For women feminist literary critic, the subjectivity versus objectivity, or critic-as-artist-or-scientist, debate has special political significance, and her definition will court special risks whichever side of the issue it favors. If she defines feminist criticism as objective and scientific, the definition precludes the critic-as-artist approach and may impede accomplishment of the utilitarian political objectives of those who seek to change the academic establishment. If she defines feminist criticism as creative and intuitive, privileged as art, then her work becomes vulnerable to the prejudices of stereotypic ideas about the ways in which women think, and will be dismissed by much of the academic establishment. 老莊雜記 發表在 痞客邦 留言(0) 人氣(393)
What causes a helix in nature to appear with either a dextral (right-handed, or clockwise) twist or a sinistral (left-handed, or counterclockwise) twist is one of the most intriguing puzzles in the science of form. Most spiral-shaped snail species are predominantly dextral. But at one time, handedness (twist direction of the shell) was equally distributed within some snail species that have become predominantly dextral or, in a few species, predominantly sinistral. What mechanisms control handedness and keep left-handedness rare? 老莊雜記 發表在 痞客邦 留言(0) 人氣(946)
The Earth's magnetic field is generated as the molten iron of the Earth's outer core revolves around its solid inner core; when surges in the molten iron occur, magnetic tempests are created. At the Earth's surface, these tempests can be detected by changes in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field. For reasons not fully understood, the field itself reverses periodically every million years or so. Clearly, geophysicists who seek to explain and forecast changes in the field must understand what happens in the outer core. Unlike meteorologists, however, they cannot rely on observations made in their own lifetimes. Whereas atmospheric storms arise in a matter of hours and last for days, magnetic tempests develop over decades and persist for centuries. 老莊雜記 發表在 痞客邦 留言(1) 人氣(384)
It has long been known that during an El Nino, two conditions exist: (1) unusually warm water extends along the eastern Pacific, principally along the coasts of Ecuador and Peru, and (2) winds blow from the west into the warmer air rising over the warm water in the east. These winds tend to create a feedback mechanism by driving the warmer surface water into a "pile" that blocks the normal upwelling of deeper, cold water in the east and further warms the eastern water, thus strengthening the wind still more. The contribution of the recent model is to show that the winds of an El Nino, which raise sea level in the east, simultaneously send a signal to the west lowering sea level. According to the model, that signal is generated as a negative Rossby wave, a wave of depressed, or negative, sea level, that moves westward parallel to the equator at 25 to 85 kilometers per day. 老莊雜記 發表在 痞客邦 留言(0) 人氣(295)
It is frequently assumed that the mechanization of work has a revolutionary effect on the lives of the people who operate the new machines and on the society into which the machines have been introduced. For example, it has been suggested that the employment of women in industry took them out of the household, their traditional sphere, and fundamentally altered their position in society. In the nineteenth century, when women began to enter factories, Jules Simon, a French politician, warned that by doing so, women would give up their femininity. Friedrich Engels, however, predicted that women would be liberated from the social, legal, and economic subordination of the family by technological developments that made possible the recruitment of "the whole female sex into public industry." Observers thus differed concerning the social desirability of mechanization's effects, but they agreed that it would transform women's lives. 老莊雜記 發表在 痞客邦 留言(0) 人氣(510)