Erin Kutz wrote:
Lexington, MA-based StreamBase Systems, a developer of complex event processing software, has pulled in a $5.5 million offering of debt, options, and warrants, an SEC filing reveals. The company, which makes software that analyzes real-time data for decision making, closed a $6 million Series D round in January 2009. Its website lists Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel as investors.
Green:Net, the only conference dedicated to exploring how information technology — software, computing and the web — can fight climate change, will be coming to you live today from the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. The show kicks off at 8:30 a.m. PT runs all day. For live-blogging of each session, head over to our sister site, Earth2Tech. Enjoy!
Image courtesy of huangjiahui’s photostream
Iced-tea maker AriZona is experiencing some collateral damage in the immigration debate over a new law in the state of Arizona. Since the law passed, making it a crime for illegal immigrants to be in the state and requires police to check citizens for evidence of legal status, opponents have called for a boycott of the state. On Tuesday, a comic writer named Travis Nichols suggested—jokingly, we think—that consumers should also boycott AriZona iced tea because it’s "the drink of fascists." For whatever reason, others took Nichols up on the idea, even though the brand, now owned by Ferolito, Vultaggio & Sons, is based in New York. Responding to the bone-headed criticism, Don Vultaggio, founder and chairman of AriZona Beverages, set the record straight on the company’s Web site: "We are very proud to be an American company with roots in New York," he wrote. No word yet if JCPenney brand Arizona Jeans is caught up in the debate as well. The company wisely changed the name to AZ Jeans a while back.
—Posted by Todd Wasserman
Concentrated Solar Set to Shine
A California-based startup, Amonix, has received $129 million in venture-capital investments to further its commercialization of concentrated photovoltaic technology. The company’s product combines powerful lenses, a tracking system, and solar cells for large, highly efficient solar-power installations. The funding could give the company, and the emerging field of concentrated photovoltaics, the boost it needs for widespread utility-scale deployments.
“We’ve looked at 100 solar companies in the last 18 months, and Amonix is the one that stood out to us as having breakout potential,” says Ben Kortlang, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which led the recent investment.
Amonix recently launched its newest solar concentrator, which converts one fourth of the sunlight that falls on it into AC electricity. That’s compared with the approximately 18 percent system efficiency–including inverters that convert solar’s DC power to useable AC power–of the most efficient photovoltaic systems that don’t use special optics or track the sun.
To collect sunlight as efficiently as possible, Amonix starts with a massive 23.5-meter-by-15-meter array. The array is covered with thin, plastic Fresnel lenses, each measuring 350 square centimeters, that focus sunlight to an area that’s .7 square centimeters. The sunlight, concentrated to 500 times its normal intensity, hits an ultra-efficient multi-junction solar cell that converts 39 percent of the light into electricity. The cell, made by Spectrolab, is the most efficient in the world, demonstrating more than 41 percent efficiency in lab tests. To further enhance performance, Amonix uses a tracking system that keeps the lenses pointed within .8 degrees of the angle of the sun throughout the day.
Russia’s Putin voices fears for polar bears
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, better known in the West for his tough-guy image, expressed concern Thursday for the fate of Arctic polar bears threatened by climate change.
“The polar bear is under threat. Their population is currently only 25,000 individuals,” Putin was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying after a recent trip to an island in the Arctic Ocean.
Although Putin is better known in the West for pushing a muscular foreign policy and tightening control over the Russian political system, he has occasionally shown compassion for wildlife and nature.
His press service and the Russian Geographical Society said that Putin went to the Arctic to visit Russia’s most northerly border post and take part in a Russian scientific expedition.
“The reduction in the surface of the ice sheet, the melting of the ice, all this adds to the complications in the conditions of life” of the polar bears, he said.
He helped scientists put a tracking collar on a 230-kilo (506-pound) polar bear as part of an observation programme,
Last year he condemned the hunting of baby whitecoat seals, saying it was a “bloody business”
The big question: How much CO2 can the Earth hold?
The Dutch used to discover new worlds across unexplored seas. Now, they are beginning to trace the edges of a new undiscovered country, and it is right beneath their shores.
The Netherlands, a country that chose to build many of its cities below sea level, is famous for its pragmatic, long-term planning. So it should be no surprise that, when it comes to efforts to store carbon dioxide underground for a millennium or more, Holland has been leading the way, planning for years to turn declining natural gas fields off their shores into storage sites.
Initial estimates of the fields were promising. It seemed 40 years of emissions from eight large coal-fired power plants could be stored. Then scientists looked closer, probing each site’s geology, to disturbing results.
Some fields were too small or perforated by drills to store CO2, they found. Others were stubborn, their rocks likely to resist the injection of the gas.
Soon enough, the Dutch had to cut their storage estimate in half.
It is a disappointing result that should be kept in mind as estimates of CO2 storage potential, which mostly exist on countrywide or regional levels, are refined and localized, said Filip Neele, a research geologist here at the geosciences branch of TNO, the Dutch national lab of applied sciences.
In some cases, Neele would not be surprised to see storage estimates fall by up to 95 percent compared with the original projection. Though even then, he added, the capacity would be still large thanks to the vast size of the available storage formations.
“This is likely to be true for any large-scale inventory of storage capacity,” Neele said. “If you look at a country scale and try to assess the storage potential, you’re very likely to grossly overestimate the storage potential.”
Welcome to the new terra incognita. As politicians and businesses push forward with carbon capture and storage, or CCS, as their “bridge” to renewable energy, geologists are scrambling to properly estimate how much CO2 can be stored in deep, water-flush rock formations — called saline aquifers — that have long been ignored by, well, pretty much everyone. They are blank spaces below the map and are only beginning to be better understood.
House panel approves $84B research, innovation bill
The House Science and Technology Committee last night approved, 29-8, an $84 billion research and education bill that reauthorizes an innovative energy technology research program at the Energy Department.
The committee approved the bill (H.R. 5116) with a substitute amendment that would keep key science agencies on a path to doubling their budgets from 2007 appropriated levels after hours of debate on nearly 60 amendments.
“Honestly, this bill is a big deal and is important,” said Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.). “It’s a big deal and important for our country and for this committee’s stature in the Congress. It’s a big deal and an important step in leading our innovation agenda.”
In addition to authorizing big boosts in funding for DOE’s Office of Science, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Standards and Technology over the next five years, the legislation would authorize $3.15 billion in spending at DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, through fiscal 2015. That funding level, laid out in a manager’s amendment offered by Gordon, is a 7 percent decrease from the funding level passed out of subcommittee last month.
The funding cut in the manager’s amendment — 10 percent of the original bill’s authorization level — was a move to earn the support of Republicans who have lamented such big spending increases during an economic downturn. But the effort did not appease all concerns.
Most Americans still breathing dirty air — Lung Association
More than half of the U.S. population lives in areas whose air is often unhealthy, the American Lung Association said in a report released today.
The group’s annual State of the Air report found that while air quality in many regions of the country has improved, about 58 percent of Americans — about 175 million people — still live in areas with dangerous levels of soot or smog.
Compared with last year’s report, the study found that fewer Americans live in counties with unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution. The 2009 assessment showed that about 186 million people lived in areas with unhealthy air (Greenwire, April 29, 2009).
The report looks at levels of ozone and particle pollution from monitoring sites across the country between 2006 and 2008. Those are the most current quality-assured data available nationwide for the analysis, according to the study.
The association credits the improvements in part to reductions in emissions from coal-fired power plants and the transition to cleaner diesel fuels and engines.
“State of the Air 2010 proves with hard data that cleaning up air pollution produces healthier air,” said Mary Partridge, American Lung Association national board chairwoman.
Still, said Janice Nolen, the association’s assistant vice president of national policy and advocacy, “one thing to keep in mind is, this is not clean air.” She said that while the country has made improvements, “we are not where we need to be.”
World needs clean energy revolution: UN chief
Rich and poor nations need a “clean energy revolution” in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said here Wednesday.
“We cannot achieve the (poverty-reduction) Millennium Development Goals without providing access to affordable modern energy,” he said as he opened a day-long energy conference.
Noting that 1.6 billion people around the world lack access to electricity while two to three billion still rely on traditional energy sources such as firewood, peat or dung, the UN boss said access to energy must be expanded “in the cleanest, most efficient way possible.”
Ban spoke as he launched a report by his advisory group on energy and climate change that calls for “universal access to modern energy services” by 2030 and stresses the need to cut energy intensity by 40 percent also by 2030.
Energy intensity is measured by the quantity of energy per unit of economic activity or output.
“The aim of providing universal access should be to create improved conditions for economic take-off, contribute to attaining (the development goals by the 2015 target) and enable the poorest of the poor to escape poverty,” the report said.
It added that curbing global energy intensity would require developed and developing countries to strenghthen their capacity to implement effective policies, market-based mechanisms, investment tools and regulations with respect to energy use.
GE’s leader issues an energy warning
While the rest of the world invests in renewable, nuclear and cleaner energy sources, the U.S. continues to fall further behind, General Electric’s chairman and CEO said Wednesday in Houston.
In an interview before the company’s annual meeting, Jeffrey Immelt said the situation eventually could put the nation at a competitive disadvantage.
“We just seem to be stalled,” he said.
Over the next five years, China will have installed five times more than the U.S. in power capacity, Europe is moving aggressively into offshore wind power, and Asia is focusing on solar energy, he said.
Only two of about 50 nuclear plants under construction globally are in the U.S., he said. “It’s just not enough.”
Immelt called for a comprehensive government effort to put standards into place so businesses can invest in technologies that have a solid future.
“Some leadership in Washington would be helpful,” he said, emphasizing that he’s not focused on any one technology.
If the United States doesn’t do it, GE will have to go overseas. “We have to go where the action is,” he said.
GE recently announced it would invest about $200 million in European offshore wind projects, especially in the United Kingdom and Norway. The investment will create about 2,000 jobs.
A Fiat resolveu ser criativa em sua campanha de marketing para o Novo Uno, que está prestes a ser lançado no mercado nacional e já está interagindo com o público alvo do veículo (pessoas mais jovens) utilizando duas coisas que estão se tornando uma febre na internet. Entenda-se: O Twitter e o Formspring.
Acredito que o Twitter dispensa maiores explicações sobre como funciona. E o Formspring é uma página onde os usuários podem deixar perguntas para a empresa e elas serão publicadas no dia do lançamento do Novo Uno, e essa página foi entitulada “a maior entrevista coletiva do mundo”.
Se quiser tirar alguma dúvida a respeito do Novo Uno, basta acessar o formulário de perguntas do Formspring, ou então seguí-los no Twitter acessando @novofiatuno.
Via | Blogauto
Normally, I wouldn’t say that having dinner with a famous person merits any commentary. Honestly, if I had to eat a meal with the Beckhams, I would probably take it to my grave and never tell a soul.
But some celebrities are transcendent enough that when you hear someone met, dined with, or even saw them, you feel a wave of jealousy creep over your body. That’s how many of us feel about Bill Murray, who has been a constant in cinematic comedy for the past 30 years. He hasn’t gotten cheap, he hasn’t sold out, and he’s always been really really funny. And cool.
How cool? Well, here he is at SXSW with RZA and GZA from Wu-Tang, taking over the bar and serving the drinks himself:
Not doing it for you? Fine. Here’s a story about him getting pulled over (drunk) in a golf cart in Stockholm and refusing a breathalyzer.
Sold? Thought so. Anyway, this reporter from New York Magazine had the pleasure, honor, and privilege of sitting down by the man we know by many names: Carl Spackler, Peter Venkman, Steve Zissou, ummm…Bob.
Here is her story. May her song never die.
Related posts:
We’re happy to announce the DROID Incredible by HTC is finally available to purchase for Verizon Wireless! If you haven’t caught all the leaks, specs, videos and phone photos we’ve posted of the HTC Incredible… here’s your chance. Better yet go to a store and check out the latest in Android hardware and software collaboration atop HTC’s SENSE user interface which brings your social life to your home screen.
Shares in Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. are on the move, as the Street shower's the country's second biggest railroad with praise following better-than-expected earnings results announced Wednesday.
Back of above $60, and closing in on a new 52-week high, analysts think CP stock has plenty of upside still to come.
"We consider the strong Q1 results to be a key catalyst for the CP shares – as we believe investors had discounted CP's ability to significantly realign its cost base," Walter Spracklin, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets said in a note to clients.
Mr. Spracklin maintained his Outperform rating and raised his price target to $70 from $65.
He said he expects substantial upward earnings revisions, leaving his "street-high" 2011 estimate of $4.66 unchanged.
"We are increasing our target multiple on the CP shares to 15x (from 14x) on the back of the improving economy and CP's leverage to this improvement, the analyst wrote.
Trading at roughly 11x his revised 2011 earnings estimate of $4.65, Raymond James analyst Steve Hansen said CP is trading at a discount to its peers. He increased his price target to $70 from $65 and reiterated his Buy rating,
"Looking forward, sustained potash and coal volumes through 2Q will continue to trounce last year’s paltry comps, in our view," he told clients.
"Healthy merchandise and intermodal improvements, coupled with plenty of idle capacity still in the system, should also facilitate further operating and financial gains."
The European Commission has published today a Eurobarometer survey showing that an overwhelming majority of Europeans would find it useful to have European legislation on radioactive waste management. Due to the use of radioactive substances and materials also for medical applications and for research, the concern for the safety risk related to radioactive waste is shared both in countries with and without nuclear power plants .
Research plays a major role in addressing particular aspects of nuclear waste management and the monitoring and reduction of its environmental impact. It is primarily needed to reduce prediction uncertainties and thus increase general confidence. The JRC has a long-standing track record in independent and reliable research and science and technology assessment in the nuclear field, with a view to providing science-based options to address issues of nuclear stakeholders, public acceptance and policy concerns.
Cops in the City of Angels have their eye on former WWE star Chyna: The burly bruiser is accused of attacking a female companion at a local motel last Saturday night.
Gabriela Targos alleges that the former reality star — whose real name is Joanie Laurer — assaulted her in an unprovoked attack at a motel in Sherman Oak, just outside Los Angeles, on April 24.
Chyna reportedly punched Targos in the face, beat her with a wire hanger, pulled her hair, and threatened to kill her before Gabriela managed to make a break for it, at which point she promptly contacted police.
Chyna is being investigated as part of the battery case, but no arrests have been made.
The Recovery Act cut taxes by more than $100 billion and spent another $150 billion in 2009 on projects like Medicaid, schools and infrastructure projects while raising GDP by an estimated one to three percentage points at the end of the year. So this is not good:
Nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe the $787 billion stimulus
package the president passed last year has helped create jobs,
according to a new Pew Research Poll.
Not good, but not surprising. Only 12 percent of Americans know that the administration cut taxes in the Recovery Act. Maybe they don’t know what the stimulus legislation looks like, but they know what the job market looks like. Ten percent unemployed. Another six percent underemployed. They also know what the hiring market looks like: April 2010 hiring is still at April 2009 levels, despite nine months of economic growth.
If you look at the economy from any corner in New York’s financial district, it looks like the machine is buzzing again. Bank of America and JPMorgan both announced big quarters with billions of dollars in revenue from trading. If you look at the economy from a Main Street corner, you get a different picture. Indeed, BofA and JPM are still dealing with losses in their credit card and real estate sectors.
This poll isn’t evidence that the stimulus failed. It’s evidence that Americans evaluate the economy by how bad things are, and not by the difference between how bad things are and how bad they could be.
(graph from Pew).
While Palm is getting access to a big pile of cash courtesy of HP, their webOS launch partner is continuing to lose money and subscribers hand over fist, but at least Sprint’s now looking at smaller hands over fists. As of the end of the last quarter Sprint had lost another 578,000 postpaid (contract) subscribers, but picked up enough prepaid (i.e. Boost Mobile) subscribers to bump their net customer loss down to 75,000.
That’s better than the loss of 148,000 from the preceding quarter, but with more and more of Sprint’s subscribers becoming the prepaid variety, you’d think that Sprint’s revenue would be taking a hit as well. It’s not so, as Sprint saw its first rise in revenue in more than three years, bringing in $8.1 billion compared to $7.8 billion the earlier quarter. The bump in revenue corresponds to a drop in the net loss (or a rise in profit, albeit still negative, if you prefer). Sprint lost $865 million in the quarter, compared to $980 million the quarter before. It’s better, but not great, but Sprint’s still working off the bad mojo from the merger with Nextel in 2005.
[via: Engadget]
McAfee, Inc. has announced that they are providing McAfee VirusScan Mobile to Android users of Korea’s SK Telecom. The anti-malware solution is designed to secure Android-based handsets in the same manner that McAfee does for desktops. Further, the app secures personal information, offers automatic updates, and prodivdes real-time scanning. McAfee VirusScan Mobile is available as a free download to customers with a Motorola XT720. More handsets are expected before long and McAfee plans to support them as well.
Would you download McAfee VirusScan for your Android handset if it were made available to you? Why or why not? Leave a comment below and share your reasoning.
Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:
We saw a healthy mix of life sciences news over the past week, with a generous serving of device news, some venture funding, a dash of clinical trial results, and voila! Enjoy!
—San Diego’s Celladon said an experimental gene therapy treatment met its primary goal of showing the treatment was more effective than a placebo in a trial that enrolled 39 heart patients. The experiment tested a single-shot infusion of Mydicar, Celladon’s gene therapy drug.
—San Diego’s Aragon Pharmaceuticals said it raised $22 million in venture funding to advance its lead drug treatment for prostate cancer into an initial clinical trial. The startup is testing a new approach to treating cancers by targeting certain hormones.
—The slicing and dicing of venture capital data from the first three months of 2010 continued this week, with a new MoneyTree report saying life sciences is holding its position as the largest single industry getting venture capital funding nationwide. The report, “Holding the Lead,” says VC firms invested $1.3 billion in 160 deals nationwide—representing 28 percent of all dollars invested and 23 percent of the deals. The report was prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.
—San Diego’s Digirad (NASDAQ: DRAD) said the FDA gave the Poway, CA, company approval to market Ergo, a nuclear imaging camera system for hospitals that’s smaller and more portable than existing hospital systems.
—Luke profiled San Diego-based NuVasive (NASDAQ: NUVA), which has developed a new approach for repairing damaged or aging vertebrae. NuVasive’s technology enables surgeons to go into the body through a patient’s side, rather that through the front or back, giving doctors easier access to the spine.
—The Flax Council of Canada is investing about $5.5 million through a partnership with San Diego’s Cibus Global to develop a crop strain of flax that is resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used weed killer Roundup. Cibus says it intends to develop a strain that’s acceptable to Europeans opposed to genetically modified crops.
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Erin Kutz wrote:
HealthEdge Software, a Burlington, MA-based provider of healthcare payment software, has raised $1.5 million of a planned $3.5 million round of debt, options, and warrants, according to an SEC filing. The company pulled in $3.5 million in equity-based funding last July. The newest financing involved four investors, but they were not named in the filing.
Lyoto “The Dragon” Machida and Mauricio “Shogun” Rua met once before in UFC 104, where the former won by way of a unanimous decision. They’re set to meet again in UFC 113 on May 8th, but while
Thanks to the World Cup, the South African entertainment industry has been getting more traffic with more international artist gracing the country.
This coming weekend Grammy Award winning crooner, Ne-Yo will be performing gracing the motherland with two performance schedule to take place in Johannesburg at the “COCA-COLA DOME” on Saturday May 1st ‘2010 and in Cape Town at thee “BELLVILLE VELODROME” on Tuesday May 4th ‘2010.
For more information on the performances and the tickets please visit www.computicket.com
Know a Cub Scout? Give him a video game and help him earn a pin. Apparently the Boy Scouts of America have come up with a new Cub Scout merit pin and belt loop earned by playing
Today we conclude our two-part remembrance of the French philosopher Pierre Hadot, who died last week at age 88. Yesterday, Hadot’s friend and former student Michael Chase gave an account of the various turns in Hadot’s intellectual life; today, he shares some personal recollections of a figure whose plainspokenness and accessibility belied the extraordinary sophistication of his mind and work.
Those of you wondering where to look for a good entry point to Hadot’s work might start with What Is Ancient Philosophy?, Chase’s translation of Hadot’s 1995 book Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?, in which Hadot articulated most fully his view on "philosophy as a way of life."
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Pierre Hadot – Part II
By Michael Chase
Having won a grant from the Canadian government to pursue my doctoral studies in Neoplatonism anywhere in the world, I followed an old teacher’s advice and contacted the author of the book on the subject that I most admired: Porphyre et Victorinus. I first met Pierre Hadot at a conference at Loches, France, in the summer of 1987, where he gave a memorable lecture on “The Sage and the World.”1 He was kind enough to read and comment on the M.A. thesis I had written on Porphyry, and while I could not officially enroll under his direction for my PhD, since the Collège de France was not a degree-granting institution, I did enroll under his successor at the École pratique des hautes études, Philippe Hoffmann. After attending his lectures at the Collège for a couple of years, I persuaded him to allow me to translate some of his works into English, and this marked the beginning of a close friendship between Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadot and my wife Isabel and myself. As I continued my studies, he continued help to me out with advice, books, and articles, and when times got rough, with a few hundred francs from his own pocket as well.
What I remember most about Pierre Hadot was his simplicity. Although he had reached the highest echelons of the hierarchical French academic scheme, he never let it go to his head: in his lectures he spoke clearly, without excess rhetorical flourish, and if he wrote on the blackboard he did so with complete grace and relaxation, and often with that self-deprecating laugh that was so characteristic of him. On one occasion, he invited Isabel and me to lunch, along with half a dozen others; we were to meet at his office at the Collège de France. We all showed up, and Hadot began to lead the whole bunch of us off to the restaurant. In the hallway, however, he came across a lost-looking young couple, obviously foreigners, and asked them if he could help them. They were looking for the cafeteria, they told him timidly, and Pierre Hadot, instead of merely giving them directions, insisted on accompanying this unknown couple all the way to the cafeteria, leaving his “invited” guests to twiddle their thumbs. Each individual, known or unknown, deserved respect and courtesy in the view of Pierre Hadot. Yet he also spent a good deal of his life as an administrator, particularly at the EPHE, where he showed himself to be a tough and uncompromising negotiator, especially when questions of principle were at stake.
Over the years, my wife and I enjoyed the Hadots’ hospitality on many occasions, often at their home in Limours, a suburb some twenty miles south of Paris, where he was very proud of his well-kept garden and loved to go for walks in the neighboring woods. When he was in Paris, we would often go for dinner to a Vietnamese restaurant on the Rue des Ecoles, no longer extant, to which Michel Foucault had introduced him. He always encouraged us to have the deep-fried banana for dessert, mainly because although he loved the dish, his delicate health and vigilant wife would not allow him to order it for himself, but he could always sneak a bite from someone else’s plate. In every circumstance, he was the same: simple, unpretentious, with a mischievous gleam in his eye. Seldom has a man worn his erudition more lightly. Seldom, as well, has a man practiced so well what he preached. Although he won numerous awards and distinctions,2 he never discussed them in any tone other than that of self-deprecating humor. He liked to tell of how Jacqueline de Romilly once telephoned him to let him know he had been nominated for the prestigious Grand Prix de Philosophie by the Académie Française: “We didn’t have anybody this year,” she allegedly told him, “and so we thought of you.” He also had great fun with the fact that two volumes of his articles were published by Les Belles Lettres in a collection entitled “l’âne d’or”—“The Golden Ass.”3 He claimed, with a characteristic twinkle in his eye, that he had posed for the fine portrait of the golden donkey that graced the cover of these books.
As a young philosophy student, I had often been disillusioned by finding that my philosophical heroes had feet of clay: although they wrote fine-sounding phrases in their books, they were often vain, disdainful, or otherwise unpleasant when one met them in person. Not so Pierre Hadot: like Plotinus, he was always available to himself, but above all to others. For his 80th birthday, Hadot reserved a restaurant near Limours for over a hundred guests, who were distributed at tables in groups of six to eight. As the meal progressed, Hadot made sure to come and sit for a while at each table, laughing and joking with everyone, making each guest feel as though he or she were truly special to him. Waiters and hostesses received, unfailingly, the same friendly, non-condescending treatment.
I last saw Pierre Hadot on April 12th of this year, when, despite his weakness, he came from Limours to Paris to attend a celebration devoted to him at the library of the École Normale Supérieure. At age 88, he was extremely fragile, and his eyesight and hearing were failing rapidly. Yet he held out for two hours, answering questions from the audience—something he always disliked, convinced that he was not sufficiently eloquent in unrehearsed repartee—and seeming to regain strength as the evening progressed. At the end, he thanked the organizers and participants, emphasizing that what was important was that the event had been organized and carried out in an atmosphere of friendship and mutual respect. Soon afterwards, he entered the hospital at Orsay and was diagnosed with pneumonia. He died less than two weeks after his appearance at the ENS, accompanied, as he had been for 45 years, by his beloved Ilsetraut.
Needless to say, it is too soon to give a definitive evaluation of Hadot’s thought, and only the future will verify, or fail to verify, Roger-Pol Droit’s judgment on him: “ discrete, almost self-effacing, this singular thinker might well be, in a sense, one of the influential men of our epoch.”4 What is certain is that he has trained a generation of students and scholars who continue his work, and that his writings, translated into many languages, continued to inspire readers from throughout the world, many of whom wrote him to say, in a variety of formulations: “You have changed my life.” Pierre Hadot was a man almost destitute of personal vanity, but if there was one thing he was proud of, it was not the multiple honors he received throughout his career, but the effect he had on the average reader.
Michael Chase
CNRS UPR 76 / Centre Jean Pépin
Paris-Villejuif
France
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1 “La figure du Sage dans l’Antiquité Gréco-latine,” in G. Gadoffre, ed., Les Sagesses du Monde, Paris 1991, p. 9-26.
2 1969 : Prix Saintour décerné par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres; 1969: Prix Desrousseaux décerné par l’Association pour l’encouragement des Études Grecques; 1972: Corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur of Mainz; 1979: Silver medal, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; 1985: Docteur honoris causa de l’Université de Neuchâtel; 1990: Prix Dagnan-Bouveret de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques; 1992: Prix d’Académie (Fondation Le Métais-Larivière Fils), Académie Française; 1999: Grand Prix de Philosophie de l’Académie Française; 2000: Corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften at Munich; 2002: Docteur honoris causa de l’Université de Laval (Québec).
3 Études de philosophie ancienne, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998. (L’âne d’or; 8); Plotin. Porphyre. Études néoplatoniciennes, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999. (L’âne d’or ; 10). These works contain some of Hadot’s more technical works on the history of Greek and Latin philosophy, but also some of his early studies on the philosophy of nature. There is material for many more such volumes, among the 100 or so articles Hadot penned throughout his career.
4 “Pierre Hadot, 86 ans de sagesse,” Le Point. Débats, 17/04/2008, downloaded at http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-chroniques/2008-04-18/pierre-hadot-86-ans-de-sagesse/989/0/238823.
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Chuy may not be the only member of the Chelsea Lately family with an X-rated skin flick hidden away in somebody’s sock drawer. On her E! chat show Wednesday night, comedienne Chelsea Handler addressed reports that a decade-old sex tape featuring her as a petite twentysomething has recently resurfaced.
Will comedy fans by stuffing their stockings with a Chelsea Handler Sex Tape next Christmas?
Earlier this week, Radar Magazine revealed that the wisecracking Playboy centerfold was filmed “nearly a decade” ago “on all fours” having sex with an unidentified man with a heavy British accent. While Chelsea insists — however jovially — that the video was part of a comedy bit she participated in as 23-year-old funny gal new to showbuisness, Radar says the footage they saw was saucy enough to make a hooker blush.
“Chelsea, who is on all fours on a bed is naked and at several times during the filming she looks directly at the camera. Her breasts are bare and swinging during the sex act. At the end of the “performance” Chelsea’s partner speaks in a clear British accent, asking, “Did we get the (bleep) shot?” Chelsea looks into the camera and smiles at this point.”
