Am I geek enough? NO, compared to the ones sneaking into Apple to volunteer a canceld project.

The Graphing Calculator Story

David Brooks has selected (Part I|Part II) what he thinks to be the best essays that were written this year. Here is the list reproduced, thanks to Patio Pundit:

Part I


"When Islam Breaks Down" by Theodore Dalrymple; City Journal.

"The Other Sixties" by Bruce Bawer; The Wilson Quarterly.

"Faculty Clubs and Church Pews" by William J. Stuntz; Tech Central Station.

"Blind Into Baghdad" by James Fallows; The Atlantic Monthly.

Seymour Hersh's work on Abu Ghraib: ; The New Yorker


"The Global Baby Bust" by Phillip Longman; Foreign Affairs.

"Power and Population in Asia" by Nicholas Eberstadt; Policy Review.

Part II

"Holland Daze" by Christopher Caldwell; The Weekly Standard

"Victory in Defeat" by Neal Ascherson; The London Review of Books.


"High Prices: How to Think About Prescription Drugs" by Malcolm Gladwell; The New Yorker

"World War IV" by Norman Podhoretz; Commentary

"A Fighting Faith: An Argument for a New Liberalism" by Peter Beinart; The New Republic

Charles Krauthammer, The National Interest | Francis Fukuyama, The National Interest

It is always tempting to make a great story, though it may be bad history.

Books | Leaps in the Dark: The Making of Scientific ReputationsThe falling apple that supposedly inspired the theory of gravitation was a myth. As Waller points out, the devious Newton probably used it as a ploy to avoid acknowledging any of his contemporaries. Such moments make a great story, but are bad history.

In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both - though neither may be fully representative of those people on whom we're reporting.
...
I interviewed your commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, before the battle for Falluja began. He said something very powerful at the time - something that now seems prophetic. It was this:

"We're the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman's war here - because we don't behead people, we don't come down to the same level of the people we're combating.

"That's a very difficult thing for a young 18-year-old marine who's been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat. That's a very difficult thing for a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel with 23 years experience in the service who was trained to do the same thing once upon a time, and who now has a thousand-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor - and ensure we remain the good guys and keep the moral high ground." I listened carefully when he said those words. I believed them.

So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera - the story of his death became my responsibility.

Guardian | 'Something was not right': "Other foreign networks made different decisions, and because of that, I
have become the conflicted conduit who has brought this to the world."

The "strong opposition" in North Korea? Maybe not strong at all.

Print - North Korea: Joyful Dancing - DER SPIEGEL - SPIEGEL ONLINE: "The people of North Korea are not as submissive as they appear to be. Unnoticed by the outside world, strong opposition to the regime of dictator Kim Jong Il is beginning to appear. "

Scientific research, like other cooperative endeavors, requires trust to flourish. The distinguished philosopher Annette Baier explains that trust is confident reliance.1 Both elements, confidence and reliance, are vital.
Physics Today November 2004- Trust and the Future of Research

It may be a piece of positive-negative mixed message. Maybe this kind of news of Iraq is what Mr. Allawi wants, like he told Jim Lehrer on PBS today.

Hope Amid the Rubble
By PETER BERGEN

Washington

Based on what Americans have been seeing in the news media about Afghanistan lately, there may not be many who believed President Bush on Tuesday when he told the United Nations that the "Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom." But then again, not many Americans know what Afghanistan was like before the American-led invasion. Let me offer some perspective.

This summer I visited Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, for the first time since the winter of 1999. Five years ago, the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies were at the height of their power. They had turned Afghanistan into a terrorist state, with more than a dozen training camps churning out thousands of jihadist graduates every year.

The scene was very different this time around. The Kandahar airport, where I had once seen Taliban soldiers showing off their antiaircraft missiles, is now a vast American base with thousands of soldiers, as well as a 24-hour coffee shop, a North Face clothing store, a day spa and a PX the size of a Wal-Mart. Next door, what was once a base for Osama bin Laden is now an American shooting range. In downtown Kandahar, the gaudy compound of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, now houses United States Special Forces units.

As I toured other parts of the country, the image that I was prepared for - that of a nation wracked by competing warlords and in danger of degenerating into a Colombia-style narcostate - never materialized. Undeniably, the drug trade is a serious concern (it now compromises about a third of the country's gross domestic product) and the slow pace of disarming the warlords is worrisome.

Over the last three years, however, most of the important militia leaders, like Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Uzbek community in the country's north, have shed their battle fatigues for the business attire of the politicians they hope to become. It's also promising that some three million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Kabul, the capital, is now one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with spectacular traffic jams and booming construction sites. And urban centers around the country are experiencing similar growth.

While two out of three Afghans cited security as their most pressing concern in a poll taken this summer by the International Republican Institute, four out of five respondents also said things are better than they were two years ago. Despite dire predictions from many Westerners, the presidential election, scheduled for Oct. 9, now looks promising. Ten million Afghans have registered to vote, far more than were anticipated, and almost half of those who have signed up are women. Indeed, one of the 18 candidates for president is a woman. Even in Kandahar, more then 60 percent of the population has registered to vote, while 45 percent have registered in Uruzgan Province, the birthplace of Mullah Omar. With these kinds of numbers registering, it seems possible that turnout will be higher than the one-third of eligible voters who have participated in recent American presidential elections.

According to a poll taken in July by the Asia Foundation, President Hamid Karzai is drawing substantial support around the country. He has emerged not only as a popular leader, but also as a shrewd player of the kind of hardball politics that would have warmed the heart of Lyndon Johnson. This summer he dropped his running mate, Mohammad Fahim, a power-hungry general who had pompously awarded himself the title of field marshal after the fall of the Taliban. And this month Mr. Karzai forced Ismail Khan, the governor of the western province of Herat, to resign. These moves not only neutralized two powerful rivals, men who could field their own private armies, but also increased the stability of the central government.

What we are seeing in Afghanistan is far from perfect, but it's better than so-so. Disputes that would once have been settled with the barrel of a gun are now increasingly being dealt with politically. The remnants of the Taliban are doing what they can to disrupt the coming election, but their attacks, aimed at election officials, American forces and international aid workers, are sporadic and strategically ineffective.

If the elections are a success, it will send a powerful signal to neighboring countries like Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, none of which can claim to be representative democracies. If so, the democratic domino effect, which was one of the Bush administration's arguments for the Iraq war, may be more realistic in Central Asia than it has proved to be in the Middle East.


Peter Bergen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

READ MORE

... the extension of democracy throughout the world carries the seeds (if by no means the certainty) of mass murder.
The Chronicle: 9/17/2004: Delving Into Democracy's Shadows

The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.
Guardian Unlimited | Life | To urgh is human: "The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight"

"I had a one-in-four-thousand chance of dying," Kravinsky says. "But my recipient had a certain death facing her. I'd be valuing my life at four thousand times hers if I let consideration of mortality sway me." The young woman who got Kravinsky's kidney, a twenty-nine-year-old African-American, tells Parker, "It was so surreal. You're going about your life, and then you get this phone call.... It was such an overwhelming thing, such an awesome thing, I wanted to meditate on it on my own." When Kravinsky went home, four days after his kidney was removed, Parker reports, "he was wondering if he should give away his other kidney"—and live on dialysis. [...] Through it all, Kravinsky has kept up his intense scrutiny of what makes a life worth living. "It isn't that I think people are evil" for not acting altruistically, he says. "But it's a fact that our actions, in some sense our thoughts, let some people live and some people die."

There is also a brief interview with Mr. Kravinsky at CNN:
CNN.com: Kravinsky Transcript

Here is another profile for the Associated Press:
SF Gate: Zell Kravinsky

It is a nice article, but still I am a little amused by the description of China. To what extent does he really understand China?
Collision Course? by Thomas A. Metzger

A nice essay, but I'd like to read some debates on this topic.
The Hudson Review | Bruce Bawer: "Hating America "

Comparing 9/11 probe with Peal Harbor:
The coincidence prompts two thoughts:

• First, that hindsight is always warped. No matter how conveniently the pieces may seem to fit together years after the fact, it's highly improbable that either incident could have been prevented, given the circumstances before they occurred. Scapegoating is a waste of time.

• Second, that the task ahead — deterring terrorism — is enormous, as are weaknesses in U.S. intelligence-gathering. There is no quick, bureaucratic fix.
USATODAY.com - As 9/11 report arrives, remember Pearl Harbor: "déjà vu "

That said, there are real and important similarities that can illuminate our evaluations of current American policy. In fact, Iraq in some ways seems like the Vietnam War in hyperspeed.
The Chronicle: 7/9/2004: The Ghosts of War

"This report documents a national crisis," Gioia said. "Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life. The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflects a general collapse in advanced literacy. To lose this human capacity - and all the diverse benefits it fosters - impoverishes both cultural and civic life."

NEA News Room: Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline, According to National Endowment for the Arts Survey

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Doing Our Homework: "When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me: 'Finish your dinner ? people in China are starving.' I, by contrast, find myself wanting to say to my daughters: 'Finish your homework ? people in China and India are starving for your job.'"

Jonathan Swift's dictum ... "you do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into."
Why Is Religion Natural? (Skeptical Inquirer Mar 2003)

washingtonpost.com: Bull Market for Media Bias

For the past few days, the dialogue in this town has sounded more like "Sex and the City" than "The McLaughlin Group." Suddenly the question of what constitutes a relationship has come to the fore. We're not talking J. Lo here, we're talking about the Bush administration and whether its definition of "relationship" fits with everyone else's.

What exactly qualifies as a relationship in the early 21st century? Is it chatter that doesn't lead to anything, or something more? Where are Carrie Bradshaw and her friends when you need them?

Iraq, Al Qaeda, and what constitutes a 'relationship' | csmonitor.com

The clash between "Two cultures" is demonstrated in a disscussion on the poem "Fire and Ice." Maybe it is the scientists that mis-read the poem, but it may well be possbile that the poets mis-read the scientists.

Tom Hansen says:

According to Dr. Shapley, he and Frost met at an annual faculty get-together during one of Frost's stints as poet-in-residence at Harvard. Frost sought Shapley out, tugged at his sleeve--figuratively, if not literally--and said something like, "Now, Professor Shapley. You know all about astronomy. Tell me, how is the world going to end?" [1] Taken aback by this unconventional approach, Shapley assumed Frost was joking. The two of them chatted for a few moments, but not about the end of the world. Then they each became involved in conversations with other people and were soon in different parts of the room. But a while later, Frost sought out Shapley again and asked him the same question. "So," said Shapley to his audience in 1960, "I told him that either the earth would be incinerated, or a permanent ice age would gradually annihilate all life on earth." Shapley went on to explain, as he had earlier explained to Frost, why life on earth would eventually be destroyed by fire or ice.

"Imagine my surprise," Shapley said, "when just a year or two later, I ran across this poem." He then read "Fire and Ice" aloud. He saw "Some say" as a reference to himself--specifically to his meeting with Frost at that gathering of Harvard faculty. "This personal anecdote," Shapley concluded, "illustrates one of the many ways in which scientific knowledge can influence the creation of a work of art and also elucidate the meaning of that work of art."

Frost also spent several years as poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan. A recent article by Sally Pobojewski in LSAmagazine, a publication of the university, shows that Shapley's misreading of "Fire and Ice" persists today, at least among some of the scientific members of the academic community. After quoting the poem's first two lines, the article begins, "For a poet, Robert Frost was a pretty good scientist, say astrophysicists Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin. Frost's fire-or-ice scenario neatly sums up two outcomes from their new study of possible future encounters between our solar system and passing stars" (28).

Like Shapley, Pobojewski fails to see that Frost's apparent directness and simplicity frequently mask, as Cleanth Brooks illustrates in Modern Poetry and the Tradition, his reliance on symbol (113, 114, 117). Though Brooks does not specifically mention "Fire and Ice," it is clearly a poem that must be interpreted symbolically. This is not a matter of preference. The poem unequivocally declares that it is not an astronomical speculation about a catastrophe millions of years in the future.

On "Fire and Ice"

Is modern wold ugly? Seth think so:

The modern world is very ugly… and the pop culture is so mind-numbingly dumb that you have to make a conscious effort to shut it out. That’s why I’m considered a “nostalgia guy.” I just like things from the past better. I don’t want to live in 1932, but I sure wish some of the elements of that time had survived into this time. Though obviously, their fascination with “progress” is the worm in the apple that created this shitty culture we inhabit. It’s a complicated question. And believe me, no one is more confused about his feelings about the past and the present than I am. I find, as each year passes, my understanding, and feelings about the 20th century are more muddled. The only thing I can say with real certainty is: The mass culture of our current age makes me feel like I need a shower.

Am I nostalgic? Can you feel nostalgic for an era you never lived in? I am interested in the time before I was born, but I feel the most nostalgia for the era of my own childhood. The 1960’s and early 70’s was the last vestige of that old world… elements of it were still hanging around everywhere. I didn’t think about it much as a child, but now I realize those old businesses and products and movies etc. that were lingering into the time of my childhood left a deep impression on me. All that stuff seems very sad to me. I’m not really a nostalgic type so much as a melancholic. I spend a lot of time alone, and most of it is spent in a fog of self-pitying melancholy. It sounds pathetic, but it is so true.


Bookslut | An Interview with Seth: "aesthetically "

Andrew J. Wiles of Princeton University revealed during a meeting at the University of Cambridge that he had solved Fermat's last theorem. This problem, one of the most famous in mathematics, was posed more than 350 years ago, and its roots extend back to Pythagoras himself. Since no oxen were available, Wiles's listeners showed their appreciation by clapping their hands.
But was the proof of Fermat's last theorem the last gasp of a dying culture? Mathematics, that most tradition-bound of intellectual enterprises, is undergoing profound changes. For millennia, mathematicians have measured progress in terms of what they can demonstrate through proofs-that is, a series of logical steps leading from a set of axioms to an irrefutable conclusion. Now the doubts riddling modern human thought have finally infected mathematics. Mathematicians may at last be forced to accept what many scientists and philosophers already have admitted: their assertions are, at best, only provisionally true, true until proved false.
This uncertainty stems, in part, from the growing complexity of mathematics. Proofs are often so long and complicated that they are difficult to evaluate. Wiles's demonstration runs to 200 pages-and experts estimate it could be five times longer if he spelled out all its elements. One observer asserted that only one tenth of 1 percent of the mathematics community was qualified to evaluate the proof.Wiles's claim was accepted largely on the basis of his reputation and the reputations of those whose work he built on. Mathematicians who had not yet examined the argument in detail nonetheless commented that it "looks beautiful" and "has the ring of truth."
Absolute Certainty?

To see how much the intellectual landscape has changed, consider the words of President Woodrow Wilson in 1922, asked what he thought about Darwinian evolution. “Of course like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.”

Compare that with Tony Blair’s reaction to news in 2002 that a state-funded school in north-east England was teaching creationism in biology lessons: “In the end, a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children.”


How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

Been there, done that..."The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things are far worse than we have been told... We are today not far short of a disaster". Lawrence of Arabia, 1920, on the British occupation of Iraq

The rebirth of New YorK Review of Books The Rebirth of the 'NYRB'">

WSJ readers say Fox News has "most accurate" Iraq reports
Wall Street Journal
Readers are asked: Which cable news network provides the most accurate depiction of the events in Iraq?
The results at last look, with 3,976 votes:
CNN 1115 votes (28%)
Fox News 2452 votes (62%)
MSNBC 409 votes (10%)

Wall Street Journal #3180.1

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise, it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

------kafka

and here is one of his essays.
Kafka: Paradise

But Americans and their allies must understand that Iraq is not a pragmatic society when it comes to religion, culture and sexual mores. It is never acceptable to touch a woman and then come back later to express regret or, worse, offer money. In their culture, Iraqis would accept money and a public apology for the killing of a family member. But in matters of honor — sexual assault, for example — an apology is accepted only when it comes with the head of the perpetrator. Those who are unable to pay such a price had better not commit the offense in the first place. This is why Bush's appearance on Arab TV last week was insulting and meaningless. He can never have enough money to cleanse the shame that his soldiers inflicted upon the Iraqi prisoners, and no words can do this either.

Los Angeles Times: Official U.S. Reaction Compounds the Rage

Bad news for learners :

Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene, appearing on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

Read More

Wisdom of Poety?
When Shelley writes “our calculations have outrun our conception; we have eaten more than we can digest,” it is hard to believe that he was writing early in the nineteenth century and not early in the twenty-first. For when he claims “man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave,” he seems to have captured perfectly the great threat of modern technology in our day. Shelley leaves us with a sobering sense of the dangers of a scientific wisdom completely severed from poetic wisdom. As his wife’s portrait of Victor Frankenstein suggests, such a liberated science may lead to a new kind of slavery, as human beings lose control of the products of their technological imagination, and perhaps end up serving the very forces that were meant to serve them.

full text

Discussion

Rudyard Kipling
If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

What is critical thinking?
Nobody said it better than Francis Bacon, back in 1605:

For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture.

Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe . . . and Carl Sagan

It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life's preciousness on our tiny planet.

Ann Druyan



To me, faith is antithetical to the values of science. Not hope, which is very different from faith. I have a lot of hope. Faith is saying that you can know the outcome of things based on what you hope is true. And science is saying in the absence of evidence, we must withhold judgment. It's so hard to do. It's so tempting to believe in the lie detector or in heaven or that you know who you are based on the day of the month that you were born. It's a sort of unearned self-esteem. It's an identity that you can slip right into, and it's tremendously reassuring. So, I don't have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful.

....
Copyright (c)2003 Ann Druyan

Read more !

I don't need time. What I need is a deadline.
--Duke Ellington

From New York Times
_________________________________________________________________________________________

January 16, 2004
Chinese Go Online in Search of Justice Against Elite Class
By JIM YARDLEY

ARBIN, China, Jan. 14 — On Oct. 16, the day she died, Liu Zhongxia was riding in her onion cart when it scraped a sedan. Usually her death would have gotten little attention. But in a country increasingly divided between rich and poor, a detail stood out: The sedan was a BMW.

Mrs. Liu was a peasant. The driver of the BMW, Su Xiuwen, is the wife of a businessman. The initial scrape was minor, but after a confrontation, Mrs. Su drove the car into Mrs. Liu.

The trial in December lasted less than two hours, with Mrs. Su receiving a suspended sentence. The death was ruled an accident.

And that would have ended it, except for two things. First, the "BMW case" tapped into sharp class resentments emerging in this Communist country, which long espoused a classless society. And second, that anger was able to coalesce in what is becoming an increasingly influential court of appeals in China: the Internet, which boiled with online outrage.

This week, in a rare step, officials here announced an investigation into possible judicial corruption in the case, state media reported. There is already speculation that Mrs. Su could face a harsher verdict, a result that would appease the online critics but could also set an uneasy precedent for reformers trying to establish a genuine rule of law in China.

"If the case involved a tractor, I'm sure it wouldn't have attracted any attention," said Qu Wenyong, dean of the sociology department at Heilongjiang University in Harbin. "But it involved a BMW, which symbolizes wealth and power. People immediately associated it with the gap between rich and poor."

That yawning gap is a fundamental contradiction of China's economic boom. Wealth is pouring in, swelling the middle class, yet hundreds of millions still live in poverty.

Here in the northeast, once the country's industrial center but now mired in unemployment, it is not hard to find class bitterness rubbed raw by the case. "We ordinary people have to obey the laws," said a taxi driver. Mrs. Su, he said, does not: "She has the power. She has the privilege. She can drive wildly."

Initially, the accident barely attracted attention outside Harbin.

That day, Mrs. Liu's husband, Dai Yiquan, accidentally bumped their onion cart into the side of the BMW, pushing the car about three feet. Mr. Dai, interviewed at his small village home outside Harbin, said Mrs. Su jumped out and began hitting him.

Then, after bystanders intervened, she returned to the car, apparently to back up. But she unexpectedly drove forward, crushing Mrs. Liu and injuring several others. The car crashed to a halt against a tree.

"My wife was dragged for six or seven meters," Mr. Dai said. He said he tried to lift her right arm but it was broken. He saw blood coming out of her mouth. "People said she was already dead," he recalled. "I was just dumbfounded."

The question at trial was whether Mrs. Su had intentionally tried to harm Mrs. Liu or had simply mistakenly put the car into first gear instead of reverse. The trial was notable for its lack of eyewitnesses, though many saw the incident.

Mrs. Su's husband admitted that he had paid more than $20,000 — a huge amount of money in rural China — to people who were injured, which may explain why none testified at the hearing.

One of them was Mr. Dai, who said he had received almost $10,000, roughly eight years' wages. He said he did not even attend the trial. "I just want peace for my family," a weary Mr. Dai said as one of his two daughters listened. "I don't care about the verdict and whether it is justice or not."

But China's "netcitizens" cared very much. Editors at Sina.com, the country's most popular Web site, said that after the verdict, more than 200,000 messages were posted to chat rooms, many suggesting corruption was to blame.

A spate of stories in the media fueled their anger. Before the verdict, newspapers in Harbin covered the case lightly; afterward, reporters from outside the province swept in. Some stories speculated that Mrs. Su was connected to a politically powerful family. Others quoted Mr. Dai accusing Mrs. Su of intentionally trying to harm his wife.

Guo Liang, a scholar with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who studies the role of the Internet in Chinese society, said the case was the latest example of the Net's growing influence. He said Internet protests of a beating death last year that involved police officers helped prompt a change in national detention laws. The Net also became a primary source of information during the initial SARS outbreak.

Mr. Guo noted that while most Internet users are China's urban elite, he recently finished a study showing that poorer, more rural residents are increasingly online, renting time at Internet cafes for as little as 12 cents an hour.

"This platform has really changed the situation in China, because everybody can write something," he said. "They just log on to Sina.com and read all kinds of newspapers. And the fascinating thing for them is, they get to leave their comments."

But there are definitely limits. The government methodically arrests Internet "dissidents" and tightly monitors postings about sensitive political subjects, like Tibet, Taiwan and Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement. Government censors can tolerate unexpected subjects like the BMW case for weeks — undoubtedly using them to gauge public opinion — only to shut them down abruptly.

Chinese newspaper reporters and online editors say censors did just that late Wednesday in the BMW case. Newspapers were told to stop reporting and links to the case were erased from Sina.com. No public explanation was given.

The role of the Internet is particularly complicated for those working to reform China's legal system. Some analysts applaud the light that online scrutiny can sometimes shine on the justice system, yet worry about its influence on legal rulings, particularly when fact and rumor can so easily get mixed.

Meng Fanxu, a lawyer in Harbin, cautioned that people who had not read the transcripts of the BMW case should not become the equivalent of judges, even the thousands of angry ones on the Internet.

"If used properly, the Internet can promote justice and the rule of law," Mr. Meng said. But if "carried too far, and in a blind manner, it may disturb judicial justice and mislead the public to mistrust the law."

Guan Mingbo, Mrs. Su's husband, says the Internet has victimized his family. He said online speculation that his late father was a prominent provincial politician was unfounded; he was a government clerk. Mr. Guan, who owns a development company, said he paid money to Mr. Dai and others as an apology, and to help cover medical and funeral costs.

"My family has become the victims of the Internet and the newspapers," Mr. Guan said in a telephone interview. "It has gotten me in turbulent waters." Asked about suggestions of his wealth and connections, Mr. Guan said: "I am a common person, too."

His wife, he said, was not a murderer, just a bad driver who did not know how to handle a car.

In fact, he told state media, he used connections at the local traffic authority to get her a license in 1997. Otherwise, he said, she would not have been able to pass the test.

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
--Georges Bernanos (1888 - 1948), "Why Freedom?" The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, 1955

All truth passes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed;
Second, it is violently opposed; and
Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

A hundred years or so ago, C. S. Peirce, a working scientist as well as the greatest of American philosophers, distinguished genuine inquiry from "sham reasoning," pseudo-inquiry aimed not at finding the truth but at making a case for some conclusion immovably believed in advance; and predicted that, when sham reasoning becomes commonplace, people will come "to look on reasoning as merely decorative," and will "lose their conceptions of truth and of reason."

This is the very debacle taking place before our eyes: genuine inquiry is so complex and difficult, and advocacy "research" and politically-motivated "scholarship" have become so commonplace, that our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, inquiry has been loosened. I want to talk about how this disaster came about, and the role played by the phenomenon Barzun calls "preposterism" in encouraging it.

Susan Haack Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism
, Skeptical Inquirer magazine : November/December 1997

Must science come to an end? Not necessarily. But unless scientists become more philosophically sophisticated, their apologetics will continue to ring hollow. And unless our educational system focuses more on teaching students how to think than on what to think, our populace will become increasingly credulous. Scientists and educators alike need to realize that the educated person is not the person who can answer the questions, but the person who can question the answers. In our age of rapidly changing information, knowing how to distinguish truth from falsity is more important than knowing what was once considered true and false. Only a person who knows the difference between a justified and an unjustified belief can truly appreciate the value of scientific inquiry.

Susan Haack, The End of Science?, Skeptical Inquirer magazine : November/December 1997