53 Brentwood Blog

Friday, October 26, 2007

Light, Shadows and Knowledge.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Blaise Pascal.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Courage

- "Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others"-
Churchill

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

No shit!

In his long-awaited memoir, Greenspan, 81, who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, writes: 'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.'

Monday, October 15, 2007

Nobel

Mario R. Capecchi's earliest memories are of his mother being arrested by the Nazis.

In 1941, Capecchi, then a young boy living in the Italian Alps, saw the Gestapo haul away his mother, a poet who had allied herself with anti-Fascist intellectuals. The arrest was the start of a remarkable journey for Capecchi, one that included being a homeless street urchin, suffering from malnutrition in an Italian hospital, immigrating to the United States -- and yesterday, winning the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Capecchi, 70, a renowned geneticist at the University of Utah at Salt Lake City, shares the prestigious $1.54 million prize with fellow American Oliver Smithies, 82, a native of England now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Sir Martin J. Evans, 66, of Cardiff University in Wales. The trio won the award for research on how genes can be manipulated in mice to better understand disease in humans.

But it is Capecchi's story that is particularly striking.

He was only 3 when his mother, Lucy Ramberg, a member of a group of artists known as the Bohemians, was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany as a political prisoner for pamphleteering against Nazism and fascism. Anticipating the arrest, Ramberg, who never married Capecchi's father, an officer in the Italian air force, sold her possessions, giving the money to a peasant family that she asked to care for her son. But the money ran out in a year.

"They didn't have the resources to keep me and maintain their own family," the scientist said in a telephone interview yesterday. "So I went on the streets."

Capecchi moved from town to town, hungry most of the time and occasionally living in orphanages or traveling with gangs of other homeless children who stole food from carts while other members of the group distracted the vendors. "Just surviving from day to day pretty much occupies your mind," he said in a 1997 interview with the Salt Lake Tribune.

He spent years on the streets and nearly died of malnutrition in a hospital near Bologna, where he lay naked and feverish on a bed, existing on a daily bowl of chicory coffee and a small crust of bread. His mother, who was liberated from Dachau by U.S. troops in 1945, found him at the hospital after searching for more than a year. She showed up on his ninth birthday, carrying a Tyrolean outfit for him, complete with a small cap with a feather. She took him to Rome, where he had his first bath in six years.

"I still have the hat," he said in a 1996 lecture in Japan.

In 1946, Capecchi's uncle Edward Ramberg, a physicist living in a commune in Bucks County, Pa., sent money so that his sister and nephew could come live with his family in the United States.

"I was here one day, and the next day I went to my first school," Capecchi said.



Christopher Lee
The Washington Post

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Exact Approximation

Although this may seem a paradox,
all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

Bertrand Russell

Monday, October 01, 2007

Silly Songs: 'Do you know why?'

We use to say our love will stay until the cows come home,

And then the cows came home, do you know why?

We use to say we'll love this way, till Hades freezes over,

And then it just froze over, do you know why?

We thought we had a future dancing a jig for us,

Do you suppose our littledream got too big for us

We use to say our love will stay,

Forever and a night, and now forever's gone,

Darling, do you know why? Neither do I.