The Scientist provides some interesting background to this year’s Nobel for physiology or medicine. The prize went to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield. Some people think Raymond Damadian should also have shared the prize. “What all this illustrates is the difficulty of pinpointing the eureka moment in scientific endeavor.”
Jay Rosen has an extraordinary tribute to Neil Postman, who has died aged 72.
Even if you never knew Postman or his many books on education, culture and media, you should read Rosen. A brief extract (which could stand as a clarion call for a whole way of living): “He was expert in nothing. Therefore nothing was off limits. Therefore ones mind was always at risk, from a joke, a headline, an idea, a person walking through the door. The only way to respond to such strange conditions was with ready humor. And humor would bring you more ideas. Now what discipline, what department is that?”
Fresh from BloggerCon, I filed an article for The Guardian on presidential candidate weblogs. In the way of newspapers, it was greatly chopped down (they lost a page from the section), but I’m working on a much bigger exploration of the same theme.
“The template for successful presidential campaigns was established by James (‘It’s the economy, stupid’) Carville and Karl (Boy Genius) Rove. Stay relentlessly on message, control the agenda. But Howard Dean thinks there is another way. The Dean campaign for the Democrats has enthusiastically surrendered control to the internet.”