Word: stoning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even in ancient times, however, an occasional hardy soul refused to deify the sun. The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras brazenly claimed that it was merely a ball of fiery stone, and was arrested and banished from Athens for his blasphemy. But his radical concept caught on and was later refined by Aristotle, who proclaimed the sun an unchanging sphere of pure fire, devoid of any imperfections...
...stars and galaxies in the night skies and who consider the sun boring. Then why do solar astronomers persist? "We are driven to an understanding of the sun," says Robert Howard, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson. "It is an enormous lab. It is a Rosetta stone for the study of the stars. With other stars, all you have is a pinpoint of light. By understanding more about the sun, we can learn more about the distant stars...
...Viet Nam Memorial has spawned demand for more. Memorials are in progress to Korean War vets, to black Revolutionary War patriots, to women in military service, to law-enforcement heroes, to women in Viet Nam, to Francis Scott Key, to Kahlil Gibran (!). The hunger for memory etched in stone is exactly what one would expect from a culture that, having just now transcended paper and entered the radically ephemeral world of video, finds itself living in an ever moving pastless present...
...first casualty is memory. Every advance in writing, from stone to clay to paper to electronic blips, is at the same time an advance in erasing. In the electronic age erasing has become literally effortless: it takes an act of commission -- you must command your computer to SAVE -- to retain information. Simple omission, or an electrical storm, turns computer thoughts to ether...
...children of the electronic age, however, suffer differently. Forgetting is all we do. We so feel ourselves forgetting that we contrive monuments of stone -- to vets, to cops, to Kahlil Gibran, to whomever -- to anchor ourselves in time. That which is written in stone endures, we figure. If the Ten Commandments were given today, they would be flashed on the great Diamond Vision screen at Yankee Stadium, and by sunup not a soul would remember...