The Nobel Prizes are given every year to those who have benefited mankind the most in one of six fields: peace, literature, medicine, physics, chemistry and economics. For each prize, 8 million Swedish kronas (US $960,000 or 64,000 crowns) is split among the winners.
The winners for 2015 (to be filled in as they are announced):
Medicine & Physiology:
Half goes to Tu Youyou (屠呦呦) and the other half to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura (大村智). Their work helps hundreds of millions of people every year:
- Tu came up with artemisinin to fight malaria. Quinine and other medicines have long been losing their effect. She got the idea for artemisinin from a herbal remedy found in a book over 1,600 years old: Gě Hóng’s “A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies” (340).
- Campbell built on the work of Omura to come up with ivermectin, which treats river blindness and elephantiasis caused by roundworm. Roundworm is now no longer a leading cause of blindness.
Physics:
Takaaki Kajita (梶田隆章) and Arthur B. McDonald split the Physics prize. Leading two separate teams, one in Japan and one in Canada, they discovered that neutrinos have mass and change flavours, between tau, muon and electron. Neutrinos are the smallest known bits of matter in the universe. They constantly stream out of the Sun and pass right through us, but little is known about them. What Kajita and McDonald discovered goes against the predictions made by the Standard Model of particle physics, upon which our understanding of elementary particles is based.
Chemistry:
Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar win for working out how DNA repair takes place in cells at the biochemical level. Knowing this helps us to understand cancer. One of the things that damages DNA is cigarette smoke.
Literature:
Svetlana Alexievich (Святлана Аляксандраўна Алексіевіч) wins for her “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” the first journalist ever to win. She was born in Ukraine, grew up in Belarus and writes in Russian. She writes oral histories of tragedies like the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet-Afghan war and the fall of the Soviet Union. Based on hundreds of interviews of those affected, she writes a history not of facts but of the soul.
Peace:
The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet (رباعي الراعي للحوار الوطني) wins for helping to bring peace and democracy to their country. As Tunisia sank into violence in 2013 after two assassinations, the Quartet got Islamist and secular parties to agree to Tunisia’s first free democratic elections, held in 2014. They saved Tunisia from civil war. Libya, Syria and Yemen have not been so fortunate.
Economics:
Angus Deaton wins for his “analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare”. He found that poverty, inequality and health are best understood not by average income but by looking at individual spending decisions. Sometimes more money can make things worse – like giving aid to Africa.
Winners listed by country of birth:
- Britain: Deaton
- Canada: McDonald
- China: Tu
- Ireland: Campbell
- Japan: Omura, Kajita
- Sweden: Lindahl
- Tunisia: Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet
- Turkey: Sancar
- Ukraine: Alexievich
- US: Modrich
– Abagond, 2015.
See also:
- Twitter: @NobelPrize
- Nobel Prize winners for 2008
- Nobel Prize winners for 2007
- Posts on Nobel Prize winners:
- Einstein – Physics, 1921
- Jane Addams – Peace, 1931
- Winston Churchill – Literature, 1953
- Martin Luther King, Jr – Peace, 1964
- Solzhenitsyn – Literature, 1970
- Kissinger – Peace, 1973
- Aung San Suu Kyi – Peace, 1991
- Toni Morrison – Literature, 1993
- Nelson Mandela – Peace, 1993
- United Nations – Peace, 2001
- Barack Obama – Peace, 2009
- at least 100 million
- US dollar
- crowns
559
@ LoM – Is this another example of a European building upon (stealing ?) the work of someone else and then laying claim to a seminal idea?
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Barack Obama for the Peace Prize. Humph. One wonders what the survivors of drone attacks would think about that. And the tortured detainees in Guantanamo.
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I wonder how many more herbal medicines from the past can help us like artemisinin. My great grandfather used to bring us several herbal medicines when he came to visit. The guy was 95 years old guys but was still strong and had a clear mind. He knew natural painkillers that you had to pound in a bowl then mix with water and then drink. They worked. A German tourist went to visit him and I guess stole all his knowledge (probably going to tell Germans he discovered the herbs in Africa)-I was not around at that time; I would have made him sweat.
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Abagond, why didn’t you mention that Dr. Tu got her big break from Mao’s policies? Abagond, why didn’t you mention that Dr. Tu got her big break from Mao’s policies? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/world/asia/tu-youyou-chinese-scientist-nobel-prize.html. I recall a lot of nonsense being written a few months ago about how Mao “the ogre” was responsible for murdering 30-40 million Chinese. People left out the fact that he opened higher education to a number of people who would never have made it to college. http://www.rupe-india.org/59/han.html
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@ gro jo
In a post just on her, I would certainly bring that up. In this post I will have some 10 to 12 winners to cover in 500 words. Even what little I did write about her will probably get cut back.
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The Physics prize goes to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald for their discoveries about neutrinos. More in the post.
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OFF TOPIC: Napoleon.
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Murky, er, I mean Mirky, read the 2nd link I included in my comment on Tu and let’s fight over it at your blog. Just let me know when you’ve read it by posting a comment to that effect here.
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“Wonder how you can idolize Mao when Napoleon killed exponentially fewer people? Mao had over 50 million to Napoleon’s 3,500,000.” How many people did Mao enslave? ZERO. How many did he free from hunger, national humiliation? HUNDREDS OF MILLION. These facts have earned him my respect, warts and all, the man is a giant whose deeds need to be evaluated dispassionately. I don’t buy bs propaganda. Dr. Tu’s gift to humanity was made possible by the struggle of Mao to allow the Chinese people to stand up. That’s a fact, not idolization. I have my differences with Maoists, but when they are right I have no problem with them.
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Thanks, As a science geek I really appreciate us getting our props.
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As a particle physicist, let me applaud your succinct but clear summary of the physics prize. If I had one change to suggest it’s that maybe you should change “the universe” in your final sentence there to “elementary particles.” The Standard Model of particle physics has absolutely nothing to do with gravity and gravity is a pretty damn important component of the universe as we know it.
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Kiwi, have you read the links I provided? Are you denying that Dr. Tu and millions of others like her benefited from Mao’s policies? If you disagree with my comments, I’d love to read the factual basis for disagreement. Please spare me the Frank Dikötter crap about 39-40 million dead from starvation. The author of the article, Dongping Han, lived in China during that period and he calls bullshit on such claims. I suspect that your family were big shots in the pre-Mao era, hence the vehemence of your hostility to Mao. Your Tibetan Jibe is puerile and unworthy of you, leave that kind of nonsense to Murky Mirky.
In case you’re too hostile to reading something that doesn’t vilify the man the following quotes from Dongping Han will, I hope, make you think deeper about this subject: “I had a debate with one of my professors when he said in class that 40 million Chinese peasants starved to death in the Great Leap Forward. I asked him why the Chinese peasants, allegedly facing certain starvation, did not rebel during the Great Leap Forward. Chinese peasants had rebelled so many times in history when there was a famine. He said that Chinese people were too starved to rebel then. I said that apparently the Chinese peasants were not too starved to build thousands of reservoirs during the Great Leap Forward. He then said that the Chinese peasants did not have weapons during the Great Leap Forward with which to rebel. I said that throughout Chinese history, the Chinese ruling classes never allowed Chinese peasants to have weapons. But that did not prevent Chinese peasants from rebellion with sticks and shovels, again and again. In our Chinese language, we have a proverb, “jie gan erqi” (pick up a bamboo stick and rebel), to describe one of the earliest rebellions in the Qin Dynasty. I also told my professor that the Mao era was an exception in Chinese history: under Chairman Mao, the Chinese State did allow the Chinese people, both peasants and workers, to have weapons. During the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese government called upon the Chinese people to organize several hundred divisions of militia. Peasants worked in the fields with rifles stacked beside them.
This summer I interviewed the former village party secretary of Yakoucun Village in Guangzhou. He told me that during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution years, his village’s militia had more than 200 rifles, machines guns, and even anti-air artilleries. The village militia was trained regularly. The weapons were taken away from the village when Deng Xiaoping started the rural reforms in 1982. It would be much easier for peasants to rebel, if they wanted to, with such easy access to weapons. But there was not even a protest, let alone a rebellion, during the Great Leap Forward.29”
“The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was first and foremost an educational reform. It reformed the college entrance examination system. Before the Cultural Revolution, only a tiny percentage of children of school-going age were able to go to middle school and high school. An even smaller number of people were able to go to college. Most people who were able to go to college came from privileged families. The majority of people were deprived of middle school and high school education, let alone a college education. Many rural children were not able to even go to primary school. The lack of access to education in the vast rural areas of China continued for 17 years after the Communist Party came to power. The educational system the Chinese Communist Government established after it came to power was not very different from the one it had inherited from the Nationalist Government. College was still the training ground for the future elite, which largely excluded the children of workers and peasants.
During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in response to the demand of students in Beijing, the Chinese Government suspended the college entrance examination system, and called for a reform of the educational system. As a result of the reform, college students were no longer selected through a set of entrance examinations. Instead, high school graduates were required to work at least for two years at a factory, or in the countryside, or in the army before they were eligible for the college entrance examination. After 1973, when Zhang Tiesheng protested against the academic tests, the academic test part of the selection of college students was eliminated completely.31 Students were selected by workers and peasants based on their work performance. In 1976, a further important reform was instituted: college graduates would return to the place they came from, to serve the community that sent them to college in the first place.32
Had this new college student selection system continued, the idea of college as the training ground for traditional elites would have been discontinued in China. We would have had a brand new type of college graduates: dedicated to service of the people in their community rather than to personal glorification and self-enrichment. I have always argued that the worker, peasant, and soldier college students have been the best college students that China ever had. It is too bad for China and for the world that the system of selecting college students from among workers, peasants and soldiers was discontinued abruptly in China in 1977. The post-Mao Chinese Government leaders could not see the merits of the new system introduced during the Cultural Revolution. They wanted an education system in line with the general reversal they were instituting.”
“Frank Dikötter, the author of Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, won the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, Britain’s most prestigious book award for non-fiction.28 It is also rumoured that he received a $2 million scholarship for writing his book. But one of my friends in Malaysia alerted me that the front cover of his book used a picture from Life magazine of 1946. This friend wrote to Dikötter about this. Dikötter answered saying that he used the picture of the famine of 1946 in China because he could not find any pictures of the Great Leap Forward famine. Such is the academic honesty of anti-Mao scholars in the West. Because they could not find any authentic pictures, they resort to fake pictures. And yet they are able to get away with such dishonesty.
Frank Dikötter also claimed that he had documents to prove that Chairman Mao was willing to starve half of the Chinese people to death so that the other half could have more than enough to eat. My friend challenged him to produce the document. Dikötter said that he had an agreement with the source of the document not to show the document to anybody. But under pressure, he agreed to let my friend in Hong Kong to see the document. It turned out that the document was a speech by Chairman Mao at a meeting discussing the investment planned in industrial projects. China had planned to launch over one thousand industrial projects in 1960. Chairman Mao said in the speech that he would rather cut the number of investment projects by half so the Government would have enough money to quickly complete the remaining half of the projects. But Dikötter interpreted Chairman Mao’s words to mean that he was willing to starve half the Chinese population in order that the other half have more than enough to eat. Dikötter claimed that he was a China specialist. I wonder if he was able to read and understand Chinese text, or he was in fact a linguistic genius who could read into the Chinese language something that was not there in the first place.
” Let me know what you think.
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Hypocrite as in your neglect of the Hawaiian people’s right to self-determination? Why aren’t you and Kiwi outraged over that and other violations like it committed by the USA? So, Kiwi, you endorse the Dikötter claim, why was he reduced to using a picture of the 1942 famine? Why didn’t his sources, Yang Jisheng, Chen Yizi, and Yu Xiguang, provide him with pictures, it wouldn’t be because the claim is bullshit now would it?
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“Why didn’t Elie Wiesel provide pictures of Jews being gassed? The claim of Jews being gassed must be bull#%^*, too.”
Because the Germans provided all the pictures. If Yang Jisheng, Chen Yizi, and Yu Xiguang didn’t take pictures, it was because they weren’t there and didn’t see anything. If they had access to data the government wanted hidden, it’s because they were high enough in the pecking order to possess such information, making them more like the Germans than Wiesel.
Why do you resist reading the claims of Dongping Han? Please refute the following claims he made: “The post-Mao struggle between the representatives of opposing lines in the Communist Party ended in an anti-Mao faction coming to power. This anti-Mao faction began a political campaign to tarnish the Mao era in order to legitimize their political return and to introduce a different political platform, opposed to that of Chairman Mao’s. They started changing population statistics, and began to focus on the shortcomings of the Great Leap Forward. For many years, they only allowed one sided anti-Mao materials to be published. They used questionable methods to project the population changes in China during the Great Leap Forward, and eventually claimed dozens of millions of Chinese people perished during that period. A Chinese mathematics professor, Sun Jingxian, and an Indian economist, Utsa Patnaik, have refuted these claims and denounced them as an ideologically motivated attack on socialism.17 I will not repeat their argument here. Rather, I shall present some of my own field research, which will provide a case study of experiences of people in the Great Leap Forward and corroborate some of these findings.
I grew up during the Great Leap Forward, and I have done rural research in China during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In 1958, the year when the commune was formed, we had the greatest summer and fall harvests in recorded history. People ate so well. That was true not only in my hometown in Shandong Province, but also in Henan and Anhui Provinces, where I studied. Peasants in Henan and Anhui told me that they were able to eat very well, better than ever before, in 1958. This indicates that the forming of the people’s communes and the Great Leap Forward only improved people’s livelihoods in 1958.
In 1959, my hometown suffered a summer flood without precedent in the last hundred years. I still remember that my mother and my aunt took me to the fields in those days. After several days of rain, the ditches beside the roads were filled with water. All of our fields were water-logged. My mother pulled out some of the sweet potato plants which were planted about a month earlier, and saw no growth. I heard my mother tell my aunts that we were going to have a hard time that year. In the spring of 1960, my hometown had a very bad drought. On top of that, we had another very bad summer flood. The crops failed again. Quite a few people in my village migrated to the Northeast with their families, and quite a few young people left the village to look for opportunities elsewhere.
Thus our region was hit very badly by natural disasters for two consecutive years. The Shandong Provincial Government, as well as the Central Government sent teams of investigators to our county to find out what was happening with the local leadership. The County Party Secretary Xu Hua and the Head of County Government Office Wang Changsheng were both dismissed by the upper government because of the grain shortage in the county.18 But during the two years of natural disasters, we got relief grains from the Central government, the provincial government, Qingdao City, Shanghai City and many other regions. I still remember the two dried wild vegetables shipped to us from Yunan Province: one with golden hair which we called ginmaogou (golden-haired dog), because it was shaped like a tiny dog, and another which was brown and shaped like a pig liver, called yezhugan (wild pig liver) by the local people. For many years, my parents kept a piece of each of these wild vegetables as souvenirs of the two hardship years, and also to remember the help we got from other people in China.
People in Baoding Prefecture, Hebei Province, published a collection of memoirs titled During the Difficult Days, whichdescribes how, amid the severe grain shortages, people worked together helping each other, and how the local government leaders shared the hardship of the common people.19 When I read the book, I was reminded that the reason very few people starved amid the natural disasters of the Great Leap Forward was because of the spirit of socialism. Whenever and wherever one place had difficulties, people from other places helped. I remember many peasants told me that if it were not for the help of the People’s Government, many people would have starved amid disasters like the one in 1960.
By contrast, in Northern Henan Province (where the grain shortage during the Great Leap Forward was supposed to have been severe), five million people had starved to death in 1942. The Government at that time had done nothing to help the local people.20 In the 1990s, I accompanied Ralph Thaxton, my advisor in graduate school, to study (on a Guggenheim scholarship) the region’s famine. When he said that he had come to study the famine, peasants thought that he was studying the famine of 1942-3. During that 1942-43 famine, not only did five million people starve, but many people had to sell their land, their houses, and their children, before fleeing their hometowns. The local government and national government did nothing to help the people there. But nothing like that took place during the grain shortage of the Great Leap Forward.21
Amid the grain shortages, my maternal grandfather died of a disease. My paternal grandfather also died that year at the same age. They were both in their sixties. (Chinese people’s life expectancy was less than 60 years then.) They had been sick for a long time. The grain shortage might have weakened them, and they may have eventually succumbed to disease. But I think there is a significant difference between that and saying that they starved to death. Only people with ulterior motives would blame principally the Great Leap Forward, or the public dining halls, or the people’s communes, for the grain shortage we faced during these three years amid severe natural disasters. The grain shortage was caused first and foremost by natural disasters.
My village during the Great Leap Forward
In my production team of about 30 households, only one young child, Wang Daying’s younger brother, died amid the grain shortage. In our team, there were five Wang families. The three Wang brothers had in all 20 children, 10 boys and 10 girls; all survived. The other two Wang families were also related. There were no deaths in these two Wang families except for Wang Daying’s younger brother. There were three Guan families. Guan Dunshi’s family consisted of five children, his mother, and his wife. Guan Dunshi was the only full-time bread-winner of the family. All eight people survived well. Guan Zhaojie, the head of another Guan family, had seven children: three sons and four girls. Guan Zhaojie was the only full time bread–winner. All his children survived well.
There were six Liu families. Liu Kongxun had one grown son. Liu Zengxun, the third younger brother of Liu Kongxun, had five children. Liu Mengxun was the second of the Liu brothers and was the chief of the production team. One of the village leaders accused him of mismanaging the production teams’ grain supplies. He got scared and hanged himself in the production team’s forest one night. His widow, who shared a big house with her younger brother-in-law, convinced her brother-in-law to migrate to the Northeast with her. My mother and people in the team used to say that Liu Zengxun was stupid to migrate with his elder sister-in-law. She wanted to find a new husband in Northeast because her husband died and because she had no children. She needed to sell her half of the house. If her younger brother-in-law was not willing to sell his half of the house, she would not be able to sell her half of the house. Because she convinced her younger brother-in-law to migrate, she was able to sell her half of the house together with that of her younger brother-in-law. Liu Zengxun figured out late that he was being stupid, and moved back to the village in 1966, but the village had to help him to build a new home on a collective village building lot.
There were three other Liu families in my production team. Liu Chengrui, his younger brother, and his elder sister lived with their mother. His father had been drafted by the Nationalist army in 1949, just before the Communists came, and he later went to Taiwan. Liu Chengrui’s mother had bound feet, and could not work in the fields. But the three brothers, one sister, and the mother all survived well. Liu Jiamin, of another Liu family, was also young at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward. His mother too had bound feet. Liu Jiamin and his three younger sisters and his mother all survived well during the Great Leap Forward. The last Liu family was that of Liu Junxun. He was only seven years old at the time of Great Leap Forward. His father was mentally sick, and one day cut his genitals himself and died of bleeding. His mother took him and his two younger sisters to the Northeast. Later he came back to the village, while his mother and two younger sisters remained in the Northeast.22
There were two Zhang families. My mother was one of the Zhangs. There were three children and my grandfather in my family. Only my grandfather died. All three children born before the Great Leap Forward, and both the children born after the Leap, have survived. The other Zhang family had five children. The father died of a disease before the Great Leap Forward and the mother decided to migrate to the Northeast with three younger children during the Great Leap Forward, leaving the two older sons home. All five of the children survived, and of the three children who migrated to the Northeast, two came back to the village afterwards; only the youngest decided to remain away.23
There was also a Zhou family, a Song family and Lu Family in my production team. They all survived the Great Leap Forward unharmed. Of the more than 130 people from about thirty families in my production team, none could be said to have died of starvation, even though we all felt the pain of hunger. I remember that every morning before my mother went to work in the collective, I would hold on to her clothes, refusing to let her go. I said to her that I would starve to death if she did not give me some more food. My mother would knead a piece of dough, roast it on a small fire, and give it to me. With that, I would let her go to work. I do not know anybody in my village who really starved to death. Of those who left the village during the Great Leap Forward, most managed to come back, and all those who did not come back were accounted for.24
Like my mother, my father never went to school when he was young. He started working as an apprentice when he was 13 years old. When the Communist Party came to power, the Government set up night schools for workers who wanted to learn how to read and write. He learned how to read and write at the night school. Later, the factory sent him to get training from Shandong Industrial College in Jinan. Because of the training he got, he and a few others were put in charge of building a steel factory in my county (Jimo County) during the Great Leap Forward. The factory was set up in 1958, and in a very short time span, the factory recruited 2000 workers from the rural areas in the county, mostly young men in their late teens and early twenties. For three months, my father interviewed and recruited these workers. Two years later, faced with economic difficulties caused by the natural disasters and the souring of relations with the Soviet Union, the Government decided to close down the steel factory. The 2,000 young workers my father recruited and trained were all asked to go back to their original villages.25
Mr. Sun Jingxian (who, as mentioned earlier, wrote a refutation of the inflated estimates of deaths during 1959-61) argues in his article that the alleged population loss (on paper) during the Great Leap Forward was partly caused by the fact that a large number of people moved in this period. First they moved as a result of industrialization at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward; and later they moved because the closing down of these factories led to workers being sent back. What happened in my father’s factory could support Mr. Sun’s argument. An important point I want to make here is that these rural youth received important training during the two years working in my father’s factory. Later, when the economic situation improved in the country, these people became important resources and assets for the development of their villages, particularly during the Cultural Revolution years. They helped set up village industrial projects. Some of my father’s former apprentices came back to my father for technical advice on a regular basis till his death in 1984.26”
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OFF TOPIC: Mao’s atrocities.
Discuss it here instead:
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@ n0mad6
Thanks for the correction.
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Chemistry: Tomas Lindahl (Sweden), Paul Modrich (USA) and Aziz Sancar (Turkey) win for working out how DNA repair takes place in cells at the biochemical level.
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To all the claimants that Black IQ is 70, name the nations with the highest Nobel prize winners per capita?
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I hope that Ngugi Wa Thiong’o wins this years Nobel Prize for Literature.
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Physicist Murray Gell-Mann won the Nobel prize in 1969, for his work on quarks. It comes from the quotation in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
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Thousands of billions of neutrinos are streaming through our bodies each second.
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I will never understand why Nelson Mandela had to jointly share the Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk. He never thought apartheid was immoral. He has never apologized. He enforced many policies that affected millions of lives. He and his cabinet only capitulated because apartheid became untenable due to international pressure; the indefatigable dedication of struggle heroes who opposed apartheid and the unstoppable anger of the masses who threatened to bring the country to its knees.
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Although I have an interest in quantum physics, I cannot profess to any deep understanding of it all. I think I remember from struggling to understand a “A Brief History of Time” that neutrinos are extremely light particles that are possibly massless that is affected by gravity.
Even though I do not understand Takaaki KajiTta and Arthur B. McDonald’s “discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows neutrinos have mass”, I find it fascinating, nevertheless.
This is from the Nobel Prize for Physics press release:
“Metamorphosis in the particle world
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 recognises Takaaki Kajita in Japan and Arthur B. McDonald in Canada, for their key contributions to the experiments which demonstrated that neutrinos change identities. This metamorphosis requires that neutrinos have mass. The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe.
Around the turn of the millennium, Takaaki Kajita presented the discovery that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan.
Meanwhile, the research group in Canada led by Arthur B. McDonald could demonstrate that the neutrinos from the Sun were not disappearing on their way to Earth. Instead they were captured with a different identity when arriving to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.
A neutrino puzzle that physicists had wrestled with for decades had been resolved. Compared to theoretical calculations of the number of neutrinos, up to two thirds of the neutrinos were missing in measurements performed on Earth. Now, the two experiments discovered that the neutrinos had changed identities.
The discovery led to the far-reaching conclusion that neutrinos, which for a long time were considered massless, must have some mass, however small.
For particle physics this was a historic discovery. Its Standard Model of the innermost workings of matter had been incredibly successful, having resisted all experimental challenges for more than twenty years. However, as it requires neutrinos to be massless, the new observations had clearly showed that the Standard Model cannot be the complete theory of the fundamental constituents of the universe.
The discovery rewarded with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics have yielded crucial insights into the all but hidden world of neutrinos. After photons, the particles of light, neutrinos are the most numerous in the entire cosmos. The Earth is constantly bombarded by them.
Many neutrinos are created in reactions between cosmic radiation and the Earth’s atmosphere. Others are produced in nuclear reactions inside the Sun. Thousands of billions of neutrinos are streaming through our bodies each second. Hardly anything can stop them passing; neutrinos are nature’s most elusive elementary particles.
Now the experiments continue and intense activity is underway worldwide in order to capture neutrinos and examine their properties. New discoveries about their deepest secrets are expected to change our current understanding of the history, structure and future fate of the universe.”
(http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2015/press.html)
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According to Ladbrokes, an online betting site, here are the odds for the Literature prize, to be announced tomorrow:
3/1 Svetlana Aleksievich
6/1 Haruki Murakami
6/1 Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
10/1 Jon Fosse
10/1 Joyce Carol Oates
10/1 Philip Roth
14/1 Ko Un
14/1 Peter Handke
16/1 John Banville
16/1 Nawal El Saadawi
16/1 Peter Nadas
Source:
https://sports.ladbrokes.com/en-gb/betting/awards/nobel-prize-in-literature/2015-nobel-prize-for-literature/220019571/
Ngugi is featured in one of my posts, about whether Africans should mainly write in European languages:
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@abagond are you betting also? Or was it just a good stats site.
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@v8driver
@abagond are you betting also?
My prediction be Haruki Murakami, though. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is brilliant. A surprising ‘outsider’ would be Nuruddin Farah,( persona non-grata in Somalia, now living in Cape Town ) who has earned his reputation as one of the world’s greatest writers.
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The Peace Prize is a total farce- even before awarding Kissinger, Al Gore, Barack Obama, The European Union and F.W. de Klerk a prize. Elderly white men are the most represented as peaceful. The US has the most recipients and China, the most populous continent, has only one.
Mahatma Gandhi was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for freeing his people from British rule, but Mussolini and Hitler were nominees!
Watch the either the pope or Angela Merckel win.
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Aargh! Most populous country.
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I think the Prize for Literature is essentially silly and I do not take it too seriously. How can a panel of Swedish nationals have any credibility and how can they ever really get their minds round the infinitely varied work of many different traditions? For sure, though, they would be could be great judges of Swedish literature.
I think that many would argue that James Joyce’s Ulysses is the greatest novel ever written, in any language, yet he was notably excluded for the Literature Prize. Other glaring omissions are Salman Rushdie and James Baldwin. There is the intersection of racial bias, political correctness, and other factors as to why some writers are bestowed with this supposed prestigious prize and some are not. Not that different from the fancy dress Oscars whitewash where David Oyelowo, the British actor and Ava DuVernay, the black director of Selma were sidelined.
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clumsy: edit: they would be great judges
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So 1984: Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were nominated for the PEACE PRIZE.
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Literature: Svetlana Alexievich wins the Literature prize. She was the odds-on favourite. More in the post.
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@ taotesan
Franklin Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill should have won the Peace prize. They were warlords, but they pretty much prevented the Third World War.
Tolstoy should have won the Literature prize. Joyce too, as you pointed out. And James Baldwin. I suspect he is a much better writer than, say, Alice Munro, who won two years ago.
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@ taotesan
Right, like the Oscars, the judges are mostly White and so, predictably, are the winners. I think it would be easy to make the case that at least the Literature and Peace prizes are Eurocentric.
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@ v8driver
I did not bet. I just wanted to get an idea of who was in the running.
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@ taotesan
I agree. They gave it to him when he had hardly done anything, good or bad, which was boneheaded.
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That has always been the problem with the Peace Price. The people who make peace are often the same guys who fought the war in the first place. Should have Henry Kissinger, Lê Đức Thọ, Menachem Begin or Yassir Arafat gotten the Price?
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Abagond, yes. We still loved Barack Obama then, but were simply incredulous as he simply had not done anything.
I was pointing to Stalin’s Red Terror and the gulags of which Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago of which he later was awarded with the Prize for Literature.
My understanding of geopolitics leaves a lot to be desired. The Stalin nomination might have been a political move and Norway’s wish for friendly relations with the USSR in spite of their ideological differences. I have read that he was nominated Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 and 1948 for his efforts to end World War II. It was Halvdan Koht, who was a Norwegian ex- foreign minister in USA in exile who wrote the letter to the Nobel Committee in Oslo.
My understanding of the spirit of the Prize is the humanitarianism and justice seeking as exemplified in Aung San Suu Kyi, Martin Luther King, Jnr., Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela and The Dalai Lama.
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“Why was Sweden not invaded during WW2?”
http://www.emaso.com/links/ref-articles/ref30e/ref30e.htm
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Peace: The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet wins for bringing peace and democracy to their country, saving it from civil war. More in the post.
Economics, the last prize, will be announced on Monday.
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@taotesan
We labored through Ngugi’s books in high school and it was not a good experience. I like the guy, just not his writing.
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Economics: Angus Deaton won yesterday. He was born in Scotland, got his PhD at Cambridge and teaches at Princeton. Among other things, he says that giving aid to Africa can do more harm than good. That was not given as a reason for his win, but it is one of his conclusions from his research.
The post is now complete!
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@ Ab – I’m thinking more along those lines as well lately. The more I do for my tenants the less they seem to do for themselves. When I lowered everyone’s rent, most just spent more money on stuff with which to stunt and floss. As dumb as it sounds, money is not always the answer to poverty.
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