The Week - News Briefs

National Review, Dec 3, 2001

-- A 53-year-old man rushed into a suburban high school on November 8, ordered a 13-year-old girl to lie face down on a table, then administered ten strokes to her with a cane. Oh, no: another school atrocity? Not exactly. The perpetrator in the case was Ghankay Charles MacArthur Dapkana Taylor, president of the West African nation of Liberia, and the victim of the thrashing was his daughter Edena, one of the younger of his 30 known children. It had come to the president's attention that Edena, along with a teenage boy, had been disciplined by her school in the Liberian capital for "displaying improper behavior" on campus. President Taylor's press secretary spun that the flogging was "symbolic" and stressed that it should be seen in "the context of African culture." Young Edena is left nursing her "symbolic" stripes, while we are left reflecting, not for the first time, that perhaps there might be something to be said for this multiculturalism business after all.

n Suppose you decide to embark on some research in higher mathematics. You will probably buy one of those software packages that allow you to do advanced symbolic manipulation on your computer-perhaps Wolfram Research, Inc.,'s Mathematica. Then you will need a textbook from which to learn the package: as it might be, the Cambridge University Press's Beginner's Guide to Mathematica Version 4. While slogging through chapter 24 of that book you are shown an example in which taking the wrong approach to a certain computation produces a number that is very wrong indeed, by a factor so large it would need over 800 digits to write it out. Note the authors: "If we didn't have the exact answer available for comparison, we might never know that our answer is off by 807 orders of magnitude. We might continue in blissful ignorance of how wrong we really are (say, as a Republican politician might). (See chapter 25 for an explanation of why one might actually want to have such a seemingly dangerous mode of computation available. We have no chapter on why one might want to have a Republican politician available.)" Well, perhaps one reason for having a Republican politician available is to explain to the editors of Cambridge University Press why sophomoric remarks about politics of any kind are out of place in a math textbook.

-- Ken Kesey, author, provocateur, died, age 66. There was an individualist impulse there-in the guying of Nurse Ratched, of course, but also in his portrayal of the villainous labor leader in Sometimes a Great Notion. There was something all-American too-not, as Tom Wolfe pointed out, of the American frontier or farm, which was the slot patronizing hipsters tried to put him in, but of empowered post-war teenagers. There was also too much: too many words, too many drugs, too much self-indulgence. Does Walt Whitman's good writing counterbalance all the American overwriting-by Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Wolfe, and Whitman himself-that his example has blessed? A delicate question.