Springfield, VA, USA. Society (the women and men around us) has always been more comfortable if its members fall within certain known, established patterns: this is how we dress, this is what we say, this is what we believe, this is how we look.

These are the standards by which a society defines itself and separates from the non-members (the other societies that may live around it — the proverbial they and them your mother warned you about).

Throughout human history, every society has had intrinsic cultural standards for beauty, especially beauty as it applies to women. Certain images are held up as examples of womanly perfection. Ancient Egypt, which placed a strong emphasis on images (statues, reliefs, wall paintings), provides hundreds, if not thousands of examples of their societal expectation for female beauty. [N1] Cultural emphasis on women's appearance is an ancient and ongoing story, perhaps one that is coded in our genes.

What is beauty? Like pornography, we know beauty when we see it but how shall we define it?

Attempts to reduce beauty down to binary data and mathematical models is nothing new. Two millennium ago, Pythagora

Lancaster, PA, DC, USA. Independence Day is our leading national holiday. It has no equal or rival in its prominence and popularity. But maybe it should.

To be sure, the Fourth of July commemorates a crucial moment in national history; that decisive point in time in which the Second Continental Congress declared, formally and publicly, American independence from Great Britain. That day together with the written Declaration of Independence itself comprise the single most familiar day and single most famed document in American history.

But the very importance attributed to Independence Day and to the Declaration of Independence begs one of the most intriguing questions in national political life: Why then is it that we pay so little attention to another epochal event and seminal document in national history, separated in time by little more than a dozen years and equally vital, if not more so, to our national destiny?

We speak of course of the U.S. Constitution. Why do we pay so little attention to the commemoration of it while paying so much to the Declaration?

It is true that the Constitution has not been utterly ignored. In fact, ther