To Remake Man and the World...comme si? Camus's "Ethics" contra Nihilism

Whether Albert Camus’s “existentialist” thought expresses an “ethics” is a subject of disagreement among commentators. Yet, there can be no reading of Camus’s philosophical and literary works without recognizing that he was engaged in the post-WW2 period with two basic questions: How must we think? What must we do? If his thought presents us with an ethics, even if not systematic, it seems to be present in his ideas of “remaking” both man and world that are central to his The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Curiously, however, this apparent recommendation is ambiguous for the fact that while Camus proposes as much he does so “comme si,” i.e., form a perspective of “as if.” A clarification of this qualification is presented here in the light of the fact that Camus rejects any nihilist project that countenances either suicide or murder. Thereby one may argue that Camus indeed has an ethics that remains pertinent to today

Spin Clustering of Accreting X-ray Neutron Stars as Possible Evidence of Quark Matter

A neutron star in binary orbit with a low-mass non-degenerate companion becomes a source of x-rays with millisecond variability when mass accretion spins it up. Centrifugally driven changes in density profile may initiate a phase transition in a growing region of the core parallel to what may take place in an isolated millisecond pulsar, but in reverse. Such a star will spend a longer time in the spin frequency range over which the transition occurs than elsewhere because the change of phase, paced by the spinup rate, is accompanied by a growth in the moment of inertia. The population of accreters will exhibit a clustering in the critical frequency range. A phase change triggered by changing spin and the accompanying adjustment of moment of inertia has its analogue in rotating nuclei.Comment: 5 pages (AIPproc latex) 6 figures. To be presented at the International Conference on Nuclear Physics, 30 July - 3 August 2001, Berkeley, Californi

Global Influences on UK Manufacturing Prices 1970-2000.

This paper presents substantial new evidence on the competitive process that links together industrial economics and international economics. Our time-series data base concerns manufactured product prices and their domestic and international determinants. We identify cointegrating relationships, using single equation and multivariate methods.PRICES ; INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY ; MANUFACTURING