One of the joys of being a photographer is the opportunity to spend your life intersecting with a steady stream of very interesting people. One such recent encounter was with author Manil Suri (The Death of Vishnu), who I photographed for a literary magazine. I never seem to have enough time these d...

 "WALL-E" VOTED "BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR" BY THE LOS ANGELES FILM CRITICS   Awards Edition :   "Wall-E" has also been nominated as "Best Picture" in the Critics' Choice Awards to be broadcast live on VH-1 on Thursday, January 8. Previously, it fought this Movie Smackdown against "Toy Story" ... ...

The article below, by Joe Nocera of the NYT, appears in today's Magazine section.  Nocera explains the role, and type, of financial models that contributed to the near demise of our heretofore much vaunted economy over the past three decades or so.  A highly inflated economy, based o...

Sunday, on review, was a pretty productive day. It wasn't super intense, yet it was not slack. I got a bunch of things started, even finished a few. I didn't stress out over the projects yet to come or the tasks that I left unfinished for another day. This morning, I feel the anticipation of a new d...

Charles Siegel of Rigorous Trivialities ran a great series on big theorems. The series started january 10th 2008 with a post on Bezout’s theorem, followed by posts on Chow’s lemma, Serre duality, Riemann-Roch, Bertini, Nakayama’s lemma, Groebner bases, Hurwitz to end just before ch...

Intelligent Design: Unlocking the Mysteries of Life.  I am going to change subjects in our quest of knowledge.  Socrates, the gadfly of Athens , said his wisdom came from knowing that he did not know all the answers.  I find it interesting that so many scientist and academia behave as...

Well, it's not often these days that I get to feel proud of myself. But I recently got a nice little break from the self-loathing routine for a little while when I did something I've never done before: I derived a beautiful, elegant, concise mathematical formula from scratch, for a calculation I'd n...

I was recently asked the question, "What is beauty?" The best answer I have seen is the one given by Mortimer J. Adler in "Six Great Ideas" (1981), in the name of Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. Here is an excerpt from that answer: "The beautiful," Aquinas writes, "is that which pleases us upon be...

“For the time has arisen in the earth when men - everywhere - seek to know more of the mysteries of the mind, the soul, the soul’s mind.”Edgar Cayce Zwischenwelt was the second collaborative MySpace based project which Gerald Donald, under the name Heinrich Mueller, became associated with. The...

1.  “ Israel’s Gaza Defense ,” Wall Street Journal Editorial: Hamas refused to extend the truce past December 19, and the group has since resumed attacks, firing nearly 300 missiles, rockets and mortars.  The 250,000 Israelis in the southern part of the country live under constant th...