“Futility of futilities! All is futile!” I heard someone mutter recently while glancing up with darkened brow from the pages of Kohelet, the Biblical book also known as Ecclesiastes. The utterance was understandable, since most commentators, if they agree on anything at all about Kohelet, seem in accordance that it is a most vexing and…
Tag: science
Film: A Treasure in Auschwitz
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The Polish town of Auschwitz is known primarily as the site of horrific Nazi death camps, and its previous history as a town with a once-thriving Jewish community comes as a surprise. Stirred by an old storekeeper’s eyewitness account and his precisely-drawn map, Israeli Yariv Nornberg mounts an archeological expedition in search of some Torah…
Paradise now: a wetland called Cootes
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Cootes Paradise, a wetland and woodland covering 840 hectares on the western perimeter of Lake Ontario, is the focus of what may be the largest freshwater restoration project ever attempted, according to research scientists at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington. These days, the Cootes Paradise wetland is little more than a shallow muddy lake.…
Obit: Roger Boisvert, internet pioneer in Japan
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From The Toronto Globe and Mail, 2001 If it is true that part of Roger Boisvert’s phenomenal success as an internet pioneer in Japan may be attributed to his being in the right place at the right time, that luck failed him miserably on September 30, 2001. After taking a wrong turnoff on a Los…
Of bats, owls and the Center for Millennial Studies
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Owing to a paucity of documentation, historians will probably never resolve their centuries-old debate over how long or how deeply the masses of European were gripped by a millennial fever at the close of the first Christian millennium around the year 1000. Was there widespread hysteria and terror, as many historians of the “romantic school”…
Winchester on the Frisco quake of ’06
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Simon Winchester has just produced (1995) another non-fiction gem: A Crack in the Edge of The World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (HarperCollins). The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa opens this recent non-fiction book with a view of the earth from the moon, and a description of…
Hubble: Universe In A Mirror
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Regarded by many as one of America’s greatest scientific accomplishments, the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope has added immensely to our cosmological knowledge and has changed our conception of the universe. The Universe in A Mirror, a new book by American science writer Robert Zimmerman, offers a history of the epoch-making telescope as well as fascinating…
Beider on Russian-Jewish Surnames
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Alexander Beider, who is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Jewish names, has revised and updated his 1993 Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire, a four-year task that he undertook knowing it would probably not generate adequate renumeration for him. If that proves to be the case, he may yet take comfort in…
