Beautiful Things Research Articles

Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800): London's leading scientific instrument maker

Jesse Ramsden was one of the most prominent manufacturers of scientific instruments in the latter half of the eighteenth century. To own a Ramsden instrument, be it one of his great theodolites or one of the many sextants and barometers produced at his London workshop, was to own not only an instrument of incredible accuracy and great practical use, but also a thing of beauty. In this, the first biography of Jesse Ramsden, Dr Anita McConnell reconstructs his life and career and presents us with a detailed account of the instrument trade in this period. By studying the life of one prominent instrument maker, the entire practice of the trade is illuminated, from the initial commission, the intricate planning and design, through the practicalities of production, delivery and, crucially, payment for the work. The book will naturally be of immeasurable interest to historians of science and scientific instruments but, as it also sheds light on the increasing commercialisation of the scientific trade on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, should also interest social and economic historians of the eighteenth century.

My ten favorite "practical theory" papers

As the saying goes, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." Networking research has a wealth of good papers on both sides of the theory-practice divide. However, many practical papers stop short of having a sharp problem formulation or a rigorously considered solution, and many theory papers overlook or assume away some key aspect of the system they intend to model. Still, every so often, a paper comes along that nails a practical question with just the right bit of theory. When that happens, it's a thing of beauty. These are my ten favorite examples. In some cases, I mention survey papers that cover an entire body of work, or a journal paper that presents a more mature overview of one or more conference papers, rather than single out an individual research result. (As an aside, I think good survey papers are a wonderful contribution to the community, and wish more people invested the considerable time and energy required to write them

Aesthetic Deception: On Encounters with the Past

tions, including the reproduction of a portion of the historic canal district. When the original canal terminus was discovered, plans continued to build a nearby replica. The old site was to be reburied; perhaps its outline would be marked on the pavement above to indicate its presence underground. But the historic feel of old Buffalo the experience of the nineteenth-century canal town was to be evoked by a reproduction slip, by an area of newly laid cobblestone streets, and by interpretive centers and signage, all of which presented fewer engineering and financial complications. To the apparent consternation of officials in charge of the project, this plan met vigorous resistence from the vocal majority of citizens, who might have been presumed to have no interest in what was now little more than a hole in the ground. There were heated public debates, newspaper articles, courtroom hearings, injunctions, and demonstrations. Under pressure, the state development plan was revised, and it was decided to uncover, restore, and rewater the old Commercial Slip, retaining not only its site but also the original limestone walls that had been christened with a splash from a bucket by Governor Dewitt Clinton in 1825 when the canal was opened. This may seem an odd anecdote to introduce a subject in aesthetics, for engineering feat though it may have been, no one has claimed that the canal terminus represents a thing of beauty; nor except in the most extended sense can it be considered

Noninvasive ventilation, a thing of beauty!*

Critical Care Medicine: February 2008 - Volume 36 - Issue 2 - p 630-631 doi: 10.1097/01.CCM.0000299842.91373.71

Emergent Activities in the Arctic: A Space Weather Opportunity

Emergent Activities in the Arctic: A Space Weather Opportunity

The Age of African American Cinema

Page 16 American Book Review Berry and Berry devote considerable time and care to examining the lasting effects of various racisms on African American Cinema B O O K R E V I E W S The Age of African American Cinema Walter R. Jacobs Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema S. Torriano Berry and Venise T. Berry The Scarecrow Press, Inc. http://www.scarecrowpress.com 448 pages; cloth, $85.00 The Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema is volume 12 in The Scarecrow Press, Inc. “Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts” series. According to series editor Jon Woronoff, “African American cinema is in a very different category from the various ‘national cinemas’ included in this subseries. Unlike the French, Russians, or Germans, theAfricanAmericans first had to reclaim their own cinematic image before they could turn it into a thing of representation and beauty.” Indeed, the brother and sister editorial team of S. Torriano Berry and Venise T. Berry devote considerable time and care to examining the lasting effects of various racisms on African American cinema, arguing that “[t]he daunting subject of race and ethnicity permeated life in America at the turn of the 20th century and due to the effect of a certain few films, specific television images, and an often-biased news media, it still plagues us today.” Woronoff concurs: “The fact that this has been a long, hard climb from a particularly low level is shown clearly in the chronology, without which this volume might be hard to understand.” The chronology contains sixty-one entries spanning the years 1824 to 2005, including both general cinematic developments (for example, George Eastman patents Celluloid film in 1887) and specificAfricanAmerican cinematic milestones (such as a 1920–1927 comment on the production and screening of “sepia flicks,” black-themed movies shown at black-owned movie houses, colored-only “Midnight Rambles” in white theaters, or at improvised home screenings held behind Jim Crow lines). Then, an introductory chapter expands on the brief annotations of the chronology, examining the struggles African Americans have engaged in order to create their unique vision of the cinema. Beginning with “The DarkAge of African American Cinema”—which examines “the first filmed images of African Americans, visions which should have never been allowed to fade up from black”—Berry and Berry explore “The Golden Age of African American Cinema,” “The SilverAge of African American Cinema,” “The TV Age and African American Cinema,” “The Bronze Age of African American Cinema”—here we learn about blaxploitation : “To some, the glorification of pimps, hookers, and drug dealers was no better than the olden-day stereotypes of mammies, coons, bucks, brutes, and uncle toms”—“The Dawn of the Crossover Comedians,” “The New Black Film Renaissance,” and “African America [sic] Cinema: Into a New Millennium .” The introduction concludes on a message of hope: “Cinema is the youngest of all the creative arts and these new and innovative means of visual storytelling will continue to entertain, motivate, inspire, educate, and encourage not only African Americans to record and share their most intimate visions of life, but all the people of the world for many years to come.” The celebration of African American cinematic achievements against a backdrop of daunting obstacles makes the introduction a compelling read, especially when we encounter colorful phrases like the one referenced in the previous paragraph (“the first filmed images of African Americans, visions which should have never been allowed to fade up from black”), and “Hollywood turned the 1970s boom 180 degrees around when Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City, 1991, ushered in an era where instead of kicking The Man’s butt all over the screen, black people were kicking each other’s butts all over the screen.” After the eighteen-page introduction, the bulk of the Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema is comprised of “The Dictionary,” 369 pages of entries that range from singer/actress Aaliyah to the PBS biopic Zora is My Name. I wish that The Dictionary had three parts—Actors, Films, and Other—instead of a single section. (Entries in the Other category would include listings like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [currently appearing on page 3...

The Orsini: A Family of Roman Baroni in Context 5: THE ORSINI AND THE AESTHETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

This article presents three case studies on three Roman gentlewomen of late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, examined through the lenses of their inventoried goods and individual expenditure. Although enjoying very different personal statuses (the first one is a widow with grown-up children; the second is a childless widow; and the third is a newly married bride) the three of them share a common keen interest in the managing of things and the furnishings of their private apartments. But while the first one seems to be only interested in affirming her control over the family objects and spaces, the other two appear to be especially driven by the aesthetic quality of their choices. Generally excluded from the possibility of exercising magnificence, which was a public and political virtue, they nonetheless had the option to express their taste for beautiful and fashionable things. Combined with the growing offer of objects and exotic merchandise this sparked the consumer's revolution which many re...

The Beauty of the Redemption of the World: The Theological Aesthetics of Maximus the Confessor and Jonathan Edwards

Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in hisHerrlichkeit, laments the eclipse of the aesthetic in modern theology, noting that thebeingof a Christian is itself a thing of beauty inscribed by the grace of God; that is, it is a form of existence “opened up to us by the God-Man's act of redemption. . . . God's incarnation perfects the whole ontology and aesthetics of created being.” Von Balthasar traces the loss of the aesthetic dimension from Protestant theology to the Reformation principle ofsola scriptura, which seeks to abstract “data” of scriptural revelation into objective formulae. This approach leads to the historicism of Hegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Barth, effectively removing the meditative gaze from theological contemplation. Von Balthasar's ultimate argument is that it is necessary for Protestant theology to revive the Alexandrian tradition in order to recover the “transcendent principle of beauty as derived from and most proper to God,” which is to be “for us the very apex and archetype of beauty in the world.”

Unexpected Affinities: Reading Across Cultures (review)

Reviewed by: Unexpected Affinities: Reading Across Cultures Steven Shankman (bio) Zhang Longxi . Unexpected Affinities: Reading Across Cultures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. xv, 138 pp. Hardcover $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8020-9277-9. This is a wide-ranging book, written in a lively and accessible style, by a formidable scholar of cross-cultural comparative literature. As Zhang rightfully laments, today's academic world is far more comfortable with literary critics who adhere to the shibboleth of the absoluteness of cultural difference than with those who see connections between cultures, especially between cultures as different as China and the West. Zhang Longxi, in contrast, argues that "the point of reading across cultures is to reach a truly global vision of human creativity" because "only from such a broad perspective can we fully appreciate literary works and forms in all their diversities, and appreciate them not as isolated monads sealed off from one another, but as expressions of themes and ideas that are deeply connected, even though manifested in different languages and cultures" (p. 37). In the field of literary and cultural studies in our deeply historicizing academy these days, almost universally wary of universalism, Zhang's claim is both heterodox and welcome. Unexpected Affinities is based upon a series of Alexander Lectures Zhang delivered at the University of Toronto in 2005. On the one hand, the theme of Zhang's lectures—a vision of unity behind appearances of multiplicity—is true to the tradition of Northrop Frye, the Canadian critic who taught at the University of Toronto and whose archetypal approach to literary criticism saw all of literature as participating in a single grand vision, or system. On the other hand, Zhang's contribution is atypical of the Alexander Lectures, as he is the first critic from Asia to deliver them. As broad as was Frye's vision in elaborating his paradigm of archetypal criticism, the Canadian critic made no mention of any of the great classics of Asian literature. Chapter 1, "The Fallacy of Cultural Incommensurability," convincingly argues that East and West are not incommensurable opposites, that there are a great variety of opinions on many topics expressed in each of these two traditions, and that some figures from the East have more in common with their Western counterparts than they do with many of their fellow Easterners. One of these opinions expressed by some in both the Far East and the West is that East and West are incommensurable opposites. The fact that the case for incommensurability finds expression in both China and the West, Zhang argues, paradoxically invalidates that very case, since this contention is put forward by both Chinese and Western thinkers. In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, the great comparatist E. R. Curtius, in arguing for the importance of seeing European literature as a whole, likened his own approach to taking an aerial photograph of the landscape he explores (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask [New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1953], p. ix). Zhang chooses the image of standing back from a canvas (which [End Page 310] he adapts from Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961], p. 140) or high up on a ladder in order to gain an appropriate perspective on the abundant variety of the world's literary texts. Chapter 2, "'Faire une perle d'une l'arme': Reading Across Cultures," finds striking, remarkably detailed similarities in the way Chinese and Western European poets viewed their poems as oysters' pearls—things of beauty that are, in fact, produced, like the oyster's pearl, as a by-product of considerable discomfort and suffering. These affinities are indeed unexpected and, therefore, striking. Readers might, however, find less arresting and original the similarities Zhang finds between Eastern and Western views of life as a journey. In his famous essay "Plato's Pharmacy," Jacques Derrida showed how Plato used the word pharmakon to refer both to poison and to cure. In chapter 3, "'Within the infant rind of this weak flower': The Ambivalence of Poison and Medicine," Zhang extends and broadens Derrida's enquiry, finding this precise ambivalence not only in Western writers...

Julia Hoffman and the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland: An Aesthetic Response to Industrialization

RICHARD S. CHRISTEN Julia Hoffman and the Arts and Crafts Society of Portland An Aesthetic Response toIndustrialization ON OCTOBER 9, 1907, NEARLY 150 people met at the Portland Art Museum to adopt a constitution, elect officers, and enlist members for a new organization: theArts and Crafts Society of Portland.1 Among those present was JuliaHoffman, one of Portland's leading citizens and perhaps itsmost avid craftsperson. More than any other individual, Hoffman had generated an interest in handicrafts in the city. She also helped draft the new society's constitution and by-laws and, as one of its original trustees, its second president, and itsprimary spokesperson for nearly thirtyyears, infused the institution with her vision of the arts and crafts. Despite her responsibility for its existence, theArts and Crafts Society of Portland was more than Julia Hoffman's personal creation. Like similar groups that appeared in cities across theUnited States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Portland society was part of an arts and crafts movement thatflourished from the i88os to the 1920s inEngland, theUnited States, and to a lesser degree, the European continent. At its core, the arts and craftsmovement was a response to industrial ization? a loose network of individuals and institutions committed not somuch to a specific artistic style or method as to an attitude and sensi bility that something was amiss in themodern, industrial world.2 Attacks leveled by English designer, poet, and socialist William Morris against the nineteenth-century industrial revolution originally inspired themovement. Machines had undoubtedly increased efficiency, freed humans frommuch drudgery, and multiplied the quantity of consumer goods, but according 510 OHQ vol. 109, no. 4 ? 2008 Oregon Historical Society Courtesy of the Oregon College ofArt andCraft In itsearlyyears, the Arts and CraftsSociety ofPortland oftenheld classes, likethis onephotographed byJuliaHoffman, in thehomes of its mostlymiddle class and affluent patrons. The societyeventuallyopened a schooldowntown. toMorris, the cost had been unacceptable. Product quality and beauty had declined as cheap, poorly designed objects flooded themarket. The shift from craftsperson tomachine operator drained industrial workers of creativity and separated themfrom theirmaterials, products, and customers. Laborers took littlepride or pleasure indemeaning toil and suffered dramatic losses in social and financial status.3 Building on the insights of JohnRuskin and other Romantics, Morris countered industrializations harmful effectswith what historian Eileen Boris refers to as "the craftsman ideal."4This archetype fused two particular notions that Morris believed had been trampled by the factory system: first, an aesthetic ideal ? that natural beauty, simplicity, and usefulness should characterize all objects and permeate everyday life; and second, a theory of labor ? a commitment towork that brings joy, dignity, and personal satisfaction to laborers.Morris believed pre-industrial artisans had embodied both notions. Because theirwork combined design and creation, he argued, itwas stimulating, pleasurable, and respected within the community; their products, created for specific purposes and people, were original, practical, and the epitome of elegant beauty. Hop Christen, Julia Hoffman and theArts and Crafts Society of Portland 511 ML'Mifafi* Hi i ^^MgB^M /w/ia Hoffman was thedrivingforce behind thearts and crafts movement in early twentieth-century Portland. She created thisself-portraitin 1885,a few years afterhermove toPortlandfrom Salt Lake City. ing to return to these conditions, Morris's answer to industrializa tion looked backward rather than forward. His was a reactionary conviction that attention to pre industrial tools, processes, and design would reverse two of the most nefarious effects of the fac tory system. He was convinced that, iffreed from the slavery of machines, laborers would again make beautiful things and per form work "worth doing ... of itselfpleasant to do, and ... done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious."5 Hoffman and other leaders of theArts and Crafts Society of Portland possessed Morris's desire to cultivate an appreciation for craftsmanship and handicrafts, but they had little of his enthu siasm for fundamental economic and social change. Like that of its counterparts inBoston and other American cities, the Portland society's goal was aesthetic rather than social or economic; they wished to counter theunsightliness of the city's commercial and industrial growth without slowing itsgrowth or challenging the status quo. To achieve thisaim, the...

Easy Facial Analysis Using the Facial Golden Mask

For over 2000 years, many artists and scientists have tried to understand or quantify the form of the perfect, ideal, or most beautiful face both in art and in vivo (life). A mathematical relationship has been consistently and repeatedly reported to be present in beautiful things. This particular relationship is the golden ratio. It is a mathematical ratio of 1.618:1 that seems to appear recurrently in beautiful things in nature as well as in other things that are seen as beautiful. Dr. Marquardt made the facial golden mask that contains and includes all of the one-dimensional and two-dimensional geometric golden elements formed from the golden ratio. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the usefulness of the golden facial mask. In 40 cases, the authors applied the facial golden mask to preoperative and postoperative photographs and scored each photograph on a 1 to 5 scale from the perspective of their personal aesthetic views. The score was lower when the facial deformity was severe, whereas it was higher when the face was attractive. Compared with the average scores of facial mask applied photographs and nonapplied photographs using a nonparametric test, statistical significance was not reached (P > 0.05). This implies that the facial golden mask may be used as an analytical tool. The facial golden mask is easy to apply, inexpensive, and relatively objective. Therefore, the authors introduce it as a useful facial analysis.

The ““Juice of a Few Flowers””: Gerald and Sara Murphy's Life of Beautiful Things

Gerald and Sara Murphy were friends to scores of the twentieth century's leading artists, writers, and composers including Picasso, Lééger, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Stravinsky, among others. The Murphys created a life of beautiful things for themselves, their three children, and their circle of friends. Trans-Atlantic Americans, the Murphys took great joy in entertaining especially at their home in Antibes, which they named Villa America. Gerald was famous for preparing his legendary signature drinks, including one he called the "Juice of a Few Flowers." He was an extremely talented artist - although short-lived - and one of his few paintings, Cocktail, depicts all the accoutrements that would be found on a bar tray. Gerald and Sara often hosted their famous friends at parties that included F. Scott Fitzgerald's drunken outbursts. They drank sherry with the Hemingways in Pamplona and ate ranch food with them in Montana. Always accommodating, they kept recipes of friends' favorite foods to serve at their intimate gatherings. Through their warmth and ability to entertain, the Murphys created a life of beautiful things for themselves and everyone around them.

Orator O'Rourke: The Life of a Baseball Radical (review)

Reviewed by: Orator O’Rourke: The Life of a Baseball Radical David Ball Mike Roer. Orator O’Rourke: The Life of a Baseball Radical. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. 342 pp. Paper, $29.95. If you know much at all about baseball history, you probably know James "Orator" O'Rourke as a nineteenth-century Hall of Fame outfielder and catcher. But you may not know that he was much more than that. During nearly half a century of serious involvement in what was gradually becoming the national pastime, O'Rourke served as a Major League player-manager and umpire and then continued playing well into his fifties for a Minor League team he owned in his native Bridgeport, Connecticut. Besides acting as his own manager there, O'Rourke served as league secretary and a member of the board of the Minors' National Association. Over the course of his long career, he negotiated with club owners on his own behalf with uncommon stubbornness, helped lead the Player's Brotherhood in its revolt against management, designed catcher's equipment, and, in his spare time, earned a law degree from Yale University. O'Rourke began his Major League playing career catching underhanded pitchers without a glove and ended it as Christy Mathewson's teammate. He fought the sales system for the Brotherhood and lived to sell his own son's contract to the team soon to be known as the New York Yankees. In short, Jim O'Rourke was a man who saw it all and did most of it. Mike Roer has produced a biography of this remarkable figure, somewhat rough in places but always entertaining and informative. A man of such long and varied experience might have served as the center for a life-and-times study rather than a biography, and while Roer has not chosen to write such a book, he includes a sometimes embarrassing wealth of detail that is not always either relevant to O'Rourke's life story or really integrated into the presentation. Still, if you care enough to pick up a book on Jim O'Rourke in the first place, you'll probably find little here that won't interest you. Those of us who know nineteenth-century baseball history well can still learn a lot from Orator O'Rourke, but inevitably Roer covers a good deal of familiar ground. What will probably be completely fresh to most readers is Roer's treatment of the more than two decades O'Rourke spent in the Minor Leagues. Because O'Rourke was active on so many levels, this section of Orator O'Rourke is almost a primer on the challenges facing Minor League operators at the level of club, league, and national organization. Orator O'Rourke does not do quite as much justice to O'Rourke's character as to his playing and executive career. Roer is an admirer of his subject to a fault, with the result that critics of O'Rourke's conduct as manager of the Buffalo club and as Minor League and club executive are almost invariably dismissed as self-interested or otherwise unreliable. This may well have been [End Page 141] the case much of the time, yet what they said might be worth considering nevertheless. Born of Irish peasant stock and the son of illiterate parents, Jim O'Rourke parlayed skill at a boy's game into a career as a baseball club–owning capitalist and Yale-educated lawyer. Roer's O'Rourke is an ambitious, intelligent, and highly disciplined man of abstemious personal habits, aggressive yet cautious in defending his own interests, a baseball politician who preferred conciliation, an attorney who habitually advised his clients to settle out of court, anything but the "baseball radical" the book's subtitle promises. Roer is surely not mistaken to believe that O'Rourke could not have accomplished what he did without considerable quantities of energy and intelligence. Yet he was a rather more complicated and colorful character than emerges from this book. Just look at the photograph of him on the book's front cover. Look at that massive soup-strainer mustache, a thing of beauty and wonder in an era of magnificent mustaches...

Lessons of Solitude: The Awakening of Aesthetic Sensibility

This paper explores the contextual value of solitude in learning; in so doing, it attempts to suggest an alternative method of instruction that is based on aesthetics as the reciprocal relationship between emotions and intellect, and between action and contemplation. Such an aesthetic education or method seeks to guide the student towards the attainment of her own life: to perfect, as much as possible, her human qualities in what she does by paying attention to the things of Beauty. The method that the essay uses is both historical and interdisciplinary: it draws from theology, philosophy, the sciences and visual art; and, it is guided by an explanatory perspective that is constructive.

Many Beautiful Things: Colonial Botanists' Accounts of the North Queensland Rainforests

Colonial botanists played an important role in both elucidating and reshaping the nature of the North Queensland rainforests between 1860 and 1915. The Government Botanist of Victoria, Ferdinand von Mueller, was the first to begin to document the plant life of North Queensland. In 1859, on separation from New South Wales, Queensland's first Colonial Botanist was appointed to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens; this role was filled initially by Walter Hill, then by Frederick Manson Bailey.They were based at a distance from the northern rainforests and largely relied on local collectors to supply them with specimens that they would then identify, name and describe. They were also part of a network that assisted in the introduction of plants to North Queensland from other tropical locations for acclimatization purposes, and they worked to promote the development of tropical agriculture in the region. Colonial botanists not only promoted the settlement of rainforest areas and utilization of rainforest species, they also recorded and commented on the associated processes of environmental change that they observed.

Pillars of Heaven

Sometimes the most beautiful things are the hardest to understand. Pillars like those of the Eagle Nebula form at the boundary between some of the hottest (10000 K) and coldest (10 K) gas in the Galaxy. Many physical processes come into play in the birth and growth of such gaseous pillars: hydrodynamic instability, photoionization, ablation, recombination, molecular heating and cooling, and probably magnetic fields. High-quality astronomical observations, quantitative numerical simulations, and scaled laser experiments provide a powerful combination for understanding their formation and evolution.

COMING OUT OF THE DARKNESS OF THE PAST

Technology is helping to reduce the education gap between developed countries and those that are still developing. The following article gives one example of an innovative teacher training project where a western university, in Rome, Italy, is selflessly showing their African counterparts, in rural Rwanda, how to become fully autonomous in training their future generations. Schrum and Hong (2002) state that “learners throughout the world are demanding educational opportunities in an ‘anytime and anywhere’ format and institutions are responding by devoting substantial resources to develop online distance learning.” This assertion is fast becoming the reality in every corner of the globe where the teaching profession is using technology to bring education to people and places that might never have imagined receiving its benefits little more than a decade ago. Such examples include teachers working with blind children in Chile on “a project called Hyperstories which exposes blind children to a learning methodology that uses 3D sound interactive software to help them construct cognitive structures that represents their surrounding space” and “aims to move these disadvantaged blind children from darkness to what they call ‘aural’ vision” (Gourley, 2004). This metaphor of technology bringing people from darkness into the light can be applied to many other contexts where professionals in the field of education are giving rather than taking from the developing world and offering hope that we can indeed create a world of shared resources and international unity, rather than division, in the future. The benefits of technology are now helping to rebuild Rwanda, the beautiful ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’ and ‘Gorilla’s In The Mist’. Unfortunately, just over a decade ago, this densely populated, tropical nation became synonymous with less beautiful things such as ethnic cleansing, genocide and refugee crises. The war was bloody and divisive and further hindered an already impoverished nation’s progress. Yet, slowly this beautiful country, in the highlands of east Africa, is successfully emerging from centuries of colonial oppression and internecine fighting to take its first steps towards becoming part of the 24/7 digital age of education.

Tough questions about wind energy

In suggesting that the US should turn to wind-generated electric power (see Physics Today, July 2005, page 34), Cristina Archer and Mark Jacobson fail to discuss the visual impact of wind farms. height from 10 meters to 10 building stories and appear to average about 50 meters. 1 1. US Bureau of Land Management, Wind Energy Development Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement FAQs, http://windeis.anl.gov/faq. The generation of significant amounts of electrical power requires multiple turbines arranged in wind farms. These farms are sited along sea-coasts, atop ridge lines, and in flat, desert areas subject to strong seasonal winds.Individual wind turbines range in See www.pt.ims.ca/9467-7 Where wind farms exist, their turbines visually dominate the landscape. To wind-power enthusiasts the turbines are apparently a thing of beauty, symbols of “free” energy and progress. Readers should study enlargements of the photographs of wind farms (see, for example, http://windeis.anl.gov/guide/photos) and decide for themselves whether the sight is an acceptable substitute for nature’s beauty.The Bureau of Land Management is currently preparing environmental impact statements before permitting wind farms on government land throughout western states. Detailed state wind power classification maps 2 2. US Department of Energy, Wind and Hydropower Technologies Program, State Wind Resource Maps, http://www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica/wind_maps.asp. show where future wind farms are likely to be sited and provide power classification, resource potential, wind power density, and wind speed at 50 meters above ground.After studying the photographs and reference 22. US Department of Energy, Wind and Hydropower Technologies Program, State Wind Resource Maps, http://www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica/wind_maps.asp., interested readers should be able to supply their own answer to Archer’s rhetorical question “why not?”REFERENCESSection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCES <<1. US Bureau of Land Management, Wind Energy Development Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement FAQs, http://windeis.anl.gov/faq. Google Scholar2. US Department of Energy, Wind and Hydropower Technologies Program, State Wind Resource Maps, http://www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica/wind_maps.asp. Google Scholar© 2006 American Institute of Physics.

Cancer at the End Stages: Palliation Is Multifaceted

Cancer at the End Stages: Palliation Is Multifaceted

Feminist Exhibitionism: When the Women's Studies Professor Is a Curator

While teaching Alice Walker's classic 1974 essay Search of Our Mothers' Gardens in my Introduction to Women's Studies courses, have for the past nine years supplemented it by showing an excerpt from a filmed documentary. This 1992 British-made documentary about Walker features readings from her work, dramatizations of scenes from the novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, historical footage from the civil rights era in the United States, and commentary by various talking heads, such as Gloria Steinem and the late Barbara Christian. But most important, it relies on interviews with Walker herself, portions of which are intercut throughout. In the section of the documentary that show in class-the segment devoted to the creation and impact of the central argument of Search of Our Mothers' Gardens-Walker's on-camera presence is particularly arresting and inspiring, as she talks about the unacknowledged artistry of poor African American women in the rural South. Yet every year, present this powerful feminist statement to my classes with some hesitation and misgivings. Why? Because the students both see and hear Walker accompanying her celebration of the arts of women of color with the following slam: I don't like museums, which is a very white Western notion of what you do with art, because it takes it out of context of life, and think for many indigenous people, earth people, you create beautiful things because beauty is all around you. mean, what else would you do? (Shaw 1992). For me, Walker's words pose a dilemma. want my students to take Walker's perspective seriously; yet don't want them to dismiss out-ofhand either the achievements or the potential of museums and other institutional exhibition spaces, such as those in university galleries and libraries, as sites for doing feminist and anti-racist work. On the contrary, would like them to consider such established spaces as opportunities for feminist pedagogy and outreach, not merely as irredeemable symbols of elitism. Indeed, would like my students to feel equally inspired and challenged by the alternative point-of-view of African American women artists such as the sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, who has exhibited in libraries such as the Main Public Library in Las Vegas, Nevada, using community-based galleries as though they were museums, on the principle that Making my work available . . . where it is accessible to Black working people is very important to me (LaDuke 1992, 138).