Egypt's pig cull

Unsurprisingly, it's exacerbating religious tensions. The oppressed minority Coptic Christians are the only ones raising pigs, of course. So even if Egypt's Moslems weren't intending to take an anti-Christian measure, it has been felt that way. Of course, there's no reason to cull pigs anywhere because of the swine flu--it's already made the jump to people, and the person-to-person transmission is what is causing the problem now.

I'm not sure about the reporter's description of relations between Christians and Moslems in Egypt as "usually harmonious." Actually, that may be true, but there's a lot of tension there, and it doesn't take too much to make strife bubble up.

WSJ on Michael Crichton

A very nice retrospective on Dr. Michael Crichton here. (And yes, he was a medical doctor!) I've read a lot of his novels and enjoyed every one. He has a talent for giving his characters thought-provoking discussions into the nature of science. Some of his chapters are nothing more than an extended conversation on a single topic, and these have often stuck with me for years afterwards, getting me to think more about it.

The first novel of his that I read was The Andromeda Strain back in junior high, and it was written in the pseudo-documentary style so well (with even the acknowledgements keeping up the pretense) that I kept turning back to the spine to check that I'd actually taken it from the Fiction section of the library!

The WSJ mentions Al Gore's displeasure regarding State of Fear, which critiques the anthropogenic global warming hysteria. It's a little ironic, considering that I've gotten the impression that he'd consulted Gore heavily for Rising Sun some years earlier. (I think Gore might have been mentioned in the acknowledgements, and there's certainly one of those extended dialogue chapters, with a politician who seemed to me to be favorably based on Gore.) The reaction of the Left to Crichton's discussion of global warming is a strange overreaction. I got an earful from a German astrophysicist at a conference in 2005 when some of us were discussing Jurassic Park. This guy was absolutely outraged by Crichton regarding global warming and was using really strong language and just anathematizing the guy. Yikes! Of course, this was also a person (the German fellow) who gave us a heartwarming anecdote about his parents meeting, all thanks to Mao Tse Tung, and so he has a soft spot for the blood-soaked Communist dictator. So he's got a different set of priorities than I do, let's say.

Economics of foreign adoption

No, not in the monetary sense, but in the more general meaning--something that could have found its way into Freakonomics. My cousin, who is a pediatrician who does a lot of work with foreign adoptions, noted that the strong prejudices against Gypsies in Eastern Europe has had a noticeable effect on the relative health of babies adopted from those countries. Gypsy children being adopted into the United States are more likely to be in good health than babies (who are up for foreign adoption) of the majority ethnic group of that country. Why? Because the babies of the majority group are preferred by locals wanting to adopt, and they'll obviously further prefer one of good health. So the majority-group babies who are left for foreign adoption are mostly those who have some health or developmental problem. Meanwhile, the Gypsy babies are more likely to be passed over by local adopters, and so those being adopted into the US still have the typical distribution of health.

I don't know of any moral to take from this. I just found it interesting.