ThirstyFish

I'm not sure "loving" was on her mind, but she was consumed with whatever she was reading.

If you look the backgrounds in many of the shots taken in New York City, you can see garbage piles, beat up buildings, dirty streets and unshoveled snow. Some say those give the city its character? This photo was taken in one the better neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Cobble Hill.

New York's infrastructure is crumbling. More generally, the U.S. infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is in dire straits. The infrastructure problem is evident in airports, bridges and roads. Many that travel extensively will testify to that.

The Need for Interaction; Hubris:

During the late 17th Century, there was an argument between two great mathematicians, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, about who had first invented calculus. The "calculus controversy" became a thing of national pride between the British and Europeans. For a period of over a century, proud British mathematicians refused to interact with their European counterparts and consequently remained stagnant in the realm of mathematical discovery. Today, the consensus is that Leibniz and Newton independently invented calculus. There is a good reason that hubris is considered the original and most serious of the Seven Deadly Sins.

2012-02-27 Update: I just watched the HBO Documentary The Loving Story. It is about an interracial couple, Mildred and Richard Loving, who fought Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision dated June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled:

• Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.