Unfortunately terrorist attacks have become a routine in Pakistan, but today is especially a heartbreaking and sad day in Pakistan. Killing of innocent children is an evil act and we condemn such acts of terrorism in all forms. Our heartfelt sympathies to the families of the victims and citizens of Pakistan, who have to endure such terrorist acts on daily basis. Below is a worth reading article by Rafia Zakaria in Dawn (Editors)

Pakistan’s Schools of Sorrows

They began the day in their school uniforms, they ended it in burial shrouds.

On the morning of December 16, 2014, it was exam time at the Army Public School in Peshawar and most of the students were inside the examination hall where they would take their tests.

The night before, there must have been much cramming, much last minute memorisation, much anxiety about how they would fare.

Their minds would have been focused on doing the best they could, scoring the highest marks. They did not expect to die.

Also read: ‘I saw death so close’: student recalls Peshawar school carnage

The assailants who came to kill them scaled a wall adjoining a graveyard. Once inside, they fired in the schoolyard dispersing the students that remained there.

Then, they came to the examination hall.

To save themselves, the students hit the ground, their young bodies aligning with the earth to evade the bullets that sought their bodies. But the killers had come to kill; according to eyewitnesses, there was no hurried or haphazard showering of bullets.

The killers killed one by one, pointing their guns at one child and then another, watching their bodies flinch and fail. Later, when the corpses would be counted, they would number over a hundred.

Also read: Militant siege of Peshawar school over, at least 141 killed

In the aftermath, the children are gone, silenced and buried. The country is in mourning, stunned again, shaken again, angered again at the barbarity that lives within and spawns such death.

Outrage is an easy emotion in Pakistan and after a decade of terrorist attacks almost a habit; when the tears dry up as tears do, little changes.

Were we not locked into this cycle of act, outrage and forgetfulness, the imminence of an attack such as this one would have long been acknowledged, its probability seen as high, its likelihood necessitating preparation and security.

There were numbers that told of the possibility; a report issued by the Global Coalition for the Protection of Education earlier this year noted that in the years between 2009 and 2012 there were 800 attacks on schools in Pakistan.

Not one or two, but 800 warnings of the carnage to come, boxed away, set aside, pushed away to the back pages of newspapers, the recesses of consciousness.

In pictures: Tears, loss and despair for our children

In the years after the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japanese created a memorial to the victims. Painstakingly, they collected the bits and pieces of the belongings left behind by the dead so they would be a reminder to the living of the near limitless depths of human depravity.

The most touching, the most poignant and the most heartbreaking of the collection are the belongings of the many dead children; schoolbooks with work half done, lunchboxes with food half eaten, last uniforms worn in final moments.

Those children are dead too, but at least they are remembered and memorialised; theirs is an immortal innocence that speaks decades later and chastises humanity for its criminal apathy.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1151230/pakistans-schools-of-sorrow

FIFTY years ago this month, the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell submitted a short, quirky article to a fly-by-night journal titled Physics, Physique, Fizika. He had been too shy to ask his American hosts, whom he was visiting during a sabbatical, to cover the steep page charges at a mainstream journal, the Physical Review. Though the journal he selected folded a few years later, his paper became a blockbuster. Today it is among the most frequently cited physics articles of all time.

Bell’s paper made important claims about quantum entanglement, one of those captivating features of quantum theory that depart strongly from our common sense. Entanglement concerns the behavior of tiny particles, such as electrons, that have interacted in the past and then moved apart. Tickle one particle here, by measuring one of its properties — its position, momentum or “spin” — and its partner should dance, instantaneously, no matter how far away the second particle has traveled.

The key word is “instantaneously.” The entangled particles could be separated across the galaxy, and somehow, according to quantum theory, measurements on one particle should affect the behavior of the far-off twin faster than light could have traveled between them.

Entanglement insults our intuitions about how the world could possibly work. Albert Einstein sneered that if the equations of quantum theory predicted such nonsense, so much the worse for quantum theory. “Spooky actions at a distance,” he huffed to a colleague in 1948.

In his article, Bell demonstrated that quantum theory requires entanglement; the strange connectedness is an inescapable feature of the equations. But Bell’s proof didn’t show that nature behaved that way, only that physicists’ equations did. The question remained: Does quantum entanglement occur in the world?

Starting in the early 1970s, a few intrepid physicists — in the face of critics who felt such “philosophical” research was fit only for crackpots — found that the answer appeared to be yes.

John F. Clauser, then a young postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was the first. Using duct tape and spare parts, he fashioned a contraption to measure quantum entanglement. Together with a graduate student named Stuart Freedman, he fired thousands of pairs of little particles of light known as photons in opposite directions, from the middle of the device, toward each of its two ends. At each end was a detector that measured a property of the photon known as polarization.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/opinion/sunday/is-quantum-entanglement-real.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

Posted By F. Sheikh

With more emphasis on scientific evidence in daily life as well as in academia, the discussion is raging whether the Humanities is a dying breed and it has submitted to Science. Are just reasonable arguments enough or arguments has to be supported by science? Following is excerpt from description of the book, Minding The Modern by Thomas Pfau   ( F. Sheikh) 

In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that humanistic concepts these writers seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time, unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice.

A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today’s predicaments. 

Following are some excerpts from the Editorial in “ Point” on the subject of The New Humanities

“Sadly, the respect of present-day humanities scholars for “the way things have always been done” ranks just barely above their respect for the presidency of George W. Bush. There might have been a time when the humanities offered a counterweight within the university to the sciences’ relentless optimism and obsession with “progress,” but since at least the 1970s—perhaps not incidentally when the enrollment numbers began to decline—only the heretics have stood up for anything resembling tradition. Today’s humanities professors speak of nothing but “new research opportunities,” nothing but “progress,” nothing but the gross injustice of the “way things have always been done.”

Wieseltier and Pinker’s debate is thus academic in the pejorative sense. Wieseltier accuses Pinker of wanting the humanities to submit to the sciences; Pinker maintains that he simply wants the humanities to admit the relevance of scientific methods. Yet with a couple of exceptions (the Core at Columbia and the University of Chicago, the St. John’s colleges, that place out in the California desert where they herd cattle while debating Plato) the scholarly humanities have admitted much more than the relevance of the sciences: they have submitted; they have been subsumed. “Imagine,” writes Wieseltier,”

“This might seem a dire situation for the humanities; and it is, for the academic humanities. Fortunately, the humanities have always been bigger than the academic humanities. Unlike in the sciences, to participate in the conversation about what it means to be human does not require an advanced degree (increasingly it seems to be impeded by it)—which is why it should come as no surprise that the humanities are often more aggressively defended by magazine editors and op-ed columnists than by academics. In Wieseltier’s case, the argument for the sanctity of the academic humanities eventually tilts over into a call for what he calls the “old humanities,” examples of which (like Vendler’s recent piece on Dickinson) abound in the brilliant Books section over which he has stood guard since 1983. – “

http://thepointmag.com/2014/criticism/the-new-humanities