* Gary Younge in Chicago
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 6 2008 00.01 GMT
There are times when the usually glacial pace of social progress accelerates to such a degree that you feel you are experiencing it in real time. Stand in the present and history comes rushing towards you, making you feel lightheaded.
The second that Ohio fell to Barack Obama on Tuesday evening, effectively handing him the keys to the White House, was one of those dizzying moments. A man born three years before African-Americans had secured their right to vote had risen by popular acclaim to the highest office in the land before he reached 50.
A political journey that should take generations felt as though it had occurred in a moment.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
前首相 John Prescott 一直以自己是 working class 出身而自豪，同样一直认为英国的 class system 依然顽固地存在着。他为BBC拍摄的2小时长的纪录片 The Class System And Me 就是他到处找人辩论 class system。其中一段他和17岁的少女 Josie Hall 和她的朋友对话。Josie Hall 住在council house，中学因打老师被开除，没有工作，但是能说会道，颇有思想。他们谈到 class system:
John Prescott: What class are you then?
Josie Hall: I’m middle class.
John Prescott: You are middle class?
Josie Hall: Yeah. I ain’t got lots of money. I’m not poor.
John Prescott: As far as I see, I will say you are working class, but you say you are middle class.
Marc Abrahams 是双月刊《不可思议的研究》(Annals of Improbable Research)主编和 “搞笑诺贝尔奖”Ig Nobel Prize组织者。他为《卫报》写的专栏就叫”不可思议的研究”(Improbable Research)。今天的专栏介绍了三位英国巴斯大学的研究者对啄木鸟身体结构的研究。
How Woody the living hammer hit the spot
Improbable research into how to make a better, lighter hammer involved two mechanical engineering students carrying out a post-mortem on a dead woodpecker
* Marc Abrahams
* The Guardian,
* Tuesday November 4 2008
While others tried to build a better computer or teapot or mousetrap, Julian FV Vincent, Mehmet Necip Sahinkaya and W O’Shea of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Bath tried to build a better hammer. Unlike most previous hammer smiths, they studied woodpeckers. Why? Because to mechanical engineers, when they are in a certain frame of mind, a woodpecker is nature’s finest version of a hammer.
今天《卫报》邀请了几位美国作家以”大选之后的早晨”为主题写一篇短篇小说。这里是最短的一篇，也是想像最狂野的一篇，作者是 Harry Shearer, 小说 Not Enough Indians 的作者，还是电视剧Simpsons 中 Mr Burns 等角色的配音。有兴趣的可以阅读和翻译所有五篇小说。
Harry Shearer
November 5, 2008, was the best of times and the worst of times for Senator John McCain. Eking out a surprise electoral-college victory in the presidential election he was favoured to lose, McCain was taking a victory lap around his Sedona, Arizona, compound when, complaining of chest pains, he texted his wife Cindy. What turned out to be his final message was: “Sell Budweiser stock.”
I’m hard-pressed to think of a single thing the Bush administration has done to promote the arts. Things have gone on as before: novelists are writing books, people read them or don’t read them, movies are being made and people go or don’t go, artists are painting pictures, people are making music. I don’t see that the Bush people have affected the cultural landscape that much.
In 1950, when the mathematician Alan Turing set out to tackle the question “Can machines think?” the intellectual litmus paper he settled on was conversation. The Turing test – in which an AI program attempts to fool judges into believing they are conversing with a human – has never been passed, though two weeks ago, a program named Elbot came close.
Wendy Roby 介绍了一种新现象：针对女性的恐怖电影、网站和艺术节。
It’s a scream!
As Halloween draws near, Wendy Roby explores a new wave of films, websites and festivals feeding women’s growing hunger for horror
Wendy Roby
The Guardian,
Wednesday October 29 2008
For horror film fanatic Leah Holmes, a tolerance of fear began at an early age. Her anaesthetist father “had half a human skeleton which he used to get out to entertain me and my brother,” she says, “so I was very blasé about scary things. Years later, he was trying to put me off becoming a pathologist, and gave me a book with graphic photos of dead bodies in it. I think he was trying to frighten me, but I just flicked through and thought, ‘Oooh, interesting.'”
Marc Abrahams 是双月刊《不可思议的研究》(Annals of Improbable Research)主编和 “搞笑诺贝尔奖”Ig Nobel Prize组织者。他为《卫报》写的专栏就叫”不可思议的研究”(Improbable Research)。今天的专栏介绍了两位巴西研究者如何研究不同坐姿对椅子产生的压力变化。
Contrary to what you might think, sitting is not a static activity, unless you are dead. In the study Chair Load Analysis During Daily Sitting Activities, Carla Paoliello and Edgar Vladimiro Mantilla Carrasco adopt the perspective of a chair. They quantify the shifting risks your furniture faces when someone sits on it.
