View the best links of January 2007.
February
From Counterpunch’s The Collapse of the American Empire: “All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really complex.”
From the British Computer Society’s The Death of Computing: “Neil McBride says computer science was populated by mathematicians and physicists but now virtual robots can be created by eight-year olds without needing programming, logic or discrete mathematics skills. Does that mean we have a dying discipline?”
From Slate.com’s Borges’ Bad Politics: “If we now think of Latin American literature as central to the Spanish world, and of the Spanish world as a vitally renewed force in the world entire, it has a lot to do with Borges. As a 20th-century master artist, he was celebrated even by 19th-century standards, famous on the scale of Tennyson, Kipling, and Mark Twain…[But w]hen I encountered this idea of Borges’—that the whole world is, or should be, our country—I was wondering already if the idea, so attractive on the face of it to a displaced person like myself, was really quite right.”
From Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence: “[M]ost artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.”
From The Most Talked About Subject, an article listing fun facts about sex; for example: “A female orgasm is a powerful painkiller (because of the release of endorphins), so headaches are in fact a bad excuse not to have sex,” and “The maximum speed at which erotic sensations travel from skin to brain has been clocked at 156 miles per hour.”
