Militant Islam Reaches America

by Daniel Pipes

For this book Pipes collected a number of essays he wrote or cowrote over the past decade. The first set are on the subject of Islamism and militant Islam, and the second on the subject of Islam in the US. The topics range from Elijah Muhammad to Hizbullah in North Carolina to why the US government is a patron of Islam. Naturally in such a collection you'll find many thesis, and perhaps even some evolution of his thought. And therefore my description will be somewhat scattershot :-(

In "Is Islam a Threat?" he introduces the idea that Islamism "turns the traditional religion of Islam into a twentieth-century ideology," more interested in political power than theology. I'll certainly accept the claim that Islamism owes a great debt to the Western totalitarian ideologies ( Berman's book goes into this in detail), but I think he draws too great a distinction between religion and state affairs in Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev. From Khomeini's point of view, accepting Islam as a political ideology automatically brings with it accepting Islam as a religion, since that is part of the implementation of Islamic laws. I suspect that some Muslims focus on getting the ritual and personal aspects of their religion down, and hope the social and political will follow naturally. Some clearly focus on getting the political and legal/social structure in place first, and worry about personal aspects later.

Interestingly, at some points in the book he points out that many Islamists are quite familiar with the West, and in fact this familiarity is part of what drives their anger. From what I've heard of some of the case histories this seems to be at least partly true. And yet in other parts of the book he insists that Islamists do not understand what distinctives of Western culture have given it its power. "Innocent of any deeper understanding of how the two countries differed, the Islamists vaguely thought they could repeat their Soviet success in America." Perhaps this is merely a contradiction. I think it may also reflect both our failure to educate even ourselves about our own culture, and a hollow in the heart of that culture. Aside from a few buzz-words about democracy and freedom, most of our youth seem to have no idea what the West was about; and a culture of solipsistic hedonism cuts the heart out of our ideals.

As Pipes points out, the Islamist's closest targets are other Moslems (as in Algeria); and they are often roundly hated in return. He claims that the Islamists have rolled their own version of Islam without reference to the traditions. I'm not sure this is true. He says classical Islam left minorities to rule their own affairs--which isn't exactly true, as Bat Ye'or showed. In regions (note that this is territorial, contrary to his formulation) of Dar Al Islam, the dhimmis were still controlled, albeit through their chosen representatives, and sometimes attacked despite the treaty. In any event, Islamists hate Jews and Christians even more than they hate apostates.

In several chapters Pipes points out what should be perfectly obvious to everybody by now--that in many places in Europe and the US some of the Muslim immigrants form a belligerent and unassimilated group with a hate-filled agenda. That most Muslims should want to establish a caliphate in place of the existing governments is hardly unexpected, given the nature of the religion. That they should often carefully nurture their hates is not forgivable, especially if we're the targets.

Pipes demonstrates that in the urge to keep from offending Muslim our government and most media have essentially propagandized in favor of Islam. Even Paul Harvey caved in quickly when Muslims complained about his reporting. Given that blaspheming the prophet is often a capital offense, I don't doubt that a lot of the phone calls and letters included threats. Still, we seem to be spectacularly invertebrate when it comes to judging and reporting on the obvious demerits of some Muslims and their practice of Islam. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Muslim Islamic World is a politically correct screed for Islam--never a negative; all joy and light.

Pakistan modified its code to make the (rather vaguely defined) crime of blaspheming Muhammad a capital offense. I have not yet found any reference to a punishment for blaspheming God, but I'm still looking.

Pipe's description of the Islamist is of a well-educated man exposed to the West and hating it. Aside from the obvious fact that most Islamists will be followers and not leaders, and thus probably less well-off, this thumbnail description seems to reflect a cult rather than a sect: more of a new religion than a breakaway group. I'm not sure if this distinction applies as well with Islam, but . . .

A large fraction of the Muslims in the US are from the Nation of Islam, a bizarre group led into to popularity by Elijah Muhammad. Pipes summarizes a book describing his life and the rise of the organization, which I'd not seen anywhere before. A "squeaky little man teaching hate" changed the face of religion in the US as he spread a creed mixed of science fiction and hatred.

Did slaves bring Islam with them from Africa? Pipe reviews a book claiming yes, though some of the details he reports are unconvincing. That may be due to omissions by Pipes, or the book may be stretching too far.

Pipes offers suggestions for American policy on Islam and Islamism in "Do Moderate Islamists Exist?" (short answer: no).

• Formulate and justify a policy toward militant Islam. Distinguish this from Islam, show its political dimension, and say we're against it.
• Prove that we're willing to resist.
• Ally with appropriate governments; mostly left leaning, as right leaning are often allied with Islamists.
• Do not engage in official or political dialogue with the Islamists.
• Do not appease the Islamists.
• Do not help the Islamists do anything at all. (tough to do when we have to ally with Pakistan to get at Afghanistan)
• Pressure militant Islamic states to reduce aggressiveness
• Support those confronting militant Islam
• Urge gradual democratization. Too rapid means populist Islamist parties are apt to do "One man, one vote, one time" games. Work on creating a civil society first, with democracy as the capstone.

In "Who is the Enemy?" Pipes estimates that the Islamist supporters number about 10-15% of all Muslims, and half of all Muslims hate the US. Moderate Muslims are politically weak and don't have a lot of economic power either, and are often intimidated by the Islamists. The great battle is going to have to be between Islamists and the rest of the Muslims, because they're the biggest targets and us infidels don't have standing to change religious interpretations. One policy won't fit all countries, but our goal is to weaken the Islamist side and help the "moderate" side in each region. We have to diligently exclude and expel radical Islamists in the US (and yes, this is constitutional; the relevant law was upheld). Actually keep track of who is fomenting hatred, and jail them if possible. Use some thought about our propaganda campaigns overseas--we've been looking like dunces.

Read it.

Fire devastates Saatchi artworks

The BBC reports on an intense warehouse fire that destroyed more than 100 "artworks" from Charles Saatchi's collection, including work by Turner prize winners and Emin's "Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-95" tent (with photos of everyone she's slept with and of her aborted fetuses sewn inside).

Unfortunately the disposal has also destroyed a cafe, furniture factory, and a auto repair shop. I hope the firefighters are safe and that the various businesses are able to recover soon.

The Radioactive Boy Scout

by Ken Silverstein

Some of us remember a story from late 1994 about a boy who tried to build a reactor in a shed in his backyard. Ken Silverstein tells his story.

David Hahn's father Ken was a mechanical engineer, and David early on learned how to disassemble and reassemble model kits, radios, printers, and other gadgets his father brought home. He dreamed of invention. A pivotal point in his life came with the gift of The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments from 1960, which had lively experiments--making chlorine gas, or chloroform; not like the wimpy Usborne or DK safety-first science books. The Curies became his heroes.

His parents divorced and remarried and he shuttled back and forth between them. His father Ken was extremely inattentive, and his mother Patty mentally unstable and alcoholic. Supervision of David came second, obviously.

Enamored of the things he could do with chemistry (fireworks, tanning solutions, and on and on) David's reach grew; and the "frog in the saucepan" effect meant that his various parents got used to strange gases, explosions, damaged carpet, and the occasional emergency room visit. David had no conception of safety. One day he determined to get a sample of every single element, and over the years he collared quite a few. Some are hard to get: radium, for instance, and plutonium. So, inspired by the notion of transmuting elements, and on fire with the idea of creating a working model of a breeder reactor, he set about finding the peices to make his own nuclear reactions.

Ken had persuaded him to join the Boy Scouts, and try for Eagle--and naturally David went for badges in chemistry and nuclear science. These provided plausible cover for his activities. Since he couldn't find all he needed in the local library he wrote the NRC, DOE, and everybody else he could think of for information, and slowly he pieced together what he would need. Thorium and radium are fairly easily obtainable in tiny quantities: thorium in lantern mantles and radium in antique glowing clock dials. He bought, borrowed, and stole (still unrepentantly!) items he needed. He ashed and purified the thorium, stole some beryllium, and patiently collected and purified radium from old clock dials to make his neutron gun. At school his fellow students thought he was blowing smoke until he showed some of them what the Geiger counter did with his samples.

He put together a table-top model of a reactor, and started it going with the neutron gun--and was gratified to find more radiation coming out than went in. In fact, after a while the background levels were quite high even far away from his shed.

Luckily for the neighborhood's health, the police picked him up for suspicious activity, searched his car, and the authorities soon realized they had a major health issue on their hands. His shed was shipped off to a nuclear waste dump, and he claims that the bulk of his "good stuff" (radium and thorium) wound up in the public dump when his parents panicked and got rid of it.

And what became of him? He became an Eagle Scout, though there was an effort to strip him of his status on the grounds of his being so careless with public safety. He joined the Navy, wound up on a nuclear powered carrier, and was forbidden to ever tour the reactor. He seems to still have the old fascination with nuclear power, and brings his Geiger counter into antique stores still. He will probably die young--he undoubtedly breathed a lot of radioactive dust. He still can't spell, and is no good at academics.

The book is based on an article written in Harper's Magazine. It would have been better to keep it as an article. Silverstein pads the story shamelessly, and ignorantly. You can almost taste the horror he feels at having to write the word "chemical." Silverstein does his best to depict the Boy Scouts as a neo-Nazi group indoctrinating youth into right-wing fealty to big corporations. And of course, nobody could possibly consider nuclear power for any reasonable purpose--Silverstein tries to prove that it is all a naive boondoggle, breeders especially.

Silverstein did quite a bit of research for the book, but evidently didn't understand any of it. Over and over you may find explanations of some bit of chemistry or nuclear physics, but half the time the explanation is irrelevant to the issues at hand. Even some of the simplest stuff is wrong: sodium is not explosive, for example. Dump it in a puddle and you'll get some big bangs and splatters of sodium hydroxide, but to call it explosive is seriously misleading. And, as Silverstein points out in the notes "At times, I found David's tale incredible, and there's no way to be certain of how far he got with his experiments, as he was the only witness to many of the events."

I recommended the book to a few people before I'd read far into it. Now I think I'll recommend the original article instead.

High Society by Dave Sim

This is a "graphic novel," which is to say a high-toned comic book. Disclaimer: I haven't read the first book, so maybe I'm missing something. The story arc follows the aardvark Cerebus as he arrives at the big city and finds himself more and more deeply emmeshed in the political scheming. This isn't Cerebus' cup of tea--he/she/it has much simpler tastes, such as money: but of course money comes along with power and so he is enticed into trying to gain power. The deepest battles turn out to be fought over who is going to get paid by a city that's completely bankrupt in a country of completely bankrupt cities; and what role the religious authorities will play.

I gather that this is supposed to be satirical, and it almost works. Ever-scheming Astoria and her lunatic "superhero" husband are nicely done, and Cerebus skates in and out of being an interesting character. The artwork is well done, and some of the scenes are fun. I think I'll pass on the other volumes in the series--it isn't to my taste.

The Progress Paradox

by Gregg Easterbrook

"How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse"

By almost every measure, we're better off. We're healthier, richer, longer-lived, freer. And it isn't just Americans--even in the developing world people are healthier and richer on the average. Why are so many of us miserable and incessant complainers?

Gregg asserts that when you correct for the large population of first generation immigrants to America, there is no growing gap between rich and poor or rich and middle class. Crime is dropping, and "Leading a straight-arrow lifestyle is your best defense against becoming a crime victim." The air is cleaner. "During the 2000 presidential campaign much was made of the fact that Houston had taken over from Los Angeles as the nation's 'smog capital.' Hardly anyone added that this happened during a period when Houston's smog diminished; it's just that L.A. pollution declined even faster." The water is cleaner, and there are more forests than when Columbus landed. Car deaths are down; cars are more fuel efficient and even boast higher performance. Food is cheap, plentiful, and in a variety hardly known even to emperors of old. Information about virtually anything in the world is available in firehose quantities. Work is safer and less onerous (on the whole) than ever before. Marriages aren't disintegrating as frequently as in the recent past (I'm not sure my observations agree with his, though).

So why is depression so common, and why are people so anxious?

One obvious source is the bias in our information. When Bush delayed implementing new arsenic guidelines pending a review, it was front page New York Times news (misreported as a cancellation, in their now-customary creative approach to reporting). When the guidelines were approved, it was noted briefly on page 18. Fundraising groups hype the horrific possibilities lying in wait if you don't send money--sometimes hyping with deliberate omissions and sometimes with outright lies. "If it bleeds, it leads" is the law governing reporting in all our media, leading to "headline-amplified anxiety." Elites like a focus on bad news, since it offers them a raison d'etre.

Easterbrook spends the first few chapters explaining why things are actually going very well (almost all around the world), and then asking why we perceive it as bad. Then he looks at the relationship of money and possessions to happiness. The really poor tend to be unhappy; happiness rises with income up to a level commensurate with lower middle class; income and happiness are decoupled thereafter. Wants can never be satisfied, and you are likely to find yourself controlled by your possessions if you focus on acquisition: "The victor belongs to the spoils."

From the chapter "Stress--It's Nature's Plan" I took this excerpt:

Nevertheless many prominent researchers have embraces the estimate of a tenfold increase in unipolar depression in the Western nations. One who endorses this number is Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a past president of the American Psychological Association. Seligman has developed a four-step theory on why depression is rising so much.

The first cause, Seligman thinks, is individualism. "Unipolar depression is a disorder of the thwarting of the 'I,' and we are increasingly taught to view all through the 'I,'" Seligman believes. Past emphasis on family, faith, patriotism, and community was sometimes suffocating, but also allowed individuals to view their private setbacks as minor elements within a larger context. Today in the United States and Western Europe, where formal adherence to religion is declining, community loyalties are diluted by constant moving, families are smaller and fragile, and, where only a minority now tell pollsters they consider devotion to country important, the "I" is practically the only lens through which to view events. "Rampant individualism causes us to think that our setbacks are of vast importance and thus something to become depressed about," Seligman continues. If your life is centered in family, community, faith, or nationk, and things aren't going well for you, surely there will be some person or some part of an institution to whom you are connected for whom or where things are going well, or, at least, where the problems seem more important than yours. If, however, your life is centered on pure individualism and something goes poorly, there is no counterweight. You feel bad and nothing pulls you in the other direction.

From the beginning of the Enlightenment, through the establishment of Jeffersonian democracy, through the French existentialist movement and up to the present day, writers, thinkers, artists, and huge number of typical men and women have fought for the idea that people should be free agents, unhindered by the demands of church, state, or social convention. Now that condition is largely achieved in the West, bringing with it unprecedented liberty. But freedom isn't free, as military theorists like to say. In the case of depression, the cost of freedom is leaving every person to the fate of pure individualism, without consolation or context. But the setbacks that almost everyone endures may, in the unanchored framework of pure individualism, accumulate into a cause of depression--about which, then, you may have no one or no institution to turn to, other than the disembodied voice on the 800 number at your HMO.

As his second cause of the depression epidemic, Seligman blames the self-esteem craze. It may seem counterintuitive that focus on raising self-esteem, which is supposed to make people feel good, results in them becoming depressed. But then, many initiatives have unintended consequences. "Self-esteem emphasis has made millions think there's something fundamentally wrong if you don't feel good, as opposed to just, 'I don't feel good right now, but I will later,'" Seligman says. If you don't feel good now but will ater, that's a minor matter. If something is fundamentally wrong with your life, that's pretty depressing.

Self-esteem counselors and others in the movement maintain that people ought to feel good about themselves all the time, a notion most psychologists find hopelesssly unrealistic. Everyone has setbacks, or bad days, or simply periods of time when things are boring or crummy; don't obsess because you'll have better days, is Seligman's advice. The preaching of self-esteem, now common in public schools and in the midafternoon-television and talk-radio universe, instills the idea that a person ought always to be beaming with satisfaction, and if not, then he or she must have been wronged by someone or some institution and should be angry. Fixation on self-esteem may, in the end, only cause us to go looking for things to become upset about. People who go looking for things to become upset about rarely fail to find them.

Seligman's third cause of depression flows from the second, being the "postwar teaching of victimology and helplessness." Intellectuals, politicians, tort lawyers, and the media have in the last few decades become ever more proficient at discovering victims. So many classes of victimhood have been proclaimed that, in cumulative terms, today every person in the United States may be able to call himself or herself a victim or something or other; leaving aside the question of, if we're all victims, then who did the victimizing?

Surveys, Seligman notes, show that ever higher percentages of Americans describe themselves as victims. A steadily rising percentage of incoming college freshmen, for example, characterize themselves as having been victimized or possessing little control over their fates. For university freshmen, such views may actually be rewarded--those claiming victimhood on admission essays probably increase their odds of being accepted to college, and the more innovative the victimhood claim, the better. But for contemporary Americans to claim lack of control over their own fates is striking, since, objectively, personal freedom has never been greater. The We're-All-Victims worldview only serves to deter men and women from asserting control over their own psyches.

Seligman finds particularly counterproductive, and depression-inducing, the craze for adults asserting they were victimized by their parents. Only in extreme cases, such as sexual abuse, is there a clear link between parenting behavior and adult personality, Seligman thinks the psychological data show. "You are entitled to blame your parents for the genes they gave you but you are not entitled, by any research that I know of, to blame them for the way they treated you," Seligman says. Yet the blaming of parents has become a minor industry in the contemporary United States, inspiring talk shows and whole categories of junk-science litigation. A relevant note: Depressed patients often blame their parents for their condition, but once recovered from depression, usually stop blaming parents and describe their former claims as a crutch.

Fourth of Seligman's inventory of causes of depression is runaway consumerism. Shopping, sports cars, expensive chocolates, and the like are "shortcuts to well-being," Seligman supposes. Acquiring material things may produce a momentary feeling of gratification, but the feeling rarely lasts. Incessant purchases may be piled atop one another in the quest for the same gratification that purchases once brought--this is the basic dynamic of shopaholism--while ever higher spending actives the cycle of work-and-spend. Spending as a "shortcut" to well-being is crippling owing to debt, or by locking a person or a head of a household into the soul-draining existence of always chasing maximized income.

That runaway consumerism may be a malady in the clinical sense is suggested by the fact that it sometimes responds to medication. Recent studies have suggested that shopaholism can be treated by the antidepressant Celexa. This may sound like a postmodern practical joke--if your problem is that you spend too much money, what you need is an expensive prescription drug. But it's inarguable that runaway consumerism harms some people's well-being: They spend too much, or waste too much time shopping, or make compulsion-driven purchases of things they don't even necessarily want. Perhaps excessive consumerism is a cause of depression, or perhaps a symptom, with people shopping too much because they are depressed--metaphorically, endlessly seeking that which they do not find. In either case, if an antidepressent relieves the condition, this tells us consumerism and depression are linked. That is not good news for a society grounded in consumerism.

The question of happiness and unhappiness cannot be separated from questions of meaning and responsibility. The current philosophical fashion bellows that existence is meaningless, since we arrive by accident and are shaped by random impersonal forces. Good and evil are imaginary, or at least arbitrary. You would think that claims so contrary to human experience would merely be laughed at--plainly the philosophers have made some mistake. But no, this permeates our entire culture. If there is no other meaning, we are left with "Whoever dies with the most toys dies anyway," which is pretty depressing.

So who is happy, and why? On the whole, the elderly are happier than the young. People willing to forgive are happier. People willing to be grateful are happier. People who have a purpose are happier. People who are with other people are happier. (One reason for increased loneliness and depression undoubtedly is the smaller and more separated families these days.)

Except for growing old, none of these is automatic. It is horribly easy to feel disgruntled. It takes practice to remember to be grateful. It is easier to hang out in front of a TV than to go and do things with people. Large families require time and money. Meaning and purpose don't drop out of the blue.

Parenthetically, Easterbrook claims that if you don't believe in God, you can still devise your own purpose, which is meaningful because you chose it. Unfortunately, that approach runs straight to the meaninglessness he and I decry, because without some fundamental right and wrong your choices are literally unjustifiable, and therefore meaningless. I do not say that it is impossible to have a moral code without God (that's another subject), but that roll-your-own doesn't work.

In the last few chapters he changes the subject; first to a criticism of the ethics of senior management of US corporations (an all too-easy target, their greed and dishonesty are of mythic proportions), and then to a plea for a higher minimum wage and a dramatic increase in foreign aid (which, as he points out, can in fact be helpful: things are improving and we wouldn't be pouring money down rat holes). The connection of these final chapters to the rest of the book is a bit tenuous, unless this is his suggestion for doing something useful to get us out of our funk. He is a bit overoptimistic about the war against the Islamofacists (they've been a perennial problem in Islam) and about the power of money as aid. For example, Zimbabwe would benefit less from another shipment of our food to rot on the docks than it would from a few well-placed bullets into their high and mighty kleptocrats. (That's not exactly Christian charity, but neither is deliberate starvation of your political opponents. Moi may be a crook, but Mugabe is wicked.)

Easterbrook points out a number of things we should celebrate, and the book is worth reading for those alone. I judge that he underestimates the seriousness of the disastrous trends in our culture: hyperindividualism, numbness to violence, family disintegration rates, and so on. That we can and should do more to help our neighbors is indisputable. Figuring out what will actually help is more problematic: some of our welfare programs had serious side effects. Ditto some World Bank efforts. Go read the book.

Nanobacteria?

The BBC reports on a study in the American Journal of Physiology claiming to have evidence for nanobacteria. If I rely on the BBC account, though, the researchers seem to have missed the boat.

In the lab, they stained the specimens and examined them under a high power electron microscope.

The team found tiny spheres ranging in size from 30-100 nanometres (sic), which is smaller even than many viruses.

When the tissue was broken up, filtered to remove anything more than 200nm and the filtrate added to a sterile medium, the optical density - or cloudiness - of the medium increased.

This, the researchers argue, means the nanoparticles were multiplying of their own accord.

They should have taken samples of the medium at different times and tried to count the number of "nanobacteria" they could centrifuge out as a function of time. I'm not sure I believe optical density changes by themselves.

Little nonGreen Men

Space.com has an article by Margaret Turnbull explaining why animals don't use chlorophyll. Essentially it boils down to "animals use energy faster than they can get it from the sun." This relies on three assumptions:

• The solar constant is going to be pretty similar for any planet capable of sustaining life
• You can't do better than chlorophyll's efficiency
• Animals will use energy at similar rates

The second assumption is probably pretty good. 8 percent is not bad. The first I don't know about, but for the sake of argument we'll accept it. The third is dubious. Why shouldn't animals go around slowly? There are well-known examples: sea anemones, for instance, or starfish, or sloths (though they probably go too fast).

Weathering Asteroids

It sounds like a novel . . . But

The new study appears to answer an old question about why small meteorites, which are chips off asteroids, are often a different color than the typical asteroid. . . . .

The surfaces of asteroids are reddened over billions by space weathering effects, the study concludes.

So what could cause weathering?

• Solar wind protons (1-3 MeV/c momentum) burying themselves in the outer layers has to cause some dislocations in the structure of the minerals making it up. (They should penetrate somewhere between 10 and 60 microns.) It also changes the chemistry of the outer layer. I wonder if adding extra protons tends to burn away the oxygen. Charged particles moving through matter ionize and excite nearby molecules. If you blast a silicate with protons, I'd guess that sometimes one of those ionized oxygens will combine with the proton when it comes to rest. If so, then you should see some absorbtion signatures for hydrosilicates, or exotics left behind after H2O or O2 diffuse out (the surface layer is thin, remember). X-O-SiO2 goes to X-O-SiO-H where X is the base part of the mineral (iron or magnesium or calcium or whatever).

  I don't know if these exotics are more red. Not enough chemistry. However, the dislocations should make the outer layer absorb shorter wavelengths better than an untreated surface--and make it darker. Over time you might be able to make the surface pretty black. If the asteroid is close enough to the sun to get hot, I'd expect the dislocation effect to go away thanks to annealing.

  According to today's 7-day solar wind report the average speed was about 300 km/sec and the density was about 5/cm3, which translates to a rate of 1.5 E8/(cm2 sec). 150 million protons per second per square centimeter is more than I expected.

• Hard UV and X-rays would tend to split up compounds too, but since the pieces of the original molecule are still in the same general area I'd expect them to recombine at some rate. So there'd still be some exotics, but not a lot. The very first few molecular layers could be depleted in oxygen, which stands a better chance of diffusing out than in deeper layers.

  They also can, by ionizing molecules, make exotic bonding combinations; but most of these are probably not stable enough to worry about. If you had carbon instead of silicon, that would be a different story.

• Gamma rays and penetrating cosmic rays will dump most of their energy deep enough into the rock that it should not effect surface color. I've not heard of embrittlement in things like olivine, but I suppose that might be possible. Still, meteor samples aren't famous for bulk changes due to radiation damage, so I think I can rule out any effect from high energy particles.

This could be interesting. I'll have to poke around and see what the NASA results were from the probe they launched years ago to measure solar wind and micrometeorite damage.

Bionicles and Folk Tales

Our youngest is "into" bionicles (the Lego action figures) and can recite chapter and verse about their qualities and doings. He was explaining a couple of central characters to us at supper the other night, thusly:

Mata Nui is the good guy, and Makuta was jealous, so he made Mata Nui fall asleep; like Snow White.

That's probably the first time those characters ever appeared in the same conversation, let alone sentence. Good analogy, though.

Great Wall of Iraq

Funny how well low-tech solutions often work. As long as you are willing to keep an eye on them, earthwork walls block trucks pretty well. And I suppose they also make it difficult to claim you were lost and didn't know you had left Syria . . .

Oops. Bands do get in the way.

The New Scientist reports on study showing that penguins with wing band ID's don't breed as well as others. I'd always thought those bands looked pretty huge, but apparently they don't interfere with range of motion. They do add noticable drag, though; and when life or death depends on swimming fast. . . Most banded penguins seemed to survive as well as the others, but not have the extra energy needed to breed.

The French team used an alternative tracking method--microchip transponders--and compared penguins with both with penguins with only the transponders. Apparently seals aren't as bothered by the small amount of drag--a UK group says they don't see any problems.

Dealing with disappointment 101

#3 daughter always watched her sisters' ballet and other productions with utter delight. When she first learned to walk, she got into her sisters' closet and swiped their ballet costumes. Usually she put them on upside down. When her oldest brother played his violin, she'd dance by shaking her seat up and down.

She is now 13 and has been in some small musicals as well as ballet. She has also won a blue ribbon at the County Fair for dramatic reading and has been to the State Fair in a 15 minute musical. This is no small achievement for a child with autism issues. She's a bit wobbly on stage and she doesn't always know what her voice is doing. She needs lots of coaching to get the right facial expression and pose. But performing matters to her, and she works hard.

Having friends also matters to her, as it does to every 13 year old. The hard part is, she doesn't know how to be a friend very well yet. She has trouble reading faces and body language and tone of voice. She doesn't know how to join a conversation without interrupting or being silly. Just 15 months ago, her only conversation starter was, "Do you have any pets?"

At Valentine's Day, she tried making a paper heart valentine suitable for a first grader, for an older girl who gets a lot of leads. She is under the impression that "hot" means "good." No, no, no. For her, the only time she should use the word "hot" is in reference to a cup of cocoa.

I asked her, "Who are your buddies at snack time?" She gave me two names. "Then that's who you give the valentines to," I explained. She took a stamp and ink and decorated three plastic gift bags and filled them with Hersheys, one for each snack buddy plus one buddy's mom. They liked the treat, and they thanked her. Appropriate contact made. A victory.

When her choir planned a 45 minute musical, she worked for two weeks to prepare for the auditions. None of the parts are big, but the staff looks for ways to give as many kids as possible something special to do. A few days after the audition, one of the audition committee (not the director) told me that the committee had been really impressed with her audition and that the competition was tough.

She hung on to that until after the parts were announced. She was not given a part. I repeated the committee members comment to her, dozens of times. She was NOT going back to choir. She hid the CD with the music on it under her bed. She tossed her score in the corner. The next rehearsal came after spring break. She'd had two weeks to deal with it, and she hadn't. She was NOT going back to choir!

"Yes," I told her, "you are going back. And you're going to give it your best shot."

She went back to choir the next morning without a word. She gave it her best shot. She relaxed and did her part on stage. She also made one friend she wants to get together over the summer.

Victory.

Tonight was the concert. She sang well. Her facial expression was a little odd, but she had a good time and did a good job.

The Audition committee lady came to me after the concert, looking puzzled. "I thought they'd made a part for her. We'd all recommended that the director give her a part."

I said I didn't know anything about it. I did tell the committee lady how much of a difference her compliment made in #3's dealing with the disappointment.

I'm not going to spoil her victory by telling her that maybe somebody goofed and she was supposed to get a part. She made progress. She has a lot to be proud of.

Mrs James

Requiem for a player piano

When No. 2 daughter started piano lessons,7 or 8 years ago, we had only a dinky 4 octave keyboard, with tiny keys. So when our neighbor offered us her great-aunt's old player piano for sale, cheap, we gladly rolled it up the driveway and into the living room.

The piano was a WWI era dinosaur, standing 5 feet tall, and the ivory was falling off the keys; but it still worked. We heard hours of scales and beginners' classics, and then somebody would put on a roll of "On Wisconsin," followed by the Yale fight song. We tried some of the other rolls; but "On Wisconsin" was #1 on the hit parade. Then one of the kids found the tempo lever, and somehow "On Wisconsin" kept getting faster and faster. Somebody pushed the lever to "prestissimo" once too often, and it stuck.

#2 daughter forsook the piano for the tuba, and then the "A" above middle C stuck. The tuner couldn't get at it without disassembling the entire player mechanism, and he didn't have the tools for removing the mechanism; this surgery would require a specialist. You can't play anything without "A" above middle C. And the piano could no longer be tuned. The tuner set it to a quarter tone flat; otherwise the frame would crack. Hard to learn to play that way. To get the instrument playable, except for being a quarter tone flat, would cost well over \$3000. And so we closed the cover, and the piano gradually turned into a huge ugly end table.

#1 son started singing lessons last year. He started because the speech therapist suggested it for voice control. To his great surprise, he discovered that, not only could he sing, but he had two decent baritone octaves. He got by with the little keyboard, and he took a music theory class for fun this semester. Not having any piano skills, he still managed to compose a little waltz based on the call of the chickadee for his class. Last Saturday, he won a part in the chorus of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Ruddigore."

Meanwhile, a Chicago lawyer informed me that my late aunt Philippine had left me a modest legacy, and after two years of putzing they finally had gotten the will into probate. My modest legacy came in just in time to pay of a fat bill, replace the engine in the car the teenagers drive, and buy an electronic piano. It's slender and black, with a harpsichord and pipe organ and several other instruments programmed into it. Not top of the line; no frills. A Discontinued model that the piano store wanted OUT of their warehouse. They wanted the sale bad enough that they agreed to take the dinosaur out. Today the music store delivered it.

The delivery men have handled many pianos. The skinny guy with the droopy mustache and long grey hair looked at the brand and groaned; it was a notoriously heavy brand. They wrestled it onto a dolly. The guy asked, "Want to kiss it goodbye?" I almost did.

#2 daughter came home, dug out her old piano books, and tried to remember how treble clef works. Everybody else had their turn; we have to remind #2 son that changing from organ to harpsichord in the middle of a line isn't good for the piano. We have music again.

--Mrs. James

Chinese food?

When a man sits down to the SuperBowl with nachos, he wants a big bag of chips and a really wide bowl of melted cheese. Is the bowl a Moo Goo Guy Pan? See, the cheese is . . . nevermind. Back to the drawing board.

Plastic fibers

I remember finding rounded green pebbles on the beach, and being startled to find that they were the remains of Coke bottles, battered into relative smoothness. I suppose I should have expected that plastic would be similarly battered. Some of the particles of plastic are 20 microns wide (the smallest size the researchers could see with their apparatus). The researchers say that amphipods, lugworms, and barnacles all ate the bits of plastic, but they don't know yet what long-term effects there will be as critters swallow the stuff. Maybe it'll be poisonous, maybe it'll block their guts--or maybe some bacteria will mutate to eat them. Sooner or later I expect the bacteria to make an appearance.

I suppose the best case is if the bacteria live in the lugworm guts. If free-floating bacteria can eat plastic--we have a lot of structural plastic around. . . Of course we have a lot of plastic in dumps too.

I don't know the biochemistry well enough to guess which variety of plastic is going to be eaten first. I also don't know what the waste products will be. This could get interesting.

Yet another data point

Aziz has a reference to an interesting report from Iraq suggesting that some of the Shi'ites are interested in getting rid of the bloody posturing of Sadr. I'm dubious of Aziz' take on Sistani--I've seen no evidence that he isn't power-hungry--but . . .

Honk!

The Teaching Assistants Association was on strike Tuesday and Wednesday; with banners and pickets moving from building to building. One set of banners they strung on the overpass over University Avenue: "Honk for Healthcare," etc. Some other enterprising students hung another banner nearby: "Honk for Bush."

There was lots of honking: almost every third car honked. It has to have been gratifying to elicit such response. :-)

Hybrid car

The University fleet issued me a Toyota Prius for a trip the other day. I'd never driven an electric hybrid before. Or a Toyota, for that matter. (I can't afford one.)

The displays were distracting at first, but I got used to them. The radio controls (except for the off/on/volume) were a touch-screen: very nice for the passenger, but bad for the driver. It's a long reach to get to it, and you have to take your eyes off the road. Very bad design.

Mileage is better in the city than the highway, since it recovers energy when you slow down. Very very nice. I like efficient technology. One of the displays shows the energy flow dynamically, and another shows gas mileage as a function of time.

It starts like a dream--at least in warm weather. Turn the key and its on. It handles like a van in high winds--bouncing all over the road.

Pickup isn't very good, and trying to merge after toll booth stops was less than pleasant; comparable to a fully loaded Aerostar.

For city driving, it looks like a winner.

Truer than she knows

In this morning's Wisconsin State Journal is a peice by Joanne Weintraub from the Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: "Viewers want 'new'--and they're getting it," illustrated with a picture of the infamous stars of "The Simple Life." In the penultimate paragraph:

... they represent the current state of network programming. Call it permanent flux.

How true it is: Webster's first definition of flux is "an excessive abnormal discharge from the bowels."

I think the last program I watched was the SuperBowl. We knew the half-time was going to be by MTV, so I skipped the crotch-grabbing and the stylized rape scene. My life hasn't been irreparably harmed by the deprivation.

A short list of bloggers

Some people have come up with very clever ways of categorizing their lists of blog links. I thought I'd give thumbnail descriptions instead. There are no reciprocal linkings here: I just listed those I'd looked at more than once (some I check daily, others I hardly ever look at). Some I think might be of general interest I flagged *. Opinions expressed by the authors have no necessary relationship to my own.

• Amy Welborn *Catholic writer, comments on current events in the nation and the Catholic church
• Clutter: Telford Work Theology professor: not writing much lately
• Joshua Claybourn's Home Page

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• Armed and Dangerous " Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life's simple pleasures..."
• A Voyage To Arcturus Science and SF
• Basement Burrow My son's, mostly humorous
• BreakPoint, Charles Colson *Thoughts on culture and Christianity
• Eject! Eject! Eject! Comments and essays
• Feces Flinging Monkey Eclectic comments
• Fotolog Photographers having fun
• Innocence Abroad: HokiePundit Society and living a Christian life.
• Ideofact *Thoughts about history and books
• Kim DuToit African-American: (South Africa, that is) Very 2nd Amendment, over the top
• Latif's Cavern A Pakistani in the western business world
• SgtStryker *Various military bloggers. Sgt Mom is one of my favorites.
• Science Blog Science news

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• Allah Is In The House Fellow claims to be Allah--tasteless and often funny
• DaveBarry Blog Inimitable silliness.
• Iowahawk Satire
• James Lileks: The Bleat *Columnist: Personal and general

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• AfricaPundit *News on Africa: sporadic but interesting
• Belmont Club *Well-written essays on world affairs
• BuzzMachine ... by Jeff Jarvis Mostly media notes these days
• The Command Post Connections to many news items and posts on the war
• Daily Pundit Libertarian comments on politics and war
• USS Clueless *King of the content-makers
• Dhimmi Watch Watch us become dhimmis all on our own...
• One Hand Clapping *Preacher talking about the world and war
• David Warren *Professional Canadian essayist
• EuroPundits Argentinian writing about the world
• Innocents Abroad Foreign affairs
• Ipse Dixit Comments and caption contests
• InstaPundit.Com *Come on, everybody knows who this is
• LittleGreenFootballs War-related: read the articles: comments degenerate quickly
• Merde in France A bit shrill: a view of the sickness in France: bilingual, on the spot
• OxBlog Various folks noting national and international politics
• Rantburg *Excellent news source.
• Secular Islam"Secular" view of Islam
• Thugburg Who's who in terror
• unmedia: principled pragmatism Physicist and Shi'ite
• The Volokh Conspiracy *Law experts commenting on current affairs
• WarLiberal.com
• Winds of Change.NET *Mostly world affairs, many contributors, special focus days plus good news Sabbaths

UPDATE: Many of the above have moved, stopped blogging, died, or otherwise vanished from the links above. Historical interest only at this point--some of the survivors changed so much over the decades that I've no curiosity about them any longer.

Space Battles II

I see that DenBeste decided to analyze only known/knowable technology battles, and forgo studying the popular "magic" force fields and "magic" energy beams I mention below. Naturally that changes the dynamics somewhat, but some of the worries are universal: waste heat, for example. He promises several more articles on other details. I'd only dispute his stipulation that nuclear weapons wouldn't be used.

Fallen Angels

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn

Short review: They had too much fun writing the book.

Longer review: In the very near future, thanks to falling CO2 levels and a reduction in solar output, glaciers are moving south through the northern states again. Humanity is split between the Earthbound (ferociously antitechnological) and the few doomed "angels" living in kludged-up habitats in orbit. Alex and Gorden, sent on one of the necessary nitrogen-scooping missions (things leak), are shot down to land on a glacier. The space colony is in surreptitious contact with some technophiles, who come to rescue the duo.

The technophiles are mostly science fiction fans. As I said, the authors had too much fun writing this. They threw in boat-loads of references to science fiction books, writers, movies, and fans. Some of this you can justify by the story and the need to have identification codes, but it gets distracting; not to mention incestuous.

The governments are controlled by Greens, and new agers and fundamentalists have made common cause against the teaching of science. (I gather that the authors have no personal acquaintance with Christian fundamentalists: a less likely alliance is hard to imagine.) The authors worked hard to keep the description of the Greens from becoming polemical. And the book isn't a polemic, but only because its view of the Greens (part of the extreme technophobic movement) is pretty accurate.

In a very nice touch, the book has been available online. I don't read books online at work, and there's a lot of contention for the dialup line at home, so I picked this up at the bookstore.

Rainbow Mars had the same problem as this: a nice premise and a decent plot cluttered with too many outside references. I can't really recommend either book.

Space battles :-)

DenBeste's latest piece on space battles is only a "Part 1." I get a kick out of these updates at the end:

Update: Ye Gods. I don't suppose you people could wait to tell me what's wrong with my discussion of space naval battle tactics until after I've written that part?

Update: And the letters continue to arrive. Look, what I intend to write next will have nothing whatever to do with anything you've ever read about or seen in science fiction or video games or on TV. Please restrain yourselves. I hereby request that I receive exactly zero (none, nada, zip) letters about space battles until after I've posted the second part of this article.

That's the problem with being famous :-)

Back when I was in college I wrote complaining that SF space battles always ignored such little problems as how to get rid of waste heat after using those "magic" energy beams. Think about it: you're trying to dump energy into somebody else's vessel, and in the process of generating it you release the same order of magnitude or more within your own--and there's no air or water to cool you off. You only benefit if you can focus the energy into a smaller spot on the enemy than on yourself, to locally overwhelm any defense. Even then, you can't keep shooting for long without some very aggressive scheme for pumping heat into ejectable mass.

I also griped about the "magic" force fields that somehow manage to shield away damaging energy or matter but still allow you to see through them with no trouble. In the real world, if you had any such (presumably segmented) shield, it would have to block visible light if you didn't want to have your sensors burned by lasers. So you're blind wherever your force field is on. All the enemy has to do is fire volleys of missiles that maneuver around you and pepper your vessel from all directions to keep you completely blind and out of communication with your own drones. Thus your own drones have to have enough local smarts to figure out when you're in trouble and engage the enemy's drones and open up your communication lines again. Approximately the same model applies in combats between drones (although you're more willing to risk unmanned drones). What you wind up with, instead of duels between armored knights, is "Little Fleas have lesser fleas, on their backs to bite 'em. And lesser fleas have little fleas and so ad-infinitum."

Think of swarms of different sizes of spacecraft attacking each other in unison. Since communications will be lost from time to time, each drone has to try to predict how to fight guessing how everybody else is going to fight. You want your high value vessels as far away from the center of the action as you can manage without losing control. Think decoys. There's probably no good way to disguise yourself, but you might manage the equivalent of smokescreens using EMP.

Some critical factors include battle programming and prediction, learning algorithms, spoofing enemy communications, how fast you can field vast numbers of drone fighters, and how long they can hold out in combat.

This is all pretty obvious stuff--I'm interested in seeing what DenBeste comes up with.

Another data point about Islam in the UK

The article in City Journal by Theodore Dalrymple titled When Islam Breaks Down tells of the cruelty to women he found in Muslim (but not Sikh!) Pakistan, and of the brittleness he sees as the source of the shrillness of modern Islam. He judges the fatal flaw in Islam to be its failure to distinguish church and state, which left 'both' susceptible to attacks by radical clerics and which left no neutral zone for independent thought. And without some independent thought, there's never likely to be any reform. So far, so good--his analysis is worth reading on this account alone.

But even more interesting to me than the theory is his information about what young Muslim men are actually like in the UK.

One sign of the increasing weakness of Islams hold over its nominal adherents in Britain--of which militancy is itself but another sign--is the throng of young Muslim men in prison. They will soon overtake the young men of Jamaican origin in their numbers and in the extent of their criminality. By contrast, young Sikhs and Hindus are almost completely absent from prison, so racism is not the explanation for such Muslim over representation.

Confounding expectations, these prisoners display no interest in Islam whatsoever; they are entirely secularized. True, they still adhere to Muslim marriage customs, but only for the obvious personal advantage of having a domestic slave at home. Many of them also dot the city with their concubines--sluttish white working-class girls or exploitable young Muslims who have fled forced marriages and do not know that their young men are married. This is not religion, but having ones cake and eating it.

The young Muslim men in prison do not pray; they do not demand halal meat. They do not read the Quran. They do not ask to see the visiting imam. They wear no visible signs of piety: their main badge of allegiance is a gold front tooth, which proclaims them members of the city's criminal subculture--a badge (of honor, they think) that they share with young Jamaicans, though their relations with the Jamaicans are otherwise fraught with hostility. The young Muslim men want wives at home to cook and clean for them, concubines elsewhere, and drugs and rock n roll. As for Muslim proselytism in the prison--and Muslim literature has been insinuated into nooks and crannies there far more thoroughly than any Christian literature--it is directed mainly at the Jamaican prisoners. It answers their need for an excuse to go straight, while not at the same time surrendering to the morality of a society they believe has wronged them deeply. Indeed, conversion to Islam is their revenge upon that society, for they sense that their newfound religion is fundamentally opposed to it. By conversion, therefore, they kill two birds with one stone.

But Islam has no improving or inhibiting effect upon the behavior of my city's young Muslim men, who, in astonishing numbers, have taken to heroin, a habit almost unknown among their Sikh and Hindu contemporaries. The young Muslims not only take heroin but deal in it, and have adopted all the criminality attendant on the trade.

This, while a disaster, is a different disaster than you might be led to expect from the usual news sources. It is just one datapoint, of course, since the UK's Muslim population is dominated by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis ( see this.

Always check your theories against experiment...

The Indian Ten Commandments

I see posters with "The Indian Ten Commandments:"

1. Remain close to the great spirit.
2. Show great respect for your fellow beings.
3. Be truthful and honest at all times.
4. Do what you know to be right.
5. Look after the well being of mind and body.
6. Treat the Earth and all that dwells there on with respect.
7. Take full responsibility for your actions.
8. Dedicate a share of your efforts to the greater good.
9. Work together for the benefit of all mankind.
10. Give assistance and kindness whenever needed.

These sound cute. But unless these are a brand-new collection developed especially for modern cosmopolitan American Indians, they are also spectacularly ignorant.

Don't people remember that the American Indians come from many different tribes, with wildly different cultures and religions? If you want to list religious commands, you should specify which tribe they came from. For example:

1. Rip out living human hearts on Huitzilopochtli's temple to keep the sun rising. (Aztec)
2. In February and March, sacrifice children to Tlaloc. (Aztec) [ref Krickeberg]
3. When the Great Sun dies, strangle his wives and offer your own children under 3 as sacrificial companions. (Natchez) [ref Stirling]
4. Torture your enemies to death for the honor of your clan. (Iroquois)
5. Pray to toads to obtain good weather. Treat them carefully, unless the weather is bad--in which case, whip them. (Oronoka river tribes) [ref Depons]
6. You may not marry unless you can stand being bitten by poisonous ants without making any noise. (Arawak) [ref Pitou]
7. If a man dies for any reason, you must find the witch who killed him. (Cherokee)
8. Decapitate anyone who blasphemously reveals the secrets of a Katcina. (Zuni)
9. Second-hand tobacco smoke purifies you and connects you with the gods. (numerous tribes)
10. Use a a buffalo skull stuffed with grass as an altar during the summer solstice Sun Dance ceremonies. Young men should rip skewers through their flesh. (Sioux) [ref Schwatka]

I grant you that my selection is invidious. And the first collection is an anacronistic whitewash. And if you want to find out about American Indians, go look up real tribes first. Learn a little of their histories. Then read about the modern pan-Indian movement. Then laugh uncontrollably at the fake Indian-spirituality peddled these days.

Monkeying around

Monkeying around on company time

"Act like a chimp, say scientists at the Zoological Society. They want to see if human volunteers can better defuse daily tensions by adopting the body language of our ape cousins. I'm game."

And the resulting BBC story is a hoot, and exactly what you'd expect. We do have our own languages, far more subtle and effective than chimp body language.

Religion and Egypt

I try to put myself in the skin of the people who make the artifacts and totems you find in the museums. "What would this look like to me if . . ." I don't always succeed, of course. With Egyptian relics I almost never succeed. The layers on layers of symbolism obscure any sense of the numinous. It seems like riddles, or one of those deliberately obscure gnostic texts. Rosicrucian-esque--if the common folk understand it, squeeze in an even deeper meaning for the adepts.

Maybe that's not fair. The exhibits represent nearly three thousand years of religious mixing.

I have a hypothesis . . . This must be the result of welding together local cults from up and down the Nile, shoehorning gods that look similar into single figures for national consumption. "All sky gods line up on the left, moon gods to the right, vegetation spirits over there. . ." The new sky god absorbs all the shrines and all the totems associated with the old ones. Some of the compromises are bound to look a little weird.

And if this welding happens more than once, the gods really get messy. Egypt had a number of periods of inter-dynastic chaos, so it seems plausible to me that the central worship would break down and local worship become the focus again. So if the powers-that-be try to re-unify the gods again, they might not pick the same local ones as before.

At any given time, no doubt the people had a moderately clear idea of which attributes and ceremonies were important, but from four thousand years away they all run together.

Some 25 years ago I read part of "The Book of the Dead," a translation of the common coffin texts. My memory is very sketchy on the details, but the overall impression was of a surprising lack of humility. These magic incantations even compelled the gods. Some inscriptions were petitions, but others were spells to secure safe passage or provisions from the gods.

I can't help but wonder how much popular worship partook of this same attitude--"I've given you this, now give me the good luck I want or I take my sacrifices down the road to another temple."

Quest for Immortality

I went to The Quest for Immortality exhibit at the Milwaukee Public Museum this week. It is well worth the visit--the largest exhibit from the Egyptian museums since the Treasures of Tut, and (I didn't get to see the Tut show), apparently more eclectic.

I'll say again: go see it if you have the chance. Photos in books aren't the same as seeing things up close at any angle you like.

In younger years I read everything available (not much :-() on ancient Egypt, but I clearly missed a lot. I'd never heard of anything like the sculpture of the resurrecting Osiris: on his belly, with his head raised and an enigmatic smile that for the first time starts to look appropriate.

Curiously the Milwaukee museum doesn't have extensive pictures, but look at National Gallery of Art Slideshows from the Quest for Immortality traveling exhibition. I was grateful for the audio tour since it pointed out details I hadn't thought to look for. This is their transcript of one of the explanations.

Coffin of Paduamen

ALAN SHESTACK: The coffin and mummy board here belonged to a priest named Paduamen. At the right, on the large coffin lid, we see him in the form of a mummy. His hands are crossed on his chest like the god Osiris, lord of the Underworld, for Paduamen hopes to come back to life as Osiris himself did.

DAVID O'CONNOR:In the center of the lid, is the goddess Nut who spreads out her wings to enfold the dead, and protect him from any supernatural danger.

AS: Below, Paduamen and his wife make offerings to the gods.

At the left, the slightly smaller mummy board closely mirrors the decorations on the coffin lid. It would have been placed inside the coffin, directly over the mummy wrappings, adding another layer of physical and magical protection. Here, above the hands, you'll find images of a winged scarab and a sun disk. The scarab represents the rising sun.

At the far left, we look into the bottom part of the coffin. The main figure on it is the winged goddess of the West, representing the entrance to the netherworld.

The underside of the mummy board depicts Maat, goddess of truth and rightness, with ankh signs looped on her arms, the symbol for life. She stands on the hieroglyph for gold, which is also a symbol of the sun. On the reddish-brown interior of the coffin lid, is an image of the mummy god Osiris. You may wonder about his vivid green skin.

DO:It partly has to do with the fact that he's a god of vegetation, because you know, vegetation seems to grow up out of the earth, out of the netherworld, and so the green of Osiris also refers symbolically to the hope of renewed life for the dead.

But look again at the inner mummy board's front. OK, it's easier to do in person rather than looking at the tiny picture on the web. But the face on the inner mummy board is female. If the outer cover is supposed to be Paduamen as Osiris, maybe the inner one is supposed to be Paduamen as Maat? Or perhaps neither one is "Paduamen as".

The bed seemed very flimsy, with fairly shoddy construction. The human-headed lion painted on the back of the boat looked so very Assyrian it startled me--and I think it predates the rise of Assyria somewhat. Over and over: if it looks good, it is good. If it is symbolically there, it is there.

The reconstruction of the tomb of Thutmose III was rather surprising. The ceiling was covered with stars, and the walls with illustrations of the journey of the hours of the night--not in order, and painted in a rather sketchy fashion. Even with the explanation, it was hard to keep the serpents straight, and there were dozens of look-alike gods. I don't know if this was done in a hurry, or if he had some favorite scroll and wanted it reproduced exactly.

Go see it, and wonder for yourself.

Slipping culture

"Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much." Unfortunately this article (see this if the first doesn't work) reporting on John Trinkaus's study of the decline of small honesties and small courtesies agrees with my own anecdotal observations over the years. Little things: do you clean up your shopping cart or toss the trash in someone else's; do you chip in to help pay for votive candles; and so on. Trinkaus watched and counted over the years, and finds that people are less courteous in measurable little things, like using the express checkout lane with more than the 10 allowed items or putting the shopping cart in the corral.

And yet the sense of community and social responsibility is founded on the innumerable little things of life. If we're all in this together, we don't shuffle off simple problems onto the next sucker, but try to do our part. And it seems we don't do that as much anymore.

Religious war again

If you missed Wretchard's comments about the war in Iraq against Islamism, don't wait. Go read it. We can still lose, and lose big, because of the hollow at our culture's core.

Muslim Council of Britain note

Another data point: The MCB (referred to below ) asks the Muslim community in Britain "to play its part in the fight against terrorism," and are savaged by the likes of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad who claims that "Co-operating with the authorities against any other Muslims, that is an act of apostasy in Islam."

Seasons

It was raining maple blossoms as I took the garbage out this morning.

Seasonal WIMP variation?

OK, this story from BBC is just silly. The Damo experiment in Gran Sasso is looking for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) and finding a seasonal variation. Somebody (not clear from the article) proposed that this was due to the Earth moving in and out of a filament of WIMPs and other particles pulled from the Sagittarius galaxy (orbiting our own).

Except that the stream would have to be incredibly narrow: on the order of a hundred million km. How is a stream of stuff, pulled from a source about 8 E20 meters away, wind up only about 1 E11 meters wide here at our solar system? That's a cone size of about 1/100 of a microradian. Laser beam spreads are usually measured in milliradians...

OK, error on my part. I forgot how cocked our orbit is wrt the galactic plane, and I was using different numbers for the WIMP speeds (much higher). With speeds this slow, and with the Earth's orbit cocked with respect to the putative WIMP flow, you could see a seasonal effect. I still suspect they're seeing changes in the quality of the electric power they get as a function of consumer demand.

East and West

the Experience of Islam in an expanding Europe

I've got a job, and can only take a little time off, so when the Center for European Studies hosted this (25-27 March) I only had time for one session. Wish I'd heard about the keynote address in time to go ("Religious Revivalism among European Muslims: Middle East Import or Indigenous").

I went to the "Islam and the Politics of State" panel on Friday.

It was the second panel of the day. Luckily I'd brought some work to do in case things started late--which they did, of course. I suppose it is gratifying to see that physicists are not the only ones who have trouble with speakers running overtime, or with talks with grand titles and lightweight content.

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The first fellow, Sam Cherribi, was a Dutch Member of Parliament, member of the Council of Europe, and in fact is currently running for office. His talk would have perhaps been the most interesting of the bunch: "Europe's 'Muslim Problem': What Political Elites Think." A pity somebody had put the fear of the clock into him--he ran through his slides so fast I couldn't read half of them. After the Seville summit he collared a number of officials from all over Europe. He found that left and right agreed that the MidEast problems were transnational, that illegal immigration was a key problem, and that Muslim immigrants must respect European democracy. In June 2001, the "Muslim problem" was not seen as dangerous, but people worried that they were importing the problems of the Middle East.

The leftist politicians tended to see poverty and inequality as driving the illegal immigration problems, while the right tended to see inadequate laws or enforcement as the issue--and each looked for solutions accordingly. Not exactly earth-shattering news, but I suppose you have to do a systematic check.

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The second speaker was a French expert in immigration in general, though not necessarily Islam in particular. Catherine Wihtol de Wenden spoke to "The Institutionalization of Islam in Europe." I had a little trouble following her at first, and so I missed some of the details of a very interesting assertion: that her group found poor correlation between immigration and Islamism and hooliganism, but strong correlation between Islamism and prison. I presume that means that the more vicious forms of Islamism recruit better in prisons than in the general population.

She said there were 15 million non-Europeans in Europe, with about 12 million "Muslim." 60% of the Muslims had been there more than 20 years, and the rest were mostly refugees. Reactions to refugees differ--radical Islamists are accepted in UK and Germany, but not France, while Algerian refugees are more welcome in France. Of the 3 or 4 nationalities that dominate the Muslim groups, 2 are "diaspora-like:" the Turks (mostly Germany) and Moroccans (?accent? and Spain), with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (UK) as the next largest groups.

France thinks it has about 4 million Muslims, but can't be sure because the census is now legally forbidden to ask about religion. Most of these Muslims are poor. Both France and Belgium have Muslim political parties, and both countries created central councils to address questions of conflict (marriage law, sacrificial customs, etc). Elsewhere in Europe these are usually local level discussions. People are still arguing about what it means to be a citizen of the Europe. It isn't clear if any of these great debates are getting anywhere.

Practicing Muslims she alleges to be rather rare--presumably as rare as practicing Christians. It isn't always clear what "Islam as used" (her phrase) means--many Muslims are becoming very national-minded.

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Sean McLoughlin from Leeds addressed "Muslim Leaders, the State and Civil Society: Politics, Representation and the Muslim Council of Britain." The moderator called time on him twice. He discussed the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) which was established in 1997 for "constructive engagement" on a national level. The UK has about 1.6 million muslims, almost all from the Indian subcontinent, and overwhelmingly urban (1/3 are in London alone). The Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are mostly poor (60% of Pakistanis are on the dole, compared to 16% of anglos), but the Muslims from India tend to be middle class or better. Unity wasn't particularly noticeable until the 90's, when the state suggested the Muslims get together into some larger group. {Yes, I know this conflicts with de Wenden's earlier talk.} The MCP replaced an earlier organization, and is currently facing challenges of its own from new groups {types not specified}.

Multicultural policies tend to reinforce ethnicity in the lower class Muslims, but middle and upper class Muslims look to a more cosmopolitan identity.

He circulated a slick magazine put out by those aforementioned upper/middle class Muslims. It resembled Christian general interest magazines put out by conservative Christian denominations, but with Muslim observances rather than Bible study. It even had a "Is the Passion anti-semitic" article. I didn't see any objection to it on Muslim grounds, curiously enough.

The state has begun to publicly criticize things previously protected by "multiculturalism," such as importing imams, contracting transcontinental marriages, and so on.

The MCP is spread thin, with leadership mostly middle class and of Indian background rather than Pakistani, and he said it didn't accommodate the Pakistani "peasants" well. It has a hair-trigger attitude: the slightest hint of a shadow of a thought of prejudice against Muslims evokes letters of complaint. The activists are associated mostly with Reformist Islam {sorry, I don't know what he means by this}. Some seem to have Deobandi background (Sufi tradition, but ultra-conservative) and some Jameli Islam {?didn't hear this?}. The government doesn't think them entirely moderate. {Deobandis are supposed to be moderate?}

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Jorgen Nielsen, from the University of Birmingham, telegraphed his notes as quickly as possible in order to meet an engagement to talk on the radio. He was the "comment" man. And so, briefly: Israel/Palestine questions matter more to Arab first generation immigrants (not so much second generation or non-Arab), or at least this was true until the last few years. Italy is questioning whether mosques are political centers as well as religious ones. "In many ways politicians reflect the public as well as lead the public." {Yes, he was dead serious.} There are class distinctions among Muslims. For example, the headscarf is middle/upper class, while the burka is lower class. Religions which are neither Christian nor Muslim are getting annoyed with the focus on Muslims, and the UK government is trying to defocus and talk more generically and inclusively.

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I do not vouch for the accuracy of any of their claims; I merely report what I heard.

Laundry Contretemps

This morning while digging through the clean laundry looking for a pair of socks for our youngest, I remarked to my still sleepy wife that I was having trouble telling whose T-shirts were whose these days.

She murmured agreement, so I suggested that we find a way of marking them to tell determine ownership, as we'd done years ago.

She agreed.

I suggested that she devise some kind of collar ID.

She clobbered me with a pillow.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: the story of Paul Erdos and the search for mathematical truth by Paul Hoffman

This is the biography of Paul Erdos, probably the most famous mathematician of the 20'th century. The title is unfair. Erdos comes across as a deeply social man, but one who had no language but math. Perhaps he had Aspergers syndrome.

Erdos is credited with making math a social activity, as opposed to the solitary activity most people think it to be. He got along well with children--possibly because young children like someone who takes them seriously. Most touching are the stories of how he tried to cheer up sick mathematician friends by visiting them and talking about interesting math problems. He knew that sickness and depression (depression seems rather common) could destroy a man's confidence in his own mind, and his cure was to try to interest them in something.

Erdos seems to have had a rare skill for calibrating problems to your skill. Most number theory problems I've worked on have been either trivial or impossible (for me, anyway). He could see problems in between, and find one suited to your abilities.

He lived out of a battered suitcase, and donated the prizes he won to funds to support young mathematicians. He never learned to cook, or do laundry, or drive, or most of the ordinary activities of daily life. He would show up at a mathematician's home and ask what unsolved problems he had. They (and other friends who heard Erdos was there) would talk about the math problems and how to deal with them--and as one fellow would slow down to think though what Erdos had said, Erdos would turn to the next, like a chess grandmaster playing a dozen games simultaneously. Meanwhile he was a nightmare to their wives--washing so thoroughly and carelessly that the bathroom would be 1/4 inch deep in water, or deciding that the best way to open a carton of tomato juice was to stab it in the side with a knife. One day he finally learned how to butter toast, and announced that it wasn't so hard after all.

He had a language all his own: epsilon was a child (Remember epsilon/delta proofs from calculus? No? OK, trust me, it's funny.), spoke of God as having "the Book" in which He kept all the math proofs, and called Him the "Supreme Fascist" for not telling us what the proofs are and making us find them out ourselves. He said "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into proofs," and lived on coffee and amphetamines. (Not recommended, but he lived an active life into his 90's.)

The author tries to make the appeal of math clear to the layman, with examples from Gauss' and Fermat's lives as well. If you never got past algebra you missed the parts of math where mathematicians start having fun. (Yes, fun. Playing around with ideas, and finding out which are true, is fun.) Some very deep problems are very easy to state, and easy to mostly understand--but hard to prove. Go read the book. Have fun!

Madrid

I can say nothing that others haven't said better. The injured and families have my prayers, and may the Lord have mercy on the souls of the dead. And may the Lord comfort the helpers, who hear cell phones ringing hopelessly inside the body bags.

French diplomat becomes Georgian minister

The BBC reports that the French ambassador to Georgia, who also served representing France to the US, EU, and Nato and "headed the international department of France's national security general secretariat," is being granted Georgian citizenship and a post as foreign minister for Georgia. She was born in France to Georgian immigrants.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said it had been "his dream" to appoint to the post since he met her in 1996. "She made a brilliant career in France but she stayed a Georgian at heart and a true patriot," he told reporters. Mr Saakashvili said he believed such an appointment was "unprecedented in the history of diplomacy".

"Unprecedented" seems a rather feeble description. Can you say "disloyalty?" Or "espionage?" Or at least: "untrustworthy?"

An End to Evil

How to Win the War on Terror by David Frum and Richard Perle

This book assembles in one place the bulk of the arguments for, and some of the evidence behind, the new American policies for nation-rebuilding in the Middle East. I'm surprised that such a book is necessary, but . . .

The book's points are simple. We are at war, and have been at war for some years, with an enemy whose goal is world domination. Several of our front-line institutions have proven themselves incompetent. The authors assert that the FBI is the worst of the offenders, with the CIA close behind. They point out that the State Department is institutionally ill-designed for the task at hand--and in fact often serves to promote foreign interests to the US rather than the reverse. It is common knowledge that the Saudis are very generous to friendly diplomats when said diplomats retire, and so our Saudi specialists are generally bought and paid for by a foreign power.

The authors argue that terrorists can be partly disabled by suppressing their flow of money and weapons from supportive governments. I think the jury is still out on this one: it is indisputable that terrorists are currently supported by governments now, but it is also true that terrorists establish lucrative organized crime connections (such as in Columbia, or the IRA in Northern Ireland).

They propose that we

• be serious about the fact that we're at war. Be willing to keep an eye out for suspicious activity.
• recognize that aliens are not US citizens, and take a little more care with immigration. At the moment many universities (and even cities!) refuse to cooperate with Federal programs for monitoring whether legal aliens actually go to school or work as they claimed they would.
• institute a national ID system.

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• keep our eye on the ball in North Korea, rejecting any appeasement while redeploying armed forces to reduce vulnerability and preparing for a preemptive strike.
• support Iranian dissidents
• squeeze Syria until they quit supporting/enabling terrorist groups, pull out of Lebanon, and start opening their economy and political system. I dunno about Lebanon--they say "If the Lebanese need help patrolling and policing their territory, we can arrange to get it from a less domineering source." Who? The Syrians came in quashing a nasty civil war (which they had a hand in, of course). Are those factions reconciled to each other now? Want to bet an American peace-making force on it?
• keep up the pressure on Libya. Fortunately this is becoming moot
• come up with varied plans with varied allies to deal with the many small evil places where terrorists lurk or rule. Contrary to their assertion, we did not step in to keep order in Liberia when civilization collapsed.
• include all terrorist groups in the bulls-eye, including the fashionable ones like Hezbollah and Hamas.
• keep our eye on the ball with our deepest enemies: the Saudis.
  • Tell the truth about them. (US News started on this)
  • Punish those Saudi individuals and groups who finance terror
  • Demand that the Saudis stop Wahhabi missionary efforts here and abroad. They won't. They can't. I don't think the authors have a good understanding of the religious dynamics involved here. Nevertheless, we need to strangle Saudi funding of people and literature for all Islamic centers in the US. It is imperative to keep Wahhabi clerics out of our prisons.
  • Warn the Saudis that failure to cooperate can have serious consequences. I think they already got that message. They face a rather dangerous choice: cooperate with the Iranian Shiites in stirring up mischief among the Iraqi Shiites, and risk having rising regional Shiite power stir an echoing Shiite rebellion in Saudi Arabia, or supporting the Sunni mischief-makers in Iraq, and risk having an annoyed Shiite power on their border. I doubt that cooperating with us is on their radar screen.

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• recognize that violent Islamism is on the rise around the world, and try to encourage democratic ideals. How?
• go all out to make sure that Iraq can even partially succeed in creating a free country. The power of that example in the Middle East can be huge.
• encourage as much foreign trade as we can, thus giving larger numbers of Pakistanis or Jordanians a stake in peace. A small effect, but helpful
• focus on women's rights, by encouraging women's education.
• avoid getting involved in creating/enforcing the peace in a Palestinian state. "The Arab-Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism; the unwillingness of Arabs to end the quarrel is a manifestation of the underlying cultural malaise from which Islamic extremism emerges."

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• split counter-terrorism from crime fighting in the FBI--and let people talk to each other. "Non citizen terrors suspects are not members of the American national community, and they have no proper claim on the rights Americans accord one another."
• relax rules about recruiting sources with criminal backgrounds
• change the culture of the CIA: take more care recruiting foreign agents, use less ideology in interpreting results, recruit/train more hard-language experts, be very careful using information supplied by foreign intelligence services
• put a "brilliant visionary" in charge of the CIA, to get a top-down cultural change.
• split off the "attack" operations from intelligence gathering, and merge this with Defense Special Forces.
• keep domestic and foreign intelligence gathering separate for safety's sake, and keep the DIA and NSA separate for the sake of having a good second opinion.
• reform the Pentagon, looking for more ways to use capital equipment instead of soldiers. I am deeply nervous about this focus on machines rather than eyes. The book uses an illustration from Afghanistan of a high-tech attack, but the news today has a counter-illustration of US failure due to a lack of people on the ground talking to the natives.
• eliminate the regional bureaus in the State Department, thereby streamlining it and cutting back on the tendency of regional staff to start thinking of the affairs of their area as more important than the affairs of the US. I'll take the authors' word that this is a serious problem. I'd think that losing regional bureaus might cut down on the number of knowledgeable people in the long term--we might have to re-instate these after a few years.
• increase the number of political appointees in the State Department, to make it more responsive to the needs of the country and less to its own bureaucratic imperatives. Pendulum time. The bureaucrats are too entrenched and disruptive, based on my own observations as an outsider, and the authors confirm this from insider knowledge. So you have to shake it up. Several years from now there'll be too many amateurs, and you'll have to reduce the number of political appointees. Such is life.

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• reform the spirit. Recognize that the world is hard, laws are only useful when enforceable, and have the confidence to recognize that we can fight and win and keep our souls. My phrasing, not theirs.

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• recognize that allies in one battle may not be allies in another, and that we cannot count on any country or organization (and certainly not the UN) to keep with us through all battles.
• recognize that the EU is being shaped into an opponent, and engage the various parties involved in shaping the EU. Try to enlarge the EU and NATO to dilute French influence.
• help keep Britain militarily independent of the EU. They've been a friendly ally, and if they lose control of their military we lose their support.
• be direct with China. Establish a defense partnership with Japan, Australia, and other countries.
• offer a credible military guarantee to Taiwan.
• Make South Korea responsible for its own defense
• exercise non-military power in the India-Pakistan area
  • drop the nuclear weapons sanctions we imposed as useless
  • broaden military-military relationships with all the countries, with special emphasis on humane counter-terrorism and controls to keep nuclear weapons out of the wrong hands
  • increase US aid to the subcontinent, focusing on a "providing a more appealing education than the local Islamic colleges offer." Really tough! School districts like control over the curriculum. "Trusting the holy Saudi imam to teach the Koran uninspected is one thing, but what are these infidels going to do?" The news this week included a girl's school burnt in Pakistan . . .
  • promote subcontinental economic integration by offering "a comprehensive free trade agreement with the United States--provided they sign the same agreement with one another. I like it. I wonder if it would fly.

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• tell the truth about Russia and its atrocities in Chechnya
• recognize that Russia is neither an ally nor a partner, except on a transaction by transaction basis.
• use symbolic punishment on Russia for its deals with Iran--disinviting them to the summits of the seven industrial powers, for example. I'm not sure this is sensible. The authors claim our sanctions against India and Pakistan were useless, and this seems cut off the same cloth.

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• require that the UN Article 51 be amended or interpreted to include supporting terrorists fighting a country as an act of aggression. This is also tricky. We've persistently turned a blind eye to IRA fund raising in the US, and I suspect a lot of LURD's support came from the US as well.

The books ends with a reminder that sometimes democracy needs support from outside.

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The authors have to make some important points, and so they neglect some others. The BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN et al will gleefully magnify our faults and failings, so Frum and Perle don't need to. I wish they showed a tad more humility, though. The title itself: An End to Evil, is excessively grandiose. Even if every Islamist dropped dead tomorrow, there'd still be more than enough evil in the world to guarantee constant wars.

I appreciate the insider's view of how the FBI/CIA/State work. I'm glad to see all this info in one place. I recommend the book: but I don't think the authors show a clear understanding of the religious dimensions of this war.

Volvo's new concept car

... designed by women for women.

The 'Your Concept Car' (YCC), on display for the first time at the Geneva Motor Show, was designed by a team of women keen to change the way most cars are designed with male drivers in mind.

And what does this have that makes it special? Besides gull-wing doors.

• Removable seat pads attached with magnets for easy cleaning or color coordinating with your outfit. Be still, my beating heart!
• Back seats which point up like theater seats until someone sits in them. This gives more storage space behind the front seat. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate theater seats? I hope these things still have the option of folding the back down so you can stuff really large objects into the car across the seats. This, my dear, is for women who have bought more groceries than the capacity of the trunk/ hatch/ other storage space. Remember the monthly megaload? #1 son eats like the Narnian centaurs: he has the capacity of a horse stomach and a man stomach, "which is why it is a serious business indeed to have a centaur come for the week-end." #1 daughter can knock off a gallon of milk a day by herself. #3 daughter would bring home fifty bags of junk food, which is why I don't bring her to the grocery store. #2 son would buy 50 lbs of sausage, which is why I don't bring him to the store either.

  I prefer to have grocery bags propped up on the floor of the back seat. In the old Nova, a jug of milk slid off the seat when I braked, and cracked. The Nova reeked of sour milk until the floor under the spill rusted out (the Nova had seen too many over-salted Chicago streets).

• Special umbrella, coin, and key compartments inside the bodywork. This is new? Well, maybe umbrellas--what size, by the way? Anything for Snapple bottles, pop cans, magazines, and other kid paraphernalia?
• The windshield washer fluid port is by the gas port. The hood is molded unremoveably into the front of the car. The car is programmed to figure out any problems, and send you and the garage a message about what's wrong. Only the garage mechanic can remove the hood. Yikes! I don't like to think how many times I have to get under the hood--oil, belts, cleaning the battery terminals, radiator work, etc. Volvo's concept sounds cute if you trust the car's diagnostic computer to always warn you and if you have oceans of bucks for the garage bills, and if the car never starts wearing out. (One of our cars has over 190000 miles, the other over 125000. {over 300000 km and 200000 km} Ask me if things wear out . . .) Amen. John the mechanic has made a career out of keeping our heaps on the road. Much as I appreciate John's efficiency, I don't fancy driving to the shop every time I need to add a quart of oil.
• A "body scanning system" "to automatically adjust seats, mirrors, steering wheels, and pedals." I shudder at the horrifying number of things that will go wrong with a system like this... Especially since James is 6' even; I'm 5'6, #1 daughter is 5'4, and #2 daughter is 5'2 and professes not to be able to see out the big white Behemoth her dad drives. James can't get into the car at all after #2 daughter has driven it before.

  Does this car come with an automatic radio retuner that keeps Nirvana, Eminem, baseball game beer commercials, and other losers off the family airwaves?

• A split in the headrest to accept a ponytail. I thought most recent headrests had a hole in the middle these days.

Ok, it is just a concept car, not a production model. Comes equipped with your selection of stereotypes . . .

Eagle

I'd never seen a bald eagle in the wild before, though you can find them in Wisconsin. But yesterday as I waited for the bus at the campus end of State street, a bald eagle soared overhead, and then circled around and around until its circle drifted east out of sight. Beautiful: it brightened the otherwise dead-snow dingy street.

The bird must have followed the Yahara up to visit us. Thanks!