Saturday Morning News, Views, And Links -- Part I

What a great day to get caught up on some reading. If you came here looking for notes about the Bakken, you should scroll down, or check out updates at the sidebar at the right. It might be a while before I get to the Bakken.

 I do plan to do "Top Stories" for the week which is only about the Bakken but that will be later.

WSJ Links

After all the Tesla stories, it is nice to see a story on the Corvette, which according to the writer, the next generation is a superstar. If I were a Bakken millionaire, this might be one of my five cars, which I would probably leave garaged in Phoenix. Next to a Harley. The first two paragraphs of the article:

The newly redesigned, seventh-generation Chevrolet Corvette (C7), aka Stingray, heir to Corvette's 60-year heritage and the bannered spear of a resurgent General Motors, is an excellent car. Fast, authentic, tough as a rodeo steak. If you were planning to boycott GM for life, your road just got a little narrower.

Set aside the C7's wrathful-dragonfly styling—which only the deranged won't like—or its dead-slinky leather-wrapped cabin with glass-panel avionics and configurable graphics, or the vastly improved driver's seat. Look down the barrel of this thing: 460 horsepower and 465 pound-feet of torque out of a 6.2-liter, naturally aspirated direct-injection, midfront-mounted aluminum pushrod V8; the weird-but-wonderful seven-speed Tremec manual gearbox with active rev-matching; and a rear transaxle with limited-slip differential and electronic torque vectoring (with the Z51 package). All that is bolted to a new, all-aluminum, glued-and-machine-welded monocoque, replacing the C6's steel chassis, and is 100 pounds lighter and more than 50% stiffer.

 I will read this article (print edition) later. It looks fascinating: President O'Bama's failed grand strategy in the Middle East.

In the beginning, the Hebrew Bible tells us, the universe was all "tohu wabohu," chaos and tumult. This month the Middle East seems to be reverting to that primeval state: Iraq continues to unravel, the Syrian War grinds on with violence spreading to Lebanon and allegations of chemical attacks this week, and Egypt stands on the brink of civil war with the generals crushing the Muslim Brotherhood and street mobs torching churches.

Turkey's prime minister, once widely hailed as President Obama's best friend in the region, blames Egypt's violence on the Jews; pretty much everyone else blames it on the U.S.

The Obama administration had a grand strategy in the Middle East. It was well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued.

Unfortunately, it failed. 

The book that helped me understand best the Mideast was Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong. Highly recommend. It will be interesting to read today's WSJ article in light of that book.

Wow, the Journal is just full of great articles today. Now, this: Edward Frenkel and a love for math.

The words love and math aren't usually uttered in the same breath. But mathematician Edward Frenkel is on a mission to change that, uniting the terms in both his recent film, "The Rites of Love and Math," and upcoming book, "Love and Math." Both are attempts to bridge the gap between his passion for math and the popular appetite for it.

"You say the word 'math' and people shut down," says Mr. Frenkel, sitting outdoors in New York's Bryant Park. In his book, to be published in October, the tenured professor at the University of California at Berkeley argues that the boring way that math is traditionally taught in schools has led to a widespread ignorance that may have even been responsible for the recession.

"It's like teaching an art class where they only tell you how to paint a fence but they never show you Picasso," he says of elementary school math classes. "People say, 'I'm bad at math,' but what they're really saying is 'I was bad at painting the fence.' " Love is a different story, though. "People might think they hate math but everyone loves love," he says. "I want to put more love into math."

And Mr. Frenkel, a youthful, puckish 45-year-old with a slight Russian accent and a flair for fitted shirts and tailored jeans, hopes to be math's next leading man. With YouTube videos of his lectures at UC Berkeley viewed by hundreds of thousands of people—"and that's even the most boring stuff," he adds—Mr. Frenkel does indeed talk about math adoringly. "It is this great connector," he says. "Nobody can take it away from us." What he means is that while the philosopher Pythagoras lived over 2,000 years ago, his theorem still exists today; it holds true across cultures, time and space. "How many things have the same endurance?" he asks. Mathematical formulas "have a quality of inevitability." 

I'll read the print edition later. I never get tired of reading anything about math, and it's been awhile since a "new" math book along this line has been published (at least of which I am aware).

How interesting: a short essay on maps. It certainly seems I've seen this essay or something very similar some time ago. Maybe it's just because there are so many books on maps and so many atlases out there. One bit of trivia:

The earliest efforts to ascribe boundaries to space and time were directed up instead of down. The ancients began with the lights in the night sky. The oldest star chart in existence depicts the Orion constellation, carved onto the tusk of a woolly mammoth during the Stone Age.