:: BLOG NATION aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 5.13.2008 ::

Belief in God 'childish'

Jews not chosen people: Einstein letter
AFP

LONDON — Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday.

The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.

As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.

The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell.

In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.

"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 5:24 PM [+] ::
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:: R.E.M. Tries Picking Up the Pace ::

By ALAN LIGHT
The NYT

ON the ground floor of a nondescript building, a few blocks from the University of Georgia campus here, sits a little room stuffed with instruments and decorated with Christmas lights, lava lamps, old concert posters and tacked-up 45s. R.E.M. started rehearsing in this space in 1985, and it looks as if nothing has changed.

This is a place to work not hang out, and work is what Michael Stipe, Peter Buck and Mike Mills were doing on this March afternoon, blasting through 13 songs over the course of a few hours. It was their first day of rehearsal for the shows that would introduce their hard-charging new album, “Accelerate” (Warner Brothers), and they weren’t exactly easing back onstage: later in the week they were headliners at the Langerado festival in Florida, followed by a date at South by Southwest in Austin, Tex.

“We never do much rehearsal,” Mr. Buck, 51, the band’s guitarist, said over a ginger ale later at a dark, empty bar around the corner. “Sometimes having that little edge of not feeling comfortable with the songs gives it a little bit of energy. Terror will do that.”

Despite spending 28 years together, at this moment a touch of fear is understandable for the trio. (The fourth member, the drummer, Bill Berry, left the band in 1997, following a brain aneurysm.) From its debut in 1981 until the mid-1990s R.E.M. was a definitive American rock band, but its sales and influence have steadily declined in the last decade. “Accelerate” is a very deliberate response to an internal crisis that Mr. Stipe, the group’s singer, described as major, and that they all agreed almost broke up the band.

Its last album, the hazy, somber “Around the Sun” (2004), took nine months to make and satisfied neither the musicians nor their fans. It didn’t crack Billboard’s Top 10 and sold less than 250,000 copies. The band members realized they needed to find a new way to work together or quit, coming to the end of a road that took them from this out-of-the-way college town to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“If you’re a music fan who has 15 artists you follow, and one of them kind of takes a nose dive — well, that’s disappointing, but you’ll move on,” Mr. Stipe said. “But to us this is everything that we do.”

Read more here.

A L S O

A Shiny, Happy Return For R.E.M.
CBS -- Sunday Morning

Accelerate: Track By Track
Flagpole (Athens, GA)

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 2:19 PM [+] ::
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:: "Perfect storm" of cliches make bad English list ::

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A "surge" of overused words and phrases formed a "perfect storm" of "post-9/11" cliches in 2007, according to a U.S. university's annual list of words and phrases that deserve to be banned.

Choosing from among 2,000 submissions, the public relations department at Michigan's Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie targeted 19 affronts to the English language in its well-known jab at the worlds of media, sports, advertising and politics.

The contributors gave first prize to the phrase "a perfect storm," saying it was numbingly applied to virtually any notable coincidence.

"Webinar" made the list as a tiresome non-word combining Web and seminar that a contributor said "belongs in the same school of non-thought that brought us e-anything and i-anything."

Similarly, the list-makers complained about the absurd comparisons commonly phrased "x is the new y," as in "(age) 70 is the new 50" or "chocolate is the new sex." "Fallacy is the new truth," commented one contributor.

Some words and phrases sagged under the weight of overuse, contributors said, citing the application of "organic" to everything from computer software to dog food.

In the same vein, decorators offering to add "pop" with a touch of color need new words, the list-makers said.

Such phrases as "post 9/11" and "surge" have also outlived their usefulness, they said. Surge emerged in reference to adding U.S. troops in Iraq but has come to explain the expansion of anything.

More fun with surges, webinars, and so forth, here.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 2:57 PM [+] ::
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:: "Zombie to resurrect Halloween" ::

From BBC News
Film-maker Rob Zombie is to write and direct a new film in the Halloween series, says the Hollywood Reporter.

Zombie, also a rock singer, told the trade paper that the movie will take "a totally different approach to make [Halloween] scary again".

"The look and the feel is going to be completely different," he said.

John Carpenter directed the 1978 original, about masked killer Michael Myers. Zombie has made House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects.

Halloween, which starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a babysitter terrorised by psychopath Myers, made over $60m (£31.3m) worldwide - a record for independent film at that time.

Sequels ignored

Zombie said that he sought Carpenter's blessing to make the new film.

"He was very supportive, which I thought was very important," said Zombie.

"I feel like Halloween is his baby, and I wanted to be very respectful."

The new film will disregard the numerous sequels that followed Halloween.

"Halloween started off as a very terrifying concept, a terrifying movie. But over the years, Michael Myers has become a friendly Halloween mask," Zombie said.

"But I think the story and the situation is scary. All it needed was someone to come in and to take a totally different approach to make it scary again."

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 2:09 AM [+] ::
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Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh
Originally uploaded by Mr. TRONA.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Go dtaitní an ghrian go bog bláth ar do chlár éadain
(May the sun shine warm upon your face)

Here's another Gaelic phrase, one that I like --
Go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat
(or May the cat eat you and the devil eat the cat ;-)

Ok...

Píonta Guiness, le do thoil
(A pint of Guinness, please =)

:: Mr. TRONA 2:49 PM [+] ::
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:: "Boarding now for Mars" ::

From CNET
Dawn Kawamoto
Google is the latest Web site to offer detailed images of Mars for folks looking to get a closer look at the red planet. Google Mars dishes up three types of data that users can patch into, from color-coded elevation maps to thermal infrared maps to snapshots of the far-away planet. (For screen shots from Google Mars, click here.)

And then there's the mother of Mars Web sites, published by NASA. You can get the latest info on everything from the Mars rovers to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that entered the red planet's orbit last week.

With all the attention on Mars these days, it seems the moon may be getting lonelier by the minute.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 10:06 PM [+] ::
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:: "Super-Earth" Discovered Orbiting Distant Star ::

From National Geographic

Scientists have discovered a new planet they call a "super-Earth" in a solar system 9,000 light-years away.

The icy, rocky planet, which weighs 13 times as much as Earth, orbits the outer region of its solar system, around a so-called red dwarf star that is about half as big as our sun.

The planet dominates a region similar to the one in our solar system that is populated by the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. Scientists believe the planet likely didn't accumulate enough gas to grow to giant proportions. (See an interactive map of our solar system.)

"We've never been able to see these failed Jupiter cores before," said Andrew Gould, an astronomer at Ohio State University in Columbus who is leading the research.

He suggests, however, that icy super-Earths are common and that about 35 percent of all stars have them.

Read more here.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 10:00 PM [+] ::
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:: RE Stardust ::

Composition of Comet Samples Surprises NASA Scientists
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A03

HOUSTON, March 13 -- Dust samples from a comet formed in deep space unexpectedly contain high-temperature mineral particles that may have been ejected by the young sun at the dawn of the solar system, scientists said Monday.

First-sample results from NASA's Stardust mission suggest that scientists may have to modify the traditional view that comets are bodies of ice and dust composed largely of interstellar material on the outskirts of the solar system.

Instead, the sun, in a process not yet fully understood, may have catapulted material outward even as the "dust disk" that formed the solar system was swirling inward like a whirlpool with the sun at its center, said Stardust lead scientist Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington at Seattle. "We have found fire and ice," Brownlee told reporters at the Johnson Space Center here. "We have found extremely high-temperature minerals coming from the coldest place."

Early analysis revealed minerals that included magnesium iron silicate, known as olivine, or, in its gem-quality variety, peridot; magnesium aluminum oxide, also called spinel; and titanium nitride. Brownlee said all these form at temperatures of at least 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Brownlee said images of young stars often showed not only an inward-swirling disk but also "vertical jets" leaping high above the disk plane. "Even though [solar systems] are formed by things falling in, there are also things flying out," he said.

But it was unclear whether the jets were the source of the comet's unusual minerals, and although Brownlee said that was one possible explanation, the minerals may have come from another star. He said researchers will be able to tell the difference after further chemical analysis.

Stardust, the first spacecraft to return samples from a comet, flew through the shroud of dust and gas surrounding comet Wild 2 on Jan. 2, 2004, trapping perhaps a million tiny particles in a tennis-racket-like collector. The collector had 132 small compartments filled with aerogel, a fine spun glass that is 99 percent empty space, but easily able to muffle the shock of tiny impacts and engulf the particles like a pillow.

The Stardust space capsule parachuted to a flawless landing at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah on Jan. 15. The sample canister was flown to a special lab at the Johnson Space Center in the same "clean" facility that houses the moon rocks collected in the Apollo program.

Although the samples were tiny -- the largest are about two-thousandths of an inch in diameter, half the width of a human hair -- researchers are easily able to slice them up for analysis.

Read more here.

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 9:54 PM [+] ::
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:: Kolchak RIP ::

Darren McGavin, 83; Played Reporter on TV's 'Night Stalker'
By Martin Weil
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 26, 2006; Page C08

Darren McGavin, 83, a film and television actor who appeared on an almost limitless number of television series and shows and set a standard for cynical and hard-boiled gruffness as a reporter in "The Night Stalker" and a detective in "Mike Hammer," died yesterday in California.

A son told the Associated Press that he died in a hospital in the Los Angeles area. No cause of death was specified.

Few actors of his generation remained active longer. Mr. McGavin's acting career has been traced back to a 1941 stage appearance in "Lady Windermere's Fan." There were reports that he worked on a TV pilot last year. He won an Emmy for a role on the TV series "Murphy Brown."

But the 20 episodes of the "Night Stalker" series, in which he played a rumpled, grumpy Chicago news reporter whose determination to follow every lead allows him to save society from the dangers of the supernatural, seemed to define his career.

The episodes in which he played Carl Kolchak on ABC in 1974 and 1975 were distinguished by his portrayal of the dogged shoe-leather reporter and combined the appeal of the newsroom drama with the attractions of fantasy and the occult.

Read more here.

ALSO

Darren McGavin Dead at 83
Blogcritics.org, OH

Actor 'Night Stalker' McGavin Dies
CBS News

posted by me
:: Mr. TRONA 4:44 PM [+] ::
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