Link of the day

The NY times reports that 21 people were hospitalized earlier this month (of whom, 3 have since died) after attending a sweat lodge ceremony in Sedona. This event is an excellent example of the reasons behind my extreme distrust of the New Age movement. Most of the people involved are harmless... Except when they persuade others to do dangerously stupid things.

Mathclass

I noticed an interesting aside while paging through my Intro to Chaos textbook, just now:

Incidentally, there was a violent controversy about this subject [catastrophe theory] in the late 1970s. If you like watching fights, have a look at Zahler and Sussman (1977) and Kolata (1977).

Since the textbook is interested in analyzing the math, not the social context in which the math evolved, it says nothing further about the conflict. And it's less than half an hour before I should be going to bed, and I have class in the morning, so I really shouldn't be trying to find those original papers right now. No matter how curious I am about what they were arguing over...