Monthly Readings for July 2006

July 1, 2006: Slate. Swing for the Bleachers: The Tug of War for the Mind of Anthony Kennedy. Lithwick, Dahlia.
July 5, 2006: Slate. How Scalia Lost His Mojo
July 7, 2006: WikiHow. How To Solve a Sudoku
July 12, 2006: PC Mag. The Science Fiction Files
July 18, 2006: PC Mag. Midyear Predictions
July 19, 2006: ExtremeTech. Which New Browser is Best: Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, or Opera 9
July 26, 2006: PC Mag. LCDs for Everyone

Word of the Day for Thursday July 20, 2006 nescience

nescience \NESH-uhn(t)s; NESH-ee-uhn(t)s\, noun:Lack of knowledge or awareness; ignorance.

• The ancients understood that too much knowledge could actually impede human functioning -- this at a time when the encroachments on global nescience were comparatively few.-- Cullen Murphy, "DNA Fatigue", The Atlantic, November 1997
• He fought on our behalf in the war that finally matters: against nescience, against inadvertence, against the supposition that anything is anything else.-- Hugh Kenner, "On the Centenary of James Joyce", New York Times, January 31, 1982
• The notion has taken hold that every barometric fluctuation must demonstrate climate change. This anecdotal case for global warming is mostly nonsense, driven by nescience of a basic point, from statistics and probability, that the weather is always weird somewhere.-- Gregg Easterbrook, "Warming Up", The New Republic, November 8, 1999

Nescience is from Latin nescire, "not to know," from ne-, "not" + scire, "to know." It is related to science. Nescient is the adjective form.