First Friday

TW starts it off, with a great article on Eric Schadt and Adventures in Extreme Science. "But if you're looking for a scientist whose great popularity rests in tirelessly writing papers and delivering speeches whose implicit and sometimes explicit message to the most eminent minds in his field is that they're wrong, that they've failed, and that the best way for them to stop wasting their lives is to follow him in a scientific revolution that he admits might not even work: Well, then you'd probably have to narrow your search a little bit. It takes a pretty smart guy to tell the smartest people in the world that all their success, all their hard-won knowledge has led them to a dead end ... that the approach they've taken has been a little, um, simplistic. It takes Eric Schadt to say that — and then to make the damned sale."

Scott brings a story on North Korean Special Forces - Get Down! "Mr. Im said, "You would wrap a tree trunk with ropes, and keep punching it. You throw 5000 punches day and night -- do that for a month, the inside of your fist swells up until you can barely curl your fingers." He added, "Then you open a tin can and set it up on a stand. You keep punching the sharp part. When your hand turns into mush with blood and pus, you start punching a pile of salt. Repeat it, and your hands become like a stone." Mr. Im explained, "You punch the salt so that the salt would prevent the hand from rotting away with the blood." According to Mr. Im, with the hand trained like this "you can easily break 20 sheets of cement blocks, and you can kill a person with three punches." His hands would naturally make a fist throughout the interview. This reporter had to respectfully ask that he unclench his fist during the interview."

Alex adds two stories on Frederick Seidel. First off is Laureate of Louche (NYT): One night after Christmas last year, in a dark, well-upholstered restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the American poet Frederick Seidel, an elegant man of 73 with an uncommonly courtly manner, told me a story about poetry’s power to disturb. “It was years ago,” Seidel explained in his measured voice, “in the days when I had an answering machine. I’d left my apartment, briefly, to go outside to get something, and when I came back there was a message. When I played it, there was a woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice sounding deeply aroused, saying: ‘Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going to live. But you’re not. You’re not going to live. You’re not going to live. . . .’ All this extraordinary, suggestive heavy breathing, getting, in the tone of it, more and more intensely sexual, more gruesome, and then this sort of explosion of sound from this woman, and: ‘You’re . . . not . . . going . . . to . . . live.’"

The second from The New York Review of Books: "But Seidel has made the brutal postmodern calculation that cynicism is the only defensible moral position. Any other relation to suffering sentimentalizes the pain. Seidel’s is an aesthetics that avoids aestheticizing human grief, sometimes in favor of aestheticizing human meanness."

Lawless submits a story on Warren Christopher: This was one of several paradoxes about him. He was a dour North Dakotan, but considered himself a Californian; he jogged, and had a beach house in Santa Barbara, but was also given a Theodore Roosevelt Rough Rider award by North Dakota’s governor. Few men looked less like
a Rough Rider than Mr Christopher as he clasped his prize, his handkerchief neatly in his top pocket. Few men so symbolised an era of cautious negotiation, rather than bold intervention. But perhaps few, with such a taste for plodding, got further.

Then there is a story on Transocean's safety bonuses paid to executives. Actually happened: "Transocean Ltd. had its "best year in safety performance" despite the explosion of its Deepwater Horizon rig that left 11 dead and oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the world's largest offshore-rig company said in a securities filing Friday. Accordingly, Transocean's executives received two-thirds of their target safety bonus. Safety accounts for 25% of the equation that determines the yearly cash bonuses, along with financial factors including new rig contracts."


Week one is in the books!