Science and Politics
An invitation for a private tour of the new Damascus Securities Exchange (DSE) is heady, exhilarating and a bit surreal. How people outside Syria even know about the audacious start-up?
I’m envisioning a “power triangle” between America, Iran, and Turkey suggesting that peace in the Middle East could be possible as these countries have the means to achieve this.
You see, after I described some of my political views, mentioning the strange question of the status of the Federal Reserve as a private corporation...I was told that my views pretty much matched those of members of the Tea Party. Now I knew I was against the neocons, but I had no idea that according to a helpful anarchist, that made me a fledgling member of the Tea Party.
“I remember in prison,” she said. “The jailers came every day to inspect my cell looking for a piece of paper. They said it was more dangerous than a gun. But I was happy in prison because really we are all prisoners of the system.”
“1001 Inventions has helped me think about the ways in which scientific ideas travel,"explains Dr. Margaret Honey, CEO of the New York Hall of Science. "While science is always set in a specific historical and socio-political context, the simple truth is that ideas in and of themselves, know no boundaries.”
Memes—the notion of self-replicating bits of culture—are a seductive, slippery concept, vigorously debated in some corners of academia. And while I am serious in saying that they are easily deployed not just in marketing and church, but in counterintelligence and propaganda, they can also be merely banal or annoying. For example, snippets of song you may not even like but can't get out of your head...said I'd like to know, where you got the notion...Our love is like a ship on the ocean...rock the boat, don't rock the boat, baby...”—The Hues Corporation
Love is not a word usually associated with stock markets but the conception, birth and growth of the Damascus Securities Exchange (DSE) has been nothing short of a labor of love for Dr. Mohammed Imady, former Minister of the Economy and now Chairman of the Syrian Commission on Financial Markets and Securities.
Pediatrician Jerry Ehrlich said he “stuffed the children’s drawings into the pages of the New York Times,” to get them out of Africa without detection. The humanitarian group for which he had volunteered his services, Doctors without Borders, would have confiscated the drawings had they found them.
The Russians had recently gotten the atom bomb, and we were all scared of the Commies. The nuns at my parochial school passed out comic books that showed priests hanging from lamp posts to let us know what would happen if the Commies took over. We were also taught to defend ourselves from atomic bombs by jumping under our desks and covering our heads when the Nun said “Drop!”
The miracle is that mathematics is the language that nature talks. Freeman Dyson Mathematician from the film Quark Park
"Where will the next generation of scientists come from?" lamented Hai-Lung Dai, Dean of the College of Science and Technology at Temple University during a recent graduation ceremony.
When she was a teenager, her family moved back to Calcutta, where her father worked as a professor of history. Partly through her father’s influence, Gupta developed a deep appreciation for literature and poetry, particularly the Bengali poet Tagore. But mathematics and science struck her just as forcefully.
As we roam our planet in search of purpose and destination, we experience forces that influence our thoughts and actions. Most are temporary. However there is a force we experience every moment of our lives from conception to our final breath. It affects everything we do, think and feel, and virtually all of us have never known or experienced anything outside of it – Gravity.
Scientist and entrepreneur Greg Olsen isn't your average billionaire.
Convicted of juvenile delinquency for stealing hubcaps, Olsen failed trigonometry in high school. But, in 1957, he also watched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, orbit the Earth and the experience left its mark.
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