Ian Stewart

For comic relief, forget about attending your local playhouse. Go to any baseball game involving Westminster La Quinta High and listen to the confusion among fans and scouts when discussion turns to Ian Kennedy and Ian Stewart. Kennedy pitches, Stewart plays third base, but with both being 17-year-old juniors named Ian, it's as if they were twins. Scouts have come up to Stewart and said, "I heard you pitched great the other day." Scouts have greeted Kennedy by saying, "Are you the pitcher or the third baseman?"

Almost two years after Associated Press correspondent Ian Stewart was shot in the head while covering the civil war in Sierra Leone, he still asks himself if it was worth it--would he take the same chances today for a story? To even his surprise, the answer is no longer no. "Will I risk my life for a story again? No.

Questions about the mind, brain and consciousness engage us like no others--as simple as any but not simple-minded, the preoccupation of philosophers and scientists since Plato. Does a pinprick feel the same to you and me? Do we mean the same thing when we talk about the color gray-green? Or about Picasso's gray-green portrait of Dora Maar? If we could wire up your brain in a vat, would you retain your personality, your experiences, your consciousness?

Why is the universe so mathematical? This question, which may never have occurred to you, turns out to be one of the stickiest philosophical conundrums of the day. The short answer is that no one knows the answer. No one knows why mathematics--an invention inside our heads--so accurately describes the physical world, the independent world outside. Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate in physics, put the question 35 years ago in an essay titled, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics."

Ian Stewart, the keyboardist who helped found the Rolling Stones in the early 1960s, has died of a heart attack at 47, it was reported this weekend. Stewart, whom the band called the sixth Rolling Stone after he was phased out of the group, died Thursday in a private London clinic, Paul Wasserman, the Stones publicist, said Friday in Los Angeles. He said Stewart had gone to the clinic earlier in the day after feeling unwell.