost certain to take a
place on the list of the top twenty evil for his part in the Oklahoma
City bombing. What about John Kennedy? While generally regarded as
being responsible for putting a man on the moon, which has partially
led to the technology explosion which exists today, he also came
extremely close to provoking worldwide nuclear war. Where on the list
does he belong?
I'm sure that there are literally millions of candidates for each
list. However, in nominating these candidates, we're all evaluating
them according to our own particular beliefs, so everyone's list will
be vastly different, and, some entries might even swap portions,
depending upon the person doing the evaluation. And, of course, the
scariest part of this whole process might be that people have to
publicly examine their own thoughts and their own morals, and, this
can be extremely frightening at times!
From Greg K.:
One of my favorite examples - how would JFK have been viewed if the
same moral standards we are applying to President Clinton were
applied, and if the press pried into his personal life as deeply as
the press does now (I am grossed out that this is an issue at all for
the President). I believe he would have one plot in a ranking based
upon his lifetime, and quite another if the standards of the time were
applied.
Then, what do we apply "good" and "evil" to? The person's day job?
Their life as a whole? Their motivations? President Carter may not
rank high as a "good" president, yet I believe of all the recent
presidents that he is truly committed to helping others - is this
"good", does it count?
Then there is Mother Theresa - I'm not saying she shouldn't be
considered "good" - but what about the other nuns that worked with her
that aren't recognized as individuals. Is the same work without world
recognition even more "good"? Is saving people "good"? If you feed a
starving person, are you good? If that person lives to have children
and the same basic problems of lack of resources still exists, haven't
you made things worse, merely deferred a current problem and made it
worse in the long term? Is that good or evil? Is the leadership of
China good or evil - clearly their Draconian state enables a rapid
reduction in their birth rate. Isn't that evil? Yet, if they didn't
control their birth rate, millions would die - isn't that evil?
From Jim M.:
I can't think of him as more evil than, say, John Gacy or Jeffrey
Dahmer. There are probably lots of exceedingly "good" people (measured
from the view of *not* being evil in any way) that have had no impact
on the world whatsoever, except perhaps as role models to those who
have known them. Those who have "*done* good", like some of the
examples Dave mentions, tend to be less perfect -- it's hard to be
effective without stepping on a few toes here and there. How
interesting that it's easier to come up with evil examples than good
ones. Dave's comments are interesting, but I wonder whether there's
not a tendency to confuse the inherent nature of a person with the
results of acts. For instance, McVeigh may have killed a lot more
people, but There is a web site called the "Serial Killer Hit List"
that might be useful, at http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/serial1.html .
Fairly strong stuff, but if we're talkin' 'bout EEEEvil . . .
From Craig B.:
I think Dave had a point, this is something of a can o' worms, because
as we all know, there are no moral absolutes in the cold, existential
universe we live in...or something like that, I dunno, it sure sounded
good when I typed it. But seriously, for example, one of my top
contenders would be Mao Tse-tung, leader of the Gang of Four, who
killed off somewhere between 20 and 67 million (estimates vary) of his
countrymen. But my parents recently returned from a trip there, and
his picture is still hanging all over the place.
Similarly with Mohammed, the Prophet of the Islamic faith. An amazing
number of people alive today would put him at the top of any list of
"Good" people, but if "Name the top 10 Good People of all time" were
to be asked on _Family Feud_, he wouldn't even be on the list.
Is Jack Kevorkian Good or Evil?
For personal selections, I'd probably add Mao (above), Stalin (who
killed off ~10 million misc farmers while "collectivizing" their
farms)(and there were at least a couple of other "purges" in the USSR
in the first half of this century that killed off similar numbers of
people), good ol' Pol Pot, Adolph Eichmann and the rest of Hitler's
buddies, Genghis Khan (his Mongol hordes killed off an amazing number
of people in Asia and Europe in the early 1200's (like 35 million
Chinese, I forget the figures for Europe, I know he hit Poland hard).
All of which leads me to wonder, what's worse? Mass, impersonal murder
of millions, or attention to detail? There was some nut- case in
California who got caught some years back, his deal was driving
around, picking up hitchhiking young men, then he'd knock 'em out,
wire them up to a 4x8 sheet of plywood and torture them to death.
Similarly, I've heard stories of some of the so-called "scientific
research" conducted in the WWII concentration camps. Are the doctors
involved more or less evil than Eichmann?
I'll write more on "Good" when I get a chance...sad fact is, as Jim
observes, it's easier to come up with ideas for the "evil" list than
the "good" list...but I wonder if this is a survival trait, as it's
more important to be aware of evil (which can kill you or hurt you)
than it is to be aware of good (which can help you, but in general
you're doing okay on your own if you can avoid evil). BTW, a couple of
excellent sources for this kind of discussion would be a copy of the
_Guinness Book of World Records_ and one or more of them there _Book
of Lists_...I seem to recall that at least one of them had a list of
"evil" people.
From Mike H.:
There is another aspect, and that is while we tend to single out an
"individual" as being good or evil, not infrequently as in everything
else it is the collective environment that results in the fame or
infamy of a particular person.
In post WWI Germany, if Hitler did not rise to power, someone else
would have. Perhaps the someone else would have beaten the U.S. to the
atom bomb... or managed to throw off the shackles of the punitive
Versailles "treaty" and institute a democracy (not likely in that era,
but possible). Europe was not known for peace and tranquillity back
then, it is a recent phenomena for that area.
While comment is made of Stalin, does anyone realize that the British
and French applied considerable pressure in the Dumas (but mostly with
Czar Nicholas) to continue Russian participation in WWI? The
continuing debacle led to the rise of the Bolsheviks and thence
Stalin-- heir to millions of deaths. Is Stalin the sole holder of
opprobrium here or does some get spread around to the others that
caused the environment that lead to his ascendency? In other
circumstances Stalin would be just the guy next door... or you or I
could be a Stalin... how do we know?
From Craig B.:
Okay, I've been trying to come up with a nice, big, juicy list of Good
People, and I'm finding it's harder than I thought it would be. And I
think I found a simple reason why: it's a lot easier to do something
big and bad than it is to do something big and good.
Like, if you had scales and put Stalin's massacres on the left side,
what could you put on the right-hand side to balance it? Curing
cancer? Ending world hunger? I don't know. I guess you could put
people like Jonas Salk (and others who have saved countless lives by
developing vaccines) in the Good category. But with the occasional
exception (Dr. Martin Luther King), there really aren't many
individuals who you can really say have done good things that have
affected millions of people. And someone mentioned Jimmy Carter, a man
who I agree is probably the only "good" man to hold the office in the
past few decades. But how much good did he really do while he was
president? One could argue that he's done the country more good
working with Habitat For Humanity than he did while he was in office
(not to slag the man, but it seems that Nice Guys Make Lousy
Presidents).
I guess charity is one way that people (rich people, at least) can do
Big Works Of Good. Perhaps Carnagie belongs on the list, for all of
those libraries he funded? (I know that the library in my hometown of
Edwardsville was a Carnegie library). But to do so means that Ted
Turner is Really, Really Good for giving all that money away.
And also, there is something like the Heisenberg principle at work
here: the very best people don't seek publicity for their good deeds.
The unknown heroes who work tirelessly with the poor and the sick,
firemen who risk and lose their lives saving people...these are some
of the best of the race, but few people know who they are. Even rich
people fall into this category: in the last three months I've seen at
least a couple of news- paper accounts of wealthy people who've been
very quietly donating tens of millions of dollars anonymously for
years.
That said, still the question remains: what Good Deed balances the
slaughter of millions?
From Daniel P.:
These are all pretty obvious... Have you ever read Dostoyevski's (sp)
``Notes from Underground''? Fiction, but describes a kind of violence
we all participate in to some extent. Some of those you listed are
simply mass murderers. How about a mass of murderers -- like the 3
million + KKKers who were active in the 1910's - 1930's? Or those who
for the sake of political advancement, promote the death penalty even
when it is applied to mentally retarded people who were juveniles at
the time they committed their crimes? (Bill Clinton, then governor of
Arkansas, went back to his home state to sign a death warrant for a
mentally retarded kid while campaigning for the presidency.) Or the
rest of the Americans who voted for this kind of thing? Or how about
when nobody's life is at stake, but rather what about individual
belief? Consider the Scope's trial... On one side are people who
believe people's immortal souls will be lost if they do not hear and
accept a picture of Christianity that is built on ancient Babylonian
mythology and cosmogeny... and the others who feel that they will do
their children a grave disservice in dealing with a modern world if
they do not learn the principles of science and critical analysis. Or
more, that people feel they have no need to offer charity, that it is
not a part of their moral conscience? That it is better to lock
somebody up and permanently disfranchise them, than to try to promote
their participation in legitimate society?
My own sense is that evil people have done far less than evil ideas.
From Dina R.:
I object to Lincoln's being on the good list for freeing the slaves
because it was a necessary political move and not from the goodness of
his heart. if not freeing the slaves gave him more support during the
war, he may have very well not done that. Aand i think that stalin and
hitler were more evil than genghis khan, but that's probably just
cultural conditioning, I don't know the inner motives of any of them
too well. Hey, do you know that story about when genghis khan wanted
to take this city that was behind a wall and he couldn't get into, so
he surrounded it and told the people that he'd leave if they gave him
10000 swallows and 1000 cats? Wwhen they did, he set them on fire and
let them go and they went back into the city and set it on fire and
burned it down so he could take over it. That just has style.
"When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've
never tried before." -- Mae West
From Brad P.:
I would definitely add Saddam Hussein to the Bad list. Not only did he
invade Kuwait for no good reason, and torch the oil wells on his way
out, etc., and also force his people to fight for his foolish cause,
but he has gassed and tortured his own people, killed hundreds and
thousands, drained the lands of the Reed people (Ruwa would know their
real name) in southern Iraq, causing genocide there, and destroying
thicker culture. He is an ego maniac, etc., his photos all over the
place. etc.
I am not so big on history so as to know history's worst characters. I
am wonder if Torqemada should be so high, since, in theory, he thought
he was pursuing the good of the church, etc. Shouldn't, really, the
Pope that appointed him as Grand Inquisitor be on this list then.
I don't know a thing about Vlad Tepes. But shouldn't he be much lower
on the list?
I would rate Hitler higher, perhaps at the top. And, I wonder, does
Eichman belong, given that he is really in Hitler's shadow. He would
not have existed but for Hitler. Stalin, also, should be much higher.
He killed some 20 million peasants, recall, and was ruthless etc. in
every other way. Anyway, in today's NEW YORK TIMES, on page B8, is a
superb book review on a book about Hitler. The book is "The Hitler of
History" by John Lukacs, and it addresses many of the issues you are
concerned with. Check it out and you'll see.
Interesting that so many are in the 20th century. Weapons of mass
destruction, mass propaganda, etc., have given evil minded sorts even
greater power, when they get to power. You might want to comment on
that.
H.H. Holmes certainly sounds interesting. Never heard of him, either,
so his inclusion would definitely make the book interesting.
I think you need to do a bit of discussion about what makes evil, what
is evil and good. I don't think you can define it solely in terms of a
body count. But rather it must have something to do with purity of
motive, of ego, etc. Someone who is not merely crazy, but knows what
good is and turns away, out of selfish interest. Doesn't that define
it. Evils is really putting your own selfish interests above everyone
one else's, in a manner that uses coercion and violence to achieve it.
In this respect, Hitler might actually drop on the list, inasmuch as,
from what we know, he sincerely believe in his Cause. Whereas someone
who knows better, supposedly, would rate higher. But, still, coming
from a supposedly "Christian Culture" Hitler should have known better.
And shouldn't we hold people to a higher standard in the 20th century,
when ideas about good and human rights and all are in wider
circulation? =46or example, this is why I think Saddam Hussain is so
bad. He knows what the world thinks of him, he has lived through the
genocide of Nazism, and should know better.
Now, about good people. I like, of course, that you have Baha'u'llah
-- and would put him at the top of the list in some respect. On the
other hand, theologically speaking, from a Baha'i point of view, it
would be unfair to put Baha'u'llah -- or Buddha or Christ or Moses or
Muhammad, etc., on the list at all, since we believe they are not
really ordinary men, but rather all are incarnations of pure God, of
the pure God-head, or as, we say, manifestations of God. So there can
be no evil in them at all.
If I were to draw up such a list, I would make a point about this,
talking about these figures in this way, and then excluding them from
the list. But, I know, from your point of view, this does not make
sense. So, looking at it from your perspective, I would have to
include these people, since they are so manifestly good.
If we look at goodness in terms of deeds, rather than teachings, and
if we define good as the opposite of my definition of evil, that is to
say, people who have sacrificed their self interests in favor of
serving others and helping others, then, still, Baha'u'llah would come
out very high, in that he walked away from a very comfortable life as
a Prince to go endure a life of torture and exile to promote his
concept of Good.
But if we exclude the Manifestations of God, I would suggest the
following possible additions:
Abdu'l-Baha -- Baha'u'llah's son, of course, was an ordinary man. Yet
his life was one long sacrifice and tenure of service. He had, for
example, only two coats. And he was always giving one of them away to
the poor. Giving the shirt off his back, so to speak. Lots of more
stories of self-sacrifice, etc. Gandhi -- a similar life of self
sacrifice and working for other people's go= od.
Martin Luther King -- likewise, courage in the face of fire, promoting
a good cause.
Going back in history, you might want to consider some of the Saints.
Assisi perhaps? Augustine? I don't know much about them, but there
must be something to what they have all done.
And what about great scientists who have shown courage in the face of
repression. Gallelio was imprisoned for his views. Or the
contributions of Louis Pasteur.
Then there would be the deeds of statements. Thomas Jefferson,
perhaps. Ben Franklin. You listed Abraham Lincoln. Are there others?
And what about people who have risen above and beyond the call of
duty. Done things at risk to themselves when they didn't have to.
Isn't that a high form of Good? I am thinking of people like
Schindler, etc. Although I suppose what counts is doing this
consistently, over a long period of time, over a life time. So, in
that regard, Mother Teresa is probably a good candidate for the list
(although, frankly, I think she has received rather too much
publicity.) And what about someone like a Franklin D. Roosevelt, who,
in some ways, was responsible for ridding the world of Hitler. And who
sacrificed his health and life in some ways in the battle? He was a
politician, it is true, and so many does not qualify. But he must be
counted as one of this century's greatest and most influential men. He
was also involved in founding the UN. His speech, the Four Freedoms.
etc.
And who else has won the Nobel Peace Prize?
From Diane R.:
And while we're at it, where are people like Albert Schweitzer? Or
Mohandas Gandhi? Or Florence Nightingale? Or that guy whose name I've
forgotten who hid and saved so many Jews in his factory during the
Naxi occupation in WW2? Or various winners of the Nobel Peace Prize?
And don't be saying that Lincoln "freed the slaves": I think
historians will argue that point with you, although it *is* convenient
shorthand. And did the Number 2 spot go to Baha'ullah because you know
a lot about the Baha'i faith, or really because people nominated him
for that spot?
From Phil J.:
I certainly agree with your placement of these people into their
respective "good" and "evil" categories. I would, of course like to
see Jesus at the top of the good list, as would those of other faiths
like to see, for example, Mohammed, at the top of the list. difficult,
since we have no good historical record to go by, and Millions have
needlessly died in their names due to our animal behavior. Man's
inhumanity towards his fellow Man knows no bounds...nevertheless, the
basic message is to treat others decently,which is what we are always
trying to "get around"....you would think the ten commandments say it
all...ok, I can't "rip-off" my neighbor, nor his ass, etc.; but how
much can I steal from him before it is considered
"ripping-off"?...always pushing the limits...like a child. which is
why from ancient times we have had multitudes of laws and regulations,
and lawyer-types...
From Lars N.:
Today I perused your list of good and evil people, which I guess is a
matter for conjecture. My own list would include Churchill (more
people died through the bombing of Dresden than in Hiroshima and
Nagasakiya combined) and that when the war was virtually over.
The west stood by when Ida Amin killed his countryman, they went to
Bocassas wedding as well. The UN condemned the Israelis for rescuing
the hostages in Antebe.
So if there is a spare spot on the evil list please include "Those who
let it happen".
From Ben B.:
First of all, Vlad, more formally Vladislav, impaled 10,000 men and
women when the world population was just peaking over three million.
He deserves the spot for number one most Evil man. Secondly, Octavian
of Rome is entirely missing from the list. He burned down the Great
Library at Alexandria. Had this event not taken place the Dark Ages
would have never come about, nor would slavery have existed in the New
World. Humanity would have been far more prepared for diversity. The
Spanish Inquisition would probably never have happened either. I have
successfully argued that Octavian was the most Evil man in all
history, on the grounds that had he not done what he did, most evil
acts after would never have come about. Besides, Rome needs a
representative on that list.
Perhaps Lincoln does not belong on any such list. He freed the slaves
yes, but Socrates once said: Always examine the motives of those in
power. What were Lincoln's motives? He, at various points in his life,
owned slaves. Was his motive to free the slaves, or to hold power of
the nation united. I would venture toward the latter. He was no saint,
nor should he be seen as one. After all, all he did was unite the
nation, the slaves were not truly freed until well after the 1960's.
Political and Social freedom are very different things, neither of
which African-Americans had for a very long time after Lincoln was
dead. The south did experience a short lived political/social
backlash, in which African-Americans had extended rights, but that
was, as I said, shortly lived. Newton is a far more fitting candidate
for the Good list, he created much of the modern world. Sometimes Good
is complimented by evil. Had Lincoln truly been a man of goodness he
would have rescued the slaves, burned the southern crops, and expelled
every state south of the Ohio river from the Union. Instead place
Newton on this list, he contributed much more to humanity, and was one
of the most influential persons in history. Early founders of Taoism
and Hinduism may also make fitting additions to this list.
The Dalai Lama is the same immortal being reincarnated time and time
again, each time, at the moment of death, revealing his next identity.
When we Westerners make a reference to any one of his physical forms
we tend to forget that they are all the same guy, according to His
theology. The other night I heard a news report on the new Lama, in
this report it was stated that he would have to strive to meet the
standards of the previous Lama. The report neglected to mention that
they were the same man. If we chose to look at any one religion as
basically accurate in theology, must we not look at all religions in
the same fashion? Although I do like the way in which your page gives
no factual credit to the theology behind any of the religions, perhaps
that is the better way to go--to be agnostic rather than generally
faithful.
From Rachel R.:
First of all, I'd like to say that I love your site...it's one of the
best things I've ever seen on the great, vacuous monster we call the
Internet. You asked for comments about the list of good and evil
people, so here goes. I do not believe in concepts such as good and
evil - the world is infinitely complex, and thus reducing the immense
scale of gray to simple black and white is a dangerous thing. This
said, I feel compelled to argue with a few of your choices, just
because I can.
Mother Teresa, although she accomplished many "good" things, would be
nowhere on my list of good people. She vehemently preached against
homosexuality and abortion. She was known to baptize children against
their will - given the choice of saving a sick child's life or
baptizing it, she would choose the latter. Not being a Catholic
myself, I cannot accept this.
Back on the religious theme, Jesus wasn't so wonderful either. At one
point, a rich woman was criticized for anointing him with expensive
perfume, rather than using her money for something more important -
say, feeding the poor. Jesus replied (and I'm paraphrasing, of course)
"Do not criticize her, for the poor will always be with you, and I am
here for a short time only." Also, what about all the atrocities that
have been committed in his name - not that he would approve, but I
think that should be considered.
How about Vlad Tepez's contribution to literature? If he hadn't been
such a monster, Dracula might never have been written. Just a thought.
Keep up the good work!
From Anoop:
Like others I was surprised at the omission of a few people in your
list of the 'Good'. 1. Mahatma Gandhi : I am an Indian and owe a lot
to him. But so do a whole lot of other people and countries. Showed us
the strength in truth. righteousness and nonviolence. 2. Martin Luther
King. 3. Nelson Mandela. Both of them more than once acknowledged
their own debt to the Mahatma. Incidentally Mahatma means 'Great
Soul'. What better name for a man like him ?
From Ross M.:
Your lists have certainly generated the controversy and stimulated
thinking as I'm sure you desired. Reading your reasons for putting
people on the list was as interesting as who was on it. By the way,
I'm responding through e-mail because there was no other indicated way
to post a response. I would have to say the motivations are the mark
of good and evil, and even those are suspect when put in terms of
religion and politics. Were the Iriquois who tortured their captives
evil because they believed they would gain spiritual strength if their
victim screamed out his essence, or were they simply practicing a
common belief among the five nation confederacy? Was Genghis Kahn evil
when he used total destruction of those who opposed him to spare the
lives of his own soldiers by preventing future battles. Don't forget
that once he conquered a territory he wanted it productive. When he
killed it was purposeful, and the threat he posed led to numerous
peaceful surrenders. Under the Kahn's rule, Genghis' and Kublai's at
least, a "pax mongol" existed in their empire which encouraged trade
and bettered the lives of more people than were killed in the
conquests. If you use the threat of mass destruction as a qualifier
for evil in those terms then every president of the United States,and
most of the rest of the government and American people are just as
evil. Didn't we bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to prevent more killing of
our own warriors? And didn't we, successfully, hold the threat of the
same destruction over our main rival to prevent further mass warfare?
How different is that from Genghis making an example of some cities
which resisted him to get peaceful acquisition of others? (One could
argue he had no right to want the other cities in the first place, but
that opens up another can of worms in the virtues vs. problems of
imperialism and colonialism.) Besides before condemning the Kahns and
Torquemada, look at what other divinely inspired slaughters have
occurred. Read Joshua 6:21, where under God's order the Israelite
tribe "utterly destroyed the city, both men and women, young and old,
oxen, sheep and asses, with the edge of the sword". The only people
spared were two harlots and their families. Because they'd sheltered
the Israelite spies. This is in the same bible where just a few books
earlier God had condemned harlots and other adulterers to death by
stoning! Apparently even God has a hard time figuring out relative
good and evil.
Then we could get into the Machiavalian aspect. He is often regarded
as evil, his writings in "The Prince" are usually summed up with the
phrase "the ends justify the means". We tend to regard that as an
unsavory way of thinking, but to Machiavelli, it made more sense to
have an opponent assassinated than to go to war against him. We have
laws in the United States against assassinating our ideological foes,
but what makes more sense? Risk a few agents to assassinate Hussein,
or send 100,000 and more Coalition troops into full scale battle
against an Iraqi army that had no idea what a modern air attack could
do to it? I don't feel like looking up the casualty figures from the
U. S. invasion of Panama, but on the good/evil scale, were any
casualties more than one on either side worth more than the
"dishonorable" act of taking out Noriega the individual?
Good and evil are sticky subjects. The followers of Moses who killed
their wives and children then committed suicide at Massdada are
revered, yet the followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh are
considered weird cultists because they did exactly the same thing
under an outside threat to their beliefs.
I'm quitting this commentary now. It's going to take me a while to put
together lists of good and evil people with a minimum of cultural bias
From: Dan K.
Hi Cliff, Thanks for the interesting site. I spent quite a bit of time
on it. I was looking at the good and evil people and I noticed that
one remarkable humanitarian is missing: Raoul Wallenberg. He is
credited with saving the lives of 100,000 people. How many individuals
in history can you say that about? In fact there was a direct
encounter between him and Eichmann on the platform of the Budapest
train station as he intervened even in the eleventh hour to get Jews
headed for Auschwitz off the train. Thanks again and I would like to
be on the mailing list for the new books that come out,
From: Carol K.:
) Dear Cliff, Your lists, and many of your visitors' comments, tend to
assess degrees of evil on the basis of numbers affected -- but those
who commit mass murder in the name of some perverted ideal are driven
by ideas which surely qualify them as insane. While insanity is not an
excuse, it does serve to explain the otherwise unfathomable...and, I
think, it may dilute the Evil quotient.
But what about the thug who guns down a convenience store clerk for a
six-pack? Imagine the thought process (if such people think at all):
"I want a beer. Let's kill that guy."
Do those thugs have the same mental defect that (I believe) Torquemada
had? I don't think so -- there are just too many of them. They can't
ALL be born that way.
No, I think most of them KNOW what they're doing is wrong -- they just
don't care. Yes, they are often the products of an impoverished and
violent upbringing; yes, American television offers far more evil role
models than good ones; yes, drugs and liquor drive otherwise good
people to acts of desperation. But I contend that if you have the
slightest shred of human decency in you, there is NOTHING, nothing in
the WORLD, that could induce you to kill so lightly.
So when I turn on the local news and watch the endless parade of
sullen, cold-eyed young men on trial for acts of appalling cruelty, I
see in each one of them a darkness at least as profound as that in the
heart of Hitler.
From Sherry M.:
On good and evil. Don't write a book on it. Books written on good and
evil are usually either trite or pedantic. Either way the issue is so
fraught with pitfalls you will be open to critics from one point of
view or another. Consider the "Golden Rule" of the western tradition
"do unto others what you would have done unto you. Would you want your
local masochist obeying this? Or the "Silver Rule" associated with
eastern religions "Do not do unto others what you would not do unto
yourself" Why shouldn't someone be standing on the bank of the river
as you go swirling by and think "Soon he's going to die and be with
God. I wish I was drowning".
The problem with good and evil is you can't get past the dichotomies.
Even Yaweh, giving the law to the Hebrews in Sinai says "Thou shalt
not kill" (Ex.20.13) then spends the next several chapters laying out
the law and denoting which ones the perperpertators should be executed
for. Not to mention the numerous massacres (e.g. Jericho, Josh.6.21.)
divinely ordered. My advice is stick to the beauty and, so far as we
know, objective truth of math and physics. Morality is even more
imprecise than chemistry, as I'm sure Dr. Asimov would say.
From: G. Chandy::
Dear Dr. Pickover: Marvellous Home Page! Shall be returning to it
again and again and again... A couple of strong disagreements: Apropos
of your list of good people there is one person whose leaving out of
the list you should justify: M.K. Gandhi Apropos of your list of
favourite books: please do read 'Story of San Michele' by Axel Munthe
- and tell me if you do not find it to be unquestionably one of the
greatest books of this (or any other) century. More later, when I
revisit your utterly fascinating page.
From: Drew H.:
It was not the people that were chosen that I found most interesting I
believe it was the illustration that defining humanity in such linear
terms of good and evil has a tendency to be inadequate and
frustrating.
I also believe that there is a recurring theme between your attempts
to define good and evil and your mathematical questions. As a
programmer, attempting model real world objects the greatest challenge
in defining them is the definition falls into what we call a "gray"
area. How do we define concepts that have no bounds of expression? How
do make binary computers truly understand "close" or "kind of" or
"like". It is as fruitless, or challenging, as defining beauty on a
linear scale.
I believe with the advent of chaos theory we have the beginnings of
tools necessary to approach definition of these abstract concepts. Who
knows maybe we will have a "Satan Set" that persons of evil, or in the
neighbourhood of evil, will be bounded by.
Q: (Forgive the generalization) Aren't you a bit of a "wild duck" for
IBM?
From Dugan B.:
Hw the heaven can you rank Jesus Christ 3rd? He is the most spiritual
person that ever did.
From Kntaro T.:
Hi Cliff, I have a comment to make about your Top Ten good people
list, and one which someone with your web page and your book
preferences is sure to understand:
One measure of goodness depends on what extent a person does something
for self-glorification. In particular, I think action for which public
recognition is the aim significantly diminishes the value of an
action. This belief arises out of my personal biases for judging
goodness, which are (1) that goodness depends entirely on the
intention of the actor, proverbs about paved roads to hell
notwithstanding, (2) that acting for reasons of gaining recognition
are ultimately wholly ego-gratifying, and (3) that ego-gratification
is at the root of all human evil. [Incidentally, (1) makes sense
because judging a person by the consequences he or she had on the
world is always ultimately a futile exercise, since no one will ever
know.] This reasoning immediately makes suspect many famous people who
are widely held to be good. Frankly, I doubt, for example, that Mother
Theresa did it for the fame -- she had been doing what she did long
before the world took notice.
( cont'd )
jum...@my-deja.com
But, for example, Gandhi, whom some of
your respondents listed as a perfect candidate is suspect. Did he
really do it for India? Or did he do it to secure his place in
history? He is said to have slept with beautiful naked women to prove
his ability to resist such worldly temptations -- but who would need
to demonstrate such an ability except one who wishes to be known by
them? I, personally, would change places with Gandhi (even in his
grave) if it meant I would have similar world-wide recognition for
having done good, and that suggests that what he did overall would be
"easy" for me. What would be difficult (and hence, good?) would be to
be the nameless worker in the soup kitchen or the anonymous Oscar
Schindler-type who performs good consistently for the sake of good,
with little or no recognition for it. Would I trade my life for that?
Right now, probably not. Yet I would recognize those people as people
with good intentions were I to meet them. That suggests that those
people are doing the most difficult kind of good -- that without the
incidental reward of recognition. So, I don't know if it was
intentional, but I think it's good that your top ten list is short of
ten -- the rest should be saved for the anonymous figures who did good
but never took the credit. Finally, one last comment -- surely a
graphics person can do better than that composite of you and Piers.
;-) I hope we have a chance to meet some time -- where do you spend
most of your time? Yorktown Heights? Wisconsin? Regards, Kentaro
Toyama Microsoft Research
From Dennis G.:
I was just looking at your WEB site once again, and I've been thinking
about one question for a while, namely the one about Good People or
what Good Deed balances the slaughter of millions. The road to hell
may be paved with good intentions, but the road to heaven must be
paved with results, and I would suggest these individuals as Good:
Alexander Flemming for his discovery of penicillin
Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, for their work
in ending the Cold War.
Louis Pasteur, in his effort to make French beer better than German
beer, developed his pasteurization process for milk that saved
uncounted millions of children from from death or serious illness.
Jonas Salk, for the polio vaccine.
Newton and Tesla to whom we owe much of our material comfort.
John Harrison for invention of the marine chronometer, motivated in
part by the loss of some 2,000 men in a storm off the coast of the
Scilly Isles.
The guy who devised the 401(k) plan for common people; I can't
remember his name, but he was featured in an article in Fortune
Magazine last year. He didn't make a lot of money himself, but he was
developing 401(k)'s for rich people, and his religious convictions led
him to do something for ordinary people. Must have been some
interesting mathematics here. I'd like to see this guy considered for
a Nobel prize in economics.
From Catt F.:
Some names I thought were missing from the list:
Evil - Caligula
Good - Gandhi, St. Francis of Asissi (sp?), Benjamin Franklin, Mozart,
Tesla
Also - I often do book reviews for various publications on a freelance
basis and would be interested in receiving review copies.
From: Mona Marie K.:
Hi Cliff,
The Top Ten Good: You ask for suggestions or alternate ranking. I have
no interest in debating relative evils, so I'll stick to the good.
Unfortunately, history is not one of my strengths so I can't make more
than a few simple statements: my main suggestion is to put Muhammad
before Baha'u'llah. All the rest seems okay, although there may be
some good lost somewhere in the cracks! 1.Buddha - Buddhism, far more
than Christianity or Islam, has a very strong pacifist element. The
orientation toward nonviolence has played a significant role in the
political history of Buddhist countries.
I would put either Buddha or the Prophet Muhammad as #1.
Given the reasons you state for Baha'u'llah of the Baha'is, I would
suggest putting Muhammad before Baha'u'llah, since he taught the same
thing, 1300 years earlier, to far more people. Without Islam, the
Baha'i faith would have never developed. The teachings of Muhammad had
a profound and immediate beneficial effect on society and the advent
of mathematics, astronomy, and science in general, whereas Baha'u'llah
has not had such an effect on our society. At the height of Islam,
religious tolerance was present in abundance and societal ills were
low. Islam is also meant to be a universal faith. Muslims also believe
in the oneness of humanity, and also devote themselves to the
abolition of racial prejudice, class prejudice, and other injustices
of all kinds. Islam, in its true form, has no priesthood: the muslim
can communicate directly with God at any time and in any way. No
priestly intercession is ever necessary. Muslim men and women are
equal in the sight of God and Islamic society - although you might
realize this by looking at the culturally distorted representations of
Islam in our world today. The presence of a muslim clergy is mainly
for advice-giving capability due to the massive amount of Islamic
literature that can be studied. Muslim clergy are also recognized for
their familiarity with Islamic jurisprudence, or the Shariah. Although
ritual forms of prayer are observed, Islam also aims to guide society
spiritually, socially, politically, and economically. Unfortunately,
in today's world, muslims are often not true to the spirit of Islam.
But that does not reflect upon the message taught by the Prophet
Muhammad, nor his inherent goodness. Islam also maintains that all the
great world religions point to the one god, Allah, but that the
messages were often muddled, confused, or lost over time - hence the
apparent differences in faiths. Furthermore, jihad does not actually
mean holy war, but instead means 'struggle in the path of Allah.' War
is not encouraged by Islam - in fact, the word Islam is derived from
the Arabic root SLM, pronounced Salm, which literally means peace,
submission, and obedience.
2.Baha'u'llah - Baha'is believe that all the founders of the world's
great religions have been manifestations of God and agents of a
progressive divine plan for the education of the human race. Despite
their apparent differences, the world's great religions, according to
the Baha'is, teach an identical truth. Baha'is believe that Baha'ullah
(d. 1892) was a manifestation of God, who in His essence is
unknowable. Baha'ullah's special function was to overcome the disunity
of religions and establish a universal faith. Baha'is believe in the
oneness of humanity and devote themselves to the abolition of racial,
class, and religious prejudices. The great bulk of Baha'i teachings is
concerned with social ethics; the faith has no priesthood and does not
observe ritual forms in its worship. Putting the Dalai Lama after
Muhammad and Baha'u'llah is also fine with me!
3.Dalai Lama - head of the dominant Dge-lugs-pa order of Tibetan
Buddhists and, until 1959, both spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet.
In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of his
nonviolent campaign to end Chinese domination of Tibet.
Also fine:
4.Jesus Christ - for the preaching of love.
5.Moses - just the idea of "resting on the seventh day" improved the
life of countless people.
I'm not so sure Mother Theresa had such a profound good effect on
humanity in general as did the other people mentioned in this list. I
would put some beneficial scientist in her place. Perhaps Louis
Pasteur?
6.Mother Theresa - Once Mother Theresa was asked how she could
continue day after day after day, visiting the terminally ill: feeding
them, wiping their brows, giving them comfort as they lay dying. And
she said, "It's not hard because in each one, I see the face of Christ
in one of His more distressing disguises."
7.Abraham Lincoln - for freeing the slaves.
Okay, but what about Martin Luther King? Or Gandhi?
From: Marius L.:
Hallo Clifford
While looking at some fractal resources over the weekend, I changed
upon your pages. After exhausting the fractal and chaos section, I had
a look at the more "esoteric" pieces on display. It was with great
interest that I read the piece: The Scales of Good and Evil.
While busy with this, in the background the death on Diana was again
force-fed through the commercial grinder. Some people would argue that
Diana should be on your list of good people. Taken from a historical
perspective, the question immediately arises wether or not any mention
would be made about Mother Theresa, who died in the same period. Those
same people would, if presented with a list and without any outside
influences, most probably select both of them as very good people.
If the above sounds like illogical rambling(1), let me try and
completely rephrase: How much hype surrounding people are just
propaganda with hidden motives?
In the case of Diana, commercial interest keeps the machine oiled. How
many people would buy a coffee-cup with and image of Mother Theresa on
the side? Of Diana? Who was better? Or were they equal?
The same can be said for most of the other people on the your list,
both good and bad.
A piece that kind of sums it all up:
And in the end In all that we say And all that we do All that we leave
behind Is a trail of memories Will you remember Those that are
enclosed Within the border of your mind?
Rephrase the third last line:
And in the end In all that we say And all that we do All that we leave
behind Is a trail of memories How will you remember Those that are
enclosed Within the border of your mind?
You are welcome to use the above if you want to as long as
acknowledgment is given. I do retain the copyright.
Greeting from Afrika Marius
From David A.:
Hello Cliff,
Loved the discussion of good and evil characters - great choices for
the evil ones. A couple of quick thoughts - I'd also question Abe
Lincoln's inclusion on the 'good' list, for the reasons of political
expediency behind freeing the slaves that some others have mentioned.
I'd also like to nominate L. Ron Hubbard for a spot on the 'evil'
list, for enslaving many minds and making a lot of money doing it.
Dave Anderson
From Terry F.:
Your lists displayed an obvious pro-religious politically pro-western
bias. Abraham Lincoln?!?? "For freeing the slaves?!!?" Moses because
resting every seventh day is desirable?? As if working six days a week
is acceptable? Thanks for nothing!! And never mind Moses' 300 or
whatever other mostly bloodthirsty patriarchal and authoritarian
commandments! For the evil list, how about Columbus, Cortez, or JP
Morgan?? Plenty of people did more harm than some guy who gassed
people at his bed and breakfast, but you refuse to see it because of
your biases. Andrew Jackson killed more people coldbloodedly when he
sent them on the Trail of Tears, even if they weren't rich white old
ladies. And lots of people "preached love", but few screwed the world
up as badly as the followers of jesus did.
From Anonymous:
Perhaps you should rename it the most Charismatic or Powerful Leaders.
Most of the people you named did not accomplish these deeds alone,
their ability to lead, and feed of off general trends and hysteria of
the masses, is what made all of these atrocities/good deeds happen. No
one personally murdered millions, or fed millions, it was their
ability to inspire others that created the effects described. Any
World leader/Dictator or Religious Icon does nothing more than fan the
flames of general emotion. Having the ability to discern general
trends in the population and utilise them does not in essence make
someone evil, Hitler is no more evil than the thousands of people who
carried out his orders, he was one man.. In fact we are all one
person, so unless you work alone (as in serial
murderes/pedeophiles/abusers etc) I do not believe you can be held
accountable for the "whole" . That then leaves all who participated in
any way, or who did not participate but stayed silent accountable. Of
course this is just my opinion. We all have the capacity for good/evil
if you get us at the right time, especially if we get caught up in mob
hysteria. Thus accordingly I would imagine that you would have to take
all Leaders of off your list and concentrate on individuals. Just my
thoughts. Peace
From Jeff T.:
I've enjoyed your personal pick of the 12 vilest and the 10
best......as someone mentioned- yin/yang. But most of those mentioned
had a definite lean towards one side! Vlad Tepes surprised me. I had
thought he killed a few people (well that is bad enough), but THAT
many? HH Holmes is a big surprise as I have never heard of him. I
heard that Timur-i-Leng (or Tamurlane) left a pyramid of 70,000 skulls
after the conquest of Isfahan, Persia. I be- leive he was the last of
the Mongol leaders. Josip Stalin goes to the top of my list. It is
becoming more likely that he is responsible for 30 million deaths of
his country- men. Fortunately my grandparents left that country seven
years before he came to power- as "native Germans" or Volgadeutsch
they would likely have had such a fate.
From Rich B.:
Well, it was a big topic, but you seem to be off to a good start.
I would like to suggest one more person for your good list - Ghandi.
Read a biography - absolutely amazing. The things he was able to
accomplish through non-violence is an incredibly inspiring story - he
managed to free his country from the grip of the British. Without war.
Of course, the list of things he did not manage to accomplish is sad
as well. He opposed the creation of Pakistan as a separate Moslem
country. Even his harshest critics admit that he had a good point
there. If they did, the fact that these two countries are the newest
members of the "Nuclear Club" should persuade them.
Not bad, seeing as how was an actual person. Not like another one of
your choices.
I refer, of course, to Jesus. If mythological figures are to be
included, The Tick, a mighty force opposing evil (at least on Saturday
morning cartoons), should be considered.
As far as your contention that Jesus preached love; he may have indeed
done so, but don't forget some other memorable verses attributed to
the "Lamb of God:" Luke 14:26 "If any man come to me, and hate not his
father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters,
yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." This from your
preacher of love, a commandment to hate. Also, Matthew 13:41-42 "The
Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of
his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And
shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and
gnashing of teeth." I don't feel that preaching an everlasting hell is
appopriate for someone on your list of all-time good guys.
But my favorite one, in Jesus' own words: Matthew 10:34 "Think not
that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a
sword." And that promise has surely been kept. Think also of the great
wrongs inflicted by followers of Jesus - the Inquisition, the
Crusades, the Salem Witch Trials, the sufferings inflicted upon the
natives by the (largely) Christian settlers form Europe, the support
of slavery by the Southern Baptists before, during, and after the
American Civil War.
Ghandi did not do, or inspire, any of these things. Of course, he
hasn't had as long to inspire them either...
As far as Mother Theresa goes, I suggest reading "The Missionary
Position." She was an outspoken critic of birth control, even though
she lived in the midst of an overcrowded land. She considered
suffering to be a blessing, because her lord Jesus had suffered on the
cross. She certainly did more in the face of poverty and suffering
than I could ever hope to, but she could have done more by advocating
birth control.
From Ned H.:
Dear Mr. Pickover, I read the list you have on your website of the
most evil and most benevolent people that have ever lived, and there
are two things that I would change. If I made such a list, I would
rank Adolf Eichmann first. Eichmann was not simply sitting silently by
in Hitler's "shadow," as one of your respondents said. Eichmann was
the sole orchestrator of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. He was
truly Hitler's right hand man. And at the end of the war, he did not
even have the bit of conscience to turn himself in to the war crimes
tribunal. He escaped Germany through a secret Nazi organization called
Odessa, which gave him a fake identity. He was finally tracked down in
Argentina over a decade later. After hearing his death sentence at his
trial, he said, and I quote, " I don't mind going into the grave,
because I have placed six million Jews in the grave before me." One
thing that you also have to remember about men like Eichmann,
"Hitler's Henchmen", as they are called, is that they were truly
messed up in the head. Heinrich Himmler, who was second only to
Eichmann in the Nazi's death squad, and head of the Nazi Gestapo, had
an actual mental disease that caused him to laugh and giggle
uncontrollably at the sight of anything in pain or suffering. I forget
the name of the condition, but Nazi officers said that Himmler would
sit at his desk, trying to kill a chicken by twisting its head off,
giggling wildly as it screamed and squalled in pain.
Another thing I would do would be to take Abraham Lincoln off the list
altogether. Yes, Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclomation freeing
the slaves, and yes he tried to keep the United States together, but
there is something that you are forgetting. Although Lincoln obviously
had other things on his mind, during his Presidency the drive to push
Native Americans off their land continued unabated. No President,
whose was in command during the Indian Wars for the continent, Lincoln
included, ever came out in condemnation of the attacks by the U.S.
Army against sometimes innocent tribes of Native Americans, or made a
move to negotiate lasting peace with them. Consider this: In 1863, Kit
Carson, a commander in the U.S. Army, marched 400 men to the Canyon de
Chelly to surround a Navajo stronghold. His troops killed their
livestock and destroyed their crops, in an effort to keep skirmishes
between the Navajo and settlers under control, even though there had
never been a specific offensive move by the Navajo against the army. A
year later, his troops once again entered the canyon and captured the
remaining Navajo, who were taken to Fort Sumner and imprisoned there
until 1868. And also in 1864, there was an event that came to be known
as the Sand Creek Massacre, in which a large army force in Colorado
ambushed a village of peaceful Arapaho and Cheyenne, killing men,
women and children. All who were Commanders In Chief during the Indian
Wars and made no attempt to stop it are just as responsible as the
army leaders who were in the field, there by making Lincoln
responsible to. It is a sad feature of the people of this country,
who, ignorant of their history, are apt to forget and ignore the fact
that they reside on land that was literally swept out from under the
feet of those who originally inhabited it, the instruments of this
take over being disease, broken treaties and half-hearted attempts at
peace.
From Michael P.:
Hello Cliff, I looked through your good & evil lists, and figured you
had set yourself up for some controversy, but I thought it would be
based on minor quibbling over who might have been added or deleted
from the lists. I was astounded by the ignorance about Abraham Lincoln
expressed by some of the writers. I suppose it is because of the
well-noted failure of students to learn history in school, but this is
pretty fundamental. Here are the facts: Lincoln did not own slaves.
The writer is probably thinking of Thomas Jefferson. The emancipation
was not something done to meet some unexpected political event. He did
not do it to deal with the war. The war was the result of the
emancipation order. He was the most outspoken opponent of slavery of
his time. The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates were primarily about
slavery. Douglas had created a bill which repealed the ban on slavery
in the territories. Lincoln said "No man is good enough to govern
another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading
principle--the sheet anchor of American republicanism."
He was the first republican president. The party was founded as a
single issue party, and the issue was slavery. Freeing the slaves was
pretty much the whole platform. Long before becoming a presidential
candidate, Lincoln said "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be
a master - This expresses my idea of democracy - Whatever differs from
this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy - "
It is true that the plight of blacks in the south did not improve much
after the war, but that was largely because Lincoln was assassinated
at that critical time. His successor was a democrat who tried to
complete Lincoln's program, but was unable to because he lacked the
mandate that Lincoln had. The war was fought over whether the
individual states could opt out of the nation to avoid federal orders.
The absurd idea of burning their crops and expelling those states
would have put Lincoln on your evil list, rather than qualifying for
the good list. PS: Since we are talking about a U.S. president, how
about George Washington? He was one of the most noble men who ever
lived. After defeating a much larger & better British army, there were
many who expected him to become "King." That was the tradition of the
time, and those who suggested it to him were probably quite surprised
by his response. He basically told them that they were insane, and how
could you have gone through this long fight for freedom and then talk
of giving it up to a new king? He told them to never speak of it again
unless they would like to be charged with treason. Think how different
our country would have been if he had not been such a champion of
freedom.
From Dennis M.:
I disagree with having Lincoln on the "good" list. His actions were
politically motivated. You also don't take into account his policy
concerning the Natives. His methods didn't involve negotiation or
peacemaking attempts. But merely forceful conquest.
From Matt G.:
One respondee said it was a minefield. He is a master of
understatement.
Let me open by pointing out that good and evil are religious concepts
so first you have to determine the religious orientation of the
respondant. Try to find a Jew putting anyone but folks like Hitler and
Torquemada at the top of the evil list.
But in the land of ritual sacrifice he who refuses to offer his child
is evil. And those who would try moral superiority to decide, explain
first why it is our moral obligation to kill Serbs to save Albanians
who have been openly engaged revolution and who pattern of terrorizing
Serbs over the last 20 years caused the invention of the term ethnic
cleansing.
And that leads up to separating the person from the person's
reputation. Modern research of the Spanish Inquisition, right from the
official records reveals there are barely 100 executed in both the old
and new worlds in its first century of existance. It seems the
Lutherans had the printing press and vilitifed him as part of
Catholicism. And to look to those same Lutherans, the racked up a
score of a million or three witches for their first two centuries. But
the destruction of witches was a religious good, correct? The Devil
was real. Just look how he attacked church steeples with lightning.
And then you get into politics. There are so many people who
supported, defended and so many who still do, that his 20-25 million
murders before Hitler took power fall into the Orwellian memory hole.
Down that same hole went the murders of those who surrendered to the
Nazis and of everyone who supported the Nazis and of everyone accused
of supporting the Nazis.
And then shall we judge absolute or percentage? Way back when there
was a significantly lower population, we can't downgrade people for
lack of effort, just lack of targets. Pol Pot only had a small country
to work with but got 1/3 of them or so. And it depends how you group
the targets. The US got 100% of more than half of the Indian tribes.
And then times change. Folks like Washington or Jefferson can be
condemned for owning slaves but never Julius Ceasar. Ceasar not only
owned slavs but destroyed Roman democracy and set himself up as
dictator -- Hitleresque to say the least -- and ask the Gauls about
him.
Speaking of which, after the Napoleanic Wars, saying anything good
about "that satanic Corsican" was risking a jail sentence.
And then there are problems even currently as to what people actually
said and did. Nearly all the damning things Nazis are quoted as saying
can only be found in Allied propaganda without factual basis or so
greatly distorted as to reverse the meaning. Eichmann's "5 million on
my conscience" is similarly propaganda. Good is not nearly as
interesting to talk about but citing Bhudda for his pacifist influence
on bhuddist countries such as China and Japan shows, shall we say, an
interesting avoidance of certain aspects of their hisories. While the
US Civil War was going on, China had their own with maybe 60 million
dead. I prefer war-mongering to pacifist, thank you.
As to others, you appear to be awarding credit based upon theory
rather than positive results. That is the only thing that appears to
save Marx and his ism save that his views on Jews and Slavs as he
published made Hitler look like Mother Theresa in comparison.
Lincoln ATTEMPT AT freeing the slaves was purely political. He did not
and could not as he had no power to do so. His attempt was limited to
the states in rebellion so was clearly a war or political move at
best.
And Moses for resting one day in seven. If there ever was a Moses (or
Jesus or Bhudda for that matter) prior to and long after his "time"
folks had more that 14% of the year as some form of holiday or other.
The most he can be creditted with is regularizing it and that sort of
sucked for farmers. Instead of getting their holidays in when the farm
work was minimal this screwed up the work year. And all those native
Hawaiians we have sort of a soft spot for. Dig up their original
temples and find the bones of slaves under the foundation posts. Which
of course was a good thing in their society.
Vlad Tepes is attributed with a lot but he did most all of it to the
pagan muslim invaders in defense of his country. His political problem
was that he appears to have continued it to maintain local political
power and eventually lost.
From Arne G.:
I just discovered your website (certainly above average interesting
compared to the rest of the www). I read the article "The Scales of
Good and Evil", and naturally, have an opinion of my own. I don't know
if the discussion is still open, or if you ever have the time to read
my comments (hey, you must get bucks of mail each day) but here go
some random thoughts:
Nitpicking: The guy who ordered the killing of the citizens of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki via nuclear bomb should definitely be on the
list. Not as high as, say, Josef Stalin, but on it. Reasons: The bombs
were dropped after Japan had offered to surrender (though not
unconditional surrender, which the US insisted on. Well, according to
my limited knowledge of history at least). While that may not be much
different in an absolute sense than Genghis Khan slaughtering the
inhabitants of an enemy city for strategic reasons, being a 20th
century person, he should have known better. 20th century people,
americans especially, generally think of themselves as having higher
moral standards than other people. Sounds offensive? Well, it just
shows how pointless (apart from making you think about the topic)
arguing about the details of such a list actually is. The people who
have contributed to your list come from a relatively narrow part of
cultural space/time. They have a certain set of ethics, by which they
judge what is good and what is evil. Other people had/will have other
ethics, which may differ drastically. A prominent feature of evil
persons on the list seems to be the number of people killed. But could
there be a viable set of ethics, meaning a set which functions as the
foundation of a thriving society, which doesn't put such a harsh
penalty on killing people, if done for the "right reasons" whatever
that may mean to "them"? Stuff to think about.
Some more thoughts: The first place of the evil list should be left
blank, to be filled by that someone (or the chain-of-command or
similiar) that destroys the human race. Something of a scope not
easily imagined (!) but certainly possible with creative use of todays
technology. I presume that deed, should it ever happen, would shadow
everything else put together. Or how about someone who destroys our
universe? We might not care whether just we or the whole big
everything bites the dust, but should there be some alien
intelligence, it might very well see things differently.
As to why listing evil persons is so much more easy than good persons:
We are much more aware towards killing than towards almost any other
thing people can do. Since killing people, whether directly or
indirectly (and the reason for it) is the single criterion for getting
on the evil list, this makes listing evil people naturally easier than
listing good people, whose actions are more diverse. IMHO good stuff
often has to do with people who think long term, while evil stuff
often results from people who just think about the immediate future.
But long term effects are not easily attributed to single individuals.
Otherwise, good and evil are just memes with not much worth for me.
They tend to give the illusion of an easy partitioning of the world,
but the world is really much more complicated for that to hold much
value. My subjective opinion.
From: Ross S.
I will probably offend a lot of people for saying this, but I think
the "Prophet" Mohammed deserves to be on the evil list. Islam is the
only major world religion that started wars of conquest during the
lifetime of its founder. Mohammed personally led armies to conquer
those who disagreed with him. Out of curiosity, I read the Koran. I
found it to be an intensely violent and paranoid book with dire
warnings and curses on nearly every page against anyone who doubts or
disbelieves its contents. It teaches the slaughter of pagans and the
enslavement(placing them under tribute) of Christians and Jews as a
matter of principle. It differs from the more violent parts of the
Hebrew bible in that the various prophecies of Israels triumph over
its enemies were in revenge for or correction of a historical
injustice. Even the divinely directed genocide in the Books of Joshua
and Judges were cast in light of divine retribution for specific
wickedness including ritual prostitution and infanticide practiced by
the Canaanites. The Koran offers no such justification. If you are
pagan, no matter your moral conduct, you are to be killed. If you are
Christian or Jew, you are to be enslaved. Fortunately, most modern
Muslims interpret away the literal meaning of the Koran, but the
Muslims in the days of Mohammed practiced Jihad in the literal,
violent way, not in any spiritualized "struggle". Medieval Muslims
transcended the violent origins of their religion and turned out to be
some of histories most magnanimous conquerors. Jews and Christians
were treated far better under Muslim rule than medieval christians
ever treated Jews or Muslims or each other for that matter. But as I
would not lay the conduct of the Spanish Inquisition to Jesus charge,
I will not give credit to Mohammed for medieval Muslims charge. One of
your readers, in suggesting that Mohammed be placed on the good list,
pointed out the tremendous flowering of Arab culture following the
introduction of Islam. Many great and beautiful things were created by
the rich and powerful by exploiting the underclass. The pyramids and
cathedrals, while beautiful if viewed in isolation from their origins,
were created by the death, slavery and misery of the masses who lived
and died to build them. I cannot help but see a blood covered
gravestone when I look at a Cathedral. The flowering of Arab culture
in the middle ages was purchased with the blood of peoples conquered
in the previous centuries.
From: Arlin A.
I'd delete the last one or two (de Rais was accused, on rumor, of
killing 140 children. I don't know if there is or ever was any real
evidence. Even if he did it, it pales by orders of magnitude with the
others.) Try Fidel Castro, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, (or even
Pinochet or Juan Peron?) just in our own hemisphere and century. How
about Kim Il Sung, Khomeni, Gadafy? I would argue
www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/lab/2187/philosop.htm that anything
that reduces or restricts intelligence is evil. The Moslems and then
the Christians that burned the library of Alexandria rank right up
with your worst. It could be argued that someone who kills a baby has
done less damage to civilization than someone who kills a young
adult-the investment is much less and it may even be possible for the
parents to "replace" the loss by having another kid-if their child
dies as an adult, the parents are (usually) too old to have another.
[Don't misunderstand; the loss of a baby is still a loss!]
From: Shanky
You left off many time honored favorites..What about Nero..or
Diocletian...or is your site designed to be anti-christian..if so you
might not want to include them because, they were martyred by this
man. Then there is always Sadam even though he is a modern
topic...look at what he does to the curds and shi'ite minority.
Chemical weapons...lighting up the oil wells..I mean even though I am
a patriotic american...you can see through my bias and agree this guy
is one of the biggest dicks in history. Hmmm and what about dodge
dondalo of venice....In the 13th century he lead a crusade
against..constantinople a christian city!! Why? greed and
jealousy...mostly jealousy of the magnificence of the byzantine
state...anyway the inhabitants were slaughterd..the churches
defiled..BY FELLOW CHRISTIANS..And the eastern empire was weakened
indeffinitely for the conquest by the Turks...which subjected the
christian populace of the balkans to turkish slavery for 4 hundred
plus years..
From: Colton
I would like to add Courtney Love to the evil list. That stupid b*tch
had her husband, who was a frightening wellspring of talent, murdered
and didn't care one bit about the copycat suicides. She continues to
make mediocre safe music but defeats the whole punk cause by
portraying herself as one. Before you say I'm crazy and that Kurt
Cobain killed himself do some research on the case. thanx 4 reading my
garbage
From: Carol C.
Shift Mao from the list of evil to the list of good. You have your
facts (even front-page trivia) wrong. Shift Dalai whatever to the list
of the dull. He belongs on a trivia list, having been created by the
CIA Add to Evil List: Tibetan Theocracy pre-1955 Add to evil list
(would-be or actual perpetrators of genocide): Harry Truman Lyndon
Johnson Richard Nixon Jimmy Carter (approved of carnage in East Timor
and provided weapons, etc for same) Ronald Reagan George Bush William
Clinton ADD TO GOOD Karl Marx Rosa Luxemburg N. Lenin Eleanor Marx
Malcolm X Wallace (I forget his first name; he was co-discoverer of
theory of natural selection. He goofed up for a noble reason, he was
one of the few white men in the 19th century who was not a racist)
Merlin Kennedy, President of Bloomington-Normal NAACP off and on for
over 40 years. He stands for all the unknown local activists who made
the civil rights movement Citizen X, NFL cadre assassinated by CIA and
so forth
From: Kathryn C.
> Princess Diana She was known as the peoples princess for a reason.
she crossed the barriers put up by royalty in society. she helped
raise two good sons, one of which is going to be the king of england
(hes really cute too), and they're both compasionate, caring, and
totally unlike the former view of royalty is/was. they help normal
people, they help homeless, they help. and they learned how to help
from their mother, Diana, princess of Wales
From: Emmar F.
Fred West was an incredible evil man. He was a mass murderer in the
West of England in very recent years. He is known to have killed 15
women, probably more. The attrocities he inflicted upon the women
before their death has never been revealed to the public, but it is
known that he tortured, raped, sodomised etc his victims. His wife,
Rose, was a willing accomplice to his deeds, and she languishes in
Durham prison with another EVIL woman, Myra Hindley. Myra Hindley is
pure evil, she and her lover Ian Brady killed 6-8 young children,
after torturing them. There is an excellent book about her called
Inside the Mind of a Murderer, I forget the name of the author bu can
find it for you, read that book and you will be left in doubt as to
how evil that woman is. Fred West commited suicide in prison before he
could be tried for his crimes. I am happy to help you find more info
on these people if you wish to add themto your list. Regards
From: Bob D.
Hi, So you want suggestions for your list of good and evil, hmm? Read
on, but be prepared to be shocked and/or offended. And don't post
these names until you do a little research on them yourself; always
verify everything you read, I could be a liar with an agenda. O_- Of
course, it's always easier to make a list of evil than good, that's
why I've got 5 good and 10 evil (well, nine, since one's a joke).
1. Martin Luther (1483-1546)
No, not Martin Luther King Jr. or his father, but Martin Luther, who
caused the Reformation. In simply publishing a list of subjects he
felt the dictatorial Catholic Church should discuss with Christians,
he started a firestorm of arguments. In doing so, he split
Christianity into Catholicism and Protestantism. Both were as
dictatorial and capable of atrocities such as the Inquisition, but
because there were two sides, individual people could run from one to
the other for protection, for freedom to think and act. The spread of
ideas and the freedom and safety to think and practice them can be
directly attributed to Martin Luther. Not only that, but he was the
first to translate the bible into languages other than Latin, to make
Christianity a _people's_ religion, not a church's.
2. C. Everett Koop
In a time when AIDS spread across the world, when teen pregnancy was
skyrocketing, anti-smoking forces needed a champion, here came a
*Christian Fundamentalist* who was willing to put aside his own
beliefs (he was anti-abortion, yet stayed in favour of a woman's right
to choose) to do what was in the best interests of all people. Ronald
Reagan appointed Koop thinking he had a puppet to support right wing
ideology and instead appointed a hero.
3. Tito (1892-1980)
A cold-war communist dictator as one of the most good? Yes. During
World War II under Nazi occupation, he was a key figure in the
Yugoslavian resistance. As leader of Yugoslavia under his regime, he
prevented and defused ethnic problems which have plagued Balkan
nations for the past ten years (the genocides happenning in Slovenia
and such places never happened under Tito). Tito railed against Soviet
communism, refusing to buckle under to the USSR, and he openly support
third world nations (communist and non-communist) at a time when the
west didn't care about them.
4. Kublai Khan
A Mongol emporer, though an imperialist, was also a patron of cultural
and social aims. His rule allowed China to thrive and spread its
knowledge to the world while able to do so safely under his
protection.
5. Turkey (as a nation until this century)
When the Palestinian state was created 2000 years ago, the Jews were
left homeless and spread to many parts of Europe and the world, the
Christian and Arab Turkey provided them a safe haven, setting no
extreme religious conditions on them, allowing Jews to live openly in
a tolerant society. Sadly, how the Turks have treated the Kurds (a
genocide of thousands of them in the past 20 years) puts Turkey on the
most evil list, too.
As for the most evil, you're *not* going to like some of them. The
first three are organizations, but still, their heinous crimes done
for political or religious policy is amongst the most evil ever
committed.
1. The CIA
Murderers and assassins for hire, corruptors of the democratic
process, liars who spoke of protecting the world while only protecting
a small minority of the American government and wealthy. Did you know
the communist Sandanistas in Nicaragua were *democratically* elected
in an uncorrupted election? That many democratic forces in fascist
Latin American, European, Asian and African countries were thwarted
and attacked solely to allow puppet dictators who toed the US
government's line? It was only when Manuel Noriega went against the US
was any attempty made to remove him. From its start as the OSS during
World War II (helping Nazi scientists escape) to its renaming in 1947
to its crimes of today, the CIA is arguable the most corrupt
government agency ever. (Read Philip Agee's "CIA Diary" or "On The
Run" if you can find them; "Diary" is banned in the US, and it's
doubtful bookstores will carry the other. You'd probably have to order
them from a Canadian company.)
2. The Stasi
The East German secret police many times made the KGB look like do
gooders. Their control over individuals lives, spying and bugging,
their assassination attempts, all went further than most communist
bloc government agencies. Imprisonment without trial and
torture-induced insanity (putting dissidents in asylums was a favored
communist tactic) was rampant.
3. The Mossad
Israel's secret service, this organization is amongst the most corrupt
and openly violent. Don't be fooled thinking Jews as only victims,
this group is heavily involved in crimes across the Middle East. Just
as Nettenyahu did not represent Jewish people who wanted peace with
Palestine, so do the Mossad not represent Jewish feelings towards
Arabs. The Mossad are thugs who pretend to be heroes. (Read ex-Mossad
member Victor Ostrovsky's book "By Way Of Deception" detailing the
crimes of the Mossad. Fact from the book: annually, the Mossad places
a list of people it wants to assassinate in front of the Israeli Prime
Minister, and anyone he signs his name to, they have his permission to
kill. And they kill all of them.)
4. Ronald Reagan
A man who almost started World War III ("We have outlawed Russia and
begin bombing in five minutes" he once said jokingly before a
Presidential radio address into a live microphone, the USSR almost
launching in response), this puppet of the far right was as
responsible for the destruction of the middle class with his economic
policies, for causing strife and conflict in other countries, and for
promoting racism (not overtly, but subtly with policies that made it
acceptable). This coward was a stool pigeon for Joseph McCarthy in the
1950's: while pretending to be a loyal member of the Screen Actors
Guild and other union causes, he secretly provided accurate and false
information to McCarthy which destroyed lives and careers.
5. Hirohito, Japanese emporer (1901-1989)
This "walking god" of Japanese society knew full well all the
atrocities and crimes of his country and military: the forced sexual
slavery of Asian women ("comfort women"), the torture of POWs, the
imperialism and rape of nations, the murderous massacres in China
(including the Nanking massacre: more than 300,000 people, the ENTIRE
city murdered within a week). He knew full well all the acts committed
in his name and as a head of state never faced trial as a war
criminal.
6. Pope John Paul II
This hypocrite, while spewing words of Chrisitianity is amongst the
most intolerant dictators of the 20th century. Unwillingness to face
the reality of the modern world, his hatred of women, his inaction in
the face of crimes by his church (child molestation, money laundering
and economic collusion with the Mafia, church assets which include an
Italian pharmaceutical factory that makes the pill and condoms), his
arrogance toward the world population problem (his own hand-picked
Vatican Science Council says the world cannot support more than 2.5
billion people living a western lifestyle; the pope ignores it, saying
the earth can handle 13 billion), all these acts collectively are as
abominable as any other dictator.
7. Mother Theresa
Yes, you have her on your "good list", but anyone who says women
should die rather than have abortions when their health is
threathened, or that peope in poor nations who are starving should not
practice birth control, is irresponsible. That act alone is enough to
call her evil.
8. Nero, roman emporer (37-68 AD)
Although there were actually no fiddles to play when Rome burned (they
didn't exist then), all the other things you hear about him are true.
He ordered hundreds (if not thousands) on his opponents and dissidents
killed, he himself murdered three of his own family (including his
mother), and ran the greatest empire in human history into the ground.
He stole from the people, lived in opulence while the poor starved,
treated slaves horribly (worse than anything you'll see in
"Spartacus"). The only thing he ever did to benefit anyone else was
commit suicide.
9. The Argentinian military junta of the 1970s
While not one particular person, this dictatorship was one of the most
ruthless and brutal in South America, possibly the world. The
"disappeared" (people kidnapped and murdered by the army;
"disappeared" is how the government classified them, though they often
gave the orders to kill) were in the thousands, repression of
opposition was violent to an extreme (think of the Mexican or
Columbian governments' treatment of opponents; the Argeninian
government was twice as bad). One of the favored means of killing
political opponents? Throwing people (concious or not) from aeroplane
and helicopters into jungle or the ocean from thousands of feet in the
air.
10. The creator of Barney the Dinosaur. 'Nuff said. ^_^
Well. With all that cheery discussion, I'll leave you to it. Say what
you think, and let me know. If you want places to start doing research
for yourself, I'll give you some reference points to start from.
From: David & Kristin H.
I would have to disagree with you on many of your selections for
"evil". I just can't see where the likes of Stalin, Hitler, Eichman,
Pol Pot, and Chairman Mao belong. Yes, each of these men were
responsible for great attrocities, but none of them carried out the
attrocities. Who's worse? The man who orders a death from afar or the
man who looks into the victim's eyes and pulls the trigger (albeit on
orders)?
In my opinion, anyone who has little or no blood on his hands just
doesn't cut the proverbial mustard. Certainly the likes of Ghengis
Khan and Vlad the Impaler had plenty of blood on their hands directly
- they rose to power through warfare in an age where hand to hand
combat ruled. They could never have risen in the (reasonably)
bloodless manner Hitler did.
I would make one exception to this idea (of requiring direct blood),
however. I would add Dr. Edward Teller to the list of the most evil.
Granted, while he's no blood on his own hands directly he seems to
have taken absolute glee in the creation of the US's hydrogen bomb.
Never have I seen any indication that he sees the bomb as anything
more than the grandest of toys. Any man who can build such a device
and show a complete lack of humility or remorse for what he has done
most assuredly has a heart as cold and black as coal. Compare that to
Sokharov(sp!), his Soviet counterpart who was perhaps the Soviet
Union's biggest anti-nuclear weapons advocate despite being
responsible for the success of the Soviet program to build the
"super". Clearly Sokharov understood what he had done - even if
belatedly.
From: Steve V.
Hi just some thoughts on your page. It seems to me (I'm not a
Christian btw) that your objectivity is being compromised by some sort
of personal bias torwards the christian religion. For instance why is
evil person number one a man who killed and tortured 2000, while
number two a man who killed and tortured over 20,000 (going by the
numbers you mention)? Additionally one would look at the life and
teachings of Jesus Christ and even if one doesn't believe the son of
god stuff he would still place much higher up on this list than he is.
Secondly I strongly disagree with putting Budhha at number one on your
good list. Although buddhism is a commendable religion in many ways
there's a much lesser commitment to help others than in some other
religions. I've heard it said that the concept of Karma means many
buddhists believe those in poverty or other misfortune 'deserve' their
station in life and are far less charitable, on average, than other
religions. Whether this is Buddha's fault or not I couldn't say, but
it does seem a self-centred religion.
Thirdly a suggestion for the good list, I think Gandhi is missing and
should be there.
And finally some notes on what you give priority to. Firstly no I
don't think religious leaders should have negative results such as
fundamentalist groups counted against them, none of them (AFAIK)
preached violence or intolerance and none have control over what evils
are done in their name, especially after death. As for evilness why is
personally participating in evil considered? Is the serial killer who
sadistically kills 10 victims for his own pleasure more evil than the
politician who orders a genocide of an entire race from the safety of
his office?
jum...@my-deja.com
http://www.edge.org/documents/Invention.html
--------------------------------------------
EDGE: What Is The Most Important Invention?
The Third Culture Home|Third Culture|Digerati|Reality ClubEDGE Index
[ ... ]
WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS?
[ ... ]
John Henry Holland:
BOARD GAMES
Board games, more than any other invention, foretell the role of
science in understanding the universe through symbolic reasoning.
Their essence is a simple set of rules for generating a complex
network of possibilities by manipulating tokens on a reticulate board.
Board games are found as artifacts of the earliest Egyptian dynasties,
so they don't truly fall within the 2000 year limit, but they have
undergone a rapid "adaptive radiation" in the last millennium. Thales'
invention of logic (the manipulation of abstract tokens under fixed
rules) was likely influenced by a knowledge of board games, and board
games offered an early metaphoric guide for politics and war in both
the East (Go) and the West (Chess). These insights, in turn, had much
to do with transition from the belief that the world around us is
controlled by the whims and personalities of gods to the outlook that
the world can be described in lawlike fashion. In the 19th and 20th
centuries board games became the inspiration for models, simulations
and mathematics, ranging from genetics and evolution to markets and
social interaction. Board games also offer a simple example of the
recondite phenomenon called emergence — "much coming from little" — as
when a fertilized egg yields a complex organism consisting of tens of
billions of cells. And, via a mutation into video-games, board games
offer the next generation an entry into the world of long horizons and
rigorous thought — both in short supply in the current generation.
JOHN HENRY HOLLAND is Professor of Computer Science at the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The recipient of a MacArthur genius award,
he is credited with the discovery of genetic algorithms — lines of
computer code that simulate sexually reproducing organisms. A leading
expert on complexity theory at the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico,
Dr. Holland is the author of Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds
Complexity and Emergence: From Chaos to Order.
===========================================================
das habe ich auch versucht
Author: Stieger <detlef....@t-online.de>
Date: 1999/02/12
Forum: de.sci.informatik.ki
Hey.
Ich hatte eine ähnliche Idee auch schon. Das Ziel des Spieles ist es,
den anderen Roboter abzuschießen. Das interessante ist, daß man dazu
nicht spielen muß, sondern einen Roboter programmiert.
Die Programme sollten aber keineswegs aus DLL's bestehen, sondern
vielmehr aus SCRIPTS.
Man muß also eine eigene kleine Programmiersprache entwickeln, mit der
die Roboter programmiert werden können. (Das ist wegen der geringen
Komplexität der Handlungsmöglichkeiten sehr einfach)
Ich würde so etwas wie Turing-Roboter programmieren, dann können
dessen Programme sogar nur aus Zahlen bestehen und leichter
verarbeitet werden.
Der Spieler (die anderen Programmierer) kann dann im Rahmen dieser
Sprache einen Roboter entwickeln´, also nur bestehend aus einer
Turing-Tabelle (ein Programm für seine Handlungsweise)
Moment mal !!! Programme aus Zahlen ??? Da kann man doch einen GA
ansetzten. Schon ist man wieder bei Experimenten von John Henry
Holland gelandet. ( Das waren die 450 Bit langen Ameisen auf dem
John-Muir-Weg) Nachzulesen in : Steven Levi : KL - künstliches Leben
aus dem Computer , S.206, ISBN 3-426-26477-3
Wie gesagt habe ich schon mal so etwas probiert. Ich bin bis jetzt
aber nur so weit gekommen, zwei Roboter auf den Schirm zu bringen, die
sich wie zwei homos zur Paarungszeit hinterherlaufen...hehehe
______________________
von: Stieger: mailto:03960321...@T-Online.de
Dirk Groeneveld schrieb in Nachricht <36A1B9B8...@moosburg.org>...
> Hallo!
>
> Ich arbeite zur Zeit (sekundär, zugegeben) a einem Programm, mit
> dem man einen Wettbewerb um die beste KI bestreiten könnte.
> Die KI steuert einen Roboter in einer (von Runde zu Runde
> wechselnden) 2D-Arena. Ein zweiter Roboter wird von einer anderen
> KI gesteuert. Die Roboter können
> - ihr Fahrwerk drehen
> - sich in Richtung des Fahrwerks fortbewegen
> - (unabhängig davon) ihren Kopf drehen
> - in Richtung des Kopfes schiessen
> Sie haben Kenntniss vom gesamten Spielfeld inklusive der Bewegungen
> des gegnerischen Roboters.
>
> Das ist das bisherige Konzept.
>
> Da ich mich über Star Trek hinaus noch nicht sehr mit KI beschäftigt
> habe, wüsste ich gerne was ihr davon haltet, was anders werden sollte
> und ob ich eine reelle Chance habe, nicht der einzige "KI-Entwickler"
> auf dieser Basis zu werden.
>
> Jetzt wirds etwas OT:
> Ich hatte mir vorgestellt, das in Form von DLLs (ich programmiere
> noch unter Win95) zu realisieren. Jede dll enthält eine
> "Roboterprozedur", die vom Hauptprogramm (das die Arena bereitstellt
> und sich um die Einhaltung der Regeln kümmert) aufgerufen wird. Ich
> fürchte jetzt, dass das ganze dadurch aus Sicht der KI rundenbasiert
> abläuft, weil ich ja nicht beide Roboterprozeduren gleichzeitig
> aufrufen kann.
>
> Zugegeben, mit Ethik und Bewusstsein hat das nicht viel zu tun, aber
> ich finde es wesentlich konkreter als "Data, Lore und der
> Emotionschip" ;-)
>
> Dirk
==========================================================
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/trans.html
--------------------------------------------------
The 15 Most Famous Transcendental Numbers
Cliff Pickover
For more information, see my book Chaos in Wonderland from which this
is excerpted.
Numbers like e = 2.718..., pi = 3.1415..., and 2**(sqrt 3) are
transcendental. These numbers are not the solutions of polynomial
expressions having rational coefficients. The digits of pi and e never
end, nor has anyone detected an orderly pattern in their arrangement.
After conducting a brief survey of readers, I made a list of the
fifteen most famous transcendental numbers.
pi = 3.1415 ...
e = 2.718 ...
Euler's constant, gamma = 0.577215 ... = lim midsub < n rarrow
infinity > (1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + ... + 1/n - ln(n)) (Not proven to
be transcendental, but generally believed to be by mathematicians.)
Catalan's constant, G = sum (-1)**k / (2k + 1 )**2 = 1 - 1/9 + 1/25
- 1/49 + ... (Not proven to be transcendental, but generally
believed to be by mathematicians.)
Liouville's number 0.110001000000000000000001000 ... which has a one
in the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 24th, etc. places and zeros elsewhere.
Chaitin's "constant", the probability that a random algorithm halts.
(Noam Elkies of Harvard notes that not only is this number
transcendental but it is also incomputable.)
Chapernowne's number, 0.12345678910111213141516171819202122232425...
This is constructed by concatenating the digits of the positive
integers. (Can you see the pattern?)
Special values of the zeta function, such as zeta (3).
(Transcendental functions can usually be expected to give
transcendental results at rational points.)
ln(2).
Hilbert's number, 2**(sqrt 2 ). (This is called Hilbert's number
because the proof of whether or not it is transcendental was one of
Hilbert's famous 100 problems. In fact, according to the
Gelfond-Schneider theorem, any number of the form a**b is
transcendental where a and b are algebraic (a ne 0, a ne 1 ) and b
is not a rational number. Many trigonometric or hyperbolic functions
of non-zero algebraic numbers are transcendental.)
e ** pi
pi ** e (Not proven to be transcendental, but generally believed to
be by mathematicians.)
Morse-Thue's number, 0.01101001 ...
i ** i (Here i is the imaginary number sqrt(-1). If a is algebraic
and b is algebraic but irrational then a**b is transcendental. Since
i is algebraic but irrational, the theorem applies. Note also: i **
i is equal to e ** (- pi / 2 ) and several other values. Consider i
** i = e ** ( i log i ) = e ** ( i times i pi / 2 ) . Since log is
multivalued, there are other possible values for i ** i .
Feigenbaum numbers, e.g. 4.669 ... . (These are related to
properties of dynamical systems with period-doubling. The ratio of
successive differences between period-doubling bifurcation
parameters approaches the number 4.669 ... , and it has been
discovered in many physical systems before they enter the chaotic
regime. It has not been proven to be transcendental, but is
generally believed to be.)
Keith Briggs from the Mathematics Department of the University of
Melbourne in Australia computed what he believes to be the
world-record for the number of digits for the Feigenbaum number:
4.669201609102990671853203820466201617258185577475768632745651
343004134330211314737138689744023948013817165984855189815134
408627142027932522312442988890890859944935463236713411532481
714219947455644365823793202009561058330575458617652222070385
410646749494284981453391726200568755665952339875603825637225
Briggs carried out the computation using special-purpose software
designed by David Bailey of NASA Ames running on an IBM RISC
System/6000. The computation required a few hours of computation time.
==========================================================
http://www.edge.org/documents/Invention.html
--------------------------------------------
EDGE: What Is The Most Important Invention?
The Third Culture Home|Third Culture|Digerati|Reality ClubEDGE Index
CONTRIBUTORS:
Colin Blakemore
Steven Rose
Joseph Traub
M. Csikszentmihalyi
Marvin Minsky
Philip W. Anderson
Reuben Hersh
Howard Gardner
Daniel Dennett
Freeman Dyson
William Calvin
David Shaw
Roger Schank
Stephen Budiansky
Richard Saul Wurman
Stewart Brand
George Dyson
Marney Morris
V.S. Ramachandran
Jeremy Cherfas
Bart Kosko
Stuart Hameroff
Michael Nesmith
Clifford Pickover
Margaret Wertheim
Richard Dawkins
David Haig
Chris Langton
Eric J. Hall
Clay Shirkey
Keith Devlin
Luyen Chou
Antonio Cabral
Hendrik Hertzberg
David Berreby
Charles Simonyi
Piet Hut
Susan Blackmore
James P. O'Donnell
Nicholas Humphrey
Jaron Lanier
Terrence Sejnowski
Ron Cooper
W. Daniel Hillis
John Baez
Viviana Guzman
Stephen Schneider
Philip Campbell
John Horgan
Raphael Kasper
Sherry Turkle
David Myers
Don Goldsmith
Arnold Trehub
Jay Ogilvy
Douglas Rushkoff
Mike Godwin
Duncan Steel
Tom Standage
Andy Clark
Stanislas Dehaene
John Maddox
Eberhard Zangger
Leon Lederman
Marc D. Hauser
David Buss
Leroy Hood
Julian Barbour
John Henry Holland
Gordon Gould
Bob Rafelson
John Allen Paulos
Verena Huber-Dyson
Garniss Curtis
Milford Wolpoff
Mark Mirsky
Dan Sperber
Lew Tucker
Tor Nørretranders
Richard Potts
Lawrence M. Krauss
John McCarthy
Karl Sabbagh
Ellen Winner
George Johnson
Rodney Brooks
John R. Searle
Lee Smolin
Paul W. Ewald
Carl Zimmer
Robert Shapiro
James Bailey
John C. Dvorak
Kenneth Ford
Philip Brockman
Howard Rheingold
George Lakoff
Robert Provine
Peter Cochrane
Samuel Barondes
Chris Westbury
John Rennie
Randolph Nesse
Brian Greene
Esther Dyson
Steven Johnson
Delta Willis
Joseph LeDoux
Maria Lepowski
John Barrow
Todd Siler
Peter Tallack
Brian Goodwin
John Brockman
WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS?
Introduction by
John Brockman
A year ago I emailed the participants of The Third Culture Mail List
for help with a project which was published on EDGE as "The World
Question Center." I asked them: "what questions are you asking
yourself?".
The World Question Center was published on December 30th. On the same
day The New York Times ran an article "In an Online Salon, Scientists
Sit Back and Ponder" which featured a selection of the questions.
Other press coverage can be found in EDGE In The News.
The project was interesting, worthwhile....and fun.
This year, beginning on Thanksgiving Day, I polled the list on (a)
"What Is The Most Important Invention In The Past Two Thousand Years?"
... and (b) "Why?".
I am pleased to publish below* the more than one hundred responses in
order of receipt. I expect many more entries and, in the spirit of The
Reality Club, robust discussion and challenges among the contributors.
Happy New Year!!
JB
p.s. I get the last word.
(*Please note that the length of this document is 41,000 words which
prints out to about 75 pages.)
For an open discussion of the Inventions question, visit a special EDGE
forum hosted by FEED Magazine.
RELATED PRESS
January 7, 1999
Wired News
Top-Level Think Tank Goes Public
John Brockman's invitation-only salon for scientific thinkers opens a
public forum on Feed.
By Steve Silberman
One of the Net's most prestigious, invitation-only free-trade zones
for the exchange of potent ideas is opening its doors. A little.....
Starting Thursday, two or three selected dialogs a month at Edge --
founded in 1996 by author and literary agent John Brockman -- will be
open for public reading and discussion in a special area on Feed.
January 7, 1999
Die Zeit (German Text)
Brainstorming In The Club Of Thinkers
(Partial, rough English Translation)
by Ulrich Schnabel und Urs Willmann
Could one inspire German scientists for such a brainstorming? Hardly.
In German it is already difficult to find a good translation for this
neural activity, leading to fantasy an fun. Brainstorming: "procedure
to find the best solution of a problem by collecting spontaneous
incidents (of the coworkers)", torments itself the Duden, the leading
German dictionary. You can imagine the result.
January 7, 1999|
ABCNEWS.COM
What Changed the World? Suggestions for Top Inventions
by Lee Dye — Special to ABCNEWS.COM
That question was presented on Thanksgiving Day to Nobel laureates and
other heavy thinkers by New York author and literary agent John
Brockman. Brockman, who presides over an eclectic gathering of
scientists and science buffs, started publishing the answers this week
on the group's Web site. More than 100 participants have taken the
bait so far, and their answers are as varied, and in some cases as
strange, as the participants themselves.....This is not a group that
accepts limitations gladly. Some fudged on the dates. Some eschewed
the notion of an invention as some sort of gadget, opting instead for
such things as the development of the scientific method, mathematics
or some religions.
January 5, 1998
FEED
The Mother of All Inventions
Richard Dawkins, Stewart Brand, Joseph Traub and others answer the
question: What was the most important invention of the past two
thousand years?
This special feature marks the first collaboration between FEED and
Edge, John Brockman's invitation-only Internet forum, where hundreds
of the world's leading scientists and thinkers share their thoughts on
issues ranging from the meaning of numbers to genetics to affirmative
action. Readers can visit the Edge site for even more nominations, and
an post their own suggestions in the Loop. — The Editors
January 5, 1998
Salon
"What's the Mother of All Inventions"
By Scott Rosenberg
The list makes for an enjoyable read — if you can get over the
participants' utter inability to remain within the question's
2000-year bounds. Suggesting that the most important invention of this
era is the spirit of rebellion against arbitrary rules.
January 4, 1998
Newsweek Magazine — Newsweek.com
"The Power of Big Ideas"
By Sharon Begley
Was the light bulb more important than the pill? An online gathering
of scientists nominates the most important inventions of the past
2,000 years. Some of their choices might surprise you.
January 4, 1999
The Wall Street Journal — The Wall Street Journal Interactive
(Subscription Required)
"The Nominees for Best Invention Of the Last Two Millennia Are . . ."
By David Bank
Staff Reporter ofThe Wall Street Journal
John Brockman is the premier literary agent of the digerati, so when
he asked 1,000 scientists and other techno-thinkers to suggest the
most important invention of the past 2,000 years, the responses
sounded a lot like proposals for yet another millennial book.
January 4, 1999
The Daily Telegraph
The Pill and the Birth of Invention:
From Hay and Mozart to the Internet and clocks, scientists nominatre
man's major achievements, says Roger Highfield
Nobel laureate Prof. Philip Anderson, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett,
biologist Prof Richard Dawkins and Sir John Maddox are among the 100
or so contributors who have nominated inventions randing from tha
atomic bomb and board games to the Internet, Hindu-Arabic number
system and anaethesia.
January 4, 1999
DaveNet
" Welcome to 1999!"
by Dave Winer
Congratulations to John Brockman and the people at edge.org. This is
an incredible source of new thoughts. I highly recommend it to DaveNet
readers.....Sites like www.edge.org show what can be done when there's
moderation and thoughtfulness and a little bit of editing. We can
learn from each other. The world is not filled with bullshit. There
are interesting new ideas, and new perspectives on old ideas
WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS?
Colin Blakemore:
My choice for the most important invention? The contraceptive pill.
Why? Well, there are, of course, the well-rehearsed answers to that
question. The pill did indeed fertilize the sexual liberation of the
sixties, did stimulate feminism and the consequent erosion of
conventional family structure in Western society — perhaps the most
significant modification in human behaviour since the invention of
shamanism. It did help to change our concept of the division of
labour, to foster the beginnings of an utterly different attitude to
the social role of women. But, arguably the important sequel of the
pill is the growing conception that our bodies are servants of our
minds, rather than vice versa. This relatively low-tech invention has
triggered a cultural and cognitive revolution in our self-perception.
It has contributed to our ability to accept organ transplantation, the
notion of machine intelligence, gene therapy and even, eventually,
germ-line genetic manipulation. It has shifted the quest of human
beings from controlling their physical environment to controlling
themselves — their own bodies and hence their physical destinies.
COLIN BLAKEMORE is Waynflete Professor of Physiology, University of
Oxford; Director, Oxford Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience; President
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1997-8; and
author of The Mind's Brain.
Steven Rose:
I don't need a page. The answer is clear: inventions are concepts, not
just technologies, so the most important are the concepts of
democracy, of social justice, and the belief in the possibility of
creating a society free from the oppressions of clas, race, and
gender.
STEVEN ROSE, neurobiologist, is Professor of Biology and Director,
Brain and Behaviour Research Group, The Open University; author
Lifelines; The Making Of Memory; Not In Our Genes; From Brains To
Consciousness (Ed.) . See EDGE: "THE TWO STEVES" Pinker vs. Rose - A
Debate (Part I) and (Part II)".
Joseph Traub:
My nomination is the invention of the scientific method. The Greeks
believed we could understand the world rationally. But the scientific
method requires that we ask questions of nature by experimentation.
This has led to the science and technology that has transformed the
world.
JOSEPH TRAUB is Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science
at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe
Institute. He is the author of nine books, including the recently
published Complexity And Information. See EDGE: " The Unknown and The
Unknowable: A Talk With Joseph Traub".
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
I always liked Lynn White's story about how the stirrup revolutionized
warfare and made feudal society and culture possible. Or Lefebre des
Noettes' argument about how the invention of the rudder made extensive
sailing and the consequent expansion of Europe and its colonization of
the world possible. But it's sobering to realize that it took us over
one thousand years to realize the impact of these artifacts. So I am
not at all sure we have at this time a good grip on what the most
important inventions of the past millennia have been. Certainly the
contraceptive pill is a good candidate, and so is the scientific
method. I am also intrigued by the effects of such inventions as the
flag — a symbol of belonging that millions will follow to ruin or
victory independently of biological connectedness; or the social
security card that signifies that we are not alone and our welfare is
a joint problem for the community; or the invention of civil rights
which however abused and misused is pointing us towards a notion of
universal human dignity that might yet eclipse in importance all the
technological marvels of the millennium.
MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI is professor of psychology and education at
the University of Chicago. He is the author of Flow: The Psychology of
Optimal Experience, The Evolving Self: A Psychology For the Third
Millennium, Creativity, and Finding Flow (A Master Minds Book).
Marvin Minsky:
In his work on the foundations of chemistry, it occurred to Antoine
Lavoisier (and also, I suppose to Joseph Priestly) that the smell of a
chemical was not necessarily a 'property' of that chemical, but a
property of some related chemical that had the form of a gas, which
therefore could reach the nose of the observer. Thus solid sulfur
itself has no smell, but its gaseous relatives, sulfur dioxide and
hydrogen sulfide have plenty of it. Perhaps this tiny insight was the
key to the transformation of chemistry from a formerly incoherent
field into the great science of the 19th and 20th centuries.
MARVIN MINSKY is a mathematician and computer scientist; Toshiba
Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology; cofounder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He
is the author of eight books, including The Society of Mind. See EDGE:
" Consciousness is a Big Suitcase: A Talk with Marvin Minsky "; The
Third Culture, Chapter 8.
Philip W. Anderson:
The question is impossible to answer with one thing; one could for
instance say with some justification "the germ theory of disease" but
then that goes back to the microscope — otherwise no one would ever
have seen a germ — and that to the lens, and eyeglasses may be as
important as germs, ft as germs, and so on. But I will give you my
entry; to the amazement of my colleagues who think of me as the
ultimate antireductionist, I will suggest a very reductionist idea:
the quantum theory, and I include emphatically quantum field theory.
The quantum theory forces a revision of our mode of thinking which is
far more profound than Newtonian mechanics or the Copernican
revolution or relativity. In a sense it absolutely forces us not to be
reductionist if we are to keep our sanity, since it tells us that we
are made up of anonymous identical quanta of various quantum fields,
so that only the whole has any identity or integrity. Yet it also
tells us that we really completely know the rules of the game which
all these particles and quanta are playing, so that if we are clever
enough we can understand everything about ourselves and our world.
Note that I said understand, not predict — the latter is really in
principle impossible, for reasons which have little to do with the
famous Uncertainty Principle and a lot to do with exponential
explosions of computations.
I would agree with whoever said "the scientific method" if I thought
that was a single thing invented at some identifiable time, but I know
too much history and see too much difference between different
sociologies of fields.
Why has no one mentioned the printing press yet?
The other really profound discovery is the molecular basis of
evolution, for which probably Oswald Avery deserves more credit than
anyone. Evolution itself has, like the scientific method, much too
complicated a history to class as a single invention.
PHILIP W. ANDERSON is a Nobel laureate physicist at Princeton and one
of the leading theorists on superconductivity. He is the author of A
Career in Theoretical Physics, and Economy as a Complex Evolving
System.
Reuben Hersh:
The most important invention of all time was the interrogative
sentence. i.e., the asking of questions.
However, the original request was for the most important invention of
the last 2,000 years, not of all time. To that I would say, space
travel. Of course, it may be centuries before we know the full
consequences of space travel.
REUBEN HERSH is professor emeritus at the University of matics,
Really? And (with Philip J. Davis)The Mathematical Experience, winner
of the National Book Award in 1983. See EDGE; "What Kind Of Thing Is A
Number? A Talk With Reuben Hersh".
Howard Gardner:
Another good question! My perhaps eccentric but nonetheless heartfelt
nomination is Western classical music, as epitomized in the
compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and above all Mozart. Music
is a free invention of the human spirit, less dependent upon physical
or physiological inventions than most other contrivances. Musical
compositions in the Western tradition represent an incredible cerebral
achievement, one that is not only appreciated but also imitated or
elaborated upon wherever it travels. Most inventions — from nuclear
energy to antibiotics - can be used for good or ill. Classical music
has probably given more pleasure to more individuals, with less
negative fallout, than any other human artifact. Finally, while no one
can compose like Mozart and few can play like Heifetz or Casals,
anyone who works at it can perform in a credible way — and, courtesy
of software, even those of us unable to play an instrument or create a
score can now add our own fragments to an ever expanding canon.
HOWARD GARDNER, is Professor of Education at Harvard University. His
numerous books include Leading Minds, Frames of Mind, Multiple
Intelligences, The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive
Revolution, The Unschooled Mind, To Open Minds, Creating Minds, and
Extraordinary Minds (Master Minds Series). See EDGE: "Truth, Beauty,
and Goodness: Education for All Human Beings" A Talk With Howard
Gardner".
Daniel C. Dennett:
The battery, the first major portable energy packet in the last few
billion years. When simple prokaryotes acquired mitochondria several
billion years ago, these amazingly efficient portable energy devices
opened up Design Space to multicellular life of dazzling variety. Many
metazoa developed complex nervous systems, which gave the planet eyes
and ears for the first time, expanding the epistemic horizons of life
by many orders of magnitude. The modest battery (and its sophisticated
fuel cell descendants), by providing energy for autonomous,
free-ranging, unplugged artifacts of dazzling variety, is already
beginning to provide a similarly revolutionary cascade of
developments. Politically, the transistor radio and cell phone are
proving to be the most potent weapons against totalitarianism ever
invented, since they destroy all hope of centralized control of
information. By giving every individual autonomous prosthetic
extensions of their senses (think of how camcorders are
revolutionizing scientific data-gathering possibilities, for
instance), batteries enable fundamental improvements in the
epistemological architecture of our species. The explosion of science
and technology that may eventually permit us to colonize space (or
save our planet from a fatal collision) depends on our ability to
store and extract electrical power ubiquitously. Our batteries are
still no match for the mitochondrial ATP system — a healthy person
with a backpack can climb over mountains for a week without refueling,
something no robot could come close to doing — but they open up a new
and different cornucopia of competences.
DANIEL C. DENNETT, a philosopher, is Director of the Center for
Cognitive Studies, and Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at
Tufts University. He is author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution
and the Meanings of Life, Consciousness Explained, Brainstorms, Kinds
of Minds (Science Masters Series), and coauthor with Douglas
Hofstadter of The Mind's I. See The Third Culture, Chapter 10.
Freeman Dyson:
This is a good question. My suggestion is not original. I don't
remember who gave me the idea, but it was probably Lynn White, with
Murray Gell-Mann as intermediary.
The most important invention of the last two thousand years was hay.
In the classical world of Greece and Rome and in all earlier times,
there was no hay. Civilization could exist only in warm climates where
horses could stay alive through the winter by grazing. Without grass
in winter you could not have horses, and without horses you could not
have urban civilization. Some time during the so-called dark ages,
some unknown genius invented hay, forests were turned into meadows,
hay was reaped and stored, and civilization moved north over the Alps.
So hay gave birth to Vienna and Paris and London and Berlin, and later
to Moscow and New York. FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His professional interests
are in mathematics and astronomy. Among his many books are Disturbing
the Universe, From Eros to Gaia, and Imagined Worlds.
William Calvin:
Computers, not for current reasons but because they're essential to
prevent a collapse of civilization in the future. Computers may allow
us to understand the earth's fickle climate and how it is affected by
detours of the great ocean currents. These detours cause abrupt
coolings within a decade that last for centuries, sure to set off
massive warfare as the population downsizes to match the crop
failures. "Natural" though these worldwide coolings have been in the
past, with their forest fires and population crashes, they're not any
more inevitable than local floods — if we learn enough about the
nonlinear mechanisms in order to stabilize climate. Computer
simulations are the key to a "preventative medicine" of climate, what
may allow human scientific ingenuity to keep civilization from
unraveling in another episode of cool, crash, and burn.
WILLIAM H. CALVIN is a theoretical neurophysiologist on the faculty of
the University of Washington School of Medicine who writes about the
brain and evolution; author of The River That Flows Uphill, The
Throwing Madonna, The Cerebral Symphony, Conversations with Neil's
Brain (with George A. Ojemann), The Cerebral Code, and How Brains
Think (Science Masters Series). See EDGE: " Competing for
Consciousness: A Talk with William Calvin".
David Shaw:
I know it would probably be more helpful to add something new to the
list, but I found Joe Traub's nomination so compelling that I'd feel
dishonest doing anything but seconding it. It's hard to imagine how
different our lives would be today without the steady accrual of both
knowledge and technology that has accompanied the rigorous application
of the scientific method over a surprisingly small number of human
generations. While the notion of formulating well explicated, testable
conjectures and subjecting them to potential refutation through
controlled experimentation (and, where appropriate, statistical
analysis) is now second nature to those of us who work in the
sciences, it's easy to forget that we weren't born with an intuitive
understanding of this approach, and had we lived two thousand years
ago, we would never have been taught to use it. Although the apparatus
of formal logic would probably rate a close second in my book, I join
Joe in casting my vote for the scientific method.
DAVID E. SHAW is the chairman of D. E. Shaw & Co., a global investment
bank whose activities center on various aspects of the intersection
between technology and finance, and of Juno Online Services, the
world's second largest Internet access provider. He also serves as a
member of President Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and
Technology, and previously served on the faculty of the Computer
Science Department at Columbia University.
Roger Schank:
We are using it now. The internet. Of course the internet relies on
numerous other inventions (chips, networking, CRTs, telephones,
electricity etc). The reason why the internet isn't an obvious choice
at first glance (besides the fact that is so present in our lives we
can fail to notice it) is that its power has not yet begun to fully
manifest itself. We still have schools, offices, the post office,
telephone companies, places of entertainment, shopping malls and such,
but we won't for long. Information delivery methods affect every
aspect of how we live. If we don't have to walk to town to find out
what's going on, or to shop, or to learn, or to work, why will we go
to town? Schools (which have not been able to change) will completely
transform themselves when better course can be built on the internet
than could possibly be delivered in a university. Of course, we
haven't seen that yet, but when the best physicists in the world
combine to deliver a learn by doing simulation that allows students to
try things out and discuss what they have done with every important
(virtual) physicist who has something to say about what they have
done, the only thing universities will have to offer will be football.
Shopping malls aren't gone yet but they will be. Why go to a store to
buy music CDs any more? You can listen to samples of whatever you want
and click a button for delivery while seated at home. Any object that
needn't be felt and perused to be purchased will find no better
delivery method than the internet. Newspapers? Not dead yet, but they
will be. Pick an aspect of the way we live today and it will change
radically in the coming years because of the internet. Life (and human
interaction) in fifty years will be so different we will hardly
recognize the social structures that will evolve. I don't know if we
will be happier, but we will be better informed.
ROGER C. SCHANK, computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, is
director of The Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern
University, where he is John Evans Professor of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science as well as Professor of Psychology and of
Education and Social Policy; author of The Creative Attitude: Learning
to Ask and Answer the Right Questions, Tell Me A Story, and Engines
for Education . See The Third Culture, Chapter 9.
Stephen Budiansky:
There is an inherent bias in all such surveys, because everyone
strives to be original and surprising and so shuns the obvious but
probably more correct answers — such as steel, or moveable type, or
antibiotics, to name but three obvious things that have utterly
transformed not only how people live but the way they experience life.
The only way I can think of being surprising is to violate John's
terms and go back 6,000 years. But if I will be permitted to do so, I
would argue that the single invention that has changed human life more
than any other is the horse — by which I mean the domestication of the
horse as a mount. The horse was well on its way to extinction when it
was domesticated on the steppes of Ukraine 6,000 years ago, but from
the moment it entered the company of man the horse repopulated Europe
with a swiftness that announced the arrival of a new tempo of life and
cultural change. Trade over thousands of miles suddenly sprang up,
communication with a rapidity never before experienced became routine,
exploration of once forbidding zones became possible, and warfare
achieved a violence and degree of surprise that spurred the
establishment and growth of fortified permanent settlements, the seeds
of the great cities of Europe and Asia. For want of the horse,
civilization would have been lost.
STEPHEN BUDIANSKY, Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the
author of If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution
of Consciousness and The Nature of Horses: Exploring Equine Evolution,
Intelligence, and Behavior.
Richard Saul Wurman:
ELECTRICITY CONTAINS THE WORD CITY — WHICH CERTAINLY IS OUR MOST
COMPLEX INVENTION & FROM THE DENSITY OF HUMAN INTERACTION ALL ELSE
FLOWS.
RICHARD SAUL WURMAN is the chairman and creative director of the TED
conferences. He is also an architect, a cartographer, the creator of
the Access Travel Guide Series, and the author and designer of more
than sixty books, including Information Architects, Follow the Yellow
Brick Road and Information Anxiety.
Stewart Brand:
The question does most of the answering: "What Is The Most Important
Invention In The Past Two Thousand Years?"
That lets out agriculture, writing, mathematics, and money. Too early.
"Most important" would suggest looking for inventions near the
beginning of the period, since they would have had the most time for
accumulative impact.
Where did that number "Two Thousand" come from? From the approaching
Year 2000, which is a Christian Era date — now referred to as "Common
Era": 2000 CE. That's quite a clue.
The most important cultural — hence all-embracing — invention is a
religion. Only two major religions have been invented in the last two
millennia, Christianity and Islam. Try to imagine the last two
millennia, or the present, without them.
STEWART BRAND is founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The
Well, cofounder of Global Business Network, president of The Long Now
Foundation, and author of The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT
and How Buildings Learn. See EDGE: "The Clock of the Long Now";
Digerati, Chapter 3.
George Dyson:
The Universal Turing Machine. Because it is universal.
Not only as the theoretical archetype for digital computing as we
practice it today, but as a least common denominator — translating
between sequence in time and pattern in space — that lies at the
foundations of mathematics and suggests the possibilities of a
communications medium we have only just begun to explore.
Life and intelligence that achieves widespread distribution across the
cosmos (and over time) may be expected to assume a digital
representation, at least in some phases of the life cycle, to
facilitate electromagnetic transmission, cross-platform compatibility,
and long-term storage. This requires a local substrate. And we are
doing our best, thanks to the proliferation of our current
instantiation of the UTM (known as the PC) to help. When we establish
contact with such an intelligence, will we receive instructions for
building a machine to upload Jodie Foster? Probably not. The download
will proceed the other way. To paraphrase Marvin Minsky: "Instead of
sending a picture of a cat, there is one area in which they can send
the cat itself."
GEORGE DYSON is the leading authority in the field of Russian Aleut
kayaks, he has been a subject of the PBS television show Scientific
American Frontiers. He is the author of Baidarka, and Darwin Among The
Machines:The Evolution Of Global Intelligence. See EDGE: "Darwin Among
the Machines; or, The Origins of Artificial Life"; See EDGE: "CODE -
George Dyson & John Brockman: A Dialogue" .
Marney Morris:
(Well John, you did say most important invention, not the one we
should be most proud of). The invention (and detonation) of the atomic
bomb has changed the world more profoundly than any other human
development in the last 2000 years. In seconds, nearly 200,000 people
were dead or dying in Hiroshima, and consciousness was forever changed
on our planet. Although the arms race fueled our economy for a few
more decades, the bomb set into motion a 'warfare stalemate'. With the
ability to destroy our planet within the realm of possibility, we were
forced to examine our rules of war, and seek new means of engagement
to work out our differences. And although hundreds of wars are going
on at any time on our planet, there are checks and balances,
underscored by the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Please note that if you were to have phrased the question to include
time prior to 2000 years ago, then I would have suggested that our
most powerful invention would be song.
MARNEY MORRIS, is president of Animatrix, which is publishing
Sprocketworks, a next generation learning program, early in 1999. She
teaches interaction design at Stanford.
V.S. Ramachandran:
My personal favourite is the place value notation system combined with
the use of a symbol 0 for Zero to denote a nonexistent number marks
the birth of modern mathematics. I think this is the greatest
invention but I am being a little jingoistic — it was invented in
India in the 4th or 5th century BC , systematised by Aryabhatta in the
4th Century AD by the Indian Astronomer and then transmitted to the
west via the Arabs. And Maths of course is essential for all science.
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN, M.D., PH.D., is professor of neurosciences and
psychology and Director of the Brain Perception Laboratory at the
University of California in San Diego. He is author of Phantoms In The
Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (with Sandra
Blakeslee).
Jeremy Cherfas:
Some of your jump-start friends and colleagues seem to have ignored
your (arbitrary?) cutoff date, so I will too. I think you'd have to go
a long way to find a more important invention than the basket. Without
something to gather into, you cannot have a gathering society of any
complexity, no home and hearth, no division of labour, no humanity.
This is not an original insight. I ascribe it to Glyn Isaac, a
sorely-missed palaeoanthropologist. The basket ranks right up there
with hay, the stirrup, printing and what have you.
While we're about it, though, I'd like to take issue with Dan
Dennett's choice of the battery. Granted it has enabled all the things
he says it has (and I seriously considered nominating the Walkman — a
bizarre idea, the tape recorder that doesn't record — as the invention
with most impact on our lives) but at what cost? All extant batteries
(though not fuel cells) are inherently polluting and wasteful. It
takes something like six times more energy to make a Zinc-alkaline
battery as the battery can store. I can't help but think that if a
small portion of the effort that has gone into inventing "better"
batteries had gone into, say, solar panels, our world and culture
would be even more different.
Thanks for a stimulating time.
JEREMY CHERFAS, biologist and BBC Radio Four broadcaster, is author of
The Seed Savers Handbook.
Bart Kosko:
Most important invention: CALCULUS
The world today would be very different if the Greeks and not
Newton/Leibniz had invented or "discovered" calculus. The world today
might have occurred a millennium or two earlier.
Calculus was the real fruit of the renaissance. It began by taking a
fresh look at infinity — at the infinitely small rather than the
infinitely large. And it led in one stroke to two great advances: It
showed how to model change (the differential equation) and it showed
how to find the best or worst solution to a well-defined problem
(optimization). The first advance freed math from static descriptions
of the world to dynamic descriptions that allowed things to change or
evolve in time. This is literally where "rocket science" becomes a
science. The second advance had more practical payoff because it
showed how to minimize cost or maximize profit. Thomas Jefferson
claimed to have used the calculus this way to design a more efficient
plow. Someday we may use it to at least partially design our offspring
to minimize bad health effects or (God forbid) maximize good behavior.
Calculus lies at the heart of our modern world. Its equations led to
the prediction of black holes. We built the first computers to run
other calculus equations to predict where bombs would land. The recent
evolution of calculus itself to the random version called "stochastic
calculus" has led to how we price the mysterious financial
"derivatives" contracts that underlie the global economy. Calculus has
led us from seeing the world as what Democritus called mere "atoms and
void" to seeing the world as atoms that move in a void that moves.
BART KOSKO is professor of electrical engineering at the University of
Southern California; he is author of Fuzzy Thinking and Nanotime.
Stuart Hameroff:
The most important invention in the past two thousand years is
anesthesia.
Have you ever had surgery? If so, either a) part of your body was
temporarily "deadened" by "local" anesthesia, or b) you "went to
sleep" with general anesthesia. Can you imagine having surgery, or
needing surgery, or even possibly needing surgery without the prospect
of anesthesia? And beyond the agony-sparing factor is an extra added
feature — understanding the mechanism of anesthesia is our best path
to understanding consciousness.
Anesthesia grew from humble beginnings. Inca shamans performing
trephinations (drilling holes in patients' skulls to let out evil
humors) chewed coca leaves and spat into the wound, effecting local
anesthesia. The systemic effects of cocaine were studied by Sigmund
Freud, but cocaine's use as a local anesthetic in surgery is credited
to Austrian ophthalmologist Karl Koller who in 1884 used liquid
cocaine to temporarily numb the eye. Since then dozens of local
anesthetic compounds have been developed and utilized in liquid
solution to temporarily block nerve conduction from peripheral nerves
and/or spinal cord. The local anesthetic molecules bind specifically
on sodium channel proteins in axonal membranes of neurons near the
injection site, with essentially no effects on the brain.
On the other hand general anesthetic molecules are gases which do act
on the brain in a remarkable fashion — the phenomenon of consciousness
is erased completely while other brain activities continue.
General anesthesia by inhalation developed in the 1840's, involving
two gases used previously as intoxicants. Soporific effects of diethyl
ether ("sweet vitriol") had been known since the 14th century, and
nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") was synthesized by Joseph Priestley in
1772. In 1842 Crawford Long, a Georgia physician with apparent
personal knowledge of "ether frolics" successfully administered
diethyl ether to James W. Venable for removal of a neck tumor. However
Long's success was not widely recognized, and it fell to dentist
Horace Wells to publicly demonstrate the use of inhaled nitrous oxide
for tooth extraction at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1844.
Although Wells had apparently used the technique previously with
complete success, during the public demonstration the gas-containing
bag was removed too soon and the patient cried out in pain. Wells was
denounced as a fake, however two years later in 1846 another dentist
William T.G. Morton returned to the "Mass General" and successfully
used diethyl ether on patient William Abbott. Morton used the term
"letheon" for his then-secret gas, but was persuaded by Boston
physician/anatomist Oliver Wendell Holmes (father of the Supreme Court
Justice) to use the term anesthesia.
Although its use became increasingly popular, general anesthesia
remained an inexact art with frequent deaths due to overdose and
effects on breathing until after World War II. Hard lessons were
learned following the attack on Pearl Harbor — anesthetic doses easily
tolerated by healthy patients had tragic consequences on those in
shock due to blood loss. Advent of the endotracheal tube (allowing
easy inhalation/exhalation and protection of the lungs from stomach
contents), anesthesia gas machines, safer anesthetic drugs and direct
monitoring of heart, lungs, kidneys and other organ systems have made
modern anesthesia extremely safe. However one mystery remains. Exactly
how do anesthetic gases work? The answer may well illuminate the grand
mystery of consciousness.
( cont'd )
jum...@my-deja.com
Inhaled anesthetic gas molecules travel through the lungs and blood to
the brain. Barely soluble in water/blood, anesthetics are highly
soluble in a particular lipid-like environment akin to olive oil. It
turns out the brain is loaded with such stuff, both in lipid membranes
and tiny water-free ("hydrophobic") lipid-like pockets within certain
brain proteins. To make a long story short, Nicholas Franks and
William Lieb at Imperial College in London showed in a series of
articles in the 1980's that anesthetics act primarily in these tiny
hydrophobic pockets in several types of brain proteins. The anesthetic
binding is extremely weak and the pockets are only 1 /50 of each
protein's volume, so it's unclear why such seemingly minimal
interactions should have significant effects. Franks and Lieb
suggested the mere presence of one anesthetic molecule per pocket per
protein prevents the protein from changing shape to do its job.
However subsequent evidence showed that certain other gas molecules
could occupy the same pockets and not cause anesthesia (and in fact
cause excitation or convulsions). Anesthetic molecules just "being
there" can't account for anesthesia. Some natural process critical to
consciousness and perturbed by anesthetics must be happening in the
pockets. What could that be?
Anesthetic gases dissolve in hydrophobic pockets by extremely weak
quantum mechanical forces known as London dispersion forces. The weak
binding accounts for easy reversibility - as the anesthetic gas flow
is turned off, concentrations drop in the breathing circuit and blood,
anesthetic molecules are gently sucked out of the pockets and the
patient wakes up. Weak but influential quantum London forces also
occur in the hydrophobic pockets in the absence of anesthetics and
govern normal protein movement and shape. A logical conclusion is that
anesthetics perturb normally occurring quantum effects in hydrophobic
pockets of brain proteins.
The quantum nature of the critical effects of anesthesia may be a
significant clue. Several current consciousness theories propose
systemic quantum states in the brain, and as consciousness has
historically been perceived as the contemporary vanguard of
information processing (J.B.'s "technology = new perception") the
advent of quantum computers will inevitably cast the mind as a quantum
process. The mechanism of anesthesia suggests such a comparison will
be more than mere metaphor.
STUART HAMEROFF, M.D. is Professor, Departments of Anesthesiology and
Psychology, University of Arizonan 1996. He is coeditor of Toward a
Science of Consciousness : The First Tucson Discussions and Debates
and Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson
Discussions and Debates.
Michael Nesmith:
After reading the various answers to the question, I'm going to sneak
through the door opened by Philip Anderson and nominate a discovery
instead of an invention. And it is the Copernican Theory. Generally it
was a counter-intuitive idea, and it ran opposite to the
interpretation of senses (not to mention the Church) I mean, one could
"see" the sun going across the sky. What could be more obvious than
that? A nice move. It took a lot of intellectual courage, and taught
us more than just what it said.
MICHAEL NESMITH is an artist, writer, and business man; former cast
member of "The Monkees".
Clifford Pickover:
As usual you are a font of important, stimulating ideas and have
gathered together an awesome collection of minds for your latest
survey. Here is my response.
In 105 AD, Ts'ai Lun reported the invention of paper to the Chinese
Emperor. Ts'ai Lun was an official to the Chinese Imperial court, and
I consider his early form of paper to be humanity's most important
invention and progenitor of the Internet. Although recent
archaeological evidence places the actual invention of papermaking 200
years earlier, Ts'ai Lun played an important role in developing a
material that revolutionized his country. From China, papermaking
moved to Korea and Japan. Chinese papermakers also spread their
handiwork into Central Asia and Persia, from which traders introduced
paper to India. This is why Ts'ai Lun is one of the most influential
people in history.
Today's Internet evolved from the tiny seed planted by Ts'ai Lun. Both
paper and the Internet break the barriers of time and distance, and
permit unprecedented growth and opportunity. In the next decade,
communities formed by ideas will be as strong as those formed by
geography. The Internet will dissolve away nations as we know them
today. Humanity becomes a single hive mind, with a group intelligence,
as geography becomes putty in the hands of the Internet sculptor.
Chaos theory teaches us that even our smallest actions have amplified
effects. Now more than ever before this is apparent. Whenever I am
lonely at night, I look at a large map depicting 61,000 Internet
routers spread throughout the world. I imagine sending out a spark, an
idea, and a colleague from another country echoing that idea to his
colleges, over and over again, until the electronic chatter resembles
the chanting of monks. I agree with author Jane Roberts who once
wrote, "You are so part of the world that your slightest action
contributes to its reality. Your breath changes the atmosphere. Your
encounters with others alter the fabrics of their lives, and the lives
of those who come in contact with them."
CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER is a research staff member at the IBM T. J.
Watson Research Center. He is the author of over 20 books translated
in 10 languages on a broad range of topics in science and art. His
internet web site has attracted nearly 200,000 visitors.
Margaret Wertheim:
Good question!
My immediate response (without even thinking) was the contraceptive
pill. My mother had six children in five and a half years and it was
only the invention of the pill that saved our family from becoming a
mini-nation-state in its own right. But since Colin Blakemore has
already described so well its immense importance, let me suggest
another "invention" — electrification.
Why electrification? For a start, one of my most vivid childhood
memories is of my mother seemingly spending endless hours washing
nappies and clothes by hand. The electric washing machine and other
electric home gadgets (vacuum cleaners, fridges, food processors et
cetera) have freed billions of women from the endless drudgery of
heavy-duty housework. By bringing us light and heat and power on tap,
electricity has truly transformed life — not just in the home, but in
almost every industry. Modern manufacturing would be impossible
without electricity. Ditto the modern office. The ability to literally
transport power is, I think, the most revolutionary technology to come
out of modern science. And of course, it is the ability to transport
electric power at the micro level that has made possible silicon
chips, and the attendant computer and information revolution. Far more
than Einstein and Bohr, Faraday and Maxwell are the true "heroes" of
the modern technological world.
MARGARET WERTHEIM is a science writer, and a research associate of the
American Museum of Natural History. She is the author of Pythagoras
Trousers a history of physics and religion.
Richard Dawkins:
THE SPECTROSCOPE
The telescope resolves light from very far away. The spectroscope
analyses and diagnoses it. It is through spectroscopy that we know
what the stars are made of. The spectroscope shows us that the
universe is expanding and the galaxies receding; that time had a
beginning, and when; that other stars are like the sun in having
planets where life might evolve.
In 1835, Auguste Comte, the French philosopher and founder of
sociology, said of the stars:
"We shall never be able to study, by any method, their chemical
composition or their mineralogical structure . . . Our positive
knowledge of stars is necessarily limited to their geometric and
mechanical phenomena."
Even as he wrote, the Fraunhofer lines had been discovered: those
exquisitely fine barcodes precisely positioned across the spectrum;
those telltale fingerprints of the elements. The spectroscopic
barcodes enable us to do a chemical analysis of a distant star when,
paradoxically (because it is so much closer), we cannot do the same
for the moon — its light is all reflected sunlight and its barcodes
those of the sun. The Hubble red shift, majestic signature of the
expanding universe and the hot birth of time, is calibrated by the
same Fraunhofer barcodes. Rhythmic recedings and approachings by
stars, which betray the presence of planets, are detected by the
spectroscope as oscillating red and blue shifts. The spectroscopic
discovery that other stars have planets makes it much more likely that
there is life elsewhere in the universe.
For me, the spectroscope has a poetic significance. Romantic poets saw
the rainbow as a symbol of pure beauty, which could only be spoiled by
scientific understanding. This thought famously prompted Keats in 1817
to toast "Newton's health and confusion to mathematics", and in 1820
inspired his well known lines:
"Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine —
Unweave a rainbow . . ."
Humanity's eyes have now been widened to see that the rainbow of
visible light is only an infinitesimal slice of the full
electromagnetic spectrum. Spectroscopy is unweaving the rainbow on a
grand scale. If Keats had known what Newton's unweaving would lead to
— the expansion of our human vision, inspired by the expanding
universe — he could not have drunk that toast.
RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi
Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University;
Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene, The Extended
Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River out of Eden (Science Masters
Series), Climbing Mount Improbable, and the recently published
Unweaving the Rainbow. See EDGE: "Science, Delusion, and the Appetite
for Wonder: A Talk by Richard Dawkins"; The Third Culture: Chapter 3.
David Haig:
My suggestion for the most important invention of the last two
millennia is the computer because of the way it extends the capacities
of the human mind for accurately performing large numbers of
calculations and for keeping track of and accessing vast bodies of
data. As with any great invention, these enhanced abilities have a
light and a dark side. As a scientist I am now able to answer
questions that could not be answered prior to the computer. On the
dark side is the loss of privacy and the enhanced potential for social
control made possible by the ability to manipulate large databases of
personal information.
As another candidate, my mother has said that her all time favorite
invention is the telephone because of how it allows her to stay in
intimate and immediate contact with distant friends.
DAVID HAIG is an evolutionary biologist and a member of the Department
of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
Christopher G. Langton:
Like others who have responded, I think the choice is obvious. The
remarkable thing is that "the obvious choice" is different for
everyone! To my mind, the most important inventions are those which
have forced the largest changes in our world-view. On the basis of
this criterion, I pick two (for reasons listed below): The telescope,
and the theory of evolution by natural selection.
I pick two because it seems to me that there are two major categories
of important inventions: a) complexity increasing, and b) complexity
decreasing.
By complexity increasing, I mean those inventions that open up vast
new realms of data, which can not be accounted for on the existing
world view, making the universe less understandable, and therefore
seemingly more complex.
By complexity decreasing, I mean those inventions that identify a
pattern or algorithm in vast realms of data, ridding that data of a
good deal of its apparent complication. These inventions force
alterations to our world view to account for previously unaccountable
data, or to account for it more directly and simply, making the
universe more understandable, and therefore seemingly less complex.
The former tend to take the form of instruments or devices — physical
constructs — while the latter tend to take the form of concepts,
theories, or hypotheses — mental constructs. Both qualify as
inventions.*
(*To be careful, the former also involves a mental construct — a
device alone is useless without the mental construct that points it in
the right direction.)
In the former category, nothing rivals the telescope.
No other device has initiated such a massive reconstruction of our
world view. It forced us to accept the Earth, and ourselves, as
"merely" a part of a larger cosmos. Of course, numerous theories
besides the earth-centered universe existed before its invention, but
the telescope opened the doors to the flood of data that would resolve
what were previously largely philosophical disputes. The microscope —
a relative of the telescope — also opened the door to a previously
unimagined universe, and runs a close second to the telescope on the
world-view shaking Richter scale.
In the latter category, there are many brilliant candidates, but I
think that Darwin's invention of the theory of evolution by natural
selection outshines them all. It is perhaps the only truly general
theory in Biology, a field much more complex than physics. If we
discover life elsewhere in the universe it is likely to be the only
biological theory that will carry over from our terrestrial biology.
Darwin's theory reduced tremendously the complication of zoological
data. Critically, as with the telescope, it has put tremendous
pressure on the previous world-view to accommodate man as "merely" a
part of a much larger nature. This pressure is still largely being
resisted, but the outcome is clear.
A close second would be the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Although the
Second Law has not, perhaps, posed such a profound challenge to our
collective world view, it has tremendously reduced the complexity of a
great body of data (and it profoundly affects the world view of anyone
who studies it in detail!)
I would have nominated the computer, but I think that, although it has
profoundly affected our daily routines, it has not yet profoundly
affected our world view. The computer is a kind of mathematical
telescope, revealing to us a vast new realm of data about what kinds
of dynamics follow from what sorts of rules — we are constantly
discovering new galaxies of mathematical reality with computers.
However, it will be a while before these empirical discoveries force a
profound alteration of our world view.
CHRISTOPHER G. LANGTON a computer scientist, is internationally
recognized as the "founder" of the field of Artificial Life. He is
Chief Technology Officer at The Swarm Corporation, and editor of the
Artificial Life journal. See The Third Culture, Chapter 21.
Eric J. Hall:
Quite a good question and some very interesting responses. However, I
take a more pragmatic view. For me, the steam engine was the most
important invention in the past two thousand years. The steam engine
freed man and beast from physical labor. No other invention had so
many different and versatile uses. Man could cut down entire forests
to feed sawmills to build cities, quarry stone, propel trains and
ships to make the world a smaller place, power factories, and generate
electricity. Agrarian society was over and industrialism reigned. Most
importantly, the steam engine created more leisure time for mankind.
No longer was leisure a pastime for the idle rich. The pursuit of
leisure and the changes it created in society far outstripped the
first 18 centuries. Without the steam engine, our society would be
radically different from today.
ERIC J. HALL is President of The Archer Group, a consulting firm
specializing in emerging technology companies. He has helped found
companies including Yahoo!, Women.com, and The ImagiNation Network.
Clay Shirkey:
My vote for "The Most Important Invention In the Past Two Thousand
Years" is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. This single piece of
mathematical jujitsu, proving unprovability, formally ended the strain
of Western thought begun by Socrates and first fully fleshed out by
Aristotle. The ancillary effects of that theory — a rejection of
master narrative, an understanding that we will never know all the
answers, an acceptance of contradiction, and an embrace of complexity
— are just now making themselves felt in the dawn of the post complete
world.
CLAY SHIRKEY is Professor, New Media Department of Film & Media,
Hunter College.
Keith Devlin:
Of course, "What is the single most important invention of the past
two thousand years?" is one of those questions that does not really
have an answer, like "What is the best novel/symphony/movie?
But if I had to make a choice, it would be the Hindu-Arabic number
system, which reached essentially its present form in the sixth
century.
Without it, Galileo would have been unable to begin the
quantificational study of nature that we now call science. Today,
there is scarcely any aspect of life that does not depend on our
ability to handle numbers efficiently and accurately. True, we now use
computers to do much of our number crunching, but without the
Hindu-Arabic number system we would not have any computers.
Because of its linguistic structure, the Hindu-Arabic number system
allows humans who have an innate linguistic fluency but only a very
primitive number sense to use their ability with language in order to
handle numbers of virtually any useful magnitude with as much
precision as required. In addition to its use in arithmetic and
science, the Hindu-Arabic number system is the only genuinely
universal language on Earth, apart perhaps for the Windows operating
system, which has achieved the near universal adoption of a
conceptually and technologically poor product by the sheer force of
market dominance. (By contrast, the Hindu-Arabic number system gained
worldwide acceptance because it is far better designed and much more
efficient, for human usage, than any other number system.)
KEITH DEVLIN, a mathematician, is the author of Goodbye, Descartes :
The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind; Life
by the Numbers; and The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible
Visible.
Luyen Chou:
I would have to vote for philosophical skepticism as the most
important "invention" (if one thinks of invention as fabrication
rather than discovery, as it is more archaically meant) of the past
two thousand years. The notion that there is a "truth behind" things
and a "bottom" to the matter has instilled in all of us, whether
scientists, philosophers, theologians, or lay people, a maniacal
obsession with improving our explanatory capabilities. As such
skepticism can be seen as the driving force behind science and
technology, modern conceptions of faith, the soul, and the other. Of
course, one might argue that skepticism has been around for longer
than two thousand years; but its characterization as a fundamental
problem to be contended with before any constructive work can be done
seems to me a peculiarly modern invention, a defining feature of our
intensively self-conscious, post-Cartesian world.
LUYEN CHOU is President and CEO of Learn Technologies Interactive in
New York City, an interactive media developer and publisher. See EDGE:
"Engineering Formalism and Artistry: The Yin and Yang of Multimedia: A
Talk With Luyen Chou".
Antonio R. Cabral, M.D.:
I propose that the most important invention in the past two thousand
years is: "Languages". If you take a look at the proposals you have
received (or will) so far: the contraceptive pill, the scientific
method (whatever that means), the quantum theory, and so on, they
could not have even been thought out, let alone conveyed, without the
aid of a language. I do not mean a language in particular, but all the
languages, dead or alive. Of course one tends to think that live
languages deserve the credit, but without the so-called "dead
languages", such as Latin, the live ones simply would not exist. If
one accepts that language is the most important invention in the past
2000 years, one has to concede that the "Human Brain" is the most
important inventor during the same period.
In my opinion, the printing press comes second to languages as the
most important invention in the past 20 centuries; this puts Johann
Gutenberg (c.1400-1468) as the second most important inventor of all,
since one can easily pinpoint him as the Father of the printed letter.
Without a (written) language, specially when it conveys concepts and
feelings, all cultures — scientific, literary or otherwise — would be
all but a conceptless matter. The Third Culture simply could not
breathe.
One can speculate ad nauseam about which language in the current state
of world affairs, including the Internet, is the most important one of
all. I have some ideas, to theorize about them, though, is beyond your
original question.
ANTONIO R. CABRAL, M.D. Is Associate Professor of Medicinem National
Autonomous University of Mexico.
Hendrik Hertzberg:
Philip Anderson asks the right question: "Why has no one mentioned the
printing press yet?"
I mean, doesn't it seem kind of obvious that printing — under which
would be subsumed all forms of large-scale reproduction of the written
word, from handmade wooden type to the computer and word-processing
program I'm using to write this — was the most important invention of
the past two thousand years? Printing led directly to mass literacy,
democracy, the scientific revolution, cyberthis and cyberthat, and all
those other good things.
A more general observation. I notice that most of the responses you
included in the email suggest that the most important invention of the
past two thousand years, whatever it was, just happens to have
happened in the past hundred years. Doesn't this reflect a bad case of
chronocentrism, i.e., the irrational belief that one is lucky enough
to be living in history's most important era? Given that people have
been inventing things all along, isn't it unlikely that all the most
important inventions would have happened in one little century out of
twenty? Wouldn't it be more logical to expect them to be spaced out
randomly over all twenty? Even if the twentieth is a particularly
inventive century, isn't it a little myopic to imagine that the one we
just happen to be living in is twenty times more inventive than any of
the others? Maybe four or five times more inventive, but even that
would be a stretch.
HENDRIK HERTZBERG, executive editor of The New Yorker since 1992, is
the author of the book One Million and, with Martin Kalb, of
Candidates.
David Berreby:
Interesting question. My candidate would be: The concept of
information as a commodity, a thing that can be bought and sold. It's
an ancient invention, dating back to the day of the fleet footed
messenger, but its enormous consequences had to wait for the
acceleration of information-carrying technologies like the telegraph
and the Internet. We're only now witnessing the cumulative impact, as
the buying and selling of information begins to outweigh the buying
and selling of stuff.
Why is this so important? Because humans who trade in information
behave like our hunter gathering ancestors. They are alert and
adaptable to an ever-changing environment. They work in small groups.
They are independent thinkers who dislike taking orders and are
fervently egalitarian. They place their faith in face to face
relationships, not authority or a title. For as long as humanity got
its living by agriculture or industry, such traits had to be
suppressed in favor of those more amenable to centralization,
authority, large-scale enterprises. This epoch is coming to an end. In
the post-industrial west we no longer value stability, steadfastness
and predictability over change, adaptability and flexibility. We are
no longer awed by political power, instead seeing those who hold it as
just like us. (When I was a kid people worried about the ``Imperial
Presidency'' becoming too awesome for a democracy to support. But
then, when I was a kid, an ex-wrestler could not get elected governor
of Minnesota.) Corporate types often remark that their 20-something
employees can't take orders and expect to be able to dress as they
please and bring their parrot to work.
All this is supposed to be a consequence of prosperity. But it seems
to me the shift is far more profound. After a 7000-year detour through
agriculture and industry, we are returning to the ways of our proud,
individualistic, headstrong, small-group-dwelling forebears, and that
will reshape the human community profoundly. And it's the move from a
thing-economy to an information-economy that's making it happen.
DAVID BERREBY'S writing about science and culture has appeared in The
New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, The Sciences and
many other publications. He is currently at work on a book about the
psychology of Us versus Them.
Charles Simonyi:
In the spirit of completeness and risking chronocentrism big time, I
nominate Public Key Cryptosystems as something invented during the
last two thousand years and which will remain useful long after the
printing press will exist only in the (electronic) history books next
to the steam engine. PKC has three incredible properties: perfect
privacy, perfect authentication, and a reliable carrier of value and
contracts — like gold used to be. All this in the digital environment
where information can be easily and perfectly stored and copied. At a
single stroke PKC transformed our vision of the asymptotic result of
information technology from the 1984-ish nightmare to a realistic and
ultimately attractive cyberspace where identity and privacy are not
lost, despite of our (and Orwell's) commonsense intuition to the
contrary.
CHARLES SIMONYI, Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation, focuses on
Intentional Programming, an ecology for abstractions which strives for
maximal reuse of components by separating high level intentions from
implementation detail. See EDGE: Intentional Programming: A Talk with
Charles Simonyi" and EDGE: " CODE II — Farmer & Simonyi: A Reality
Club Dialogue".
Piet Hut:
Building autonomous tools is my candidate for the most important
invention.
Artificial complex adaptive systems, from robots to any type of
autonomous agent, will change our world view in a qualitative way,
comparable to the change brought by the use of thing-like tools.
Tinkering with tools has shaped our view of the world and of
ourselves. For example, the invention of the pump enabled us to
understand the mechanical role of the heart. Science was born when
laboratory apparatus was used to select among mathematical theories of
the physical world which one correspond most closely to reality. But
all those tools have been lifeless and soulless things, and it is no
wonder that our scientific world view has tended to objectify
everything. Grasping the proper role of the subject pole of
experience, through the invention of subject-like tools, may provide
the key to a far wider world view.
With the invention of perspective, in the late Middle Ages, we shifted
our collective Western experience one-sidedly into the object pole,
leaving the subject pole out of the picture. We started looking at the
world from behind a window, and a couple centuries later, in science,
we attempted to take a God's eye view of the world. By now, we are
coming around full-circle, with our science and technology providing
us the means of exploration of the role of the subject.
We have only set the first steps towards building artificial subjects.
Just as our current artificial objects are vastly more complex than
the first wheel or bow and arrow, our artificial subjects will grow
more complex, powerful, and interesting over the centuries. But
already we can see a glimmer of what lies ahead: our first attempts to
build autonomous agents has taught us new concepts. As a result, we
are now beginning to explore self-organizing ecological, economic, or
social systems; areas of study where thing-like metaphors hopelessly
fail.
PIET HUT is professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced
Study, in Princeton. He is involved in the project of building GRAPEs,
the world's fastest special-purpose computers, at Tokyo University.
Susan Blackmore:
Birth control (or if you need it to be more specific, the pill)
Why? Because freedom from constant childbearing means that women can
become meme-spreaders like men — working for their memes rather than
their genes. This then means a change in the kinds of memes that
propagate effectively, including all the memes of other inventions as
well as the meme-spreading media, myths, science and the arts. In
other words, it is important because it changes the whole of culture.
Few single inventions have this effect on the whole meme pool.
SUSAN BLACKMORE, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of
the West of England, Bristol, columnist for the Independent, and
author of Dying To Live: Near-Death Experiences, and In Search of the
Light .
James J. O'Donnell:
If you read through this growing list, you will see that people tend
to discover that the most important invention in the last 2000 years
is something they just happen to know a lot about. Well, I know a lot
about some important inventions — like the codex book (and the
consequent idea that a book can be a manual for living — that leads us
to the 19th century and its dead ends) and like the computer (which
gives us a model for ignoring the manual and just living by
experiment), but I think it is quite undeniable that there is
something far more important going on: effectual health care. Not just
antibiotics, not just birth control, not just anesthesia (to say
things mentioned here), but the underlying fundamental fact that we
have learned to cross the scientific method with care for human beings
and save lives. A thought experiment I like to have people play is
this: review your own life and imagine what it would have been like
without late 20th century health care. Would you still be alive today?
An astonishingly large number of people get serious looks on their
faces and admit they wouldn't: I wouldn't, that's for sure. It's
medical techniques, it's antibiotics, but it's also vitamin pills and
— in some ways most wondrously cost-effective of all — soap, as in the
soap doctors use to wash their hands.
JAMES J. O'DONNELL, Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost
for Information Systems and Computing at the University of
Pennsylvania, is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to
Cyberspace.
Nicholas Humphrey:
The most important invention has been reading-glasses. They have
effectively doubled the active life of everyone who reads or does fine
work — and prevented the world being ruled by people under forty.
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY is a theoretical psychologist; professor at the New
School for Social Research, New York; author of Consciousness
Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, and Leaps of Faith:
Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation . See
The Third Culture, Chapter 11.
Jaron Lanier:
Joe Traub already nabbed the invention I would have chosen; empirical
method. So I'll stake out a different claim. For present purposes,
I'll claim that the most significant invention of the last 2000 years
was the human ego.
The ego I'm talking about is the self-concerned human that Harold
Bloom credits Shakespeare with having invented. It's the thing that
William Manchester finds definitively missing in the Medieval mind.
Jostein Gaarder, in his children's philosophy novel, Sophie's World,
blames St. Augustine for inventing it. It's what the fuss is about in
Nietzsche. It's what exists in existentialism.
In truth, I'm not entirely convinced that I don't find good evidence
of this creature in pre-Christian/Common-era texts. (Thomas Cahill
thinks it was a gift from the Jews.) But it does seem that the sense
of individual self, outfitted with moral responsibility, free will,
consciousness, and — most importantly — neurotic self-obsession, at
one time did not exist, and then did.
That same sense of self is now being challenged by AI-ish members of
the EDGE community. Perhaps it will disappear, just as it once
appeared. So it is reasonable to think of the ego as a natural
inhabitant of approximately the last 2000 years.
One could argue that the ego had to precede empirical method. The
shift from pure rationality to empiricism relied on an acknowledgement
of differing perspectives of observation (while pure rationality was
thought to be independent of personal perspective). So the self was
needed in order to have a starting point from which to pose theories
and to make measurements in order to test them. Only an ego can have
imperfect enough knowledge to make mere guesses about what's going on
in the universe, and the hubris to test and improve those guesses.
I personally hope the ego survives the computer.
JARON LANIER, a computer scientist and musician, is a pioneer of
virtual reality, and founder and former CEO of VPL. He is currently
the lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative. See
Digerati, Chapter 17.
Terrence Sejnowski:
Technological advances in communication from clay tablets, to
papyrus,to moveable type, to postscript have had a shaping influence
on society and these are accelerating. Almost overnight, the
accumulated knowledge of the world is crystallizing into a distributed
digital archive.
Images and music as well as text have merged into a universal currency
of information, the digital bit, which is my choice for the greatest
discovery of the last two millennia. Unlike other forms of archival
storage, bits are forever.
In the next millennium this digital archive will continue to expand,
in ways we cannot yet imagine, greatly enhancing what a single human
can accomplish in a lifetime, and what our culture can collectively
discover about the world and ourselves.
TERRENCE SEJNOWSKI, a pioneer in Computational Neurobiology, is
regarded by many as one of the world's most foremost theoretical brain
scientists. He is the director of the Computational Neurobiology Lab
at the Salk Institute and the coauthor of The Computational Brain.
Ron Cooper:
I am surprised no one mentioned distillation, the great alchemical
invention of transformation in the search to understand the essence of
existence.
Alchemy appears to have started in Ancient Egypt (al-khem means the
art of Egypt in Arabic). Alchemy travelled with Islam as it spread
across Northern Africa and into mainland Europe with the Moorish
invasion of Andalucia in the tenth century.
Alchemy tries to make sense of the world by, among other things,
working with the elements to transform matter and attempt to strip
away the extraneous and capture its purest essence.
Some suggest Alchemy's founding father was the Egyptian god Thoth (in
Greek Hermes). Both are symbols of mystical knowledge, rebirth and
transformation.
To find the first evidence of distillation of spirits, you have to go
to fourth century China, where the alchemist Ko Hung wrote about the
transformation of cinnabar in mercury as being: "like wine that has
been fermented once. It cannot be compared with the pure clear wine
that has been fermented nine time". Is he talking about distillation?
It seems possible. How do you ferment a wine nine times unless you
distill it? By that time, the Alexandrian Greeks had discovered that
by boiling you could transform one object into another. Pliny writes
about distillation being used to extract turpentine from resin, while
Aristotle recounts how sea water could be turned into drinking water
in 4 AD.
Aside from being the basis of modern science and industry, the
transformation of human beings brought on by the imbibing of distilled
spirits is of great interest to me.
RON COOPER, painter and sculptor who is known as "the King of
Downtown," was one of the original artists in the Los Angeles downtown
loft scene. More recently, he is founder and president of Del Maguey,
Single Village Mezcal (TM).
W. Daniel Hillis:
I agree that Science is the most important human development is the
last 2000 years, but it doesn't quite qualify as an invention. I
therefore propose the clock as the greatest invention, since it is an
instrument that enables Science in both a practice and temperament.
The clock is the embodiment of objectivity. It converted time from a
personal experience into a reality independent of perception. It gave
us a framework in which the laws of nature could be observed and
quantified. The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for
self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its
mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct
descendant of the clock.) Once we were able to imagine the solar
system as a clockwork automaton, the generalization to other aspects
of nature was almost inevitable, and the process of Science began.
W. DANIEL HILLIS is a physicist and computer scientist; Vice president
of research and development at the Walt Disney Company and a Disney
Fellow; cofounder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines Corporation
where he built Connection Machines; co-chair of The Long Now
Foundation. He is author of The Connection Machine, The Pattern on the
Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work (Science Masters
Series), as well as numerous articles.See The Third Culture, Chapter
23; Digerati, Chapter 11.
John Baez:
Here is my reply to your fiendish question:
How can we possibly pick the most important invention in the past two
thousand years? The real biggies — language, fire, agriculture, art —
came too soon. In the last two millennia our world has seen so many
inventions that it's hard to think of one that stands above all the
rest. The printing press? The computer? The A-bomb? After a bit of
this, one is tempted to give a smart-aleck reply and back it up with
the semblance of earnest reasoning: "Thousand Island dressing!"
But even this is boring. Somehow we have to break out of the box!
Well, if inventions are important, surely it's even more important to
invent the social structures that will guarantee a steady flow of new
inventions. I've heard it said that Edison was the first to turn
invention into a business. Every day he would walk into his lab and
say "Okay, what can we invent today?" But the groundwork was laid
earlier. Perhaps the invention of a patent office was the key step? Or
further back, Bacon's "New Atlantis", which envisioned the
techno-paradise we are now all so busy trying to build?
JOHN BAEZ is a mathematical physicist working on quantum gravity using
the techniques of "higher-dimensional algebra". A professor of
mathematics at the University of California, Riverside, he enjoys
answering physics questions on the usenet newsgroup
sci.physics.research, and also writes a regular column entitled "This
Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics".
Viviana Guzman:
Why hasn't anyone mentioned television??!! Is it too obvious? I think
it's the single most powerful and manipulative tool ever invented.
It's today's most important source of information and serves as a
tremendous behavior patterning device. Since it's inception, crime has
risen, sex has increased and the attendance at live performances has
died.
VIVIANA GUZMAN is a flutist whose latest album is Planet Flute.
Stephen Schneider:
My first association for the most (whatever that means) important
invention was the unconscious mind, because, I thought to myself, the
concept offers some explanation — and thus hopefully later remedies —
for the behaviors coming from the darker sides of our nature.
Armed with better understanding of the origins of such behavior,
hopefully we could fashion ways out of the irrational clamp that
fundamentalist religion, blind nationalism or deep ideology often puts
on our conscious awareness. But, one thought later was that I believe
the unconscious does indeed exist, so logically it is a discovery, not
an invention.
That (somewhat uneasily) suggests psychotherapy (again, whatever that
means given all its incarnations — psychotherapy being but one of a
basket of techniques to make the unconscious more conscious) as my
invention. At least in principle — and often in practice too I believe
— it does offer us the opportunity to become more conscious, therefore
less inclined to absolute thinking and the subjugation and/or violence
absolutism often engenders in the minds of those who don't harbor
doubts.
In discussing the causes and possible solutions to global
environmental problems (e.g., global warming in particular), I note in
dialogues with junior high school students — right on down to senate
committees — that we can't easily fix problems we can't see. Thus,
solutions to long-term, global-scale systems threats require — in a
democracy at least — overcoming any collective denial that our "puny"
individual impacts can cause a major disruption at a planetary scale
or over timeframes longer than our lifetime.
Admittedly, I'm not going to seriously claim psychoanalysis is as
"important" an invention as the scientific method over the past 2000
years (as I recall one of your respondents proposed). What I see as a
key invention for the year 2000+, though, is an expanded systems
analysis that includes methods to build in an understanding of the
role of the unconscious of individuals which leads to lifestyles and
behaviors which "scale up" to create unanticipated collective
consequences.
Although not directly responsive to your question, the invention I
really like — think we will really need — is a fusion of systems
analysis with psychotherapy. But the new field of "systems therapy" is
yet to be invented!, leaving me dangling uneasily between systems —
and psycho-analysis. Perhaps, if armed with insights from tools that
integrated physical, biological, social and psychological drivers of
our behaviors across a range of scales, rather than always chugging
merrily along in business as usual mode, we'd be more aware of the
range of consequences of our unconsciousness. Then, if we continued to
damage the collective or put the future at risk, at least that would
be more of a choice and less of a surprise. With best wishes to all
for the holiday season.
STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER is a Professor in the Biological Sciences
Department at Stanford University, and the Former Department Director
and Head of Advanced Study Project at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research, Boulder; author of The Genesis Strategy; The
Coevolution Of Climate And Life; Global Warming: Are We Entering The
Greenhouse Century?; and Laboratory Earth (Science Masters Series).
Philip Campbell:
Thanks for the reminder. Here's my shot. Perhaps the most
challengingly important inventions are those that open up new moral
dilemmas, and thus make some people question whether the invention
should have been allowed (or precursor discovery sought) in the first
place. This even applies to Howard Gardner's suggestion of classical
music: I would add Adorno's (I think) statement that, in contrast to
some composers, it is impossible to find evil that could have been
reinforced by any note written by Mozart.
On the other hand, I believe Wagner is still banned in Israel.
But my own suggestion is closer to my professional interests. As
delightfully examined in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel,
writing was at least one of the most important inventions of all time,
but Sumerian cuneiform is too old for me to offer it, by 3000 years.
So, in agreement with Philip Anderson's nudge, the printing press is
my response to the question. After all, even the World Wide Web is
just a printing press with electronic and photonic elaborations. But I
can't resist looking forward at an editorial fantasy, ignoring all
sober estimations of the difficulties involved: a cumulative invention
which, if fulfilled, would certainly have a capacity for good and
evil. To quote William Gibson's Neuromancer:
".. and still he dreamed of cyberspace...still he'd see the matrix
in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across the
colorless void..."
No keyboard, mouse or screen, just neural connections and a
many-dimensional space of, at least, information, to explore, organise
and communicate at will — perhaps, dare I presumptuously suggest, with
occasional help from an editor. I fear it's too much for me to expect,
but my grandchildren could love it.
PHILIP CAMPBELL (whose oldest offspring is 13) was founding editor of
Physics World, and has been Editor of Nature since 1995.
John Horgan:
Okay, I'll bite. Has anyone nominated free will yet? The concept is
more than 2,000 years old, but surely it deserves consideration as one
of our most important inventions ever. Almost as soon as philosophers
conceived of free will, they struggled to reconcile it with the
materialistic, deterministic views of nature advanced by science.
Epicurus insisted that there must be an element of randomness within
nature that allows free will to exist. Lucretius called this
randomness "the swerve." Modern free-willers find the swerve within
chaos theory or quantum mechanics. None of these arguments are very
convincing. Science has made it increasingly clear — to me, anyway —
that free will is an illusion. But more even than God, it is a
glorious, absolutely necessary illusion.
JOHN HORGAN, science writer; author of The End of Science : Facing the
Limits of Knowledge In The Twilight of the Scientific Age, has also
written freelance articles for The New York Times, The New Republic,
Slate, The London Times, Discover, The Sciences and other
publications. See EDGE: " Why I Think Science Is Ending: A Talk With
John Horgan" and EDGE: " The End of Horgan?".
Raphael Kasper:
My immediate reaction to the question was to choose between the
printing press and any of a set of public health-related inventions
(antibiotics, sewage treatment, ...). And since it seems as though we
might never have had the public health advances without the printing
press, but did, in fact, have the printing press without the public
health advances, I'd have to choose the printing press.
Why? Because it opened the possibility that knowledge (information,
wisdom) could be disseminated beyond a small number of privileged
individuals, thus permitting larger numbers to share or debate
world-views and to build upon past and present ideas. Thus far, at
least, new electronic technologies (radio, movies, television,
computers) have been employed as extensions of this broadening of
access to knowledge, altering the medium of exchange but not the
concept. At some time in the future they may lead to more fundamental
changes in the human condition, but not yet, I'm afraid.
RAPHAEL KASPER, a physicist, is Associate Vice Provost for Research at
Columbia University and was Associate Director of the Superconducting
Super Collider Laboratory.
jum...@my-deja.com
Sherry Turkle:
My candidate would be the idea of the unconscious, the notion that
what we say and do and feel can spring from sources of which we are
not aware, that our choices and the qualities of our relationships are
deeply motivated by our histories. In recent years, the Freudian
contribution has tended be seen as historical...something we have
passed beyond...but I think that in large part this is because the
most fundamental ideas of psychodynamics have passed into popular
culture as a given. These ideas animate out understandings of who we
are with our families, with our friends and work. They add a dimension
to our understandings of what it is to be human that will become
increasingly important as we confront world in which artificial
intelligences are increasingly presented to us and our children as
candidates for dialogue and relationship (this year's Furbies are only
a beginning) — and we are compelled to a new level of reflection about
what is special about being a person.
SHERRY TURKLE is a professor of the sociology of sciences at MIT. She
is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit;
Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution,
and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.. See
Digerati, Chapter 31.
David Myers:
Others in this science-minded group have appropriately mentioned the
scientific method. Speaking for my discipline let me sharpen this:
When it comes to thinking smart — to sifting reality from wishful
thinking — one of the great all-time inventions is the control group.
If we want to evaluate medical claims (from bloodletting to new drugs
to touch therapy), to assess social programs, or to isolate influences
on human behavior we construct a controlled reality. By random
assignment we form people into equivalent groups which either receive
some experience or not — thereby isolating the factor of interest. The
power of the controlled experiment has meant the death of many wild
and wacky claims, but also the flourishing of critical thinking and
rationality.
DAVID MYERS, professor of psychology at Hope College, is the author of
The Pursuit of Happiness: Who Is Happy, and Why, as well several
textbooks which include Exploring Psychology, and Psychology .
Don Goldsmith:
The most important invention has been a mental construct: the
realization that we on Earth form an integral part of a giant cosmos,
not a privileged form of existence in a special place. This invention,
once the province of a few intellectuals in an obscure corner of the
world, has now become widespread, though it remains a minority view
among the full population; its implications and successes lie all
around us.
DONALD GOLDSMITH is an astronomer and the author of over a dozen books
including The Astronomers, the companion volume to the PBS series of
the same title, and The Hunt for Life on Mars. In 1995, Dr. Goldsmith
was the recipient of the Annenberg Foundation Award for lifetime
achievement awarded by the American Astronomical Society. He has also
been awarded the Dorothea Klumpke-Robert prize for astronomy
popularization.
Arnold Trehub :
The most important invention in the past two thousand years?
In my opinion it is the invention by Otto von Guericke in 1660 of a
machine which produced static electricity. This device was the
primitive tool which unlocked our understanding and application of
electricity. Modern power generation, communication, computation, and
almost all of our most important analytic devices stand on the
foundation of von Guericke's machine. A long line of basic
intellectual formulations from electromagnetism to the bioelectric
properties of brain mechanisms owe a debt to this invention. When we
discover how the human brain creates the covert models of its own
inventions, the structure and dynamics of the brain's own electrical
activity will undoubtedly be an essential aspect of the explanation.
ARNOLD TREHUB is adjunct professor of psychology, University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, and the author of The Cognitive Brain.
Jay Ogilvy:
Okay, I'll weigh in with the invention of secularism — getting out
from under the thumbs of the gods.
From all we can tell from historians and anthropologists, every
ancient society worshipped some god or other. Superstition ran
rampant. Human beings denied their own freedom and autonomy by
praising or blaming the gods for their fates. Not until some bold
minds like Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and
Sigmund Freud did it become thinkable, much less fashionable, to
preach atheism. These were inventors of a new order, one that allowed
human beings to make up our game as we go along, unfettered by
superstitions about the will of the gods or fear of their punishment.
For my part I am appalled at how slowly this invention has been
accepted. Over 60 percent of Americans still agree (somewhat, mostly,
or strongly) that, "The world was literally created in six days, as
the Bible says," (confirmed on three successive national probability
sample surveys by the Values and Lifestyles Program at SRI
International where I was director of research during the 1980s).
Islam claims over a billion devotees. And I find it remarkable the
number of highly educated, intelligent adults who still embrace a
childlike, wish-fulfilling belief in God.
Without kneeling down to positivism, or overestimating what is
knowable, or underestimating the mysteries that remain lurking in the
individual and social unconscious, let us nevertheless celebrate our
liberation from superstition, remain humble before forces that
transcend our individual egos, but accept the collective
responsibilities of human freedom, and sing, as my GBN partner,
Stewart Brand, did in the epigram for the Whole Earth Catalog: "We are
as gods so we might as well get good at it."
JAY OGILVY is a cofounder and Vice-President of Global Business
Network , responsible for training; headed "Values and Lifestyles"
research at SRI International; former professor of philosophy at Yale
and Williams College; author of Living Without a Goal and Many
Dimensional Man.
Douglas Rushkoff:
The eraser. As well as the delete key, white-out, the Constitutional
amendment, and all the other tools that let us go back and fix our
mistakes.
Without our ability to go back, erase, and try again, we'd have no
scientific model, nor any way to evolve government, culture, or
ethics. The eraser is our confessor, our absolver, and our time
machine.
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is the author of Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the
Future, and the novel Ecstasy Club. His books have been translated
into 16 languages, and his weekly column is syndicated by The New York
Times. He writes and lectures about technology and culture, and
teaches at New York University.
Mike Godwin:
The most important invention in the last 2000 years has to be the
moveable-type printing press. Cheap book production put the printed
language in the hands of the masses and led directly to the rise of
literacy. Once you have a large literate class, you see the democratic
impulse flourish — even a moderately educated populace begins to make
judgments about its rulers and its mode of government. Cheap book
production also advances both scientific and historical knowledge by
ensuring that valuable source documents are duplicated and preserved
and (just as important, really) ensuring that those old documents are
readable. Cheap book duplication makes it possible to quickly build a
cadre of scientists and historians who've read the same works and thus
share a common body of knowledge. Finally, moveable type makes it
possible for the past to speak to the future en masse in a way that
the evanescent oral tradition never could.
It's helpful to look at the other inventions listed as the most
important in the last 2000 years and try to imagine how they might
have come about had there been no moveable-type printing press.
MIKE GODWIN, an attorney, is counsel for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, the San Francisco-based cyber-liberties organization, and
the author of Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age.
See Digerati, Chapter 12
Duncan Steel:
Summary answer: The non-implemented 33-year English Protestant
Calendar. Let me start my answer by making a few comments about the
suggestions made by other correspondents, and the general premise of
the specific answer I give myself.
At the time of writing many answers are already in, and so many good
ideas have been aired. I don't even need to refer to the list to guess
at some of them: the computer, the contraceptive pill, gunpowder, the
internal combustion engine, nuclear weapons. Wait! you say. What am I
suggesting, that nuclear explosions are good? Well, maybe not from the
perspective of how they may be used on Earth; but from another
perspective one could claim that they have been a major peacekeeping
influence over the past half-century, which has been comparatively war
less compared with what one might have expected given the other
technologies available: jet planes, napalm, guided missiles,... Note
that I wrote "one could claim" — that does not mean that I am claiming
it, I am just posing an arguable position.
In the same way one could argue that the contraceptive pill, which has
indeed been nominated as one of the most important inventions, is
actually a bad thing. For example, we cannot know whether it has
robbed us of a 21st century Einstein who would have found the way to
unify the laws of physics whilst identifying a cure for cancer in her
spare time.
The impossibility of knowing how the world might have been post hoc
opens up various avenues of thought, like what if Hitler had never
lived? (a matter explored in certain ways by Stephen Fry in his novel
'Making History'). Obviously this has a wide variety of implications
with gross repercussions, especially for the Jews, Gypsies and other
races which were the target of such atrocities. But for my present
purposes let me sidestep such huge considerations, and instead look at
some trivial ones. Suppose that you are the President of the Boston
and Area Volkswagen Beetle Owners Club: you might adjudge the
hypothesized nonexistence of Hitler as being most important in your
life because the Beetle would never have been built.
One therefore has to think about what important means in the context
of different people's lives. Right now the most important thing to a
Denver Broncos fan (I write as they stand 13-0) is whether a perfect
season is in the offing. Excuse me but isn't that totally
insignificant to some starving child in Ethiopia; but it is the thing
foremost in the mind of that Broncos fan, perhaps fatally-so: he may
crash whilst driving to the next game at Mile High Stadium and lose
his life, never getting to see his team romp the Superbowl again.
The outcome of my own mental perambulations on this question of the
most important invention is that all the technological products, of
recent years and old, would not only have been invented
sooner-or-later anyway, but also they are mere applications of ideas.
An idea may be important, even though it does not directly lead to an
important invention with a physical reality. An idea itself I count as
being an invention in the current context.
Further, how we got to where we are now is the result of many
important ideas producing branching points in history. Now, one could
make a case for the more distant (in history) branching points being
more fundamental, because all following events depend upon them. If
Alexander the Great, Charlemagne and William the Conqueror had never
lived, then neither would Hitler. But that form of reasoning leads to
a reductio ad absurdum. Rather, I choose to ask: "How did we get to
where we are now?" The first step needed there is to define where we
are, and the answer to that is: with the USA being the powerhouse of
most of the rest of the world. Thus the branching point I look to is
that which made the USA a reality. I do not mean the Declaration of
Independence. I mean: what made the English first go and settle the
Atlantic seaboard of North America?
The answer to that provides my answer to the "Most Important Invention
In The Past Two Thousand Years", but it is not original to me. The
thing I am going to describe was suggested to me by Simon Cassidy, a
British mathematician who lives in California.
Here is the story. When the Catholic Church (per Pope Gregory XIII)
brought in the reformed calendar in 1582, they decided to use a
second-best solution to the problem. Let me tell you, all Christian
calendar matters hinge on the question of the Easter computus. That
depends upon the time of the vernal equinox, which is ecclesiastically
defined to be March 21st, although astronomically-speaking the equinox
on the Gregorian calendar shifts over the 400-year leap-year cycle by
53 hours, between March 19 and 21. This follows from the long cycle
time. By far preferable from a religious perspective would be a
calendar which keeps the equinox on one day, requiring a shorter
cycle. Even so far back as AD 1079, Omar Khayyam had shown that an
eight leap-years in 33-year cycle provides an excellent approximation
to the year as measured as the time between vernal equinoxes. The
advisers of Gregory XIII knew this but instead recommended the
inferior 97/400 leap-year system we use, perhaps in the belief that
the Protestants did not know of the better 8/33 concept.
But in England, they did. John Dee and others (Thomas Harriot and
Walter Raleigh amongst them) had secretly come up with a plan to
implement a 'Perfect Christian Calendar' using the 33-year cycle (the
traditional lifetime of Christ). In that span there are eight
four-year cycles leading to a time-of-day wander by the equinox of
just below 18 hours. The problem is the one five-year cycle in each
grand cycle, during which the equinox steps forward by just below six
hours in each of four jumps before the following leap year pulls it
back by 24 hours. The full amplitude of the movement is 23 hours and
16 minutes. To get the equinox to remain on one calendar day
throughout the 33-year cycle one has to use as a prime meridian for
time-keeping a longitude band which is just right, and quite narrow.
It happened (in the late sixteenth century but with movement east
since due to the slow-down of the Earth's spin) to be at 77 degrees
west, which Cassidy terms "God's Longitude".
If you look down that meridian you will find that in the 1580s the
settled areas (in the Caribbean, Peru, etc.) were under Spanish, hence
Catholic, control. To grab part of God's Longitude and found a New
Albion, enabling them to introduce a rival calendar — that Perfect
Christian Calendar — and convert the other Christian states to the
Protestant side, England mounted various expeditions which historians
have since misinterpreted. In 1584-90 the so-called Lost Colony was
sent to Roanoke Island, a bizarre place to attempt to start
colonization but an excellent site from which to make astronomical
observations to fix the longitude and thus decide how far inland New
Albion should be. Similarly in 1607 the choice of Jamestown Island
seems bizarre from the settlement perspective — why not out on
Chesapeake Bay, and away from the attacks of the local Algonquians led
by Pocahontas' father Powhatan? — but makes sense from the paramount
need to grab a piece of God's Longitude. From the foothold the English
managed to gain, Old Virginny grew and later other colonizers came to
New England, and New Amsterdam was bought from the Dutch. But later
utility/developments do not reflect the original purpose of the
English coming to Roanoke Island and Jamestown Island any more than
the Eiffel Tower was built to provide a mount for the many radio
antennas which now festoon its apex.
After the fact the English did not reveal their prime motivation for
Raleigh's American adventures and the investment in the ill-starred
Jamestown colonizers, and all of this is yet to be properly teased
out. But if the English had never invented their non-implemented
33-year Protestant Calendar, then the USA as it is would not exist,
and all of the scientific, technological and cultural development of
the world over the past couple of centuries would be quite different.
In view of this I nominate that calendar, due to John Dee, as the most
important invention of the past 2000 years.
DUNCAN STEEL conducts research on asteroids, comets and meteors and
their influence upon the terrestrial environment, is Director of
Spaceguard Australia, and the author of Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday
Comets.
Tom Standage:
It all depends on how you define important, of course. But to my mind
the most important invention is telecommunications technology: the
telegraph, the telephone, and now things like the Internet. Until
about 150 years ago, it was impossible to communicate with someone in
real time unless they were in the same room. The only options were to
send a message (or go in person) by horse or ship.
The early optical telegraphs of the 1790s made long-distance
communication possible at hitherto impossible speeds, at least for the
governments that built them, but they were not available for general
use. Then in the 1840s, the electric telegraph enabled people to send
messages over great distances very quickly. This was a step change,
though its social consequences took a while to percolate. At first,
telegraph operators became the pioneers of a new frontier: they could
gather in what we would today call chat rooms, play games over the
wires, and so on. (There were several telegraphic romances and
weddings.) The general public, of course, was still excluded, and had
no direct access to the real-time nature of the technology. But the
invention of the telephone in the 1870s made real-time
telecommunications far more widely available.
Today, in the developed world at least, we think nothing of talking
with people on the other side of the world. During the course of a
normal working day, many people spend more time dealing with people
remotely than they do face-to-face. The ubiquity of telecommunications
technology has become deeply embedded in our culture. Of course, life
has sped up as a result. But we watch TV and use telephones, fax
machines and, increasingly, the Internet, almost unthinkingly. If the
mark of an advanced technology is that it is indistinguishable from
magic, then the mark of an important one is that it becomes invisible
— that we fail to notice when we are using it. That makes the
significance of telecommunications technology very easy to overlook,
and underestimate.
TOM STANDAGE, Science Correspondent of The Economist and former deputy
editor of the Daily Telegraph's technology supplement, "Connected," is
the author of The Victorian Internet: A History of the 19th Century
Communications Revolution. He has written for many newspapers and
magazines including Wired, The Guardian, The Independent, and The
Daily Telegraph. He has also appeared as a technology and new media
pundit on BBC television and radio.
Andy Clark:
DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMS
A digital ecosystem is a kind of universe, realized in electronic
media, in which we observe incremental evolution and complex
interaction. The classic examples come from work in Artificial Life,
such as Tom Ray's Tierra project in which strings of code compete for
resources, such as CPU time, and in which cascades of strategies for
success develop, with later ones exploiting the weaknesses and
loopholes of their predecessors.
But the idea is much broader. The worldwide web and browser
technologies have combined to create a massive digital ecosystem
populated by ideas and product descriptions, whose true impact on the
human lifestyle is only just beginning to be felt. The human mind was
never contained in the head, and has always been a construct involving
head, artifacts (such as pen and paper), and webs of communication and
interaction. We make our worlds smart so that brains like ours can be
dumb in peace. But the development of web and internet technologies
may well signal the next great leap in the evolution of thought and
reason. For we now have a medium in which ideas can travel, mutate,
recombine and propagate with unprecedented ease and (increasingly)
across the old barriers of culture, language, geography and central
authority.
Moreover, and in a kind of golden loop, we can use our experience with
more restricted digital ecosystems to improve our grip on the
properties of the kind of large, distributed, self-organizing system
of which we are now a proper part. Understanding these properties is
important both for policy making (what kind of regulation creates and
maintains the optimal conditions for productive self-organization in a
complex and highly uncertain world?) and for moral and economic
reason. Human brains are bad at seeing the patterns that will result
from multiple, ongoing, bidirectional interactions: see, for example,
the simulations that show, to most peoples surprise, that if each
person in a group insists on having just 30% of their neighbors 'the
same' as them (picked out by race, gender, sexual inclination or
whatever you like), that over a short period of time what evolves is a
highly segregated ecology containing a great many 'all X'
neighborhoods. Perhaps if our children get to play with quite
large-scale digital ecosystems, in games such as Sim City or using new
educational resources such as such as Mitchell Resnick's Starlogo,
they may yet learn something of how to predict, understand, and
sometimes avoid, such emergent patterns.
Digital ecosystems thus both radically transform the space in which
human brains think and reason, and provide opportunities to help us
learn to reason better about the kind of complex system of which we
are now a part. The double-whammy gets my vote.
ANDY CLARK is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy/
Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis,
St Louis, MO, USA. He is the author of Microcognition, Associative
Engines and most recently Being There: Putting Brain, Body And World
Together Again.
Stanislas Dehaene:
In my opinion, the most important human invention is not an artefact,
such as the pill or the electric shaver. It's an idea, the very idea
that made all these technical successes possible: the concept of
education.
Our brain is nothing but a collection of networks of neurons and
synapses that have been shaped by evolution to solve specific
problems. Yet through education and culture, we have found ways to
"recycle" those networks for other uses. With the invention of reading
and writing, we recycle our visual system to do word reading. With the
invention of mathematics, we apply our innate networks for number,
space, and time to all sorts of problems beyond their original domain
of relevance. Education is the key invention that enables all these
rewirings to take place at a time when our brains are still optimally
modifiable.
As David Premack likes to remind us, homo sapiens is the only primate
that has invented an active pedagogy. Without education, it would only
take one generation for all the inventions that other have mentioned
to vanish from the surface of the earth.
STANISLAS DEHAENE is a researcher at the Institut National de la Santé
studies cognitive neuropsychology of language and number processing in
the human brain. He is author of The Number Sense: How Mathematical
Knowledge Is Embedded In Our Brains. See EDGE: "What Are Numbers,
Really? A Cerebral Basis For Number Sense" by Stanislas Dehaene."
John Maddox:
I'm amazed that fellow beneficiaries of this site are making such
heavy weather of your pre-millennial assignment. Incidentally, surely
some have bent your rules in that assorted Sumarians, Assyrians and
Egyptians, not to mention Chinese, Greeks and Romans, were well into
the recording of history long before 2,000 years ago.
Ab-reacting a little, I was tempted to enter the central
locking-systems on modern motorcars (a.k.a. "automobiles") as the
greatest contribution to the convenience of modern life, but that's a
trivial invention (and should have been incorporated on the model-T).
In any case, there's no doubt in my mind that the invention of the
differential calculus by Newton and, independently, by Leibnitz, was
the outstanding invention of the past 2,000 years. The calculus made
the whole of modern science what it is. Moreover, this was not a
trivial invention. Newton know that velocity is the rate of change
(with time) of distance (from Galileo, for example) and that
acceleration is the rate of change of velocity (with time), but it was
far from self-evident that these quantities could be inferred from the
geometrical shapes of Kepler's orbits of the planets. Nowadays, of
course, mere schoolboys (and girls) can play Newton's game — it's just
a matter of "changing the variables", as they say.
In the seventeenth century, it was far from obvious that the
differential calculus would turn out to be as influential as later
events have shown. Indeed, Daniel Bernoulli claimed (in 1672) that
Newton had deliberately hidden his "method of fluxions" in obscure
language so as to keep the secret to himself. But Leibnitz's technique
was hardly transparent; it fell to Bernoulli himself to interpret the
scheme, much as Freeman Dyson made Feynman's electrodynamics
intelligible in the 1940s.
Both Newton and Leibnitz appreciated that the inverse of
differentiation leads to a way of calculating the "area under a curve"
(on which Newton had earlier spent a great deal of energy), but it was
Liebnitz who invented the integral sign now scattered through the
mathematical literature. That these developments transformed
mathematics hardly needs assertion.
But the effect of the calculus on physics, and eventually on the rest
of science, was even more profound. Where would be field theories of
any kind (from Maxwell and Einstein to
Schrodinger/Feynman/Schwinger/Weinberg and the like) without the
calculus?
One can, of course, say much the same about the invention of
arithmetic, but that long predates 2,000 years ago. The calculus was
the next big leap forward.
JOHN MADDOX is Editor emeritus of Nature; physicist; author of
Revolution in Biology, The Doomsday Syndrome, Beyond the Energy
Crisis, and What Remains to be Discovered. See EDGE: "Complexity and
Catastrophe" A Talk With Sir John Maddox."
Eberhard Zangger:
The tricky part of the question is not what the most important
invention is, but the qualifier "in the past two thousand years".
Technological innovations alter the frontier between humans and their
natural habitat. Because of the insuperable importance of the
environment, humans have always sought to maximize the advantage they
can take from the laws provided by nature. As a consequence, truly
fundamental innovations date back many thousand years ago. The most
outstanding innovation of all times was probably the domestication of
animals, followed by that of plants. Life in permanent homes, villages
and cities, the wheel, the sailing ship, engineering, script, as well
as conceptual achievements such as nations, democracy, religion, music
and songs, even taxes, interest and inflation all date back way before
the beginning of the common era. Several innovations suggested in this
forum were actually part of every day routines of Bronze Age people,
including, for instance, language, steel, paper, and reading glasses.
Scientific method must have also existed in some form, since 14th
century BC hydraulic installations in Greece perfectly meet the
parameters of the given environment. Even moveable type was known by
1500 BC, as the example of the Discos of Phaistos from Minoan Crete
shows. Finally, heliocentricity was first discovered by the astronomer
Aristarchos of Samos during the 3rd century BC — but the concept
failed peer reviews and its acceptance was thus delayed by 1800 years.
Since the principle factors controlling people's lives today already
existed 2000 years ago, the skeptic in me would intuitively vote for:
nothing worth mentioning.
If we take a stroll through a Roman town 2000 years ago — and ancient
Pompeii provides a good example of a city frozen in a moment of every
day life — we would find a city containing factories (including one
for fish sauce), public baths, athletic stadiums, theaters, plastered
roads, proper sidewalks, pubs and, inevitably, brothels — facilities
for people who were, for the most part, in better physical shape than
us. What distinguishes a modern city from its Roman predecessor? Two
things come to mind, the first belonging to the category of conceptual
realization: Christianity. The Roman dominion over the western world
lasted for about 1000 years — and we might indeed still live in the
Roman era, if there would not have been a common denominator which
united the many tribes suppressed by the imperious control. This
unifying factor was Christianity. — The second prominent innovation
which distinguishes a Roman from a modern city is electricity. Only
through the invention of electricity is it possible to operate laundry
machines and subnotebook computers; two inventions I personally
cherish the most, as well as many of the other items suggested in this
forum.
However, I recall enjoying a particularly Romantic evening in the
usually overcrowded, noisy Cretan tourist resort of Elounda. Some time
passed before I realized what made this evening so special — a general
power shut down had knocked out all fluorescent lighting and
loudspeakers. Lanterns and kitchen stoves still worked — with gas.
This brings me back to my original response to the question, what is
the most important invention of the past two thousand years. Nothing
worth mentioning.
EBERHARD ZANGGER is a geoarchaeologist and works as chief physical
scientist on many archaeological field projects in Mediterranean
countries. He is author of The Flood from Heaven: Deciphering the
Atlantis Legend and The Future of the Past: Archaeology in the 21st
Century.
Leon Lederman:
If we suggest anything other than the Printing Press, Brockman will
cancel our Christmas bonuses and New Years Eve turkey. So: the
greatest invention in the past two thousand years is the printing
press. Next is the thermos bottle.
LEON LEDERMAN, the director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory, has received the Wolf Prize in Physics (1982), and the
Nobel Prize in Physics (1988). In 1993 he was awarded the Enrico Fermi
Prize by President Clinton. He is the author of several books,
including (with David Schramm) From Quarks to the Cosmos : Tools of
Discovery, and (with Dick Teresi) The God Particle: If the Universe Is
the Answer, What Is the Question?
Marc D. Hauser:
I read through the list. Some good ones. I think it is interesting
that many found it so difficult to stick to the 2000 year cut off. Is
it really the case that all the big inventions happened so long ago?
This is surely an important and profound statement, if correct.
I have two suggestions, both within the cut-off period. First, the
electric light, born about 50 years before Joseph Swan put a patent on
the incandescent lamp in 1878, and then Edison in 1879. Having lived
in Africa, where one is often forced to read from fire light,
electricity is a god send. Moreover, having invented the incandescent
lamp, it didn't take too long to come up with the flashlight, another
handy device for those of us working in dark jungles. My second
suggestion for great inventions is the aspirin, invented, oddly enough
in 1853 in France. Clearly, other medicines have been around, many of
which serve comparable functions, but what a useful little pill. Among
the Maasai in Kenya, headaches are treated with goat feces, a mud
compact to the head. I prefer the aspirin personally.
MARC D. HAUSER, evolutionary psychologist, is Associate Professor at
Harvard University where he is a fellow of the Mind, Brain, and
Behavior Program; and author of The Evolution of Communication.
David Buss:
In my view, questions of "importance" cannot be answered without first
specifying "criteria of importance," of "important with respect to
what." Thus, I would give the following answer to your question:
"One criterion for "most important" is that which has most profoundly
altered patterns of human mating. Changes in mating can affect the
subsequent evolutionary course of the entire species, with cascading
consequences for virtually every aspect of human life. Although many
inventions have altered human mating over the past 2,000 years,
television must rank among the most important. Television has changed
status and prestige criteria, created instant celebrities, hastened
the downfall of leaders, increased the importance of physical
appearance, and accelerated the intensity of intrasexual mate
competition — all of which have acutely transformed the nature of
sexuality and mating and perhaps forever altered the evolutionary
course of our species."
DAVID BUSS is Professor of Psychology at The University of Texas at
Austin; author of The Evolution of Desire : Strategies of Human
Mating.
Leroy Hood:
I nominate the printing press as the most important invention in the
past 200 years.
LEROY HOOD, M.D., Ph.D., is the William Gates III Professor of
Biomedical Sciences and founding chair of the Department of Molecular
Biotechnology at University of Washington. He is principal
investigator of the Leroy Hood Laboratory and coeditor (with Daniel J.
Kevles) of Code of Codes : Scientific and Social Issues in the Human
Genome Project.
Julian Barbour:
If it had not been invented over three thousand years ago, I should
have nominated the bell, but instead I choose the symphony orchestra.
This is because, like the bell, it establishes a dramatic link between
two seemingly disparate worlds — the material world of science and the
world of the psyche and the arts. The symphony orchestra is surely
important because it made possible classical music, the nomination of
Howard Gardner. However, I choose it as a symbol for something that
may yet be to come, like space travel, the choice of Reuben Hersh.
What is more, I make my choice precisely because in just one point I
disagree with Howard Gardner — classical music is crucially dependent
on physical inventions: musical instruments. I have long been
fascinated by one of the great conundrums of philosophy that was
clearly recognized by Newton's contempories: If there is only a
material world characterized by the so-called primary qualities such
as extension, motion, and mass, how are we to explain our awareness of
so many different secondary qualities such as colors, sounds, tastes,
and smells? The material world has no need of them and can never
explain them. Of course, we all know that science can now demonstrate
how specific sensations are correlated with physical phenomena, but a
correlation is not necessarily a cause — for both correlates may have
a common cause — and still less is it an explanation. How can the
vibrations of cat gut create in me the effect I experience when
listening to Beethoven's quartets? Perhaps I am naïve, but I am a
committed scientist. I cannot be content to regard the secondary
qualities as epiphenomena. I think there could be a physics, far
richer than the one we presently know, in which the secondary
qualities are as real as electric charge. The bell and symphony
orchestra call us to ponder higher things and wider possibilities, the
domain where science is reconciled with the arts.
JULIAN BARBOUR is a theoretical physicist and the author of Absolute
or Relative Motion : A Study from a Machian Point of View of the
Discovery and the Structure of Dynamical Theories : The Discovery of
Dynami.
John Henry Holland:
BOARD GAMES
Gordon Gould:
Here is my $.02 on what is significant, in addition to all the
illustrious suggestions received so far:
Double Entry Accounting: While it is not all that sexy, it has been a
significant force in shaping the West and by the globalization of
market-driven economies, the world. Invented in 1494 by a Franciscan
monk named Luca Pacioli, double entry accounting was designed to help
the flourishing Venetian merchants manage their burgeoning economic
empires. Today, it remains the core methodology for most accounting
systems worldwide. It is the DOS of money.
Based on the principle of equilibrium (ie a balance sheet), double
entry accounting provides both control over the internal state of an
agent (in this case, an economic entity) and the necessary structures
required for individual organizations to cooperate/collaborate in the
emergent construction of modern market economies. In other words,
double entry accounting simultaneously enables organizations to
regulate themselves (through internal accounting and control
mechanisms) while also allowing the larger economy to assess the
relative health and worth of an enterprise using standardized
measures. If money is the blood and markets are the circulatory
systems of the global economy, then double entry accounting ledgers
are the nerve cells that both control and, in turn, respond to changes
in the flows of money.
GORDON GOULD is the President of Rising Tide Studios, parent company
of the Silicon Alley Reporter and the Digital Coast Reporter. Prior to
joining RTS, he was a principle at Thinking Pictures, an interactive
entertainment/database technologies company, and also oversaw the
Multimedia/Internet Group for Sony Worldwide Networks.
Bob Rafelson:
Richard Gatling started with a cotton seed sowing machine and
graduated to a weapon that rotated 10 barrels of 0.45 in bullets at a
rate of 1000 rounds a minute. The Confederacy didn't purchase the
thing 'til after the Civil War. But in the next several decades it was
bought and used by powerful armies around the globe. Finally it proved
its battle merit in Africa where it mowed down thousands of
unsuspecting Zulus. The Gatling Gun was the first weapon of mass
destruction. Moreover, it spawned the ongoing, if clumsy, debate about
weapons being banned for the sake of mankind.
BOB RAFELSON is a film director and producer whose work includes Head,
Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Postman Always Rings
Twice, Mountains of the Moon, and Blood and Wine.
John Allen Paulos:
Thanks for your invitation (and for your project in general). I'd
respond more fully but the question seems too ill-defined to answer.
(I guess I still have something of the reductionistic, literal mindset
of a mathematician despite periodic forays into more nebulous realms.)
An invention or innovation that becomes essential has a tendency also
to become invisible as we, in a sense, "grow around" it. If I were
forced to name something, I guess I would go with Gutenberg's movable
type. And if I wanted to be puerilely self-referential, my choice for
most important invention might be the notion of a precise question.
(Nevertheless, I do see the value of vague ones as well.)
JOHN ALLEN PAULOS, professor of mathematics at Temple University in
Philadelphia, is the author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and
Its Consequences, Beyond Numeracy: Ruminations of a Numbers Man, A
Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, and Once Upon a Number: The Hidden
Mathematical Logic of Stories.
Verena Huber-Dyson:
My first reaction to your question was The Zero, the next Infinity,
but my answer is The Infinitesimal Calculus.
Creating a bridge between the two archetypal fictions 0 and * it makes
sense of them. It has become a tool in just about every branch of
engineering and science. It provides a language for the formulation of
laws and a method for constructing explanations, solutions and
predictions. It is alive: its invention in the 17th century — by
Leibniz and Newton independently — articulated a concept that had long
been vaguely anticipated and applied implicitly, its development is
still in progress, leading to the resolution of old puzzles (e.g.,
Zeno's Paradox) while raising new ones (e.g., the continuum
hypothesis). Leibniz had been agonizing over what he called "the
labyrinth of the continuum" but the 19th century put the infinitesimal
calculus on a firm basis by analyzing the concepts of a limit and of
infinity from a variety of view points. Nowadays we are blessed with
new developments coming from the quarter of symbolic logic that arose
out of a digital (0,1) modeling of rational arguing: non standard
analysis vindicates Leibniz' use of "infinitely small" non-zero
quantities.
VERENA HUBER-DYSON, a mathematician, has published research in group
theory, and taught in various mathematics departments such as UC
Berkeley and University of Illinois at Chicago. She is now emeritus
professor at the philosophy department of the University of Calgary
where she taught logic and philosophy of the sciences and of
mathematics which led to a book on Gödel's theorems published in 1991.
See EDGE: "On The Nature Of Mathematical Concepts: Why And How Do
Mathematicians Jump To Conclusions?" by Verena Huber-Dyson.
Garniss Curtis:
My instantaneous response was: Gutenberg's printing press with movable
type. This knee-jerk response was followed by a pause and reflection.
What is meant by "invention"? So, to the dictionary! Essentially,
anything that did not exist previously, whether it be a mechanical
device or art,literature,or music, is an "invention". Sobered by this,
I reflected again.
The skulls of l0 skeletons found in Skhul Cave at the foot of Mt.
Carmel in Israel in the l930's are similar in size and shape to modern
Homo sapiens. These have been dated at 80,000 years. A similar skull
found in a cave at Qafzeh, Israel has been dated at 9l,000 years.
Having the same size brain capacity, of course, does not necessarily
mean they had our same intelligence, although they were capable of
making beautiful stone tools.
We jump now to the Chevaux cave in France, where wall paintings of
animals extant in Europe at that time are beautifully depicted and
have been dated at over 30,000 years. l5,000 years later in the caves
at Le Portel and Lascaux in France, our ancestors were making
magnificent polychrome paintings of animals. Their stone tools at that
time and for the previous 5,000 years are comparable in technique and
beauty to any made by Native Americans in the past few hundred years.
Can anyone doubt that these Cro-Magnons could have learned to read and
write, to philosophise, to do math at a high level, to learn chemistry
and physics if magically brought into our culture of today? (Let's
leave out some fundamentalists who still don't believe in evolution.)
We find that cuneiform writing began about 5,000 years ago and quickly
evolved. By 2,500 years ago, the Greeks were producing masterpieces of
plays, literature, art, architecture, and they were doing some
wonderful things in mathematics and elementary observational science.
The Romans carried on these traditions until their fall. Christianity
came in and destroyed as much as it could of this great heritage in
western Europe including the great library in Alexandria.
Thus began the "Dark Ages" in Europe. The gradual dissemination of
knowledge, other than ecumenical literature (which wasn't much
faster!) was extremely slow. So, in the mid fourteen hundreds along
comes Gutenberg with his printing press and its movable type. Of
course, almost the first thing he did was print a bible or two and
they sold like hot cakes. True, fixed or non movable type had been
around for a short time, but the process wasn't much faster than
printing books by hand and was very costly, so, the rapid
dissemination of knowledge through printed books began with Gutenberg.
While it is true that the Dark Ages began to end about the year l,000,
real progress wasn't made until the Renaissance and, particularly,
with the rapid dissemination of knowledge via Gutenberg-type presses.
As books were published, people became inspired to learn to read.
Reading led to thinking about what had been read and to further
publications and to communications between people. The first world
wide web had been started, Anyone with a grain of sense can see what
this has led to!
So, John, after my consideration outlined above, I still think the
Gutenberg press with movable type is the greatest invention of the
past 2,000 years or, perhaps of the last 5,000 years after cuneiform
writing was invented!
GARNISS CURTIS is Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Geology &
Geophysics at the University of California, Berkeley and Founder of
the Berkeley Geochronology Center. A colleague of Louis Leakey, he
determined the age (1.85 my) of the famous Zinjanthropus fossil which
rocked the anthropological world. His research continues that
endeavor: In 1994 with colleague Carl Swisher he re-dated Homo erectus
in Java at 1.8 my instead of the long-held .8 my.
Milford H. Wolpoff:
Science, because it brings us explanations of our world we may act on,
is by far the most important invention of this time. The fact that the
explanations are usually wrong brings the partial illusion of
progress, as well as tenure, which is a consequence of the
publications debating the various wrongnesses.
At its best, science works in a sort of Darwinian frame, where
hypotheses are the source of variation (cleverness counts) and
disproofs are the extinctions.
Developments from hypotheses are the analogues of ontogeny, and there
are various other processes that parallel the biological world such as
the roles of randomness (first publications carry excess influence by
virtue of being first, just as Microsoft systems succeed by being most
common but not necessarily best), and punctuated equilibrium
(scientific revolutions are complete replacement events). There are
even biological-like terms like "memes" that may describe how
hypotheses are transmitted. All and all, ever since when well before
Neandertal times we hominids developed significantly complex culture,
that extrasomatic way of transmitting hierarchically structured
information, we have enjoyed (in the sense of the Chinese curse)
interesting times.
MILFORD WOLPOFF is a paleoanthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at
the University of Michigan, author of Paleoanthropology ; and coauthor
(with Rachel Caspari) of Race And Human Evolution.
jum...@my-deja.com
Mark Mirsky:
Last year, I held my tongue when it came to questions. No one however
asked directly as I recall what was most important to me. What is
going to happen to me after I die? This is only the prologue to other
questions that go to a root of human consciousness for me, is there
order or no order in the universe? If there is order does it represent
in my own life a pattern that is supposed to mean something for me.
What meaning does my life have? Is there order or simply random event
in my life? Does what I do effect the order of the universe in any
important way, in any way that effects its order?
According to the scholar of religious philosophy Harry Wolfson,
Spinoza believed that memory would survive, though he had no logical
proof for this belief. Human actions would therefore matter because
they would be bound up with memory. Evolution and DNA in part confirm
that at least in limited spans of time this is true. What will survive
me? What is most important in the last two thousand years, I feel is
the human capacity to enact symbols, to identify reality with them.
A friend who is both a distinguished mathematician and a rabbi, likes
to quote Maimonides to the effect that only original thoughts will
survive in the after life. This is after all, a consoling thought to a
mathematician, since "original thoughts" are the métier of the
sciences. And it is with "fear and trembling" that I tread through the
gates of EDGE site on the sacred ground of scientists.
As a novelist however, I beg to differ with the particulars of this
hope, for originality is not necessarily important in the world of
fantasy or rather what is compelling is not necessarily what is most
original. The very word "invention" has in some of the early
responses, a scientific, or pseudoscientific interpretation. I believe
(as someone who has seen briefly — though in a state of such high
anxiety I can readily admit — they may have been hallucinations —
ghosts), that the act of symbolic enactment is a key to the riddle of
consciousness and the most important of human "inventions." Nor do I
think such "enactment" or symbol drama is entirely a "human"
invention. For I believe I derives from play, though in human beings
it has come to combine play with the self reference of thought about
existence. The latter drama of symbols I think it is part of the
uncanny tension between the weight of the Unknown (which I choose to
personify with a Capital) and consciousness.
The story that has historically "galvanized" Jewish thought and then
Christian thought is the Biblical saga of the sacrifice of Isaac,
where a family or tribe obviously familiar with human sacrifice,
passed to its symbolic enactment. In the Sinai desert, years ago, a
German sociologist, Gunnar Heinneson, told me that the Jews were the
first people to do away with the exposure of unwanted infants. You can
speak volumes about human values, but without ceremonies that address
terror of the Unknown, the human majority falls prey to the
overwhelming anxiety of death and its handmaiden, survival.
I am not enough of a historian or anthropologist, to insist on what
Gunnar spoke of as fact. Symbolic enactment obviously goes much
further back in human history than the Biblical world in which we have
idealized patriarchs and matriarchs. It probably derives from the play
that we can observe among animals. It is however, a process that is
constantly being refined. I can appreciate that the Sioux Indians when
they knocked an opponent on the head with a stick rather than killing
him, also invented something that civilization needs — an extension
that the rage for national sports teams may well answer. We recognize,
I think, as a society that feels that peace with ourselves is
important, that exposing children who are actually delivered, on door
steps, brutalizes us as a people of shared customs.
Steven Rose speaks of inventions as concepts. It is in bringing
ourselves back, again and again, to the concept of invention and in
particular of the invention of symbol in the light of our fear, that I
think both the human body and mind find themselves in a balance that
allows them to experience that mysterious state that Plato called the
"good" and the Bible referred to as "completed" or "perfect": or
"quiet within oneself." I would challenge Colin Blakemore's assertion
that control of human destiny has shifted from the body to the mind.
The mind after all is finally subject within the human span to the
body, just as the latter has no conscious existence without the mind.
We have to reinvent a form of the Shamanism that seeks to bridge this
division within contemporary religion or suffer a terror that will
devastate most of us in mind and body. When we seek overwhelming joy,
in sex, art, music, even the pursuit of knowledge, or understanding,
some of us are asking to be just that, overwhelmed through the mind
but throughout the body and that has to be part of my "greater good"
or "balance." At Thanksgiving dinner, two prominent friends in the
lofty upper spheres of the university were mocking the blessing of
human organs as they passed to the recipient. I felt the opposite,
that in the bleak sphere of the hospital, it might be important to a
system in shock. The symbol dramatized recalls inspired pages of
Milosz on the dance and the way movement locates us in the universe.
Space grows bleak without a sense of this location and dangerous in
its suggestion of no meaning. I think we need a more powerful sense of
symbol if we are to avoid the fear that our very mastery of
technological invention spurs. If human sacrifice was found to be
unnecessary, so could heroic distinction based on war, national
identity based on exclusion, social identity based on wealth, even the
more exaggerated rewards of entrepreneurship, great wealth. Some years
ago I suggested (in the "Village Voice") that the Israelis and
Palestinians could find a lasting peace if they both acknowledged
large parts of what is called "Israel," what is called "the West
Bank," even what is called "Jordan," in other words, Biblical Canaan,
as sacred space and turned what was still empty into religious park.
Tragically, their statesmen can not invent such a symbolic space.
To answer Colin Blakemore, I certainly found the contraceptive pill a
liberation, at first. Soon, however, it seemed to confuse some of the
deepest impulses of sexual joy. I am not sure that the puritanical
strategies of the 19th century in which eroticism was buried in
passionate friendship were not more effective as symbolic of the
desire to be one with another than sex in which no children were
intended or hoped for. I would never want to go back to a world
without the pill or effective contraceptives, but I am not sure we
have mastered its implications for the body or the mind in that body.
For the pill has no ceremony, no weight of ritual behind it and the
meaning of its communion still awaits definition.
MARK MIRSKY is the author of many novels including Thou Worm Jacob,
Blue Hill Avenue, My Search for the Messiah, and The Red Adam. He is
editor of the recently published Diaries : Robert Musil 1899-1942 . He
is editor of "Fiction" and a professor of English at CCNY.
Dan Sperber:
I am afraid the answer I find compelling is a rather trivial one. The
two most important inventions in the past two thousand years are the
computer and the atomic bomb. The computer will bring about the
greatest change to human life since the neolithic revolution, unless
the bomb destroys human life altogether.
DAN SPERBER is a researcher at the CREA in Paris. He is the author of
Rethinking Symbolism, On Anthropological Knowledge, Relevance:
Communication and Cognitions (with Deirdre Wilson), and Explaining
Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.
Lew Tucker:
I would have to agree that Gutenberg's printing press is the most
important invention in the past two thousand years because it changed
forever the cost of knowledge distribution. What other inventions
wouldn't have happened if the inventor didn't have access to books? In
a sense I think we can trace many aspects of our information society
back to this single invention. In it's electronic form on the web we
see movable type and a yearning for information to be accessible and
free. The web is taking the cost of distributing information down near
zero. Gutenberg would be pleased to see where his invention has taken
us.
LEW TUCKER is a Java evangelist and director of developer relations at
Sun Microsystems. He has worked in the areas of artificial
intelligence and parallel computers at Thinking Machines and is now
building an online community of software developers. See Digerati,
Chapter 30.
Tor Nørretranders:
THE MIRROR
The most influential invention in the past 2000 years has been the
mirror: It has shown to each person how she or he appears to other
persons on the planet. Before the widespread production and use of
mirrors that came about in the Renaissance, humans could mirror
themselves in lakes and metallic surfaces. But only with the
installation of mirrors in everyday life did viewing oneself from the
outside become a daily habit. This coincided with the advent of
manners for eating, clothing and behaving. This again made possible
the modern version of self-consciousness: Viewing oneself through the
eyes of others, rather than just from the inside or through the eyes
of God.
Hence, consciousness as we know it is an effect of an advanced mental
task: To acknowledge the person experienced out there in the mirror as
the same as the one being simultaneously experienced from within. To
know that the person out there in the mirror is controlled by me in
here. The invention of the mirror is closely related to the problem of
free will and to the invention of the modern human ego as described in
this poll by Jaron Lanier.
The problem with overemphasis of conscious control is thus the problem
of supervising oneself through the eyes of others, rather than just
acting out. Many malaises of modern life stems from the fact that one
tends to consider the mirror-image of oneself as more real than the
view from within.
This new loop of the-outside-person-viewed-by-the-inside-person
recently got a parallel with the first images of the Earth seen on the
sky of the Moon: No longer just the planet we can touch and live on,
the Earth became a heavenly body comparable to other celestial
objects.
TOR NØRRETRANDERS is a science writer and communicator based in
Copenhagen, Denmark and the author of The User Illusion: Cutting
Consciousness Down to Size.
Richard Potts:
Over 4.6 billion years, the most important evolutionary inventions
have been those that code, store, and use information in new ways.
DNA; nervous systems; organic devices enabling cultural transmission
of information. In large perspective, the most important invention
over the past 2 thousand years will likely be something related to
computers, electronic information coded and handled outside of living
bodies. Its importance, however, has not yet been fully realized. I'm
going with something whose impact so far is more apparent. The
paleontologist in me wants to say something like the discovery of time
— from inventions that have led to an intense sense of personal time
to others that have found out the age of the universe or the human
species. These inventions are perception-altering. But there's another
invention with greater impact. My vote is for flying machines.
Before 2 thousand years ago, sea craft allowed the overcoming of
water; the wheel, the conquest of earth. And now flying machines, the
conquest of air — an invention that taps into the center of our
mythologies.
Many inventions change our lives but stay in the predictable range of
human nature. Firearms, for example, have had their impact mainly by
extending existing tendencies to bluff, subjugate, or kill in
immediate, face-to-face situations. Air craft have altered our
perceptions in ways that were evolutionarily unpredictable. They
changed the delivery of weapons, vastly destructive weapons, to a
inter-continental scale — a wholly new scale, unprecedented in
evolutionary history. A flu virus that mutates in Kennedy Airport is
spread around the world within a day or two. And so the history of
disease has been altered by moving the month- or year-long dispersal
of disease to a time scale of hours.
We now meet other people en masse anywhere in the world in less than a
day's travel. Thus things foreign and strange have become familiar.
Ancient phobias and bias toward hatred and exclusion have been altered
widely. The CNN culture (instantaneous worldwide information) is an
extension of this; in my view, the actual intermingling of people from
one place to another has been the more important, precedent-shattering
development. Despite international information media, civil strife
remains the worst where cultural and physical insularity reigns.
Finally, flying machines have meant a global altering of how societies
approach food and other resources, tying humanity together in a
worldwide economy (resource exchange) driven by our interdependence.
Two million years ago, the movement of resources (like food and stone
tools) had become a development with extraordinary implications for
human evolution. But even 2 thousand years ago, no one could have
foreseen just how far this process of resource exchange has gone today
— largely due to flying machines.
RICHARD POTTS is Director of the Human Origins Program, Dept. of
Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian
Institution in Washington. He is the author of Early Hominid
Activities at Olduvai and Humanity's Descent: The Consequences of
Ecological Instability, and co-author of Terrestrial Ecosystems
through Time.
Lawrence M. Krauss:
If I take the word "important" to suggest an invention that will have
"the greatest impact on the next 2000 years" (after all, it is the
future that counts, not the pa st!),then the invention of the
programmable computer seems to me to be the most important invention
of the last 2000 years. ( I am not including in my list of
possibilities here ideas and concepts, since I don't think they
qualify as inventions, and I suspect that the intent of the question
is to explore technology, not ideas...). While the printing press
certainly revolutionized the world in its time, computers will govern
everything we do in the next 20 centuries. The development of
artificial intelligence will be profound, quantum computers may
actually be built, and I am sympathetic to the idea I first heard
expressed by my friend Frank Wilczek, that computers are the next
phase of human evolution. Once self-aware, self-programmable computers
become a reality, then I have a hard time seeing how humans can keep
up without in some way integrating them into their own development.
The only other invention that may come close is perhaps DNA
sequencing, since it will undoubtedly lead to a new understanding and
control of genetic and biology in a way which will alter what we mean
by life.
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS, Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, Professor of
Astronomy, and Chair, Physics Department, Case Western Reserve
University, is the author of The Fifth Essence; Fear of Physics; The
Physics of Star Trek; Beyond Star Trek.
John McCarthy:
The most important invention is the idea of continued scientific and
technological progress. The individual who deserves the most credit
for this is Francis Bacon. Before Bacon progress occurred but was
sporadic, and most people did not expect to see new inventions in
their lifetimes. The idea of continued scientific progress became
institutionalized in the Academei dei Lincei, the Royal Society and
other scientific academies. the idea of continued invention was
institutionalized with the patent laws.
JOHN McCARTHY, a computer scientist and one of the first-generation
pioneers in AI, is at the Computer Science Department of Stanford
University.
Karl Sabbagh:
Clearly, none of us is playing by the rules in this game, otherwise we
would all concentrate on a few key inventions that are obviously the
most important — the Indo-Arabic number system including zero,
computers, the contraceptive pill. Instead we are all reading the
suggestions so far and then trying to select something different.
Because I've come in late my friend Nicholas Humphrey has bagged my
first thought — reading glasses, so I'll break the rules in two ways
by choosing something which was invented more than two thousand years
ago but refined over the last two thousand years.
In fact I'll break the rules a third time by choosing two things —
chairs and stairs. Apart from the fact that they rhyme, they also
represent an imaginative leap by seeing the value to the human anatomy
of an idealised platform in space at a certain height. A platform of,
say, 7 inches would enable a person to raise himself towards some
higher objective without undue effort, but that's as far as it goes.
But if, from that new starting point, a further platform of the same
height could be constructed, the objective could be more closely
approached. The refinements have all been to do with the fact that the
greater the height you want to reach the larger the floor area that
has to be taken up by the staircase. But landings and 180 degree turns
helped to solve that problem, along with the even later improvement of
a spiral structure.
The consequences of stairs have obviously included greater density of
occupation of site areas, but they have also included the propagation
of the Muslim religion by allowing muezzins to call the faithful to
prayer from minarets. As far as chairs are concerned, the same thought
process was involved — seeing the value of a platform at just above
knee height and then constructing it.
Portability came in at some stage as well so that instead of finding
somewhere — a wall, a rock, etc — of the right height you carry around
with you, or position where you liked, the place to park your butt.
Somehow, the height was chosen, or evolved, so that we can stay for
the maximum time in a fixed position with eyes,hands and arms free to
do what eyes, hands and arms are good at. Lying down, standing up, and
squatting all get uncomfortable after a while, particularly for
reading or writing (although we have to accept that medieval monks
seemed to manage O.K, transcribing manuscripts standing up.)
KARL SABBAGH is a writer and television producer. His programs for the
BBC and PBS have encompassed physics, medicine, psychology,
philosophy, technology, and anthropology. Three of his television
projects have been accompanied by books: The Living Body, Skyscraper,
and 21St Century Jet: The Making And Marketing Of The Boeing 777.
Ellen Winner:
I will cast my vote for anaesthesia. While this invention may not have
changed the world for all, it has certainly altered the lives of many
for the good. Imagine a world without anaesthesia. It makes me
shudder.
Howard Gardner and I are probably one of the few couples who replied
to your request. Last night we were at a party and we mentioned this
project. I said that Howard's and my choices (Western classical music,
Howard; vs. anaesthesia, Ellen) showed how different we were, Howard
the optimist, I the one who thinks of the grim side of life. At the
party was Yo Yo Ma, who listened with interest and said, without
skipping a beat, that our two choices were not so different, because
"One is a form of the other."
(Interpret that as you will ‹ I take it to mean that music is the
ultimate escape from pain, but also perhaps that anaesthesia [when
needed] is as pleasurable as music).
ELLEN WINNER is Professor of Psychology at Boston College, and Senior
Research Associate at Harvard Project Zero. She is the author of
Invented Worlds: The Psychology of the Arts ; and Gifted Children:
Myths and Realities.
George Johnson:
Surely one of the most powerful earthly inventions has been the
ability to represent any phenomenon with numbers — either analogue or
digital — and then use this representation to predict outcomes in the
real world. This information revolution actually began before the year
zero with the Pythagoreans and has advanced through stages that
include the invention of calculus and, most recently, boolean algebra
and all the advantages of digital modeling.
And just as important has been the recent humbling realization that
there are limits to this scientific cartography; that, tempting as it
is, the map can never be mistaken for the real thing.
GEORGE JOHNSON is a writer for The New York Times, working on contract
from Santa Fe. His books include Fire In The Mind: Science, Faith, And
The Search For Order; In The Palaces Of Memory: How We Build The
Worlds Inside Our Heads; and Machinery Of The Mind: Inside The New
Science Of Artificial Intelligence .
Rodney Brooks:
The electric motor, in all its guises where electricty produces
mechanical motion. The industrial revolution was restricted to places
of work and shared production until the relatively small and clean
electric motor enabled the adoption of its bounty into the home; for
instance, refrigeration, automated cleaning, cooling, better heating,
entertainment, mass data storage, home medical care, and more
comfortable personal transportation.
True, many of these aspects were present in the home with simpler
technologies (e.g., gravity driven water flow, convective air flow),
but it was the electric motor which made them pervasive.
The change in our western lifestyle has been profound and has
completely changed our expectations of how our bodies should fit with
our surroundings.
A question: what will it take for the computer revolution to truly
enter our lives in the way that the electric motor has enabled the
industrial revolution to do so?
RODNEY BROOKS, a computer scientist, is director of MIT's AI Lab.See
EDGE: "The Deep Question," A Talk With Rodney Brooks.
John R. Searle:
If by invention we mean actual technological advances — as opposed to
ideas, theories and concepts — then there have been some good ones.
One thinks of the printing press and the clock, for example. It is too
early to say for sure but my choice for the most important invention
of the past 2000 years would be the invention of the set of
agricultural techniques known collectively as "The Green Revolution".
This invention began in the 1960's and continues into the nineties,
indeed, it is now being extended into something that may well come to
be called "The Green-Blue Revolution", which would extend new
agricultural techniques to the oceans. The most important invention of
all time is the Neolithic Revolution. With the Neolithic Revolution,
humanity found ways to grow crops systematically, and thus overcame
both the instability and the fragility of life itself that went with
hunter-gatherer ways of survival.
Hunter-gatherers could neither stay in one place long enough to
develop a stable civilization, nor could they count on being able to
survive periods of drought and other forms of natural catastrophe.
With the Neolithic revolution, both of these problems were solved, and
civilization became a real possibility.
However the Neolithic Revolution brought problems of its own. In
particular, the Malthusian problem, because the growth of population
was constantly threatening to outrun the growth of food supply. For
the foreseeable future, at least, this problem has been solved by the
Green Revolution. The food supply has vastly outrun the increase in
population. At this time, if you read that there is a famine going on
in some part of Africa or Asia, you know that it is deliberately
politically created. There is no international shortage of food. There
is plenty of food to go around, and because of the Green Revolution,
there will be food to go around for the foreseeable future.
JOHN R. SEARLE is the Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the
University of California, Berkeley and author of The Rediscovery of
the Mind, Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures,
Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, The Construction
of Social Reality, and Mind, Language & Society: Doing Philosophy in
the Real World (A MasterMinds Book).
Lee Smolin:
The most important invention, I believe, was a mathematical idea,
which is the notion of representation: that one system of
relationships, whether mathematical or physical, can be captured
faithfully by another. The first full use of the idea of a
representation was the analytic geometry of Descartes, which is based
on the discovery of a precise relationship between two different kinds
of mathematical objects, in this case, numbers and geometry. This
correspondence made it possible to formulate general questions about
geometrical figures in terms of numbers and functions, and when people
had learned to answer these questions they had invented the calculus.
By now we have understood that it is nothing other than the existence
of such relationships between systems of relations that gives
mathematics its real power. Many of the most important mathematical
developments of the present century, such as algebraic topology,
differential geometry, representation theory and algebraic geometry
come from the discovery of such relationships, of which Descartes
analytic geometry was only the first example. The most profound
developments in present mathematics and theoretical physics are all
based on the notion of a representation, which is the general term we
use for a way to code one set of mathematical relationships in terms
of another. There is even a branch of mathematics whose subject is the
study of correspondences between different mathematical systems, which
is called category theory. According to some of its developers,
mathematics is at its root nothing but the study of such
relationships, and for many working mathematics, category theory has
replaced set theory as the foundational language within which all
mathematics is expressed.
Moreover, once it was understood that one mathematical system can
represent another, the door was open to wondering if a mathematical
system could represent a physical system, or vise versa. It was Kepler
who first understood that the paths of the planets in the sky might
form closed orbits, when looked at from the right reference point.
This discovery of a correspondence between motion and geometry was far
more profound than the Ptolemaic notion that the orbits were formed by
the motion of circles on circles. Before Kepler, geometry may have
played a role in the generation of motion, but only with Kepler do we
have an attempt to represent the orbits themselves as geometrical
figures. At the same time Galileo, by slowing motion down through the
use of devices such as the pendulum and the inclined plane, realized
that the motions of ordinary bodies could be represented by geometry.
When combined with Descartes correspondence between geometry and
number this made possible the spatialization of time, that is the
representation of time and motion purely in terms of geometry. This
not only made Newtonian physics possible, it is of course what we do
every time we graph the motion of a body or the change of some
quantity in time. It also made it possible, for the first time, to
build clocks accurate enough to capture the motion of terrestrial,
rather than celestial, bodies.
The next step in the discovery of correspondences between mathematical
and physical systems of relations came with devices for representing
logical operations in terms of physical motions. This idea was
realized early in mechanical calculators and logic engines, but of
course came into its own with the invention of the modern computer.
But the final step in the process began by Descartes analytic geometry
was the discovery that if a physical system could represent a
mathematical system, then one physical system might represent another.
Thus, sequences of electrical pulses can represent sound waves, or
pictures, and all of these can be represented by electromagnetic
waves. Thus we have telecommunications, certainly among the most
important inventions in its own right, which cannot even be conceived
of without some notion of the representation of one system by another.
Telecommunications also gave rise to a question, which is what is it
that remains the same when a signal is translated from sound waves to
electrical impulses or electromagnetic waves. We have a name for the
answer, it is information, but I do not have the impression that we
really understand its implications. For example, using this concept
some people are claiming that not only is it the case that some
physical or mathematical systems can be represented in terms of
another but that, there is some coding that would permit every
sufficiently complicated physical or mathematical system to be
represented in terms of any other. This of course, brings us back to
Descartes, who wanted to understand the relationship between the mind
and the brain. Certainly the concept of information is not the whole
answer, but it does gives us a language in which to ask the question
that was not available to Descartes.
Nevertheless, without his first discovery of a correspondence between
two systems of relations, we would not only lack the possibility of
talking about information, we would not have most of mathematics, we
would not have telecommunications and we would not have the computer.
This the notion of a representation is not only the most important
mathematical invention, it is the idea that made it possible to
conceive of many of the other important inventions of the last few
centuries.
LEE SMOLIN is a theoretical physicist; Professor of Physics at the
Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State
University; author ofThe Life of The Cosmos. See EDGE:" A Possible
Solution For The Problem Of Time In Quantum Cosmology" By Stuart
Kauffman and Lee Smolin. See The Third Culture, Chapter 17.
Paul W. Ewald:
My nominee is the concept of evolution by selection (which encompasses
natural selection, sexual selection, and the selective processes that
generate cultural evolution). It offers the best explanation for what
we are, where we came from, and the nature of life in the rest of the
universe. It also explains why we invent and why we believe the
inventions described in this list are important. It is the invention
that explains invention.
PAUL W. EWALD is an Evolutionary biologist; Professor of Biology at
Amherst College; author of Evolution Of Infectious Disease.
Carl Zimmer:
I nominate waterworks — the system of plumbing and sewers that gets
clean water to us and dirty water away from us. I'm hard pressed to
think of any other single invention that has stopped so much disease
and death. It may not inspire quite the intellectual awe as something
like a quantum computer, but the sheer heft of the benefits it brings
about so simply makes it all the more impressive. John Snow didn't
need to sequence the Vibrio cholerae genome to stop people from dying
in London in 1854 — he didn't even know what V. cholerae was — but a
pattern of deaths showed him that to stop a cholera outbreak all he
needed to do was shut down a fouled well. Without waterworks, the
crowded conditions of the modern world would be utterly insupportable
— and you only have to go to a poor city without clean water to see
this. Another sign of the importance of an invention is the havoc it
can wreak, and waterworks score here again—by cutting down infant
mortality they help fuel the population explosion, and they also let
places like Las Vegas suck the surrounding land dry.
I'd even go so far as to put the importance of the invention of
waterworks on an evolutionary scale with things such as language. For
hundreds of millions of years, life on land has been crafting new ways
to extract and hold onto water. With plumbing, however, you don't go
to the water — the water comes to you.
CARL ZIMMER is a senior editor at Discover and author of At the
Water's Edge: Macroevolution and the Transformation of Life.
Robert Shapiro:
Most of the inventions mentioned thus far have affected, as one
contributor put it, the boundary between we humans and the natural
world that surrounds us. But the operations of the human body, and the
brain which it contains, support all of the experiences that make up
our existence. Discoveries that will permit us ultimately to take
charge of these functions, and shape them to our desires, surely
deserve nomination as the most important of the last two millennia.
These insights have flowed broadly from the entire area of science
that is now called molecular biology, but if I had to single out the
most important invention that made the entire process possible, then I
would select genetic sequencing for the honor. The new techniques
developed by Fred Sanger in Cambridge and Walter Gilbert at Harvard in
the mid-1970's allowed us to read out rapidly the specific information
stored in our genes and those of all other living creatures on Earth.
The new methods stimulated a burst of scientific energy that will
culminate in the next decade, when the sequence of about 3 billion
characters of DNA that encodes a typical human being will be fully
deciphered by the Human Genome Project. In subsequent explorations, we
shall how individuals differ in their heredity, and how this
information is expressed to produce the human body.
Thus far the effects of sequencing have largely impacted us through
such media worthy events as the identification of the stain on Monica
Lewinsky's dress, validation of the identity of the Romanov bones,
refutation of the claim of Anna Anderson to be Anastasia and
confirmation of Thomas Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings. Much,
much more is yet to come.
The completion of the Human Genome Project will provide us with an
understanding, at the molecular level, of human hereditary disease
(much has already been learned about Huntington's disease, cystic
fibrosis and others). Further, by the application of other tools from
modern molecular biology, we shall be able to do something about these
afflictions in the near future.They will be treated and, if society
permits it, corrected at the genetic level. Beyond that, we shall come
to understand, and perhaps control, many unfortunate aspects of the
human condition that have until now been taken for granted, from
baldness to aging. Ultimately, we may elect to rewrite our genetic
text, changing ourselves and the way in which we experience the
universe.
Much more has been written on these subjects, but I hope that the
above brief treatment should be enough to qualify genetic sequencing
for the short list of finalists in this contest. I will also suggest
that any poll taken now would not do justice to this invention, as
most of its consequences still lie ahead of us. Perhaps we should
schedule another poll for the year 3998, to determine the best
invention in the period AD 1-2000?
ROBERT SHAPIRO, Professor of Chemistry at New York University, has
written three books: Life Beyond Earth (co-author), Origins: A
Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth, The Human Blueprint.
James Bailey:
Terrence Sejnowski said it beautifully: the most important discovery
of the past 2000 years is the bit.
Not the bit used 8-by-8 to redisplay the old sequential sentences and
equations that carry too much of our culture today, but rather the bit
which, used in parallel profusion, can embody living realities far
beyond the expressive power of static text. Images and music are just
the beginning of it.
We are only now awakening to how much the printing press narrowed
western culture by driving it into text and sequentialism for the past
500 years. Is it true, as the recent da Vinci museum exhibit haughtily
claimed, that Leonardo was not a true scientist at all because, unlike
Galileo, he did not publish? Of course not. It was merely the fact
that his highly parallel, and hence visual, way of doing science was
hopelessly incompatible with the printing press. (He probably wouldn't
even have participated in this exercise, where we are all limiting our
responses to those which can be expressed in text even though we are
no longer forced by technology to do so.) Imagine, just for a moment,
that Gutenberg had invented the worldwide web instead of movable type.
It would have been Leonardo's science, with its focus on the living
and the parallel, that would have been ubiquitous. Galileo's endless
dialogs might have been lucky to get percussio per diem una.
In general, the equations of the book era have been superb at
describing the parts of reality that are dead and hence universal.
Bits seem much more capable of describing the other 99%. I have the
sense that biology is already moving into the post-book era. To
understand what biologists are doing, it is not enough to read the
sentences they write. Increasingly, one must run the programs they run
and get at the bits themselves.
JAMES BAILEY is a former computer company executive at Thinking
Machines; author, After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human
Intelligence.
John C. Dvorak:
Let's ignore discoveries (germs) and technique (scientific method) for
starters before determining the greatest invention. I also think that
the printing press, a device invented to rip-off the bible buying
public, should be relegated to its rightful place as number two to a
newer invention: computer networks. While it is quaint to romanticize
the past by citing the printing press, steam engines or 18th century
lug nuts, we ignore the fact that our inventiveness as a civilization
is increasing not decreasing and newer inventions might be the most
important inventions. And let's choose an invention in and of itself
and not argue about derivatives. Right now the invention that is
revolutionizing the world (more than TV, for sure) is the computer
network — the Internet in particular. And, for what it's worth,
arguing that none of this would be possible if man hadn't learned to
grunt first, therefore grunting in the most important invention is
nonsense.
More interesting in this artificial discussion is how most of the
participants, including myself, have chosen an invention from their
particular specialty. Perhaps we should ask the question: what is the
most insidious invention of the past 2000 years? How about
specialization? Look at how insidious it is in this discussion. So
much so that it's frightening. Change the topic! Discussing the most
insidious inventions would be more fun than talking about the
importance of hay, the concept of infinity or Goedel! Just think of
the possibilities. We can nominate plastic, the stock market, roller
pens, the vibrating dildo, sitcoms, the literary agent, Microsoft
Visual BASIC, the animated cartoon, CNN, the wrist watch, roller
blades, the spinach souffle. The possibilities are endless. Let's
start over.
JOHN C. DVORAK is a columnist at PC Magazine, PC/Computing, Computer
Shopper, PC-UK, Info (Brazil), Boardwatch, Barrons Online, host of
Public Radio's Real Computing and host of Silicon Spin on ZDTV. He's
written 14 books, all out of print. Co-founder of the Oswald Spengler
Society. See Digerati, Chapter 8.
Kenneth Ford:
Well, this isn't very imaginative, but my choice-like that of several
other contributors-is the pill. Here's my reasoning. The greatest
invention of the last 2000 years is the one that is most likely to
help avert the collapse of civilization in the next 2000. Electricity
as a means of information and energy transport is a candidate. Modern
medicine is a candidate. But what drives or exacerbates every major
global problem is, ultimately, population growth. So whatever most
effectively limits population growth is the greatest invention-and
that's the pill, or contraception more generally.
KENNETH FORD is Director of Science Programs at the David and Lucile
Packard Foundation, former director of the American Institute of
Physics, and, with John Archibald Wheeler, the recent co-author of
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life In Physics.
Philip Brockman:
As a researcher I believe that my most important contributions are
inherent in the younger people I have worked with and in the increase
of the universal knowledge that has resulted from the work that I have
done and have sponsored among universities and companies.
Stephen Budiansky points to importance of "the domestication of the
horse as a mount." The amazing fact is that mankind can learn new
technology at an amazing pace. Thus, in a relatively short time after
the introduction of the horse to America, the Apache were a great
light cavalry. I would also agree with David Shaw re: "the steady
accrual of both knowledge and technology that has accompanied the
rigorous application of the scientific method over a surprisingly
small number of human generations "; and with Stanislas Dehaene on the
"concept of education."
So I guess my invention violates the 2000 year (very Christian limit).
It is the intergenerational passing of information.
PHILIP BROCKMAN , a physicist, has been at NASA LaRC (Langley Field,
Virginia) since 1959 and is a recipient of NASA's Exceptional Service
Medal (ESM). His research includes: Shock tubes; Plasma propulsion;
Diode laser spectroscopy; Heterodyne remote sensing; Laser research;
Laser injection seeding; Remote sensing of atmospheric species, winds,
windshear and vortices. He is currently supporting all solid state
laser development for aircraft and spaceborne remote sensing of
species and winds and developing coherent lidars to measure wake
vortices in airport terminal areas.
Howard Rheingold:
The kind of thinking that makes it possible for all these people to
expound upon "the single most important invention of the last two
thousand years" is the most important invention of the past two
thousand years. There is no such thing as the single most important
invention of the last two thousand years. The evolution of technology
doesn't work like that. It's a web of ideas, not a zero-sum game.
Knowing how to turn knowledge into power is the most powerful form of
knowledge. The mindsets, mindtools, and institutions that make massive
technological progress possible are all part of an invisible cultural
system — it is learned, not inherent, it was invented, not evolved, it
hypnotizes you to see the world in a certain way.
What we know as "technology" the visible stuff that hums and glows —
is only the physical manifestation of a specific kind of social
system. That invisible system, which emerged over the past three
centuries — what Jacques Ellul called "la technique" and Lewis Mumford
called "technics" — is more important than all the inventions it
engendered.
Do we lack one important invention at a crucial time when our
inventions are becoming our only evolutionary competitor? We haven't
formulated and agreed upon a way of making good decisions about the
powerful technologies we're so good at creating. We have a lot of the
knowledge that turns knowledge into power. We need more of the wisdom
that knows what we ought to do with the power of invention.
HOWARD RHEINGOLD, founder of Electric Minds, is the author of Tools
For Thought; Virtual Reality, and Virtual Communities.
George Lakoff:
As a cognitive linguist whose job is to study conceptual systems, both
conscious and unconscious, I was struck by what was meant by
"invention."
• The most concrete "inventions" proposed have been gadgets,
mechanical or biological — the printing press, the computer, the
birth control pill.
• A step way from the concrete specific technical innovations are
specific technical inventions of a mental character: Gödel's
Theorem, Arabic numbers, the nongeocentric universe, the theory of
evolution, the theory of computation.
• A step away from those are the general innovations of a mental
character in specific domains like science and politics, e.g., the
scientific method and democracy. I would like to go a step further
and talk about the invention that was causally necessary for all
of the above:
• The most basic fully general invention of a mental character is
The Idea of an Idea.
THE IDEA OF AN IDEA
It's a bit more than 2,000, more like 2,500 years, at least in the
West.
It is an 'invention" in the sense that human beings actively and
consciously thought it up: to my knowledge, it is not the case that
every indigenous culture around the world objectifies the notion of an
idea, making it a thing that can be consciously constructed.
What is required for all other human inventions is the notion that one
can actively, consciously construct new ideas. We take this for
granted, but it is not a "natural" development. Three-year-old
children have lots of ideas and even make up new ideas. But they do
not have the Idea of an Idea that they can construct anew; they do not
naturally arrive at the idea that making up new ideas is something
people do. The Idea of an Idea is a cultural creation that children
have to learn.
It is only with the Idea of an Idea that we get conscious specific
intellectual constructions like democracy, science, the number system,
the computer, the birth control pill, and so on. The Idea of an Idea
is the generative notion behind the very notion of an invention and is
causally necessary for all specific inventions.
GEORGE LAKOFF is Professor of Linguistics at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he is on the faculty of the Institute of
Cognitive Studies.He is the author of Metaphors We Live By (with Mark
Johnson), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal
About the Mind, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic
Metaphor (with Mark Turner), Moral Politics, and Philosophy in the
Flesh (with Mark Johnson).
Robert Provine:
Discovery of Childhood and Invention of Universal Schooling
Instead of suggesting a device, I nominate the educational process
essential for a high velocity of inventiveness, the evolution of a
technological society, and the spread of culture. While schools for
the elite have existed since antiquity, the recognition of childhood
as a unique time of life with special schooling, social, and emotional
needs, and different standards of justice, is relatively recent and
associated with Rousseau, Freud, Piaget, and their forbearers.
The discovery that children are not "miniature adults" led to a more
humane society and was essential to tailoring educational programs to
the developmental stage of the student. Universal schooling (and even
the modern university) were born both of this increased appreciation
of the special needs of children and necessity — the industrial
revolution needed a cadre of trained workers, scientists and
engineers. The complexity of modern technology and the associated
acceleration of innovation demand a critical mass of creative minds
and hands that cannot be provided by occasional virtuosi toiling in
solitude.
ROBERT R. PROVINE is Professor of Neurobiology and Psychology at the
University of Maryland.
jum...@my-deja.com
Peter Cochrane:
The Thermionic Valve by DeForest in 1915 really was the birth of the
electronic age. Without this invention most of us would never have
been born. Without electronics this planet would not be supporting the
massive numbers of people now living in the West. We would not be able
to communicate, compute, manufacture and distribute atoms on the scale
we now enjoy. There would be no radio, TV, computers, Internet, modern
medicine — engineering, international travel of any scale, atomic
power and almost everything we currently take for granted. In fact our
species and our civilisation would have stalled without this
invention.
This Thermionic Valve is very closely followed by the Transistor in
1945 with Bardeen and Shockley creating the foundation for what you
are reading this on — the PC.
PETER COCHRANE is Head of Research, BT Laboratories, UK and the author
of Tips for Time Travelers.
Samuel Barondes:
The great invention of the modern era is the invention of organized
science — scientific societies and journals that foster the
accumulation and dissemination of knowledge based on evidence rather
than on authority or revelation. Before the invention of these
organizations the accumulation of scientific knowledge was slow,
because there were no established venues for criticism and education —
essential social interactions at the heart of science. Now that these
organizations (in the developed world) have become very large
(necessitating the proliferation of many subdivisions, to allow for
personal interactions on a human scale) they facilitate the
unprecedented opportunities for collective knowledge and self
knowledge that so many of us enjoy.
SAMUEL H. BARONDES, M.D. is the Jeanne and Sanford Robertson Professor
of Neurobiology and Psychiatry at the University of California at San
Francisco, President of the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience,
and the author of Molecules and Mental Illness and Mood Genes: Hunting
for Origins of Mania and Depression.
Christopher Westbury:
My nomination for the most important invention of the past 2000 years
is probability theory, which was mainly put together in a series of
steps between 1654, when Blaise Pascal proposed a solution for
splitting the pot in an unfinished game of chance, and 1843, when
Antoine Cournot offered a definition of chance as the crossing of two
independent streams of events. I don't nominate it simply because
probability theory laid the foundation for statistical analysis, which
provided us with a vocabulary without which most scientific
discoveries made in the last century would have been (literally)
unthinkable.
Nor do I nominate probability theory because it gave us for the first
time a trustworthy tool for deciding how to apportion belief to
multiple sources of evidence. Probability theory had even more
fundamental epistemological implications whose importance is
under-appreciated in our time because those implications are so
seamlessly integrated into the foundations of our modern world view.
Until the nineteenth century, the idea that there could exist deep
regularities underlain by pure chance — regularities arising from
distributions of events which were themselves the result of
multifarious unmeasurable causes — was not only almost unknown
(Aristotle had hinted at it, as he seems to have hinted at
everything), but actually philosophically repugnant. It required the
invention of probability theory to make this idea thinkable.
In making it possible to think about such abstract regularities,
probability theory rescued us from two philosophical shackles which
had held us back from the beginning of history: that of needing to
postulate a centralized controller that made everything come out
right, and that of assuming that "what you see is what you get" — i.e.
that the proper objects of scientific study are roughly identical to
the direct objects of the senses. Though perhaps they have still not
been totally removed, those philosophical shackles needed to be at
least loosened in order for science to get moving.
A whole new world of law-obeying objects to be studied was opened up
by probability theory. Neither Darwin's theory of natural selection,
nor Maxwell's theory of statistical mechanics (both published in the
same year, only 140 years ago) would have been thinkable before
probability theory was thinkable. Without probability theory, human
kind would be (and was) unable to even conceive of the explanations
for many — probably most — of the phenomena which we have ever
explained.
CHRISTOPHER WESTBURY is a post-doctoral fellow at the University Of
Alberta.
John Rennie:
Earlier contributors have already staked out the intellectual high
road of mental constructs like scientific method and the calculus, so
I'll retreat to the most prosaic, literal reading of your question:
What is the one device invented by one person at one moment during the
past 2,000 years that has had the most influence to date?
I'd be a traitor to my inky profession if I didn't at least echo the
nominations for Johann Gutenberg's movable-type printing press. But in
the spirit of the game, let me throw support behind something else:
Alessandro Volta's electric battery of 1800.
Static electricity was known since at least the time of the Greeks,
but study of it had largely stalled. When Pieter van Musschenbroek
built and discharged the first Leiden jar in 1745, nearly killing
himself in the process, he also jolted the study of electricity back
to life. But it was Volta's invention of a steady source of current,
inspired by the electrochemical observations of Galvani, that
revolutionized technology and physics. Without it, Oersted could not
have proved that electricity and magnetism were different faces of the
same force, electromagnetism. Electrochemistry itself offered clues to
the underlying electrical nature of all matter. And of course, Volta's
battery was the forerunner of all the electrical devices that have
transformed the world over the past two centuries.
What I find so appealing about Volta's creation is that it had immense
practical significance but also opened to us a world of physical
phenomena that in themselves changed our understanding of the
universe. Yet it was not a bolt-from-the blue inspiration; it pulled
together other threads of discoveries by Volta's contemporaries.
There's a lesson about greatness in there somewhere.
JOHN RENNIE is the editor in chief of Scientific American magazine.
Randolph Nesse:
Text is Special
It seems to me, as it will no doubt to many others, that the printing
press has changed the world more than any other invention in the past
two millennia. But why has such a simple technology had such a huge
influence? And why, after 500 years, has no one invented a superior
replacement?
I suspect it is because text has a special relationship to the human
mind. Printing is the third wave of the biggest innovation, the one
that started with the co-evolution of language, thought and speech.
Speech makes it possible to share and compare internal models of the
external world, a capacity that gives huge selective advantages. But
acoustic vibrations are ephemeral, fading in moments into questions
about who said what, when. Writing, the second wave, is like a blast
of super-cooled air that freezes words in mid-flight and smacks them
onto a page where they can be examined by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Writing makes possible law, contracts, history, narratives, and
poetry, to say nothing of sacred texts with their overwhelming
influence. Printing transformed writing into the first mass medium,
and the world has never been the same since. In the half-century that
followed Gutenberg's 1446 Bible, over a thousand publishers printed
over a million books. Suddenly it was worthwhile, and soon essential,
for even ordinary people to learn to read. Now, people whose brains
have trouble with this trick are at a severe disadvantage, while some
with particular verbal felicity can make a living just by arranging
words on paper.
Is text merely a temporary expedient, necessitated by the previous
inability to record and transmit speech and images? We will soon see.
In just a few years, sensors, storage and bandwidth will be so
inexpensive that many people will be unconstrained by technical
limitations. This affords a fine opportunity to make bold predictions
that can be completely and embarrassingly wrong, as wrong as the
predictions that said that e-mail would never catch on. In that
spirit, I predict that voice and video attachments to e-mail, "v-mail"
and "vid-mail," will be the next big thing, and they will create all
manner of consternation. At first they will be hailed as more personal
and more natural, thanks to the increased content carried by
intonation and exclamations. But soon, I predict, the usual human
strivings will give rise to problems.
Many people who previously were forgiven as "liking to hear themselves
talk" will be revealed as actually wanting to hear others listen to
them talk. Some, especially bosses, will send long soliloquies to
hundreds of other people in the expectation that they will be listened
to in full. The wonderful veil of privacy in which a reader considers
a text will be rent. You won't be able to jump around and skip whole
paragraphs in v-mail and vid-mail, as you can in e-mail. Time and
attention will be revealed as the valuable resources they are. Many
people will post electronic notices equivalent to the one a friend has
on his answering machine, "Leave a message, but please KEEP IT BRIEF."
To solve this we will, of course, turn to still more technology.
V-mail will be transformed automatically into text so we will have a
choice of mediums. What will we choose? It will depend. For emotional
endearments, and many narratives, v-mail and vid-mail. For simple
facts, and subtle ideas, however, I think will we choose text, at
least, that is, until our brains are changed by the selective forces
unleashed by these technologies.
RANDOLPH NESSE, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry, Director, ISR
Evolution and Human Adaptation Program, The University of Michigan and
coauthor (with George C. Williams) of Why We Get Sick: The New Science
of Darwinian Medicine.
Brian Greene:
My initial thought of how to define the importance of an invention was
to imagine the impact which would be caused by its absence. But having
just sat through yet another viewing of "Its A Wonderful Life," I am
inspired to leave contemplation of the contingencies of history to
others better suited to the task. And so, I will vote for my
"knee-jerk" response: The Telescope.
The invention of the telescope and its subsequent refinement and use
by Galileo marked the birth of the modern scientific method and set
the stage for a dramatic reassessment of our place in the cosmos. A
technological device revealed conclusively that there is so much more
to the universe than is available to our unaided senses. And these
revelations, in time, have established the unforeseen vastness of our
dynamic, expanding universe, shown that our galaxy is but one among
countless others, and introduced us to a wealth of exotic
astrophysical structures.
BRIAN GREENE is a professor of physics and of mathematics at Columbia
University, and author of The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden
Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.
Esther Dyson:
I'd say the notion that people can govern themselves, rather than
being governed by someone who claims divine right. (I'm wrestling with
that one myself right now, on the Internet.)
ESTHER DYSON is president of EDventure Holdings and editor of Release
1.0. Her PC Forum conference is an annual industry event. She is the
author of Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. Release
2.1, the paperback upgrade, is now available. Dyson is also active in
industry affairs; she is the interim chairman of ICANN, the Internet
Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers; a member of the board of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is a member of the President's
Export Council Subcommittee on Encryption. See Digerati, Chapter 9.
Steven Johnson:
Given the amount of self-reference in the answers so far, I'm tempted
to nominate this very discussion list as the greatest invention of the
past two thousand years, and hopefully out-meta all the other
contenders.
I think part of the problem here is the fact that inventions by nature
are cumulative, and so when asked to pick out the single most
important one, you're inevitably faced with a kind of infinite
regress: if the automobile is the most important invention, then why
not the combustible engine? (And so onŠ) In that spirit — and in the
spirit of nominating things you happen to be working on professionally
— I'd nominate the ultimate cumulative invention: the city. Or at
least the modern city's role as an information storage and retrieval
device. Before there were webs and telegraphs making information
faster, there were cities bringing information physically closer
together, and organizing it in intelligible ways. It's not a stretch
to think of the original urban guilds as file directories on the
storage device of the collective mind, combining disparate skills and
knowledge bases and placing them into the appropriate slots. (Manuel
De Landa has a wonderful riff on this in the first section of his new
book, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.)
But of course, the city isn't an invention proper, at least in the
conventional way that we talk about inventions. It's the sum total of
multiple inventions, without each of which the modern city as we know
it might not exist.
I think what this discussion makes clear is that we need a better
definition of "invention"!
STEVEN JOHNSON is the author of Interface Culture: How New Technology
Transforms The Way We Create And Communicate, and the editor-in-chief
of FEED Magazine. He is working on a new book about cities and
emergent behavior.
Delta Willis:
Had you asked two years ago I would have nominated the airplane, for
it symbolizes the essence of invention by being composed of other
inventions: the wheel, the bicycle, a glider, a prop, and a 12 horse
power engine. The airplane is important because it diminishes our
parochial view, it too changed the manner of warfare (Hey, nice
bomber) and one can argue that it was an early form of the space
shuttle. But if by important you mean sweeping, the utility of
electricity is pivotal to so many things mundane and great, especially
the broadcast of information, the A train, the monitors that tell me
if my flight is delayed, this modern version of Gutenberg's press, and
Les Paul's guitar. Thomas Edison received 389 patents for electric
light and power, and Nikola Tesla patented his Apparatus for
Transmitting Electrical Energy. Of course humans no more invented
electricity than we invented flight, but utility is key. As I write I
am preparing to go out for New Year's Eve, and packing a flashlight,
just in case an old programming shut down code of 99 introduces us to
the Y2K bug a year early. Should such a power failure occur then, the
impact of electrical utility will be known.
DELTA WILLIS wrote The Hominid Gang: Behind the Scenes in the Search
for Human Origins, and The Sand Dollar and The Slide Rule, Drawing
Blueprints from Nature.
Joseph LeDoux:
Inventions. My top runners in the area of physical inventions would
have to be ways of harnessing energy, ways of moving around the world,
and ways of communicating. And since the latter two depend on the
first, I'd have to put my money on energy control and use.
But we've got lots of psychological and social inventions as well. I'd
put the idea that all people are equal at the top of the list. This is
an invention that we could make better use of.
JOSEPH LEDOUX is a Professor at the Center for Neural Science, New
York University. He is the author of the recently published The
Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life,
coauthor (with Michael Gazzaniga) of The Integrated Mind, and editor
with W. Hirst of Mind and Brain: Dialogues in Cognitive Neuroscience.
See EDGE: "Parallel Memories: Putting Emotions Back Into The Brain" —
A Talk With Joseph LeDoux.
Maria Lepowsky:
I've been pondering your millennial/bimillennial question, and I'd
like to cheat a bit by giving several answers.
I too offer a vote for the oral contraceptive pill. It is
revolutionary for two reasons. First, it makes a quantum leap in the
effectiveness of technologies for the control of human fertility —
which are found in every known culture and likely date back more than
a hundred millennia. The pill and subsequent devices have the
potential for a revolutionary impact on the lives of women from
puberty to menopause everywhere in the world, allowing women to
control their own fertility and thus enabling members of half the
human species to control their own adult lives.
In addition, these devices have the potential to save the planet Earth
from the ongoing disaster of human overpopulation, with its present
and future dire consequences globally of mass poverty, pandemics,
warfare and violent confrontations over scarce resources,
environmental degradation, and wholesale species extinctions.
My next vote for most important technology of the last two thousand
years goes to the gun, or more precisely to a series of European
inventions of more efficient killing technologies. The ship-mounted
cannon, the Spanish trabuco and the British Snider rifle — to mention
just a few weapons from recent centuries — in the hands of members of
authoritarian societies (whose populations had exceeded the carrying
capacities of their homelands given contemporary agricultural
technologies), bent on acquiring new territories, propelled across the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by ships built according to the most
advanced maritime technologies of their eras, effected the European
conquest of large portions of the planet's landmass, resources, and
human populations. The momentous consequences of the European conquest
will continue to play themselves out in every sphere of human life
around the globe over the next millennium.
My final vote goes to the revolutionary improvements in hydraulic
engineering made beginning in the late nineteenth century that have
solved what has for millennia been the single greatest problem of
urban life: how to bring clean water in and human waste out of a large
nucleated settlement. While the Roman waterworks were brilliantly
designed (and their epoch crosses the bimillennial cut-off point of
this exercise), improvements in sanitation made only a century or so
from the present led, in industrial societies like Britain and the
United States, to a revolutionary drop in the death rate from
infectious diseases transmitted by fecal contamination of drinking
water. These advances in hydraulic engineering have extended human
life spans even more than the subsequent discovery of antibiotics.
This technology has diffused only slowly around the globe as it
encounters barriers created by unequal distributions of wealth and
power. Even so, ironically, our resulting increased longevity, and the
increases in population fertility that declines in mortality rates
confer when they are unchecked by other variables, contribute
dramatically to the ongoing crisis of human overpopulation. This makes
the wide availability of advanced contraceptive technology, invented
two generations later, all the more critical for the survival and
well-being of our species and of the entire planet.
MARIA LEPOWSKY is Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of
Wisconsin, and author of Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an
Egalitarian Society.
John Barrow:
John, The most important invention is the Indo-Arab counting system
with 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 with its positional information content (so
111 means one hundred plus one ten plus one unit), zero symbol, and
operator property that by adding a zero to the righthand end of a
string multiplies the number by the base value of 10. This system of
counting and enumeration is completely universal and lies at the
foundation of all quantitative science, economics, and mathematics.
JOHN BARROW is is Professor of Astronomy at the University of Sussex,
England. He is the author of The World Within the World, Pi in the
Sky, Theories of Everything, The Origins of the Universe (Science
Masters Series),The Left Hand of Creation, The Artful Universe, and
Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits.
Todd Siler:
To avoid incurring the wrath of some scholars, I wanted to add this
parenthetical note (see asterisk below) to my statement about
language. Hopefully, it clarifies my point a little; or, at least,
focuses it. My first candidate is "language"; specifically, our
initial realization* of its creative potential, building on the
intuitions of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Language is the
life-force and body of communica- tion. It comprises all forms of
symbolic creations, expressions and systems which we use to
communicate: from the mathematical to the vernacular. Without
language, every other invention and innovation may never have existed
-- including humor!
My close-second candidate is E = mc2. When we learn to tap the full
meaning of that piece of symbolic language, we'll create more than a
Nuclear Age. "Matter is frozen energy," Einstein said, relating the
essence of his insight into the mass-energy relationship. Similarly,
language is frozen meaning. When we discover how to unleash the
enormous energy in meaning by continually transforming information
(data, ideas, knowledge, experience) in new contexts, we'll make a
quantum leap in applying the power of language to achieve our boldest
dreams.
* Note: Some people may choose to date our first deep realization of
language's potential around the late 1700's. That's when the first
scientific study of the nature and origins of language began to unfold
through the systematic, comparative studies of the German scholars
Friedrich Schlegel, Jakob Grimm, and Franz Bopp. Others may focus on
the work of Ferdinand de Saussure whose general, descriptive method
led to some basic laws that relate to all languages (about 3,000 or
more now). My broad statement is meant to embrace the "makeup" of
language: its symbolic nature, structures, semantics, and boundless
usages. I'm not simply referring to the inventive act of classifying
spoken and written languages into families, or categorizing the growth
patterns of language, or charting the evolution of grammar.
TODD SILER is the founder and director of Psi-Phi Communications, a
company that provides catalysts for breakthroughs & innovation in
business and education. He is the author of Breaking the Mind Barrier
and Think Like A Genius.
Peter Tallack:
The horse collar as the most important high-tech invention.
Developed around 1000 AD in northern Europe, it allowed the region to
be farmed efficiently and so, it could be argued, was responsible for
the rise of civilization there. It also gave its possessors great
war-making potential — think of knights in armour, for example.
PETER TALLACK, former book editor of Nature, is science editor of
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London.
Brian Goodwin:
The most important invention in the past two thousand years is the
printing press. When William Caxton published 'The Canterbury Tales'
in the 15th Century with his newly invented printing machine, he
dramatically accelerated the separation of human culture from nature,
eclipsing the direct experience of natural processes that continues in
the oral tradition and replacing it by words on a page. This cut in
two directions. (1) The power of nature diminished so that science and
technology could start the systematic program of gaining knowledge for
control of nature, liberating people from drudgery and freeing the
imagination. (2) At the same time, nature was degraded to a set of
mechanisms that humans could manipulate for their own purposes, and
the 'rape of nature' began in earnest. We are now reaping twin
harvests: vastly expanded potential for written communication through
the internet, as in this exchange of views at the Edge web site; and a
vastly degraded planet that won't support us much longer, as things
are going. Can we use one to save us from the other? We can now
connect with each other as never before; but what about nature?
BRIAN GOODWIN Brian Goodwin is a professor of biology at the
Schumacher College, Milton Keynes, and the author of Temporal
Organization in Cells and Analytical Physiology, How The Leopard
Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity, and (with Gerry
Webster) Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles
in Biology. Dr. Goodwin is a member of the Board of Directors of the
Sante Fe Institute. See EDGE: A New Science of Qualities; The Third
Culture, Chapter 4.
John Brockman:
DNI: DISTRIBUTED NETWORKED INTELLIGENCE
In their classic book The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude
Shannon and Warren Weaver stated: "The word communication will be used
here in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which
one mind may affect another. This, of course, involves not only
written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the
theater, the ballet, and in fact all human behavior."
Marshall McLuhan pointed out that by inventing electric technology, we
had externalized our central nervous systems; that is, our minds. We
had gone beyond Freud's invention of the unconscious, and, for the
first time, had rendered visible the conscious.
Composer John Cage went further to say that we now had to presume that
"there's only one mind, the one we all share." Cage pointed out that
we had to go beyond private and personal mind-sets and understand how
radically things had changed. Mind had become socialized. "We can't
change our minds without changing the world," he said. Mind as an
extension became our environment, which he characterized as "the
collective consciousness," which we could tap into by creating "a
global utilities network."
We create tools and then mold ourselves in their image.
Seventeenth-century clockworks inspired mechanistic metaphors ("the
heart is a pump") just as mid-twentieth-century developments in
self-regulating engineering devices resulted in the cybernetic image
("the brain is computer").
Although you don't hear much about cybernetics today in the scientific
arena, its impact is profound. "The cybernetic idea" stated
anthropologist Gregory Bateson, "is the most important abstraction
since the invention of Jesus Christ." He went on to note that we were
now living in " a world of pattern, of order, of resonances in which
the individual mind is a subsystem of a larger order. Mind is
intrinsic to the messages carried by the pathways within the larger
system and intrinsic also in the pathways themselves."
In this new epistemology Ockham's Razor meets Gödel's Proof and the
fabric of our habitual thinking is torn apart. Subject and object
fuse. The individual self decreates. (See By The Late John Brockman).
Reality passes into description and thus becomes invention. Such
ideas, which appear destructive, liberate, allowing us to lay waste to
the generalizations of previous epochs which we decreate by getting
through the history of our words. As Wallace Stevens wrote: "The words
of the world are the life of the world. It is the speech of truth in
its true solitude: a nature that is created in what it says."*
Key to this radical rebooting of our mindsets is the term information,
which, in this scheme, refers to regulation and control and has
nothing to do with meaning, ideas, or data. Bateson pointed out that
"information is a difference that makes a difference." The raindrop
that hits the ground behind you contains no information. The raindrop
that hits you on the nose has information. Information is a measure of
effect. Systems of control utilize information if and when they react
to change to maintain continuity.
If Newtonian physics taught us that it is the parts that matter, we
now inhabit a universe that interacts infinitely with itself, where
importance lies in the patterns that connect the parts. This becomes
problematic because how can a system describe itself without
generating a spiralling ladder of recursive mirrors?
The answer?
Nobody knows, and you can't find out.
The description of the plane of language is the plane that holds our
descriptions. Language becomes a commission, a dance, a play, a song.
With the Internet we are creating a new extension of ourselves in much
the same way as Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein pieced together his
creation. Only this creation is not an anthropomorphic being that
moves through accretive portions of space in time. It is instead, an
emergent electronic beast of such proportions that we can only imagine
its qualities, its dimensions.
Can it be ourselves?
I propose as the most important invention of the past two thousand
years: Distributed Networked Intelligence (DNI). DNI is the collective
externalized mind, the mind we all share, the infinite oscillation of
our collective consciousness interacting with itself, adding a fuller,
richer dimension to what it means to be human.
JOHN BROCKMAN is the author/editor of nineteen books, including By The
Late John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific
Revolution, Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite and (with
Katinka Matson) How Things Are: A Science Took-Kit for the Mind. He is
founder of Brockman, Inc., a literary and software agency, President
of Edge Foundation, Inc., founder of The Reality Club, and editor and
publisher of EDGE, a Website presenting The Third Culture in action.
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http://www.mathsoft.com/asolve/constant/constant.html
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Favorite Mathematical Constants
Steven Finch, Research and Development Team, MathSoft, Inc.
All numbers are not created equal; that certain constants appear at all
and then echo throughout mathematics, in seemingly independent ways, is
a
source of fascination. Just as physical constants provide "boundary
conditions" for the physical universe, mathematical constants somehow
characterize the structure of mathematics.
The constants listed below are rather arbitrarily organized by topic.
You
might find an associated table of constants to be more helpful, as well
as
the (overall MathSoft website) search utility. Some of the essays
contain
links to Mathcad files. If you don't own Mathcad, please consider
downloading the free read-only version called Mathcad Explorer. Here
also
is an accessible overview of the subject.
These web pages will be undergoing fairly continuous construction, so
please visit frequently. I welcome notification (e-mail to
sfi...@mathsoft.com) of significant references I've missed, errors I've
committed or favorite constants I've overlooked. The date each essay was
last revised is indicated.
Well-known constants
Zero, 0
One, 1
Imaginary unit,
Pythagoras' constant, . . . . . . . . . . Jan 24, 2000
Golden mean, . . . . . . . . . . Sep 7, 1999
Natural logarithmic base, e . . . . . . . . . . Mar 11, 1999
Archimedes' constant, . . . . . . . . . . Apr 22, 1999
Euler-Mascheroni constant, . . . . . . . . . . Jan 24, 2000
Apéry's constant, . . . . . . . . . . Jan 26, 2000
Catalan's constant, G . . . . . . . . . . Jan 26, 2000
Khintchine's constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 22, 1999
Feigenbaum constants . . . . . . . . . . Jun 26, 1999
Madelung's constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 22, 1999
Chaitin's constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 11, 2000
Constants associated with Number Theory
Hardy-Littlewood constants . . . . . . . . . . Jan 18, 2000
Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin constants . . . . . . . Jan 18, 2000
Euler gamma function constants . . . . . . . . . . Jan 23, 2000
Landau-Ramanujan constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 2, 2000
Sierpinski's constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 13, 1998
Brun's constant . . . . . . . . . . Feb 7, 1999
Artin's constant . . . . . . . . . . Jan 11, 2000
Linnik's constant . . . . . . . . . . Dec 9, 1997
Hafner-Sarnak-McCurley constant . . . . . . . . . . Dec 15, 1999
Gauss-Kuzmin-Wirsing constant . . . . . . . . . . Aug 26, 1999
Stolarsky-Harborth constant . . . . . . . . . . Sep 8, 1999
Porter's constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 22, 1999
Glaisher-Kinkelin constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 10, 1998
Fransén-Robinson constant . . . . . . . . . . Aug 3, 1998
Alladi-Grinstead constant . . . . . . . . . . Apr 5, 1999
Niven's constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 8, 1999
Backhouse's constant . . . . . . . . . . Sep 25, 1998
Mills' constant . . . . . . . . . . Apr 16, 1999
Stieltjes constants . . . . . . . . . . Jan 18, 2000
Liouville-Roth constants . . . . . . . . . . Feb 9, 1998
Diophantine approximation constants . . . . . . . . . . Jul 23, 1998
Erdös' reciprocal sum constants . . . . . . . . . . Mar 14, 1999
Abundant numbers density constant . . . . . . . . . . Dec 11, 1997
Self-numbers density constant . . . . . . . . . . Dec 9, 1997
Ramanujan-Soldner constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 25, 1999
Cameron's sum-free set constants . . . . . . . . . . Oct 2, 1998
Euler totient function asymptotic constants . . .Jan 18, 2000
Pisot-Vijayaraghavan-Salem constants . . . . . . . . . . Dec 15, 1998
Nielsen-Ramanujan constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 22, 1999
Triple-free set constants . . . . . . . . . . Aug 15, 1997
De Bruijn-Newman constant . . . . . . . . . . Oct 29, 1998
Komornik-Loreti constant . . . . . . . . . . Apr 23, 1999
Freiman's constant . . . . . . . . . . Dec 5, 1998
Erdös-Lebensold constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 11, 1999
Cahen's constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 12, 1998
Hall-Montgomery constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 22, 1999
Fast matrix multiplication constants . . . . . . . . . . May 11, 1999
Erdös' sum-distinct set constant . . . . . . . . . . Apr 5, 1999
Vallée's constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 22, 1999
Pell-Stevenhagen constants . . . . . . . . . . Jan 28, 2000
Constants associated with Analytic Inequalities
Shapiro's cyclic sum constant . . . . . . . . . . Apr 5, 1999
Carlson-Levin constants . . . . . . . . . . Aug 3, 1998
Landau-Kolmogorov constants . . . . . . . . . . Jul 29, 1997
Hilbert's constants . . . . . . . . . . Oct 26, 1999
Copson-de Bruijn constants . . . . . . . . . . Jul 29, 1997
Wirtinger-Sobolev isoperimetric constants . . . Nov 5, 1999
Whitney-Mikhlin extension constants . . . . . . . . . . Mar 2, 2000
Korn constants . . . . . . . . . . Jan 3, 1999
Kneser-Mahler polynomial constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 9, 1999
Grothendieck's constants . . . . . . . . . . Mar 26, 1999
Du Bois Reymond's constants . . . . . . . . . . Jan 1, 2000
Steinitz constants . . . . . . . . . . May 9, 1999
Young-Fejér-Jackson constants . . . . . . . . . . Feb 3, 2000
Van der Corput's constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 2, 2000
Constants associated with the Approximation of Functions
Wilbraham-Gibbs constant . . . . . . . . . . Aug 3, 1998
Lebesgue constants . . . . . . . . . . Aug 28, 1997
Favard constants . . . . . . . . . . Jul 29, 1997
Bernstein's constant . . . . . . . . . . Aug 3, 1998
The "one-ninth" constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 15, 1999
Laplace limit constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 26, 1999
Integer Chebyshev constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 14, 1999
Constants associated with Enumerating Discrete Structures
Abelian group enumeration constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 22, 1999
Pythagorean triple constants . . . . . . . . . . Dec 31, 1998
Rényi's parking constants . . . . . . . . . . Sep 30, 1999
Golomb-Dickman constant . . . . . . . . . . Sep 30, 1999
Lengyel's constant . . . . . . . . . . Oct 5, 1998
Otter's tree enumeration constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 20, 1999
Pólya's random walk constants . . . . . . . . . . Oct 8, 1998
Self-avoiding-walk connective constants . . . . Nov 11, 1999
Feller's coin tossing constants . . . . . . . . . . Feb 6, 1998
Hard square entropy constant . . . . . . . . . . Jan 26, 1999
Binary search tree constants . . . . . . . . . . Sep 30, 1999
Digital search tree constants . . . . . . . . . . Apr 24, 1999
Quadtree constants . . . . . . . . . . Aug 14, 1997
Extreme value constants . . . . . . . . . . Aug 15, 1997
Pattern-free word constants . . . . . . . . . . Mar 15, 2000
Takeuchi-Prellberg constant . . . . . . . . . . Oct 15, 1998
Percolation cluster density constants . . . . . . . . . . Oct 3, 1998
Klarner's lattice animal constant . . . . . . . . . . May 2, 1999
Lenz-Ising constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 1, 1998
2D Monomer-dimer constant . . . . . . . . . . Sep 22, 1998
3D Dimer constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 1, 1998
Lieb's square ice constant . . . . . . . . . . Jan 26, 1999
Odlyzko-Rains constants . . . . . . . . . . Jul 24, 1999
Tutte-Beraha constants . . . . . . . . . . Mar 5, 2000
Constants associated with Functional Iteration
Gauss' lemniscate constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 26, 1999
Grossman's constant . . . . . . . . . . Jul 25, 1997
Plouffe's constant . . . . . . . . . . Oct 13, 1998
Lehmer's constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 4, 1999
Iterated exponential constants . . . . . . . . . . Jun 8, 1999
Continued fraction constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 29, 1999
Infinite product constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 22, 1999
Quadratic recurrence constants . . . . . . . . . . Jul 2, 1999
Conway's constant . . . . . . . . . . Aug 3, 1998
Constants associated with Complex Analysis
Bloch-Landau constants . . . . . . . . . . Feb 21, 2000
Masser-Gramain constant . . . . . . . . . . Oct 7, 1998
John constant . . . . . . . . . . Oct 15, 1998
Hayman constants . . . . . . . . . . Jan 17, 2000
Littlewood-Clunie-Pommerenke constants . . . . Sep 5, 1999
Whittaker-Goncarov constants . . . . . . . . . . Feb 19, 2000
Grötzsch ring constants . . . . . . . . . . Feb 8, 2000
Constants associated with Geometry
Geometric probability constants . . . . . . . . . . May 12, 1999
Circular coverage constants . . . . . . . . . . Jan 20, 2000
Universal coverage constants . . . . . . . . . . Aug 23, 1998
Hermite's constants . . . . . . . . . . Oct 29, 1999
Tammes' constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 18, 1998
Calabi's triangle constant . . . . . . . . . . Feb 19, 1998
DeVicci's tesseract constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 15, 1998
Graham's hexagon constant . . . . . . . . . . Mar 9, 1998
Traveling salesman constants . . . . . . . . . . Oct 29, 1999
Steiner tree constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 29, 1999
Moving sofa constant . . . . . . . . . . Oct 14, 1998
Beam detection constant . . . . . . . . . . Aug 6, 1999
Heilbronn triangle constants . . . . . . . . . . Jan 20, 2000
Kakeya-Besicovitch constants . . . . . . . . . . Aug 22, 1998
Moser's worm constant . . . . . . . . . . Aug 6, 1999
Rectilinear crossing constant . . . . . . . . . . Nov 11, 1999
Maximum inradius constants . . . . . . . . . . Jun 21, 1999
Apollonian packing constant . . . . . . . . . . Apr 1, 1999
Magic geometric constants . . . . . . . . . . Nov 24, 1999
Relevant Links
Inverse Symbolic Calculator, by S. Plouffe
Mathematical Constants and Computation, by X. Gourdon and P. Sebah
Recognizing Numerical Constants, by D. H. Bailey and S. Plouffe
The Miraculous Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe Pi Algorithm
What is a Number?, by A. Bogomolny
What is a Closed-Form Number?, by T. Y. Chow
How Many Fundamental Physical Constants are There?, by J. Baez
University of Tennesse Mathematics Archives Page about Numbers
Math Forum Internet Mathematics Library Page about Numbers
Yahoo Page about Numbers
S. Finch
Copyright (c) 1999 MathSoft Inc.
All rights reserved.
===========================================================
http://www.mathsoft.com/asolve/constant/table.html
--------------------------------------------------
Table of Mathematical Constants
Table of Mathematical Constants
Steven Finch, Research and Development Team, MathSoft, Inc.
Here is an alternative indexing of the Favorite Mathematical
Constants web pages. Please send comments or questions to
sfi...@mathsoft.com.
VALUEBRIEF DESCRIPTION AND RELEVANT POINTER
0 Zero; also conjectured value of the de Bruijn-Newman constant
0.00016...Estimate of one of Cameron's sum-free set constants
0.0002206747...6th Du Bois Reymond constant
0.0013176411...Heath-Brown-Moroz constant, with Artin's constant
0.0020538344...Third of the Stieltjes constants
0.0052407047...4th Du Bois Reymond constant
0.0096903631...Negative of second of the Stieltjes constants
0.0173271405...Mentioned with Du Bois Reymond constants
0.018315639...exp(-4); one of Rényi's parking constants
0.0219875218...Gauchman's constant; mentioned with Shapiro's cyclic
sum constant
0.0230957089...Mentioned with Stieltjes constants
0.0257358318...Mentioned with quadtree constants
0.02759...K_S(p_c); discussed with percolation cluster density
constants
0.0282517642...3rd Du Bois Reymond constant
0.0333810598...One of the Feigenbaum constants
0.0355762113...K_B(1/2) = -41/16+3*sqrt(3)/2; with percolation
cluster density constants
0.038156...One of Rényi's parking constants
0.048239269...c(3,4) Meissel-Mertens constant, with Hadamard-de la
Vallée Poussin constants
0.06057...One of the Euler totient function asymptotic constants
0.0653514259...Norton's constant, discussed with Porter's constant
0.065770...K_S(1/2); discussed with percolation cluster density
constants
0.0659880358...e^(-e); one of the iterated exponential constants
0.0728158454...Negative of first of the Stieltjes constants
0.0773853773...Mentioned with Vallée's constant
0.0946198928...Non-alternating series of reciprocal primes, squared;
Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin constants
0.097...Base-10 self-numbers density constant
0.10413324511...-d_0; mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
0.1076539192...The "one-ninth" constant
0.1149420448...prd(cos(/n), n=3..inf); one of the infinite product
constants
0.1475836176...arctan(1/2)/, Plouffe's constant
0.14855...4D critical point, mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
0.1490279983...Conway's impartial misère games; with iterated
exponential constants
0.14966...4D inverse critical temperature, with Lenz-Ising constants
0.1715004931...delta0; Hall-Montgomery constant
0.1715728753...3-2*sqrt(2); Heilbronn triangle constant for five
points in unit triangle
0.1764297331...-G_2; mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
0.1807171047...Zagier's constant; mentioned with Freiman's constant
0.1878596...Series mentioned with iterated exponential constants
0.1924500897...sqrt(3)/9; Heilbronn triangle constant for five
points in unit square
0.1945280495...2nd Du Bois Reymond constant
0.1994588183...Vallée's constant
0.2078795764...i^i = exp(-/2); with iterated exponential constants
0.209...Base-4 self-numbers density constant
0.21759...Lower bound on one of Cameron's sum-free set constants
0.218094...3D critical point, mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
0.21862...Upper bound on one of Cameron's sum-free set constants
0.221654...3D inverse critical temperature, with Lenz-Ising
constants
0.2351252848...Conway-Guy constant; with Erdös' sum-distinct set
constant
0.2396512475...24 - 26^2 + 228; one of the quadtree constants
0.2419707245...1/sqrt(2**e); with traveling salesman constants
0.247...The abundant numbers density constant
0.25Koebe's constant, with Bloch-Landau constants
0.252660259...Binary self-numbers density constant
0.2614972128...C1, one of the Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin
constants
0.2649320846...Overlapping circles; with circular coverage constants
0.2665042887...Mentioned with Otter's tree enumeration constants
0.2677868402...Unforgeable word constant, with pattern-free word
constants
0.2696065...Alternating series of reciprocal primes; with
Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin constants
0.2697318462...One of the Pell-Stevenhagen constants
0.272190...Cassaigne-Finch constant, discussed with
Stolarsky-Harborth constant
0.280169499...Bernstein's constant
0.28136...One of the Pell-Stevenhagen constants
0.2853...Mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
0.2857142857...2/7; conjectured value of second Diophantine
approximation constant
0.2867420562...-c(1,4) Meissel-Mertens constant, with Hadamard-de la
Vallée Poussin constants
0.2867474284...Strongly carefree constant; discussed with
Hafner-Sarnak-McCurley constant
0.2887880950... Q; one of the digital search tree constants
0.297461553...One of the Pythagorean triple constants
0.3036630029...Gauss-Kuzmin-Wirsing constant
0.3074948788...C_4; one of the Hardy-Littlewood constants
0.3084437795...Zygmund's constant, from Young-Fejér-Jackson
constants
0.309150708...(8/3)*(-ln(2)); one of the geometric probability
constants
0.3123633245...Discussed with Klarner's lattice animal constant
0.315718452...-C1, one of the Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin
constants
0.3166841737...Atkinson-Negro-Santoro constant; with Erdös'
sum-distinct set constant
0.32...tau; discussed with percolation cluster density constants
0.3230659472...ln(beta); with Kneser-Mahler polynomial constants
0.3271293669... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.3349813253...Non-alternating series of reciprocal primes; with
Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin constants
0.3405373296...One of Pólya's random walk constants
0.3472963553...2*sin(/18); discussed with percolation cluster
density constants
0.3532363719...Hafner-Sarnak-McCurley constant
0.3605924719...Im(i^i^i^...); with iterated exponential constants
0.3611030805...r(12) conjectured value; with circular coverage
constants
0.362536424...Identity trees enumeration; with iterated exponential
constants
0.367879441...1/e; with natural logarithmic base, Golomb-Dickman,
iterated exponentials
0.3728971438...One of the extreme value constants
0.3733646177... One of the binary search tree constants
0.3739558136...Artin's constant
0.380006...r(11) conjectured value; with circular coverage constants
0.3949308436...r(10)=1/(1+2*cos(2/9)) conjectured; with circular
coverage constants
0.4105489982... - 1/6 ;one of the quadtree constants
0.412048...Mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
0.4124540336...Thue-Morse constant; with infinite product constants
0.414213562...r(9)=sqrt(2)-1; mentioned with circular coverage and
Lenz-Ising constants
0.4159271090...One of the extreme value constants
0.4203723394...Bower's constant; with continued fraction constants
0.4207263771...Conjectured value of Integer Chebyshev constant
0.4212795439...Schlüter's ten disc constant s(10); with circular
coverage constants
0.4213829566...Lévy's constant (6*ln(2))/^2; discussed with Porter's
constant
0.4282495056...Carefree constant; discussed with
Hafner-Sarnak-McCurley constant
0.4302966531...From Young-Fejér-Jackson constants
0.432332358...(1-exp(-2))/2; one of Rényi's parking constants
0.434...Mentioned with Hardy-Littlewood constants
0.4382829367...Re(i^i^i^...); with iterated exponential constants
0.4399240125...One of Otter's tree enumeration constants
0.4406867935...ln(sqrt(2)+1)/2; mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
0.4450418679...r(8)=1/(1+2*cos(2/7)); with circular coverage
constants
0.4466...Estimated value of three dimensional dimer constant
0.4472135955...1/sqrt(5); Hurwitz's value of first Diophantine
approximation constant
0.4522474200...One of the Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin constants
0.461543...-sum(1/rho(n)^2, n=1..inf), rho(n)=nth zeta zero;
Stieltjes constants
0.4645922709... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.4702505696...2*(Conway-Guy constant); with Erdös' sum-distinct set
constant
0.4718617...Conjectured value of Bloch's constant
0.474949379...Weierstrass constant, with Gauss' lemniscate constant
0.4756260767...Mentioned with Plouffe's constant
0.4784176044...4^2 - 39; one of the quadtree constants
0.4865198884... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.48762...Gaussian twin prime constant, with Hardy-Littlewood
constants
0.4906940504... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.4945668...Shapiro's cyclic sum constant
0.521405433...One of the geometric probability constants
0.53133995...One of the Pythagorean triple constants
0.5341...Mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
jum...@my-deja.com
0.5349496061...One of Otter's tree enumeration constants
0.5351070126...Mentioned with Artin's constant
0.5432588...Conjectured value of Landau's constant
0.553051293...Kuijlaars-Saff constant; with Tammes' constants
0.5559052114...Bezdek's six disc constant r(6); with circular
coverage constants
0.5598656169...prd((1-p)^(1/p)), prime p=2..inf); one of the
infinite product constants
0.561459483...exp(-); Euler's constant, totient function and
Golomb-Dickman constant
0.5671432904...W(1); solution of x*exp(x)=1; with iterated
exponential constants
0.56850...One of the quadtree constants
0.5697515829...Weakly carefree constant; discussed with
Hafner-Sarnak-McCurley constant
0.57339...One of the Pell-Stevenhagen constants
0.5759599688...Stephens' constant, with Artin's constant
0.5761487691...Discussed with Klarner's lattice animal constant
0.5772156649...Euler-Mascheroni constant, ; also Stieltjes constants
0.5773502692...1/sqrt(3), curiously clumped between and /(2*e)
0.5778636749...The ratio /(2*e), discussed with the Masser-Gramain
constant
0.5784167628...(8/7)*cos(2/7)*cos(/7)^2; with Diophantine
approximation constants
0.5805775582...Pell constant, with Pell-Stevenhagen constants
0.581948659... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.583121808...2*G/; ln(dimer constant); with Catalan's constant and
Kneser-Mahler constants
0.5926327182...Lehmer's constant
0.5927460...p_c; discussed with percolation cluster density
constants
0.5963473623...One of the continued fraction constants
0.5990701173...M/2, with Gauss' lemniscate constant
0.6079271019...6/^2, with Hafner-Sarnak-McCurley constant and
Archimedes' constant
0.609382864...Neville's five disc constant r(5); with circular
coverage constants
0.6134752692...Strongly triple-free set constant
0.6180339887...-1, mentioned with the Golden Mean
0.6243299885...Golomb-Dickman constant
0.6278342677... Discussed with conjectured value of the John
constant
0.6294650204...Davison-Shallit constant; with Cahen's constant (k=2)
0.63168...One of the quadtree constants
0.6333683473...2*(Atkinson-Negro-Santoro constant); with Erdös'
sum-distinct set constant
0.6351663546...C_3; one of the Hardy-Littlewood constants
0.6419448385...Non-alternating series of reciprocal primes; with
Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin constants
0.6434105462...Cahen's constant (k=1)
0.6462454398...The constant c discussed with the Masser-Gramain
constant
0.6539007091...Mentioned with Cahen's constant (k=3)
0.6556795424...One of the continued fraction constants
0.6569990137...-delta0; Hall-Montgomery constant
0.6600049346...Mentioned with Cahen's constant (k=4)
0.6601618158...The twin prime constant, discussed with
Hardy-Littlewood constants
0.661707182...One of the geometric probability constants
0.6627434193...Laplace limit constant
0.6632657345...Mentioned with Cahen's constant (k=5)
0.6675276...Lower bound on one of the magic geometric constants
0.66974...Shanks' constant, with Hardy-Littlewood constants
0.67...Erdös-Lebensold constant
0.6749814429...Graham's hexagon constant
0.67906...One of the quadtree constants
0.6829826991... Mentioned with regard to Calabi's triangle constant
0.68640673...One of the Hardy-Littlewood constants
0.6922006276...(1/e)^(1/e); one of the iterated exponential
constants
0.6931471805...ln(2); with natural logarithmic base
0.6975013584...Rank 2 Artin constant, with Artin's constant
0.697774658...I1(2)/I0(2); one of the continued fraction constants
0.69953887...One of Otter's tree enumeration constants
0.70258...Embree and Trefethen's constant; with the Golden mean
0.704479881...1 - 35/(12*^2), discussed with the rectilinear
crossing constant
0.7047534517...Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.7098034428...Rabbit constant; with continued fraction constants
0.7124...Estimated value of one of the traveling salesman constants
0.71478270079...Conjectured value of one of the traveling salesman
constants
0.71615...One of the quadtree constants
0.7182336...Upper bound on one of the magic geometric constants
0.7236067977...(1/2)*(1+1/sqrt(5)); with Diophantine approximation
constants
0.725206483...97/150+/40; one of the geometric probability constants
0.7266432468... Mentioned with regard to the van der Corput's
constant
0.7326498193... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.737338303...Grossman's constant
0.7377507574...Conjectured value of Whittaker-Goncarov constant
0.7404804897.../sqrt(18), densest spatial packing of spheres; with
Hermite's constants
0.7424537454...Mentioned with Catalan's constant
0.7439711933...Sarnak's constant, with Artin's constant
0.7475979203...One of Rényi's parking constants
0.7493060013...Discussed with Kneser-Mahler polynomial constants
0.752...One of the abelian group enumeration constants
0.764223653...Landau-Ramanujan constant
0.76519769...J0(1); mentioned with continued fraction constants
0.7735162909...Discussed with infinite product constants
0.7759021363...Bender's constant; discussed with Lengyel's constant
0.7834305107...sum((-1)^(n+1)/n^n, n=1..inf), one of the iterated
exponential constants
0.7841903733...3D Steiner ratio, in Steiner tree constants
0.7853805572...An integral appearing in infinite product constants
0.7853981634.../4; mentioned in infinite product constants
0.7885305659...Lüroth analog of Khintchine's constant
0.7916031835...One of Otter's tree enumeration constants
0.79220...Lal's constant; mentioned with Hardy-Littlewood constants
0.8008134543...Bender's constant; discussed with Lengyel's constant
0.8093940205...Alladi-Grinstead constant
0.812556...Stolarsky-Harborth constant
0.8128252421...From Young-Fejér-Jackson constants
0.81318...c0; one of the Odlyzko-Rains constants
0.8254994054...prd(1-32/n^5, n=1..inf); one of the infinite product
constants
0.8269933431...3*sqrt(3)/(2*) asymptotic efficiency; with circular
coverage constants
0.8324290656...Rosser's constant, with Hardy-Littlewood constants
0.83462684...1/M, with Gauss' lemniscate constant
0.835107636...Mentioned with Hall-Montgomery constant
0.8371132123...B3', discussed with Brun's constant
0.8427659133...Lévy's constant 12*ln(2)/^2; discussed with Porter's
constant
0.8472130848...Ubiquitous constant M/sqrt(2), with Gauss' lemniscate
constant
0.8561089817... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.8621470373...Flajolet-Vallée constant, squared; discussed with
Khintchine's constant
0.8657725922...Conjectured value of Integer Chebyshev constant
0.8660254037...sqrt(3)/2, 2D Steiner ratio, in Steiner tree
constants
0.8689277682... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.8705883799...B4, discussed with Brun's constant
0.8740191848...L/3; with Gauss' lemniscate constant and
Landau-Ramanujan constant
0.8815138397...Average class number constant, with Artin's constant
0.8856031944...Minimum of Gamma, with Euler gamma function constants
0.890536209...exp()/2; with Hardy-Littlewood constants
0.8928945714...Reciprocal sum of integer powers; with Niven's
constant
0.90177...sqrt(c0); one of the Odlyzko-Rains constants
0.9068996821.../sqrt(12), densest planar packing of circles; with
Hermite's constants
0.9089085575...Mentioned with the "one-ninth" constant
0.915965594...Catalan's constant, G
0.9285187329...Flajolet-Vallée constant; discussed with Khintchine's
constant
0.9296953983...ln(2)/2+2*G/; mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
0.9375482543...Negative of zeta'(2), discussed with Porter's
constant
0.9468064072... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.9625817322...c_0; mentioned with Lenz-Ising constants
0.9730371351...One of the quadtree constants
0.9730397768... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.978012...Elbert's constant, discussed with Shapiro's cyclic sum
constant
0.97955746...One of Bendersky's constants, mentioned with
Glaisher-Kinkelin constant
0.985247581... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
0.98943127...An asymptotic constant related to the Lebesgue
constants
0.9920479...One of Bendersky's constants, mentioned with
Glaisher-Kinkelin constant
1One
1.0074347569...DeVicci's tesseract constant
1.0149416064...*ln(beta); Gieseking's constant; with Kneser-Mahler
polynomial constants
1.0306408341...Lévy's constant ^2/(6*ln(2)*ln(10)); discussed with
Khintchine's constant
1.03091675...One of Bendersky's constants, mentioned with
Glaisher-Kinkelin constant
1.0346538819...One of the Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin constants
1.0478314475...One of the quadratic recurrence constants
1.0544399448... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
1.087378025...One of Feller's coin tossing constants
1.0892214740...Mentioned with Vallée's constant
1.0894898722...1/2+(Wilbraham-Gibbs constant)/
1.0978510391...B3, discussed with Brun's constant
1.0986419643...Paris' constant, discussed with the Golden mean
1.0986858055...Lengyel's constant
1.1064957714...One of the Copson-de Bruijn constants
1.1128357889...(4*L)/(3*); with Landau-Ramanujan constant
1.117864...Goh-Schmutz constant; with Golomb-Dickman constant
1.12127...Discussed with infinite product constants
1.13198824...Viswanath's random Fibonacci constant; with the Golden
mean
1.1373387363... One of the digital search tree constants
1.1481508398...A Porter-like constant, mentioned with Porter's
constant
1.1530805616... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
1.158728473...Grazing goat; with circular coverage constants
1.1762808182...Salem constant; smallest Salem number
1.178979744...(2/)*(Wilbraham-Gibbs constant)
1.1865691104...Lévy's constant ^2/(12*ln(2)); discussed with
Khintchine's constant
1.1970816793...One of the quadtree constants
1.1981402347...M, with Gauss' lemniscate constant
1.1996786402...Mentioned with Laplace limit constant
1.2013035599...Reciprocal of Rosser's constant, with
Hardy-Littlewood constants
1.202056903...Apéry's constant, ; see also Nielsen-Ramanujan
constants
1.2087177033...Baxter's constant; with Lieb's square ice constant
1.236839845...One of Feller's coin tossing constants
1.25775...Discussed with Alladi-Grinstead constant
1.2599210498...Cube root of 2; discussed with Pythagoras' constant
1.2640847353...One of the quadratic recurrence constants
1.2672063606...One of the extreme value constants
1.28242713...Glaisher-Kinkelin constant
1.2910603681...Mentioned with Vallée's constant
1.2912859971...sum(1/n^n, n=1..inf), one of the iterated exponential
constants
1.2923041571... Mentioned with regard to the Landau-Ramanujan
constant
1.2985395575...Bateman's A constant, with Hardy-Littlewood constants
1.302...Square-free word constant, one of the pattern-free word
constants
1.3035772690...Conway's constant
1.30568...Apollonian packing constant
1.3063778838...Mills' constant
1.3070624971...One of the quadtree constants
1.3110287771...Quarter-lemniscate arclength L/2, with Gauss'
constant
1.3135070786...K(-3); discussed with Khintchine's constant
1.3203236316...Twice the twin prime constant; with Hardy-Littlewood
constants
1.3247179572...With Perrin's sequence and the Golden mean; also
smallest P-V number
1.3325822757...One of the Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin constants
1.338515152...Associated with two dimensional monomer-dimer constant
1.346885252...Mentioned with Catalan's constant
1.3505061...One of the quadratic recurrence constants
1.3511315744...Discussed with Vallée's constant
1.3679335007...One of the quadtree constants
1.3694514039...Shallit's constant, discussed with Shapiro's cyclic
sum constant
1.37281346...Twice 0.68640673...; one of the Hardy-Littlewood
constants
1.3751...One of the Hadamard-de la Vallée Poussin constants
1.3813564445...beta; with Kneser-Mahler polynomial constants
1.3905439387...Bateman's B constant, with Hardy-Littlewood constants
1.395485972...Hard hexagon constant; associated with hard square
entropy constant
1.4045759346...Conjectured value of complex Grothendieck constant
1.414213562...Pythagoras' constant, sqrt(2)
1.4236003060...One of the extreme value constants
1.435991124...... 1/3+2*sqrt(3)/, one of the Lebesgue constants
1.4446678610...e^(1/e); one of the iterated exponential constants
1.4503403284...K(-2); discussed with Khintchine's constant
1.4513692349...Ramanujan-Soldner constant
1.4560749...Backhouse's constant
1.457...Cube-free word constant, one of the pattern-free word
constants
1.4616321449...x minimizing Gamma, with Euler gamma function
constants
1.4655712318...Moore's constant; with the Golden mean
1.4670780794...Porter's constant
1.4681911223...prd((1+p)^(1/p)), prime p=2..inf); one of the
infinite product constants
1.4879506635...-zeta(2/3)/zeta(2); with Niven's constant
1.498155...One of the quadratic recurrence constants
1.502836801...One of the quadratic recurrence constants
1.503048082...Hard square entropy constant
1.50685...Nagel's constant; with Lieb's square ice constant
1.5078747554...Greenfield-Nussbaum constant, with quadratic
recurrence constants
1.5163860592...One of Pólya's random walk constants
1.5396007178...(4/3)^(3/2); Lieb's square ice constant
1.542219722...Madelung constant for planar hexagonal lattice
1.5513875245... Calabi's triangle constant
1.5849625007...ln(3)/ln(2); discussed with the Stolarsky-Harborth
constant
1.6066951524... One of the digital search tree constants
1.6155426267...Negative of 2D NaCl Madelung constant
1.6180339887...The Golden mean,
1.6222705028...Odlyzko-Wilf constant, mentioned with Mills' constant
1.6281601297...Flajolet-Martin constant, discussed with infinite
product constants
1.6366163233...sum(1/(p*ln(p)) over primes p; with Erdös-Lebensold
constant
1.6616879496...One of the quadratic recurrence constants
1.6824415102...Krätzel-Shiu cube-full constant c3, with Niven's
constant
1.6910302067...Mentioned with Cahen's constant
1.7052111401...Niven's constant
1.7356628245...Discussed with Klarner's lattice animal constant
1.7454056624...K(-1); discussed with Khintchine's constant
1.7475645946...Negative of 3D NaCl Madelung constant
1.7579327566...Infinite nested radical; with the Golden mean
1.77108...-c1; one of the Odlyzko-Rains constants
1.7724538509...sqrt(), with Euler gamma function constants,
Carlson-Levin constants
1.781072418...exp(); with Euler's constant and Erdös-Lebensold
constant
1.7818046151...Conjectured value of power series constant, with
Whittaker-Goncarov constant
1.7822139781...Conjectured value of real Grothendieck constant
1.787231650...Komornik-Loreti constant
1.7916228120...exp(2*G/); dimer constant; with Catalan's constant
and Kneser-Mahler constants
1.82...Conjectured value of Masser-Gramain; generalizes Euler's
constant
1.8392867552...Associated with the Tribonacci sequence and the
Golden mean
1.839399084...Negative of 4D NaCl Madelung constant
1.8442049806...sqrt(3)/(2*sqrt(2)-1))^(1/3), one of the
Landau-Kolmogorov constants
1.847759065... sqrt(2+sqrt(2)); conjectured value of a
self-avoiding-walk constant
1.851937052...Wilbraham-Gibbs constant
1.8540746773...L/sqrt(2), with Gauss' lemniscate constant
1.8602...Average degree of root in identity trees; with iterated
exponential constants
1.9021605824... Brun's constant
1.9081456268...beta squared; with Kneser-Mahler polynomial constants
1.9276909638...One of the Feigenbaum constants
1.940215351...Two dimensional monomer-dimer constant
1.9435964368...One of the Euler totient function asymptotic
constants
1.9484547890...c4; with Kneser-Mahler polynomial constants
1.9655570390...Negative of 6D NaCl Madelung constant
1.9670449011...c5; with Kneser-Mahler polynomial constants
1.9771268308...c6; with Kneser-Mahler polynomial constants
1.9954559575...Discussed with the Fransén-Robinson constant
2Two; conjectured value of Linnik's constant and fast matrix
multiplication constants
2.006...sum(1/(q*ln(q)) over prime powers q; with Erdös-Lebensold
constant
2.05003...One of the Whitney-Mikhlin extension constants
2.0524668272...Negative of 8D NaCl Madelung constant
2.0531987328... Conjectured value of semi-meander critical exponent;
with self-avoiding-walk constants
2.0649...Lower bound on one of Erdös' reciprocal sum constants
2.0742250447...prd(1+1/n^5, n=1..inf); one of the infinite product
constants
2.1102339661...Brown-Wang constant, from Young-Fejér-Jackson
constants
2.1732543125...zeta(3/2)/zeta(3); with Niven's constant
2.1760161352...Discussed with Kneser-Mahler polynomial constants
2.2001610580...Lüroth analog of Khintchine's constant
2.2038565964...One of the Euler totient function asymptotic
constants
2.21953...Moving sofa constant
2.2247514809...Robinson's C constant, derived from Khintchine's
constant
2.2665345077...Discussed with the Fransén-Robinson constant
2.294856591...Abelian group enumeration constants; Stieltjes
constants
2.3038421962...Robinson's A constant, derived from Khintchine's
constant
2.3136987039...3D lattice sum analog of Euler's constant; with
Madelung's constant
2.3731382208...Lévy's constant ^2/(6*ln(2)); discussed with
Khintchine's constant
2.3768417063...Conjectured value of Integer Chebyshev constant
2.404825558...First zero of J0(x), with Wirtinger-Sobolev
isoperimetric constants
2.428189792...prd(1+1/n^3, n=1..inf); one of the infinite product
constants
2.4832535361...One of Otter's tree enumeration constants
2.49961...One of the abelian group enumeration constants
2.5029078750...One of the Feigenbaum constants
2.517540355...Identity trees enumeration; with iterated exponential
constants
2.5193561521...Mentioned with Madelung's constant
2.5849817596...Sierpinski's constant
2.5980762114...sqrt(27/4); with Lieb's square ice constant
2.6180339887...Golden root +1, one of the Tutte-Beraha constants
2.622057554...Half-lemniscate arclength L, with Gauss' constant
2.6381585... Estimate of one of the self-avoiding-walk connective
constants
2.6789385347...Gamma(1/3), with Euler gamma function constants
2.67896...4*(Shanks' constant), with Hardy-Littlewood constants
2.685452001...Khintchine's constant
2.7182818285...Natural logarithmic base, e; also Whitney-Mikhlin and
iterated exponentials
2.723...Ellison-Mendès-France constant; with Euler-Mascheroni
constant
2.8077702420...Fransén-Robinson constant
2.826419997...Murata's constant, with Artin's constant
2.8372974795...Mentioned with Madelung's constant
2.858248596...One of the Hardy-Littlewood constants
2.9557652856...One of Otter's tree enumeration constants
2.9904703...Goh-Schmutz constant; with Golomb-Dickman constant
3Three; Tutte-Beraha constants (three color theorem)
3.1415926535...Archimedes' constant, ; see also the Favard constants
3.196220617..."Plate" constant, discussed with Wirtinger-Sobolev
isoperimetric constants
3.2099123007...exp(4*G/); dimer constant squared; with Kneser-Mahler
constants
3.2469796037...Silver root, one of the Tutte-Beraha constants
3.2758229187...Lévy's constant exp(^2/(12*ln(2))); discussed with
Khintchine's constant
3.3038421963...Robinson's B constant, derived from Khintchine's
constant
3.33437...Bumby's constant; mentioned with Freiman's constant
3.3643175781... Van der Corput's constant
3.4070691656...Magata's constant; with Backhouse's constant
3.4201328816... Conjectured value of meander critical exponent; with
self-avoiding-walk constants
3.4493588902...Robinson's D constant, derived from Khintchine's
constant
3.501838... Conjectured value R of meander connective constant; with
self-avoiding-walk constants
3.6180339887...+2, one of the Tutte-Beraha constants
3.6256099082...Gamma(1/4), with Euler gamma function constants
3.627598728...2*/sqrt(3), discussed with Hilbert's constants (p=3,
q=3/2)
3.703874104...2*(Wilbraham-Gibbs constant)
3.764435608...Associated with Catalan's constant
3.796...Critical activity; associated with hard square entropy
constant
3.9002649200...2D lattice sum analog of Euler's constant; with
Madelung's constant
3.9998...Upper bound on one of Erdös' reciprocal sum constants
4Four; Tutte-Beraha constants (four color theorem); 2D Grötzsch ring
constant
4.01808...One of the Feigenbaum constants
4.0626...Klarner's lattice animal constant
4.151180864...One of the Hardy-Littlewood constants
4.2472965...One of the geometric probability constants
4.3076923076...56/13; Korn constant for 3D ball
4.3110704070... One of the binary search tree and quadtree constants
4.527829566...Freiman's constant
4.5678018826...Gasper's constant, from Young-Fejér-Jackson constants
4.590843712...Gamma(1/5), with Euler gamma function constants
4.6592661225...Krätzel-Shiu cube-full constant c1, with Niven's
constant
4.6692016091...One of the Feigenbaum constants
4.683907... Estimate of one of the self-avoiding-walk connective
constants
4.730040745..."Rod" constant, discussed with Wirtinger-Sobolev
isoperimetric constants
4.799891547... Three-arc approximation of beam detection constant
4.8189264563... Two-arc approximation of beam detection constant
5.2441151086...Lemniscate arclength 2*L, with Gauss' constant
5.2569464048...d maximizing spherical volume, with Euler gamma
function constants
5.5663160018...Gamma(1/6), with Euler gamma function constants
5.6493764966...Conjectured value of Integer Chebyshev constant
5.8726188208...Krätzel-Shiu cube-full constant -c2, with Niven's
constant
5.9679687038...One of the Feigenbaum constants
6.7720... Estimate of one of the self-avoiding-walk connective
constants
7.1879033516... Conjectured value of the John constant
7.2569464048...d maximizing spherical surface area, with Euler gamma
function constants
7.3719494907... One of the digital search tree constants
7.3719688014... One of the digital search tree constants
7.7431319855... One of the digital search tree constants
8.7000366252...prd(sec(/n), n=3..inf); one of the infinite product
constants
8.72109...One of the Feigenbaum constants
8.8386... Estimate of one of the self-avoiding-walk connective
constants
9.0803731646...Hensley's constant, discussed with Porter's constant
9.27738...One of the Feigenbaum constants
9.2890254919...Reciprocal of the "one-ninth" constant
9.37...3D Grötzsch ring constant
10.5101504239...Zagier's constant; mentioned with Freiman's constant
10.8788... Estimate of one of the self-avoiding-walk connective
constants
11.09016994...(11+5*sqrt(5))/2; associated with hard square entropy
constant
12.262874... Conjectured value R^2 of meander connective constant;
with self-avoiding-walk constants
14.6475663...One of the abelian group enumeration constants
15.1542622415...e^e; one of the iterated exponential constants
22.6...4D Grötzsch ring constant
29.576303...One of the Feigenbaum constants
39.1320261423...Mentioned with regard to Calabi's triangle constant
55.247...One of the Feigenbaum constants
118.6924619...One of the abelian group enumeration constants
S. Finch
Copyright (c) 1999 MathSoft Inc.
All rights reserved.
============================================================
http://www.mathpuzzle.com/books.htm
-----------------------------------
books
Books available in association with
There are many good books available for mathematics. One key book in
my life was my father's copy of Plane Geometry. I remember, at a
young age, looking at the diagrams in this book. They made some
claim, and I thought "that can't be true." But it was. A bit later, I
got hooked on Martin Gardner. Am I missing something? Write me with a
recommendation. Back to www.mathpuzzle.com.
My favorites
These books are approachable by anyone. Young adults will be
interested in the diagrams. These provide an incentive to learn more
-- something to look forward to in the future. A few word-based books
are here, too.
First, the entire Mathematical Games collection by Martin Gardner [
Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions ($11), Second
Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions ($12),
The Unexpected Hanging : And Other Mathematical Diversions ($13),
Magic Numbers of Dr Matrix ($17), Knotted Doughnuts and Other
Mathematical Entertainments ($12), Wheels, Life, and Other
Mathematical Amusements ($12), Time Travel and Other Mathematical
Bewilderments ($12), Fractal Music, Hypercards and More ($12), Penrose
Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers ($28), and The Last Recreations ($18). Two
more are available only at the MAA site ]
The CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics by Eric W. Weisstein
($100) (online version)
Amusements in Mathematics by Dudeney ($8)
The Book of Numbers by John Horton Conway, Richard K. Guy ($29)
How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff ($7)
New Rules for Classic Games by Wayne Schmittberger ($8)
The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry by David
Wells ($18)
Recreations in the Theory of Numbers by Albert Beiler ($10)
Making the Alphabet Dance by Ross Eckler ($12)
The Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary ($18) (online version)
Cambridge International Dictionary of English ($27) (online version)
Sound and Sense by Perrine and Arp (my favorite book of poetry) ($36)
The Harry Potter Series: Sorcerer's Stone, Chamber of Secrets,
Prisoner of
Azkaban by J K Rowling ($9, $9, and $10)
For Younger People
Adventures of Penrose - The Mathematical Cat by Theoni Pappas ($9)
Secrets of the Maze by Adrian Fisher ($18) (his website)
For High School Students
Along with any of the books above, the following books should be
enjoyable for bright high school students.
Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Thompson and Martin Gardner ($16)
Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Raymond Smullyan ($10)
Codes, Puzzles, and Conspiracy by Dennis Shasha ($11)
Concepts of Modern Mathematics by Ian Stewart ($8)
Dissections: Plane & Fancy by Greg Frederickson ($35) (his website)
Elementary Theory of Numbers by William Leveque ($7)
From Erdos to Kiev by Ross Honsberger ($34)
A Gamut of Games by Sid Sackson ($6)
Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension by Rudolf V B Rucker
($6)
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter ($16)
An Imaginary Tale by Paul Nahin ($18)
Ingenuity in Mathematics by Ross Honsberger ($20)
Introductory Graph Theory by Gary Chartrand ($9)
Introduction to Graph Theory by Richard J. Trudeau ($8)
Journey Through Genius : The Great Theorems of Mathematics by William
Dunham ($12)
Mathematics as Problem Solving by Alexander Soifer ($19) (his website)
Mathematical Gems II by Ross Honsberger ($12)
Mathematical Gems III by Ross Honsberger ($12)
Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Lloyd by Martin Gardner ($5)
Mathematical Recreations : A Collection in Honor of Martin Gardner by
David Klarner ($15)
Mathematical Tourist by Ivars Peterson ($12) (his MAA Column)
The Mathematical Universe by William W. Dunham ($16)
More Mathematical Morsels by Ross Honsberger ($20)
New Ambidextrous Universe by Martin Gardner ($12)
The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers by David
Wells ($12)
The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco by Dennis Shasha ($7)
The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections by Rausch and Coffin
($25) (online version)
Supermazes by Robert Abbott ($14) (his website)
What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences by Barry Cipra ($14)
Winning Ways by Conway, Berlekamp, and Guy ($69)
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by David Crystal
($24)
For College Students
Ah, college. Who can forget their first $100 book? In addition to the
above, the following books are recommended.
Analysis of Numerical Methods by Eugene Isaacson ($12)
Applied Analysis by Cornellius Lanczos ($14)
Art of Computer Programming Vol 1 by Knuth ($50) (his website)
Art of Computer Programming Vol 2 by Knuth ($50)
Art of Computer Programming Vol 3 by Knuth ($50)
Basic Complex Analysis by Marsden and Hoffman ($112)
Calculus and Analytic Geometry by Thomas and Finney ($107.40)
A Combinatorial Introduction to Topology by Michael Henle ($8)
The Four Color Problem by Saaty and Kainen ($7)
Games of No Chance by Nowakowski ($30) (online version)
generatingfunctionology by Herbert Wilf ($50) (online version)
Geometry and Symmetry by Paul Yale ($10)
Group Theory by W R Scott ($12)
An Introduction to Knot Theory by W B Raymond Lickorish ($50)
Linear Differential Operators by Cornelius Lanczos ($12)
The Mathemagician and the Pied Puzzler by Berlekamp and Rodgers ($34)
Matrices and Linear Transforms by Charles Cullen ($11)
The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics by Edna Kramer ($32)
Number Theory and its History by Oystein Ore ($9)
Numerical Recipes in C by Press, Teukolsky, Vetterling, and Flannery
($58) (online version)
Proofs from the Book by Martin Aigner ($30)
Principles of Mathematical Analysis by Walter Rudin ($102)
Regular Polytopes by H S M Coxeter ($8)
Theory of Functions by Konrad Knopp ($8)
Three-Dimensional Geometry and Topology by William Thurston ($45)
Tracking the Automatic Ant by David Gale ($21)
Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham ($45) (his website)
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons ($16)
What is Mathematics? by Richard Courant, Herbert Robbins, and Ian
Stewart ($16)
For Hardcore Mathematicians
At this level, you usually need to appeal to the mathematician's
specialty. Do not dream of giving a book on partial boundary value
problems to an algebraist, for example. Here are a few of the high
level books I like.
Algebraic Topology by C R F Maunder ($10)
Counterexamples in Topology by Steen and Seebach ($8)
Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry by Goodman and
O'Rourke ($110)
Real and Complex Analysis by Walter Rudin ($82)
Set Theory by Thomas Jech ($117) Note: The 2nd edition is identical to
the first edition, save for a few pages of errata that has been added
at the back of the book.
Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups by John Horton Conway and N J A
Sloane ($70)
Topology by John G. Hocking ($10)
For Reference Nuts
Some books are purely designed as reference material. There is
nothing really readable in any of the following books. All of them
are packed with facts, though.
The CRC Handbook of Combinatorial Designs by Colbourn and Dinitz
($100) (online version)
The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences by Sloane and Plouffe ($57)
(online version)
The Mathematica Book by Stephan Wolfram ($35) (online version)
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics 80th edition ($91)
Standard Mathematical Tables and Formula by Zwillinger ($50)
Out of Print books
Tilings and Patterns by Grunbaum and Shephard
The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics
The Master Crossword Puzzle Dictionary by Hebert Baus
On Numbers and Games by John H Conway
A Budget of Trisections by Underwood Dudley
Encyclopedia of Chess Variants by D B Pritchard
Patterns in Nature by Peter S. Stevens
Mad Mazes by Robert Abbott (available from the author at his site)
From Polychords to Polya by Mike Kieth (available from the author at
his site)
The Ins & Outs of Peg Solitaire by John Beasley
Satan, Cantor and Infinity by Raymond Smullyan
The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Puzzles by David Wells
Books I plan to buy and evaluate
Another Fine Math by Ian Stewart ($12)
Applied Combinatorics by Alan Tucker ($90)
Beta Mathematics Handbook by Lennart Rade ($60)
Combinatorial Theory by Martin Aigner ($35)
Computability and Logic by George Boolos and Richard Jeffrey ($27)
A Course in Combinatorics by J H Van Lint, R M Wilson ($40)
Elementary Number Theory by Landau ($20)
Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics by Mathematical Society of
Japan ($80)
Fractals Geometry of Nature by Benoit Mandelbrot ($28)
Geometry and Trigonometry for Calculus by Peter H. Selby ($16)
Geometric Patterns from Islamic Art and Architecture by Robert Field
($7)
Geometric Patterns from Churches and Cathedrals by Robert Field ($8)
Geometry by Harold Jacobs ($49)
Graphs and Digraphs by Chartrand and Lesniak ($80)
Handbook of Combinatorics by R L Graham ($185)
History of the Theory of Numbers vols. I, II, III by L. E. Dickson
An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers by Hardy and Wright ($55)
Introductory Quantum Mechanics by Richard Liboff ($91)
The Knot Book by Colin Adams ($23)
Knot Theory by Charles Livingston ($42)
The Lighter Side of Mathematics by Richard K. Guy ($20)
Mathematical Discovery by George Polya ($90)
Measure Topology and Fractal Geometry by Gerald Edgar ($33)
The Nature of Mathematical Modeling by Neil A. Gershenfeld
The Planiverse by A K Dewdney ($20)
Polyominoes by George E. Martin ($15)
p-Adic Numbers by Fernando Q. Gouvea ($44)
Problems For Mathematicians Young and Old by Paul Halmos ($36)
Problem Solving Through Problems by Loren Larson ($45)
Theory and Application of Infinite Series by Knopp ($12)
Turtle Geometry by Abelson and diSessa ($26)
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte
($28)
The Pleasures of Counting by T W Korner ($36)
My Favorite Amazon Reviews
From William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition Problems and
Solutions : 1938-1964 (out of print)
"However, I found the characters somewhat flat. Why, for example, does
the set N choose to define himself in such narrow terms? Has he no
dreams, no fantasies, no weaknesses, nothing but a recursive
definition? Many of the characters had similar problems; I had
difficulty relating to the motives behind some of their
self-simplifying actions."
From What is Mathematics?
Albert Einstein -- A lucid representation of the fundamental concepts
and methods of the whole field of mathematics...Easily understandable.
(Editor's note: "hmmm...")
jum...@my-deja.com
( previous attempt was snipped at bottom, so here is repost ):
>>> jum...@my-deja.com wrote:
>>>> I don't recall disputing the fact of Jewish slave-traders,
>>>> however you've been conflating slave-trading with the
>>>> institution of slavery.
>
"For centuries, the Jewish community in Spain had fourished
and grown in numbers and influence, though anti-Semitism had
from time to time made itself felt and pressure to convert was
brought to bear on the Jews. Nominal converts from Judaism
were called Marranos. After Aragon and Castile were united
by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella (1469), the Marranos
were denounced as a danger to the existence of Christian Spain,
and a bull of Sixtus IV in 1478 authorized the Catholic kings
to name inquisitors.
"The first Spanish inquisitors, operating in Seville, proved
Read this definition above.
return to TK's observations about whether industrial civilization
should be preserved, or thrown-out onto the dustbin of history.
Seems that TK should regard "economic activity" in a category
similar to "road construction" which, by allowing "people to
travel much faster" means they might need to invest in the high
pollution vehicles contributory to high carbon-dioxide emission,
the greenhouse effect, consumption of non-renewable resources,
noise and traffic jams, automobile accidents, urban sprawl, and
a general fouling of the nest and destruction of that ground
upon which we stand, by means of rape upon nature. You might
disagree with TK's position, yet TK's literal intentions seem
quite clear. Rome was a polluter as well? Seems to be another
general pattern emerging there, concerning human stupidity.
Ralph Austen's concluding paragraph:
"We Jews, however, even liberal ones, who
justifiably insist that the history of the Nazi
Holocaust not be denied, can hardly urge African
Americans to suppress the record of the slave
trade and the involvement of our own ancestors in
it. It also does not help to accompany all
discussions of Jewish slave trading with
indictments of Christians and Arab Muslims as the
true villains of the African slave trade.
(Brackman, for example, provides a somewhat lurid
catalogue of "Arab slave raids" using, among other
sources, my own research. In fact, the Muslim or
Oriental slave trade out of Africa involved mainly
Berber, Swahili, and other Black African raiders
and merchants rather than Arabs.) Thus while we
should not ignore the anti-Semitism of The Secret
Relationship (limited at least to accusations of
avarice rather than blood libels or plots to rule
the world), we must recognize the legitimacy of
the stated aim of examining fully and directly
even the most uncomfortable elements in our common
past. There are certainly better ways than those
of this book, from both a scholarly and moral
perspective, to carry out such an examination. But
carried out it must be, not to apportion or remove
guilt but rather to learn who we are through what
we were and to incorporate this knowledge into the
struggle to become something better."
( Ralph A. Austen "The Uncomfortable Relationship"
_Tikkun_, March-April 1994, v.9,n.2, p 65(5) ).
- regards
- jb
.
==============================================================
http://www.seattletimes.com/news/nation-
world/html98/math26_20000326.html
Sunday, March 26, 2000, 03:53 p.m. Pacific
Prime numbers at root of challenge
by The Associated Press
LONDON - Two publishers are offering a million dollars to anyone who
can prove that all even numbers are the sum of two prime numbers. No
one has cracked the problem in the more than 250 years since it was
first posed, and this month's announcement indicated the publishers
aren't too worried about having to pay up.
The theory, known as Goldbach's Conjecture, was suggested by the
Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach in 1742.
It's easy enough to think of an even number that is the sum of two
prime numbers - those which cannot be divided evenly by any number
except themselves. For instance, 5 plus 7 equals 12, or 67 plus 3
equals 70. But so far it has been impossible to prove that it works
for every imaginable even number.
Faber and Faber, in conjunction with Bloomsbury Publishing in the
United States, announced the challenge to promote the upcoming release
of "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture," by Apostolos Doxiadis.
"Proving it may well be impossible," the publishers said, "and it is
very probable that only a highly skilled mathematician would ever be
able to produce a proof that meets the requirements of these rules."
The publishers set a deadline of March 15, 2002.
To claim the prize, the winner would have to have the solution
accepted for publication by a reputable mathematical journal, and then
have the proof confirmed by at least four members of a six-judge panel
appointed by Faber and Faber.
Copyright © 2000 The Seattle Times Company
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
jum...@my-deja.com
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, March 16, 2000 p9.
Title: Throwing fake punches in campaign-finance reform.
(Opinion)(Column)
People: Gore, Albert, Jr.
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 The Christian Science Publishing Society
Al Gore met with Jesse the Body/Mind Ventura last weekend and compared
cowboy boots. Mr. Gore stood next to Minnesota's populist governor and
announced that their boots were similar, except that Jesse's were made
of ostrich and this meant they were "cooler."
The scene couldn't have been much odder. It was Brooks Brothers going
to seek the support of black leather. Mr. "Earth in the Balance"
hoping to catch some of the shine off of Mr. "Ain't Got Time to
Bleed."
Still, something about the meeting was just so right. The two men
talked about campaign finance reform and its role in the campaign. And
at the moment, that debate has about all the honesty of a professional
wrestling match.
Gore charges out of his corner and attempts to apply the funding
headlock - no soft money or short ads, only debates. But W. (actually
not a bad wrestling name) counters with the Buddhist jackhammer.
The crowd goes wild, but notice that the two guys seem unfazed by it
all. No visible scars. And suddenly it's clear why. These two guys
have been throwing fake punches, because neither is really in a
position to do a lot. Both benefit mightily from the system as it is.
From a mere 65 people, a group of donors called "Pioneers," Mr. Bush
had raised $4.4 million by the end of 1999. The names on the list
represent many of the nation's largest companies, including Blue
Cross, SkyTel, and Ernst & Young.
And Gore too has club. The 13 people in his inner circle have raised
about $1.5 million as of January 1. Some of the people on that list:
the chairman of Saban Entertainment and the chairman of the Learning
Company.
These are facts it seems we sometimes forget in Washington.
For the past three years, the media has focused intensely on Gore's
1996 fund-raising trip to a California Buddhist temple from which
illegal contributions were funnelled to Democratic candidates. An
investigation of the incident led to the conviction of a campaign
contributor. But all told, that fund-raiser brought in somewhere
between $65,000 and $140,000 in illegal contributions, chump change in
the world of presidential politics. (One can only wonder if the story
would have been as big if the word "Buddhist" wasn't involved, or if
the surnames mentioned were Murphy or Smith, instead of Hsia.)
Obviously those caught violating campaign-finance laws should be
punished. But in all the talk about monasteries and Buddhists, we lose
perspective about what's important where the issue is concerned. The
problems with campaign finance are broad and systemic. Violations
aren't the real problem.
The real problem is that Gore and Bush raised more than $6 million
with the help of just 78 influential people. Regardless of who wins,
Americans will be left to wonder about decisions. Is a break to a
specific industry or company some kind of quid pro quo, or is it
simply done because it is believed to be the right thing to do? We'll
never know, and that's why the system needs to be changed.
Which brings us back to the main event. Gore says he has learned from
his 1996 mistakes and wants real change. He says he wants to pick up
McCain's flag and carry it through to November. He adds, however, that
he can't make the changes because if he unilaterally disarms he will
be crushed. There's a certain amount of logic to this, but his
post-McCain conversion seems a bit too perfectly timed. Picking up the
flag is a good idea if you want the troops to follow. But the real
question is how long he will hold on to it if and when he arrives in
the White House.
Probably not long enough. Campaign-finance laws are difficult things
to change.
As for Bush, his response is worse. He has already brought up the
Buddhist temple fiasco more than a few times (that won't change), but
his solution is to basically keep the system as is. He wouldn't set
any limits on how much money individuals could give to political
parties. And at one debate he actually said there should be no
campaign-finance limits at all, just full disclosure.
This is a bad suggestion on its face, but it's particularly untenable
when there are barely enough reporters to keep track of conflicts of
interest now. Even if they could manage to find all the needles in the
haystack there'd still be the problem of getting the story in the
paper.
Everyone likes talking about how money ruins politics, but few like
reading about it. The stuff about Buddhist temples is just so much
more compelling. That's why few politicians seriously propose acting
on it. And that's one more way the whole thing is like a wrestling
match. In the end, someone wins and someone loses, but none of it
means very much.
The campaign finance debate has all the honesty of a pro wrestling
match.
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society
========================================================
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, Jan 25, 2000 p1.
Title: Court affirms campaign-finance limits; It rules free speech
isn't harmed when states restrict individuals'.(USA)
Author: Warren Richey
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 The Christian Science Publishing Society
In an important victory for proponents of campaign-finance overhaul,
the US Supreme Court has reaffirmed that limits can be placed on the
amount of money individuals contribute to political candidates.
The decision comes at the start of an election year that promises to
be the most free-wheeling and expensive in US history. It ends
speculation that the high court might do away with or undermine
efforts to limit the amount of money involved in the election process
on the grounds that such restrictions would curtail free speech.
In effect, it opens to the door for lawmakers to press further efforts
aimed at campaign-finance reform.
Some free-speech advocates have argued that political contributors
should be free to give as much as they wish under the First Amendment.
Campaign-finance reform advocates have countered that money buys
influence and undermines the quality of the democratic process.
In a 6-to-3 decision announced yesterday, the justices upheld a major
portion of the Watergate-era system of campaign finance reform that is
aimed at reducing the impact of special-interest dollars in US
politics. The primary mechanism is by limiting the level of individual
contributions to candidates.
In upholding such limits the court recognized that controlling the
amount of money flowing from private individuals to candidates can be
an effective means to deter corruption and prevent the appearance of
corruption.
"There is little reason to doubt that sometimes large contributions
will work actual corruption on our political system, and no reason to
question the existence of a corresponding suspicion among voters,"
Justice David Souter wrote for the court.
The case before the court involved campaign-finance restrictions
enacted by the State of Missouri that limited contributions to
candidates for statewide office to $1,075. Roughly two-thirds of the
states have similar restrictions.
"A lot of these laws are fairly new and were going to be in effect for
the first time during the 2000 round of elections," says Brenda
Wright, managing attorney at the National Voting Rights Institute in
Boston. "So we are going to see if [this decision] has some impact on
the role of money in politics, at least at the state level."
The Missouri law was challenged by a candidate who had the support of
a few backers who were willing to make large contributions. He argued
that his supporters had a free-speech right to spend their money to
support the candidate of their choice. A federal appeals court agreed
and declared the limits unconstitutional. The court's ruling reverses
that decision and establishes a benchmark for state and federal
lawmakers seeking to limit the influence of money in politics.
"The decision is extremely important because there are
campaign-finance efforts going on throughout the nation, and many
courts have been waiting for guidance from the Supreme Court before
they decide challenges to their own laws," says Deborah Goldberg of
the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
"Hopefully the court's decision will provide additional guidance on
some of these issues," she says. "But even if all it does is leave us
exactly where we were before..., it means that citizens and
legislators can act with confidence that this court will respect their
decisionmaking process...."
The high court's ruling will not block future legal challenges to what
some view as overzealous efforts to limit contributions.
"Controversial limits are still subject to challenges under the First
Amendment if the limits have the effect of preventing the ability of a
candidate to mount an effective campaign," says James Bopp Jr.,
general counsel for the James Madison Center for Free Speech. "There
have been seven cases where contribution limits have been struck down
on that basis and there are challenges in four states currently."
The decision represents a shift from prior court precedent. "The court
seems to have now said that corruption exists as a matter of law and
doesn't have to be proved," he says. "I think the debate will now
shift in the court from corruption to the effects of contribution
limits on candidates speech."
Others say the decision offers insight into the difficult question of
how to balance free-speech rights and the right to make campaign
contributions. "The court is not blind to the reality of what these
contributions buy," says Larry Makinson of the Center for Responsive
Politics in Washington. "There are legitimate questions of corruption
here."
Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia
dissented.
"The court's decision has lasting consequences for political speech in
the course of elections, the speech upon which democracy depends,"
Kennedy said in a dissenting opinion.
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society
=======================================================
Source: The New Republic, Nov 29, 1999 p13.
Title: Campaign reform that might actually work: Taking Offense.
(campaign finance reform)
Author: Jonathan Cohn
Subjects: Lobbyists - Political activity
Political campaigns - Finance
Locations: United States
Organizations: Public Campaign - Political activity
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 The New Republic, Inc.
During the week of October 12, as the Senate prepared for a final
showdown on the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, Ellen
Miller directed her organization, Public Campaign, to do what every
other good-government group in town was doing: pressuring members of
Congress. But, while the other reform groups were feverishly trying to
assemble the votes to overcome a Senate filibuster, Public Campaign
was pursuing a different agenda: torpedoing a compromise bill that was
taking shape.
The compromise would have replaced the McCainFeingold bill's outright
ban on soft money donations with a cap of $60,000 while raising the
existing limits on other types of donations. In Miller's mind, it
would have given wealthy interests even more influence: "deform"
instead of "reform," as she likes to say. So Public Campaign's
lobbyists began circulating newspaper advertisements that the group
was threatening to run in the hometown papers of senators who voted
for the compromise. "Instead of listening to us," the ad text read,
"Senator XXXXXX just voted to triple the amount individuals can give
to a candidate.... That's not campaign finance reform.... Senator
XXXXXXXX: Out of Touch With His Constituents." The compromise never
materialized, and on October 19 McCain-Feingold died for the second
year in a row.
It wasn't the first time Public Campaign has played hardball, or, for
that matter, the first time the group's putative comrades in the
reform movement were left grumbling about the famously obstreperous
Miller and her band of troublemakers. Public Campaign's whole premise
is that, when it comes to money in politics, only an aggressive,
strident, sweeping approach to reform can work. Piecemeal solutions,
they argue, aren't only bad policy; they'll never pass. It's a strange
argument, considering that in politics compromise is usually a synonym
for realpolitik. And it may well be right.
Public Campaign dedicates itself exclusively to a reform it calls the
"Clean Money" plan. Under this plan, the government offers candidates
full public financing--that is, money from the taxpayers--for their
campaigns. In return, candidates agree not to raise private money. The
idea is to get at the campaign finance problem from the demand side.
Instead of limiting the supply of money to candidates by regulating
certain kinds of contributions or campaign spending--and then watching
candidates figure out new ways around those barriers--Clean Money
reduces the demand for money by simply giving it to candidates. It's
far more comprehensive than anything Congress has contemplated in
years.
Just about every pro-reform group supports some version of public
financing. The question is how you get there. The strategy championed
by campaign finance reform stalwarts like Common Cause has been to
pursue incremental, supply-side reforms--on the theory that public
financing is too difficult a sell with a public skeptical of big
government. The premise of Public Campaign is exactly the opposite:
that the only way to pass campaign finance reform is to bypass
legislatures altogether (via the ballot initiative) or to bully
lawmakers into submission. An inside game, they insist, can never
work, because campaign finance reform is an unusual issue: it doesn't
pit one Washington faction against another but the entire political
establishment against those outside it. As a result, everything
depends on grassroots pressure. If the compromises required to cobble
together a congressional majority sap the reform issue of its public
clarity, then legislators have no incentive to make any changes at
all--which is exactly what happened with McCain- Feingold.
At the national level, Public Campaign has steadfastly refused to
lower its expectations, focusing on pummeling opponents of reform.
While past efforts at reform have generally treated legislators with
kid gloves--lest swing votes be lost--Public Campaign has begun giving
out a "Golden Leash Award" for members of Congress who are in the
pockets of special interests. At the state level, meanwhile, Public
Campaign works with local groups to pass actual laws. Key to this
effort has been the group's emphasis on how special interest money
skews politics on bread- and-butter issues, a strategy that makes the
normally staid topic of government reform resonate with people
concerned about particular issues. ("Want Guns Out of Our Schools?"
asked one recent ad. "Get Gun Money Out of Our Politics.")
And it's working. Over the past four years, while Common Cause and
other reform groups have continued their quixotic crusade for
incremental reforms in Congress--each year proposing ever-more-
minimalist measures, only to see them fail--"Clean Election" laws have
passed in four states. And, while victory in the liberal New England
havens of Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts was perhaps to be
expected, Public Campaign also eked out a narrow win in notoriously
libertarian Arizona. It turns out that ordinary voters, even in
conservative states, are a much easier sell than Beltway politicians.
Of course, passing these initiatives is merely a first step. To be
parlayed into success nationally, the state laws must work as
demonstrations. Here the evidence, although hardly definitive, is
encouraging. Anti-reform groups such as the Chamber of Commerce have
filed several lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the
measure. But, to date, not one suit has won (Clean Election's most
recent victory came last week in Maine). Even the American Civil
Liberties Union, whose absolutist reading of the First Amendment has
long made it a thorn in the side of campaign finance reform efforts,
recently signed on to Public Campaign's crusade.
More important, there's evidence that the Clean Election laws may
actually be curbing fund-raising activity. In June, an Arizona
Republic story, headlined "all's quiet on legislative fundraising
front," chronicled a sudden drop in the number of fund-raisers being
held for candidates running in the 2000 elections. Activity has since
picked up, according to local operatives; but, in one of the first
major tests of the law--the race for Arizona's Corporation Commission,
a board with vast regulatory powers over the state's utilities and
telecommunications industry--the four candidates for two open seats
have indicated they will seek public funding under the Clean Money
law.
None of this means the future of Clean Money is assured. Several court
challenges remain, and there are still kinks in the laws that the
states must work out. At some point, an extremist candidate will
likely qualify for public funds. If the local equivalent of David Duke
starts receiving taxpayer dollars to fund his campaign, voter
attitudes might change quickly. And, at the national level, if the
attacks on individual members of Congress don't either radically
change its composition or shame moderates into backing comprehensive
reform--a tall order--there will be no Clean Money laws coming out of
Capitol Hill for a very long time. Public Campaign's is an
all-or-nothing gambit, and on balance the odds still favor nothing.
That sounds pretty unappealing, until you consider that nothing is
pretty much what we have now.
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)
=====================================================
Source: The New Republic, Nov 15, 1999 p21.
Title: Good riddance, McCain-Feingold: Well Off.
(campaign finance reform)
Author: John Mueller
Subjects: Campaign funds - Laws, regulations, etc.
Business - Political aspects
Democracy - Economic aspects
Freedom of speech - Economic aspects
People: McCain, John - Social policy
Locations: United States
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 The New Republic, Inc.
John Mueller is a professor of political science at the University of
Rochester. His new book, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph's Pretty
Good Grocery, will be published this fall by Princeton University
Press.
Once upon a time, carping about campaign finance abuse was mainly the
province of Democrats. Nowadays, however, at least some of the most
prominent proponents of campaign finance reform are Republicans:
people such as John McCain, who cosponsored the campaign finance
reform bill that died yet another death in the Senate last week, and
Elizabeth Dole, who cited her inability to raise enough money to
compete with George W. Bush and Steve Forbes as a primary reason for
her withdrawal from the presidential race. To the extent that
intelligent commentators question campaign finance reform--as the dean
of Stanford Law School, Kathleen M. Sullivan, did on the op-ed page of
The New York Times last Sunday--they usually do so because they worry
that particular reforms might either backfire or violate the First
Amendment.
But it is the defenders of money in politics, the ones so widely
reviled in the elite press, who speak the truth about campaign finance
reform. In a democratic system of government, there will always be
some inequality of influence. Yet that is not necessarily a flaw, and
it is rarely as debilitating to good government as reformers would
have you believe. When you dig beneath the rhetoric of campaign
finance reform, you discover that the "reforms" being proposed would,
in practice, constitute anything but an improvement.
The essential complaint of reformers is that the present system gives
too much influence to so-called special interest groups. This is also
the most popular complaint. Who, after all, supports special
interests? Actually, we all should. Democracy is distinguished from
autocracy not as much by the freedom of individual speech--many
authoritarian governments effectively allow individuals to petition
for redress of grievances and to complain to one another, which is
sometimes called "freedom of conversation"--as by the fact that
democracies allow people to organize in order to pursue their
political interests. So the undisciplined, chaotic, and essentially
unequal interplay of special interest groups that reformers decry is
not a perversion of democracy-- it's the whole point of it.
Nor is campaign finance reform likely to subdue special interests.
People and groups who seek to influence public policy do so not for
their own enjoyment but because they really care about certain issues
and programs. If reformers somehow manage to reduce the impact of such
groups in election campaigns, these groups are very likely to find
other ways to seek favor and redress, no matter how clever the laws
that seek to inconvenience them are. For example, if Congress
prohibited soft money donations to political parties--which is what
the ill-fated McCain-Feingold bill promised to do--special interests
would merely spend more money on their own advertising and
get-out-the-vote efforts, which are known in the political business as
"independent expenditures." As Senator Robert Bennett of Utah put it,
rich people "will always have influence in politics." The solution, he
said, is not, or should not be, to create barriers that impel them to
"spend even more money to hire lawyers and consultants to find ways
around the law to get the same results."
Lurking behind the complaint about special interest groups is a
concern about political inequality--a concern that sounds quite
reasonable, since, in a democracy, nobody should be denied political
opportunity merely because of his or her social or economic class, or
because he or she does not adhere to the visions or dictates of a
particular ideological group. But that is not the same thing as saying
that people must necessarily be equal in their impact on the political
system. Democracy is fundamentally a system in which people are
(equally) free to become politically unequal. They are allowed to try
to increase their political importance by working in politics or by
supplying money to appropriate places. Democracy is therefore
characterized not by political equality, active participation by the
citizenry, or something resembling majority rule and consensus, but by
varying degrees of political inequality and by substantial
apathy--that is, by minority rule and majority acquiescence.
Some people, because of their manipulative skills, social position, or
sheer luck, will do better than others. Unlike other systems, however,
democracy gives everyone--without regard to status or ideology--the
opportunity to seek to manipulate the system in their favor.
Effectively, this means that democracies are often quite sensitive to
small groups that organize to seek influence over policy, whether they
represent racial minorities, gay rights advocates, beekeepers, yacht
owners, or disabled veterans. Democracies are thus responsive and
attentive to the interests of the citizenry--at least when compared to
other forms of government--but they are nowhere near equally
responsive to the interests of each citizen all the time, and they
cannot be made so by means of legislation.
Many reformers are primarily concerned about a particular influential
minority: the business community. But if a business leader's advantage
in access to a time-pressured politician is somehow reprehensible and
must be reformed, what about other inequalities--that is, why focus
only on economic ones? A telephone call from a big-time political
columnist such as David Broder of The Washington Post is likely to get
a politician's attention even faster than a call from an important
CEO. Should the influential Broder hold off on his next column until
the rest of us deserving unknowns have had a chance to add our two
cents in the same forum? And, while Broder's experience over the years
as a political journalist arguably gives him some added credibility on
questions of how we should run our country, so, surely, does that of a
CEO who has successfully managed a large corporation and has amassed
enough wealth to attract the attention of politicians. Inequalities
such as these are simply and unavoidably endemic to the whole
political system, as they are to life itself. It may be possible to
reduce this inequality a bit, but it is difficult to imagine a reform
that could raise the political impact of the average factory
worker--or even of the average business executive--to anywhere near
the level of influence enjoyed by a David Broder. One can even argue
that, because it allows the rich (along with other minorities) to
organize to protect their interests, democracy has been able to
survive a potential defect that theoreticians from Plato onward have
considered terminal: democracy has been able to co-opt, rather than
alienate, the rich.
What makes the philosophy of campaign finance reform so ironic is that
the laws have such a poor track record of rooting out the alleged
abuses they are intended to eliminate. In fact, many of the ills
reformers now seek to address are the by-products of earlier attempts
to clean up the system. By capping individual contributions to
candidates at the ludicrously low level of $1,000 (which has never
been adjusted for inflation), for example, the Watergate-era reforms
diverted political funds into soft money (donations made directly to
political parties, which the parties then spend to influence
elections) or into direct-issue advertising--which happen to be the
two primary targets of most current reforms. The reforms have also
enhanced the comparative advantage of billionaires, such as Ross Perot
and Steve Forbes, who can finance their campaigns out of their own
pockets, or famous sons, such as George W. Bush, who inherit vast
fund-raising networks.
Reformers of all stripes argue that political campaigns cost too much.
But the real question is, compared with what? The entire cost of the
1996 elections was about 25 percent of what Procter & Gamble routinely
spends each year to market its products. In what sense is this amount
too much? Some people do weary of the constant barrage of advertising
at election time, but democracy leaves them entirely free to flip to
another channel, the same method used so effectively by anyone who
would rather not learn about the purported virtues of Crest
toothpaste.
There is also the related gripe that the ever-increasing need for
donations means that politicians spend too much of their time raising
money. But much of this problem arises from the absurdly low limit the
reformers have placed on direct campaign contributions. If anything,
rather than restricting soft money (as the McCain-Feingold bill would
have), it's time to raise or eliminate altogether the $1,000 limit on
individual contributions to candidates. Politicians seem to find it
politically incorrect to advocate this sensible change, even though it
would probably reduce the amount of time they spend campaigning for
campaign funds. Getting rid of special interest influence by other
means--say, by regulating independent groups' expenditures--would only
work if reformers successfully dispensed with the right to free
speech. Since the advocacy of special interests is the very stuff of
the democratic process, the unintended goal of the campaign reformers
ultimately seems to be the repeal of democracy itself.
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)
===========================================================
Source: Time, Nov 8, 1999 v154 i19 p38+.
Title: The Buyer's Guide to Congress: Where there are big issues,
there is big money. Just a coincidence?(Nation/Campaign
Finance)(Statistical Data Included)
Subjects: Health insurance industry - Political activity
Liquor industry - Political activity
Financial services industry - Political activity
Bankruptcy law - Laws, regulations, etc.
Internet - Laws, regulations, etc.
Clothing industry - Political activity
Year 2000 transition (Computers) - Laws, regulations, etc.
Lobbying - Political aspects
Locations: United States
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Time, Inc.
It was, many say, the biggest industry coup of the year in Congress.
How did the airlines manage to scuttle a bill that had had consumers
applauding? The Airline Passenger Fairness Act--born in part of a
holiday horror show of delayed flights and trapped passengers--called
on carriers to be more up front about major annoyances like delays and
fare prices. In its place, they were able to substitute a toothless
promise to be nicer.
Was it the money? In the weeks preceding a key Senate committee vote
on the airlines' substitute, almost $300,000 in soft money went
gushing into the accounts of both parties. From January 1997 through
June of this year, the airline industry gave Democratic Party
committees $1.3 million, the G.O.P. $1.9 million. "Making the charge
they bought their way out of trouble--that's kind of a huge charge,
but certainly there is the appearance of that," says Holly Bailey of
the Center for Responsive Politics.
That kind of unlimited "soft money" contribution would have been
outlawed under a bill that died earlier this month in the Senate, the
victim of another procedural mugging, by G.O.P. Senator Mitch
McConnell and Republican majority leader Trent Lott.
So the perception, if not the reality, of vote buying remains. In this
chart, TIME reviews some of the issues of the session that is about to
wrap up--and the interests, and the soft money, behind them.
FOR SALE PATIENTS' BILL OF RIGHTS
THE ISSUE Whether patients would have the right to sue their
health-maintenance organizations for deficient care or for being
denied care
THE PLAYERS --The Insurance Side Health-insurance companies, the
American Assn. of Health Plans and Health Insurance Assn. of America
--The Consumer Side Trial lawyers and consumer groups
WHAT THEY GAVE HMOs, insurers: To Dems $811,000 To G.O.P. $1,774,000
Lawyers, doctors:
To Dems $6,394,000
To G.O.P. $517,000
WHAT THEY WANTED
--INSURERS, fearing lawsuits directed against them, wanted continued
legislative protection
--TRIAL LAWYERS sought the reverse, hoping to see a lucrative new area
of the mass-tort industry. It would protect consumers as well
WHAT THEY GOT --SPLIT DECISION Insurers got a Senate bill that
contains no provision for lawsuits against the companies. Consumers
and trial lawyers did better in the House, whose bill does include
such a provision
THE UPSHOT Insurance companies and the corporations that buy their
services win the battle of the bucks. Any reform bill that would allow
them to be held liable will be strangled in Congress before it can get
to President Clinton's desk
FOR SALE INTERSTATE WINE SALES
[THE ISSUE] A bill to let states sue in federal court for violations
of bans on interstate shipment of alcohol. Post-Prohibition state laws
are now loosely enforced
[THE PLAYERS] --Liquor Wholesalers and Distributors They purport to be
concerned about Internet liquor sales to minors
--Winemakers in California and elsewhere They want to sell over the
Internet and allow tourists to ship wine home
[WHAT THEY GAVE] Vintners and allied trade groups:
To Dems $1,339,000
To G.O.P. $1,623,000
The liquor lobby:
To Dems $144,000
To G.O.P. $209,000
[WHAT THEY WANTED]
--WHOLESALERS have emphasized the underage-drinking issue, but what
really spooks them is that e-commerce erodes their business
--WINEMAKERS want the direct-sales route, which will also give them
more leverage with distributors
[WHAT THEY GOT] --WHOLESALE VICTORY Both the House and the Senate have
passed the wholesaler-backed provision
--TASTE FOR WINE But House version has an amendment making the law
much less onerous to the winemakers
[THE UPSHOT] The amendment is now in the conference committee on the
juvenile-justice bill, which is hornswoggled over things like the sale
of guns at gun shows. If the amendment dies, it will certainly be back
next year
FOR SALE BANKRUPTCY OVERHAUL
[THE ISSUE] A proposal that would make it harder for individuals to
erase debts by declaring personal bankruptcy. Some 1.4 million filed
last year, up 95% since 1990
[THE PLAYERS] --The Lenders Credit-card companies like Visa and
MasterCard and the banks that issue the cards, plus mortgage and
finance companies
--The Borrowers Consumer groups acting on their behalf
[WHAT THEY GAVE] The Lenders:
To Dems $1,228,300
To G.O.P. $4,232,800
The Borrowers:
(Who has any money?) $0
[WHAT THEY WANTED]
--LENDERS say consumers have abused the system, using bankruptcy as a
debt-avoidance tactic. The stigma is gone
--CONSUMER GROUPS protested, saying the lenders brought it on
themselves by luring unqualified borrowers in over their head
[WHAT THEY GOT] --PAY UP, BUDDY House passed a bill with a means test
that denies bankruptcy to anyone who can pay $6,000 over five years
and makes it easier for creditors to attach alimony and child support.
Senate is working on a slightly more debtor-friendly version
[THE UPSHOT] Too big a victory for the bankers. Hillary Clinton has
attacked the legislation as unfair to women and children, and even
Republican Henry Hyde said the House bill is too pro-creditor. The
Senate may bring it up next year. The House bill had a veto-proof
majority
FOR SALE BROADBAND ACCESS
[THE ISSUE] Internet service providers such as America Online want the
government to force cable companies to give them access to new
high-speed fiber-optic lines
[THE PLAYERS] --The Internet Side Such ISPs as AOL and Microsoft that
act as Internet gateways
--The Cable Side AT&T, which bought out TCI; Time Warner (TIME's
parent company); and MediaOne Group
[WHAT THEY GAVE] AOL and Microsoft:
To Dems: $286,000
To G.O.P.: $911,000
Time Warner and AT&T:
To Dems: $886,000
To G.O.P.: $1,356,000
[WHAT THEY WANTED]
--AOL AND ITS KIN, which now depend on slow phone lines, are pushing
the FCC for access to high-speed lines, fearing that otherwise
consumers will find them obsolete
--CABLE COMPANIES AND AT&T want them to build their own
[WHAT THEY GOT] --ON HOLD Little is moving on Capitol Hill--yet
--BUT The FCC's efforts to stay out of Internet regulation have led to
some community battles that have gone AOL's way. That means at least
some parties want Congress to act to avoid piecemeal, local rulemaking
[THE UPSHOT] Huge amounts of soft money have poured into the party
committees, and lobbyists are furiously trying to frame the issue
their way. Stands to be one of the hot-button issues of 2000
FOR SALE CARIBBEAN TARIFF RELIEF
[THE ISSUE] A bill to let Caribbean and Central American countries
export apparel to the U.S. duty and quota free, provided that the
goods are made of U.S. fabrics
[THE PLAYERS] --The Manufacturing and Retail Side Retailers (the Gap),
apparel companies (Sara Lee Corp.), the American Textile Manufacturers
Institute
--The Union Side The AFL-CIO, anti-sweatshop groups and at least one
U.S. textile firm
[WHAT THEY GAVE] Manufacturers and retailers:
To Dems $961,000
To G.O.P. $2,449,000
Labor interests:
To Dems $12,424,000
To G.O.P. $528,000
[WHAT THEY WANTED]
--THE CLOTHING FIRMS want access to cheap, tax-advantaged offshore
production. Both Clinton and Republicans favor it as a free-trade
measure
--LABOR fears that more U.S. jobs will be lost. Anti-sweatshop groups
are wary of exploitation
[WHAT THEY GOT] --NOTHING YET The Senate version of the provision is
attached to a controversial African-trade bill that's still pending.
The House has passed the trade bill without the Caribbean element
[THE UPSHOT] If the Senate bill passes, differences must be hammered
out with the House. The two chambers could be at odds over key
provisions involving whether imported apparel must be made of U.S.
fabrics
FOR SALE Y2K LAWSUITS
[THE ISSUE] If the lights go out at the stroke of midnight on New
Year's Eve, who gets sued? The bill in Congress proposed to limit
corporate liability for Y2K computer bugs
--The Computer Side Silicon Valley software and hardware companies,
backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
[THE PLAYERS] --The Consumer Side Trial lawyers and consumer-advocacy
groups
[WHAT THEY GAVE] Silicon Valley:
To Dems $2,484,000
To G.O.P. $3,746,000
Trial lawyers:
To Dems $5,758,000
To G.O.P. $114,000
[WHAT THEY WANTED]
--HIGH-TECH COMPANIES sought protection from potentially huge awards
decided by juries made up of consumers
--CONSUMER GROUPS AND TRIAL LAWYERS wanted to preserve their ability
to hold companies liable for damage from Y2K glitches
[WHAT THEY GOT] --HIGH-TECH, HANDS DOWN The law gives firms 90 days to
fix glitches before being sued, limits punitive damages against small
firms, holds companies liable only for their fair share (big outfits
won't pay the whole bill) and limits class-action suits
[THE UPSHOT] The law was signed in July after close call on whether
the White House would veto it. Congressional Democrats initially
opposed the bill, but critics say the lure of high-tech donations made
many of them supporters
JAN. '97-JUNE '99 GIFTS, SOURCES: CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS;
COMMON CAUSE
=========================================================
Source: The Nation, Oct 18, 1999 v369 i12 p14.
Title: The Supreme Court and Campaign Finance.(Brief Article)
Author: David Cole
Subjects: Campaign funds - Laws, regulations, etc.
Locations: United States
Gov Agncy: United States. Supreme Court - Cases
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 The Nation Company L.P.
The Supreme Court's 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo is the bete
noire of campaign finance reform. In Buckley the Court essentially
equated money and speech, and therefore subjected campaign finance
restrictions to "rigorous" First Amendment scrutiny, rendering many
reform efforts unconstitutional. Scholars have criticized the decision
ever since; in 1998, NYU's Brennan Center for Justice released a
petition signed by 209 law professors calling for Buckley's
reconsideration.
Yet as the Supreme Court again takes up campaign finance this term, in
the Dickensian-captioned Shrink Missouri Government PAC v. Missouri,
the Brennan Center, Common Cause and other leading reformers have all
become spirited defenders of Buckley, urging the Supreme Court to
stand fast against arguments that Buckley should be overturned. What
gives?
In Buckley the Court ruled that the First Amendment prohibits any
limits on how much individuals and candidates may spend in connection
with political campaigns, but it upheld limits on how much individuals
and PACs may contribute to candidates. The reformers would like the
Court to revisit the conclusion that expenditures must be
unrestricted, but the Shrink case challenges contribution limits,
which reformers support. The reformers want Buckley rethought, but
only in one direction.
The politics of campaign finance have long divided allies and united
enemies, and this case is no exception. The ACLU's brief strongly
urges the Court to abandon Buckley's holding that contributions may be
limited and offers as the centerpiece of its analysis an extended
quotation from Justice Clarence Thomas, definitely not a
"card-carrying member." That brief in turn prompted a response brief
from most of the ACLU's former presidents and directors, who ask the
Court to maintain Buckley's permissive stance toward contribution
limits.
The Shrink decision is almost certain to be reversed. The Court of
Appeals for the Eighth Circuit struck down a Missouri limit on
campaign contributions virtually identical to the contribution limit
upheld in Buckley, on reasoning only a lawyer could love: that the
state failed to prove that unrestricted campaign contributions created
an appearance of corruption. Some facts are so obvious they need no
proof. As the Supreme Court recognized in Buckley, the appearance of
corruption is "inherent" in a system of unlimited contributions.
The broader issue, however, is that the system of campaign finance
wrought by Buckley is a disaster. Buckley struck a compromise, ruling
that expenditures must be unlimited while contributions may be capped,
but in doing so it created a system shot through with unintended
consequences. It gives a huge advantage to the independently wealthy,
since there's no limit on how much a candidate may spend on his or her
own campaign. It has not reduced the amount of money spent on
campaigns but has required elected officials to devote massive amounts
of time to raising funds from lots of small contributors. When Senator
Frank Lautenberg announced in February 1999 that he would not run for
re-election in November 2000, he cited "the searing reality that I
would have to spend half of every day between now and the next
election fundraising." Buckley favors incumbents by making it
increasingly difficult for challengers to raise the seed money
necessary to launch a serious challenge. It has increased the power of
parties, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of "soft money,"
money that does not directly advocate a candidate's election. And it
has not reduced the influence of wealthy donors, who remain free to
dole out unlimited amounts of "independent expenditures" advocating
the election of the candidate whose favor they seek to curry.
In short, Buckley (with the help of a none-too-reform-minded Congress)
has created a mess. A comprehensive rethinking is necessary, even
though Shrink is unlikely to spark it. The issue does not admit of
easy answers: As surely as private concentrations of wealth threaten
the integrity of the democratic process, so too do "reforms" enacted
by incumbents who have every interest in protecting their seats by
limiting effective challenges. Thus, Buckley was not wrong to
recognize that restrictions on money limit speech, nor to subject
incumbents' efforts to regulate their re-elections to rigorous
scrutiny. Rather, its error was to define too narrowly the permissible
ends of campaign finance regulation. The Court said limits are
permissible only to forestall the reality or appearance of corruption
(in the sense of bribes) and branded as illegitimate any efforts to
equalize the voices of the wealthy and the not so wealthy. For a brief
moment in 1990, the Court, in an opinion by the late Justice Thurgood
Marshall, upheld a campaign finance law designed to combat "the
corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth," a
view that would seemingly authorize equalization efforts such as
carefully tailored spending limits or serious public financing. But
the Court has never again taken Marshall's position seriously. It's
about time it did.
David Cole, legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, is the author
of No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice
System (New Press).
=======================================================
Source: The New Republic, Oct 18, 1999 p6.
Title: TRB From Washington : Swoon Song.(falling for John McCain)
Author: Charles Lane
Abstract: Sen. John McCain's maverick Republican presidential
campaign is defended on the basis of his non-isolationist
foreign policy. His courage in support of campaign finance
reform was far overshadowed by his principled support of
President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo. Other
candidates of both parties waffle on the US role in the
world. McCain was also the only prominent Republican to
condemn Pat Buchanan over revisionist World War II history.
Subjects: Presidential candidates - Evaluation
International relations - Moral and ethical aspects
People: McCain, John - Evaluation
Buchanan, Patrick - Evaluation
Bush, George W. - Evaluation
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 The New Republic, Inc.
A feeling is building up inside me, and, rather than continue trying
to keep it to myself, rather than deny it any further, I think it's
time finally to open up and discuss it publicly. I didn't want this to
happen. I know it shouldn't be happening. But it is: I'm falling for
John McCain, the former POW and current senator from Arizona who
finally made his presidential candidacy official on September 27.
Thus, I join the ranks of the largest and most dewy-eyed media fan
club to glom on to any presidential candidate, real or wished-for,
since the great swoon over Colin Powell in 1995. I hate myself for
being a part of this pack--for exhibiting so little originality or
independence. My family and friends might disown me for succumbing,
even tentatively, to the allure of a Republican, and a pretty
conservative one at that. But the guy is running such a terrific
campaign, speaking so forthrightly about so many matters of real
substance, that I just find him irresistible.
And I'm not even talking about the issue that has won McCain the
uncritical attention of so many other pundits: campaign finance
reform. I couldn't care less about his quixotic campaign to abolish
soft money donations, partly because I think this ostensible
anti-corruption drive is actually questionable in terms of its impact
on free speech, and partly because I think it's just futile. Rather,
what impresses me most about McCain is that he is the only candidate
who has, so far, articulated a tough-minded and morally robust
approach to foreign policy. Sure, maybe I trust him more on these
matters because there's something about a man who used to be in
uniform. But even adjusted for the
ex-POW-and-son-and-grandson-of-admirals effect, his ideas would be the
best anyone's put forth so far.
I guess I began falling for McCain's foreign policy during the Kosovo
crisis, when he stood up in the Senate in favor of giving President
Clinton the option to use ground troops. This position was not only
vindicated by events (Milosevic capitulated only when nato seemed to
be turning from an air-only war to a ground attack), but taking it was
a real political risk for McCain. Polls showed the American public
deeply ambivalent about the idea, and he was both bucking his party
and pushing a reluctant White House. But McCain did it because he
understood that American values and interests demanded that we stop
mass murder in the Balkans and stabilize Europe and that these were
values and interests worth fighting and dying for.
At a time when politicians, including the president, routinely shrink
from the very idea that any American should ever die in war, no matter
how worthy the cause, McCain's stand was gutsy. This is one Vietnam
vet-- indeed, one who suffered terribly himself in that war--who
doesn't have a case of Vietnam Syndrome. McCain understands this
central lesson of the twentieth century: the supposed dichotomy
between pursuing our values and pursuing our interests is a false one.
As he put it in a superb August 24 speech to the World Affairs Council
of Northern California, "For the United States, values and interests
are inextricably linked, and, traditionally, American leaders have
designed policies to serve both ends." McCain correctly identifies the
Achilles' heel of Clinton foreign policy as "self- doubt"--too often
this administration acts as if it needs to ask other nations' pardon
for doing what is manifestly right and justified, such as bombing
Saddam Hussein's Iraq or challenging North Korea over its dangerous
nuclear program.
He is the only candidate to have evinced appropriate disgust at the
moral handwringing of a Democratic administration seemingly
uncomfortable with the idea that American power is, and historically
has been, a force for good in the world. In the same speech, he
lamented the fact that "the president often spends a portion of his
overseas visits apologizing for one or another American transgression
against the host country." He added that "a world where our ideals had
a realistic chance of becoming a universal creed was our principle
object in this century" and should be in the next.
As the administration tinkers with the details of its "containment"
plans for the Persian Gulf and endeavors to sweeten its appeasement
package for the Stalinists in Pyongyang, McCain boldly calls for a
policy of "rollback" toward rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea.
With regard to China, McCain wisely advocates drawing a line in the
Taiwan Strait, on the sound principle that only a clear American
signal to Beijing to back off will ensure that China never starts a
war over the island. "Engagement is not surrender," he says. "In our
pursuit of a strategic partnership with China we have spent more time
wondering how to couch our diplomacy in language that won't give
offense to Beijing than we have making clear the force of our
opposition to China's increasing assertiveness in disputed territorial
questions in Asia. Isn't the point of our relationship with China to
maintain international stability, protect our security and encourage
political reforms? The relationship is not an end in itself."
( cont'd )
jum...@my-deja.com
McCain has explicitly attacked the rank isolationism that is rampant
both in his party and in the leftmost precincts of the Democratic
Party. Perhaps more impressively, he has at least implicitly sketched
an argument against the "realism" that appears to be gaining ground in
the George W. Bush camp (and which, along with Bush's own inexperience
in such matters, probably accounts for the muddled and insincere way
that the GOP front-runner reacted to the Kosovo crisis--see "Team W.,"
by Jacob Heilbrunn, September 27). McCain likes America's
sole-superpower status and seeks to exploit it; he doesn't fret unduly
about "imperial overstretch" and other exaggerated menaces. He knows
that, to some degree, being a superpower must be a use- it-or-lose-it
proposition.
There is a connection between McCain's moral clarity about foreign
policy and his moral clarity about the latest menace to the integrity
of the Republican Party: Pat Buchanan and his grotesque view that
World War II was the result of Anglo-American provocations against
Nazi Germany. Once again, McCain didn't mince words about what
Buchanan should do: Hit the road. This stand showed McCain was willing
to take one of the great lessons of the century's struggle against
totalitarianism--appeasement doesn't work--and apply it to an
apologist for totalitarianism in his own party. "No political campaign
is worth sacrificing our principles," he said.
George W., by contrast, played the role of Neville Chamberlain. As
front- runner, he has greater responsibilities, which supposedly
include the obligation not to build Buchanan up by paying attention to
his outrageous views. Better to keep Buchanan inside the party, he
said, so as not to drive off his purportedly numerous supporters.
"It's politics," he told the Associated Press. "[S]hould I be the
nominee ... I'm going to need every vote I can get among Republicans
to win the election." Thus does the student of foreign policy realists
practice campaign realism on the home front. Maybe it's not so crazy
to join the pack swooning for McCain after all.
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)
=====================================================
Source: Newsweek, Oct 11, 1999 v134 i15 p96.
Title: A 100 Percent Tax on Speech? Bradley's idea would eviscerate
the First Amendment in the name of campaign reform.(Bill
Bradley's campaign finance reform proposals)(The Last
Word)(Brief Article)
Author: George F. Will
Subjects: Presidential candidates - Political activity
Political campaigns - Finance
Campaign funds - Laws, regulations, etc.
People: Bradley, Bill - Political activity
Locations: United States
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Newsweek, Inc.
At a stroke, Bill Bradley recently refuted the bromide that he is
boring, and in doing so he usefully illuminated the upcoming Senate
debate on campaign finance reform. He did all this with a remarkable
proposal--a proposal flagrantly unconstitutional and amazingly
inimical to democratic values, but definitely not boring.
On a call-in program on New Hampshire public radio, Bradley was at
first boring: he advocated public financing, saying we spend $900
million a year promoting democracy abroad and for about the same sum
we could supplant all private money with public money in campaigns.
This would "totally take special interests out of our election
process." His unremarkable, because familiar, thought raises
questions:
By what criteria would he sort the "special," and impliedly
disreputable, interests from the nonspecial, reputable ones that
deserve to be in our election process? When the sorting is done, what
will that process be about? Is Bradley a modern Mugwump, trying to
scrub the stain of politics from politics? Bradley is a practicing
liberal who (therefore) is comfortable with the regulatory state,
which, with all its regulating and subsidizing, is waist-deep in the
business of allocating wealth and opportunity. Does he understand that
the way to reduce the role of money in politics is to reduce the role
of politics in the acquisition of money?
But let us move on to Bradley's remarkable idea.
The host of the radio program, noting that Bradley is ardent for
campaign reforms, asked about "issue ads," noting that "nonprofit
advocacy groups" of many persuasions are alarmed about the regulation
of such ads envisioned by the Shays-Meehan bill, the House-passed
version of campaign finance reform. Bradley replied that the way to
deal with issue ads is to "simply say if somebody is going to buy an
issue ad, that there's got to be an equal time on the other side."
That, he said, is "the regulatory way. The market way to do it is
simply say, when an issue ad is put on, there's a 100 percent tax, and
the 100 percent tax is then given to the other side so that you get
both points of view presented and you simply don't have the point of
view that has the most money behind it dominating the airwaves."
A caller declared it "appalling" and "scary" to say "if I'm going to
express my opinion I have to support somebody else who wants to
express his opinion." And the caller added that Bradley, by talking
about giving money to "the" other side so that people would hear
"both" points of view on an issue, assumes, unrealistically, a tidy
bipolarity of public debate, rather than a variety of opinions on
particular issues. Bradley called that "a very good point" and "food
for thought."
Here is more such food: the campaign finance reformers' assault, in
the name of political hygiene, on the First Amendment is now so
sweeping, and so untroubled by even twinges of conscience, that a
mainstream politician like Bradley can casually propose such a tax on
political communication. Note well: the tax is intended not to raise
revenue but to change behavior--to extinguish an entire category of
political advocacy.
Bradley suggests this in the name of a chimera. It can be called
"equality of political efficacy." The reformers' preferred metaphor is
"leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their
language: fields are leveled by bulldozers. Speaking of scary, imagine
the government as a bulldozer used to produce equality of political
advocacy for each point of view and "the" other side.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court has said government cannot require
people "to pay a tax for the exercise of that which the First
Amendment has made a high constitutional privilege." And "the power to
tax the exercise of a privilege is the power to control or suppress
its enjoyment" and is "as potent as the power of censorship." And "the
concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of
our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly
foreign to the First Amendment."
Bradley has usefully compared money in politics to ants in the
kitchen: "You have to block all the holes or some of them are going to
find a way in." This is a useful metaphor because it explains why the
law regulating political speech must metastasize.
Controls on "hard" money, which is given directly to particular
candidates, do not allow the political class to ration political
speech as effectively as that class desires. So it wants to supplement
those controls with controls on "soft" money, which is given to
parties to fund advocacy and other activities not specifically
supportive of particular candidates. But even controls on "hard" and
"soft" money will be largely vitiated unless "express
advocacy"--urging the election or defeat of specific candidates--by
private groups is controlled. But even those three kinds of
restrictions on political communication will not give the political
class the control it desires over communication about itself unless
restrictions are imposed on issue advocacy by private groups. Hence
Bradley's 100 per-cent tax.
His proposal is not of practical importance: in the unlikely event
Congress enacted it, the Supreme Court would hurl the law back across
First Street, N.E., with "Are you out of your collective minds?"
scrawled across it. But Bradley's proposal is profoundly important as
a symptom of the indifference--no, hostility--of campaign reformers to
First Amendment values.
Now that it has become "progressive" to "reform" politics by
restricting political speech, reformers are constantly dreaming up
refinements to the restrictions. As a result, the nation is acquiring
a speech code that, like the tax code, is constantly in play, subject
to endless tweakings by groups seeking additional advantages.
Speech-rationing laws, once present, proliferate, like ants in the
kitchen.
======================================================
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, Oct 5, 1999 p1.
Title: Testing time for campaign finance; Supreme Court hears a
case today that may revamp the role of money in.(USA)
Author: Warren Richey
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 The Christian Science Publishing Society
The debate over campaign finance moves from state legislatures and the
halls of Congress to the US Supreme Court today, where justices must
determine how best to break a constitutional logjam over the role of
money in politics.
At stake are two different perspectives on the same issue.
In one camp are campaign-finance reformers who consider money and
campaign contributions to be a potentially corrupting influence on
candidates and elections.
In the other camp are First Amendment freedom-of-speech advocates who
view candidates raising large amounts of money as a healthy and
essential part of the democratic process.
It will be the job of the justices to decide which of these two
conflicting outlooks is most consistent with the Constitution.
The case, involving a Missouri law limiting campaign contributions, is
among the most important to be argued this term. If five of the nine
justices agree with a federal appeals court in St. Louis - which
struck down the state's limit on campaign donations - the vast
majority of campaign-contribution limits enacted in 35 states would be
called into question. It could also jeopardize contribution limits
that have applied to congressional and presidential elections for
nearly a quarter-century.
Presidential price tag
That would set the stage for a proliferation of campaign fund-raising
that would easily make the 2000 elections for Congress and the
presidency the most expensive and freewheeling in US history.
On the other side, if a majority of the court overturns the appeals
court, it could set an important precedent that those who contribute
money to political campaigns enjoy a lower level of First Amendment
freedom of speech than a candidate who uses that same money to
directly spread a political message.
"This case is about whether the court will continue as it has in the
past to protect the First Amendment right of citizens to contribute to
candidates of their choice," says James Bopp, a Terre Haute, Ind.,
lawyer who is mounting legal challenges to campaign-finance
restrictions around the country.
Reformers have a different view. "What is at stake is the ability of
states to set reasonable regulations on the amount of money going to
political officeholders from private interests," says Brenda Wright of
the National Voting Rights Institute in Boston, an advocacy group that
supports campaign-finance reform.
At issue in the Missouri case is whether the state's $1,075 limit on
individual contributions violates the free-speech rights of would-be
contributors and candidates.
When Zev David Fredman decided to run for the office of Missouri state
auditor in 1998, he knew he faced an uphill battle.
As a first-time candidate, he did not have a broad network of
political contacts or a ready-made base of contributors. But he did
have a small number of supporters who were willing to make large
contributions to fund his candidacy. The problem was that Missouri law
barred all contributions larger than $1,075.
In effect, Mr. Fredman's ability to compete successfully in the
election was hindered by the state's campaign-finance law.
Fredman and one of his supporters, a political-action committee called
Shrink Missouri Government PAC, filed suit in federal court saying the
law violated their First Amendment right to engage in politics, a
fundamental form of free speech.
A federal judge threw out the case, but the Eighth Circuit Court of
Appeals agreed with Fredman and the PAC, striking down Missouri's
campaign-contribution limits as violating the Constitution.
The divided appeals court ruled that Missouri's campaign contribution
limits were set too low. In addition, it ruled that because the
state's contribution limits were adopted by lawmakers as a means to
protect against corruption, the law must also be struck down in that
the state was unable to present any evidence of corruption in Missouri
involving large campaign contributions. Such evidence is necessary,
the court said, to justify the infringement of free-speech rights of
candidates and contributors.
The Supreme Court must now decide whether the Eighth Circuit applied
the correct test from the 1976 landmark campaign-finance case, Buckley
v. Valeo.
In that case, the Supreme Court wasn't entirely clear about the
standard of proof necessary to justify limiting campaign
contributions.
Reformers argue that the court should adopt a common-sense approach in
which public concern about the possible appearance of corruption from
candidates accepting large campaign contributions should be enough to
justify limits.
First Amendment advocates counter that the Constitution requires
actual proof of corruption or actual proof that contributions in
excess of the limits would create an appearance of corruption. They
argue that no such evidence was presented in the Missouri case and,
thus, the law must be struck down.
"The essence of this case is that if the state wants to limit your
freedom, it has to prove that it is necessary," says Mr. Bopp.
History as a yardstick
The Supreme Court in its 1976 precedent relied on common sense and an
understanding of history, says Deborah Goldberg of the Brennan Center
for Justice at New York University School of Law.
The 1976 court, with a fresh memory of Nixon administration
campaign-finance abuses, determined that the potential for corruption
resulting from large campaign contributions was self-evident and that
no further evidence was needed, she says.
Ms. Goldberg says the Eighth Circuit's reliance on proof of actual
corruption, if embraced by the Supreme Court, would create a new
constitutional standard that would make it extremely difficult for
legislators to satisfy when attempting to enact campaign-finance laws.
A decision in the case is expected by next summer.
(c) Copyright 1999. The Christian Science Publishing Society
========================================================
Source: National Review, Sept 27, 1999 p40.
Title: Bucks and Buckley : The plaintiff makes his case.
(campaign finance reform)
Author: James L. Buckley
Abstract: The report recently released by the Twentieth Century Fund
entitled "Buckley Stops Here: Loosening the Judicial
Stranglehold on Campaign finance Reform proposes a legal
strategy in the Buckley v. Valeo case. It suggests strategy
to persuade a Supreme Court reversal in the Buckley
decision. The Supreme Court held that any limitation on a
the amount a campaign committee or independent citizen may
spend to support a federal office candidate is forbidden.
The report supports stringent restrictions on amounts
contributed by all players in elections.
Subjects: Campaign funds - Reports
Fund raising - Laws, regulations, etc.
Locations: United States
Gov Agncy: United States. Supreme Court - Laws, regulations, etc.
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 National Review Inc.
I suppose it is time that the Buckley in Buckley v. Valeo say a word
about today's campaign-finance-reform debate. Recently, the Twentieth
Century Fund released a report entitled "Buckley Stops Here: Loosening
the Judicial Stranglehold on Campaign Finance Reform." As the title
suggests, the report proposes a legal strategy for persuading the
Supreme Court to reverse certain of its holdings in the Buckley
decision. The authors of the report are particularly concerned about
the Court's conclusion that the First Amendment forbids any limitation
on what a campaign committee or independent citizen may spend in
support of a candidate for federal office or on what a candidate may
expend on his own campaign. For them, meaningful reform requires
stringent restrictions on the amounts that may be contributed or spent
by all players in the election game. As I am a federal judge, I accept
the Court's construction of the Constitution; but as the lead
plaintiff in that 1976 case, I feel obliged to offer a dissenting view
as to what constitutes true reform, as a matter of public policy.
It is instructive to consider who the Buckley plaintiffs were. They
were political underdogs and outsiders. Although I was a United States
senator at the time, I had squeaked into office in 1970 as the first
third-party candidate in forty years to be elected to the Senate. My
co-plaintiffs included Senator Eugene McCarthy, who bucked his party's
establishment by running a sufficiently effective challenge to cause
President Lyndon Johnson to withdraw his candidacy for reelection; the
very conservative American Conservative Union and the equally liberal
New York Civil Liberties Union; New York's Conservative Party and the
national Libertarian Party; and Stewart Mott, a wealthy sponsor of
liberal causes who had contributed $220,000 to the McCarthy
presidential campaign.
What we all had in common was a concern that the 1974 amendments to
the Federal Election Campaign Act would squeeze independent voices and
reform movements out of the political process by making it even more
difficult than it already was to raise effective challenges to the
political status quo. That legislation established, among other
things, an elaborate system of public financing for presidential
elections, and it placed ceilings on what could be spent by
presidential and congressional campaign committees. It also restricted
independent spending in support of a candidate to $1,000, limited
individual campaign contributions to $1,000, but permitted
contributions of $5,000 to political action committees (the notorious
"PACs") which, in turn, could contribute up to $5,000 to a candidate.
We believed that these restrictions were fundamentally flawed both
constitutionally and as a matter of public policy. The core value
protected by the First Amendment's speech clause is the freedom of
political speech. It is incontrovertible that, in today's world, it
takes money-and a great deal of it-for political speech to be heard.
Therefore, we opposed the 1974 amendments' limits on contributions and
spending as unlawful restrictions on political speech. We found the
legislation equally objectionable on grounds of public policy, because
a healthy democracy should encourage competition in the political
marketplace rather than increase the difficulties already faced by
those challenging incumbents or the political establishment.
Incumbents enjoy enormous advantages over challengers. These include
name recognition, the use of the frank to communicate with
constituents, automatic access to the media, and the goodwill derived
from handling constituent problems.
Given this fundamental political reality, a challenger who is not a
celebrity in his own right must be able to persuade both the media and
a broad base of potential contributors that his candidacy is credible.
This requires a substantial amount of seed money. As I testified in
Buckley, I could not have won election in 1970 if the present $1,000
limit on individual contributions had been in place. Thanks to
substantial gifts from a handful of individuals, my campaign was able
at the outset to hire key personnel, print campaign literature, and
rent a strategically located New York City headquarters. This caused
the media to take my candidacy seriously; and that, in turn, enabled
me to raise (largely through mass mailings) the $2 million required
for a competitive campaign. Nor could Senator McCarthy have launched a
serious challenge to an incumbent president without the more than $1
million that was provided by fewer than a dozen early supporters.
We won a number of our arguments before the Supreme Court, but lost
the critical one. The Court agreed with us that the restrictions
placed on what could be spent in support of a congressional candidate
were unconstitutional. It held, however, that the limitations placed
on contributions by individuals and PACs were constitutional because
of Congress's expressed concern for avoiding the appearances of
improper influence on federal elections. But because an individual
cannot corrupt himself, the Court overturned the limits that Congress
had placed on what candidates could spend on their own campaigns.
THE BURDEN OF FUNDRAISING
In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision, we are left with a
package of federal election laws and regulations that have distorted
virtually every aspect of the election process. The 1974 amendments
were supposed to de- emphasize the role of money in federal elections.
Instead, by limiting individual contributions to a thousand dollars of
diminishing value, today's law has made the search for money a
candidate's central preoccupation. When I ran in 1970, I never made
telephone calls requesting money, and I doubt that I attended as many
as a dozen fundraising functions. Passing the hat was exclusively the
concern of my finance committee. Today, the need to scrounge for money
has proven so burdensome that two senators have recently cited this as
a major reason for their decision to retire from public life.
The federal regulation of campaigns has all but driven grass-roots
action from the political scene. The rules have become too complex,
the costs of a misstep too great. In 1970, when on campaign tours
around New York State, I would often run into groups that, on their
own initiative, had rented storefronts from which to dispense my
campaign literature, man the phones, and deploy volunteers. Today,
anyone intrepid enough to engage in such spontaneous action is well
advised to enlist the counsel of an election lawyer and accountant,
and even then he must be prepared to prove his independence in court.
In the case of my New York storefront volunteers, the mere possession
of my campaign handouts would have been cited as proof enough of
collusion.
The restrictions on giving are also at the root of the alarums in
recent times over the uses of "soft" money, a word of art used to
describe money raised by political parties that is not subject to
federal election law limits and sometimes used to describe all
unregulated money. The term describes, for example, the use of funds
to advocate positions with which a particular candidate is
identified-so-called "issue advocacy." Such expenditures are perfectly
legal and, in fact, constitutionally protected if one is to take the
Supreme Court's holdings in Buckley at face value. Nevertheless, the
reformers are demanding the closure of what they describe as the
loopholes in present law that permit such egregious abuses of
political speech.
Today's reformers also complain about the power of PACs, and there is
some justification for their concerns. PACs can have very specific
objectives, and they may condition contributions on a candidate's
commitment to vote this way or that on future legislation. But these
committees are the beneficiaries of the restrictions placed on
individual giving by the reformers of 1974. A citizen who would
contribute $25,000 to one or two candidates in whom he believes, but
is limited to a gift of $1,000 to each, will find other ways to deploy
the rest of the money he has earmarked for political purposes.
But perhaps the most disturbing consequence of the 1974 amendments has
been the way they have consolidated the political power of favored
establishment forces. By compounding the difficulties faced by
challengers, they have enlarged the advantages already enjoyed by
incumbents. By restricting the political speech of political
outsiders, they have enhanced the power of the two major parties. By
discouraging individual action, they have enhanced the political
influence of trade associations and labor unions. And if current
efforts to control issue advocacy succeed, the result will be to
increase still more the political power already exercised by the mass
media.
THE WAY OUT
There is general agreement that the current state of the law governing
federal campaigns is worse than unsatisfactory. The answer, however,
is not to place further restrictions on the freedom of speech but to
reexamine the premises on which the existing ones have been based. In
the first instance, it has been amply demonstrated in a dozen recent
races that money cannot "buy" elections. The voters have the final
say. What money can do is buy the exposure without which no candidate,
however meritorious, has a chance. This is the major reason that sound
public policy would not place artificial obstacles in the way of
challengers trying to launch a viable campaign.
Second, while it is of course true that large contributions can
corrupt, the likelihood that a candidate will be seduced by such
contributions is vastly overstated. The overwhelming majority of
wealthy donors back candidates with whom they are in general
agreement, and they are far more tolerant of differences on this point
or that than are the PACs or other single-issue organizations to which
a candidate will otherwise turn for necessary financing. It is true,
yes, that a major financial contributor will have readier access to a
candidate he has helped elect and that with access comes the
opportunity to persuade. But corruption occurs only when a legislator
casts a vote that violates his convictions in exchange for financial
support; and virtually every study of actual voting patterns suggests
that this kind of corruption is too rare to warrant the distortions
created by the present law in an attempt to avoid the appearances of
impropriety.
This is not to deny the importance of such appearances in a cynical
age. A less damaging remedy is available, however, and that is full
and immediate disclosure. Campaign committees can and should be
required to record contributions on a daily basis and to make that
information immediately available over the Internet. The opposing
campaign can be relied on to publicize any gift that can give rise to
an adverse inference. The public can then judge whether the
contribution is apt to corrupt its recipient. What makes no sense is
to retain a set of rules that makes it impossible for a Stewart Mott
to provide a Eugene McCarthy with the seed money essential to a
credible challenge to a sitting president, or that makes politics the
playground of the super-rich who can finance their own campaigns.
The greater the government's involvement in our lives, the more
important it is that participation in political debate be unhampered
by artificial restraints. The problem today is not that too much money
is spent on elections. It isn't. Procter & Gamble spends more each
year in advertising its products than all political campaigns and
parties do in extolling the merits of theirs. The problem is that the
electoral process is saddled by a tangle of campaign laws and
regulations that restrict the ability of independent voices to make
themselves heard and that rig the political game in favor of the most
privileged players. And because congressional incumbents are the
beneficiaries of the tilted playing field (the advantages of Senate
incumbency are worth well over $1 million in some states), it is
fanciful to believe that Congress will rewrite the rule book to give
outsiders an even break.
The road to true reform lies not in trying to persuade the Supreme
Court to permit further restrictions on political speech, as the
authors of the Twentieth Century Fund report and others are seeking to
do, but to persuade Congress to rescind those that now exist while
requiring the immediate disclosure of contributions. We have nothing
to fear from unfettered political debate, and everything to gain. If
artificial restraints are lifted, viable candidates will not lack the
funds with which to be heard, because no side of the policy debate has
a monopoly on money. American democracy can ill afford government
control of the political marketplace-and that is where today's
reformers would lead us.
========================================================
Source: Commonweal, Sept 24, 1999 p9.
Title: CAMPAIGN SPENDING.(the Committee for Economic Development
report calling for campaign finance reform received little
attention until it was attacked by Senator Mitch McConnell)
(Brief Article)
Author: E J. DIONNE
Subjects: Legislators - Political activity
People: McConnell, Mitch - Political activity
Locations: United States
Organizations: Committee for Economic Development - Reports
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Commonweal Foundation
Business cries uncle
No one is more fiercely consistent in opposing reform of our broken
campaign money system than Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky
Republican (and chair of the national Republican committee that raises
funds for senatorial candidates). So when the senator attacked a group
of business leaders who say the money chase verges on what one of them
calls "a shakedown," it was not his intention to give the reform
movement a boost.
That's what he's done with his assault on the Committee for Economic
Development (CED). The venerable business organization's sin was
issuing a report endorsing campaign-finance reform. Its argument, not
heard widely enough, is that many business leaders are as tired of
being pressured to cough up political money as politicians are at
having to raise it.
"In many, many cases it's a shakedown, and they have no choice but to
give," Edward Kangus, chairman of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, said of
his fellow executives in an interview. "It's presented to them as,
'This is what you have to do,' with whatever veiled message that
sends. Especially if they're a regulated industry, they have no choice
but to play the game." Kangus, who co-chairs the committee on campaign
finance reform at CED, also worries about business complicity with a
bad system. "Our customers believe that we are co-conspirators in this
system and that we are as corrupt as the politicians who are pushing
this on us. And that's not good for business."
Charles Kolb, president of the CED and a Republican who served in the
Bush administration, summarized his group's thoroughly free-market
view this way: "Our business trustees would rather compete in the
marketplace than in the political arena."
In its report, the Washington-based CED endorses banning the flow of
unregulated "soft money" to campaigns, an issue that will sharply
divide Congress in the coming weeks. This group's most innovative
suggestion is to use public money to provide a two-for-one match of
all small contributions-those of $200 or less.
That means, if you gave $200, the fund would kick in $400 more. But
the two-for-one match only covers the first $200 contributed. That
would mean that a $1,000 contributor would get the same $400 match as
the $200 giver. Matching only small contributions, the report says,
would provide candidates "with a strong financial incentive to seek
out small contributions from a large number of donors."
Ah, but isn't this "taxpayer financing" of politics? Refreshingly, the
CED doesn't flinch. "We make no apology for proposing direct public
financing of this program," its report declares. "The improvement of
our campaign finance system is a public benefit, and it should
therefore be publicly funded. It is an investment in the people's
business."
The CED also proposes lifting the current $1,000 ceiling on individual
contributions to $3,000. By itself, this change would only increase
money's influence on politics. But as a new way of winning votes for a
broad package of serious reforms, it might be a useful concession to
politicians tired of wasting time raising money in $1,000 chunks.
Faced with opponents hard to stereotype as wide-eyed radicals,
McConnell tried to do so anyway. In a letter to business executives
associated with the group, he charged the CED with an "all-out
campaign to eviscerate private-sector participation in politics." My,
my. He said CED supported a "radical campaign finance agenda" and
"antibusiness speech controls." Ominously, he suggested to his
correspondents that "public withdrawal from this organization would be
a reasonable response." Since his letter was first made public by the
New York Times, McConnell has stayed on the attack. His office
released an op-ed piece he's circulating to Kentucky newspapers
charging the CED with "unethical conduct."
The CED, for its part, has noted the irony that McConnell's publicly
expressed solicitude for First Amendment rights did not stop him from
seeking "to stifle" theirs. "This letter has kind of exposed the way
the system works in a fashion that I don't think is terribly
flattering," Kolb says, referring to McConnell's efforts to push
businesses to sever ties with the CED. "The subtext is very clear:
Keep playing with those guys, and I won't play with you."
The message of this episode is simple: Many business people believe
the system holds them for political ransom. It distorts the market by
producing rules and tax laws that favor one competitor over another
not on the basis of market prowess, but as a product of who
contributes to whom and who works the system best. The committed
capitalists at the CED understand that. And now, thanks to Senator
McConnell, they'll be heard.
(c) 1999, Washington Post Writers Group
========================================================
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, Sept 22, 1999 p3.
Title: High-risk tactic of campaign-finance reformers; A Senate
vote on the latest bill, scaled down to woo GOP votes, is
expected next month.(USA)(Senate As Sticking Point)
Author: Ann Scott Tyson
People: McCain, John
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Christian Science Publishing Society
A longstanding drive within Congress to tighten federal controls over
campaign funding faces an important test next month in the Senate,
where advocates are pursuing a high-risk strategy to halt what they
call a corrupting flood of unrestricted money in US elections.
Senate backers of campaign-finance reform have introduced a
dramatically scaled- back version of their bill in a bid to overcome
an anticipated Republican-led filibuster - the tactic that has
repeatedly defeated such efforts in the past.
"I am ... a realist and know that we must not let the perfect bill be
the enemy of real reform," said Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona as he
announced the new bipartisan bill jointly sponsored with Sen. Russell
Feingold (D) of Wisconsin.
By limiting the latest bill to a ban on "soft-money" donations,
Senator Feingold says he and Senator McCain seek to "change the
dynamic" and sway colleagues who opposed measures contained in the
broader, original version as unconstitutional. Although 52 senators
backed the more comprehensive bill last year, eight more votes are
needed to overcome a filibuster.
Still, the whittled-down version could also draw criticism as too
weak, especially from Senate Democrats who seek more sweeping changes.
The new Senate bill would ban one of the most controversial aspects of
the US campaign-finance system put in place in 1974 - the burgeoning
use since the 1980s of unlimited "soft money" donations to political
parties to indirectly back candidates.
Soft money consists of fund-raising that occurs outside the scope of
federal laws. It allows parties to collect unlimited and unregulated
contributions or gifts from unions, corporations, and wealthy people.
These are supposed to be used solely for party-building activities and
not to promote individual candidates.
Yet such soft-money contributions in recent years have become a
mainstay of party fund-raising, multiplying from about $19 million in
1980 to $86 million in 1992 and more than $260 million in 1996.
Overall, the national parties raised more than $55 million in soft
money during the first six months of 1999 - 80 percent more than
during the same period in the last presidential election cycle,
according to Common Cause, a Washington pro-reform group.
Advocates of reform contend that the ballooning soft-money
contributions have made federal limits meaningless, allowed parties to
circumvent controls on aiding candidates, and revived the problems of
corruption and undue influence that the 1970s reforms attempted to
eradicate.
But opponents contend that the rise of soft money has strengthened
national political parties and thus boosted citizen participation in
elections.
So far, success has eluded congressional advocates of campaign-finance
reform. Despite the passage of several bills by the House, most have
died in the Senate or been vetoed by the president. Last week, much as
it did last year, the House passed a comprehensive reform bill
sponsored by Rep. Christopher Shays (R) of Connecticut and Rep. Martin
Meehan (D) of Massachusetts by a 252-to-177 vote.
However, proponents of the reform in the Senate hope the dynamic there
will be different this year when the new bill comes to the floor by
Oct. 12. Although the bare-bones McCain-Feingold bill only bans soft
money, amendments that could beef up the measure will be allowed,
according to an agreement reached with Senate majority leader Trent
Lott (R) of Mississippi.
Supporters of reform hope that senators will offer amendments to
tailor the bill to their liking, meaning that "everyone is a possible
convert," says McCain spokeswoman Nancy Ives.
GOP senators who have expressed some willingness to back reform
include Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon.
Others considered possible backers include freshmen senators and those
in tough reelection campaigns. Last year, all 45 Democrats joined
seven Republicans voting for the McCain-Feingold bill.
Advocates also believe the broader political environment is more
favorable to campaign-finance reform today than a year ago. The issue
has greater visibility, partly thanks to backing for aspects of reform
from presidential candidates, including Republicans McCain and Gov.
George W. Bush, as well as Democrats Al Gore and Bill Bradley.
The Senate also has a greater window - a full year - to pursue passage
of a reform bill, even if it meets with an initial filibuster. "There
is a lot more time to focus public pressure on the Senate," says
Donald Simon, executive director of Common Cause. "If it doesn't break
a filibuster now, it will be back." Although he conceded, "there's no
question it's a tough fight."
Indeed, Senate opponents, led by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky,
say they are confident the issue will again go down in defeat. Senator
McConnell says the ban on soft money would unfairly disadvantage
Republicans.
Republicans, heavily backed by corporations, have historically raised
more soft money than Democrats, who enjoy more labor support. "If you
get rid of soft money, Republicans would suffer more than Democrats,"
says a Senate Republican staff member.
Meanwhile, Republicans and some Democrats voice concern that the
curtailed McCain-Feingold bill would not work, because the cash banned
as soft-money contributions would simply flow into electoral politics
through other avenues.
A voting record on campaign finance
Since 1990, Congress has considered campaign-finance reform bills that
include a range of issues, from voluntary candidate-spending limits,
to capping contributions from political action committees, to the
recent 'soft money' bans. Here are some key votes.
Year House Senate President 1990 255-155 in favor 59-40 in favor veto
1991-92 273-156 in favor 56-42 in favor
veto 1993 (R) 173-263 against 60-38 in favor (D) 255-175 in favor
tabled 1995-96 162-259 against 177-243 against tabled 1998 252-179 in
favor tabled 1999 252-177 in favor pending Source: CRS Campaign
Finance Reform Briefing Book
(c) Copyright 1999. The Christian Science Publishing Society
=====================================================
Source: Business Week, Sept 20, 1999 i3647 p45.
Title: CAMPAIGN-FINANCE REFORM: THIS TIME, THE FINISH LINE?
(Brief Article)
Subjects: Political reform - Laws, regulations, etc.
Campaign funds - Laws, regulations, etc.
Locations: United States
Organizations: Republican Party - Social policy
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
For years, Washington has been locked in a familiar cycle. Campaign
spending soars. Inevitably, some finagling pol triggers a scandal.
Reformers feel the public will finally demand changes in
loophole-ridden campaign-finance rules. Yet the drive fizzles, doomed
by apathy and incumbent politicians' fierce desire to protect the
status quo. Will 1999 see a rerun? So far, the script looks familiar.
But the stock ending may be in doubt. As Congress returns from recess,
reform prospects are improving. Presidential candidates are drawing
attention to abuses in ``cleaner than Clinton'' manifestos. Record
fund-raising keeps the spotlight on checkbook politics. And some
executives, weary of nonstop shakedowns, are joining the reform drive.
``There's a feeling that politicians can be embarrassed'' into
tightening the rules this year, says New York real estate developer
Daniel Rose.
NEW LOOPHOLE? Rose and scores of other business leaders plan to blitz
Congress with letters and phone calls when it revisits reform
proposals this fall. First up is a House measure, co-sponsored by
Representatives Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Martin T. Meehan
(D-Mass.). The bill, which passed last year on a 252 to 179 vote,
would ban ``soft money'' donations. These unlimited gifts, ostensibly
meant to strengthen political parties, in reality are used to back
individual candidates. The proposal also sets strict limits on ``issue
ads'' by interest groups--thinly veiled candidate plugs in the guise
of voter education. The bill is expected to pass handily despite
procedural hurdles thrown up by GOP leaders. Among the threats: a
``poison pill'' amendment by Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) that
would let parties accept soft-money checks for Internet campaigning,
such as Web site banner ads. The result: a potentially huge new
loophole. The real action will be in the Senate. Last year, a
filibuster killed a companion bill by John McCain (R-Ariz.) and
Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.). This year, timing may help. ``Having the
Senate vote on the heels of the House will increase the pressure,''
says Donald J. Simon, executive vice-president at reform group Common
Cause. Getting the 60 votes needed to snuff out soft money will be
tough. But GOP leaders are feeling the heat. Some 100 execs--among
them, Sara Lee Corp. CEO John H. Bryan and Frank C. Carlucci, chairman
of Carlyle Group investment bank--backed a call by the progressive
Committee for Economic Development for a soft-money ban. Senator Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.), who heads the Senate GOP campaign committee, lashed
out with angry letters to CED trustees, urging them to resign. The
tactic may backfire. Since McConnell's late-July blast, the CED picked
up 30 more executive endorsements, reports its president, Charles E.M.
Kolb. ``The business community,'' says Feingold, ``may put us over the
top.'' Even so, Senate prospects are iffy. To woo more Republicans,
McCain and Feingold may opt for a simple soft-money ban coupled with a
higher ceiling on individual gifts to candidates--so-called hard
money--now set at $1,000. They also may give up on curbing issue ads.
But that's a nonstarter for Democrats, who trail the GOP in hard money
and fear Republican-aligned groups will flood the airwaves with issue
ads. Reformers plan to deploy phone banks, mailings, and door-to-door
lobbying. They'll get help from such ardent pro-reform execs as
venture capitalist Jerome Kohlberg Jr., who vows to buttonhole
lawmakers. If the odd alliance of Naderites and Country Clubbers
jells, Congress may be unable to resist the clamor for change. It
won't be the sweeping overhaul reformers once envisioned. But it will
be something.
========================================================
Source: The New Republic, August 23, 1999 p6.
Title: TRB from Washington: Cash Out.(campaign finance reform and
the 2000 presidential election)(Statistical Data Included)
Author: John B. Judis
Abstract: Background on how the campaign finance system was developed
is presented. Campaign finance reform continues to be a hot
political issue that is relevant to the 2000 presidential
election. Democrat Bill Bradley and Republican John McCain
have proposed remedies to the system, while candidate Al
Gore has not.
Subjects: Presidential candidates - Political activity
Political campaigns - Finance
Campaign funds - Laws, regulations, etc.
People: Bradley, Bill - Political activity
McCain, John - Political activity
Gore, Albert, Jr. - Political activity
Locations: United States
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 The New Republic Inc.
The outcome of the current contest for the Republican presidential
nomination may be decided before any citizen votes in a primary or
caucus. It will be determined by whichever candidate can get the
highest number of wealthy people to write $1,000 checks. This is no
way to run a democracy, and it is a result of our sorry system of
campaign finance. Two presidential candidates, Democrat Bill Bradley
and Republican John McCain, have recently addressed the flaws of this
system and proposed remedies for them. The other major candidates have
not. Al Gore has gone on the record endorsing campaign finance reform,
and, in 1986, as a senator, he introduced major campaign finance
reform legislation. But, when Bradley made his proposals, Gore's
campaign chairman, Tony Coelho, who resigned from Congress in 1989
under a cloud of scandal, focused attention on Bradley's integrity
rather than on the merits of his proposals. George W. Bush, one of the
chief beneficiaries of the current finance system, initially took no
position at all (the issue must not have been included in his talking
points), but, forced to respond, he embraced proposals that would make
things even worse.
America's original promise of political democracy was based on a
premise of rough economic equality among the country's farmers and
craftsmen, which, projected onto the political realm, would prevent
the rise of tyranny and monopoly. But the growth of large-scale
industry after the Civil War undermined this formula for success. Not
only did it give the top tier of bankers and businessmen inordinate
power over key economic decisions, it also gave them power, through
their control of campaign finance, over government itself. During the
twentieth century, there were two major efforts to reform the
political system so that it could act as a public political
counterweight to this private economic inequality. In 1907, Theodore
Roosevelt sought to introduce public financing of campaigns but had to
settle for barring direct corporate contributions. And, in 1974, in
the midst of the Watergate scandal, Congress passed comprehensive
reform measures, but they were undermined by perverse court decisions
and by loopholes left in the legislation.
There are two ways in which our current system reinforces rather than
counters this inequality of private economic power. First, most of the
contributions to congressional and presidential primary candidates
come from the nation's most wealthy individuals. In a study funded by
the Joyce Foundation, researchers found that in the 1996 congressional
elections, 81 percent of the donors had an annual family income of
$100,000 or more, while 80 percent of Americans made no contributions
at all to a candidate or political party. The Joyce study also
discovered that contributors tend to be more conservative, more
Republican, and more inclined to slash public services for the sake of
a tax cut than the average voter. That's troubling when you consider
that those who contribute gain inordinate influence over the political
process and skew the results toward their own objectives. The current
system also allows candidates to spend as much of their own money as
they want, enabling fabulously rich individuals such as oil heir
Michael Huffington and magazine heir Steve Forbes to wield far more
influence over public debate than their wisdom or experience alone
might entitle them to.
jum...@my-deja.com
Second, there are the unregulated contributions that work their way
back into elections. In 1979, to revitalize political parties,
Congress began allowing them to raise unlimited and unrestricted "soft
money" contributions to put toward "party-building" activities, such
as voter registration. But, with the approval of the courts, parties
have increasingly used this measure to garner huge contributions that
can be used to directly influence election results--either through
paying for overhead campaign expenses or through issue advertising.
Soft money contributions are even more skewed by class than hard-money
gifts to candidates. In 1996, 90 percent of the $203 million in soft
money came from corporations, trade associations, and other business
groups and businessmen. These kinds of spending were augmented by
millions in independent expenditures that were not officially
authorized by either candidates or parties and therefore escaped
restrictions on disclosure and on the size of contributions. The
afl-cio set the pace for independent expenditures in 1996, but, for
2000, one business coalition is planning to outspend the federation by
five- or sixfold.
McCain, with Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, has sponsored
legislation to address the second of these problems. McCain and
Feingold want to ban soft money contributions to parties from
corporations, unions, and individuals and to also ban the use of
independent ads that specifically promote a candidate during the last
30 days before a primary and the last 60 days before a general
election. Bradley's proposals echo those in McCain and Feingold's
bill, but they also address the problems created by private financing
of congressional elections. Bradley would have the public fund general
elections and grant matching funds for contributions of $250 or less
during primaries. He would also require television broadcasters to
make free airtime available to candidates 60 days before an election.
Bradley's proposal, which admittedly doesn't have to conform to the
realities of today's Congress, would clearly go much further than
McCain and Feingold in severing the tie between private wealth and
public politics. Requiring taxpayer funds would certainly prove
controversial, but, as the system continues to sour, citizens would
have to weigh the money spent in public financing against the greater
billions that special interests exact in subsidies and tax breaks as a
result of their campaign contributions.
Characteristically, Bush initially said nothing at all about campaign
finance reform, but, pressed by reporters in April, he announced that
he favored raising the limits on individual contributions. Bush didn't
say how high he would raise the limits, but in Texas, where the size
of contributions is not restricted, 50 contributors to Bush's 1998
gubernatorial campaign gave more than $50,000 each. By itself, raising
the limits would simply increase the role of wealth in financing
elections. Bush took a similar stance toward soft money. Faced last
month with questions about the McCain-Feingold bill, Bush declared
that he would ban soft money contributions from corporations and
unions but would not impose any limit on individual contributions.
Since the bulk of individual soft money contributions come from
wealthy contributors-- for instance, the $100,000 contributors in the
Republicans' "Team 100" Club or the Democrats' "Team 2000"--Bush's
measure would not alter, and might even aggravate, the prevailing
inequality of political influence.
Bush would clearly prefer the whole issue to go away. So, perhaps,
would Gore and Coelho. But, thanks to a threat last month from McCain
to attach his bill to other legislation, Senate Majority Leader Trent
Lott was forced to agree to a debate and to vote on the McCainFeingold
bill this fall. That will present an opportunity--perhaps the last one
before next year's elections--to grant the issue of campaign finance
reform the prominence and attention it deserves.
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)
=======================================================
Source: America, July 17, 1999 v181 i2 p4.
Title: Wisconsin Bishops for Campaign Finance Reform.(Brief Article)
Subjects: Bishops - Political activity
Campaign funds - Social policy
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 America Press Inc.
The Catholic bishops of Wisconsin, saying they share a growing concern
that the health of U.S. democracy is threatened by the current
political campaign process, have issued a draft statement supporting
campaign finance reform. The statement-for which they are inviting
public comment before writing a final draft-was released on June 29 by
the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, the bishops' public policy arm. In
the draft, the bishops rejected the idea that regulation of campaign
expenses inhibits free speech, which some pro-life groups have
maintained. The bishops do not endorse any specific reform plan, but
instead set out criteria for judging such proposals.
===========================================================
Source: U.S. News & World Report, July 12, 1999 v127 i2 p46.
Title: What money can't buy.
(campaign finance reform)(Brief Article)
Author: Ackerman; Margaret and Elise Loftus
Subjects: Corporate welfare - Political aspects
Campaign funds - Moral and ethical aspects
People: McCain, John - Moral and ethical aspects
Bush, George W. - Moral and ethical aspects
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 U.S. News and World Report Inc.
Critics of 'corporate welfare' are finding new allies during this
presidential cycle
On the same day George W. Bush revealed a record-breaking campaign war
chest, two other Republican presidential candidates took aim at
fat-cat donors, political favors they buy. Rep. John Kasich of Ohio
denounced "corporate welfare" at a hearing on Capitol Hill. "A small
businessman living on Main Street," said Kasich, "can't get the same
kind of benefits that some of the very largest multinational
corporations can get inside this country."
Meanwhile, campaigning in New Hampshire, Sen. John McCain explicitly
linked such subsidies to a corrupt campaign-finance system. "We are
defenders of an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both
parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the
highest bidder," McCain declared, vowing to make reform of both the
campaign finance system and the tax code, which provides billions in
corporate giveaways, the center of his campaign.
Corporate welfare, or the practice of granting public funds and favors
to private companies, has existed since colonial times, when
corporations like the Jamestown Co. and Massachusetts Bay Co. received
exclusive territorial privileges. For nearly as long a time, Americans
have objected to such favoritism. Critics at last week's congressional
hearing produced a laundry list of alleged abuses, ranging from
$300,000 in government help to improve the 3,000 rockets set off
nightly in Disney theme parks to $268 million given to IBM, General
Motors, and General Electric as part of the Department of Commerce's
Advanced Technology Program. (According to Public Disclosure Inc., a
Washington, D.C., firm that analyzes government data and publishes it
on the Web, those companies gave $465,700 in soft money--unregulated
political contributions funneled through third parties--to Republicans
and $154,000 to Democrats last year. In just the second half of 1998,
they spent $8.8 million on lobbyists.)
Welfare reform. "Now is a time when the corporate welfare tide can be
turned," says consumer activist extraordinaire Ralph Nader. And though
few believe that the Republican-dominated Congress will make
significant reforms (bearing in mind that Republicans received about
$32 million more soft money than did Democrats in 1998), corporate
welfare seems destined to become an issue during campaign 2000. Former
Sen. Bill Bradley, an architect of the 1986 tax reform that eliminated
hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate loopholes, will deliver a
major speech on money and politics later this month.
Indeed, the campaign against corporate welfare could prove an
effective weapon against Bush's donation-fueled juggernaut. One of the
first positions taken by the Texas governor was an endorsement of
ethanol subsidies, a virtual gift to agribusiness behemoth Archer
Daniels Midland. "We are all corrupted," says McCain. "The American
people want their money spent on their priorities, and their
priorities aren't ethanol subsidies and free advertising for giant
corporations." Voters may prove him right.
==========================================================
Source: Time, July 5, 1999 v154 i1 p37.
Title: McCain's Next Battle: The Senator could be Bush's big
headache. He wants to raise hell about campaign-finance
reform.(Nation/Campaign 2000)(Brief Article)
Author: James Carney
Subjects: United States - Politics and government
Elections - 2000
Politicians - Attitudes
Political campaigns - Finance
People: Bush, George W. - Political activity
McCain, John - Political activity
Organizations: Republican Party - Planning
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
When George W. Bush swept into Washington last week, the Republican
Party establishment threw itself at his feet. Thirty-six G.O.P.
Senators, 100 Congressmen and 2,000 well-tailored donors, many of them
lobbyists, all paid homage to the Texas Governor--a capital reception
so warm and so lucrative that even the composed candidate seemed
caught up in the hype. To the fawning Congressmen he gushed, "I look
forward to working with you," as though he had already been elected
President. And he has reason to be cocky. By the end of this week, he
will have raised more than $20 million--as much as all his G.O.P.
rivals combined--in less than four months.
But could there be a downside to Bush's embrace by his party's
leaders--and by the corporate special interests who lobby them?
Arizona Senator John McCain, Bush's rival for the G.O.P. nomination,
is counting on it. While Bush was being hailed by the
political-financial complex, McCain was plotting to blow it up. The
Senator has made his name in politics, in part, by pounding his head
against the wall of campaign-finance reform. So far, his efforts have
been thwarted by his Republican colleagues in Congress. But this week
McCain will launch the battle from a different perch, in a campaign
speech at the old town hall in Bedford, N.H., the state holding the
first presidential primary.
The moment will be poignant, even as some may try to dismiss it as
pointless. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who has
led the three-year fight against McCain's bill, loves to say, "This
issue has never defeated anyone in the American political process."
Nor has it ever launched a presidential campaign. Back in January even
McCain's top advisers hoped to persuade him that campaign-finance
reform was a loser issue. They quietly commissioned a poll of G.O.P.
voters in four key primary states to prove their point. But when the
results came in, they showed 60% of voters saying campaign-finance
reform was important, vs. just 15% saying it wasn't. "Voters want the
system changed," says John Weaver, McCain's political director.
Bush, for his part, bemoans the culture of partisanship and gridlock
in Washington but is mostly silent about the system that funds it. He
proposes lifting the $1,000 limit on individual contributions and
requiring full disclosure of contributors. But, says McCain, "that's
basically the system we have today. The restrictions we have now are a
facade." The Senator's current plan, in his McCain-Feingold bill,
would ban the unlimited contributions known as "soft money" that
corporations, lobbyists and unions can give to national parties, and
it would restrict outside, allegedly "independent" groups from running
ads to help specific candidates.
But for McCain's reform plan to resonate with grass-roots Republicans,
he must pitch it in explicitly conservative terms. "You're never going
to get a simpler, flatter tax code unless you reform the way we
finance our campaigns," McCain says. "And you're never going to get
rid of pork-barrel spending and make government smaller until you
remove the special interests that dominate our political process."
Sources close to McCain say he and his co-sponsor, Democrat Russ
Feingold of Wisconsin, will threaten to bring Senate business to a
halt this month unless G.O.P. leaders bring up the bill for debate and
a vote.
If nothing else, that ought to train a spotlight on McCain and give
him a chance to stand as the Washington-based outsider against the
Austin-based insider. In a two-person primary race, McCain hopes his
personal story will implicitly carry a critique of Bush's. At the age
of 40, Bush was still finding himself in Midland, Texas; McCain had
already served as a naval aviator in the Vietnam War and endured 5 1/2
years of hell as a prisoner of war. And while Bush has used his
father's name and connections to get ahead in business and politics,
McCain turned down paternal protection when it mattered most. As the
son of the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet during the war, he
resisted pressure from his North Vietnamese captors to go free because
he feared it would demoralize the troops.
Not surprisingly, that compelling story is making its way to voters
and bookstores very soon. The campaign has sent about 50,000
biographical videos to primary voters in New Hampshire. And in
September, McCain will launch a book tour promoting Faith of My
Fathers, a three-generation biography of his father and his
grandfather--both admirals--and the lessons of honor and patriotism
they taught him. If the tale catches on, Bush may wish to change the
subject--even to campaign-finance reform.
=========================================================
Source: U.S. Catholic, July 1999 v64 i7 p18.
Title: GOVERNMENT FOR HIRE?(political campaign finance reform)
Author: KEVIN CLARKE
Abstract: U.S. politicians spend a significant amount of time raising
money for their political campaigns. Critics maintain that
as a result of the close relationship between wealthy
donors and politicians, people without money are left with
little say in public affairs. There are various attempts at
campaign finance reform.
Subjects: United States - Politics and government
Campaign funds - Political aspects
Political campaigns - Finance
Locations: United States
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Claretian Publications
The way our political system works these days, critics say, you can
forget about the Golden Rule; it is gold that rules in the halls of
Congress. An in-depth look at how dollars and democracy mix in America
today and why reform is needed.
In March the United States embarked on a major trade war with its
European trading partners, raising tariffs as high as 100 percent on a
variety of goods being exported from Europe. The Europeans have
threatened to return the favor.
At the heart of what could turn out to be a costly confrontation for
American and European consumers aren't profound differences in trade
or tariff policies; it isn't a disagreement over European subsidies of
heavy industry. This dispute, in fact, is just "bananas." Europeans
give trade preferences to bananas imported from their former colonies;
Americans complain that's unfair to banana growers from Central
America and other noncolonial producers.
Because it's not a cash crop anywhere in the United States, it's
reasonable to wonder why American trade relations have slipped so
badly on the lowly banana. Could it have something to do with the
$536,000 in political campaign contributions made by Chiquita Banana
CEO Carl Lindner and his wife, Edyth?
Critics of the current campaign-finance system say the banana war is
just one example of official policy being constructed not at the
ballot box or in government committees but in the offices of major
campaign contributors.
Matt Keller coordinates the effort to change campaign-finance laws for
the Washington-based citizen-advocacy group Common Cause. He can
recite a litany of other instances where money and the influence it
purchases were the driving forces behind government policy (for three
more examples, see sidebar on page 20). To Keller these are the
products of an out-of-control political system grown addicted to
high-priced television advertising and political consultants, a system
that is no longer responsive to the concerns of mere voters.
Million-dollar questions
"We had Senator Bill Bradley here to speak to us," Keller remembers.
"He said the first question [political consultants] ask you when
you're planning a campaign is `Do you have a million dollars?' The
second question they ask you is `Can you raise a million dollars?'"
It wasn't the only factor, but the wearying exercise of campaign
fundraising was one of the main reasons longtime Illinois senator and
onetime presidential aspirant Paul Simon decided to call it quits
after 42 years in public office. Simon is enjoying an active
"retirement" from politics as a professor at Southern Illinois
University, where he directs its Public Policy Institute.
For his final campaign Simon raised $8.4 million--a figure eclipsed
last year by the $15.3 million Peter Fitzgerald paid to win his
Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate. Dialing for those dollars was a
process Simon found degrading.
"I enjoyed policy making," he says. "I even enjoyed campaigning,
unlike some of my colleagues. But to ask for money for myself ... it's
just distasteful, and [as a federal legislator] at least one third of
your time is spent raising money."
Simon stands with a growing number of state and federal legislators
who are calling for restraints on the amount of money spent on U.S.
political campaigns--even for complete public financing of campaigns
for public office--and for broader disclosure of where campaign
contributions originate.
What has alarmed critics of the current system, who cross both party
affiliation and ideological ground, is the increasingly high cost of
doing politics in America and a deepening public cynicism in the
political process--a cynicism engendered by the behavior the nation's
hat-in-hand political leaders and the broadening suspicion that public
policy is no longer being built on merit but on the likelihood of a
political payback.
"The casualties in this process are the people who don't have the
money," says Simon. "There are 43 million people in this country who
don't have health insurance." But, unlike health-care providers and
medical-insurance companies, "they're not big campaign contributors."
Dialing for dollars
Although each electoral cycle seems to reach new and previously
unimagined highs, the scandal- ridden 1996 campaigns were the most
expensive in U.S. history: $2.7 billion was spent on state and
national campaigns. The Clinton and Dole campaigns alone spent $232
million, supplemented by another $69 million in "issues" advertising
paid for by the Democratic and Republican parties. (Gearing up for the
2000 elections, political-party committees had already raised $193.2
million by May 1999.)
Both parties endured charges and countercharges of dubious fundraising
and accounting practices; and the Clinton/Gore campaign may forever be
associated with fundraising hijinks in Buddhist monasteries and
Indonesian executive suites, Lincoln bedroom rentals, and big-ticket
coffee klatches.
But for Simon and other critics, such scandals are only a part of the
problem. Raising the kind of money required in the TV era of political
campaigning has become something approaching a full-time job for
legislators.
"You know visitors to the Senate are often appalled to see only two or
three senators on the floor at any given time," says Simon. "How much
more appalled would they be if they knew that the rest of the senators
weren't there because they were on the phone raising money?"
Jim Kale agrees that because of fundraising pressure, there may not be
a whole lot of the nation's work taking place in Washington. Although
he has moved on to a different position now, Kale was the Chicago
archdiocese's coordinator for Dollars and Democracy, a unique
collaboration between three Midwestern Catholic dioceses and the
American Friends Service Committee (funded through the Joyce
Foundation) to get out into the churches and educate citizens about
campaign-finance reform.
[Graphic omitted]"These people spend all their time fundraising," Kale
complains. "If our politicians spend all day talking just to the
people with a lot of money, what kind of policies are they going to
enact?"
Kale also wonders about the caliber of legislators "earning" the
privilege of office. The selection process for candidates today may
focus less on the strength of personal character and breadth of
experience than on the depth of a checking account.
"The first thing people ask is what's the size of your [campaign] war
chest," says Kale, "and that's what can turn you into a front runner.
The criteria for public office has become money, not talent."
Dollars and Democracy has sponsored large forums on reform in Chicago
and Akron, Ohio and has helped put together more intimate parish-level
information sharing meetings on the issue throughout the Chicago area
and in Ohio in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Akron, and Dayton. In Akron, it
sponsored a ballot initiative to limit campaign contributions in city
races, which was overwhelmingly approved by voters. (The measure
currently faces a court challenge.) The group's organizers plan to
conduct more information-sharing meetings as well as continue their
agenda for state and local campaign-finance reform.
That sounds like a lot of political organizing activity for a church
group, and, in fact, some of the initiative's opponents such as Akron
councilman John Frank have been complaining that the leaders of
Dollars and Democracy "should have stayed with religion."
But Kale says it makes perfect sense for the church to be involved in
campaign-finance reform "if you think about all the issues we've been
involved with over many years. Take disarmament, for instance," he
says. "We can talk all we want about disarmament and peace and justice
till the cows come home, but as long as defense contractors are
handing out checks, we're wasting our time."
"People don't understand how [campaign reform] is a religious issue,"
agrees Greg Coleridge, an Akron coordinator for Dollars and Democracy
from the American Friends Service Committee. "But what are the issues
we deal with over the year? Social justice, human rights, social
services. We are stymied on these public-policy issues no matter how
well we witness, organize, or agitate. We hit this brick wall on
policy. We don't bring money to the political table, and that is how
many of the times success is measured."
In for the long haul
The effort to energize Catholics around campaign-finance reform faces
a number of obstacles, not the least of which is the difficulty of
wading through the Byzantine rules of campaign financing.
Kale admits the topic can be intimidating until parishioners begin to
understand that "it's really about money and buying votes and keeping
people out of the process." He's also able to throw his criticism of
current campaign laws into more familiar terms for Catholics. Kale
says the current system is an affront to human dignity.
Bad-faith politics, he says, "is one reason people are becoming
cynical and leaving the system. They think our political system is
just bought and sold. This is a moral issue for the church. I think
you'd say this is a religious issue if you believe in everyone having
dignity. If you ask, `Does everyone deserve a voice in our political
system?' We say a resounding `Yes, everyone does'--not just people
with $50,000 to contribute."
Matt Keller is prepared to hunker down for the long haul in the effort
to reform the way Washington does business. "It's a huge battle," he
says. "We're asking members of Congress to do something that is
against their self-interest, to put themselves at risk of losing their
next election, and we're asking the special interests to give up their
ability to influence politicians."
[Graphic omitted]He expects the reform effort's victories to be
measured across years, not months. "Real, comprehensive reform would
require a civil-rights style process.... You're talking about breaking
the nexus between money and power, and in the United States, that's a
tough thing to do."
So tough that the bipartisan reform package put together by Wisconsin
Democratic Senator Russell Feingold and Arizona Republican Senator
John McCain has spent years waiting for its day before the Senate.
Currently the McCain-Feingold bill is once more stalled in Congress,
making its annual bid for serious consideration before drifting again
into the legislative limbo of committee negotiation. A vote on its
companion legislation in the House, the Shays-Meehan bill, passed in
the 105th Congress, but a vote in the 106th has been put off until at
least September.
Both the House and Senate reform proposals call for a complete ban on
the raising of "soft money" and stronger restrictions on the running
of what some critics describe as campaign ads disguised as issues ads.
Soft money is the cash raised from corporations, labor unions, and
private individuals in unrestricted contributions to political
parties. Although critics say soft money is increasingly used directly
for political campaigns, such contributions are supposed to be used
for "general party building activities." That's why soft money evades
the tougher contribution limits and disclosure requirements federal
election law applies to "hard money"--redirect contributions to
specific political candidates.
The McCain-Feingold and Shays-Meehan reform package would eliminate
the "soft money loophole" entirely and would require that "issue" ads
that mention a federal candidate by name within 60 days of an election
be paid for with hard money.
Split decisions
The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) is among the opponents of
the kind of reform envisaged by the McCain-Feingold bill and probably
the major obstacle within the Catholic Church to a broader position in
favor of this campaign-finance-reform package. One of the nation's
biggest advocacy spenders, the NRLC has made defeating the bipartisan
reform package a major legislative priority.
The NRLC is joined in its resistance to specific aspects of the reform
package by a cross-ideological cast of characters, a "strange
bedfellows" chorus, including the American Civil Liberties Union and
the National Rifle Association. The AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club join
the NRLC in resistance to the reform package's "restrictions on "issue
ads," although both support "soft money" bans, public campaign
financing, and spending limits.
NRLC's legislative director Douglas Johnson argues that these soft
money and "issue ad" restrictions inevitably run afoul of First
Amendment protections and a precedent-setting Supreme Court decision,
Buckley v. Valeo. That 1976 decision allows political speech
unrestrained by federal election laws when it reflects "issue
advocacy," such as an NRLC ad calling for a ban on partial-birth
abortion. But the court ruled those federal controls can be applied to
"express advocacy," that is, political messages that explicitly urge a
vote for or against a specific candidate.
Critics charge that ads run around elections by the NRLC, labor
unions, and other advocacy groups skirt the spirit of the Buckley
decision by noting the names and voting records of candidates, or
sometimes simply running their images in TV advertising--even though
they may never include a specific endorsement for or against a
candidate. But to Johnson, such ads fall well within the fair playing
field of the U.S. tradition of free speech and commentary on political
issues and the intent and language of Buckley.
[Graphic omitted]Current proposals, says Johnson, would "have a
chilling effect on free speech."
The ACLU agrees, arguing that the current congressional proposals are
"doomed to failure in the courts."
"These bills don't simply deal with the way candidates raise money for
themselves," says Johnson. "A lot of this legislation would restrict
the right of private citizenship groups to reach out and speak to the
public. This is particularly critical to the National Right to Life
Committee and perhaps other organizations that the secular news media
is very unsympathetic to."
Johnson also resists restrictions on contributions, spending limits,
and tougher funding-disclosure requirements included in reform
proposals. "The court recognizes that if you can suppress
expenditures, you can suppress speech," he says.
Speaking of disclosure requirements that would reveal donor
information, Johnson adds, "This is not the kind of information you
should have to turn over to the federal government.
"Whatever members of Congress do to limit or regulate their own
fundraising policies has to respect the traditional right of American
citizens to speak on the positions of those holding office," he says.
"The essence of democracy is that everyone gets to speak their point
of view and the public gets to sort it all out."
Meanwhile, the people at Dollars and Democracy are working "to craft
constitutionally acceptable reform at the local level," says Tom
Allio, the director of Cleveland's diocesan Social Action Office and
the co-leader of Dollars and Democracy in Akron. "We're working within
the confines of the existing law, even though many of us would like to
see that law overturned. We believe that the fundamental principle of
Buckle), v. Valeo--that money is the equivalent of free speech--is
flawed.
"From a Catholic perspective this is Political Responsibility 101, and
we believe that campaign-finance reform is fundamental to all other
types of reform and all the other issues that we as a church are
concerned about: housing, education, poverty, and having a stronger
voice for the unborn and on other life issues." Unless the Buckley
decision is overturned, Allio argues, "The kind of effect you can have
at the state and federal level is going to be limited."
Allio also expresses a concern, shared by a number of other Catholic
social-policy advocates who requested anonymity, that the opposition
of the NRLC to campaign-finance reform is making the issue difficult
for the church to even discuss.
"In the Diocese of Cleveland, we have been a lot freer to articulate
principles of reform and advocate for them than seems to be the case
at the national level," Allio says.
"I think Catholics need to be concerned and informed about how money
corrupts our political system, and we are challenged to try and devise
remedies that meet constitutional barriers. It is my sincere hope that
the NRLC is not exercising undue influence on the [U.S. Catholic
Conference's] ability to tackle the complex problem of
campaign-finance reform.
"Unless advocates get a handle on reform," Allio worries, "all the
great social-justice issues that we are concerned about have less
priority for decision-makers. [Without reform] the voices of those
with money really scream down the voices of those who are advocating
on behalf of poor and vulnerable families."
The NRLC's Johnson views efforts such as Dollars and Democracy as
sincere but perhaps misguided, taking an overly simplistic view of the
problem of campaign reform and devising systemic mechanisms for
protecting free speech. In the final analysis, he says, the entire
problem of money in politics has been overdramatized by reform
proponents. "Americans spend more on potato chips than they do on
politics. We're electing people who control nuclear arsenals and
direct our lives; how much is too much to spend?"
[Graphic omitted]A call to reform
But it is not the total amount of spending on campaigns that is at
issue, counters Paul Simon; it is the effect those contributions have
on public policy, an effect whose costs can greatly exceed the
comparatively minor campaign-dollar figures.
"Let me give you an example," says Simon. "The Pentagon says, `We
don't want any B-2 bombers.' But if you vote `Yes' on the B-2 you know
you'll get a campaign contribution [from defense contractors], and if
you vote `No,' you won't get anything. What are you going to do?" asks
Simon. It is just such congressional calculus, he suggests, that
drives some of the decisions that make it out of committee in
Washington.
"That's how we ended up with 21 useless B-2 bombers."
Simon is not confident that Congress is capable of cleaning its own
house through comprehensive campaign reform, lie thinks it's more
likely that reform will eventually be forced at the federal level
based on a number of experiments in campaign funding taking place at
the state level across the country. Reforms that may rise above
congressional inaction and constitutional challenges are publicly
financed campaigns and voluntary campaign limits, already the rule in
Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and Arizona.
Whatever shape reform does take, Simon believes it's critical that the
process begins soon.
"I'm often asked about the difference between Lincoln's time and our
time," says Simon. "In Lincoln's time the world's greatest military
power was England; the world's greatest economic power was England.
And among all the industrialized nations the worst slums could be
found in England. Now a hundred years later we ask, `could this be?'
"Today the world's greatest military and economic power is the United
States. And among the industrialized nations, the country that has the
greatest percentage of children living in poverty is the United
States. A hundred years from now, people again will ask, `could that
be?'
"Part of the reason that `could be,'" says Simon, "is that no one is
paying attention to the needs of the poor. Because of these big
campaign contributions, we're paying attention to the whims of the
rich.... They say the highest commandment of the Bible is that we take
care of the poor; under the present system, we're not doing that very
well."
RELATED ARTICLE: Cash-box Congress?
Citizen-advocacy group Common Cause notes the following instances as
examples where money and the influence it purchases were the driving
forces behind government policy:
* Congress continues to refuse to repeal or adjust the 1872 Mining
Law, a legalistic anachronism that still regulates the manner in which
major natural nonrenewable resources are extracted from federal land.
This law vastly enriches a few major corporations and individuals,
produces an embarrassingly minuscule trickle of revenue for the
government, and allows mining concerns to leave environmental disaster
zones behind for your tax dollars to clean up.
* To defend the long-standing tax break it enjoys on ethanol
production, Archer Daniels Midland, the "supermarket to the world,"
since 1988 has brought a shopping cart to Washington filled with more
than $3 million in soft money contributions to both parties. Although
its repeal has long been threatened, the tax break on ethanol-spiked
gasoline, on which ADM relies to keep a market afloat for its ethanol,
has cost the U.S. Treasury $7 billion since 1979, according to the
General Accounting Office. It has returned little in terms of
environmental benefits or reduced reliance on foreign oil. First
enacted in the 1970s, the subsidy will not come up again for review
until 2007.
* Social Security "reform' will be a big item on the legislative
agenda this year. While various ideas are under discussion about how
to "save" Social Security from a threatened breakdown in 2034, what
has not been questioned is the push for "privatization," the creation
of some mechanism for disposing at least a portion of this
mother-of-all savings accounts to the tender mercies of Wall Street.
Common Cause attributes the bullishness of members of both parties to
the $53 million in campaign contributions made by the securities
industry since 1989.
--KC
RELATED ARTICLE: What the church teaches
"Certain demands which arise within society are sometimes not examined
in accordance with criteria of justice and morality but rather on the
basis of the electoral or financial power of the groups promoting
them."
--POPE JOHN PAUL II, CENTESIMUS ANNUS (1991)
"All people have a right to participate in the political process. This
is an inalienable right based in human nature and not a privilege of
wealth.... People with more money should not be allowed to dominate
the political debate or monopolize access to elected officials. Access
to money or possession of wealth should not be the prerequisite to
conducting a viable campaign for public office."
--CATHOLIC BISHOPS OF ILLINOIS, STATEMENT ON CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM
(1998)
"Political advertising can support and assist the working of the
democratic process, but it can also obstruct it. This happens when ...
the costs of advertising limit political competition to wealthy
candidates or groups or require that office seekers compromise their
integrity and independence by overdependence on special interests for
funds."
--PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS, ETHICS IN ADVERTISING
(1997)
For more information, resources, and links on money in politics visit
our Web site at www.uscatholic.org.
KEVIN CLARKE is social-issues and public-life editor for U.S.
CATHOLIC. He also is Claretian Publications' managing editor for
online products.
==========================================================
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, June 30, 1999 p3.
Title: Granny D goes to Washington; A grandmother pursues a
quixotic crusade to reform campaign-finance.(USA)
Author: Scott Baldauf
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Christian Science Publishing Society
It's 5 a.m. on a pitch-dark stretch of rolling Texas highway. But
Doris Haddock is already walking at a brisk pace on Interstate 20, as
if she had gotten off to a late start.
For six months and some 1,700 miles Mrs. Haddock - better known as
"Granny D" - has walked across the Southwest in her determination to
root out what she sees as the corrupting effect of "big money" in
America's election campaigns. At her ankles is a mutt with a Benji
face who started following her 40 miles back. In her hand is a bright
yellow flag emblazoned with her nickname. And in her conversation, one
can feel a palpable, all-consuming, passionate love of American
democracy.
"Why am I doing this? Because our democracy is in peril, and the
corporations have taken over the government," says the Dublin, N.H.,
grandmother, interrupted at times by the roar of a truck.
Whether any reform ever comes of Granny D's trek, she nonetheless
joins an American tradition of social reformers, folk heroes, and
troublemakers of all political stripes who took on the causes of their
day. Like Rosa Parks, who sat on the "wrong" end of the bus, and
Howard Jarvis, who took on state property taxes in California, Granny
D is hardly a member of the political establishment. As an individual,
her only power comes from her ability to persuade as many Americans as
she can that the system has to change.
At issue is a system critics say has corrupted representative
government. Current law allows politicians to accept only amounts of
$1,000 or less from individuals, but lawmakers can use loopholes, such
as political-action committees and other "soft money" accounts to fund
their campaigns.
Granny D says for several years she had been toying with the idea of
traveling the country to promote her favorite cause: campaign-finance
reform. When she talked with her hometown friends in the senior ladies
ballet class, they agreed that she, indeed, had to hit the road. After
nine months of rigorous training, Granny D was born.
Of course, Granny D is no stranger to the world of protest. In the
1930s, she performed in feminist plays. In the '60s, she traveled to
Alaska to protest a plan to create a new harbor using nuclear devices.
(The plan eventually was shelved.)
On the current road, there have been a few bumps. Granny D faced
dehydration in the Mojave Desert, leaned into the Arizona desert
winds, and scaled El Capitan, a mountain pass in New Mexico. But she's
rarely walked alone. Volunteers have crawled out of the woodwork,
donating housing and food.
Surprisingly enough, some of Granny D's strongest supporters are in
Congress itself - including Sens. John McCain (R) of Arizona and
Russell Feingold (D) of Wisconsin, and Reps. Christopher Shays (R) of
Conn. and Marty Meehan (D) of Massachusetts, all of whom have
sponsored campaign-finance reform bills.
"I'm proud of her," says Senator McCain. "It tells me that I have to
do a better job of making connections to Americans, the way Granny D
does."
Representative Shays says he plans to join Granny D on the road
sometime this year. "If people in the House and Senate think they can
kill campaign finance [reform] because Americans are not paying
attention, then they will," he says.
But for Granny D, her most important support comes from people she
meets along the road. Truckers on the highway, communicating by CB
radio, keep track of Granny D's whereabouts, honking as they pass.
Others drive by, put on the brakes, and voice their support. "Is she
really walking across America? I can barely make it to Eastland,"
jokes Joyce Vickers, a native of Ranger, driving up in her tattered
Pontiac Bonneville. "I don't know much about campaign finance, but I
know we need a bunch of prayer."
Some pundits argue that any grass-roots movement has built-in
disadvantages taking on the established political order.
"While the story of a lady traveling across the country on foot is
touching, I don't see how that will have much of an effect," says
Thomas Mann, a political historian at the Brookings Institution in
Washington. "In the past, it's usually been a scandal that increases
the public interest and forces politicians to make changes to law."
Even the 1996 allegations of illegal Chinese contributions to the
Democratic Party could not push through campaign-finance bills in
Congress, he adds. Granny D admits there are times she feels as if she
is "on a fool's errand."
"I know darn well that it won't happen with this walk," she says,
swallowing hard with emotion. Regaining her composure, she continues.
"But I just feel that the walk will perhaps point up to the Senate
that maybe the man on the street does care, and he's really worried
and it's not just a game. They think we don't know what's going on?"
By 9:40 a.m., Granny D has finished her daily 10-mile constitutional,
and walks into a Dairy Queen. There, she starts working the crowd,
handing out cards to a kaffeeklatch of older farmers.
At first, some of the men are dubious that this grandmother can take
the corruption out of Washington, but soon all of them express their
admiration for her tenacity.
"We need more people like you," says one older gentleman in a
Caterpillar cap. "Here she is, 80 years old...." Granny D cuts him
off. "I am not 80. I'm 89, and I'll be 90 by the time I get to
Washington."
If truth be told, Granny D wishes there was less attention to herself
and her age. She sees something larger at work.
"I feel as if I was being driven, having to do it," she says. "And
every time something comes up that seems insoluble, an angel appears.
I've gotten to the stage where I don't really worry if I don't have a
place to stay that night. Something shows up." She smiles. "It's
uncanny."
========================================================
Want Free DSL? You'll Pay For It
by Michelle Finley
3:00 a.m. Mar. 27, 2000 PST
Free DSL can save broadband-hungry users between $50-80 a month, but
what they gain in savings they usually pay for with their privacy.
Companies offering free DSL are using the ad-based model that began
several years ago with free email accounts. Free PCs and free
dial-up Internet access accounts quickly followed with goods and
services at no charge in exchange for a lot of personal information.
In order to get the free services, users must fill out detailed
registration forms when they sign up. This insures that the ads
being pushed to users are targeted to the appropriate audiences.
Most free DSL service providers also require users to download
software that will place a small window onto the desktop. The window
displays a stream of advertising and announcements from the service
provider's marketing partners. While the window can be dragged to
almost any location on the users' computer screen, it cannot be
closed or hidden when a user is connected to the free DSL service.
Andrew Shen, a policy analyst for the Electronic Privacy Information
Center, said these free DSL services are only free if you place no
value on your personal privacy.
He has serious doubts whether the people who sign up for such
services read these privacy policies and understand how invasive
they are.
The Broadband Digital Group, which is expected to begin offering
free DSL on April 1, said the data collected during its registration
process enables the company to provide their advertising and
marketing partners with a "nameless" and generic profile.
Still, according to the company's terms of service agreement, users
are required to provide their legal name, address, telephone number,
email address, and other personal information.
And BDG's Privacy Policy further states that because BDG is
providing the valuable DSL services free of charge, "BDG reserves
the right to disclose or disseminate any and all personal
information gathered directly or indirectly from you or about you to
third parties without your prior approval."
INYC, which began rolling out its free DSL service last week, has a
privacy policy that states: "A registered user's information may
also be used to contact that user when necessary, and shared with
other companies who may want to contact our users."
INYC Vice President Steven Bruno said that the service will monitor
users' Web activities, keeping track of all purchases, sign-ups to
Web services, and inquiries for information as well as visits to
iNYC's sponsor's sites. Users' activities will be tracked with the
help of a logon script keyed to each customer's user name and
password.
Bruno insists that the main reason for this monitoring is to help
the company provide their clients with a happy online experience by
presenting users with most relevant ads and services based on their
interests.
Grant Johnson, BDG's vice president of marketing, said that
customers' Web activity will not be monitored.
But BDG's terms of service agreement states, "You further
acknowledge that in exchange for the ability to use the service, BDG
may gather information about you, such as data about your use of the
service or responses to questionnaires and surveys, and that BDG may
provide this information to third parties, including advertisers.
"You also acknowledge that in exchange for the ability to use the
service, BDG may gather information about you and your practices,
preferences and other relevant information when you are online," it
adds.
But giving up personal information is not the only hidden cost.
INYC's Free DSL service isn't exactly free, either. You have to earn
it.
The company chooses to describe this as "the ultimate reward
program." Users collect a varying amount of "iBates," or points for
viewing specific sites or using advertised services. Those points
are then subtracted from the DSL monthly service fee.
"If a user should not be able to interact enough to get the line for
free, then at least they get a nice discount," Bruno said. "If they
do nothing for the month, then they pay for the line and their
worst-case scenario is they pay for the line as they would anywhere
else."
While the service itself is free when users earn the requisite
number of iBates, the company charges users for the DSL modem. If,
however, a user refers 10 friends who complete the registration
process and download the DSL software, the cost of the modem will be
paid by BDG.
Copyright © 2000 Wired Digital Inc., a Lycos Network site.
All rights reserved.
jum...@my-deja.com
Source: National Review, April 3, 2000 v52 i6 pNA.
Title: The Limits of Compassion.
(compassionate conservatism as failed campaign slogan)
Author: Richard Lowry
Subjects: Presidential candidates - Political activity
Conservatism - Political aspects
People: Bush, George W. - Political activity
McCain, John - Political activity
Locations: United States
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 National Review, Inc.
IN the media's telling, compassionate conservatism was cruelly
abandoned by George W. Bush in his lurch to the right in South
Carolina, trampled underfoot on the endless red carpet of the Bob
Jones University stage. But it's really the other way around: W.
didn't fail compassionate conservatism; it failed him. Not since all
the early Gore slogans- "practical idealism," "new horizons"-has a
campaign theme flopped so utterly. The primaries have made it clear
that Bush may yet win the White House, but only by running on the
ideas and themes he developed after compassionate conservatism fell
flat.
New Hampshire was compassionate conservatism's Water loo. The
substance of compassionate conservatism-to the extent it has
any-involves changing regulations and tax law to encourage charities
and churches to care for the poor and the troubled. A fine, but
picayune, idea. The real advantage of compassionate conservatism was
always stylistic, and defensive: It would give Bush the same
touchy-feely image as President Clinton. Early in the campaign, the
media hailed this as a brilliant tactic, since they are so enamored of
sensitivity in general, and of Clinton's caring in particular.
One problem: Republicans hated it. Both Bush and McCain reacted to
Clinton's success, but in different ways. While Bush chose to feel our
pain, McCain emphasized a tough plain-spokenness that seemed to
challenge the feminization of contemporary American politics. In New
Hampshire, this manly sensibility dovetailed perfectly with McCain's
anti-Clinton rhetoric. W. peppered his speeches with references to
"touching every willing heart" and "leaving no child behind," phrases
that seemed deliberately evocative of Clinton. McCain talked of
"raising a lot of hell" and famously pledged to "beat Gore like a
drum."
Voters associated McCain's tough words with honesty, as well they
should, since so much of today's sentimental cant in politics depends
on evasions and half-truths. Bush routinely says that "single mothers"
have the hardest job in America. Actually, many of them don't have
jobs at all, but only Jesse Ventura and-on an exceptionally good
day-his maverick cousin McCain might be insensitive enough to say it.
Bush's compassion schtick also disarmed him in purely tactical terms
in New Hampshire, as it dictated that he stay "positive."
So, in New Hampshire, compassionate conservatism had a road test. It
made Bush seem Clintonesque, soft, and dishonest, while preventing him
from hitting back against his opponent. Matched against McCain's
patriotic reformism, Bush's compassion lost by 19 points.
There are other, deeper problems with compassionate conservatism,
besides the fact that it doesn't sell. Collective entities, such as
government, can't be compassionate; they don't have feelings.
Sentiment is a rotten guide to public policy, and conservative ideas
perforce have sources besides compassion. This is why so many of W.'s
examples of conservative compassion seem so inapt. Letting families
keep more of their tax money may be wise, it may be good economics, it
may be just, but it is not "compassionate."
When it comes to a contest of compassion, liberals will always have an
advantage. The liberal conceit is that government can set a desirable
goal and directly mandate its realization. Help the poor? Write a
check. Conservatives have a more complicated vision of the importance
of institutions, rules, and virtues, which can't be legislated by
well- intentioned policymakers. When it comes to the poor, for
instance, all government can do is protect the necessary conditions
for wealth creation-by maintaining order, freeing the economy for
entrepreneurship, and insisting that people fend for themselves.
Compassion simply isn't relevant.
As John O'Sullivan and Ramesh Ponnuru have noted in these pages,
conservatism is naturally associated with sterner virtues such as
patriotism, self-reliance, and duty. Indeed, sentimentality has roots
deeply entangled in our culture of self-indulgence and cruelty. It's
no accident that President Clinton is famous for two kinds of lip
biting. The exaltation of feeling necessarily breaks down
self-restraint and hence increases running room for sheer willfulness,
for an ethic of personal convenience. So it is that our culture
celebrates compassion at the same time it destroys 1.2 million
children in the womb every year. If this is the result of a
compassionate society, please, let's have more hard-heartedness.
In fairness to Bush, he wasn't alone in paying rhetorical obeisance to
compassion. The mascot of John McCain's campaign after New Hampshire
was an almost perfect token of feminized America: the crying Boy
Scout, once ever prepared, now reduced to a long night of tears by a
negative phone call. McCain's relentless attacks on "negative"
campaigning were of a piece with the compassionate culture's fear of
saying anything critical about anyone, its distaste for argument, its
unwillingness to judge. So, it made sense that McCain would stake his
campaign on denouncing the leaders of the religious Right as "agents
of intolerance": Intolerance is one of the few things that can still
safely be called evil.
After New Hampshire, Bush found a better slogan in "reformer with
results." More important, in reaction to McCain, he became associated
with two pillars of conservatism: limited government and faith. Bush
was pushed into rediscovering the first of these by the logic of his
defense of tax cuts against McCain's attacks. This is important
because no innovation in conservatism-from compassionate conservatism
to McCain's call for a renewal of American self-government-makes sense
without an agenda of governmental retrenchment and lower taxes.
Tax cuts are often denounced as selfish and materialistic. What this
view ignores is that limited government is a necessary condition for
freedom, which has its roots in the protection of private property
from the state. So to consider as selfish and unworthy efforts to
strengthen Americans' claim to their earnings against a government
that routinely takes 40 percent of their income is to misunderstand
the basis of liberty. Deriding tax cuts as "materialistic" is a little
like dismissing the right to vote as "procedural."
It is liberty, of course, that gives meaning to all other virtues of a
republican people, including patriotism. A favorite line of pro-McCain
neoconservatives is the rhetorical question, How can you hate the
government and love your country? Well, the same way Andrew Jackson
could hate the second Bank of the United States and still love his
country. The same way conservatives in the 1960s and '70s could hate
so much of what government did-from confiscatory taxation to corrupt
welfare policies to soft criminal justice-but remain unabashed
American patriots. In fact, the Jacksonian Scottish-Irish tradition
that John McCain partly represents has always mixed distrust of
government with a bloody-minded, unreconstructed nationalism (see
Walter Russell Mead's brilliant piece on the Jacksonian tradition in
the Winter issue of The National Interest).
The two attitudes are a natural fit-because a fighting patriotism
belongs in the class of demanding virtues that tend to be smothered by
the tender ministrations of the nanny state. Tocqueville warned of the
infantilizing tendencies of big government:
It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated
rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and
the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the
crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and
guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly
restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents
existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates,
extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to
be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of
which the government is the shepherd.
This is why McCain's focus on preserving the security of the modern
welfare state runs counter to the virtues of duty, courage, and risk-
taking that he argues for when, for instance, he berates the Clinton
administration for its cautious conduct of the war over Kosovo. If
government keeps us from smoking, and gives us our prescription drugs,
and protects us from the distress of negative campaign ads, and
devotes almost all of the resources thrown off by the new economy to
preserving middle-class entitlements, why should it not also send its
warriors into combat at 15,000 feet so they can be as safe and
pampered as everyone else?
The other important conservative theme rediscovered, at least
indirectly, by Bush during the campaign is faith. Compassionate
conservatism was always coupled with Bush's evangelical Christianity,
which he tends to describe in a sentimental rhetoric of "the heart."
At one meeting of evangelicals in South Carolina, Rep. Duke Cunningham
of California warmed up the crowd for Bush by weeping while talking
about his faith. This is a style that will grate on Catholics,
old-line Protestants, and Jews, a Promise Keepers Christianity of hugs
and teary testimonials. But, given a less southern, less evangelical
pitch, Bush's message of faith is extremely important, especially in
light of the direct challenge to it by John McCain.
McCain's Virginia Beach speech represented a capitulation to what Jean
Bethke Elshtain has called "liberal monism," the idea that it isn't
enough that state and church be separate, but that civic life should
be vacuumed entirely of the irrational, illiberal traces of religious
faith and dominated by a neutral language of secularism. Between the
lines of McCain's speech was the implicit proposal for a swap of
actual, organic religion-intolerant and exclusionary-for a new civic
religion of his own devising (details to be announced).
This is a deeply unconservative notion. For better or worse, the
Republican party is one of the nation's most important barriers to the
total secularization of American public life. So it falls on Bush to
defend America's true pluralism from the secularizers by championing
and defending from the encroachments of the state the work of churches
and synagogues.
Now, faced with a crush of advice to move to the center, the Bush
campaign is reviving compassionate conservatism, when it should be
leaving its contradictions and limp rhetoric behind. Bush would do
better to develop his theme of a "reformer with results." That exact
phrase is too defensively formulated with McCain in mind, but the
campaign can work with it. Limited government and faith, freedom and
religion, the two pillars Bush rediscovered in the primaries, should
be integral to any message of conservative reform: Limiting the power
of Washington is necessary to reforming it, and faith is the best
guarantee of the virtues of a self-regulating people, of what Bush has
called "the new responsibility era."
Of course, Bush has to find fresh ways to sell these conservative
verities, to make himself "a different kind of Republican." The idea
of limited government should be draped not just in the old rhetoric of
tax cuts, but brightened by Wall Street and the Internet, by the
imaginative, free-wheeling capitalist spirit captured in those
fantastic Ameritrade TV ads. This might mean rejiggering his tax plan
to include an idea like McCain's investor-friendly family savings
accounts, and generally becoming more conversant with the web. Bush
should align himself with the sensibility of the new investor class,
encourage its growth, and use it as a wedge to reduce the reach of the
welfare state.
As for faith, it shouldn't, of course, be touted in Jerry Falwell
terms- not that that was ever in the offing. Like Jimmy Carter's,
Bush's faith should be the background music to his opposition to the
corruption and partisan poison of contemporary Washington; when
Washington seems in need of redemption, there is something to be said
for having a president who is "born again." Bush's hope should be
that, just as in 1994, the Democratic attacks on Christian
conservatives-just like John McCain's- will be recklessly overwrought,
and interpreted by the faithful as a direct assault on them.
All of this should be wrapped in a patriotic appeal, for which-as
McCain demonstrated, to his great credit-there is a tremendous hunger.
It is freedom for which so many American men have died, and it is
faith that every day prompts us, as McCain put it, to devote ourselves
to causes greater than our self-interest. Bush should unashamedly
borrow this language of patriotic purpose from McCain-and be quietly
grateful to him for drubbing compassionate conservatism in New
Hampshire.
=======================================================
Source: Business Week, March 13, 2000 i3672 p60.
Title: AN AUSTRIAN SHUFFLE.(Brief Article)
Subjects: Austria - Politics and government
People: Haider, Jorg - Selection, appointment, resignation, etc.
Locations: Austria
Organizations: Freedom Party (Austria) - Political activity
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Austria's sharp-tongued populist, Jorg Haider, resigned as head of the
Freedom Party on Feb. 28 in an apparent effort to quell international
concern about the rise of his far-right party. Few expect Haider, who
will remain governor in the southern province of Carinthia, to give up
his dream of becoming Chancellor. Haider, 50, said he would stay
active in the party in a ``supervisory'' capacity and picked loyal
lieutenant Susanne Riess-Passer to replace him as party chief.
Riess-Passer, 39, earned the nickname ``king cobra'' within the party
for the ruthless zeal she displayed in carrying out Haider's orders.
Just last month, Haider made her Vice-Chancellor in Austria's
much-criticized coalition government.
=============================================================
Source: Maclean's, March 13, 2000 p27.
Title: Haider resigns.(Jorg Haider of Austria Freedom Party)
(Brief Article)
Subjects: Austria - Politics and government
People: Haider, Jorg - Political activity
Locations: Austria
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 Maclean Hunter Canadian Publishing Ltd.
Jorg Haider, charismatic leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party,
resigned his party presidency following international and domestic
protests over his party's joining a coalition government. Haider, who
has made statements sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime,
said he wants to concentrate on his job as governor of the Austrian
state of Carinthia.
=========================================================
Source: U.S. News & World Report, March 13, 2000 v128 i10 p36.
Title: Resignation on the right.(Brief Article)
Author: Susan Ladika
Subjects: Austria - Politics and government
International relations - Analysis
People: Haider, Jorg - Selection, appointment, resignation, etc.
Organizations: European Union - Political activity
Freedom Party (Austria) - Political activity
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 U.S. News and World Report, Inc.
VIENNA- Jorg Haider, Austria's lightning rod for controversy, is at it
again. His late-night announcement last week that he was stepping down
as head of the far-right Freedom Party set off a wave of speculation
about his motives. While the new conservative chancellor, Wolfgang
Schussel, insists Haider is taking "a personal part in easing the
tensions in the European Union," others aren't so convinced of his
altruism. Some see the decision as tactical, with Haider distancing
himself from the current government, then making a bid for the
chancellorship in three years.
The far-right leader has turned Europe upside down since his party
formed a coalition with the conservatives last month. Haider has
gained notoriety abroad for his anti-foreigner rhetoric and statements
seen as sympathetic to some Nazi practices. In response, the 14 other
EU nations have frozen bilateral relations with Austria and given
Austrians the cold shoulder in official meetings.
If Austria's new government expected a quick fix from Haider's
departure, it has been disappointed. The EU pledged to continue its
isolation of Austria as long as the Freedom Party retains a role in
government. For his part, Haider, who said he will focus on his job as
governor of the province of Carinthia, has already shown that he won't
stay silent for long. A day after his resignation, he told Austrian
state television the EU's behavior was "childish," adding, "You don't
treat a democratic and exemplary country this way."
===========================================================
Source: The Economist (US), March 4, 2000 v354 i8160 p50.
Title: Austria and Europe - Poker game.(Jorg Haider)(Brief Article)
Subjects: Austria - Relations with European Union
People: Haider, Jorg - Selection, appointment, resignation, etc.
Locations: Austria; European Union
Organizations: Freedom Party (Austria) - Foreign relations
European Union - Relations with Austria
Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 Economist Newspaper Ltd.
BERLIN
A CYNICAL tactical retreat? A humiliating climbdown? Or a self-
sacrificing attempt to end a damaging boycott of his country? Whatever
the motives of Jorg Haider, who suddenly resigned on February 28th as
leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, the European Union's 14
countries (bar Austria) say that nothing has changed. Their bilateral
sanctions brought in a month ago--bilateral because the EU as such
cannot do anything drastic without Austria's co-operation--would
remain in force; the protest against the Freedom Party's presence in
the Austrian government was as firm as ever. "The key question is not
the personality of Haider," said Antonio Guterres, the prime minister
of Portugal, which now holds the Union's rotating presidency. "It is
the nature of the party."
One of Mr Haider's sharpest critics, Louis Michel, Belgium's foreign
minister, said that the resignation meant that the EU's boycott was
working. "We must continue this policy of isolation to make
[Austria's] government and coalition collapse." But Austria's
socialists, in opposition for the first time in 30 years, have
dismissed the resignation as just "one of Haider's many tactical
ruses". The man who built up the Freedom Party over the past 14 years
from a marginal faction into Austria's second force is bound, they
say, to go on calling the party's tune.
Other Austrians are less sure. Some think Mr Haider had begun to
realise that his more provocative statements, including those made
years ago, against "Europe" and foreigners were undermining the
government he had helped install. His main proclaimed aim has always
been to break the mould of the old two-party system that perpetuated
patronage and privilege. With or without him as formal head of the
party, the mould will--if the coalition survives--have been broken. "I
don't think it is a game or tactical move," says Wolfgang Schussel,
Austria's new chancellor and head of the coalition's mainstream
conservative People's Party. "It is a serious effort to ease the
pressure against the government."
Others say that Mr Haider's move should be taken at face value, but
for different reasons. "He knew he was creating too many
difficulties," says Peter Ulram, a market researcher in Vienna.
"Whatever he said, no one believed him any more. His party, which had
been attracting 33% support in January, has fallen back to around 27%.
When you step down as party leader, you automatically lose power. I
think he has realised he will never become chancellor."
That, however, is a minority view. Most Austrians believe that the
ambitious, unpredictable Mr Haider is just distancing himself from
unpopular reforms mooted by the new government--public-spending cuts,
raising the retirement age, and so on. He may think it wiser to be
free to carp from the wings, then ride in as a white knight to rally
the faithful for the general election due in 2004--and win the
chancellorship.
Mr Haider's own explanation is that he wanted to quash the constant
claims that Freedom Party ministers are sure to be puppets manipulated
by a "shadow chancellor" in Carinthia, the mountainous province of
which he remains governor. But he says he will continue to "advise"
the party's people in office in Vienna. He has certainly not ruled out
a possible future bid to be chancellor. And he has nominated one of
his closest and most devoted lieutenants, Susanne Riess-Passer, now
Austria's vice-chancellor, to succeed him. She has made it plain that
she will continue to rely heavily on Mr Haider's guidance and support.
===========================================================
http://www.foxnews.com/national/031600/vermont.sml
--------------------------------------------------
Vermont House Votes in
Favor of Gay 'Civil Unions'
Updated 6:47 p.m. ET (2347 GMT) March 16, 2000
The Vermont House approved historic legislation Thursday allowing
gays to form "civil unions" that would carry many of the benefits —
and burdens — of marriage.
The House voted 76-69 to forward the bill to the Senate, where
leaders have said they believe it will have the votes to pass.
A crowd of at least 150 people lined the galleries and balconies of
the House chamber as lawmakers cast their votes. Many wore their
feelings on their lapels — pink stickers for supporters, white for
opponents.
"This certainly is groundbreaking," said Peg Byron of the Lambda
Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay advocacy group. "I think it
really sets a moral as well as a legislative example for the rest of
the country."
Gay couples who form civil unions would be entitled to some 300
state benefits or privileges available to married couples, in such
areas as inheritance, property transfers, medical decisions,
insurance and taxes. Such couples could file a joint state income
tax return, for example.
The federal government still would not recognize such unions with
regard to such things as immigration rights, Social Security and
federal taxes.
Congress and more than 30 states have passed laws denying
recognition to same-sex "marriages" performed in other states.
Nonetheless, some suggest those state laws might not apply to
same-sex "civil unions" performed in Vermont.
The Vermont bill provides for unions that amount to marriage in
everything but name. Partners could apply for a license from town
clerks and have their civil union "certified" by a justice of the
peace, a judge or a member of the clergy.
The burdens are equally onerous. Partners who want to split up would
have to go through "dissolution" proceedings in Family Court, in the
same way that married couples have to pursue a divorce. They would
also assume each other's debts like married couples.
Although the bill carries Vermont to the edge of recognizing gay
marriage, lawmakers still sought to preserve the term "marriage" for
the union of a man and a woman, adopting an amendment making that
clear. That definition previously had existed only in the bill's
preamble and not in the text.
"This raises my comfort level," said Republican Rep. Bruce Hyde.
But the House also rejected an amendment that would have prohibited
Vermont from recognizing gay marriages performed elsewhere.
The entire issue was forced on the Legislature because the state
Supreme Court ruled in December that same-sex couples are being
unconstitutionally denied the benefits of marriage. The high court
left it up to the Legislature to decide whether to allow gay
marriages or create some kind of domestic partnership.
Opponents of the bill said it far exceeded anything done by any
other state.
"Vermont is so far out on a limb by itself because there's nothing
close to it," said Vince McCarthy of the American Center for Law and
Justice. "Even a state as liberal as Massachusetts doesn't recognize
domestic partnerships."
California comes closest. It started a domestic partnership registry
Jan. 1. Those listed as domestic partners are entitled to hospital
visitation rights, and state and local government workers registered
as domestic partners can get health care coverage through their
employers.
In Vermont, civil union partners also would be permitted to make
medical decisions on one another's behalf; they would be responsible
for one another's remains when one died; and they would be able to
inherit each other's estates without having to pay hefty estate
taxes.
Despite the excitement among gay rights advocates, there was
disappointment that Vermont did not simply approve gay marriage
outright.
"It's an important start," Byron said. "Vermont's not even able to
walk the whole road yet. But this beginning is so crucial."
— The Associated Press contributed to this report
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Scott Corey & Mary Foley
>
> Thanx for the summary. Don't know who newbie is, but I was interested. What do
> you think the chances of Kaczynski actually getting a new trial are?
Really hard to say. I'm not a lawyer. To my mind the best argument the
government has is that a new trial would be a waste of time. They can
use the admissions TK made in the plea bargain as evidence, making it
unlikely any jury would find him not guilty. I suppose that is part of
why he argues that the bargain was coerced, even though it can hardly be
conventional coercion to threaten to give a person the (theoretically,
at least) best available defense.
Still, I got to listen to one of the law professors hire by the media
when I was at the trial. He was of the opinion that, although there is
always a lot of pressure put on a defendant to refrain from it, the
right to self-representation is bedrock stuff. It is rarely denied. At
the time, everyone was thinking of the (then recent) case in which a
patently insane man defended himself against charges of murdering
numerous people on a commuter train in New Jersey. He contended that
someone from Venus materialized on the train, stole his gun while he
slept, and shot all those people. He went so far as to ask the people he
shot (on the witness stand) if he was the one who shot them, apparently
expecting them to say "No." However, avoiding this kind of circus is not
a part of any argument I've seen, it is just social background.
Theoretically, appeals are about points of law, not facts. If that were
purely so, I guess I'd be surprised if TK did not win a new trial, given
what I've heard and read. The judge had some arguments for what he did,
but I can't see how they are strong enough to justify denying basic 6th
Amendment rights, yet what do I know? So it always seem to me that it is
a question of whether the court is willing to defend (at great expense)
a right which will not be of any real help to the defendant at trial.
Messy though it may be, I can't help thinking that the prospects for
this defendant should not weigh as heavily as the damage done to future
defendants if the decision stands. Lawyers control trials to a huge
extent as it is. If the defendant is found competent (as TK was), but
allowed no role, the fate of the accused begins to look even more like a
game among attorneys than it is already.
Scott
Scott Corey & Mary Foley
>
> Great post. Thanks for the info, scott. Einstein had similar views on
> modernization and loss of dignity associated with it ("Ideas and
> opinions" By A.Einstein).
Glad to be of help. I'll keep an eye out for "Ideas and Opinions."
Scott
srs...@my-deja.com
sco...@saber.net wrote:
> ... Glad to be of help. ...
>
> Scott
>
Scott, I'm also relatively new to this forum.
It appears that you are not only helpful to others but that you have
also contributed much worthwhile info regarding the case.
I read that you're not a lawyer; and that you were present at the trial
(the duration of your presence I'm not sure). I've read only a small
number of your messages but, based upon my readings thus far, I'm
impressed by the level of objectivity you seem to maintain while
reporting on the events. I'm wondering if you are you a journalist?
And, if not, what drives your interest in this case? Please forgive me
and ignore my questions if you do not wish to answer them. I realize
they may seem personal in nature, but I'm curious about your
objectivity as I find most folks a tad irrational when expressing their
views on the subject. The focus of my curiosity is the foundation upon
which your objectivity rests rather than upon you, personally.
Whether you respond to this message or not I hope that you will
continue your updates. I check in regularly, now, just to see if you
have anything new to report. I would also like to know from where you
obtain your up to date information (if you care to share that info). I
have read that you call the 9th Circuit, directly, for filing
information but that's all I know at this point. I asked the
sacbee.com site to update the site, but the last I checked they had not
done so. I haven't found any better source than you! :)
jum...@my-deja.com
pyro wrote:
> You are conflating Islam's Golden Age with ancient Persia. Rather
> than to speculate as to which of these was the highest point in
> Persian culture (a rather stupid and ignorant exercise, I might
> add), I think it would be best if we were to attempt to understand
> how ancient Persian civilization came to influence the Islamic
> Golden Age, and modern civilization especially, particularly as it
> fused with Greek civilization to produce the Hellenistic Age.
Yes, a very good idea. Here was the original exchange that had
kicked off your frap over the term "zenith." As you can see, the
-original- exchange stemmed from a discussion about how "a Jew and
an Arab might agree to play games of Chess to determine (relative)
`correctness' in the gaming context..." So actually, after all of
the distractions and diversions -YOU- had introduced, we are back
to the original exchange. The basic concept, which is perhaps too
basic for you, is that a "zenith" occurs when Jews and Arabs live
in harmony, or the harmonious condition you had identified during
the period of Cyrus the Great, and a condition I identify during
the 12th/13th centuries prior to introduction of the Renaissance
in Spain which, unfortunately, Spain had mismanaged and botched
because Spain was tardy in making that further transition into
the Age of Enlightenment. The source of ancient influence from
Persia was due to rationalism engendered through Chess mysticism.
>>> jumangi wrote:
>>>> Now a Jew and an Arab might agree to play
>>>> games of Chess to determine (relative)
>>>> "correctness" in the gaming context just as
>>>> they might be playing at politics to determine
>>>> "correctness" over an ensuing course of history.
>>>> It should be a pastime agreeable to both since
>>>> Chess was reputed to be a game invented in an
>>>> Arab/Persian world when Zoroaster was said to
>>>> have given instruction to the King.
>> pyro wrote:
>>> Outside of the Arabian peninsula, Arabs were not
>>> very influential until they were converted to
>>> Islam by Mohammed in the 7th century and consequently
>>> driven by a raging fanaticism to convert others in
>>> their "jihad." At around the time of Zarathustra,
>>> the Persians were very Indo-European with perhaps
>>> some Semitic/Turkic elements beginning to seep its
>>> way in. The Persians did not come into much contact
>>> with the Jews until Cyrus the Great took Babylon and
>>> allowed the Jews to rebuild Jerusalem.
> jumangi wrote:
>> Interesting observations, I suppose, from conditions
>> that were then while this is now. Jews and Arabs
>> lived in harmony during Persia's zenith, and I see
>> nothing which might prevent another similar zenith.
pyro wrote:
> I fail to see why we should be quibbling over semantics when we
> should be trying to understand and appreciate the influence of the
> ancients over our lives today. Learning is a step by step process:
> the average person today knows far more on many things than some of
> the greatest minds in ancient times. Yet, without the
> contributions of the ancients, who established the building blocks
> by which ideas were presented and challenged, and who advanced the
> sciences and schools of learning, we would be nowhere near where we
> are today. To compare Islam's Golden Age with ancient Persian
> civilization, as you can see, is foolish.
>
> During Islam's Golden Age plenty of original material was produced:
> poetry, prose, new concepts in mathematics and science were found,
> and medical texts became standard until many centuries later, etc.
> Much of the success in this age came as a result of the thirst for
> knowledge among the Moslems, who, unlike the Christian Europeans,
> refused to disregard the writings of the "pagan" Greeks.
>
> The Hellenistic Age came after Alexander the Great conquered the
> Persians, took their land, and encouraged Greek settlement in these
> lands. Alexander founded 70 new cities, one of which was
> Alexandria, which became a cultural center until many centuries
> later. Alexander even encouraged his generals to take Persian
> women.
>
> If the ancient Persians were as barbaric as you claim, there would
> have not been a Hellenistic Age, for it came with the blending of
> Greek and eastern customs.
Persians were reintroduced during Rome's decline, and we find
that they were once again regarded by Roman emperors as barbaric.
There are many varieties of a "thirst for knowledge" and we cannot
fault Christian Europeans for being geographically/linguistically
remote. The feature of Crusades indicates how serious differences
of opinion in religious doctrine also obscured cultural exchange,
however Robin Hood's Moslem friend returned with him to England.
You noted previously the existence of slaves in ancient Greece, yet
many of those were captured Persians who, when properly directed
and administrated under their Greek masters, helped build Hellenism.
It's true that Islam's Golden Age is incomparably far superior to
ancient Persia, and that's why everyone agrees Persians benefited
greatly subsequent to the Arab conquest following Mohammedism.
Semantic inquiry is consonant with appreciation for the ancients,
since etymology is the study of word origins and derivation.
pyro wrote:
> As I pointed out, the Persians were the first to produce coins of a
> standard value. They also built impressive roads. They preserved
> the history of the empires that rose and fell in Southwest Asia.
> Learning and the arts progressed and came to influence even modern
> Persians. They established standardized weights and measures.
> Zoroaster's ideas came to influence Christianity and Judaism.
>
> To suggest the Persians were vandals is beyond stupidity, Jumangi.
As was pointed out to you, TK's Hippocratic advice was something
like "first build no more roads." The Manifesto refers to money
grubbing as another "surrogate" activity so it seems, to me at least,
that you're going to run into contradiction when praising Persians
for introducing a monetary system while next criticizing Jews for
utilizing it. Zoroaster's "Chess" was, in turn, taken from India's
_chaturanga_ -- the Army game -- with the essential notion here that
one should first consider fighting the war cognitively upon a board
with game-pieces so as to develop one's sense for strategy/tactics,
and perhaps discover how many of the battles are simply unnecessary,
in stark contrast to recent reports that Afghanistan's _Taliban_ has
outlawed Chess. Zoroaster's ideas became further mediated/developed
by Manichaeism from which St.Augustine had converted to Christianity.
I neither said, nor suggested, that ancient Persians were vandals.
I had cited a few passages from Plato, who was a Greek and successor
to the episode of Persian conquest, in a pattern of writing history.
A long time ago, I had notified this list of the connection between
Plato's dialectics and cognitive-skill boardgames (checkers), so the
upshot is that one element of advantage in Greek philosophy comprised
of expansion upon Zoroastrian influences, obtained from North India
- the Aryan region - but they did not have blue eyes, nor blond hair.
> jumangi wrote:
>> Do you have evidence that the Marranos practiced Judaism secretly?
pyro wrote:
> From www.britannica.com:
>
> Marrano
> "In Spanish history, a Jew who converted to the Christian faith to
> escape persecution but who continued to practice Judaism secretly.
> It was a term of abuse and also applies to any descendants of
> Marranos. The origin of the word marrano is uncertain."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Which appears to contradict your earlier claim:
pyro wrote:
> Marranos ... did not adopt Catholic standards
> of behavior (at least not privately); and for
> this reason they were called "Marranos," or pigs.
How would you go about proving that a _converso_ was a Marrano?
You've cited a definition, but isn't it a contradiction in terms
to assert the existence of secrecy before secrecy is established,
and if one could establish secrecy then in what way was it a secret?
I suppose this was the point at issue unfathomable to those of the
Spanish Inquisition, which became critical during the Enlightenment.
If a _converso_ is suspected of being a Marrano, or if a person one
labels as Marrano is suspected of practicing Judaism secretly then
there must have been some "probable cause" or "rational reason" for
that suspicion in the first place, contradicting the other assertion
of "secrecy" in the nature of secret practices. Why not simply pass
laws proscribing unwanted behaviors and/or business practices, if
that was a cultural civilization concern of 15th-16th century Spain?
I think what had happened in 15th-16th century Spain was instead a
reactionary movement which stemmed from massive informational influx
during the 12th-13th-14th centuries, from the Arab scholarly world
(though Moors were not necessarily counted as Jewish/Arab scholars).
The reactionary movement of the Spanish Inquisition was not unlike a
reflection of earlier Crusades describing Christian/Moslem conflict.
You had (above) characterized the European Christians as disregarding
many of the scholarly materials known to what I had (in prior posts)
called a more flamboyant and cosmopolitan Islamicism, which Oswald
Spengler would later term a "magian" cultural civilization. It does
not strike me as an unreachable conclusion to associate that pattern
of right-wing Christian fundamentalism as extending from the burning
of the library at Alexandria, to the Spanish Inquisition, to events
in Nazi Germany, as exerting the DELETERIOUS influence upon cultural
civilization and completely in opposition to a "thirst for knowledge"
which you associate with Islam's Golden Age. A non-self-destructive
form of (Catholic) Christianity would instead stem from Erasmus, so
involved here is a key component of discernment among self-proclaimed
forms of sectarian Christianity, which themselves could be resolved
if they applied Zoroastrian/Platonic/Manichaean methods of inquiry,
i.e. Chess, checkers, dungeons-&-dragons boardgames, for logic study.
Christian indolence at not resolving their own interior sectarian
squabbles is inexcusable, yet a Catholic appeal to original sin does
not win approval from St.Peter who holds the keys to Heaven's Gate.
The major Christian philosophical innovation was focus upon dualism
of "heaven and hell." These are alternative existential conditions,
quite abstract and removed from accusation and judgment. Once these
are more clearly comprehended it is not difficult to understand why
believers should be willing to endure persecution, since the believer
who analyzes a contemporary circumstance as "hell" will arrive at the
conclusion that -any- alternative, inclusive of death, is preferable.
Additional anti-semitism merely amplifies the paradox of why Judaism
should continue to be practiced, since what advantage should accrue
to the believer who persists in the face of persecution? Thereby the
fact of Jews remaining in the face of anti-semitism, or some people
converting to Judaism, produces more curiosity about Judaism than if
nothing had been said. As with Hollywood, "negative publicity can be
preferrable to no publicity at all." Christianity itself became more
enshrined in context to its central figure, martyred on the cross.
Persecution pours gasoline on the flames of fanaticism. Though I am
unable to speak with authority on the specifics of Judaism, I can see
the difference between "anti-semitism" and Christian "non-semitism."
Christian "non-semitism" is a kind of "zero" concept also introduced
from Indo-Aryan symbolism, however "zero" is not equal to a negative.
The illogic of blaming Jews for "killing Jesus" is also unfathomable.
In the first place among the marketplace crowd who demanded Barrabas
over Jesus were a great majority of unconverted Gentiles. Jesus had
himself ELECTED to go to the cross as early as Matthew 16:21, as also
further confirmed by his prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane, and had
plenty opportunity to bail-out when brought under prosecution before
Pilate. In Luke, Jesus also appears before Herod yet offers nothing
by way of answer to Herod's questions, because Jesus was on a mission
to the cross, for the purpose of establishing a Resurrection Doctrine
of Christian faith for all time. There's no resurrection without his
death, so there could not possibly be a central main theme to that
gospel story without releasing Barrabas instead of Jesus. Any of the
alternatives would diminish both message and meaning of the Gospels.
pyro wrote:
> "The Jewish religion remained deeply rooted in their hearts, and
> they continued to transmit their beliefs to the succeeding
> generations. Many Marranos did eventually choose emigration,
> however, principally to North Africa and to other western European
> countries. Marranism had disappeared in Spain by the 18th century
> owing to this emigration and to gradual assimilation within Spain."
Well, I have a number of questions concerning how it could be
possible for Marranism to come and go, particularly if it should
refer to secret practices unknown to those not in on the secrets.
What exactly were those "secret practices" they sought to banish?
"The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and
were sneering at Jesus. He said to them, `You are
the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men,
but God knows your hearts. What is highly valued
among men is detestable in God's sight." ( Luke 16:14-15 )
So during the period of that Spanish Inquisition, Torquemada is
in the role of playing a "pharisee" claiming to know the secrets of
hearts known only to God, with four Papal Bulls, Bartolome de las
Casas, and Charles I all putting a high value on slavery for the
New World economic exploitation, "quite detestable in God's sight."
Now Jesus has presently come to mean for us a persecuted "everyman,"
whether Jew or Gentile.
> jumangi wrote:
>> Furthermore, Torquemada was himself of Jewish descent:
>>
>> "Torquemada, Tomas de (b.1420, Valladolid, Spain d.Sept 16, 1498,
>> Avila), first grand inquisitor in Spain, whose name has become
>> synonymous with the Inquisition's horror, religious bigotry,
>> and cruel fanaticism. He joined the Dominicans and from 1452
>> to 1474 was prior of Santa Cruz Monastery, Segovia. His belief
>> that the Marranos (Jewish converts), the Moriscos (Islamic
>> converts), the Jews, and the Moors threatened Spain's welfare
>> enabled him to influence and affect the religious policies of
>> the Catholic monarchs Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand V,
>> to whom he was confessor and adviser. Torquemada, ironically
>> of Jewish descent himself, in 1492 persuaded the rulers to
>> expel all Jews who refused to be baptized, causing about
>> 170,000 Jewish subjects to leave Spain." ( Encycl.Brit. )
pyro wrote:
> It's funny how the biggest anti-Semites always seem to turn out
> being Jewish. With claims such as Hitler having been part Jewish,
> as well as Philip II of Spain (who appeared Aryan), and Christopher
> Columbus (who had blond hair), among other notable people in
> history, I need proof.
The Encyclopedia Britannica was compiled by British historians.
It would not surprise me to learn that you were Jewish.
> jumangi wrote:
>> "_The_Spanish_Inquisition_. With its large Moorish and
>> Jewish populations, medieval Spain was the only multiracial
>> and multireligious country in western Europe, and much of
>> the development of Spanish civilization in religion,
>> literature, art, and architecture during the later Middle
>> Ages stemmed from this fact. The Jews had served Spain
>> and its monarchs well, providing an active commercial class
>> and an educated elite for many administrative posts. But,
>> inevitably, their wealth created jealousy and their hetero-
>> doxy hatred in a population that traditionally saw itself
>> as the defender of Christianity against the infidel."
>> ( Encycl.Brit. )
pyro wrote:
> Oh, sure, the "poor," "oppressed," "victimized," "innocent" Jew.
> That's how they are portrayed in the history books, but that's not
> how things were. It was the Jews who oppressed others with usury,
> often charging interest up to 200% (or perhaps much higher),
> therefore causing many people to go bankrupt, whereupon their
> property was seized by the Jews. The Jews also frequently engaged
> in illegal business activities. They were crooks. This was the
> main reason why they were expelled from every single country in
> Europe. The intellectuals despised the Jews.
I'm in agreement that usury is generally a bad idea all around,
however as long as it was a practice regulated by law, judgment
on matters of usury would proceed from standards of prevailing law.
It's quite a mistake to imagine notions of "justice" existing only
in recent times. The procedures you've described, with a "200%
interest" (must have been special circumstances), bankruptcy and
property forfeiture, should have fallen within purview of the courts.
Would you be saying there was no access to the courts at that time?
If the Jews were so well known as "crooks" then why did some people
continue borrowing money at high rates of interest for risky venture?
Apparently many other business dealings had paid off handsomely, else
such practices would have not continued. Another alternative would
have been to convert to Judaism, since usury was not much in effect
among the Jews. So high rates of interest were instead reflective
of greater degree of uncertainty when lending to others not of the
same religious affiliation, identity of religion being among many key
elements determinative of expectational ethicism and trustworthyness.
Let's also ask why someone should want to borrow money at a "200%
interest" rate. Was the crown so stingy with funds that money could
not be found through alternative means? I recall that the Catholic
Church had, through history, been notable for its luxurious largesse.
Why wouldn't the Catholic Church lend money at lower interest, or at
no interest, to those disreputable borrowers? Caveat emptor.
> jumangi wrote:
>> "_The_conversos_. Nevertheless, the expulsion of 1492 did
>> not signify the end of Jewish influence on Spanish history,
>> as used to be thought until quite recently. It is not,
>> however, easy to establish a clear-cut direction of pattern
>> of this influence. At the end of the 15th century there
>> may have been up to 300,000 _conversos_ in Spain, and the
>> majority of these remained. They had constituted the
>> educated urban bourgeoisie of Spain, and the richer families
>> had frequently intermarried with the Spanish aristocracy
>> and even transmitted their blood to the royal family iteslf."
>> ( Encycl.Brit. )
pyro wrote:
> Sounds like a bit of revisionist history. Even devout Christians
> with Jewish blood in their veins were hated in Spain. They were
> considered subhuman and potentially subversive. King Philip II of
> Spain, whom the Jews claim to have been part Jewish, particularly
> despised (ethnic) Jews who were practicing Christians.
Take up your argument with the Encyclopedia Britannica. If
anything, your contributions to a.f.u. have been repeatedly shown
as false: outright lies, exaggerations, distortions, and stupid.
> jumangi wrote:
>> "But the majority of the _conversos_ and their descendants
>> probably became and remained orthodox Catholics, playing
>> a prominent part in every aspect of Spanish religious
>> and intellectual life." ( Encycl.Brit. )
pyro wrote:
> This is poppycock. The Jews produced NO ARTISTS OR ARCHITECTS.
What is the percentage of academics who would agree with your
statement above? Cite all sources for your answer.
> jumangi wrote:
>> " ... It has now become clear that
>> without them the `Golden Century' of Spain would be
>> inconceivable. They ranged from such saints as Teresa of
>> Avila and St.John of God, one a mystical writer and founder
>> of convents, the other an organizer of care for the sick,
>> to Diego Lainez, a friend of St.Ignatius of Loyola and
>> second general of the Jesuit Order. They included Fernando
>> de Rojas, author of _La_Celestina_, the first great
>> literary work of the Spanish Renaissance, and, two
>> generations later, Mateo Aleman, who wrote a picaresque
>> novel, the _Guzman_de_Alfarache_; and they could boast
>> Luis de Leon, a Humanist and poet; a Dominican, Francisco
>> de Vitoria, perhaps the greatest jurist of any country in
>> the 16th century; and another famous Dominican, the
>> defender of the American Indians and historian of the
>> Indies, Bartolome de Las Casas. ( who, in turn, was the
>> one first credited with petitioning Charles I, and thereby
>> the pope, for permission to bring African slaves to the
>> New World -- indeed this was Spain's `Golden Century' )."
>> ( Encycl.Brit. )
pyro wrote:
> As an ethnic tribe that has existed for millennia, and has survived
> countless expulsions and diasporas, even Jews are given to produce
> great intellectuals every now and then. However, Jews have a
> tendency to exaggerate and outright lie about their
> accomplishments. It is absolutely false that the Spanish Golden
> Age would be inconceivable without Jews.
I'm inconceiving it right now, so it's absolutely false that
"it is absolutely false." For example, we had just been examining
the fact of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisitio: _conversos_,
Marranos, and Moriscos. Had you forgotten already? You had been
claiming Jewish, or _converso_, prominence in the Spanish-originated
cross-Atlantic slave-trade, so essential (as they thought) for their
New World economic exploitation and Golden Age domination.
pyro wrote:
> The pre-eminent writer of Spain's Golden Age was Miguel de
> Cervantes, who was anti-Semitic. Another towering genius of
> Spain's Golden Age was Quevedo y Villegas, who also was
> anti-Semitic. Tirso de Molina created the legend of Don Juan.
> Calderon de la Barca was Aryan. Same with Gongora y Argote and
> Lope de Vega.
Any relation to Esteban Manuel de Villegas, jailed for satires in
1659 by the very same Inquisition that was persecuting _conversos_,
Marranos, and Moriscos? Of Quevedo y Villegas we may read:
"On the ascension of Philip IV of Spain, Osuna fell from favour
and Quevedo was placed under house arrest. He thereafter refused
political appointment and devoted himself to writing, producing a
steady stream of satirical verse and prose aimed at the follies of
his contemporaries." (Encycl.Brit. V.viii, p.351)
Also:
"...The hell of his visions is actually a surrealistic
distortion of the world around him." (Encycl.Brit. V.viii, p.351)
So, all in all, perhaps a writer worth investigating but hardly to
be considered much by way of any wellspring for genuine objectivity.
pyro wrote:
> During the Golden Age Spain produced Diego Rodriguez de Silva y
> Velazquez (among the greatest ever), and attracted El Greco (who
> was from Crete).
Well, you've prompted me to review Spanish Golden Age artists,
architects and writers -- which is a big assignment -- though from my
earlier impressions that insofar as they tended toward the romantic,
rather than the classical, mode, there was some sacrifice of mental
balance. The phrase "tilting at windmills" today continues to
signify an unfeasible pursuit, or ambition, toward unrealistic ends.
pyro wrote:
> Even the Encyclepedia Britannica admits that the Jews produced NO
> ARTISTS OR ARCHITECTS. The claim that Teresa of Avila and St. John
> of the Cross were of Jewish descent is dubious. If it is the case
> that they had Jewish in them (however unlikely it is), exactly how
> Jewish were they: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, ... ?
Your misstatement concerning the Encyclopedia Britannica is quite
laughable. I'm looking at a topic heading "Jewish Peoples, Arts of"
in the 1974 edition, so you'll probably need to acquire that free
30-day subscription over the web if you wish to read that in full.
Its article runs 12 pages, another 10 pages for Jewish philosophy,
and another 13 pages for Jewish mysticism, myth and legend. You
got the denominators right (powers of 2) but failed to realize that
numerators could be values other than 1. If anything, it's rather
astonishing how much of a blithering idiot you are, considering that
you must have at least tried to obtain a high-school education.
pyro wrote:
> These are questions that are not answered by the Encyclopedia
> Britannica, and perhaps cannot be answered. What I do know is that
> Spain did not allow even converted Jews to take high positions
> within the Church (from www.britannica.com):
>
> "In 1499 a staunch and somewhat fanatical Roman Catholic, Pedro
> Sarmiento, wrote the anti-Semitic Sentencia-Estatuto, which
> prohibited conversos from holding public or ecclesiastical offices
> and from testifying against Spanish Christians in courts of law.
> That statute was followed by the 16th-century laws of purity of
> blood (limpieza de sangre) which further strengthened the laws
> against anyone of Jewish ancestry and were more racial than
> religious in nature. It was not until the late 19th and early 20th
> centuries that some of the legalized prejudice against Jews in
> Spain was modified."
Well, ok. So why was "legalized prejudice" later modified?
Why had Spain failed to preserve its 16th-cent Golden Age?
pyro wrote:
> Jews are a culturally destructive race. THEY DO NOT PRODUCE
> ARTISTS, and they do not produce scientists of the stature of Isaac
> Newton, Mendel, or Darwin. They do not produce mathematicians to
> the level of Archimedes. They do not produce dramatists of the
> stature of Euripides, Aeschylus or Sophocles.
You won't find much agreement with such statements among those
in the know who are academics, even among non-Jewish academics.
pyro wrote:
> They do not produce architects of the level of Antonio Gaudi, or
> filmmakers that can rival Luis Bunuel. They cannot -- and almost
> certainly never will -- produce writers to the level of Shakespeare
> or Cervantes, or even Dickens and Tolstoy.
So Jews do not have a vice-grip on Hollywood and the Media?
pyro wrote:
> They do not produce philosophers that rival those produced by the
> ancient Greeks: Socrates, Plato or Aristotle.
Ludwig Wittgenstein provided the new 20th-century paradigm for
philosophy, revising Locke's revisions of Plato.
pyro wrote:
> They have not produced musicians miles within Mozart, Bach,
> Beethoven, or Brahms.
Doesn't even deserve the benefit of a reply. Richard Strauss
told Adolf Hitler that he couldn't improve upon a single note of
Mendelssohn. Hitler very much liked Mendelssohn's music. I had
mentioned this to you late October and early November 1999, but
apparently your memory is shorter than your dick.
>> pyro wrote:
>>> I have asked you to present evidence that Arabs were architects of
>>> New World slavery, and thus far you have failed to do so. I, on
>>> the other hand, provided a terse quote from a professor of the
>>> University of Chicago who indicates the "structural importance of
>>> Jews in the early stages of the New World slave trade."
>
pyro wrote:
> Are you suggesting Jews were forced into slave-trading? That these
> poor, innocent souls had no other way to make ends meet because
> they were treated so unfairly? <weeps>
>
> As I pointed out, simpleton, one-third to one-half of the Blacks
> died in the voyage to the New World. Like it or not, the greasy,
> ugly, disgusting, greedy and hook-nosed Jewish vermin were
> responsible. They took part in it. They saw gold in trading
> Blacks. They always play the victim, just like serial killers do.
Actually the death rate among Non-Jew slave-trading ships was
probably much lower than among the Jewish slave-trading ships,
because the Jews were more clever about taking care of perishable
wealth, and had the intelligence not to sail during perilous times.
The statistic I've seen cited, was more like 20%, not 1/3-to-1/2.
> jumangi wrote:
>> "...In fact, the British were the leading slave traders,
>> controlling at least half of the translatlantic trade by the
>> end of the 18th century..." (Encycl.Brit. V.4, p.892d, c1974)
pyro wrote:
> Karl Marx is considered "German" yet we all know he was a kike.
> Jews are masters of disguise. It is a known fact that many of the
> slave ships involved in the North American trade were owned by
> Jews. The Jews were heavily involved in slave dealing in just
> about every New World colony.
I checked up on this and found that Hugh Thomas (_The_Slave_Trade_,
c1997) agrees with Eli Faber (_Jews,_Slaves,_and_the_Slave_Trade_:_
_Setting_the_Record_Straight_, c1998) with the following data:
III. Vessel Owners (p.165)
Table I
Ownership of Vessels Entering Jamaican Ports
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Non-Jewish Jewish Religion not Known
--------------------------------------------------------------------
12/25/1744 - 256 6 1
12/24/1745 (Q4)
12/25/1754 - 477 6 1
12/24/1755 (Q4)
12/25/1764 - 649 6 2
12/24/1765 (Q4)
12/29/1784 - 667 27 4
12/29/1785 (Q4)
12/29/1795 - 548 12 27
12/29/1796 (Q3)
12/29/1804 - 739 9 40*
12/29/1805 (Q4)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
* Mostly foreign packets
(Q3) Three quarters of reporting year recorded
(Q4) All quarters of reporting year recorded
Sources: PRO, CO 142/15, 142/16, 142/23, 142/24.
Table 2
Ownership of Vessels Entering Barbados Ports
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Non-Jewish Jewish Religion not Known
--------------------------------------------------------------------
3/25/1735 - 344 0 1
2/25/1736 (Q4)
1/5/1774 - 420 3 0
1/5/1775 (Q4)
1/1/1800 - 143 2 2
12/31/1800 (Q2)
2/1/1805 - 490 0 2
1/31/1806 (Q4)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
(Q2) Two quarters of reporting year recorded
(Q4) All quarters of reporting year recorded
Sources: PRO, CO 33/16, 33/18, 33/21; PRO, T 64/49.
IV. Slave Imports and Exports (p.175)
Table I
Slave Imports Recorded by the Naval Office in Jamaica, 1719-1806
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Slaves on Vessels
Owned by Non-Jews Owned by Jews Other*
--------------------------------------------------------------------
6/24/1719 - 3,643 295 455
6/25/1720 (Q4)
9/29/1742 - 2,299 200# 0
12/25/1742 (Q1)
3/25/1743 - 8,064+ 0 0
3/25/1744 (Q4)
3/25/1744 - 6,359+ 0 4
12/25/1744 (Q3)
12/25/1744 - 3,730 0 101
12/24/1745 (Q4)
12/27/1745 - 4,698 0 0
12/24/1746 (Q4)
12/29/1746 - 9,757+ 0 0
12/25/1747 (Q4)
12/25/1747 - 1,316 0 0
3/25/1748 (Q1)
3/25/1748 - 10,886 0 210
3/24/1749 (Q4)
3/25/1749 - 1,521 0 0
6/25/1749 (Q1)
12/25/1751 - 6,011 0 0
12/25/1752 (Q4)
12/25/1752 - 7,689 35 0
12/25/1753 (Q4)
12/25/1753 - 9,459 0 0
12/25/1754 (Q4)
12/25/1754 - 12,499+ 55 0
12/25/1755 (Q4)
12/25/1755 - 6,822 0 0
12/25/1756 (Q4)
12/25/1756 - 4,580 0 0
12/25/1757 (Q4)
12/25/1761 - 6,894 0 0
12/25/1762 (Q4)
12/25/1762 - 7,718+ 0 0
12/26/1763 (Q4)
12/25/1763 - 10,498 0 0
12/25/1764 (Q4)
12/25/1764 - 10,525 80 0
12/25/1765 (Q4)
12/25/1765 - 9,919 142 0
12/29/1766 (Q3)
12/29/1766 - 3,063 153 0
12/29/1767 (Q4)
3/29/1768 - 3,077 0 0
9/29/1768 (Q2)
3/29/1769 - 1,341 0 0
12/29/1769 (Q2)
12/29/1781 - 6,167 0 0
12/29/1782 (Q4)
9/29/1783 - 4,354 0 600
12/29/1783 (Q1)
12/29/1783 - 15,238 0 0
12/29/1784 (Q4)
12/29/1784 - 11,410 0 0
12/29/1785 (Q4)
12/30/1785 - 5,655 0 0
12/29/1786 (Q4)
12/29/1786 - 5,976 0 0
12/29/1787 (Q4)
12/29/1787 - 2,668 0 0
6/29/1788 (Q2)
12/29/1795 - 4,532 0 0
12/29/1796 (Q3)
12/29/1796 - 7,201 0 0
12/29/1797 (Q2)
12/29/1797 - 5,972 0 0
9/29/1798 (Q2)
12/29/1801 - 8,444+ 0 386
12/29/1802 (Q4)
12/29/1802 - 5,395+ 0 0
12/29/1803 (Q4)
12/29/1803 - 5,064 0 0
12/29/1804 (Q4)
12/29/1804 - 4,726 0 0
12/29/1805 (Q4)
12/29/1805 - 7,989 0 377
12/29/1806 (Q4)
12/29/1806 - 6,965 0 261
6/29/1807 (Q2)
TOTALS 260,124+ 960 2,394
--------------------------------------------------------------------
* Names of vessel owners either not given or their religious
affiliation not known
# Returned from the Spanish Coast
+ Total higher but cannot be determined because of defective ms.
(Q1) One quarter of reporting year recorded
(Q2) Two quarters of reporting year recorded
(Q3) Three quarters of reporting year recorded
(Q4) All quarters of reporting year recorded
Sources: PRO, CO 142/15 - 142/24.
Table 2
Slave Exports Recorded by the Naval Office in Jamaica, 1719-1806
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Slaves on Vessels
Owned by Non-Jews Owned by Jews Other*
--------------------------------------------------------------------
6/24/1719 - 21 0 12
6/25/1720 (Q4)
9/29/1742 - 274 0 0
12/25/1742 (Q1)
3/25/1743 - 815 8 0
12/23/1743 (Q3)
12/25/1743 - 1,542 50 0
12/24/1744 (Q4)
1/3/1745 - 595+ 220+ 0
12/24/1745 (Q4)
12/30/1745 - 960 180 0
12/26/1746 (Q4)
12/25/1746 - 2,654+ 278 0
3/25/1748 (Q5)
3/25/1748 - 2,681+ 260 0
3/24/1749 (Q4)
3/25/1749 - 278 0 0
6/25/1749 (Q1)
12/25/1751 - 1,038 0 0
12/25/1752 (Q4)
12/25/1752 - 939+ 0 0
12/25/1753 (Q4)
12/25/1753 - 1,592+ 68 0
12/25/1754 (Q4)
12/25/1754 - 652 0 0
12/25/1755 (Q4)
12/25/1755 - 1,260 0 0
12/25/1756 (Q4)
12/25/1756 - 738 0 0
12/25/1757 (Q4)
12/25/1761 - 40 0 0
12/25/1762 (Q4)
12/25/1762 - 1,502 0 0
12/26/1763 (Q4)
12/25/1763 - 3,023 0 0
12/25/1764 (Q4)
12/25/1764 - 2,275 4 6
12/25/1765 (Q4)
12/25/1765 - 625 40 0
12/29/1766 (Q3)
12/29/1766 - 544+ 90 0
12/29/1767 (Q4)
3/29/1768 - 73+ 220 0
9/29/1768 (Q2)
3/29/1769 - 99 105 0
12/29/1769 (Q2)
12/29/1781 - 0 0 0
12/25/1782 (Q4)
9/29/1783 - 0 0 600
12/29/1783 (Q1)
12/29/1783 - 757 280 0
12/29/1784 (Q4)
12/29/1784 - 904 349 0
12/29/1785 (Q4)
12/29/1785 - 347 342 0
12/29/1786 (Q4)
12/29/1786 - 473 12 32
12/29/1787 (Q4)
12/29/1787 - 216 12 0
6/29/1788 (Q2)
12/29/1795 - 1,122 52 23
12/29/1796 (Q3)
12/29/1796 - 1,850 10 0
12/29/1797 (Q2)
12/29/1797 - 393 50 83
9/29/1798 (Q2)
12/29/1801 - 572 50 0
12/29/1802 (Q4)
12/29/1802 - 863 36 0
12/29/1803 (Q4)
12/29/1803 - 322 13 200
12/29/1804 (Q4)
12/29/1804 - 182+ 0 0
12/29/1805 (Q4)
12/29/1805 - 106 0 0
12/29/1806 (Q4)
12/29/1806 - 87 0 60
6/29/1807 (Q2)
TOTALS 32,414+ 2,729+ 416
--------------------------------------------------------------------
* Names of vessel owners either not given or their religious
affiliation not known
+ Total higher but cannot be determined because of defective ms.
(Q1) One quarter of reporting year recorded
(Q2) Two quarters of reporting year recorded
(Q3) Three quarters of reporting year recorded
(Q4) All quarters of reporting year recorded
Sources: PRO, CO 142/15 - 142/24.
>> pyro wrote:
>>> Even as a small fraction of those involved in the trade, or who
>>> bought slaves, Jews played a major role given the fact that they
>>> had so much capital. Aaron Lopez, for example, was a Jew who owned
>>> at least 26 ships!
>
> jumangi wrote:
>> Once again, from Ralph A. Austen, who is one of your experts:
>>
>> "It was not the material wealth of the Jews that made
>> them so crucial to this emerging South Atlantic economy
>> but rather (as with other ethnic-commercial
>> diasporas such as the Huguenots, the Quakers, the
>> overseas Chinese, Muslims in Africa) their ability
>> to transfer assets and information among
>> themselves across the entire economic network."
pyro wrote:
> High in-group loyalty and ethnic collusion. These are certainly
> prominent traits among the greasy, disgusting kikes. Interesting
> that Mr. Austen should emphasize this point.
Not quite so disgusting as the "oversocialized" Nazis on a.f.u.
Interesting that Mr. Austen, who is Jewish, should be among the
first to report the accurate findings. As I had mentioned quite
some time ago, the Jews were among their own worst critics. I've
tried to identify one positive contribution from the anti-semites
here, and can't recall anything much from `pyro' that was actually
truthful, undistorted, AND relevant to the contemporary situation.
The TOTAL collective slave-holdings of -ALL- Jews in the days
prior to the civil war did not exceed that of the single largest
slave plantation holding in the Old South. (cf Hugh Thomas, Lind)
> jumangi wrote:
>> "Dangerous ideas" that is, not unlike those they sought to
>> repress among Jews through forcible conversion. So all around,
>> Spain's clergy was anti-Enlightenment and had much to contribute
>> to Spain's inexplicable but inexorably slow cultural diminution.
pyro wrote:
> The Jews did not have "dangerous ideas." In fact, they had no ideas
> at all. Jews were -- and always will be -- usurers. They were
> parasites. Spain should have exterminated all of them, rather than
> to leave other countries with the burden of dealing with these
> rats. When they left Spain they continued to scam people of other
> nations. Ferdinand and Isabella had the chance to take care of the
> problem once and for all
>
> The Spanish clergy established the Society of Jesus (also known as
> Jesuits), with the Pope's sanction. They were among the most
> educated and enlightened in Europe. They were schooled in both the
> classics and theology. Many of the Enlightenment thinkers were
> influenced by the Jesuits.
As I had previously mentioned, Torquemada persecuted its founder:
"By the edict of March 31, 1492, Spanish Jews were
given the choice of exile or Baptism. When in
1502 Islam in its turn was proscribed, the
Inquisition began to devote its attention to the
Moriscos, the Spanish Muslims who had accepted
Baptism. When the Protestant Reformation began to
penetrate into Spain, the relatively few Spanish
Protestants also were eliminated by the
Inquisition. Nor did Catholics escape its rigors:
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits,
was twice arrested on suspicion of heresy, and the
archbishop of Toledo, the Dominican Batholome de
Carranza, was imprisoned for almost 17 years."
(Encycl.Brit.)
However, this requires that you know how to read, and also use
more than 10% of your brain to think carefully about what you read.
If the Jews had "no ideas at all" then they couldn't be -converted-
since "conversion" to the status of being a _converso_ requires a
CHANGE of ideas. You wouldn't be able to reconcile the Jews having
"no ideas at all" with your other allegation of the Jewish "secret
practices" making some of them "Marranos" rather than _conversos_.
If usury was not illegal then what made usury reprehensible? Having
"no ideas at all" has never been a crime, whereas many of the great
Spanish literati you've cited were imprisoned for dangerous satires.
> jumangi wrote:
>> "However the definition of 'zenith' is:
>>
>> 1. The point of the celestial sphere that is exactly overhead and
>> opposite to the nadir.
>> 2. The highest or culminating point: the _zenith_ of one's career:
>> opposed to _nadir_.
>> (< OF cenit, ult. < Arabic _samt_ (ar-ras) the path (over the head))
>>
>> "So the term 'zenith' refers to something which relates to the head,
>> and not to power, with an etymology stemming from Old French and
>> Arabic, not Persian. Power that can be 'ended forever' can hardly be
>> characterized as much of any kind of 'zenith.' It's not my fault if
>> you lack a fundamental understanding of word definitions. Your
>> description of Alexander's conquest illustrates Persia's nadir. Ask
>> Arab/Persian scholars when their greatest contributions to World
>> History and Civilization occurred."
pyro wrote:
> You ignoramus! I was not pointing out Persia's zenith, but its
> decline. The Darius in the quote is Darius III, not Darius the
> Great! Persia's peak occurred in the 6th and 5th century B.C.
> Cyrus the Great took Babylon and Asia Minor, Cambyses II took
> Egypt, and Darius the Great spread the empire to NW India and
> Afghanistan. He even took some of Greece's colonies. He lost when
> the Greeks retaliated. His son, Xerxes, tried to avenge his
> father's humiliation. This was in the 5th century. I then
> fast-forwarded to the 4th century, to mark Persia's collapse. You
> confused Darius the Great with Darius III. It was Darius III who
> was defeated by Alexander.
Then we shall be expecting you to continue illustrating Persia's
decline in your future postings to alt.fan.unabomber ?
pyro wrote:
> (Essai sur le Moeurs) ...
>
> (From a letter to a Jew who had written to him, complaining of his
> 'anti-Semitism.' Examen des Quelques Objections... dans L'Essai sur
> le Moeurs.) ...
>
> ("Juif," Dictionnaire Philosophique) ...
>
> (Letter to Jean-Baptiste Nicolas de Lisle de Sales,
> December 15, 1773. Correspondance. 86:166) ...
>
> (Lettres de Memmius a Ciceron, 1771) ...
>
> -- Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet)
Reaching as far back as the 18th century because you can't
find anything from the past fifty years? The topic is: TODAY .
- regards
- jb
jum...@my-deja.com
Life of Tomas de Torquemada, First Grand Inquisitor of Spain
Author: Phokas <pho...@marbletower.freehosting.net>
Date: 2000/03/11
Forum: soc.culture.greek
Tomás de Torquemada
First Grand Inquisitor of Spain, born at Valladolid in 1420; died at
Avila, 16 September, 1498. He was a nephew of the celebrated
theologian and cardinal, Juan de Torquemada. In his early youth he
entered the Dominican monastery at Valladolid, and later was appointed
prior of the Monastery of Santa Cruz at Segovia, an office which he
held for twenty-two years. The Infanta Isabella chose him as her
confessor while at Segovia, and when she succeeded to the throne of
Castile in 1474 he became one of her most trusted and influential
councillors, but refused all high ecclesiastical preferments, choosing
to remain a simple friar. At that time the purity of the Catholic
Faith in Spain was in great danger from the numerous Marranos and
Moriscos, who, for material considerations, became sham converts from
Judaism and Mohammedanism to Christianity. The Marranos committed
serious outrages against Christianity and endeavoured to judaize the
whole of Spain. The Inquisition, which the Catholic sovereigns had
been empowered to establish by Sixtus IV in 1478, had, despite
unjustifiable cruelties, failed of its purpose, chiefly for want of
centralisation. In 1483 the pope appointed Torquemada, who had been an
assistant inquisitor since 11 February 1482, Grand Inquisitor of
Castile, and on 17 October extended his jurisdiction over Aragon. As
papal representative and the highest official of the inquisitorial
court, Torquemada directed the entire business of the Inquisition in
Spain, was empowered to delegate his inquisitorial faculties to other
Inquisitors of his own choosing, who remained accountable to him, and
settled the appeals made to the Holy See. He immediately established
tribunals at Valladolid, Seville, Jaen, Avila, Cordova, and
Villa-real, and, in 1484, at Saragossa for the Kingdom of Aragon. He
also instituted a High Council, consisting of five members, whose
chief duty was to assist him in the hearing of appeals (see
INQUISITION -- The Inquisition in Spain). He convened a general
assembly of Spanish inquisitors at Seville, 29 November, 1484, and
presented an outline of twenty-eight articles for their guidance. To
these he added several new statutes in 1485, 1488, and 1498 (Reuss,
"Sammlungen der Instructionen des spanischen Inquisitionsgerichts",
Hanover, 1788). The Marranos found a powerful means of evading the
tribunals in the Jews of Spain, whose riches had made them very
influential and over whom the Inquisition had no jurisdiction. On this
account Torquemada urged the sovereigns to compel all the Jews either
to become Christians or to leave Spain. To frustrate his designs the
Jews agreed to pay the Spanish government 30,000 ducats if left
unmolested. There is a tradition that when Ferdinand was about to
yield to the enticing offer, Torquemada appeared before him, bearing a
crucifix aloft, and exclaiming: "Judas Iscariot sold Christ for 30
pieces of silver; Your Highness is about to sell him for 30,000
ducats. Here He is; take Him and sell Him." Leaving the crucifix on
the table he left the room. Chiefly through his instrumentality the
Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492.
Much has been written of the inhuman cruelty of Torquemada. Llorente
computes that during Torquemada's office (1483-98) 8800 suffered death
by fire and 96,54 were punished in other ways (Histoire de
l'Inquisition, IV, 252). These figures are highly exaggerated, as has
been conclusively proved by Hefele (Cardinal Ximenes, ch. xviii), Gams
(Kirchengeschichte von Spanien, III, II, 68-76), and many others. Even
the Jewish historian Graetz contents himself with stating that "under
the first Inquisitor Torquemada, in the course of fourteen years
(1485-1498) at least 2000 Jews were burnt as impenitent sinners"
("History of the Jews", Philadelphia, 1897, IV, 356). Most historians
hold with the Protestant Peschel (Das Zeitalter der Entdeckungen,
Stuttgart, 1877, pp. 119 sq.) that the number of persons burnt from
1481 to 1504, when Isabella died, was about 2000. Whether Torquemada's
ways of ferreting out and punishing heretics were justifiable is a
matter that has to be decided not only by comparison with the penal
standard of the fifteenth century, but also, and chiefly, by an
inquiry into their necessity for the preservation of Christian Spain.
The contemporary Spanish chronicler, Sebastian de Olmedo (Chronicon
magistrorum generalium Ordinis Prædicatorum, fol. 80-81) calls
Torquemada "the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the saviour of
his country, the honour of his order".
Visit Byzantium, the True Story
marbletower.freehosting.net/
==========
Re: More Lies From the Lying Whore
Author: ANGIE-ANNETTE CAREW <OTH...@prodigy.net>
Date: 2000/03/27
Forum: alt.religion.christian.roman-catholic
Hav'ah wrote:
> :-)
>
> Here's an actual clipping from the Globe & mail about it...
>
> www.sstsystems.net/~havah/inqstion.html
What your\there talking about we Catholics call the "Black Legend"
see below:
From the "Catholic Dossier Magazine"
November/December 1996
The Spanish Inquisition: Fact Versus Fiction
by Marvin R. O'Connell
"Even while I breathed there came to my nostrils the breath of the
vapor of heated iron. A suffocating odor pervaded the prison. A deeper
glow settled each moment in the eyes that glared at my agonies. A
richer tint of crimson diffused itself over the pictured horrors of
blood. There could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors. Oh,
most unrelenting! Oh, most demoniac of men! 'Death,' I said, 'any
death but that of the pit.'"
And so on for twenty pages reads the most familiar literary indictment
of the wickedness of the Spanish Inquisition. Edgar Allen Poe's short
story, "The Pit and the Pendulum," is, to be sure, a piece of fiction,
its author a specialist in creating scenes of horror and dread, as the
titles of some of his other works suggest: "The Murders in the Rue
Morgue," "The Haunted Palace," "The Conqueror Worm." Yet Poe's hideous
image of the red-hot poker being prepared as an instrument of torture
by grinning Spanish sadists - the "most demoniac of men" - did not
strain the credulity of his readers a century and a half ago, nor does
it today. We may indeed express our abhorrence a little more
light-heartedly - when Professor Higgins, in "My Fair Lady" wishes to
evoke the most frightful of possible alternatives, he sings, "I'd
prefer a new edition/Of the Spanish Inquisition," and, with the
shivers running up and down the spine, we know exactly what he means.
At a rather more sophisticated level was the picture drawn by
Dostoyevsky who, in "The Brothers Karamazov" imagines the Grand
Inquisitor, with "his withered face and sunken eyes," in confrontation
with Jesus on the streets of Seville, where the Savior has just
restored life to a dead child. "The Inquisitor sees everything; he
sees them set the coffin down at Jesus's feet, sees the child rise up,
and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows, and his eyes
gleam with a sinister light. He holds out his finger and bids the
guards arrest Jesus. And such is his power, so completely are the
people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the
crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of a
deathlike silence they lay hands on Jesus and take him to the
Inquisitor who says: 'Tomorrow I shall condemn thee and burn thee at
the stake as the worst of heretics.'"
Once more, suspension of disbelief is not so difficult, because it is
a given that the officers of the Spanish Inquisition were so glutted
with pride and blood-lust that they would not have stopped at deicide
to gain their ends. Does not the very name of Torquemada summon up
visions of ruthlessness and cruelty?
And then of course there is the cinematic conception of the era of the
Inquisition, brought to the silver screen in dozens of swashbuckling
melodramas, in which the upright, truthful, intelligent,
compassionate, handsome, brave Anglo, with his light complexion and
buff-colored hair - this last constituent sends a strong ethnic
message - crosses swords with the cruel, devious, lustful, foppish,
superstitious, cowardly Spaniard with - please notice - his swarthy
skin and greasy black hair and mustache. Needless to say, North
Atlantic virtue always triumphs over Mediterranean depravity in these
contests, Protestant blue-eyed heroism over intrinsically inferior
Catholic dark-eyed perfidy, and the audience goes home contented,
having seen the Spanish galleon, all afire, sink beneath the waves,
while the gallant Erroll Flynn (or someone like him) stands coolly
self-possessed on the main deck of his ship, his protective arm around
the waist of the beautiful blonde lady he has just rescued from the
clutches of villainous Latins.
These pulp-fiction romances seldom advert directly to the Inquisition;
movie moguls make it a rule to keep their plots uncomplicated. But
they do trade in a deep-seated prejudice which has been so carefully
cultivated over so long a time that it has become an integral part of
our culture. It was not only Poe and Dostoyevsky and even Professor
Higgins who assumed that the Spanish Inquisition was wicked because it
was Spanish; the rest of us, the "hoi polloi", concluded the same. To
assert that conclusion was enough to establish its truth; no evidence
was required and no rebuttal allowed. In one of the most enduring
public relations victories ever accomplished, the history of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spain's Golden Age, was consciously
and methodically distorted by what scholars now candidly call "the
Black Legend." This collection of bitter fables, with their overtones
of bigotry and racism, proves once more - if proof were necessary -
that a lie told often enough and convincingly enough will in the end
be accepted as gospel. "One of the great conditions of anger and
hatred," the wryly cynical Thackeray observed, "is that you must tell
and believe lies against the hated object in order to be consistent."
The lies in this instance about the Spanish character and about the
Catholicism practiced in the Spain of Queen Isabella, St. Teresa of
Avila and Cervantes, were told in order to promote a Protestant and
particularly an English Protestant ascendancy, which in due course
crossed the Atlantic with the colonists who eventually founded the
United States; the sad irony is that though any serious commitment to
that cause has long since vanished from the old world and the new, the
racist and bigoted distortions put on the record in its behalf by the
concoctors of the Black Legend have proved to have a life of their
own.
But perhaps the Spanish Inquisition was indeed a wicked institution.
If so, that judgment should be made on the basis of those discernible
facts an honest examination is able to reveal, and not upon the
fevered testimony of self-interested politicians, biased preachers,
witless pamphleteers, or - deriving from one or more of these - naive
writers of fiction. And, as is the case with any historical
reconstruction of a phenomenon now passed away, to understand the
contextual framework is a condition for understanding the phenomenon
itself. An organization as consequential as the Spanish Inquisition
could not have taken shape in a vacuum, nor could its activities have
been divorced from the circumstances of its time and place. The same
principle therefore holds good in its regard as it does in analyzing
other events contemporaneous with the early years of the Inquisition.
Thus, for example, we need to know what political and social as well
as theological concerns persuaded Queen Elizabeth I of England to
treat her Catholic subjects with such barbarity; similarly, we need to
recognize that the fanaticism that drove Dutch Calvinists to hang all
the priests and vandalize all the churches that fell under their
control was not unrelated to a primitive nationalism and even to a
primitive capitalism.
As far as the Spanish Inquisition is concerned, one must look for
context to chronology and geography. Chronology first. The Holy
Office, as it was popularly called, was founded in 1478 on the
strength of a papal rescript requested by the sovereigns of a newly
united Spain, the wife and husband, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand
of Aragon. For precedent they cited the functioning of the Roman
Inquisition during the thirteenth century when, under this rubric, the
popes established special circuit courts to investigate and, when
possible, to root up various heterodox movements, especially in
southern France and northern Italy. These movements - lumped together
under the rather sinister-sounding label "Cathari" - had alarmed the
lords temporal of the time no less than the lords spiritual, because
the Manichaean doctrines and life-style proposed by the Cathari were
deemed as subversive of civil well-being as of ecclesiastical. Over
the course of a hundred years or so the Cathari were pretty well
stamped out or driven underground through the cooperative efforts of
Church and State. The inquisitors' job had been to establish the
juridical facts in each case, and if, as a result, an individual were
judged to be an unyielding heretic, the government's job had been to
exact punishment from that person, up to and including death.
Yet in many respects - and here is a truth extremely difficult for us
at the end of the twentieth century to comprehend - to speak of
"Church and State" during the Middle Ages, and indeed much later, is
to draw a distinction without a difference. That the civil and
ecclesiastical entities represented essentially separate spheres, that
religion should be a strictly private matter left to the choice of
each individual, that persons of conflicting religious views or with
no religious views at all could live in fruitful harmony - these ideas
were unknown during the time the Roman inquisitors were harassing the
Albigensians in the south of France, and unknown also when, two
centuries later, Ferdinand and Isabella asked for the establishment of
an Inquisition unique to Spain. Pope Sixtus IV, in granting their
request, explicitly testified to the principle that it was the first
duty of kings to nurture and defend the faith of their people, and
implicitly he professed what was for him and his contemporaries a
truism, that no society could exist without religious uniformity, that
- to appropriate a celebrated statement of another era - "a house
divided against itself cannot stand." Here was a conviction fully
appreciated, incidentally, by the likes of Elizabeth I and the Dutch
Calvinists, who gave it full rein in their own persecution-policies.
The organization of the Spanish Inquisition differed markedly from its
Roman predecessor. The former, with its emphasis upon centralization
and royal control, reflected the emergence of the nation-state and the
responsibility the monarchy now assumed to guarantee religious
orthodoxy. Thus the Grand Inquisitor was appointed by the king and
answerable to him, with only the nominal approval of the pope. The
Inquisitor in turn appointed the five members of the High Council over
which he presided; this body, with its swarm of consultants and
clerical staff, exercised ultimate power within the Inquisition's
competence. It decided all disputed questions and heard all appeals
from the lower inquisitorial courts, which by the middle of the
sixteenth century numbered nineteen scattered across Spain and several
more in Spanish-occupied territories in Italy and America. Without the
permission of the High Council no priest or nobleman could be
imprisoned. An "auto-de-fe" the religious ceremony which included the
punishment of convicted heretics and the reconciliation of those who
recanted, could not be held anywhere without the sanction of the High
Council. Control was also enhanced by the requirement that the lower
courts submit to the Council yearly general reports and monthly
financial ones.
As far as procedure was concerned, the Spanish Inquisition pretty much
followed the precedent established in the thirteenth century and the
models provided by secular tribunals. The legal machinery was put into
motion by sworn denunciation of an individual or, on occasion, of a
particular village or region. In the latter instance, prior to the
formal inquiry a "term of grace" of thirty to forty days was routinely
issued, during which period suspected dissidents could recant or
prepare their defense. Once accused, a defendant was provided the
services of a lawyer, and he could not be examined by the officers of
the court without the presence of two disinterested priests. The
identity of the witnesses of his alleged crime, however, was not
revealed to him, and so he could not confront them. This was a severe
disadvantage, even though harsh punishment was meted out to those
revealed to have been false accusers. Judges, not juries, decided
questions of fact as well as of law, and in effect the Spanish
Inquisition combined the functions of investigation, prosecution, and
judgment. Indeed, anyone arrested by the Inquisition was presumed
guilty until proven innocent, a circumstance very unsettling to us who
have enjoyed the blessings of the English common law tradition.
Torture, a commonplace with secular jurisdictions, had been forbidden
at first in the old Roman Inquisition, but then it had gradually come
into use, with the provisos that it be applied only once and that it
not threaten life or limb. In Spain these rules were adopted from the
start, but early on Sixtus IV, deluged with complaints, protested to
the Spanish government that the Inquisition was employing torture too
freely. Unhappily the pope's remonstrances fell on deaf ears.
But to return to the chronological consideration, with a bit of
geography thrown in for good measure. In 1478, at the moment the
Inquisition was set up, the Christians of the Iberian peninsula had
been engaged in a crusade for nearly seven hundred years. The fighting
had not been constant, to be sure - it took our enlightened epoch to
develop the fine art of total war - but ever since the eighth century,
when the Arab Muslims had stormed across the straits of Gibraltar from
Africa and with fire and sword had subjugated the peninsula as far
north as the Ebro River, the native resistance to their occupation had
been constant. And, by fits and starts, with frequent intervals of
inactivity, resistance had gradually evolved into ounter-attack, into
a growing determination to win back what had been lost to the alien
invaders. Little by little this relentless process of reconquest -"la
reconquista"- drove the descendants of those invaders, the Moors, ever
farther into the south until, in 1478, they had left to them only a
small enclave around the city of Granada. The end of the crusade was
in sight.
It would be difficult to exaggerate how profound an impact this
extraordinarily long and all-consuming "cruzado" had upon the
formation of Spanish public policy. Comparisons are impossible to
draw, because no other Christian people had experienced anything even
remotely similar. As suggested above, a Europe-wide consensus had
indeed developed during the Middle Ages that religious dissidents
could not be tolerated if true religion and harmonious society were to
endure. Add to this the universal conviction that heretics adhered to
their objectionable opinions not out of conscience but out of bad
will, and it comes as no surprise that increasingly stringent laws
were enacted throughout Christendom against those who refused to
conform. Since such a refusal was judged the worst possible crime,
the ultimate penalty for it everywhere was the worst form of capital
punishment imaginable, burning at the stake. Though this ferocious
sentence was carried out relatively rarely, the prospect of it did act
as a deterrent and did induce all except the most stout-hearted to
disavow their heterodoxies once brought to light by a judicial
process. Still, the troublesome possibility remained that those who
had formally recanted might have done so out of fear rather than
conversion of mind, and that they continued to practice their
subversive heresies in secret, waiting for a more propitious day.
In the Iberia of the "reconquista" a scenario of this kind presented a
danger profoundly more serious than elsewhere. As the Christians
slowly reestablished their hegemony over the peninsula - expressed in
the two distinct political entities, Portugal and Spain - the
potential antagonists of religious uniformity they were determined to
impose were not indigenous eccentrics, as was the case in other
European countries (bear in mind that the Protestant Reformation was
at this moment still forty years in the future), but a conquered
population linked by ties of race and religion to the Muslims living
in the principalities of North Africa, which at Gibraltar lay only
sixteen watery miles away. Even more ominous from the Spanish point of
view was the fact that these so-called barbary states - the modern
nations of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia - formed part of a vast
imperial system established by the Muslim Turks, a system as powerful
and menacing to western Europe as the Soviet bloc was conceived to be
in our day. As the "reconquista" proceeded, therefore, and especially
after Granada and the last remnant of Spanish Islam fell to the armies
of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, policy-makers had to decide how to
treat the Moors and the relatively small but influential Jewish
community which, in marked contrast to what our century has witnessed,
had flourished within a larger Islamic society. The Christian
victors, fearful of Muslim sympathizers in their midst, offered no
compromise: Moors and Jews had to accept baptism or face expulsion
from the country now defined as entirely Catholic.
What this decision amounted to, of course, was a policy of forced
conversion, something quite incompatible with traditional Catholic
teaching. This fact was pointed out by several popes and numerous
Spanish theologians over a long period, but the sentiment expressed by
one of Ferdinand of Aragon's royal predecessors was the one that
prevailed: "The enemies of the cross of Christ and violators of the
Christian law are likewise our enemies and the enemies of our kingdom,
and ought therefore to be dealt with as such."
Predictably, however, the stark choice between conformity and exile
invited pretense and hypocrisy on the part of those dragooned into a
faith not of their own choosing. The Jews and Moors who conformed
rather than depart the land in which they and their ancestors had
lived for hundreds of years did so with varying measures of
reluctance, merging often into downright dissimulation. And this is
precisely why the Inquisition was created by the Spanish monarchs: as
the etymology of the word implies, the first task of this new judicial
body was inquiry, specifically inquiry into the authenticity of the
conversion of the Moors and Jews who had come under the sway of those
monarchs.
But once again we must stress the chronological track, because the
bloody reputation of the Spanish Inquisition - though it formally
existed for more than three centuries - was earned during its first
decade and a half, even before, that is, the capture of Granada.
During this unhappy period perhaps as many as 2000 persons were burnt
as heretics. Though this number is only a small fraction of what the
Black Legend routinely alleged, it is nevertheless sobering enough.
Almost all those executed were "conversos" or "New Christians",
converts, that is, from Judaism who were convicted of secretly
practicing their former religion. It should be borne in mind that the
Inquisition, as a church-court, had no jurisdiction over Moors and
Jews as such. But, ironically, once such persons accepted baptism
they became capable of heresy in the technical sense of the word.
Thus the early savagery of the Spanish Inquisition contributes another
chapter to the sad history of anti-Semitism, motivated on this
occasion, however, more by politico-religious expediency than by
racial hatred. It was in any event an enormous and unforgivable
miscalculation. Far from constituting a danger to the nation, the
Jewish "conversos" of previous decades had already been admirably
blended into the larger community. As Professor William Monter has
pointed out, the New Christians "represent the first known large-scale
and long-term assimilation of Jews into any Christian society.
Although the process included many painful adaptations, some severe
backlash and even a decade of brutal persecution under the
Inquisition, it ended with their general integration into Spanish
society. Their descendants quietly flouted racist codes and
contributed to the vibrant Catholicism of Golden Age Spain; St. Teresa
of Avila was the granddaughter of a New Christian penanced by the
Inquisition."
It seems as though the violence with which the Spanish Inquisition
began its tenure exhausted or perhaps shamed it into a moderation
which the purveyors of the Black Legend stonily ignore. But the facts
cannot be gainsaid. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
when Spanish sovereignty extended from Italy to most of Latin America,
on average less than three persons a year were executed by the
Inquisition, which was formally constituted in all those places as
well as at home. Or, to give the Spaniards the benefit of the doubt,
perhaps as the bitter struggle of the "reconquista" gradually faded
from their collective memory, even as the Muslim threat itself
receded, they exercised a restraint consistent with their principles.
However that may be, for my part I am glad there is no longer in
existence an Inquisition that might have me arrested on the basis of
charges lodged by persons unknown to me, as happened to St. Ignatius
Loyola. Yet as one who has lived through most of a century in which
cruelty and atrocity and oppression have reached a pitch,
quantitatively and qualitatively, inconceivable to our ancestors -
inconceivable even to Torquemada - I think a measure of discretion
would be appropriate when bemoaning the wickedness of the Spanish
Inquisition, more discretion anyway than that exercised by Poe and
Dostoyevsky.
Marvin R. O'Connell is professor emeritus of history at the University
of Notre Dame and a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul. The author
of a prize-winning biography of the redoubtable John Ireland, he is
currently at work on the life of Edward Sorin, the founder of Notre
Dame. Readers responded enthusiastically to Father O'Connell's
contribution to our Modernism issue.
If you want to read all the articles see
www.catholic.net/RCC/Periodicals/Dossier/1112-96/intro.html
Jim Carew sfo :)
=================
Re: dead on arival: Mandelbrot set Autopsy!
Author: Paul N. Lee <NOS...@Worldnet.att.net>
Date: 2000/03/23
Forum: sci.fractals
Jersey 216 wrote:
>
> do u know where i can get pictures of
> fractals and descriptions i need like 3
> if u can please send to Jers...@aol.com
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Fractal Galleries (URL alphabetical order): 347 lines
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albums.photopoint.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=72299&a=689825
aloha.net/~mdon/
alpha.teleriviera.fr/~hugo/fractale.htm
aragorn.cjb.net/
ccrma-www.stanford.edu/~stilti/images/chaotic_attractors/nav.html#fsh
chat.carleton.ca/~pderbysh/novagal.html
community-1.webtv.net/Inspiring2/MyDigitalArt/
computerart.org/fractal.html
digiserve.com/digital/howie/
eclectasy.com/nullzone/guests/
fatmac.ee.cornell.edu/~goldwada/gallery/artgal1.html
fas.sfu.ca/~dhepting/personal/images/gallery/
Fast.to/Storj
fractal.cc/
fractal.mta.ca/
fractal.mta.ca/fractals/carlson/
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fractalart.home.ml.org/
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fractals.jumpfun.com/setinsideset.html
free.polbox.pl\r\retsam
gallery.uunet.be/LenaertsW/fractals.htm
graffiti.u-bordeaux.fr/MAPBX/louvet/jpl0a.html
grafik.freepage.de/nussweck/
garland.galacticworlds.com/
hammer.prohosting.com/~design9
home.att.net/~ALDINMIT/fract-0.htm
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home.bc.rogers.wave.ca/kvdoel/mandelbase.html
home.earthlink.net/~tftn
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home.hiwaay.net/~stephenf/
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home.nice.teleriviera.fr/~hugo/
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home.wtal.de/spiriteye/fractal/
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home1.gte.net/itriazon/
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home8.inet.tele.dk/kimb/fractal.htm
hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA017746/
library.advanced.org/12740/
library.advanced.org/26242/
linas.org/art-gallery/
lonestar.texas.net/~dragon13/gallery.html
mac.fractals.webjump.com/
math.uwaterloo.ca/~wgilbert/FractalGallery/FractalGallery.html
matrix.crosswinds.net/~mtsn/
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mikedunn.cjb.net
my.cybersoup.com/twgg/
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pages.prodigy.net/mikestuph/
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perso.club-internet.fr/dreamp/
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prime-fe2.lvcablemodem.com/arkangel/
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www.crosswinds.net/washington-dc/~aardvarko/images/fractals/
www.cs.cmu.edu/~spot/flame.html Scott Draves
omaha.mt.cs.cmu.edu/spot/electricsheep/
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neosapien.net/flame/
www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~binde/fractals/
www.cygnus-software.com/gallery/stampindex.htm
www.d.umn.edu/~dfinton/fractals/
www.demon.co.uk/davidg/spigots.htm
www.digiserve.com/digital/howie/
www.donarcher.com/moca/
www.dorsai.org/~arch/
www.dwponline.com/fractals/
www.echo-on.net/~hnhersco/
www.eclectasy.com/cruelanimal/
www.eclectasy.com/insect/
www.eclectasy.com/nullzone/guests/
www.ecosafe.com/canisee/
www.eecs.wsu.edu/~hart/
www.efg2.com/lab/FractalsAndChaos/
www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/massimin/quat/f_gal.ang.html
www.elitesuites.com/aclnts/Per/Mortimer/mortimer.htm
www.erols.com/dgnuse/fractal.html
www.evensen.org/gallery/
www.exit118.com/~earlh/
www.exotique.com/fringe/art/chaos.htm
www.exotique.com/fringe/art/artndx.htm
www.fatdays.com/fractals/
www.fdimentia.kangaweb.com/
www.flash.net/~redbeard/
www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/covent/37/fracpic.html
www.fortunecity.com/roswell/barker/3/Chessiecat.html
www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/stephenson/5/abpf.html
www.fortunecity.com/victorian/palette/31/
www.fractal-art.com/
www.fractaldomains.com/html/gallery.html
www.fractals.com/fractal_gallery/uwe_kreuger/room1.html
www.fractalus.com/cheshirecat/gallery.htm
www.fractalus.com/galleries.htm
www.fractalus.com/gumbycat/
www.fractalus.com/ifl/
www.fractalus.com/kerry/
www.fractalus.com/sharon/
www.fraktalwelt.de/
www.freeyellow.com/members5/fractaluniverse/fractalpage1.html
www.freezone.co.uk/rhull
www.frii.com/~dboll/fractal.htm
www.frontiernet.net/~jmb184/interests/fractals/
www.geocities.com/~ann-s-thesia/fractals/
www.geocities.com/~gedeonp/
www.geocities.com/~gumbycat/
www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/2402/fractals.html
www.geocities.com/Area51/Orion/4798/gallery.html
www.geocities.com/Area51/Vault/4995/chaos/
www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/3825/
www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/5003/
www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/9753/
www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Spa/6918/fractal.html
www.geocities.com/Paris/Bistro/9217/
www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/1195/
www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/3542/page2.htm
www.geocities.com/Paris/5519/gallery1.html
www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/7279/
www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Cable/4917/Fractals/FRACTALMAIN.htm
www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/8447/Fractal.html
www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Software/9127/
www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/4421/fractals/strange.html
www.geocities.com/SoHo/Den/2358/
www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/4082/my-fractals.html
www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/2605/
www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/5601/
www.geocities.com/Soho/Square/6525/
www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/6648/
www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/8823/
www.geocities.com/SoHo/6971/
www.geocities.com/SoHo/7611/
www.geocities.com/svermuyten/
www.geom.umn.edu/graphics/pix/General_Interest/Fractals/
www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbsmat/fractals/fractals.html
www.globalserve.net/~derbyshire/fractals.html
www.globalserve.net/~jval/
www.goshen.edu/~kevin/fractals.html
www.gwfa.de/fractal/fac99/
www.harptree.demon.co.uk/fss/
www.hevanet.com/lkuhn/px/
www.hiddendimension.com/
www.home.aone.net.au/sci-gal/sci-gal.htm
www.homepages.hetnet.nl/~groeetezjaak/
www.hooked.net/~mchris/fractals.htm
www.ibm.com/Stretch/EOS/fractals.html
www.ifrance.com/FRACTALS/
www.iglobal.net/lystad/fractal-top.html
www.immrama.com/
www.immrama.com/bucklin-gal.htm
www.ingress.com/~arch/
www.itgoesboing.com/
www.itsnet.com/~bug/fractals.html
www.itsnet.com/~bug/fractals/theloop.html
www.jamspace.org/photo/d_orchid/
www.john.r.young.btinternet.co.uk/
www.joweber.de/
www.kingman-art.com/exhibits/gallery/fractal_forms/01.html
www.kiwi.gen.nz/~karl
www.krs.hia.no/~fgill/fractal.html
www.lanset.com/brla/frac_ndx.htm
www.lifesmith.com/
www.lightlink.com/artmatrix/
www.lynescreations.com/ "Masamitsu, Lyne"
<ly...@MINDSPRING.COM>
www.mandelbrot.com/
www.mannixdesign.com/
www.mhri.edu.au/~pdb/fractals/
www.mindspawn.com/fractal1.html
www.mindspring.com/~karen_mc/fractal.htm
www.mitchellware.com/mitchell/home/fred/fractals/
www.mk.dmu.ac.uk/~khcm8ac/
www.moeman.com/gallery.htm
www.multimania.com/warey/fract/
www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Edu/Fractal/Fractal_Home.html
www.neosoft.com/~mrdowney/LITTLEFRED.htm
www.nerdworld.com/users/dstein/nw385.html
www.neurosim.wisc.edu/~lukeg/lgpage.html
www.ntu.edu.sg/home/eyqchen/ifsworld/ifsworld.html
www.organised-chaos.com/
www.oz.net/~alden/animfrac/
www.ozemail.com.au/~spr/sitework/fractal/fractals.htm
www.parkenet.org/jp/fractvty.htm
www.paru.cas.cz/~hubicka/XaoS/gallery.html
www.perigee.net/~webbyld/byl/fractal.htm
www.piglette.com/fractals1.html
www.piripiri.com/galleries.html
www.primenet.com/~blitzw/fractal/
www.primenet.com/~lkmitch/
www.quelin.org/
www.ramblin.dial.pipex.com/Fractals.htm
www.ramos.nl/yyfire.html
www.riq.qc.ca/users/mdessureault/
www.rdrop.com/~tblackb/fractal.html
www.s-scv.ce.edus.si/STROJNA/Zbor/JovanI/selishnik_eng.htm
www.sb.net/arkangel/
www.sci.usq.edu.au/~robertsa/legofracs.html
www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/musgrave/art_gallery.html
www.shineout.com/
www.snailgrafx.com/
www.sol.com.au/kor/gan.htm
www.swin.edu.au/astronomy/pbourke/fractals/
www.systorm.com/fractal/
www.tabletoptelephone.com/~hopspage/
www.tamrof.org/fractals/
www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~lard/fc/
www.tc.umn.edu/~nguy0505/Fractals.htm
www.thecat50.freeserve.co.uk/ness/
www.thinkpiece.com/
www.teknet.net.au/~plavers/
www.tony-net.net/pnorthover
www.top.net/tim/fractal/
www.toptown.com/innercircle/gumbycat/
www.uni-ulm.de/~s_hschie/omg/omg-frac.htm
www.unpronounceable.com/graphics/
www.users.bigpond.com/FlatArc/
www.users.zetnet.co.uk/rgirvan/
www.utp.ac.pa/~rperez/gallery.html
www.uvm.edu/~msargent/qsimage.htm
www.valpo.edu/home/student/jcamp/fractals_gate.html
www.webdragon.com/fractals.html
www.widowsweb.com/design/gallery/fractals/
www.xmission.com/~legalize/fractals/
www.xs4all.nl/~bassie/fractal.htm
www.zenweb.com/pan/rayn/twg/
www.zipworld.com.au/~mikedunn/quart.htm
www-hs.iuta.u-bordeaux.fr/louvet/
wwwcip.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/~phy11733/index_e.html
wwwserv.caiw.nl/~jaccobu/
www02.u-page.so-
net.ne.jp/cb3/stc_mtka/soft/mandelbrot/mandelbrot_eng.html
www2.capcollege.bc.ca/~mfreeman/mand.html
www3.sympatico.ca/su.gar/Home.html
3dfractalgate.homestead.com/
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Animations (URL alphabetical order):16 lines
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buh.sj.ca.us/fractals/
members.aol.com/lukeplant/fractals/anim.html
members.aol.com/RBarn0001/
runetek.hypermart.net/ (Win95/98 startup screens)
soma.tvk.rwth-aachen.de/PhatFractal/
web.cnam.fr/fractals.html
www.crosswinds.net/athens/~jgal/Fractals.html
www.cygnus-software.com/fxmplugin/
www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/2621/
www.iglobal.net/lystad/fractal-top.html
www.metaverse-portal.com/
www.netmonkey.com/shlep/hop/
www.organised-chaos.com/
www.oz.net/~alden/animfrac/animfrac.html
www.runetek.com/
zadig.cnam.fr/fractals.html
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Interactive (URL alphabetical order): 65 lines
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134.76.41.105/fractal/
aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/julia/explorer.html
cm.bell-labs.com/who/jelena/Applets/Dragon.html
cm.bell-labs.com/who/wim/cascade/
daa.com.au/~james/fractals/
delenn.roentgen.physik.uni-goettingen.de/fractal/
home.att.net/~RBinNJ/mbapplet.htm
home.rochester.rr.com/dak/
home2.swipnet.se/~w-26404/vague/
huizen.nhkanaal.nl/~klup82/mandel.html
java.sun.com/applets/Fractal/example1.html
math.bu.edu/DYSYS/applets/
members.aol.com/strohbeen/fml.html
members.tripod.com/aciddome/fractal/Fractal.html
mitpess.mit.edu/flake/
nis-www.lanl.gov/~mgh/mand.shtml
numinous.com/_private/people/pjl/graphics/mandelbrot/mandelbrot.html
pineapple.apmaths.uwo.ca/~blair/nonlinearlab.html
reality.sgi.com/employees/rck/hydra/
reality.sgi.com/rck/hydra/
shell.rmi.net/~tph/fractalkit/fractal.html
sprott.physics.wisc.edu/java/attract/attract.htm
storm.shodor.org/mandy/
tqd.advanced.org/3288/
vrml.eecs.wsu.edu/~hart/qjs-bin/qjs.html
www.actrix.gen.nz/users/chaoslab/
www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~ishmnn/java/mandelbrot.html
www.bridgewater.edu/departments/physics/ISAW/FracMain.html
www.calresco.org/sos/java.htm
www.chaosclub.com/
www.concentric.net/~Oomph/fractal.shtml
www.daa.com.au/~james/fractals/
www.dorsai.org/~arch/form4.htm
www.exploratorium.edu/complexity/java/lorenz.html
www.forestecho.com/ferns.html
www.franceway.com/java/fractale/mandel_b.htm
www.frontiernet.net/~jmb184/fractals/java_fractals/
www.geocities.com/Area51/6902/t_sd_app.html
www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/7959/
www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/5788/
www.geom.umn.edu/java/
www.ifa.au.dk/~bdj/
www.iglobal.net/lystad/fractal-top.html
www.ingress.com/~arch/form4.htm
www.ipm.sci-nnov.ru/~DEMIDOV/MSet/Archive.htm
www.ipm.sci-nnov.ru/~demidov/eng/java_e.htm
www.ipm.sci-nnov.ru/~demidov/fract/RGallery/Enter.htm
www.julianhaight.com/filmer/
www.khm.de/~christi/java/Fractal_e.html
www.krs.hia.no/~fgill/javascript/mandscr.htm
www.metaverse-portal.com/
www.mindspring.com/~chroma/mandelbrot.html
www.missouri.edu/~polsksm/
www.mit.edu:8001/people/mkgray/java/Mandel.html
www.netmonkey.com/shlep/hop/
www.pjbsware.demon.co.uk/
www.softlab.ntua.gr/mandel/mandel.html
www.stolaf.edu/people/mcclure/java/Julia/
www.sunlabs.com/~shirriff/java/
www.ukmail.org/~oswin/
www.vt.edu:10021/B/bwn/Chaos.html
www.wildfire.com/ag-bin/fractal.pl
www.wmin.ac.uk/~storyh/fractal/frac.html
www3.sympatico.ca/mandel.html
www-europe.sgi.com/Fun/free/java/chris-thornborrow/
zenith.berkeley.edu/seidel/Frac/
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Newsgroups (URL alphabetical order):18 lines
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news:alt.bainaries.pictures.fractals
news:alt.binaries.pictures.fractals
news:alt.chaos
news:alt.fractals
news:alt.fractals.pictures
news:bit.listserv.frac-l
news:sci.chaos
news:sci.fractals
news:t-netz.fractint
news:uw.mail-list.fractals
news:z-netz.alt.fractint
news:zer.t-netz.fractint
The following items may or may not be up,
depending on server and time of day:
news://jesusfreke.tulsa.ok.us/alt.binaries.pictures.fractals
news://jesusfreke.ddns.org/alt.binaries.pictures.fractals
news://192.203.164.196/alt.binaries.pictures.fractals
news://jesusfreke.dyn.ml.org/alt.binaries.pictures.fractals
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Documentation (URL alphabetical order): 47 lines
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ftp://anon...@rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/fractal-faq
archives.math.utk.edu/topics/fractals.html
cassiopaea.org/quantum_future/papers/garda.htm
faqs.colombianet.net/sci/fractals-faq/
fractal.mta.ca/sci.fractals-faq/
homepages.force9.net/calresco/
hypertextbook.com/chaos/
library.advanced.org/11679/
linas.org/art-gallery/escape/escape.html
math.bu.edu/DYSYS/FRACGEOM/FRACGEOM.html
math.bu.edu/DYSYS/FRACGEOM2/FRACGEOM2.html
members.aol.com/calresco/
mitpress.mit.edu/books/FLAOH/cbnhtml/
non.com/news.answers/fractal-faq.html
ftp://pit-manager.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/fractal-faq
ftp://pit-manager.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/sci/fractals-faq
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/sci/fractals/
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/fractal-faq
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/sci/fractals-faq/
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/sci.fractals/
spanky.triumf.ca/pub/fractals/docs/SCI_FRACTALS.FAQ
spanky.triumf.ca/www/quartet-info.html
spanky.triumf.ca/www/whats-new.html
sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/home.html
sprott.physics.wisc.edu/sprott.html
tftnrlb.tripod.com/
webpages.marshall.edu/~stepp/fractal-faq/faq.html
w1.111.telia.com/~u11109996/CubTut/cubictut.html
www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~vojak/
www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/fractal-faq/faq.html
www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/sci
www.columbia.edu/~gae4/chaos/
www.cribx1.u-bordeaux.fr/fractals/faq/
www.cygnus-software.com/theory/theory.htm
www.eecs.wsu.edu/~hart/
www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/5003/
www.home.aone.net.au/sci-gal/sci-gal.htm
www.ipm.sci-nnov.ru/~DEMIDOV/MSet/Contents.htm
www.lib.ox.ac.uk/internet/news/faq/sci.fractals.html
www.mta.ca/~mctaylor/sci.fractals-faq/
www.olympus.net/personal/dewey/mandelbrot.html
www.shop.de/priv/hp/3133/fr_4d.htm
www.swin.edu.au/astronomy/pbourke/
www.swin.edu.au/chem/bio/fractals/refslist.htm
www.teknet.net.au/~plavers/
www.ugr.es/CRYSLAB/Fractals.html
www.users.zetnet.co.uk/rgirvan/udo.htm
www3.bc.sympatico.ca/moormank/abstract.html
Scott Corey & Mary Foley
>
> Scott Corey & Mary Foley <sco...@mail.saber.net> writes:
>
> > Theoretically, appeals are about points of law, not facts. If that were
> > purely so, I guess I'd be surprised if TK did not win a new trial, given
> > what I've heard and read.
>
> a judge like the one Jack Kervorkian had. Since "consent of the victim" is
> not an allowed defense to the charge of murder, Kervorkian was not allowed
> to turn the court into a dog-and-pony show for his political views on
> assisted suicide.
There is another way, which has worked before. It's called the
"extended necessity" defense. The idea is that one is entitled to defend
oneself, and this right of self-defense is not always limited to an
immediate threat. Therefore, on can argue, just as Kaczynski is inclined
to argue, that something is a pervasive, or eventual danger. That
requires explanation. Hence, one gets to explain how the technological
system is a threat to oneself.
This approach was used by the Catonsville 9. A group including priests
and nurses poured blood on the files at the local office of the
Selective Service (i.e., the draft) during the Vietnam War. They got a
lot of latitude to explain their motivations at trial.
Scott
Scott Corey & Mary Foley
briefly.
The struggle for objectivity in reporting comes from personal
inclination, but also from the training I got in Political Science. I
published some op-ed pieces during the trial, but would not consider
myself a journalist.
I find this case interesting for many reasons, the simplest of which is
that I did my dissertation on revolutions and political violence, and
the Unabomber is an instance of such things. Also, I was at Berkeley
when the second attack happened there, so it got my attention when the
government announced there was a serial bomber at large. As for
attending the trial, I was the only member of the "general public" who
got in every day.
I get my basic updates by calling the court, and my background from the
court documents I have had copied and sent. However, as I will put in
another thread, I now have the briefs for this appeal and will try to
have them read and summarized by next weekend.
Scott