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Blogvoices’ Hottest Threads, across blogs.

What’s Wrong with These Questions? Cornell physicist N. David Mermin poses ten more questions, in response to the heralded August, ’00 New York Times list of questions some physicists said they’d like to ask their colleagues of 100 years from now. It’s evident Mermin is more of a metathinker than that other bunch. Physics Today [via Ethel]

Thanks to the null device for pointing me to the want ad of the week ( if not the month).

New York’s bully in chief meets his match: ” ‘Yo Mama’ artist Renée Cox won’t let adulterer Rudy
Giuliani use Catholicism to beat her up.”

Mayor Rudy Giuliani is taking another shot at the
Brooklyn Museum of Art, wrinkling his pointy little nose
and spitting out labels like “outrageous,” “disgusting” and
“anti-Catholic.” Again he’s accusing the Brooklyn Museum,
which a little more than a year ago raised his ire by
including Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary” accessorized
with elephant dung in its “Sensation” exhibit, of being
deliberately inflammatory and defaming the Roman
Catholic Church in order to increase museum attendance.

The current object of Giuliani’s indignation, which, again,
he has not yet seen in person, is a series of photographs by
artist Renée Cox called “Yo Mama’s Last Supper.” Cox’s
depiction of the biblical scene differs from, say, Leonardo
da Vinci’s in that all the disciples are black. What’s more —
and here’s what presumably has Giuliani really upset — Cox
herself poses, naked and lovely, with arms outstretched, in
Christ’s place. Salon

PC, M.D. by Sally Satel: “A doctor argues that
affirmative action
and ignoramus
patients
organizations are
ruining American
healthcare.” reviewed in Salon

In Search of the ‘Gay Gene’. A review of new evolutionary biological explanation of the persistence of homosexuality because of its adaptive value. “Even explains Ashcroft.” Washington Post

In defense of Oprah’s Book Club, which critics roundly dismiss and one has called the “carpet-bombing of the American mind.” The essayist says “Winfrey’s broad appeal is built on her capacity to affirm both the simple and the complex. In the end, Winfrey wants her
audience to read books. Period. She wants her audience to read because, just as much as Harold Bloom, Franz Kafka and
other literary heavyweights, she believes reading is transformative.” National Post

Physics’ new big question: what does ‘is’ mean?. Reading Prof. Lee Smolin’s new book, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (which, the reviewer says, “… makes Hawking’s A Brief History of Time seem as intellectually demanding as Hello“) shows an intellectually credible way to grapple with the philosophical questions that the quest for the Grand Unified Theory of physics brings up — unlike those Quantum-Physics-is-Eastern-mysticism lightweights of a decade ago. Telegraph UK Click here to search for <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?q=Prof+Lee+Smolin&hq=&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&btnG=Google+Search
“>more on Smolin.