Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Current Events and General Interest Bits & Pieces -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (52)	11/17/2002 2:57:11 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 603

James Traub, Who Needs the U.N. Security Council? nytimes.com [ Another one I'd be tempted to post elsewhere, but I see from a quick peek that the Godwin's Law demonstrators are out in force as usual . Goodbye to all that. ] The Security Council need not be wholly reduced to its legitimacy-granting function. The U.N. and its various agencies have built up enormous expertise in the thankless task of nation building; one U.N. official says that the Bush administration even approached the organization to take over the civil administration of Afghanistan after the Taliban had been dislodged, a role that it has played in East Timor and elsewhere. (The U.N. had the good sense to decline.) The American resolve to engage in strategic nation wrecking may increasingly force the Security Council, which will be asked to authorize these missions, into the role of picking up the pieces. But in a world defined by the fight against terrorism, which is to say a world shaped by a single power overwhelmingly preoccupied with the fight against terrorism, the Security Council's central role will be to shape the terms and establish the conditions under which that fight becomes broadly acceptable. Its job is both to restrain and to license the superpower. Conservative critics of the U.N., some of whom now occupy important posts in the Bush administration, have long argued that the Security Council is useful only when it accepts American leadership and embraces American interests -- which, they would add, is virtually never. And yet what has become obvious in recent weeks is that with only the most modest gestures toward multilateralism on the part of the U.S., the Security Council is prepared to offer that embrace. And the Bush administration is likely to hug back when it suits its needs. It's a relationship of convenience. But it's a relationship. One Security Council diplomat who finds this prospect both professionally pleasing and deeply gratifying to his sense of irony points out that the final draft of the Iraq resolution essentially gives Hans Blix, the head of the U.N. inspection team, the power to decide whether or not the Iraqis are in compliance (though Blix has told the Council he doesn't want to bear that burden). Blix, he points out, ''is a nice, soft-spoken, grandfatherly Swede, not an American, not a warmonger'' -- the perfect legitimator of the American war effort. ''If the war comes,'' he adds, ''I see Bush making an 8 o'clock speech to the nation, with Hans Blix mentioned at least 10 times.''

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (52)	11/18/2002 12:33:13 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 603

In Theory, It's True (or Not) nytimes.com [ Elsewhere on the French front, this may be amusing, or not, it's somewhat obscure at any rate. ] On the surface, the Bogdanovs' papers appear to be little different from what trickles daily into the electronic archives physicists use to exchange ideas. Last week, to pick a couple of titles at random, the fare included "Rotating Black Holes, Closed Time-Like Curves, Thermodynamics, and the Enhancon Mechanism" and "Superspace Formulation of 4D Higher Spin Gauge Theory." When Igor Bogdanov writes, "We consider inertia as a topological field, linked to the topological charge Q = 1 of the singular zero size gravitational instanton," is that so different from Edward Witten, a premier string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, proposing, as he did in a recent paper, "that multi-trace interactions in quantum field theory on the boundary of AdS space can be incorporated in the AdS/CFT correspondence by using a more general boundary condition for the bulk fields than has been considered hitherto"? Either passage, it seems, could have been generated by a computer programmed with a list of buzzwords and some basic rules of syntax. That, of course, is just the point the deconstructionists tirelessly belabor: All is surface without depth. And that is just the view Dr. Sokal took on with his lampoon in Social Text. Physicists, who pretty much have to believe in the existence of an objective reality, insist that sense can be separated from nonsense, even in a field so abstract that laboratory experiments remain but a dream.