Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 62
February 16, 2011
meet gramps
via science.nationalgeographic.com
Dimetrodon–it looks like a dinosaur but it's the forerunners of mammals from the Permian period.
Filed under: Interesting Tagged: Dimetrodon
Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya?
Yesterday also saw the first mass demonstrations by Libyan women against the regime. 'No one is clear what is going to happen or what is being planned,' a Libyan opposition figure told me. 'There are no opposition movements inside Libya but many young people have had enough of the regime.'
via lrb.co.uk
People want to be free. It should not be as rare as it is. I hope that someday it won't be. And for those of us who are, we should celebrate and cherish it–and not worry so much about things that don't matter.
Filed under: Interesting, Uplifting Tagged: Libya uprising
February 15, 2011
pregnant dads?
Scientists have now shown that normal, healthy men often undergo real bodily changes when they're expecting children. What for years we've considered to be a disorder of the mind is actually a natural physiological reaction to impending fatherhood.
via blogs.plos.org
Filed under: Miscellany
the real price of computers is child labour
Apple found more than 91 children working at its suppliers last year, nine times as many as the previous year, according to its annual report on its manufacturers.
The US company has also acknowledged for the first time that 137 workers were poisoned at a Chinese firm making its products and said less than a third of the facilities it audited were complying with its code on working hours.
via guardian.co.uk
Here's more in the report: multiple suicides at a supplier; a decrease in compliance on working hours of a max of, get this, 60 hours a week; only 57% compliance with codes to prevent injuries (and how minimal were they?). 137 workers were poisoned by n-hexane. This is what is known, how much slips by?
This is the cost of cheap manufacture in a foreign jurisdiction, where laws differ and oversight is more difficult.
Here's a picture of where the garbage ends up
Filed under: Concerning Tagged: working conditions of Apple employees in China
how do women fare in academia?
In-depth review of sex differences in salary, rank tenure for science & engineering http://ow.ly/3WIIZ
Filed under: Miscellany
February 14, 2011
ancient religious artifacts among 18th c slaves' possessions
In 1785, as an unknown African slave built the furnace for a plantation's greenhouse, he packed in this prehistoric pestle among the bricks. The object is a West African spirit practice symbol,
via scientificamerican.com
Filed under: Miscellany
The Finkler Question: A Review
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson is perhaps the funniest book I've ever read; it's also seriously brilliant. This is a novel that deserved to win the Booker prize.
It's about anti-semitism in particular, but more generally about other-ness and self, about hatred, jealousy and love. The first 2/3 is laugh out loud funny, so much so that I attracted attention from my kids (what's so funny, Mom?), my h (who took the kobo from me to read a passage) and strangers who looked around to see the hilarity for themselves (in the girls' change room, in the lobby of a nursing home).
The last third, while funny in spots, is necessarily more serious as the book draws toward its end, and each of the main characters is inescapably confronted with humanity's worse aspects, each of them choosing a different response.
The three main characters are an elderly widower, a middle-aged widower, and a middle-aged man who has, his whole life, been a mourner in search of an object to be mourned. The first two are Jewish types. Libor is a nearly 90 year old holocaust and Communist era survivor who moved between Hollywood and London. Sam Finkler is an ASHamed Jew (the name of the organization he co-founded), a loud, successful philosopher-author of self-help books and tv personality. While they have an overabundance of identity to cope with, Julian is their foil, a Gentile with too little, a wannabe something who makes a living by imitation as a celebrity look-alike, a dreamer who wants to hold a dying woman in his arms, and if not that, to be a persecuted Jew.
The humour in the novel comes from playing with these types, taking a core of truth and exaggerating it in caricature to highlight its characteristics. And yet the characters aren't simple or flat, but rounded out and turned around so that we can see other dimensions of who they are and how they interact with each other, their children, their wives, their lovers.
I don't know if it sounds as funny as it is, or as sharp. I wasn't all that attracted to the book by the descriptions I read of it, but it was available as an e-book at my library, so I downloaded it.
Readers on amazon are about evenly divided between people who loved it and people who hated it, which I find interesting and not uncommon. I've been on both sides of that fence, liking A Reliable Wife, and disliking The Kite Runner (second half), for example.
By the end of the first page of The Finkler Question, I knew that Howard Jacobson could write, but it wasn't until the end of the first chapter that I realized just how well. He's a smart guy that Jacobson, and a compassionate one, who isn't afraid to stick his hands into some of humanity's nasty bits. And yet I didn't end the book feeling at all depressed by it. If anything I felt elated by the brilliance of the novel, its humour and its honesty.
This is what I drew from it. There are various responses one can have to the pain of this world and to life, but the best of them is to live fully, mourn honestly and love one another.
Filed under: Literary Tagged: Howard Jacboson, The Finkler Question
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