Airplanes and birds My youngest received a model airplane for Christmas: one of those you pump up and let the compressed air run a piston that drives the propeller. We took it to a nearby park and flew it (usually into the ground, but that's part of the fun) until a gentleman showed up with a remote control plane of his own and a large black dog. As we left (my youngest does not like dogs), the second flight of the remote control plane with bird-shaped wings nosed down not far from us--at which point a red-tailed hawk flew out of the nearby trees, and hovered over the downed plane for a few seconds before deciding it was inedible and flying away. Beautiful.

Christmas Dinner

And so we celebrated the birth of the most famous Jew of all time with a ham dinner. I think next year we'll try something maybe a little more fitting...

Late Neanderthals 'like us'

The BBC has a science report asserting that the later Neanderthals were more gracile and structurally like modern men. It says a great deal about how little we know about them that a single find has people jumping to dramatic new conclusions: Interbreeding with modern humans or evolving in the same direction . . . The old rule of thumb says that if two critters have fertile offspring, they're the same species--which would mean that Neander and Sapiens (semi-sapiens?) were the same species. Without salvageable DNA, there's no way to test that hypothesis, though.

Evolving/breeding in the same direction . . . does that mean that the environment was less harsh, or that technology meant that you didn't need to be The Incredible Hulk to survive, and so might actually survive to adulthood? I wonder how much of the bone size difference is due to environment... The skulls are legitimately different and the baby Neanders are alleged to also have thicker bones than Sapiens, so obviously not all the difference is response to environmental stress. Someone claimed serious iodine deficiency might be responsible for making a Sapiens look Neader, but that doesn't match what little I've seen in the pictures of various deficiencies. But iodine deficiency in a Neander might look rather dramatic--and a number of the Neander sites are in areas without a lot of fish. Maybe the gracile Neander is normal and the Hulk isn't?

Theories are a dime a dozen when you don't have much data...

Failure of nerve

The site Sci Tech pointed me to this article at the Ayn Rand Institute in which David Harriman combines a legitimate skepticism about 26-dimensional string theory with a spectacular ignorance of fairly elementary experiments in the field. Sorry, Mr. Harriman, but the sub-atomic world is rather weird, and if you assume that a photon takes only one path through the two slits you wind up with the wrong answer. I hold no brief for the multiple universe stuff, but the case for dark matter is getting quite strong--go look up what's happening with Einstein lensing of remote galaxies.

I originally followed the link without checking where it lead. Somehow it seems fitting that it turned out to be the Ayn Rand Institute. Rand seems to be popular in blogland, but I find her theories marvelously simple, untainted by reference to messy reality.

A science conference

I can tell that this fellow, quoted in Wired, has been to a few conferences...

Brian Alexander, in his recent book Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion, aptly describes the ennui potentially engendered by scientific sessions:

"The talks almost always take place in the dark," he writes. "During the first 10 minutes, the scientist-presenter fumbles with a bulky laptop computer in an effort to get the PowerPoint program to work. During the next 30 minutes, the scientist, who has never been trained in the art of public speaking, explains, often through a very thick Chinese, German, French or Italian accent, why the mass of pinkish cells on the right is the surprising and highly significant result of the procedure performed on the almost identical mass of pinkish cells on the left. Line graphs are shown.

"The final five minutes is taken up by a question period. Colleagues stand at a microphone in the middle of the aisle and, using the polite code phrases of science, ask the presenter if he has considered the possibility that his head has unaccountably become entangled in his ass."

We don't look at cells in physics, but we do look at interminable plots of histograms comparing data and monte carlo--frequently not very similar . . .

Mbeki supports Mugabe

The BBC reports Mbeki as saying that 'a lack of international support for Zimbabwe made forcible land seizures "perhaps inevitable".' Since I presume Mbeki is already familiar with the history (Mugabe's cronies stole the money Britain gave to buy out the white farmers, and the biggest drop in international support has come since, not before, Mugabe started the violent seizures by fake war veterans) I have to conclude that Mbeki is a liar. And why lie? Because he gets popular support in South Africa when he makes racist claims about the villainy of white "imperialists."

I wish this sort of evil were less common, but 'the yellow peril' sells newspapers. Real enemies exist, and it is a piece of cake for politicians to fan up minor grudges into bit hatreds in the name of defense. I'm a bit more familiar with American history (waving the bloody flag, anyone?), but I see the same story everywhere. And I do mean everywhere, fantasies about peaceful pre-Columbian Indians to the contrary.

Of course around the University I find people hypersensitive to bloody-flag-waving by Americans, to the point of denying that there are real enemies; and inattentive to the same thing by foreign leaders, to the point of serious dishonesty.

Cage revisited

In an earlier post I said I hadn't heard his 4:33 piece on the radio. But, I forgot ZENPR from Alex's Restaurant. (link is gone, replaced w/ description)

Debka: oops

Debka is a well-known Israeli news site, specializing in cutting edge rumors, some of which turn out to be major scoops and some of which are sheer hot air. It isn't often that I see such a contradiction as in this one, though, in which the writer claims that Saddam was kept as a prisoner by captors looking for the reward, who kept him without means of committing suicide. Umm. He had two guns, as another part of the story mentions, and not much room for food or water. Doesn't Debka have an editor?

Saddam

So Saddam is caught. Now we find out how much of the fighting centered around him, and how much was imported. I suspect that he's been mostly a figurehead for the past few months as the net closed tighter around him--hard to be involved in day-to-day management and keep your head down at the same time.

Lord of the Rings

I've seen that some theaters are offering the trilogy all at once, which has got to be at least 10 hours long, or more if they use the extended versions. This sounds like a job for the suit Dave Barry advertised which has pockets and fittings for everything. For dedicated fans only, I guess.

I haven't seen the extended versions yet. I looked at my \$ supply and decided not to buy them, and then looked at how often I had a 4 hour block of time to watch a video, and decided not to rent them.

Opus, by Breathed The State Journal picked up the comic strip Opus last month. It gets twice the area as the next largest strip, and 4 times the area of some of the others. I don't think the Journal is getting their money's worth; it seems Breathed has forgotten his old skills. Opus isn't funny.

Paris

The State Journal put a "Who is Paris Hilton" story on the front of their Daybreak section last week, sparking a little argument around the kitchen table. My eldest daughter thought her ugly and stupid-looking, with phony style.

I think she'll be an attractive lady when she grows up. (If she grows up.)

Powerpoint Poisoning

The NYTimes quotes Edward Tufte saying that Powerpoint limits presentations to such minimal information as to distort them. You can't easily put much text on a slide, or easily show connections between points--and the bullet model isn't the most appropriate for all presentations.

Amen. It may be OK for trying to decide between "tastes great" and "less filling," but it (and OpenOffice's equivalent) is painful to use when describing an analysis.

I know that you can only put so much info on the screen and expect people to be able to read it (focus!--and don't get me started on remote video: it's like trying to read through jello). The discipline of paring down your speech to the important points is hard to acquire, and Powerpoint helps with that. But when you share details--and lots of them--with people who care about the details, Powerpoint is a mess.

FWIW, our solution is to provide all presentations on the net, so that remote sites (like mine) or laptop users can read the details in a PostScript or PDF file.

What's that again?

Headline in the classified section:

Year-end blowout on used cars!

Makes me want to take one out for a spin!

Is it music?

John Cage "wrote" a famous piece: 4:33 which was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of a pianist not playing the piano (in 3 movements). But is it really music? When was the last time you heard this played on the radio? Hmmm? (Peter Sinclair's ZENPR in Alex's Restaurant doesn't count.)

The Transformation of American Religion

How We Actually Live our Faith, by Alan Wolfe

Alan Wolfe's claims that religions in America have been changed at least as much by the culture as the culture has been changed by religion. He makes a pretty good case for it, too. We talk a lot about God, but on inspection we don't actually say a great deal.

When you're too close to a mountain, you don't see it very well. It may seem a small thing to say that our culture loves novelty, but the pervasive quest for novelty has profound effects on everything from the economy to religion. Set aside brand-new do-it-yourself religions like Wicca: religions appeal to timeless tradition--perhaps newly revealed to some Smith or another, but nevertheless reflecting the ancient/eternal plans of God (or karma, or whatever). "Gimme that old time religion" is its traditional appeal--after all, ultimate reality shouldn't change.

But Americans don't respect tradition and authority. Americans enjoy/suffer the most hyper-individualistic culture I know of, with very little reference to duty or sacrifice. Churches, synagogues, and Muslim groups all make accommodations to these cultural traits; by downplaying the elements of sacrifice, focusing on "consumer-oriented" service, and very often minimizing doctrine in favor of affirming personal experience.

The result: churches which differ less and less; making fewer and fewer claims to truth; and trying to appeal to members who may have once been Catholic, Pentecostal, and Methodist--or at least members of churches with those names. Even nominal faith-based social projects tend to rely almost exclusively on the same social and economic principles as secular programs. God

"is a God of love, comfort, order, and security. Gone is the God of judgment, wrath, justice, mystery and punishment. Gone are concerns about the forces of evil." America's God has been domesticated, there to offer solace and to engage in dialog with the understanding that, except that under the most unusual circumstances, he will listen and commiserate. In a world governed by this more accessible God, sin still exists and atonement is still possible. But the sins are less numerous, less serious, and more forgivable. The wrongs that people do are the sorts of things that can be set right by pleading to God's good side, not his commanding presence.

I firmly agree that the church must constantly translate its message into the language of the then-current culture. Unfortunately there are irreducible complexities--statements about the nature of God and man that aren't part of everyday experience. We easily slide from the precise to the fuzzy to the wrong. Because guilt generally makes you feel guilty, feeling guilty is a good sign of guilt. So we talk about feeling guilty (part of everyday experience). But not all guilty feelings are important, and so we wind up talking about feelings and psychology rather than moral guilt.

Wolfe looks at the impact of culture on religion in worship, fellowship, doctrine, tradition, morality, sin, witness, and identity. (And he skewers The Prayer of Jabez gratifyingly.)

I find it hard to pick out a single section from his chapter on tradition, but he details the curious interplay between Jewish denominations in their reaction for or against the traditions--including a Conservative kaddish which event which has the aura of tradition while changing just about everything about it.

Sin seems to vanish into psychology and non-judgmentalism--for some reason people don't like to hear that they are sinners, and often don't come to churches that talk about sin. They want uplift (a good thing), and somehow the subject of sin doesn't come up so much.

Morality

Wolfe covers many topics here. Though fundamentalists often speak of the submission of wives to husbands, in practice this is heavily modified and indeed many women resemble what he (after Carol Gilligan) calls "difference feminists," holding that "women's morality tends to be more caring and cooperative." Mormonism "is all but creedless and stands completely without exegesis." And Islam in prisons . . .

Although Islam in many ways resists the culture of the prison, in other ways it copies it. "We have to deal with discipline in the ranks of the masjid [mosque]," as one life-term Sunni Muslim comments. To do so, Muslims, he points out, judge their own, and when mild punishment fails, "other methods can be invoked. In certain instances people have been severely beaten up or stabbed, depending on the severity of the transgression and the threat it presents to security of the Muslim community."

And he looks at the famous study in which 150 students were told that some of their exams were graded in error--some over and some under by a point. (All were a point too high.) "The teacher wanted to know whether students who were more religious would be less likely to cheat that those who were less religious. And that is exactly what he found. ... the faithful, on every single measure of religiosity, were the ones more likely to say so. ... The true importance of this little study lies in the fact that, given a chance to cheat, the overwhelming majority of students, religious or not, in fact took it."

Witness

It is no secret that evangelicals, despite the name, rarely evangelize. Instead of the often reviled Bible-thumping proselytizing, you find extreme sensitivity (to the point of shyness) to the feelings of others and a heavy reliance on "lifestyle evangelism," in which you try to be a good person and hope non-believers notice.

In traditional evangelism, the church, standing in for God, is the savior and the sinner is the penitent; believing themselves to be in possession of a truth that will set others free, evangelicals seek to bring the power they possess to those whose empty spiritual lives render them weak. Lacking either downtown locations that bring them in contact with strangers or public places in which they can reach out to passersby, evangelical megachurches, by contrast, have little choice but to offer incentives that will bring people to their doors. That process inevitably transforms the balance of power between institution and individual. The unchurched and the newly churched know that they have something the megachurches want--their potential or continuing membership--and they are willing to drive a hard bargain before they offer it up.

Evangelicals have tried to use contemporary music as a vehicle for evangelism. But

one has to pay careful attention before the coded religious messages of Heart in Motion can be detected. . . . There is always a price to be paid by those who cross over into the mainstream, and for evangelicals, the price is self-effacement.

Identity

For Muslims in a non-Muslim America the mosque has taken on a number of the roles that governments or community organizations performed back in their Muslim homelands--and so the mosque takes on a prominence that it lacked back home. In fact, "in the United States, mosques inevitably come to resemble churches," with well-defined congregations, with formal instruction, and with opportunities for socialization.

In East Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Muslim community in the United States, "the Sunday service--or any service, for that matter--is a time to meet with friends," writes an anthropologist who lived in and studied the community. "This is very much the case for young unmarried men, who cluster in corners of the building. Not always welcome in the homes of one another's parents because of the unmarried sisters who may be present and because they are often perceived as a general nuisance, the mosque is a safe haven for them. Unless they have pretensions to religious sophistication . . . enlightenment by the sheiks is probably not their primary concern."

(It had not occurred to me before that the sequestering of women would have the effect of creating a pool of discontented young men hanging out in a place quite likely to offer radicalizing instruction.)

My take

Go read this one for yourself. I cannot do the book justice here--he covers too many aspects of the transformations for any neat summary.

Are the transformations good? As I read my history, each era has its characteristic virtues and vices--and likewise the church in each era. If you "go with the flow"--we know where the broad road leads. I believe that only by maintaining the tension between the ideal and the available can churches stay honest. Preach uplift if you like, but don't forget about sin. The same Jesus who said "My yoke is easy" also said "count the cost."

What was that again? department

Not far from here is Temple Gardens, whose sign proclaims "Chinese Restaurant, Noodles of the East." Under that new sign you can clearly see in the unfaded blue paint where a previous sign read "Frozen Custard, Burgers, & Blues."

You are what you eat

This article from BBC about helpful parasites seems slightly horrifying. Why would hookworms be helpful? Perhaps for the same reason that leaches are still useful for draining blood from congested areas, or perhaps there's some handy chemical the hookworms use to suppress the body's reaction that we might be able to isolate. I'd prefer that, myself. After all, hookworms do cause some damage.

I'm not an expert, but what I've read seems to fit a "bored army" model for some immune disorders. The immune system is supposed to be sensitive, and if you don't give it enough to do it can become hair trigger sensitive, and start going after our "slightly odd" (but necessary) cells. Or to describe it another way--every part of our bodies needs exercise to keep from deteriorating, though not so much exercise as to destroy us. Running is good, shin splints are bad. A mild cold doesn't hurt too much, malaria is bad news.

If that model is correct, then we need a little exposure to dirt to keep us "in fighting trim," but not so much that we damage ourselves. I have no prescription for how to do that. Having kids play outside and maintaining basic waste sanitation (our own wastes are more likely to infect us than those of other creatures) seems like a nice rough and ready set of rules. (Yes, I know about river blindness, but I live in Wisconsin.)

Practical Science

I see that Leeds University is doing its best to benefit humanity. Although perhaps folks might want just a tad more butter on the toast in Milwaukee than in Yorkshire... This is in the grand tradition of discovering that cheese flavors are different with different thicknesses, or how to dunk a cookie in tea (a "biscuit" to the islanders) or how best to mop up gravy. OK, maybe we snicker a bit, but there's value in checking that the received wisdom is actually right--sometimes it isn't.

New fountains at the Capitol

The State Journal says that new fountains are planned to replace the old ones on the capitol square. It's a shame--the old ones were distinctive, and reflected Wisconsin's Dairyland fame: they looked like cow pies.

Greater Jihad

I'm told that most flavors of Islam recognize a lesser and a greater jihad, where the lesser is the physical war against infidels and the greater is the struggle for self-mastery. Does that mean the greater jihad is about inner booty?

Simile is not Causality

I find posters tacked up around the department today. "Carol Adams draws the parallels between women and animals, sexism and meat in The Sexual Politics of Meat Slideshow," sponsored by, among others, the Campus Women's Center and the Hindu Student's Council. The underexposed illustrations are of a cow showing the cuts of meat and a naked woman similarly outlined.

Pretending that metaphors are reality appears to be Adams' stock-in trade.

That pornography often objectifies the object of desire to be a mere body with automatic stereotypical reactions is clear, and bad; and that our arts and culture are being "pornographied" as porn becomes mainstream is also clear, and bad. But an sexually objectified body isn't meat, but skin and meat and reactions. A hamburger will just lie there; a pork chop never says "Do it again!" Even simple nude pictures have an implicit narrative of welcome.

I say nothing about comparisons with S/M and torture pornography, partly because I know little about it, but mostly because it doesn't form the majority of the market. You can't honestly take an extreme as typical.

So is her claim dishonesty or self-deception? I appeal to common experience: the constellation of feelings in erotic desire don't map into the sensations of desire for a chili-dog. To be self-deceived about something so obvious demands that she be horribly emotionally crippled. I think she's dishonest.

I think the Hindu sponsorship is telling. The claim that animals are equivalent to people is not supported by science--it is essentially a religious claim. If science could make any such statement (it can't) it would be more along the lines of "life forms are not all equivalent to each other."

The latest bombing in Riyadh

I've heard claims that al Qaeda had bad intelligence, or they wouldn't have attacked the compound they did. After all, there weren't any Americans there. I wish I were confident that this was a mistake.

It's no secret that Saudi controlled Arabia has internal problems, and some analysts have gone so far as to say it is unstable. We know that 'al Qaeda' is very popular in some parts of Arabia, and a crackdown by the royals might spark a civil war.

How does radical Wahhabi/al Qaeda benefit from a civil war in Arabia?

• They might win, of course, though that may be a long shot.
• They hurt the evil royals, who are on their enemies list. The price might seem a bit high for the rank-and-file, but the bigshots care more about their money pipelines--which I'd think would get pinched.
• A civil war anywhere in Arabia would have to impact the price, and probably supply, of oil from there. Saudi controlled Arabia being pivotal in oil price stability, we'd have to see prices shoot up around the world. And if there are significant interruptions, Western (read "Crusader") economies get hurt badly.

  And if Western powers bring armies in to Arabia to help protect the supplies, it ticks off hundreds of millions more Muslims. Up goes recruitment and influence for 'al Qaeda.'

Is it worth to 'al Qaeda' to lose some supporters in Arabia to hurt the evil Crusaders so badly? Probably. They don't get the satisfaction of killing the infidels themselves, but they do get to watch Europe's economy and influence tank, and maybe replace their Saudi support with even more popular support from around the world. Donald Sensing disagrees in this piece from 2 months ago, but his analysis is predicated on Osama's stated policies. I don't think Osama is still alive.

By the way, I write 'al Qaeda' in quotes to include affiliated groups, splinters, and name changes.

Did I read that right?

On a hill near Reiner road is a pile of rubble--concrete, sheets of grimy metal and a nest of rebar. Beside it stands a sign declaring in huge letters BOMKAMP, and the site certainly looks like somebody planted a bomb there. The first thought through my mind was "I knew Madison was ultra-leftist, but I didn't know they were hosting Palestinian training camps.." Of course, the fine print on the sign says "Excavating" . . .

A walk around the main ring

I've been working at Fermilab off and on for 25 years, and I've never taken the popular walk around the main ring. Last Thursday afternoon was warm and breezy, so after shift I decided to finally try it, and started out on the bike path. The clouds thickened, and the wind shook the praire grass, and it seemed a pleasant enough walk--until I noticed that the path seemed to quit at the D0 site, and the only path out of there went to the power transmission towers (which crackled nicely in the moist air).

Ah--light dawns--the path is on the inside of the ring! And so it proved: take the access road over the berm and there is main ring road, running around just inside the berm. It was getting pretty dim by this time, and flock after flock of geese came honking overhead to bed down on the cooling ponds.

It seemed a kind of anti-Mordor. On one side of the road are gravel parking lots next to blue or red buildings full of alien hummings, high tech gadgets and huge cabinets seen in the garish fluorescent light. On the other side--4 foot high prairie grass, with geese swimming in the cooling channel beyond; and beyond that more grass hissing in the wind with more waterfowl gently honking on further hidden ponds.

Why I am not a Muslim

by Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq is furious. Why is the West so blind, refusing to see Islam as it really is? Why is the Moslem world unwilling to look at the fraud perpetrated on them?

And so he wrote this book to summarize as much of the scholarship about and against Islam as he could. Some is quite valuable, and some much less so. He quotes Smirnov summarizing Morozov's assertion that Muhammad (MTLHMOHS) did not exist--not noticing that a Soviet religious scholar in 1930 was not free to say anything else--his job was to denigrate all religions, by any means.

I wish I were more confident of Warraq's sources. The claim that Muhammad (MTLHMOHS) borrowed (and corrupted) a great deal from the Jewish Midrash stories is quite interesting. Clumsy transitions in the Koran's story of Cain and Abel or of Joseph compare unfavorably with the clearer (exactly parallel) stories in the older Midrash--pretty clear evidence of borrowing.

Warraq seems to have shoveled all the sources he could find together without sorting through them carefully. He quotes Crone approvingly in a claim that the Koran was written late (2 centuries late), not noticing that the Shi'ite split was early, and would inevitably have meant different scriptures if the canon were not already firm.

To make matters worse, Warraq is an atheist (he calls himself a humanist), and he proceeds to trot out all the tired old chestnuts to prove that there is no God and therefore Islam is false. He seems to have not idea how badly this weakens his attack.

The Koran claims that the Christian trinity includes Mary--which was never true; and implies that the mother of Jesus was the sister of Moses, and similar nonsense. It is taken to repudiate itself internally as later pronouncements supercede the earlier eternal pronouncements. There are even the "Satanic verses." The Hadiths can stand even less scrutiny--they are known to be largely bogus, and Warraq claims that Hadith-writing industries appeared during the Umayyads and lasted through the Abhasids, fueled largely by political disputes.

After shredding the Koran, Warraq addresses himself to the character of Muhammad (MTLHMOHS), who doesn't shine with a very holy glow. Muhammad (MTLHMOHS) seems to have become more skillful at discovering convenient revelations to suit his interest as time went on, as shown by the stories of the early Moslem hagiographers themselves. His cruelty was perhaps in keeping with his culture, but then how is he a model for the ages?

He goes on to document how "tolerant" Islam has had heretic hunts. Everybody knows of the Shi'ites; but the Mu'tazilites led one such heretic-hunt, only to be hunted away in their turn. You can hear very bitter quarrels to this day, with various schools anathamizing each other, in places like Pakistan.

Islam's vaunted tolerance for others (about which see Bat Ye'or) developed its rules in an era when Moslems were both conquerors and a minority. (My observation, not his.) Life wasn't pleasant for the conquored, and as Moslems became the majority, the need for tolerance evaporated, leaving behind only fitfully applied rules.

Moslems apologists love to boast of the glorious flowering of arts and sciences in the Persia, but Warraq and others note that the arts were inherited from Zoroastrian Persia, and the whole business dried up about the time that the gates of ijtihad were closed and sharia was fixed. (Maybe a coincidence--I seem to recall a political/military decline; but my references are 150 miles away.)

Warraq illustrates that Islam is inherently totalitarian and deeply oppressive of women. The quotes are fairly damning.

For the honor of truth, I should point out that the theory and practice can differ amazingly. It is, or was until the Saudis starting throwing Wahabism around the world, quite possible to find Africans who called themselves Muslim whose practice was much more like their animist neighbors than anything in Arabia.

His answer to me would undoubtedly be that the seeds of the "pure form" are there, and can easily be brought to fruition by purist reformers. And he would be correct. Islam has always had a violent tendancy--unavoidably, given the way it started.

In sum, you'll find a lot of useful references in here, but there's a lot of less reliable material. Use salt.

Global warming

I've heard conflicting explanations of the causes, but I also keep hearing news reports about melting ice in important areas.

For the moment, never mind the causes. Short term there's not much to be done anyway--if ice packs are warming just stopping CO2 emissions won't do much beyond changing the slope of the warming curve. If this is a warming trend, we're stuck with it for at least a decade or so.

Given that, what is at risk in the short term?

I see three general types of risk:

• Rising sea levels due to melting Antarctic ice. (Arctic ice is already floating, and won't change sea levels if/when it melts.)
• Melting Arctic ice change the ocean currents in the north, and the nutrient flows, with possible damage to fishing.
• Changing ocean currents change the air weather patterns in unpredictable ways. Some regions might get better growing weather, but even if agriculture is easier in some regions we have to deliberately adapt to it. If the wheat belt gets too dry we could have a new dust-bowl/desert if we keep on trying to grow wheat there.

What regions are susceptible to rising sea levels?

I think we ought to write off New Orleans, global warming or no--we're fighting a losing battle there. Plan a 20-year evacuation, with a new Mississippi course (and watch the notoriously corrupt Louisiana politicos swoop on this trough) as a test case. It is the biggest single city-drowning problem I know of in this country: Venice on the Gulf.

There'll be lots of problems, and things that don't work; but

• It just gets harder the longer we wait
• The political and legal and engineering lessons we'll learn apply to the partial city drownings elsewhere (and flood plain cities, too; and cities next to active volcanoes)

Moving a city takes bucks, and a lot of political will. There's a lot of voters in N.O. who don't want to move unless somebody can guarantee they'll be better off afterwards. The only really big club the Feds and state have is the Army Corps of Engineers and a new route for the Mississippi. Given that the Mississippi is going to pick a new route on its own in a few decades and kill a lot of people when it does, it makes good public policy sense to try to point it into a convenient channel. And that dries up New Orleans trade.

There'll still be a rump city hanging out to the bitter end, trying to run the pumps and repair the levees on its own, but if we make it clear that insurance companies don't have to insure property in the flood area after 2030 I think most people will get the message.

I wonder if something like the Abu Simbel project might get the ball rolling: condemn the whole French Quarter and move it to 'Newest Orleans.' I'd predict lots of storm and fury, lawsuits, sabotage, and very powerful people making sure they wind up with lots of bucks. And at the end, if it moved successfully, the tourist promoters would make a virtue of necessity and offer combination packages. We might have to move the cemetary too...

Now that I think about it, the collapse in the fishing industry is starting already. A sudden change in ocean currents might be a good thing if it started up a new rich region we didn't find out about for a few years.

The changes in local climate we can prepare for, if we've a mind to. What we need are variants of old crops and new crops with farming procedures to get them growing efficiently in new places.

That's nice and vague. For example, suppose that the Great Plains become substantially drier. We then can't tap the aquafer enough to sustain wheat. (Not that we can do that sustainably now anyway...) So, we give up on wheat there. What instead? (For the sake of argument, we'll assume we can still grow crops of some kind, and don't have to plant grass and pray for rain.) Amaranth? I've never tried it myself, but I understand it is a nice dry weather crop, though not a lot of yield. OK, three problems: nobody knows how to eat it (and people can be very stupid about unfamiliar foods), the yield isn't great, and we don't have any procedures for growing it or tools for harvesting it on a large scale.

Trying to get people to eat new foods isn't something the government is very good at, unless its World War II and everything is in short supply. Waiting for private enterprises to see a need, develop means, and advertise the heck out of the product sounds like a nice, adaptable approach. Unfortunately, the time scale for developing new crops and tools is more like decades than quarters; and very few businesses I know of think that far ahead. So we need federal research funding for new crops--crops for a dry Midwest, for a wet Midwest; for a cooler South, for a hotter South; and so on.

And we try to increase yields slightly. We could breed for greater yields if we could assume a particular climate. I think a shotgun approach works better, though--try a little of everything and hope something works.

No matter what the causes of the ice melting are, these are things that need addressing.

Unread books

OK, I have to admit it. I have plowed through some pretty formidable tomes over the years; tombstone-heavy books that mated dull material with clumsy style. But I haven't been able to finish the incomparable Koran. Maybe the small print and Sale's older English make it worse.

I started at the back, with the short suras, and tried to work my way forward. The earlier suras are supposed to be shorter, more lyrical, and more benign; the compilers were the ones who decided to include them in order of descending length.

It doesn't help. I read a little while, wonder what in blazes he means with some particular turn of phrase; stop to look up what some obscure item refers to--and then I hit some jarring thing like "I swear by the declining day." Ummm--God is supposed to be saying that? And what's this about blowing on knots?

I'll try again--I want to deal with original sources as often as I can--but . . .

Yes, I'm still trying to learn Arabic, and no, I haven't made much progress.

On a related note, I never finished the Book of Mormon either. I gratefully gave up on that ghastly forgery when I heard that it wasn't relevant to Mormon doctrines, (which apparently derive more from a different book and a collection of nominal revelations.) For those unfamiliar with the book, Joseph Smith claimed an angel gave him some gold sheets and the magical ability to translate them into what turned out to be a book in form quite parallel to the Bible, but shorter and written in ungrammatical King James-style English. It purports to be a history of various tribes of Israel which emigrated to North America and proceeded to undergo a series of wars and disregarded prophets; their only legacy being a lot of mounds.

Convoy Bombing

The NYTimes says that "Palestinian police arrested three members of a small militant group Thursday in connection with a deadly attach on a U.S. diplomatic convoy". (The link may be temporary.) I'm actually a little surprised.

Given the huge strategic importance to Arafat of US pressure on Israel, it doesn't make good sense to start openly attacking us. The key word there is openly. I have no doubt that little is done without Arafat's knowledge or direction, and the attack was meant as a warning.

The surprise lies in that the captured suspects are still alive. Live people sometimes talk. Talking it over with my eldest last night, I predicted that the PA would provide several corpses to the FBI.

Universe a Dodecahedron?

Everybody has seen the story by now that the universe may be finite and wrap around itself, with the dodecahedron shape suggested as a model (though I'm still not sure why).

OK, look at the story, and in particular look at the critical plot of data vs theory. The data fits the theory well except at a single point--the left-most point. The plot doesn't give the error estimates, which is deeply unfortunate, but from the way nearby points deviate from the curve I have to guess that the systematic error is substantial. Without that point the data is quite in line with the "infinite universe" theory, and even with it we aren't given an adequate estimate for how much the data differs from theory.

The soccer-ball universe hoopla is a bit overinflated, given the data I've been shown.

Rush

I suspect Rush would rather die than try cocaine, but Oxycontin doesn't seem so horrible. And it's probably true that fewer people die per dollar supporting the Oxycontin trade than the cocaine trade, so maybe in that sense its a more benign addiction.

I don't think I'll bother starting to listen to him, though.

I only saw his show once, and that perhaps demands a little explanation. At work I cannot concentrate properly with people chattering on the radio, so I either tune in the classical music station or leave the radio off altogether. (I can't stand pledge drives.) He had a TV show, but we watch virtually no TV (we can't even pick up the Cubs games very well!).

So my first introduction to him came when I was on shift at Fermilab, staying in one of the dorms. His show opened with a rather tasteless shot of him standing on a rotating pedestal, and then he started lighting into the New York Superintendant of Schools. Rush blasted him, then played a tiny snippet of the Superintendant's speech, then blasted him again. Next on the list was some Western militant semi-military lesbian shock group, and then something I don't recall.

On the basis of other sources I already considered the NY School Super to be intellectually and morally unfit for his job, and I hold no brief for lesbian shock theater. But to my horror, I found that after listening to Limbaugh for 10 minutes I was starting to be defensive on their behalf! Although Limbaugh's ultimate conclusions were correct, the way he defended his conclusions (and arrived at them?) was so wrong that I was becoming sympathetic to the NY School Super.

I left the common room and have never bothered with anything of Rush's since.

ET and God

"Could earthly religions survive the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe?", an article in the Atlantic, has to be one of the most idiotic collections of unexamined assumptions I've ever seen. C.S. Lewis addressed the bulk of these issues years ago (The World's Last Night and Other Essays).

If alien life exists, this neither confirms nor denies that God created it. (My personal take on this is that God has been so creative with life on Earth that He is probably equally creative elsewhere.) There's no fear that finding alien bacteria on Mars will somehow disprove Christianity. (Davis found a proof-text from the Koran to suggest that Islam wouldn't have a problem with extraterrestrial life, though it pretty clearly refers to angels.)

Nowhere is it cast in stone that we will be even able to communicate with aliens, supposing we ever found any. Star Trek and Dr. Who may have dressed up humans in rubber masks and had them use sound to communicate (mostly), but how would you communicate with someone who lived in a pool of liquid methane and thought at a speed of 2 words a month?

In particular, we can't say a priori if an alien species needs salvation or not. If it doesn't, then the history of God's actions on our planet will not doubt be of joyful interest to them, but not essential to their wellbeing. If they do need salvation, then the questions start. But until we find that out, we're just asking "What if God weren't good?" questions, and spinning our wheels in the same old way: How many angels can dance on a pin head? Is it as many as God wants or as many as the world God created allows?

This isn't to say that Christianity isn't falsifiable. It is. If Jesus didn't return to life, ashcan the whole thing and look elsewhere for the truth. If you can demonstrate that God created a people only to damn them without help or hope, then we have some serious issues with Christianity. But that's a very long way from worrying about bacteria on Mars.

FWIW, Davis mentions the possibility of seeding Mars with Earthly bacteria thanks to meteor impacts. It is possible, but quite hard. Since the trip is uphill all the way through the Sun's gravitational field, the effective escape velocity is very high. To get a kick like that you need to be close to the impact point, and the closer you are to the impact the more likely you are to be damaged by the heat and shock of impact.

California Governor

So Arnold won, and by quite a large margin. What difference does it make?

The ugly mess California is in can't be blamed wholly on the old governor--the suck-up bills Davis was merrily signing in his last days didn't appear there by magic: the Legislature passed them. It won't change.

The whole recall business struck me as a feel-good exercise designed to vent steam without making any significant changes. If the Californians were serious about a recall they'd have recalled the whole barge-load: not just the governor but the legislators, and anybody else they could lay a vote on. Call it a popular vote of no confidence. Of course it wouldn't touch the bureaucrats, but you can't have everything.

I predict that next year will find no significant changes in California's budget crisis and rate of loss of businesses. Neither will the year after. I'm not sure Mr. S. will do worse than Davis, but I don't see how he can do better.

Street Sweeper's Blues

This morning southbound on Wright street I noticed the characteristic marks left by the streetsweeper--which at one point carefully swerved around a dead skunk. You'd think that collecting such debris was part of the sweeper's job, but think of driving around all day with a dead skunk in the rubbish bin right behing you; never driving fast enough for the breeze to keep the smell away...

NASA? Or AnyLab after enough time?

If you haven't seen the comments of NASA folk on the Columbia accident report, have a look. Quite a few comments are anonymous and frank; and some situations sound vaguely familiar.

The Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield

I'm reluctant to try to give a synopsis, since the twists and turns are part of the fun. Plutarch mentions a war between Athens and Amazons, and Pressfield took that ball and ran with it. He invented a culture for the Amazons, basing it partly on other nomadic tribes and partly on the mythic image of the female Amazon warrior. This time he doesn't forget the centrality of religion and custom, and once again (as in Gates of Fire) shows how an alien and sometimes horrible culture has a human core. His theme isn't courage so much as freedom, in its several guises.

The story is set in Theseus's Athens (pre-Trojan war!), and begins with a family who count among their servants Selene, a captive Amazon kept as a tutor for their daughters. She teaches them more than the father suspects (of course) and after King Theseus (who had married the Amazon Antiope) comes by with a message she considers the oath binding her to stay fulfilled. She makes mincemeat of the other slaves on the farm who try to stop her flight.

When the elder daughter takes off to try to join her the next night, family honor demands an expedition for the recovery of them both. Even with a sturdy crew of soldiers, they run into difficulties. And then we hear the story of the earlier conflict as seen by Damon and by Selene. (I guess Pressfield likes to have somebody narrate his stories.)

For some reason I had a little trouble getting into the story at first: Selene seemed a bit unreal; but once the expedition sets out with the reluctant younger daughter (tied so she doesn't run off too), the story picks up. I'll not summarize--suffice it to say that once Damon and Selene started telling their stories I didn't want to put the book down.

The violence is graphic and extreme, so be warned. Some details don't quite work: nobody could survive the underground battle, the coastline is unreasonably heavily populated, etc. But the book works well, and I recommend it.

Frankie Valli

This Frazz cartoon was in our paper this morning. I commented that Frankie was one of those men who wanted to be a soprano. My better half replied "But he didn't make the cut."

Pirate?

I am informed that today is Talk Like A Pirate Day. This catches me unprepared, so you'll have to be satisfied with this.

The United Burger States of America by Peter Biddlecombe

Up till this book I would have unhesitatingly recommended Peter Biddlecomb, on the strength of the other four books of his I've read (Travels With My Briefcase, French Lessons in Africa, A Nice Time Being Had By All, and Very Funny, Now Change Me Back Again). He writes of his travels, and as a representative of a British commercial bank he has had to work in a great many different cities. He claims that the true traveler is the business traveler. The vacationer can pick and chose, but the business traveler has to immerse himself in the local culture enough to communicate and deal with the local businessmen. Marco Polo was, after all, a business traveler, not an adventurer.

In the earlier books Peter wrote of his own experiences, often exaggerating or combining events for a better story. And they are good travel stories. By all means go read one of them.

But Burger States isn't mainly about his adventures, but is mostly his impressions and tall tales, with the occasional bitter screed tucked in here and there. The tailor should stick to his last, and Biddlecombe should tell his own stories.

He tried to classify the various states by food, with salad states and cheese states and burger states, etc; which is a nice idea but not well developed.

I could not finish the book. When Franklin wrote to his European audience of the grand spectacle of whales leaping up Niagara, he thought it was a hoot; but it has always struck me as too dumb to be funny. Likewise this book... Maybe Biddlecombe was trying to be a new Dave Barry? If so, he missed badly.

There are a few good spots and a few accurate lines. When visiting the Abbey of Gethsemani (Peter says he is a Thomas Merton fan!) he writes "I've never known so many Americans keep so quiet for so long." (For those not familiar, the Abbey is Trappist, and Trappist monks keep a vow of silence.) But in the end I didn't think it worth my time to finish the book, and I doubt you will either. A pity. Go read one of his others.

11-September-2001

I'm not the best person to write a tribute or a memorial: I wasn't there and I didn't know anybody who was.

My life didn't change much, beyond starting to read Bernard Lewis. A few years before a man lit a pail of gasoline in one of the city buses, and I've been watchful since then in ways 9-11 didn't increase.

One change galls me, though. My hope is to point people to heaven, not hurry them to hell. Yet I find I must spend energy trying to remind people that we have to fight the war, and not miss the forest for the leaves. A stunning number of people can't conceive that the Iraq campaign is just one more campaign in a world-wide war.

The blindness isn't just a University-town effect. Most of the Democratic candidates for president seem to have no clue at all that we're in a major struggle, and several seem to think that we should retreat. I'd thought better of Gore, but his pronouncements on Iraq were ludicrous.

I see the war to come as one with pauses, where we make deals with Beelzebub to attack Lucifer (Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example). We'll try to make peaceable relations with Iraq and Iran (both absolutely critical), and hope that Pakistan and Egypt can manage to reject their jihadists. In the meantime the Saudis will keep funding the jihadist schools churning out terrorist supporters, trying to subvert the entire Islamic world to their Wahhabist party line. We try to win hearts and minds from the outside, as infidels; and they try to win from the inside. The jihadists will keep striking wherever they can, and with the collusion of some governments (Pakistan?), use disease and poison weapons. One day Arabia will be partitioned into the Shi'ite oil fields, the Jordanian holy places, and the Saudi desert; but we'll still see decades pass before the damage done by the unholy madrassas is undone.

With this in mind, I see blindness in other quarters as well. Winning the war isn't a matter of "Do A, do B, send the Marines to C." We can lose. We almost certainly will lose at least a city during the war. And unless we have something more than mere secularism to offer, we aren't going to win enough hearts and minds to matter.

I don't fault Bush for dealing with the Saudis--we can't attack them directly and everybody knows it. But why not tell us we're going to have to make some sacrifices? Where is the drive to address the philosophical/religious issues that inspire our enemies? (Ad campaigns about how nice life is for Muslims in the US won't cut it.) Is anybody going to pay attention to the recruiting in our prisons or quit cowering when CAIR glowers? And we're going to need a lot more soldiers... not just National Guard.

And so I find myself having to call for war when I want to call for peace.

Siloam tunnel

BBC reports researchers have radio-dated Hezekiah's tunnel to 700 BC, in accordance with other estimates, though "though some have contended it is much younger."

Understand something about scientists: They dream about making a big break-through; with something new nobody expected before. They live under pressure to discover. In fields where there is no easy means of disproving a theory--where experiments are hard or impossible--you'll find that contrarians are quite common, and theories a dime a dozen. I think we have an instance of that here. Ancient records say Hezekiah ordered a tunnel dug, and there's the tunnel. Ockham's rule suggests that Hezekiah actually did order the tunnel. You can be open to the possibility that it was an enlargement of an older structure, or that someone later enlarged or repaired it, but I can't see why you would contend that someone else built it, absent any other substantial evidence.

Scientists also want recognition, which is why any conspiracy theory that requires scientists to keep secrets about 200 mpg cars is laughable. The temptation to publish would be too great.

"The Siloam Tunnel itself remains a wonder of ancient engineering, excavated by two teams of diggers starting at opposite ends and meeting somehow - no-one knows how - in the middle." They didn't have good mirrors, but mirrors they did have. I'd think of surveying-in a pipe with a mirror to reflect skylight down the tunnel. If the mine supervisor finds that the day's digging dims the light to one side, he could correct that in the next day's digging. Or you could try making a surface line from one spot to the other, and have people pound on the rock above; or perhaps at two spots equidistant from the line and let the supervisor try to figure which was closer.

UPDATE 9-Feb-2004: I'm told the tunnel had lots of jags, and someone mentioned occasional vertical shafts (for air or alignment?) Hmm.

War: obsolete index

War

Everybody else already put their oars in, so I guess it is my turn.
Updated 28-Feb-2004
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe--
...
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

---

• We are in a religious war
• Winning a religious war
• Winning a religious war correction
• Comment on comment on MidEast
• France
• Should France be grateful?
• Vichy and D-day question
• American Empire
• War reporting
• A new campaign begins
• Our World-Historical Gamble
• TV reporting of the war
• Terror and Liberalism and Qutb
• Islam Unveiled by Robert Spencer
• Liberia Again
• The Worst Believer is Better than the Best UnBeliever
• 911 in 2003
• Palestinia ns bombing Americans (prediction didn't pan out)
• Bombing Arabs in Riyadh
• Saddam caught, now let's see
• Signs of Winning or Losing
• Battling for Hearts and Minds in a Religious War
• East and West: the Experience of Islam in an expanding Europe
• Muslim Council of Britain note
• Another data point about Islam in the UK
• Yet another data point
• Slipping culture
• Religous war again
• Madrid
• An End to Evil How to Win the War on Terror by David Frum and Richard Perle
• Militant Islam Reaches America by Daniel Pipes
• Nuking Mecca?
• "Entitled" and frustrated
• We hate near-paradise
• In the mosques of the Middle East

---

Peace, peace,' they say, when there is no peace.

The Worst Believer is Better than the Best UnBeliever

I hear very few Muslim voices unconditionally condemning Al Qaeda. Even when somebody ventures a rebuke, it always seems hedged about with complaints and excuses--usually involving the Palestinians.

Part of this is no doubt that everybody likes rooting for David against Goliath, and its no skin off their noses if we get bruised.

Part is systematic. The worst believer is better than the best nonbeliever.

---

It is an article of faith that even the most wicked believer is in a different and better relationship to God than the most virtuous unbeliever. Here understand unbeliever as one who has rejected the revealed truth. The merely ignorant are in a rather different class. Because your relationship with God is infinitely more important than your relationship to anyone or anything else, if follows that even a wicked believer is better before God than the most virtuous person who rejects God. Note that there is a slight difference between my statement and the title.

While a Christian might object that you can't hate your visible brother and still love the invisible God, Christians also hold that believers are better before God than rejectionist unbelievers.

There is no point in trying to challenge this doctrine. That a supernatural relationship is established between God and His worshipers is central to Islam, and to Christianity, and a number of other revealed religions as well. While several Christian denominations deny this, close examination shows that they have departed from orthodoxy in many other particulars as well and do not reflect traditional Christianity.

---

Who is competent to judge who is a believer and who is not? Christianity and Islam nominally provide different answers to this question--after all, Jesus warned that not everyone who called Him Lord was one of His; while anyone who pronounces the formula is Muslim. In practice when clerics dominate we tend to see the same sort of assumptions in both--either you see an inclusionist "If you do the basics you are a real zzz" or you see a heretic-hunting "If you don't do the details you're not a real zzz." In either case the clerics feel competent to judge, and everyone else can follow their lead. This attitude isn't quite as unjustifiable as it might appear, since the proper relationship with God ought to properly order the rest of one's life (sooner or later), and this can be dramatic. We can easily distinguish between Mother Theresa and John Wayne Gacy.

Still, this judgment can look like a usurpation of God's prerogative.

---

What are the practical consequences of the attitude that a believer is better before God than an unbeliever? First notice that if I am competent to judge who is a true believer and who is not, then I can safely say that a believer is better than a unbeliever. Second, the more tightly coupled all aspects of the law are, the larger will be the differences between believer and unbeliever. Commonly a believer's testimony carries more weight than an unbeliever's, who already shows a disregard for the Truth. It just gets worse from there, with greater and greater disabilities applied to the unbeliever. Sharia notoriously couples all aspects of law, but the lack of divine authority to oppress unbelievers hasn't always hobbled Christians either. (Of course in Hinduism, where it is impossible to change your religious status, the restrictions on non-Brahmans enforce a permanent and particularly noxious caste system.)

---

We have a secular society for a number of reasons, including the rise of atheism/secularism, the ascendancy of philosophies that despair of finding absolute truth, a history of bitter experience of religious wars, and a little sentence of Jesus' about giving Caesar what was his and God what was His. The secular society shows some great advantages, even though it has some shortcomings. In fact our society is very aggressively materialist and anti-religious, unless those religions are willing to become materialist and un-dogmatic. This doesn't seem to endear us to Muslims.

I take it as given that a materialist or un-dogmatic religion isn't worth the water to flush it. Attempts to make Islam un-dogmatic I believe must fail at the best, and backfire at the worst. Orthodox Islam is always going to hold that a believer is in a special relationship to God.

At the other end of the chain we find that Islam so tightly couples all aspects of law under divine authority that it seems inevitable that unbelievers must be treated worse than believers.

I think the weakest link in this chain is the assumption that a human can judge if another person is a true believer. If you lie while pronouncing the Muslim formula, are you really a Muslim? Is rebellion against the laws of God kin to apostasy?

---

These subtle points are not useless speculation. We want Muslims to despise evil-doers who injure infidels just as they despise evil-doers who injure Muslims. The more they blindly hang together against the infidel (us), the more cover and scope the bin Ladens have. They should not usurp God's prerogative of final judgment, and restrict themselves to what a human can judge. A little uncertainty about who is honestly Muslim seems compatible with some of the hadiths I've seen.

We need to persuade them that this is Islamic and pious.

We would like Muslims to have the benefits of a secular society (preferably without the evils). They won't accept it unless a secular law is a logical consequence of Islam, or at least not in conflict with it.

We need to encourage them to find the way.

Where can we find scholars willing to study Islam and its expressions who are unafraid to challenge foolish implementations? Perhaps we can't find enough left in the West, but maybe there are some bold souls within Islam willing to ask the loyal but hard questions.

Bad Pun Time

America's Dairyland is a state of superlatives. Whatever you want to see, we're muy.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol 1 by Moore and O'Neill

I heard the movie was a turkey, but the "graphic novels" it was based on were supposed to be pretty good. The premise sounded amusing: collect a disparate crew of heroes from popular novels of the nineteenth century and give them some common task.

It took a while for the library copy to get around to me, hence the lateness of this review. (Yes, I'm a cheapskate.)

In brief: lots of detail (good), lots of attention to detail (very good), lots of references to literature (amusing), lots of plot twists, and only about half of the characters are satisfactorily rendered (the Invisible Man, for one). I suppose some of the failures in rendering are inevitable--some of the characterizations in the books rely on the texture of the original author's prose. But I'm afraid I just don't believe their Nemo.

The (text) back story at the end, apparently intended to explain how Quartermain wound up an addict, is unreadable. While not the worst fan fiction I've ever run across ... well, I couldn't finish it. I skimmed a passage here and there. Why Lovecraft?

I'll only recommend this for fans of the genre. The rest of us can continue to live joyful and contented lives without reading it. (No, it is not for kids.)

Harley Time!

If there are this many Harleys in Madison, what must it be like in Milwaukee? I heard that all the hotels and campsites were full in Milwaukee, so aficionados were sleeping as far away as Madison and commuting to the events.

I dunno what the police thought, but all the riders I ran across were courteous.

Motorcycles aren't high on my wish list: maybe because of all those years of riding on dirt roads. I learned that when another car approached you had to roll up the windows quickly to keep crud from hitting you in the face. I like windshields. And you can't carry very many bags of groceries on a cycle. Still, if I ever found I needed one I'd look at a Harley first. True, it sounds like the motor is coughing up phlegm, but its almost a human sound compared to the other sounds of the road, and I see why people like it.

Mars

Four of us went to campus to try to see Mars Wednesday night. The line for the observatory was easily a block and a half long, and I found out the next day that they only took the first 200 and turned back at least 300. Luckily I remembered the old observatory on top of Sterling.

I called from my office to say where we were going, and yep, the light was on in the dome. Up to the roof, where a stiff breeze was making the youngest daughter bitterly regret her summer outfit. Alas, the grad student manning the refractor hadn't used it before, and was yanking it this way and that staring through the main scope. Someone more experienced suggested that using the spotter scope was a good idea, as was putting eyepieces in the various scopes. (Yes, he had taken the lens cap off.) Still no joy. I was close to offering my services when a researcher took pity on us and offered to let us look through his scope in a nearby dome. His was a much more compact reflector, but with twice the diameter.

He tried to show our little group of 17 a globular cluster first, but my youngest son was first in line, couldn't see well, and grabbed the scope for balance. Sic transit globular cluster. The dome rotated smoothly around as the long-suffering researcher looked for Mars. He spent most of his time punching buttons on some kind of special calculator, which I guess must translate coordinates and time into a direction for the scope.

The magnification was no bigger than on our little scope at home, but it was far brighter, and the colors weren't those of the rainbow. Mars was clear and beautiful--wobbling a bit because of the wind shaking the building. We all looked a couple of times, thanked our host, and trekked our separate ways.

And, of course, what better treat to end an outing with than ice cream?

Glass box purse

Last week a woman boarded the bus carrying a purse which was a glass box--perfectly clear. I could count how many bus tickets she had left, see whether there were hairs in her brush, estimate how fat her wallet was and try to guess where she was planning to go for lunch from the coupons. I did none of these things, but she seemed to invite them. When I mentioned this to a friend from church I learned that some high schools require transparent backpacks! (I leave as an exercise to the reader describing 3 ways of transporting weapons in a transparent backpack, with extra credit for approaches that won't set off metal detectors.)

Transparency is supposed to be a good thing, but I think this exceeds the bounds of courtesy. What next? Transparent clothing? (If you start getting excited, think pot bellies and appendicitis scars.) Surely her job doesn't require this, does it?

Perhaps the lady has an exhibitionist streak, and wanted the world to see what color her comb was and whether she used pads or tampons. I don't think I need to know these details, though.

From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's short stories are often gems, and put to shame most of the unimaginative triple-decker tomes that litter the bookstores. In The Martian Chronicles he assembled a number of his short stories about Mars, added a little connective work, and let fly; not worrying that the various stories weren't very consistent with each other.

Unfortunately he worries about consistency here. I almost didn't finish the book, which would have been a shame, since there are a few fine moments in it. He built it around his Elliot family, with the lonely and oddly unempathetic mind-rider Cecy and the normal boy Timothy living among and longing to be one of the creatures of the night. Bradbury's strength lies in moods, and he undercuts this when he tries to explain too much, or gets preachy--as he does sometimes here. I wish he could have done the collaboration with Charles Adams he mentions in the afterwards--I think they would have fed each other's ideas and made a much better book.

Putting on compassion, kindness, humility ...

In Colossians 3:5-14 we're instructed to put to death the works of the old nature and put on the works of the new. This sounds a bit hypocritical--"never mind what you really feel like, act this way." But if we actually have been given the Spirit of God, then that is now our deepest nature, whether we feel it or not, and it is our job to give expression to the desires of God and not the desires of our old corrupt nature. And so, with faith in the assurances that this is so, let's do it unashamed.

Ain't it always that way?

Some interesting topics in number theory that I'd been playing with in my spare time turn out to have been the subject of a thesis 5 years ago. I asked for a copy (wish it were online!) and I'll see if it answers all the questions I had. Oh well, it won't be the first time I've reinvented the wheel.

(You may ask why I didn't do a literature search long ago. I did, but I wasn't adequately familiar with the jargon describing the tools she used to attack the problems.)

Oxymorons

Not far from us Kraus Realty plowed up some farmland, and, with no apparent sense of irony, built what they call Nature's Preserve Office Park. Not that there was a lot of wildwood there in the first place--next to two highways...

More on Maggie

The Enemies of Eros is extremely disjoint. It reads very much as though it were welded together from a set of essays. In my earlier summary of her main points I reorganized them for a better logical flow. And I did not do justice to her effort to demonstrate how attitudes are shaped by possibilities.

My eldest daughter read it (by agreement, I name no family members here), and asserts that Maggie overstates the antipathy to stay-at-home mothers--she has not observed this. Nor does she think her boyfriend is afflicted by the unwillingness to take responsibility for a family that Maggie saw spreading.

I'll accept both observations, though with the caveat that there's a sampling bias at work. She moves in very different circles from Maggie.

Answering Maggie

In the previous post I gave a skeleton review of Enemies of Eros. The book is notable by its absence of solutions.

Some proposed solutions are implicit:

• Tighten up divorce laws to make it much more difficult to divorce, especially if children are involved.
• Try to rationalize the welfare system to involve fathers.
• She doesn't address this, but it follows from her thesis Phase out all domestic partner benefits.

Unfortunately the biggest problems are social and cultural, and not amenable to simple actions. The cultural elite are unfriendly to traditional families, and you can't just make this entrenched oligarchy change their minds or go away at the snap of your fingers--a real cultural revolution takes time. What can you offer to counter the flood of "sex without responsibility" images that flood the movies, TV, radio, and advertisements?

One thing that can help is to ask "Who benefits from the current situation?" Unmarried men make out very well (pun intended), and business interests benefit from the cheap labor pool that the influx of part-time women represent. Realize that there are winners as well as losers, and ask if it is worth the candle.

We need to be clear what we support, and able to dissect the bogus sociology and philosophy that supports the anti-family forces.

We need to review our approach to the legal standing of families, with an eye to re-incorporating the role of the extended family. The nuclear family should not be the ideal--the extended family has built-in psychological and financial support that we need to recognize.

Enemies of Eros

by Maggie Gallagher

How the sexual revolution is killing family, marriage, and sex and what we can do about it

Her book spreads itself to touch many different topics and examples, and does not follow a path sharp enough to summarize easily. I'll try anyway. [Go read the book yourself! Also see The Abolition of Marriage] She observes that:

• Sex in our culture has been abstracted, dehumanized, and dis-integrated. "Sex is about physical pleasure" is the Big Lie. If sex were only about physical pleasure, who would bother with the complexities of dealing with another purpose, when masturbation is so easy? Sex is about the union with another person: not just a body, not just a set of physical stimuli.
• Sex without responsibility is an illusion. Sex makes babies, who require years of care--unless you kill them.
• Contract law doesn't even begin to reflect the complexities and sacrifices that marriage and parenting entail. Contract law focuses on choices rather than status, but in a family responsibilities are based on status--husband, wife, father, mother, child. To be a member of a family is the exact opposite of being an economic cog in the machine; and interchangeable part.
• You can't pay people enough to raise a child properly--unless they fall in love with the child.
• Children need stable families.(*)
• Gender differences are real. Their expression varies slightly with the culture, but every other culture tries to distinguish masculine and feminine. Sex roles create a climate of stability.
• Easy divorce creates a climate of instability that effects everybody.
• It is no longer possible to make a commitment to marry for life and have this honored by law. Marriage in the customary sense no longer exists in law.
• Popular feminist theory demonizes stay-at-home mothers. This is perverse enough already, but an unintended side effect of encouraging women to work and be independent is that men take this at face value, and frequently decline to support the woman and his/her children.
• Some women are meant for careers outside the home, but the majority fall in love with their children.
• Men need to be civilized. Without social pressure they often duck their responsibilities, and thus never fall in love with their children, and thus do not care for them effectively.
• The sexual revolution is designed for the convenience of unmarried men. Women are expected to put out without the promise of commitment.
• Simple-minded welfare programs have, by making men less necessary, made them less involved with their families (often never bothering to marry), and thus perpetuating the poverty the programs were meant to relieve.

To give a flavor of her insights...

If sex roles are too stifling, the obvious answer is to widen the range of opportunity contained in the role, not to extirpate gender altogether. What is the result of attempting to abolish sex roles by proclamation? Men, abandoning a civilized male role, increasing turn to promiscuous sex and violence as their primary route to male identity. Women remain in our traditional role as caretakers of the children--poorer, overworked, more vulnerable to male abandonment and abuse. And children, both male and female, become the most vulnerable of all.

Men are, apparently, rather bad at determining when a woman is actually attracted to them.

I don't know how they can have failed to notice that, as a matter of hard empirical fact, not every woman who smiles at a man is signaling an uncontrollable desire to become his own sweet patootie. But from their point of view, it seems, men are constantly surrounded by lustful women who perversely refuse to sleep with them. ... What men are apparently doing is projecting their own sexual responses onto women. It's only natural, women do the same thing in the opposite direction.

One consequence is that women vastly underestimate the effect their sexuality has on men in relationships which they have defined as nonromantic. This emerged clearly in Richardson's landmark study of mistresses. "One of the primary reasons these relationships escalate is because the men and women have different assessments of the situation. 'His' reality and 'Her' reality are not the same." If forewarned is forearmed, women who believe in androgyny are ripe for the plucking.

And get plucked they do.

Nothing is more astonishing than the naivete of the sophisticated woman. "We talked about it for several months," reports one woman, "and I only saw him after work. I told him I wouldn't mind just being friends, purely platonic, but if he wanted a flesh relationship, forget it. Because he kept seeing me, I knew he wanted to be friends too."

By all means go read her book(s).

---

(*)The crime rates prove this. Note people frequently lie with statistics, by saying that the average child without a stable family is not much more violent than one from a stable family. This is misleading because the criminal activity comes from the tail of the distribution (the number violent beyond a certain threshold), and a small change in the mean produces a huge change in the number whose violence becomes disruptive.

She points out that black families in the USA have been hugely disrupted, and the social effects are horrible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology

is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke

NIMBY = Not In My BackYard

BANANA = Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody

I gather that our existing power generation technology is already so advanced that a large fraction of the American public considers it magical. Who needs power plants or transmission lines? Doesn't electricity just automatically appear when you turn on the switch?

What a way to welcome new students!

Johnson street (the eastbound of a pair of streets) is torn up from Engineering to well past the East end of campus. One spinmeister said that we now have "4 lanes of gravel parking" for the convenience of move-ins, but that's cold comfort to out-of-towners. Madison is like a strangled octopus even when all the roads are available.

Islam Unveiled

by Robert Spencer

Spencer's thesis is simple: It is not possible to separate out a violent and a peaceful Islam--both spring from exactly the same root.

He addresses in each chapter issues like "Does Islam Respect Human Rights," The Crusades: Christian and Muslim," "Is Islam Tolerant of Non-Muslims," and "Does Islam Promote and Safeguard Sound Moral Values?" To answer the latter he draws heavily on the life of Muhammad, showing his prophecies to be remarkably solicitous of Muhammad's sex life. It is trivial to demonstrate that Islam is not a particularly peaceful religion. The Crusades were the Western reaction to the Muslim jihad, after all.

While Spencer recognizes periods of tolerance of non-Muslims, he cites Bat Yeor and a number of other historical incidents to show that intolerance is just as fundamental as tolerance.

That there are many peaceful Muslims is not germane to the issue. It is possible to be a peaceful Muslim and true to traditions of the founder of Islam. It is also possible to be a violent and intolerant Muslim and still be true to the traditions of the founder, and Spencer illustrates the sources of these traditions. It is not possible to be a violent and intolerant Christian and still be true to the dictates of Jesus.

Without drastic reform, Islam will continue to inspire violent subgroups. And (though Spencer doesn't address this) there isn't a simple rule for reform. Qur'an-only doesn't help, nor does "Qur'an plus only the best-attested hadith."

Kristof and Religion

In his most recent column in the NYTimes Kristof expresses astonishment at the number of people who believe in their religion, and bemoans their lack of intellect. Of course he puts it in nicer words than that, but that's what it boils down to. To help make his point, he looks at Mary rather than Jesus; and talks about the Virgin Birth (found in the original sources) and the Assumption of Mary (a much later addition, and not universally accepted) in the same breath--a debating tactic rather than a real argument.

He refers to two Biblical scholars who disparage the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, and leaves you with the impression that these represent all Biblical scholarship. But a quick googling (combing out the popularizers) shows scholarship on both sides of the issue, addressing precisely the points he mentions. In short, Biblical scholarship cannot be claimed to be on the side of the skeptics. He is badly misinformed.

At the end he says "The heart is a wonderful organ, but so is the brain," and asserts that we are drifting "away from a rich intellectual tradition and toward the mystical." I propose that Mr. Kristof try reading a little history, and learn who Aquinas was, for example.

In the "answer-back" section in which he replies to readers Kristof quotes Kant to the effect that religious matters are not open to proof or disproof. Selective scholarship of this sort does not reflect well on Kristof. Plenty of scholars disagree with Kant on this matter. He may be fashionable, but that doesn't mean he's right. In the earliest Christian writings Paul says that Christianity is open to disproof--if Jesus wasn't raised from the dead, then he (Paul) is wrong; and if you doubt the fact then go ask the eyewitnesses.

I thought reporters went out looking for facts (and sometimes Kristof seems to do this well), but in some ways Kristof seems to want to hide in a comfy little philosophical world--no debate needed with the obviously ignorant outsiders.

The ideal of the working woman

The stay-at-home woman isn't earning a paycheck, and the dominant forms of feminism in this land seem to despise her for that. I find it rather curious that feminism, nominally founded on the notion that women are people just as valuable as men, seems instead to believe that men and women are not really valuable at all except as cogs in economic machines. I suppose that's a kind of equality...

Analog to Godel's Theorem in Politics?

Godel's Theorem says that within any axiomatic (logical) system of inference and proof, it is possible to make a statement within that system which is valid, true, and unprovable, unless you introduce some new postulates (rules). This put a quick end to the grand attempts to derive all of mathematics from a few postulates.

Years of watching legislatures tinker with laws, and years of laying down the law myself as we try to raise children, have led me to suspect that Godel's theorem has a political/legal analog.

When we make laws we use various principles, and observations about what is just and unjust, to guide the creation of laws designed to punish some actions and reward other actions. No matter how well crafted the laws may be (and I try hard, I assure you), there always seems to be some loophole. There always is some behavior that ought to be rewarded and isn't, or ought to be punished and can't be. The analogy with axiomatic systems is not exact, so I can't prove this rigorously, but it is empirically true that "There is always a loophole." (Call it a special case of the Law of Unintended Side Effects). That sounds like a joke, but check it for yourself--it is true.

So, what do we do? Here at home we when faced with a problem we can try

• "We are the king and queen and the ultimate authority, and we're going to punish this even if it didn't break the rules, because it violates such and such a principle."
• "Oops, oh well. Just don't do that next time."
• "Drat. We have to make a new rule about that."

Because we're the parents, and because we love our children, we can make any of these work reasonably well; but we're still fiddling with the rules after 21 years (our youngest is almost 10).

The political world is rather different. What do you do when someone comes up with a creative way of bookkeeping that bends the rules, or tries out a new mask for extortion?

• We can select a person or group to review cases with the authority to override the laws if there is manifest injustice. You may as well call this person a king. We know what happens with kings--the temptation to abuse power for their own benefit generally gets the better of them. [OK, not always, but almost always]
• We can shrug our shoulders, say that nothing is perfect, and hope that social pressure or approval serves to fix the problem. The culture isn't always perfect either, of course (I give you Pakistani attitudes toward rape as an example); and history is full of plausible villains who managed to finesse social pressure and win support for their villainy.
• We can add a new observation to the system ("yyy" is bad) and pass some new laws to take care of the problem. Of course there'll be a new loophole in the new and improved system. In addition, steering among the thicket of laws becomes harder; and eventually the laws begin to contradict each other (see the US Federal Tax Code for examples {hat tip to an H&R Block man I carpooled with}). Unless there are periodic efforts to eliminate laws the system becomes unusably complex--buggy.
• Run things according to God's laws, which are by definition perfect. Unfortunately the interpreters turn out to be imperfect (and not infrequently stupid) priests, imams, or what have you.
• Trust to education and reshaping the culture to make people look for the just and the good even when these are not strictly prescribed by law. The fact that this hasn't worked anywhere for the past 3000 years doesn't seem to dissuade the partisans of this method who seem certain that their little change in strategy will make the teaching take. Rule of thumb--it is easy to make people worse, but very hard to make people better

There don't seem to be any silver bullets for this problem, and indeed if "Godel's Political Analog" is true, we shouldn't expect one.

One thing does seem to work, or at least help. If the participants have both humility and a hunger to do the right thing, the results can be acceptably just and free. These virtues aren't legislatable, or even reliably teachable. If these virtues infuse the culture (not the same as saying that everyone has them), the society may not be perfect, but it will be a lot nicer to live in provided you come from the right side of the tracks. You needn't have a law against cannibalism if the act is unthinkable. You don't need laws against littering if everyone thinks the public streets are their own and picks up any trash they see (yes, I lived in Switzerland for a few months).

I think I can safely assert that these sorts of virtues do not arise naturally out of some kind of social system, but are inputs to it. I may revisit that assertion to demonstrate it... And I can't say that any of the examples either have been permanent or have extended their benefits to strangers well.

Subliminal or sloppy?

On the back of a 22oz box of Corn CHEX

everyone LOVES
   waking up to chex!

Two, and only two letters overlap: the large letter s from 'loves' and the h from 'chex'. The eye reads it naturally just the way you expect: waking up to Sex....

None of the Above

There've been several elections I've voted in where I disliked all the candidates for some office or another. I've wished there were a binding way of saying None of these turkeys--try again.

Suppose there were? How could we get it to work?

First off, we can't do this for the office of the President without monkeying with the Constitution, and I want to avoid that. Any experiments we should try locally and see what happens. (The Law of Unintended Consequences is a fundamental rule of the Universe.)

Let's define a simple model, and try it out as a gedanken experiment. Bear in mind that this does not interfere with other voting approaches, such as weighted voting.

For each office, the last name on the ballot is "None of the Above." If a candidate achieves a majority, he wins. If no candidate achieves a majority, there is a runoff election. In that runoff election no candidate outpolled by "None of the Above" may appear. If, for example, NOTA (None of the Above) receives more votes than all but candidate A, then candidate A may appear on the runoff ballot, but the others may not. All parties which ran candidates on the first ballot may offer replacement candidates, with the number of signatures required to appear being reduced. NOTA is also a candidate on this runoff election.

If no candidate receives a majority in the runoff election, a second runoff election is scheduled. The number of signatures required to appear on the ballot is the same as for the first runoff. This time no candidate is excluded, and NOTA does not appear on the ballot (somebody has to serve in the office, after all). (There might be a third runoff between the top two vote-winners.)

Comments:

• This is apt to be expensive.
• Getting together enough signatures in a few weeks is hard, and biases the system towards nominating people for the runoffs who have a very strong organization backing them, such as party and labor leaders. Personal shoeleather campaigns are less likely to win.
• If party X has a strong candidate A and nobody else in the wings as good, then party Y faces a strong temptation to wage a campaign of cynicism in hopes that NOTA will win and give party Y a better chance in the runoff.

The way it ought to work

All parties nominate decent candidates who argue about issues and credentials. The voters give one a majority.
Scenario A

Party X nominates A and party Y nominates B. During the campaign we discover that A has some unfortunate character traits or lack of skill. Yellow-dog partisans of X, unwilling to ever vote for anyone from party Y, vote for NOTA hoping for a runoff. If NOTA actually outpolls candidate B, B must not be very popular in the district, and it doesn't distort the representation to let party X have the chance to try somebody new. Conclusion: It costs $$ but doesn't misrepresent the wishes of the voting public.
Scenario B

Voters become even more cynical than they are now. Rather than stay home when they don't know who's who, a significant number show up and register protest NOTA votes. This could be important, as about 60% of potential voters don't. Voters who don't show up don't distort the results much, but voters trying to sabotage the system can. Conclusion: Regular wins by NOTA are a warning sign. Either the parties are fielding jerks, the campaigns are worthless, or a large chunk of the population has given up on democracy.
Scenario C

Selecting nominees becomes a poker game, where party bosses calculate the chances of forcing a runoff; offering sacrificial candidates for the first round and campaigning for NOTA. They balance the risk that the other party might beat NOTA and the risk that NOTA might also win the runoff against the chance of putting the other party's best candidate out of the running. Conclusion: I don't see any upside to this. The strategy is very risky, but I've learned not to underestimate the cunning of political strategists.

Worth a try?

A city might be willing to try this experiment, if the state legislature could be persuaded to agree. Yours?

Vices

Usually the light timing is such that I drive through the intersection with the "adult" bookstore, but this morning I waited at the red. A woman stepped out of the store into the back parking lot, lit up and stood smoking in front of the "No loitering" sign. The law keeps most businesses here "smoke-free"--some vices are unsupportable. :-)

Liberia Again

In a previous post I tried to understand how we could intervene. I had an oversight in the analysis: It is all too easy to define a country's interests as those of some particular special interest, and those can be (and often have been) global and intrusive. I was assuming that we gave enough attention to the situation to spot and forestall such hijackings of foreign policy--but it is true that we haven't always been caught them.

It certainly looks as though the situation has deteriorated for Taylor et al, but I can't tell for sure since I don't know how LURD and Taylor are supplied. LURD might be running low on ammo and about ready to fall back. I hope the CIA knows, but I've my doubts about their competence in studying non-sexy countries. I have the feeling that Bush is hoping that Taylor's forces collapse, ending the official civil war (though maybe not the soldier vs civilian civil conflict).

But what then? If LURD won, they'd have a load of Taylor's soldiers on their hands. It wouldn't be smart to try to kill them all, however richly they may deserve it--you want them to surrender and be disarmed. (Just execute the officers?) So what will these soldiers do after the war? What will LURD's soldiers do, given that most won't be needed any more? I think the answer is pretty plain: freelancing.

And freelancing Liberian fighters is exactly what the region does not need.

So is our plan to wait till LURD wins and then lean on them hard to collect the leftover fighters for (supervised) retraining? Imagine guarded camps run by the US which hold the fighters, ID the fighters, trace their home towns (part of ID'ing them), train those we think trainable and imprison those obviously guilty of major crimes. The graduates get a chunk of farmland (I know, this doesn't fit well into the old village system, but I'm not sure how much of that is left anyway) or some tools for their new career, and a warning that if they're ever caught with a weapon again they die.

That would take care of some of the fighters, but not all by a long shot. It takes a relatively small commitment of money and forces once the fighters are rounded up--but we'd have to be ready right away. And the recidivists will still be a serious problem in and around Liberia. And without a lot of help rebuilding infrastructure Liberia will continue to be a mess, and someone else will start this foolishness again. And LURD will need to be leaned on hard to become and stay honest. It still doesn't sound expensive, but it takes a commitment and alert people.

Semi-Conclusion

I believe that we have both strategic interests and an ethical obligation to help Liberia. (We did not have such an ethical obligation to Somalia.) I am just not sure what the best thing to do is. If we weren't in the middle of a war I could support the grand intervention with more enthusiasm--it doesn't seem a very dangerous battlefield--but it does tie up a lot of troops. I don't want our troops sitting in between warring factions, which seems to be what Taylor wants (and the starving refugees too). Given the recent history of the country, we would need to demand a large say in how any aid we offer is used--essentially turning the country from a nation into a protectorate.

Perhaps the best solution is to let (or covertly help) LURD win, and then immediately send in aid, but condition all military and economic assistance on Liberia becoming a 10-year protectorate of the US. But this is incredibly tricky. We have to have agreements in place with rebel groups right now. It requires finding people able to supervise rebuilding right now. And I don't think there's a lot of political support for it either.