Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:42:39 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Peter Pettus :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Peter+Pettus istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/embracing-our-ever-changing-earth/37583/ Wed, 9 Aug 2006 00:00:00 EST Not long ago, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman took a break from his analysis of world affairs and went to Machu Picchu in Peru to have a look at the Andes Mountains. According to his column filed that day, Mr. Friedman was troubled by what he saw. The mighty peaks surrounding Machu Picchu, once described in guide books as "snow capped," are now merely "snow frosted," he tells us. Not only is the snow disappearing from the mountains, but a whole cascade of calamities is now about to... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/straight-from-the-sheeps-mouth/34616/ Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:00:00 EST Does anyone remember the clamor and furor that surrounded the birth of the first test-tube baby? After Louise Brown was born in 1978 as a result of in vitro fertilization, there was an outburst of criticism that IVF was crackpot science and those responsible were monsters meddling with an intimate process best left to nature. We were headed down a "slippery slope" leading to eugenics, deformed babies, and doctors playing God. So we were warned. By now, of course, IVF is an accepted part of our... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/coming-paradigm-shift/32059/ Wed, 3 May 2006 00:00:00 EST Remember those old newsreel clips from the 1920s and '30s showing bizarre flying machines struggling in vain to get off the ground? Remember the one with the huge steel flapping wings that simply blew apart with the first insane flap? Well, according to Robert Frenay's new book, "Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 546 pages, $30), that failed effort to fly like a bird is the perfect metaphor for our present transition to the coming... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/science-for-better-government/31164/ Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST The example of the Manhattan Project taught that a disparate group of strong-willed scientists, working together voluntarily, could achieve marvels. This was the model followed by the group of scientific advisers we now know as the Jasons. Originally formed by veterans of the Manhattan Project, the group included such gigantic personalities as Freeman Dyson, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and Hans Bethe, and demonstrated how creative cooperation between scientists and the government could... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/who-we-are-why/27543/ Tue, 14 Feb 2006 00:00:00 EST In 1998, a kindly grandmother living in New Jersey wrote a book about child-rearing that created quite a stir. In "The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do," Judith Rich Harris had the temerity to suggest that the most important influences on children were not their parents but genes and peers. This was heresy, and critics immediately attacked the book in reviews with titles such as "Parents Don't Count!" Nonetheless, Mrs. Harris had made a very convincing argument, and she... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/light-in-the-darkness/25639/ Wed, 11 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST A new book about man's "unappeasable appetite for energy"? With a promotional blurb from arch-Greenie Bill McKibben? It looks at first as if we are in for another Bush-bashing environmentalist diatribe telling us to turn down the thermostat, start walking, and join the Kyoto Protocol. But Alfred Crosby, emeritus professor of history, geography, and American studies at the University of Texas, has done something quite different and unexpected. He has written a direct and clearly expressed... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/how-evolution-evolved/23261/ Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST In 2000, in dramatic testimony to Charles Darwin's continuing influence in the 21st century, the image of the Victorian naturalist replaced that of Charles Dickens on the British 10-pound note. While Freud and Marx are slowly receding in importance, Darwin and his revolutionary ideas have grown ever more important and relevant. Beginning this weekend, the American Museum of Natural History presents the first major exhibition celebrating the upcoming 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/what-is-the-nature-of-man/20532/ Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST Near the beginning of his new book, "The Singularity Is Near" (Viking, 601 pages, $29.95), Ray Kurzweil quotes a remark the computer scientist Mark Miller made in 1986: "You know," Mr. Miller said, "things are going to be really different! ... No, no, I mean really different!" Just how really different things are going to be is the subject of this exhilarating and terrifyingly deep look at where we are headed as a species. What Mr. Kurzweil terms "The Singularity" is the point in the future... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/never-trust-a-senator-with-a-test-tube/19380/ Wed, 31 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST Hmmm. "The Republican War on Science"? Could this possibly be a partisan polemic? One possible clue (aside from the fact that the book's ad campaign is sponsored by the Nation and Mother Jones) might be the cover jacket. There, at the top, we see the back end of an elephant. At the bottom of the cover is a smashed lab vessel oozing a life-saving potion that the long-suffering people of the world will now unfortunately never have, thanks to the "elephant" and its ilk. Not surprisingly, it turns... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/land-was-theirs-before-we-were-the-lands/18333/ Wed, 10 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST So much guilt, myth, and historical misinformation has accumulated around the saga of the American Indian that it is a wonder that anything new can possibly be said. Yet in fact we understand comparatively little about North America before the arrival of the Europeans. The difficult task is made more so by the many layers of politically correct ideology and old habits of thinking which threaten any new interpretation of the Indian past. A great many people, not only American Indians, have a... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/faster-better-evolution/15723/ Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST "Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - and What It Means To Be Human" (Doubleday, 400 pages, $26) opens with a New Yorker cartoon depicting Modern Man standing on an infinite staircase gazing up at it with a puzzled expression on his face. Below him stands a less-evolved caveman who comments, "I was wondering when you'd notice there's lots more steps." As Joel Garreau explains in this fascinating and disturbing book, not only is human evolution... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/harnessing-a-demon-for-humanity/5353/ Wed, 24 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST 'We say it's Frankenfood and we won't eat it!" These are the shrieks of opposition to genetically modified foods now echoing throughout Europe and North America. An intense campaign against these foods is active worldwide, enlisting a large coalition of supporters that includes Greenpeace, Prince Charles, Dennis Kucinich, Jeremy Rifkind, and vast legions of the passionately ill-informed. Europeans - having had a long history of bitter opposition to all sorts of food including potatoes... PETER PETTUS http://www.nysun.com/arts/was-this-man-a-fraud/3155/ Wed, 13 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EST Isaac Newton did it. So did Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin. Louis Pasteur, and many other giants of science. Sigmund Freud apparently did it all the time. They all, at one time or another, fudged and nudged the data a bit; skewed the results of experiments; tweaked the numbers, or doctored the photographs. In a word, they were all guilty in some degree of what scientists refer to as "FF&P": fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. (The Total Hoax, as in the Piltdown Man farce, is an...