The need for consumers to sustain a permanent connection has been driven by a deep-seated need, fueled by peers, the furor of social media and just simply a trend to have immediate access to anything at anytime, anywhere.  As consumers, we all crave a perpetual connection to the Internet.  Personally, I am at a total loss if I’m deprived of my daily IP-fix.  I think I can confidently speculate that we all have a deep-seated need to be connected.  The availability of Wi-Fi in bars, shops, restaurants and so on, along with favorable data packages offered by both fixed and cellular providers has allowed us all to sustain that all-important ‘IP-fix’.

The Lawnmower Man Effect (LME) represents the consumers ability to traverse digital systems across the globe, all Captained from their personal area networking space utilizing pervasive WAN technologies.

—Dr. Dean Anthony Gratton, The Handbook of Personal Area Networking Technologies and Protocols, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Figure 1: The Lawnmower Man Effect typifies the consumers’ ability to traverse digital systems across the globe, all Captained from their personal area network through pervasive WAN technologies.

I have penned the Lawnmower Man Effect (LME) as a definition; a term that classifies the ability afforded to a new generation of consumers who seek to have that permanent connection to anything, at anytime, anywhere.  A generation of consumers who are nowadays armed with a myriad of electronic devices that have an inherent ability to connect.  In Figure 1, I conceptualize the LME supposition where we, as individuals, have this unique ability to virtually cross the globe in an instant.  I derived the term from the 1992 film starring Jeff Fahey and Pierce Brosnan, The Lawnmower Man.  In the film we witness Brosnan conducting numerous experiments on Fahey using virtual reality in an attempt to increase his intelligence but, of course, this is not the focus of my definition here.  Rather, despite the character’s malevolent motivation, Fahey physically becomes holistic within the wider area network, having an ability to traverse computers, technology and telephony systems and a range of other digital applications and services across the globe.  Essentially, the Lawnmower Man Effect typifies the modern consumers’ ability to likewise traverse similar systems across the globe, whether sat at a computer, waiting for a train or cheering at a sporting event; hopefully void of the malevolence portrayed in the movie and all Captained from their personal area network.  What’s more, LME is a supposition that consumers, irrespective of their location and despite their conceptual boundaries, are all connected to this one-network – if you like, one IP-enabled global community, where each consumer has every opportunity to remain connected, no matter where they are in the world.  Nowadays, immediacy of content and access, and perhaps social media is also responsible for this need to be ever-present.  In a society that often demands, “We want it now” it seems we can no-longer wait for that all important email; tweet, Facebook or Google+ message.  Indeed, there are some who are eager to oust their colleague to become Mayor of a popular establishment on Foursquare.  The vibrant shift in communication through social media has given rise to a new revolution of fresh knowledge and curation – all supported by a culture through virtual communities mapped across our virtual space.  No matter where new technology leads us, we are holistically connected in our virtual community, connecting with other like-minded people across the global, indirectly supported by the Lawnmower Man Effect.

Dr Dean Anthony Gratton is a bestselling author and columnist. Dean has worked extensively within the wireless communications R&D industry and has an accomplished career in software engineering. He was an Editor of the Specification of the Bluetooth System: Profiles, v1.1 and participated in defining the initial Bluetooth Personal Area Networking profiles. He was also active in the NFC technology and marketing committees. Dean is a contributor to several industry periodicals, where he has written many contentious articles sharing his thoughts and challenges on wireless industry news, opinions and gossip.

For over 150 years, Charles Darwin and his work have influenced the fields of science, religion, politics, gender, literature, philosophy, and medicine. With a view in 2013 of the innumerable changes he has sparked across a number of disciplines, what should be considered Darwin’s most important contribution?

Here’s what they had to say:

“Charles Darwin’s most important contribution, made in his Origin of Species (1859), was to establish the fact of evolution—common descent from primitive ancestor(s)—and supply the chief mechanism, natural selection.  It can be argued that the effect of this in the wider domain, challenging religion for instance, is more important overall, but it begins with the science and it is for this that we celebrate Darwin.”—Michael Ruse, editor of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought

“In a word, contingency. Darwin disabused humanity of our vainglorious conceit that we were destined to rule this planet. Like every other species that ever lived, Homo sapiens arose through a long chain of improbable—and unrepeatable—events. Darwin proved this beyond the shadow of a doubt for any unbiased thinker who reads his Descent of Man, arguably as great a masterpiece as his Origin of Species. Descent reads like a legal brief, and rightly so, because Darwin knew that he was pleading a tough case in the biased court of public opinion. In the first chapter Darwin presents the human embryo as Exhibit A. Then, like Sherlock Holmes, he uses details to deduce the history of past events. More exhibits follow, leading inexorably to an inconvenient conclusion: we are only one frame in a long movie, stretching back to the dawn of life. The narrow escapes that our ancestors managed from events beyond their control were as legion as the hair-raising challenges that Harrison Ford faced in the Indiana Jones movies. We should celebrate Darwin not only for giving us an antidote for our hubris but also for bequeathing to us what Richard Dawkins (our modern-day Darwin) has called The Greatest Show on Earth. Contingency and endless entertainment: these are Darwin’s greatest legacies.”—Lewis Held, an evolutionary-developmental biologist and author of Quirks of Human Anatomy

“No one has influenced our knowledge of life on Earth as much as Charles Darwin. His theory of evolution by natural selection, now the unifying theory of the life sciences, explained where all of the astonishingly diverse kinds of living things came from and how they became exquisitely adapted to their particular environments. His theory reconciled a host of diverse kinds of evidence such as the progressive nature of fossil forms in the geological record, the geographical distribution of species, recapitulative appearances in embryology, homologous structures, vestigial organs and nesting taxonomic relationships. No other explanation before or since has made sense of these facts. In further works Darwin demonstrated that the difference between humans and other animals is one of degree not kind. In geology, zoology, taxonomy, botany, palaeontology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, literature and theology Darwin’s writings produced profound reactions, many of which are still ongoing. Yet even without his evolutionary works, Darwin’s accomplishments would be difficult to match. His brilliantly original work in geology, botany, biogeography, invertebrate zoology, psychology and scientific travel writing would still make him one of the most original and influential workers in the history of science. Darwin’s writings are consequently of interest to an extremely wide variety of readers.”—John van Wyhe, director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

“Darwin showed us that we’re animals. He showed us that there’s no fundamental distinction between us and any other critter on the planet. The most important implication of this Gestalt shift may be ethical. As soon as we accept that the human-animal distinction is not fundamental in nature, it becomes difficult to accept a moral code that privileges the wellbeing of human beings but is indifferent to the wellbeing of any other animal. It becomes hard to resist extending our moral concern to any creature capable of suffering, human or not. If present trends continue, the main beneficiaries of Darwin’s great idea may not be human beings. Ultimately, the main beneficiaries may be the other animals we share the planet with.”—Steve Stewart-Williams, author of Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life

“Theories of evolution were around long before the Origin of Species, and natural selection became fully accepted within science only after decades of work by others in the laboratory and field. Why then does Darwin matter? As the philosopher John Dewey said over a century ago, Darwin is important not because he gives the right answers, but because he asks the right questions. His writings possess the tact, humility, and literary skill to convince readers that evolution, including that of humans, should be the subject of scientific inquiry. Readers are encouraged to think, observe, experiment, and explore for themselves–to share Darwin’s passion for understanding the laws that govern the natural world.”—J.A. Secord, director of the Darwin Correspondence Project

It’s strange how apparently unconnected events can link together. When I was a small child I enjoyed playing all sorts of games. My father taught me chess when I was six, and we also played drafts and Scrabble and card games like Canasta and simple snap. I even invented board games to play with my younger brother and sister. When I was about ten, my father liked one of my games so much that he sent it to Waddington, the largest British board game manufacturer. They rejected it, of course, but I was not upset. Rather, I felt it was a feather in my cap.

At the same time, I was always good at school at arithmetic and then mathematics, I suppose because it came easily to me. Success is a great motivator. It never occurred to me at that time that there might be any connection between the games I enjoy playing and the mathematics we did at school. Later, I became British under-21 chess champion, the result of some talent and a lot of hard work, and after giving up playing chess seriously I took up the Oriental game of Go and became quite good at that too – but still made no connection to mathematics.

It was only when I became a mathematics teacher and simultaneously developed an interest in philosophy that I began to see connections, as well, of course, as differences. Mathematics and abstract games are not the same, they are not identical, far from it. There are similarities, and there are obvious differences. Professional mathematicians seem to react instantly by focusing on the differences. One of the curious features of the book has been the number of professionals whose initial reaction is that there is no connection – that the very idea is absurd – a sheer fantasy – but then, in one case after many, many, many emails, they come round to the view that, perhaps, yes, maybe there are some links after all.

In contrast, many non-mathematicians have no difficulty in seeing that the very elementary maths that they learnt at school, including both algebra and geometry, is a bit like a game, an idea that several philosophers have had in the past but never taken seriously.

I do take it seriously, as I explain in the book, but the connections are also fun and intriguing, as I hope readers will agree. I would also like to think that the comparison can be helpful to pupils in schools. Algebra and geometry are notoriously difficult for many teenagers. The idea that, for example, algebra is not merely a set of routines to be memorised, but is rather a game in which the player has a large choice of moves that could be made, and many tactics and strategies that can be used, could be a very helpful and very motivating picture for many pupils – but that is a project that I’m working on at the moment, and for the future.

In the meantime, I hope that readers will enjoy the argument and the beautiful examples of mathematics that I have used as illustrations. In the long run, that is the punchline: mathematics and games like chess and Go are all extremely beautiful. Why else would they have so many devotees?

Check back in for more about Games and Mathematics on “Into the Intro,” and test your gaming and mathematical skills by solving this puzzle from the book.

The Eight Queens puzzle: how can eight chess queens be placed on a chessboard so that no queen attacks another?

Think you’ve solved it? Scroll down for a solution.

This solution looks simple, easy and elegant – but don’t be fooled. There are exactly 96 solutions in total, reducing to 12 if solutions which can be rotated or reflected into each other are counted as one!

Example from David Wells’ Games and Mathematics.

Many mistakenly believe that the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were the ancestors of the modern Presidential debate. They were not. In 1858 Douglas, the leading Democrat in Congress and an internationally known figure, ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate while Lincoln, unknown outside Illinois, managed to secure that state’s Republican nomination for the Senate and proceeded to stalk Douglas on the campaign trail until he relented and agreed to a series of seven three-hour debates.

What few people realize is that two years later, when Lincoln, thanks mainly to his performance in those debates, became the Republican Party candidate for the Presidency, he did not debate his rival; indeed, he shunned public appearances altogether and refused even to issue a statement laying out his views. His silence had been in fact typical of Presidential candidates since Washington. There was a code against campaigning that had been observed by nearly every Presidential candidate since the beginning of the republic and that Lincoln and two other candidates in 1860 followed. Only Stephen Douglas challenged this code. He undertook what became the prototype of the modern whistle-stop Presidential campaign.

In 1860 both Lincoln and Douglas, the Democrat, were hated in the South, where extremists threatened to take their states out of the Union if the Republican candidate, whose party platform unambiguously opposed slavery, were to win the Presidency. Others hated Douglas for his opposition to an imposition of slavery on federal territory unless the people there wanted it.

Despite appeals to reassure the South that he would not touch slavery in states where it existed, Lincoln stayed home and stayed silent throughout the campaign. In contrast Douglas took his belief in local self-determination across the country, including two trips through the South despite threats against him. Most often with his beautiful young wife at his side, Douglas spent 160 days campaigning in more than 150 towns in twenty-three of the thirty-three states. Several hundred thousand persons saw and (if they could) heard him. He was a national celebrity who was cheered even in the heart of antislavery New England and the pro-slavery South.

Douglas’s Presidential campaign was unprecedented. He continued even after he knew he would not win. He made his second foray into the South in order to persuade its people not to secede from the Union. His consistency was as impressive as his purpose and effort. While he was a master democratic politician who did his homework and knew what rhetorical buttons to press in every locale, he did not trim his message. He believed in local self-government, in the right of local majorities, whether in states or federal territories, to decide domestic issues for themselves – including the question of slavery.

Lincoln of course won the election, kept silent until he was inaugurated four months later, and came into office facing a country that had already split apart. Douglas became a confidante of sorts and important ally in trying to restore the Union. Their relationship in1861 was fascinating because for the first time in the quarter-century they had known each other their roles were now reversed. But in June 1861 Douglas died at age 48, exhausted physically from his grueling campaign, which also straitened his estate.

Modern Presidential campaigns have turned candidates into national celebrities who have been able to parlay their fame into wealth. Douglas’s campaign cost him physically and financially. Why he did it, why he truly believed his message, and why he sacrificed his health and wealth for politics is a story about American democracy as it used to be.

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire in April 1564: tradition has it that his birthday is 23 April, St George’s Day, but the only detail we have is that he was baptised on 26 April 1564 in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Shakespeare’s father, John, was a prominent citizen and a glover, living in Henley Street, Stratford. We know little of Shakespeare’s early life: he almost certainly went to the town’s grammar school, where he would have learned grammar and rhetoric, using textbooks including plays by Terence and Plautus, rhetorical treatises by Cicero and poetry by Ovid, which can be seen to influence his later writing. There is no evidence that Shakespeare attended university.

In November 1582, aged 18, he married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a local farmer. It is likely that she was already pregnant – as were many Elizabethan brides, partly due to different customs about betrothal and marriage – because their first child, Susanna, was baptised in May 1583. Twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born in 1585. (Hamnet died in 1596.)

We do not know what Shakespeare was doing for most of the 1580s: he turns up on the London literary and theatrical scene in a snide remark by the dramatist Robert Greene, who called him an ‘upstart crow’ in a 1592 publication. The so-called ‘lost years’ of Shakespeare’s life have been inventively filled by biographical speculation: for those who maintain Shakespeare was a Catholic, for example, this is the period during which he served as schoolmaster to a northern recusant family; for those who enjoy romantic stories he left Warwickshire to avoid prosecution for poaching deer in Charlecote Park; for others he is picked up to supply a providential gap in a touring theatre company. Like many other ambitious young men of the period, he moves to the rapidly expanding metropolis to pursue his career, leaving the family behind in Stratford.

With the Republican National Convention getting underway in Tampa, FL (the usual fanfare tempered by the approach of Tropical Storm and projected Hurricane Isaac), we turn to the introduction to Elizabeth Price Foley’s timely and insightful account, The Tea Party: Three Principles. Curious about the relation between the Republican party and the Tea Party movement? Look no further than the extract below, or download the full text HERE.

The more  one  knows  about  the  Constitution, however, the  more one grows concerned, unless one thinks  the  Constitution has (and should have) no real fixed meaning.  There is an incessant  drumbeat in one’s brain  that  says, “This  is really important,” “You need  to know this,” and “This country won’t survive if you don’t understand this.” Realizing how much the founders  studied and understood the intricacies  of political philosophy and the science of government – and what high hopes  they had for Americans to grasp these  matters  as well – creates  an urgency  about  keeping their  hopes  from being extinguished.

It also, to a great extent, allows one to rise above petty politics. The modern labels “conservative” and “liberal” seem almost irrelevant  in this context.  What matters  is preserving the Constitution, its meaning, and its foundational principles. All else is petty  politics.

View or download the entire preface HERE.

Marie Cummings 

This summer seems to have been rife with shootings, from the daily reports of violence in the city to the horrific mass murders at the Colorado premiere of The Dark Knight Rises and the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. What separates the Wisconsin massacre from the others is that this event could have been racially motivated, opening up the discussion of our First Amendment right to freedom of speech. In the days since this shooting, President Obama said, “These kinds of terrible and tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching and examine additional ways that we can prevent such violence.” (CNN)

There have been numerous reports about Wade Michael Page’s heavy involvement in white supremacist organizations such as the Hammerskin Nation, the Ku Klux Klan, and hatecore bands. These associations give people like Page an outlet to express their racial, religious, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic hatred and, according to the United States Constitution, they are perfectly within their rights.

Page was an active member of the hatecore movement for the past ten years, frequently posting on online forums and conducting interviews for his bands: End Apathy, Definite Hate, and the Blue Eyed Devils. Although the white supremacy movement has experienced an era of decline, decentralization, and disorganization since the election of President Obama in 2008, the popularity of this music continues to surge. In fact, white power organizations such as the National Alliance and the Hammerskin Nation use hatecore festivals as opportunities to recruit impressionable listeners to join and raise money for their cause. Joe Heim of The Washington Post interviewed Byron Calvert, a white power music producer for his article; he explained that the music appeals to its listeners because “they are tired of multiculturalism being shoved down their throats. They’re tired of the forced guilt trip about slavery.”

Since Page was such a presence on white-power forums and other social media outlets, we are able to gather a sense of some of his political and social ideals. BBC News reported that Page described his lyrics as “vary[ing] from sociological issues, religion, and how the value of human life has been degraded by being submissive to tyranny and hypocrisy that we are subjugated to”. LA Times reporter Kim Murphy shows that in another interview that was posted on End Apathy’s record label’s website, Page admitted to founding his band in an effort to discern

what it would take to actually accomplish positive results in a society and what is holding us back. A lot of what I realized at the time was that if we could figure out how to end people’s apathetic ways, it would be the start towards moving forward. Of course after that it requires discipline, strict discipline, to stay the course in our sick society.

Joe Heim of The Washington Post rightfully informs his readers that “such music is well within the tradition of protected free speech in America.” Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, told Heim that it’s “true whether it is extremist Islam or pro-anarchist literature or the communist manifesto or extremist animal rights groups. And it’s true for extremist racists as well.” Eduardo Bertoni and Julio Rivera Jr., contributors to The Content and Context of Hate Speech, outlined Article 13 of the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights on page 502 that freedom of speech is perfectly legal until:

Any propaganda for war and any advocacy of national, racial, religious hatred that constitute incitements to lawless violence or to any other similar illegal action against any person or group of persons on any grounds including those of race, color, religion, language, or national origin shall be considered as offenses punishable by law.

Could the regulation and monitoring of such online content and song lyrics as Page produced have prevented the shooting?

Another contributor to The Content and Context of Hate Speech, Floyd Abrams, stated that “banning or punishing ‘bad’ speech leads inexorably to the empowering of governments to ban speech that others may think of as good, that censorship of speech leads to more censorship.” (125) Therefore, because we live in a censor-free society, Jeremy Waldron posits that “even the most hateful message has to be allowed to make its presence felt in the maelstrom of messages that populate the marketplace of ideas” (331) for the very reason that what is ‘bad’ and  ‘hateful’ to some is not to others.

While Ronald Dworkin agrees that freedom of speech is a delicate subject, on page 342, he had a fundamental difference with Waldron’s thesis that all ideas should be validated because

vituperative hate speech also denies some citizens—its targets—the equal concern and respect they are entitled to have from other citizens. So balancing is necessary: censorship of the worst forms of hate speech, at least, is justified on balance because the damage such speech does to the respect owed its targets outweighs the damage done to racists by compromising their democratic rights.

Yared Legesse Megenistu furthers this point on page 359: “Freedom of speech must be balanced against another central constitutional value—equality. No right, including freedom of speech, is absolute; thus, it is inadequate simply to assert that freedom of speech always prevails over equality claims when the two cannot coexist.”

Upon hearing of August 5^th’s horrific events, we contacted some of the contributors of The Content and Context of Hate Speech in order to gauge their reactions and determine whether or not their views on censorship and regulation have changed. Bhikhu Parekh said that “The tragic events at the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin and others like it show the power of hatred and ill will, which flourish unless the utterances that feed them are countered by law. Free speech can never be absolute and needs to be balanced against the requirements of mutual respect and social harmony.” Michel Rosenfeld stated that “the recent tragedy in Wisconsin sadly illustrates the perils of combing too much speech and too little comprehension in an age of intolerance.” Perhaps Theodore M. Shaw put it best:

Some may think at moments like this that we can stop violence motivated by bigotry and hatred by banning speech and making illegal the expression of ugly ideas. But the sad truth is that we can never completely inoculate ourselves from the deeds of sick-minded individuals or groups who do violence in the cause of hatred.

[…] Our governments must protect their people from violence and hate crimes. We, the people, and the governments that represent us, must make clear that racial, religious, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, national, and other forms of bigotry fall beyond the boundaries of acceptability. The words and deeds of those who purvey it must be delegitimized. Those who perpetrate violence in the cause of hatred must be punished.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the debate over freedom of speech, but one thing is clear: all citizens of the United States are entitled to their beliefs, ideals, and individual ways of life, but the question is, at what cost to their fellow man’s dignity, respect, and equality?

Shirley Brice Heath

In recent months, I published a book about adolescents who let me hang out with them in the waning years of the first decade of this century.  For most of these teens, I had done the same thing with their parents two decades earlier and their grandparents more than three decades ago.  The teens of the 21^st century were a special case. They laughed at the idea that I was actually writing a book!  They argued that I should “just blog” or maybe “tweet,” since “nobody reads books.”

In spite of today’s teens’ discouraging words about books, I did publish Words at Work and Play:  Three Decades in Family and Community Life (2012).  As I explained to the young 21^st century pioneers, they would very soon be history, and history would, for at least the next few decades, need to be recorded in writing – particularly in books. Within the next decade, what they as today’s teens were doing as they read, wrote, watched, and performed with IT (internet technology) would be outdated. Facebook would evolve or even dwindle as MySpace had done, and new social networking means would emerge with more efficient and effective ways of connecting people, places, actions, and ideas on the internet.  Teens today read, watch, talk, and experiment or perform when they want to know or do something.  Their parents, in contrast, watched, talked, and relished trial and error.

Indeed across just the two generations represented by them and their parents, work and play, along with ways of talking, regarding written sources of information, and expressing ideas to others had changed right in front of their eyes.  Uneasy with being confronted with the speed of change that now makes history, the teens gradually came to relish taking part in the research that went into my book.  They digitally recorded their conversations with friends and sessions when friends worked together to create a film or research games on the internet.  They learned to count parts of speech, tense changes, and hypotheticals in transcripts of their own talk and to compare these numbers with those from similar recordings their parents had made when they were teenagers.  While their parents used past, present, and future tense in their everyday conversations, the teens of today tended to stick with the present tense, making it extend backwards and forwards through vocal emphasis, gesture, and facial expression.  Their parents had lacked the fondness for adverbs that today’s teens found in their talk; when they listened to their own recordings, they heard actually, really, totally over and over. While their parents had occasionally used like to introduce a segment of a narrative, today’s teens found this word in their conversations “like everywhere.”

Immersed in a world of now, they have no need for stating conjecture.  They just “do it, try it, go for it.” They spend relatively little time positing for themselves future selves and laying out steps along a pathway that they want to take in the coming years.

In short, Words at Work and Play eventually managed to work its way into the hearts and minds of the teens who populate the book.  When their parents and grandparents read the book, they find much to celebrate about their own youth and more to lament about today’s teenagers. Yet the elders realize that such has been the pattern of transgenerational assessments for centuries. Harder for them to take is the realization that in past decades responses to economic changes lay largely within the control and conscious choice-making of individuals and families.  Such is not the case today. The global economy exerts pressures that reach into nearly every aspect of life at the local level.  Consumerism, entertainment, and material accumulation have overtaken saving, doing, and knowing.

In the words of one teen, this collection of stories is “too big to be on the internet.”  Conjoined compliment and complaint, this description fits the book well.  The volume’s narrative takes in thirty years of economic changes and ripples in parenting, working, playing, and talking.  Families and communities now figure in the lives of children and young people in ways that only faintly resemble those of a decade ago. Where this kind of demand comes from and where the innovations that may result will take us constitute the essence of Words at Work and Play across three decades of family and community life.

Joanne M. Ferraro

Ever since the great floods of 1966, when waters rose more than six feet above the mean tide, Venice has been an international cause célèbre with an imbalanced ecology that threatens to bring about its ruin. Some thirty organizations from around the world, including UNESCO, Save Venice, and Venice in Peril, have joined the Italian government, which passed a Special Law in 1973 to stave off depopulation and inundation, in raising funds to restore precious artwork, crumbling architecture, and cracking foundations.

The city’s flooding and sinking have attracted the greatest concern. Among the causes of  deterioration are the filling of canals and redirection of tides; draining artesian water in the industrial town of Marghera from the bedrock underneath the lagoon to serve the oil refinery and chemical industries; the deepening of canals leading into the harbors; the admission of giant oil tankers, and the rise of world sea levels.  Further, industrial zones and banked-in fishing beds have reduced the size of the lagoon basin by half. Water and air pollution are also causes of distress. Chemical detergents destroy fish; heating systems produce smog and industrial smoke.  Moreover, the weight of brick and marble on mudflats and the hoards of tourists are also sinking the city. However, thanks to the work of the academic community, technicians, and philanthropic funding organizations much good restoration work has taken place.

The project that holds the most promise in staving off decline is Mose, a 6.5 billion dollar flood-prevention system which is scheduled to begin functioning in 2013. This enterprise, developed over the last decade by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in conjunction with Italian engineers, consists of four barriers situated at the lagoon’s inlets. They are engineered to rise in sync with the tides in order to prevent the lagoon from flooding and to keep the city’s water level below 3.28 feet. While the project holds great promise, it has also generated much controversy: Opponents raise concerns about the barriers’ environmental consequences as well as the costs of operation, which are estimated to exceed 20 million euros annually.

Scientists continue to observe and measure the ways in which Venice is sinking. A team that includes the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, the University of Miami, and the Tele-Rilevamento Europa concluded in March 2012 that the lagoon and city have dropped approximately .08 inches annually over the last ten years. Scientists predict that in 20 years the sea will take over 3.2 inches of the lagoon. A second observation is that Venice is tilting eastwards. As an historian I cannot resist the double entendre this conclusion invites: From its beginnings in 568 CE Venice consistently “tilted” eastwards, first to the Byzantine and then to the Islamic world, in forming a multi-ethic, composite culture. The eastern margins of Piazza San Marco, with the golden Basilica and the Ducal Palace, recall the architectural forms of Constantinople and Alexandria, respectively. Historically, Venice, unlike other Italian cities, is rooted in the cultures to its east, where its merchants both traded and colonized.

Please forgive the cultural digression; it is obviously not what scientists had in mind in describing Venice’s dire circumstances. Back to the flooding. Tourists may be fascinated by it, either kayaking or purchasing thigh-high wading boots to affront the floods. But residents who need to leave their homes to work and shop, or play, are frequently held hostage to the high waters that rise more than three feet above the foundations of their buildings. When this occurs sirens wail, warning the city. Passarelle, planks of wood on platforms, are temporarily placed in the areas where they might facilitate walking, but essentially merchants and residents experience an uncomfortable paralysis. On acqua alta days I simply stay home, unwilling to face the hassle.

Mose may promise to control flooding, but it will not resolve the other inundation assailing the city: tourism. Each day during tourist season cruise ships and buses drop off thousands of day visitors, half of whom congregate in Piazza San Marco. No wonder the city is sinking.  Medieval Venice, with its mud flats and clay foundations, was not designed to bear the weight of so many people. But alas the city’s allure is eternal, making it difficult to limit the number of curious visitors mesmerized by the shapes of its bell towers, palaces, and crenellations glinting and glazing in the sun and painting the waters with undulating cityscapes. Nonetheless, the tides must change.

Perhaps “Anti-Christ” is too strong? After all, Singer is a chaired professor at Princeton University and arguably the world’s most influential living philosopher. His Animal Liberation has been translated into more than twenty languages and is the book most responsible for bringing the concerns of non-human animals to the Western world’s attention. Whether he is writing for Cambridge University Press, giving a public lecture, or writing an Op-Ed in the New York Times, one cannot ignore Peter Singer. Indeed, Australia recently awarded their native son their highest honor “for eminent service to philosophy and bioethics as a leader of public debate and communicator of ideas in the areas of global poverty, animal welfare and the human condition.”

But some reacted to his receiving the award by calling it “madness.” Many Christians consider him to be a leader of a “culture of death”, especially given his very public support of infanticide and euthanasia of the mentally disabled. Many disability rights groups have come out strongly against his view. Singer has been essentially silenced in German-speaking areas, where (given their checkered past) they are especially unforgiving of those who advocate for euthanasia. The last few times he has spoken in these areas Singer has been shouted down so loudly that he could not deliver his presentation. One time a protester leapt onto the stage, forcibly removed Singer’s glasses, and stamped on them.

Much of the academy doesn’t like him either. Three years ago I explained to one of my favorite senior ethicists that I was writing a book on Singer and was even going to meet him for an (obviously) vegan lunch in Manhattan. His reaction?  “Be careful, Charlie, you’re going to like him.” And yes, despite being a pro-life Christian ethicist, I have come to like Peter Singer. Since that lunch-meeting I have debated him twice in his courses at Princeton and he has presented in my graduate bioethics seminar at Fordham; he and I gave the opening papers at a conference at Oxford last year called Christian Ethics Engages Peter Singer; we organized and planned an international conference at Princeton designed to find new ways to think and speak about abortion; and we are currently working on planning an event that would challenge Christians to take non-human animals far more seriously than we currently do. Through all of these experiences I have found Singer to be friendly and compassionate. He is willing to listen to an argument from almost anyone, and is unburdened by any sort of academic pretension is so doing. He is motivated by an admirable desire to respond to the suffering of human and non-human animals, and an equally admirable willingness to logically follow his arguments wherever they lead.

But this is all consistent with Christians still considering Singer our enemy. After all, he attacks many of the vulnerable populations Christians are called to defend. He has criticized a Christian ethic as incoherent and dependent on pretense. He claims that the West needs another “Copernican Revolution” to fully extricate ourselves from the stranglehold of Christianity.

But in my new book Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization, I show that the disagreements between us are remarkably narrow. Though Singer is pro-choice for infanticide, on all the numerous and complicated issues related to abortion but one (it turns out to be complex argument about the moral value of “active” potential vs. “passive” potential), Peter Singer sounds an awful lot like Pope John Paul II.

I also show that Singer is even closer to Christianity when it comes to poverty and non-human animals. An authentically Christian ethic understands that all of creation has been pronounced “good” by God independent of human beings, and even Pope Benedict (now known in some circles as the “Green Pope”) has condemned factory farming of non-human animals as inconsistent with God’s word. And Singer himself is aware of how much he has in common with Catholic social teaching on our radical duties to the poor. Indeed, both approaches claim that one is guilty of indirect homicide if one fails to aid someone who will otherwise die—even if this person requires nothing more from us than a $200 donation to an organization like Catholic Relief Services.

Singer has admitted that he can work with Christians on matters of poverty, non-human animals, and ecological devastation. In his recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict said that Christians should engage in “fraternal collaboration” with non-believers in the service of justice and peace in our world.  Let me make the counter-intuitive suggestion that Peter Singer is precisely the kind of collaborator with whom we should engage.