Categories
ranting

Nobel Prize Winners – 2002

The Nobel Foundation had awarded all of this years Nobel Prizes:
Physics: Raymond Davis Jr., Masatoshi Koshiba and Riccardo Giacconi
Chemistry: John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka and Kurt Wüthrich
Medicine: Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston
Literature: Imre Kertész
Economics: Daniel Kahneman, Vernon L. Smith
Peace: Jimmy Carter Jr.

Head over to the Nobel e-Museum to read more about each and past winners. It’s a great site just to browse and learn something.

The wording of that award very clearly stabed at Bush’s warhawking saying;

“In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international co-operation based on international law, and respect for human rights.”

I should also point out that one of the winners of the Economics prize is a George Mason professor. This is the second person in the GMU Economics department to win a Nobel Prize. I went to Mason for three years and never met any Economics students…. Now I know why, all the professors where doing research rather than teaching!

Categories
ranting

radio station

Why do radio stations play thier ads in big 15 minute long marathons? That’s how they lose people to other stations. I know a lot of people don’t bother changing the station when the ads come on but a lot of people (especially those in cars) do change it. You’d think the advertisers would know this and tell the radio stations not to do it. I think it makes much more sense to play a song then an ad or two and then another song or two. Mix it up, so that listeners know that if an ad comes on they only have to listen to it for a minute or two. That would make me less likely to change the channel, which I do now when the first add comes on.

Just a note: most of the time when I am in C’ville I listen to the greatest radio station on Earth 91.9 wnrn! And you can even listen over the net…

Categories
books

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Author
J.R.R. Tolkien

The second installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy picks up where the first left off, and follows the broken fellowship as they take separate paths to their goal of saving the world from the darkness of Mordor. This book is filled with more classic sword and sorcery fantasy, but continues the vivid creation of Middle Earth. New lands and new histories open up as the trilogy continues.

On Amazon.com

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books

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Author
J.R.R. Tolkien

A readers pole a few years ago voted the Lord of the Rings trilogy the best books published in the past 100 years (meanwhile the editors picked James Joyce’s Ulysses, which having read I just don’t understand, but that’s another story.) This is the first installment of the Lord of the Rings, and my personal favorite of the series. The Fellowship is filled with the history of Middle Earth: it’s hero’s, it’s legends, it’s lands. It is all the stuff that is not important to the plot of the book that makes Middle Earth so memorable. Every little detail that Tolkien writes brings the land alive. You can read this one over and over again and find something new every time.

On Amazon.com

Categories
books

Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works

Author
William Shakespeare
Editor
Richard Proudfoot

Only Homer and the Bible have had a comparable effect on western culture. Who cares if William Shakespeare or the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays, it’s the plays themselves that count. Timeless archetypes of humanity in universal situations. No education is complete without some Shakespeare, and I consider myself lucky to have been born into the English speaking world so I might enjoy the Bard’s plays and sonnets to their fullest in the original language. Though, of course, “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

Shakespeare is my favorite author, I’ve read all the plays, all the sonnets and both long poems. I own three copies of his complete works. I like the Arden Shakespeare because they are as close to “the official Shakespeare” as you can get. They are the ones what poor over all the copies of the folios to come up with a copy of each play that is as close to the original as possible. They also include a massive amount of footnotes explaining word usage, allusions and historical notes to each play. Their individual books are also excellent.

On Amazon.com