he Hebrew University in Jerusalem has lost its place amongst the world’s top 100 universities, sliding from 93rd to 102nd place in the annual list published by the London Times Thursday.

The paper ranks the top 200 universities in the world according to criteria such as published scientific studies as well as the quality of teaching and students, both local and international.

Tel Aviv University succeeded in maintaining its spot as number 114 for the second year in a row, a rating it shares with Pittsburg University. Haifa’s Technion, however, slid from number 109 to number 132.

Your examples put a nail in the coffin of the idea that scientific achievement gurantees as civilized and enlightened society.

Does the fact that China has produced few, if any, Noble-winning scientists mean that China is a backward society and that Chinese are inadequate?

And how many of the Nobel wining scientists were from Israel?

Good lord. Where do people get these numbers?

Reminds me of how some claim that the slave trade killed 60 million Africans, and at least one person says 600 million. Where’d they get these numbers? Well, the lower number was obtained by adding one zero to the Holocaust death toll and the other was obtained by adding two zeroes. This means the slave trade beats the Holocaust in the competitive slaughter competition. What the true number is doesn’t really matter.

This kind of thing is a pet peeve of mine.

Israel does produce great scientists. This tells us very little about its moral values.

He spoke his first words at four months. At the age of six months, he said to his pediatrician “I have a left ear infection” [2] and learned to read at the age of ten months. [3] … He finished high school at age 6, enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College at the age of six, graduating at 8 with an Associate of Science in Geology. He is listed in the Guinness Book as the world’s youngest university graduate at the age of 10, receiving a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of South Alabama. He graduated from Middle Tennessee State University with a master’s degree in biochemistry at the age of 14. …
He taught at Vanderbilt University also in Tennessee at 16. He received a second Master’s degree in Computer Science from Vanderbilt when he was 17.

The scientists showed that when using his frontal lobe, his cognitive abilities were extraordinary, but when he used the amygdala (medium temporal lobe), which is the location of emotional reactions, he reverted to being a teenage boy. The amygdala controls the emotions, not intelligence; and in Michael’s case, when the amygdale ruled, the frontal lobe couldn’t. [This video is currently on HuffPo.]

When I read hyperbolic overly-emotional attempts at rationality, such as the Michael Oren bleating above, I am struck by the untamed emotion and the lack of intelligence. Undiscriminating Israel supporters: Amygdala robots?

“Jordan soon emerged as one of the most important figures in quantum physics. He became Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rostock in 1929. Over the next few years he attempted to popularize these theories in books such as Elementare Quantenmechanik (1929) and Anschauliche Quantentheorie (1936).”

“In 1952 Braun became technical director of the US Army’s Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Alabama and was chiefly responsible for the manufacture and successful launching of Redstone, Jupiter-C, Juno and Pershing missiles. After the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik on 4th October, 1957, Braun concentrated on the development of space rockets and in January, 1958 launched Explorer I. In 1960 Braun became director of the Marshall Space Flight Center where he developed the Saturn rocket that helped the United States to land on the moon in 1969.”

“Philip Lenard was born in Pozsony on 7th July, 1862. He studied at Heidelberg and Berlin and in 1898 he became professor of experimental physics at Kiel. He investigated the photoelectric effect and cathode rays (the stream of electrons emitted from the cathode in a vacuum tube) and in 1905 he was awarded the Nobel Prize and two years later became professor of of experimental physics at Heidelberg University.”

“Stark correspondence with Albert Einstein and this resulted in him exploring what became known as the light quanta hypothesis. In 1913 Stark modified the photo-equivalence law that had been proposed by Einstein seven years earlier. In 1919 Stark discovered the splitting of spectral lines in a electric field and six years later won the Nobel Prize for Physics as a result of his work on electro-magnetism.”

ALL OF THESE BRILLIANT SCIENTISTS AND NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS HAVE ONE THING IN COMMON, THEY WERE NAZIS. So much for the implication of brilliance with the actions of nations.