Book Review: Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. by Stephen L. Carter.

Book review: Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. By Stephen L. Carter. New York: Basic Books. 1991. Pp. xiii, 286. Reviewed by: Daniel R. Ortiz

Book Review: Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. by Stephen L. Carter.

Book review: Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. By Stephen L. Carter. New York: Basic Books. 1991. Pp. xiii, 286. Reviewed by: Daniel R. Ortiz

Saving the Self?

In a recent article, Law, Politics, and the Claims of Community, Stephen A. Gardbaum accurately diagnoses one of the greatest problems in contemporary political and legal theory: the complete confusion about what communitarianism means. Gardbaum\u27s basic insight is, I think, both powerful and correct. We have been seeing contradiction and conflict where there often is none at all. As important and salutary as his account is, however, it deserves response. His taxonomy of communitarianism, the heart of his piece, well shows that communitarianism makes fundamentally different types of claims. It does not, however, make as many different kinds of claims as he suggests; it makes two different types of claims, no more than that. This disagreement may appear a quibble, but by proliferating the claims of community Gardbaum threatens to confuse further the very debate he seeks to clarify and, more important, to undercut some of his own quite powerful insights

Assessment of different formation scenarios for the ring system of (10199) Chariklo

Context. The discovery that the Centaur (10199) Chariklo possesses a ring system opens questions about their origin. Aims. We here asses the plausibility of different scenarios for the origin of the observed ring system. Methods. We first consider the possibility that the material of the ring originated in the disruption of a satellite that had reached a critical distance from the Centaur. We discuss the conditions for the putative satellite to approach the Centaur as a consequence of tidal interaction. A three-body encounter is also considered as a transport mechanism. In addition, we study the case in which the ring is formed by the ejecta of a cratering collision on the Centaur and we constrain the collision parameters and the size of the resulting crater of the event. Finally, we consider that the ring material originates from a catastrophic collision between a background object and a satellite located at a distance corresponding to the the current location of the ring. We compute the typical timescales for these scenarios. Results. We estimate that in order to be tidally disrupted a satellite would have had to be larger than approximately 6.5 km at the location of the rings. However the tidal interaction is rather weak for objects of the size of outer solar system bodies at the ring location, therefore we considered other more effective mechanisms by which a satellite might have approached the Centaur. Collisonal scenarios are both physically plausible for the formation, but semianalytical estimations indicate that the probability of the corresponding collisions is low under current conditions.Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísica