. . to Marie-Antoinette. Hm. Of course The Saga of Burnt Njal was kicked off by a similar incompatibility.

Some say rebuild the towers exactly as they were. Some say leave their footprints bare. Seems to me you can have both: rotate the plan by a quarter-turn.

GPS sparks boundary wars. New measurements tell Rhode Islanders that they live in Connecticut, and so on. (Thanks to Monty Solomon for the link.) If it were a question of private property, I believe the rule of adverse possession would decide in favor of the occupants. But in matters of Government one can’t allow common sense, or such trifles as the reasonable expectations of the people affected, to get in the way.

Current reading: Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds (Harvard, 1997).

[Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)] misled a whole generation of students and historians of science into believing that all scientific revolutions are concept-driven. The concept-driven revolutions are the ones that attract the most attention and have the greatest impact on the public awareness of science, but in fact they are comparatively rare. In the last 500 years, in addition to the quantum-mechanical revolution that Kuhn took as his model, we have had six major concept-driven revolutions, associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Freud, and Einstein. During the same period there have been about twenty tool-driven revolutions, not so impressive to the general public but of equal importance to the progress of science. Two prime examples of tool-driven revolutions are the Galilean revolution resulting from the use of the telescope in astronomy, and the Crick-Watson revolution resulting from the use of X-ray diffraction to determine the structure of big molecules in biology.

Mourn on the Fourth of July: A National Day of Protest

The goal, if any goal is possible to us, is no longer reform or restoration: it is resuscitation or reincarnation. This Fourth of July is no longer a holiday. It’s a funeral or, just possibly, a wake.

I applaud the Ninth Circuit for recognizing that teaching schoolchildren to recite “one nation under God” is an establishment of religion; though without the offending phrase the tots are still being taught that their first duty is to “the republic for which it [the flag] stands”. I dimly remember (or imagine that I remember) being bothered by the implication that whatever conditions prevail in my “nation indivisible” are the definition of liberty and justice.

Let it not be forgotten:

The Pledge of Allegiance . . . was written by an avowed Socialist, Francis Bellamy, in 1892. Bellamy was at one time the vice president of the Society of Christian Socialists, and once delivered a sermon entitled “Jesus the Socialist.” Bellamy wrote the pledge to help a Boston publisher sell flags through one of his magazines . . . he also saw it as a way to instill veneration of the state and its symbols in the hearts and minds of schoolchildren . . . . —David F Nolan, Libertarian Party News, September 1995

Someone’s having fun a little early: I just heard the unique sound of a display rocket.