First results from Martian soil samples

The Phoenix lander on Mars has sent back its first results on the soil chemistry, and it looks "friendly" enough to support life! No organic material (yet), mind you, but a slightly alkaline soil that's similar to what you might find in Antarctica. They say you could plant asparagus in it and have it thrive.

There's also some water content. That's more evidence to put into the column for a past wet Mars. And, of course, if we're ultimately looking for signs of life (past or present), that's one ingredient we'll certainly need.

The NYT article is here, and the AP wire story is here.

Mars was struck by Pluto-sized planet early on

Mars' known asymmetry was likely caused by a collision with a Pluto-sized planet. Scientists have known about the asymmetry for years, and the collision hypotheses has been out there since the '80s, but only now have they been able to answer some basic objections to the model.

The Earth had a similar collision with a Mars-sized planet, the debris from which coalesced into the Moon. Hmmm...I wonder why the debris from this collision produced no moon for Mars. Phobos and Deimos are captured asteroids.

Mars, Mars, Mars...

I've got three posts on Martian science coming up. The papers have been full of them this week. I say "papers," and in this case, it's websites of actual newspapers. I remember in Clark's 2010 or 2061 (I've forgotten which, but it was one of his sequels to 2001), one old lady is living in EPCOT Center (remember: it was originally designed as a living community, not just a scientific theme park), and she's described as having a newspaper clipping on her wall, from one of the last of the printed editions of the New York TImes.

Back then, I thought Clark was really stretching, because there's no way we'd want to read our newspapers hunched over a computer monitor. For that matter, I still prefer to read on paper, rather than on a screen. But the economics of the thing is catching up to it. Sigh.

US removes last nukes from Great Britain

We've secretly taken out the last of our nuclear weapons from Britain. The US now relies more on the "southern" NATO locations (Italy and Turkey) than a northern location like Britain, according to the article.

It's the Guardian reporting this, so I should have expected the quotations and analysis to be exclusively from lefties like the Federation of American Scientists and similar groups. I just wish there'd been someone quoted to refute their attitude of knowing defense strategy better than the military does.

D.C. Gun Ban Unconstitutional

Scalia wrote the decision. Says Constitution guarantees an individual right, unconnected to service in a militia. Halleluja. I'd been getting a little ticked off with this session's decisions the last week or so.

Glenn Reynolds has more.

Diamond and oil cartels

The New York Times' John Tierney has a thought-provoking discussion of cartels, especially in diamonds and oil. I've been intrigued with the diamond market, ever since I proposed to my wife and owned a loose diamond for all of about two weeks, before they set it in the ring. It made me feel like one of the guys on an episode of Simon & Simon who'd have a bunch of loose diamonds in a velvet bag get stolen, and the Simon brothers would have to infiltrate a smuggling ring or something. Actually, I think most of the guys running around with loose diamonds in detective shows in the '80s were the bad guys. But still, it felt really cool! Wait--I'm sure there were some good guys with loose diamonds that got stolen on these shows. They usually had them in a safety deposit box. Yeah.

OK, anyway, after listening to a BBC story about de Beers and how much money in diamonds they have sitting in their building in...London?...and how the trading works in Amsterdam, and how they have the mineral rights to all the diamonds in South Africa--I became fascinated by the economic model of it all. I don't like the principle of a cartel, but it's still fascinating.

Tierney points out the precarious nature of cartels and how so many of them have failed over the years. The diamond market itself is in trouble right now, thanks to artificial diamonds that are (apparently) indistinguishable by a jeweler. I don't know that I really want to have artificial diamonds being considered equivalent to the natural ones. There's a different feel to it, a cheapness, in knowing I had an imitation, even a nearly perfect one that was physically equivalent. But that's a psychological thing.

He makes the comparison to the pearl market, now that nearly all commercial pearls are cultured. But a pearl has to be grown inside of an oyster, whether you put the sand in its gullet or the tide did it. It's still the same natural process from that point on. I can see the additional desirability of a natural pearl, but I'm not as adamant about it as I am with diamonds. But sure, the advent of pearl farms certainly meant the market saw a glut and prices came down. And diamonds are maybe close to seeing that.

Oil? Well, if we could find a cheap, large-scale way of manufacturing artificial oil... Heh, heh, heh. Right. So OPEC doesn't have to worry about that kind of competition. But there are other sources of energy, and technology can bring the prices down. I hope we'll someday see that cartel get broken. But I don't know it'll be soon.

More Google parterships with NASA

This time, they're building an office complex at NASA's Ames Research Center. Before this, I was only aware of their co-funding of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

We scientists could never do anything that would hurt people!

Report on a study tracking cell-phone users' movements to see how far they move around during the day. They did this in a foreign country and encrypted the cell numbers so the subjects were anonymous. Still, it's a little worrying, thinking about who's watching where you're going. And if they can do it, who else might be? A government?

These guys were obviously harmless, but I got an eye roll out of this quotation:

"In the wrong hands the data could be misused," Hidalgo said. "But in scientists' hands you're trying to look at broad patterns.... We're not trying to do evil things. We're trying to make the world a little better."

Go read Liberal Fascism and think of that quotation again.

Mark Steyn faces off his accuser's sock puppets

Pajamas Media has an almost depressing write-up of Mark Steyn's TV confrontation with his accusers. Depressing because he's convinced he'll lose the case and be effectively banned from the Canadian press. But he certainly got the better of them on TV, and I can only hope that the Canadian public is on his side, fat lot of good that'll do him in the kangaroo court.

UN racism investigator checks out our presidential election

So the UN is sending a "special rapporteur" to check out racism in the US. Reuters connects this with the presidential campaign, seeing as how we have a black running for president, and there are some people in the country who aren't voting for him. I don't know if that's the real reason for the "special rapporteur"'s visit or not, but I'll just highlight this deep, insightful line from the article: "However, the United Nations has almost no clout when it comes to U.S. domestic affairs and is widely perceived by many as interfering." No kidding?

Get the heck out of my country, and go bury your nose in someone else's business.

Obama to Tennessee GOP: lay off. Tennesee GOP to Obama: pthllbt!

Well, well. Obama doesn't want his wife to be discussed in the presidential campaign. Yet another item to put into the increasingly long list of things that'll be considered dirty, low-down attacks by his camp. I think if he wants to make discussion of his wife off-limits (in principle, that's a fine idea), then she ought to stop running down our country. She does that while campaigning for him, and she can't help but make herself an issue. This would have been the same with any candidate's wife or husband. If Laura Bush, of all people, or Barbara Bush (the two most nonpolitical First Ladies we've had in decades) had campaigned for their husbands and said that America was a "mean" place, or that seeing people supporting their husbands had made them "really proud" of their country for the first time in their adult lives, then you bet they'd have become political liabilities. You don't run down America and expect to be off-limits as a potential First Lady.

With that in mind, I think the Tennessee GOP's YouTube video welcoming Michelle Obama to Nashville is an excellent way of poking fun at her, and rather gently, too. It doesn't slam her but simply lets her words speak for themselves, interspersed with comments by patriotic Tennesseeans on what they love about America. Very nicely done.

Jenna Bush's wedding and the stone cross

Nice article on Jenna Bush's wedding at her parents' Texas ranch. One thing I noticed from the photo was the large, apparently stone, cross. I wondered if it were simply a temporary decoration for the occasion. The article clears that up: nope.

Jenna Bush and Henry Hager exchanged vows in front of a Texas limestone altar with an attached vertical limestone cross picked out personally by President Bush. The three-ton cross and altar are permanent and manmade from stone from a local quarry.

"My one contribution is to -- we put a giant cross made out of Texas limestone that will serve as the altar, but also serve as a landmark on our place for years to come," President Bush told ABC's Robin Roberts in an exclusive interview this week at the White House.

That's an interesting approach, and it speaks for the President's devotion. I've always liked the idea of worship services at home with the family (like is depicted in the beginning of Gone With the Wind), and this fits in that category. Reminds me of a smaller version of the one at the University of the South at Sewanee.

Armageddon, here we come!

A lot of my fellow astronomers didn't like the movie Armageddon, since it was pretty ridiculous in its science. True enough, but I don't mind turning off my brain and having a fun time at the movies, so I enjoyed it. But the idea of having astronauts land on an Earth-crossing asteroid is getting some serious consideration now. Rob Landis at Johnson Space Center has been promoting this as a practice for some of the tasks we'll need to master for the manned Mars mission in a few(?) years. He's proposing to use the new Aries/Constellation Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would "land" on the Earth-crossing asteroid 2000SG344. Because it's so small (yacht-sized) and spins, it'd be a tough approach and would have to be anchored to the asteroid.

Landis has a few papers out on this topic. The full text of one is available as a PDF here: Scientific Exploration of Near-Earth Objects Via the Crew Exploration Vehicle. The abstract of another is here.

I love the idea. My only complaint is the use of that horrible PC wording NASA's trying to promote: "crewed" or "human" as opposed to "manned." Ugh! It's a butchery of the English language: "...experience conducting crewed exploration missions..."

The best data recovery I've ever heard of

I see here that a computer hard drive from the space shuttle Columbia has been restored, and 99% of the experimental data on it has been recovered. Wow. This, despite the fact that the outside of the drive was a melted lump of metal and plastic, the seal had broken open, and part of the disk had been pitted with dust-sized debris. But because the computer was running DOS, which stores data in one place at a time, rather than scattering it across the disk, it chanced that the damage was not to the place the experimental data was stored, and 99% of the experiment's results were recovered.

The experiment probed the effect called "shear thinning," which is how substances like canned whipped cream come out like a liquid but then stiffen. They measured shear thinning in xenon near its critical point. NASA's write-up is here (with photos!), and this is a link to the article itself, coming out in Phys. Rev. E.

I think I remember some acquaintances or friends of friends at NASA who had another experiment on Columbia, but I don't know if any of their data were recovered.

Weekly Standard on The Newseum

The Weekly Standard has an interesting review of the Newseum, the new museum of journalism in D.C. I'm curious to see inside it, but I haven't read any good reviews of it yet on substance.

At last, at long last!

(Also via Instapundit) Holographic computer memory finally comes to market. Next month, in fact. Man, I've been reading about this for well on 20 years, and I can't believe they're finally selling them.

The drive is $18,000, at least for now, but each removable disk holds 300 GB. And it's photographic, which means it's got a much longer life than most digital media (they're saying 50 years for this). I wonder if this will be a solution for the huge memory requirements of the LSST observatory, which will be recording half a petabyte (1 petabyte=1000 terabytes) of data per month. For 10 years. Imagine adding 500 1-TB hard drives every month to some warehouse-sized room. That's the amount of computer storage they're going to need. Now, the LSST doesn't come on line until 2012, and we can expect disk space to get denser and denser by then, but it's an amazing amount of material they're going to be storing. I'll bet they're looking at these holographic drives as a possibility.

Let the North seceed!

Via Instapundit, here's an annoying and insulting article by a damned Yankee who understands less about the South than a tick does about gardening. As far as Hirsh's throwaway line about the North seceeding, go right on ahead! Just be sure to take D.C. with you.

Dutch food and fun with computer translations

Ever since I went to Holland and got to have "slagroom" in my coffee, I've been trying to figure out how to make it myself. Slagroom is a kind of whipped cream, but it seemed a lot thicker than whipped cream here. I've tried taking heavy cream, adding various amounts of sugar (or powdered sugar), and beating it longer than you would for regular whipped cream. It seems to get close, but I'm not sure. In Holland, I was actually given a knife to cut it and put it in the cup.

Anyway, I've found a Dutch-language Wikipedia entry on slagroom, but not reading Dutch, I tried the "translate this page" option on Google. It worked out nicely, but with a few quirks I got a laugh out of. For one, you've got something like a mathematical degeneracy--multiple words being translated into the same one in English: Cream is one of several types of thin cream that of the whole milk is geschept. ...and the occasional untranslated word which sounds like Yiddish.

And here's my favorite: Traditionally eaten on whipped cream is also a lawyer. Well, the Dutch sure know something about tort reform! (The double-entendre was accidental, but I'm proud of it.)

Democracy and the ability to lose

I remember a historian making the argument that American democracy was not demonstrated (or proven, maybe) with the election of George Washington in 1789, so much as with the election of Jefferson in 1800. In that year, the Federalists lost their first election, and Jefferson's Democratic Republicans came to power. It was a peaceful, orderly transfer of power from one party to another. You've got to have that, if you want a stable democracy.

In that vein, read Jerry Pournelle's comments on the Democratic party today:

And meanwhile the Democrats seem to be drifting toward the concept of prosecution of former office holders by criminalizing policy differences. That's a certain formula for civil war; perhaps not immediate, but inevitable. The absolute minimum requirement for democratic government is that the loser be willing to lose the election: that losing an election is not the loss of everything that matters. As soon as that assurance is gone, playing by the rules makes no sense at all.

I don't think we're heading towards civil war, but this attitude does undermine the stability of our system. An Instapundit reader adds some historical context to this, on the Roman civil war.

Re: E pur si muove

Figulus: it's unbelievable to me that there really are geocentrists out there in this day and age. (And, ironically, using such technology as the internet!) I've seen Robert Sungenis' website and read some of his arguments for it, and what strikes me about both him and the fellow you were debating is that they try to (mis)use some general principles of physics qualitatively but can't handle them quantitatively. You mentioned that General Relativity (GR) reduces to Special Relativity (SR) in the low-gravity/low-acceleration limit, which reduces to Galilean relativity in the low-velocity limit. The differences are incredibly small in the low-end case, so if we have a major problem there with Galilean relativity, we're going to have a major problem with the more sophisticated versions, too.

These guys have got to learn how to calculate. I doubt they can actually work their way through the numbers to get quantitative results from GR.

I had a student who had a similar problem last year--he's fascinated by physics, but he didn't have the math experience to go with it. So he'd come in and want to solve all kinds of cutting-edge problems conceptually, and his solutions would be wildly impractical. He knew some concepts, but he didn't know how to apply them to get actual answers. This year, he's taken all kinds of math courses and is starting again at the introductory physics level, and the difference is amazing. He gets the correct answers almost instinctively now, because he understands how to apply the concepts mathematically. And his flights of fancy are tempered by the mathematical reality. He's going to go on with great success now, I can tell. Grad school, definitely.

E pur si muove

Two month's ago I got into an argument with some geo-centrists over at a liturgy blog. Comments are now turned off at that particular blog, which is just as well, since geocentrism is not really on topic for a liturgy blog. But in my zeal to fight the errors of the Bloch-heads (as I called them here), I figured I may as well respond here.

For the backstory, read the relevent comments here. The argument is between me (Rob F.) and RBrown and a few others.

RBrown said, "Since when is it falling prey to resentment or a lack of charity to say that someone is wrong?"

My apologies. I assumed that you must have some animus against Galileo because it seemed so farfetched to me that you would say that he did not understand his own Principle of Relativity, or that he secretly did not believe it.

RBrown later said, "I’m sure it made perfect sense for Galileo—but it also made sense for him to say that Scripture was wrong."

Galileo never said that Scripture was wrong. He said the earth moved; that's not the same thing, unless you interpret scripture to mean the earth does not move. That would be an erroneous interpretation of scripture, obviously.

RBrown also said, "Once again: Time is intrinsic to Motion—thus Motion cannot be considered to be relative as long as Time is considered to be absolute."

Position as well as time is intrinsic to motion. You can have relative motion if you have relative position, which is what Galileo said. If you have relative position, you do not need to have relative time as well. It doesn't hurt to have both, but you do not need both; one will do fine. As a matter of fact, we do have relative time as well, but Galileo had no reason, none at all, to assume that.

RBrown said regarding Einstein's General Theory, "Once again, I refer to the General Theory of Relativity. In the Special Theory Einstein assumes the uniformity of all inertial frames of reference. In the General Theory, however, inertial frames are jettisoned, replaced with curved Space-Time."

Since Einstein's General Theory (EGT) reduces to his Special Theory (EST) in low gravity fields (and his Special Theory reduces to Galileo's Principle (GP) at low velocities), it seems to me that proving that the earth revolves at low velocities in low gravity with Einstein's Special Theory (or Galileo's Principle) is equivalent to proving the same thing with Einstein's General Theory. After all, if GP is wrong at low gravity and low velocity, then EGT will be wrong too.

But let me offer a thought experiment that does not rely on Galilean or Lorentz invariants to prove my point. Consider the time dilation due the Earth's rotation around the Sun. Take two clocks, A and B, on Earth and synchronize them. Move A to the Sun and let both clocks keep ticking for some centuries. Then take A and move it back to Earth and compare it with B. There will be a discrepancy between A and B. Now correct for the effect of gravitational time dilation. There will still be a remaining discrepancy. This remaining discrepancy will be due to the time dilation in B due to the continuous acceleration of the Earth. If it were the Sun that were moving, the remaining time dilation would be in A. But EGT predicts the time dilation to be in B. That's because according to EGT, like EST and GP, says it is the Earth that is revolving around the Sun, and not the Sun around the Earth.

I do not expect this thought experiment to be carried out by NASA any time soon. I simply propose it to demonstrate that EGT cannot support geocentrism.

This thought experiment is quite analogous to subatomic particles revolving around a storage ring in a laboratory. It has been observed that such particles have their lifetimes dilated with respect to the laboratory clocks exactly as predicted by Einstein. This dilation demonstrates that it is indeed the particles that are revolving in the lab, and not the lab that is revolving around the particles!

These direct observations, along with observations of stellar parallaxes mentioned above by Fr. Augustine Thompson and observation of the aberration of starlight also mentioned previously, serve to demonstrate that there is indeed a qualitative and measureable difference between revolutional and rotational motion on one hand and translational motion on the other, and while translational motion is relative, neither revolutional nor rotational motion is, at least not entirely.

Any way you look at it, it still moves.

They should have traded forgers

Kevin Kusinitz at the Weekly Standard's blog posts about the Los Angeles Times piece on the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. A supposed confidante of Sean Combs is the story's source, providing FBI documents implicating Sean Combs.

Except it turns out those are crude forgeries, banged out on a typewriter "three decades after the feds switched to computers." Kusinitz reminds us of the CBS/Dan Rather/Bush/Air National Guard kerfuffle, but isn't it a beautifully symmetrical reversal?

The Bush forger used a computer to forge documents that were done on typewriters, while this guy used a typewriter to forge documents that are done on computer!

Obama's religion speech

Drudge has the full text of Obama's speech. Not bad in places, but it still sounds as if he's trying to weasel out of questions about what he knew of Rev. Wright's anti-Americanism and apparent anti-white racism. Twenty years with the guy, remember. He asks us to partially excuse these outrageous sentiments, because there's some background to them that we shouldn't dismiss. OK, I'd like to see him say the same thing next time a white makes a racist comment. We've got to understand, don't you know?

One ugly moment was equating Geraldine Ferraro's mild and justifiable comments--on Obama's unremarkable political qualifications, aside from his race (I'll add, though, that he's a good orator)--with Wright's explicit and angry anti-American and anti-white diatribes. He put those right down on the same level! And he didn't excuse Ferraro, mind you--he implied a partial condemnation of Ferraro similar to his partial condemnation of Wright. Classy.

More on Wikipedia

Heh, heh, heh...I just came across this funny article about Wikipedia and accuracy. I especially enjoyed the author's response to a couple of readers who'd snidely (reasonable in principle, but it was snide in tone) suggested comparing Wikipedia and Britannica in the error rate per word, rather than per article:

Let's put to this to the test.
Here's a hypothetical entry, containing two serious errors.

Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1462 and published the Theory of Relativity.

We can see that it is 13 words long: an "error rate" of one every 6.5 words.
Now here's a longer version.

Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1462.
Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger snake
He published the Theory of Relativity.

This version is 114 words long, and contains only 2 errors - an "error rate" of one every 57 words. That's almost nine times more accurate - and very much proves Barry and Ernest correct.
We unreservedly apologize, and once again, must hail the power of "collective intelligence".

My rising frustration with Wikipedia

It came to my attention this week that there were some problems with the Wikipedia entry on a University of Pittsburgh physicist, David Snoke. I've linked to the Discussion page, rather than the entry itself, to demonstrate the bile and bad behavior that goes on in the process of making an "encyclopedia" entry at this site. It's disgusting.

Snoke is a respected condensed-matter physicist, albeit one who probably wouldn't have gotten a Wikipedia entry (well, except he is in Who's Who). The entry was created because of an article he co-authored on complexity in protein evolution. It has implications for intelligent design, and there's where the problems have come up.

The page has been run by anti-ID people and had for a while been worded more like a polemic against Snoke. Snoke has tried to correct some of it, but much of what he adds keeps getting deleted by his antagonists. I have never done any Wikipedia editing, just because I haven't felt like spending the time it seems to take, but this would be something worth contributing to, if I did.

I'm not convinced by ID, but it deserves a more respectful hearing than it's getting in this excuse for an encyclopedia. I'm glad that at my institution, we're able to have debates on it amongst the faculty, without this kind of behavior.

Why I love the internet

While trying to find the link to The Nation in my previous post, I came across its Wikipedia entry and decided to read the history of the magazine. The history mentions a 1919 letter to The Nation which Franz Boas, father of American anthropology, angrily wrote, denouncing four (unnamed) scientists for acting as spies for the United States during WWI. They'd been using their scientific work as a cover, but they were real scientists. Boas was taken out to the woodshed for this, being quickly and overwhelmingly condemned by the American Anthropological Association.

I clicked on to Boas' entry for more. He wrote,

A soldier whose business is murder as a fine art, a diplomat whose calling is based on deception and secretiveness, a politician whose very life consists in compromises with his conscience, a business man whose aim is personal profit within the limits allowed by a lenient law -- such may be excused if they set patriotic deception above common everyday decency and perform services as spies. They merely accept the code of morality to which modern society still conforms. Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth. We all know scientists who in private life do not come up to the standard of truthfulness, but who, nevertheless, would not consciously falsify the results of their researches. It is bad enough if we have to put up with these, because they reveal a lack of strength of character that is liable to distort the results of their work. A person, however, who uses science as a cover for political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an investigator and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this cloak, his political machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist.

He was referring to the spy ring run by Sylvanus Morley, which was looking for evidence of German U-boat bases in Mexico and for German activity in that country. Don't forget that we'd intercepted the Zimmerman telegram in 1915, in which Germany tried to convince Mexico to attack the US in return for getting the Southwest back. So this wasn't some idle hobby for Morley--it was a serious bit of work he did to defend this country. Morley's own entry states that he's considered the best spy America produced in WWI, and his scientific work was an excellent cover. He was a real scientist, in fact. He worked on the Mayans and discovered Uaxactun, in Guatemala. He also did a lot of work on the Mayan hieroglyphs.

That set me off to my bookshelves, because I've got a few books on those. Sure enough, Morely's mentioned in them! I didn't think that a post on The Nation's rebuke of Chavez would send me all the way around to this, but that's the fun of these things.

"The Nation" on Chavez

Huh. I just saw The Nation on the newsstand, and their cover story asks whether comrade Chavez is starting to betray Venezuela's "experiment in democracy."

Wow. One of two the major left-wing opinion magazines questioning Chavez's democratic credentials?! Next thing, they'll be praising Reagan, and it's all downhill from there...

Clinton's awkward backtracking on Mississippi insult

"[T]he former first lady said the comments she made about the state in the run up to the Iowa caucuses "were not exactly what I said," even though they came directly from an interview she gave to the Des Moines Register in October. Let's review those comments, shall we?

The newspaper quoted the New York senator discussing Iowa and Mississippi being the only states that have never elected a woman governor or sent a woman to Congress.

"How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi? That's not what I see. That's not the quality. That's not the communitarianism; that's not the openness I see in Iowa."

And how does she slither out of this one?

"What I said is what I learned is that neither Iowa or Mississippi had ever elected a woman statewide and I referenced the fact that I was the first woman elected statewide in New York and I told the Iowans that they had a chance to try to change that and now in Mississippi giving Mississippi voters a chance to change that."

Awww, how noble of her! Offering her humble services to lift the benighted Mississippians out of their backwardness.

Obviously, though, her original comment was insulting precisely because she was praising Iowa at the expense of Mississippi--using the latter state as the standard of backwardness. It does no good to say that Mississippi and Iowa both have opportunities with her candidacy. "How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi?" She was flat-out slamming Mississippi.

Damn yankee. (And my apologies to nice yankees out there.)

Eco nonsense

Why does the press give any attention to a group like "Friends of the Earth"? They're complaining that an American Airlines flight from New York to London had only 5 passengers on board...and (oh my gosh!) it still flew!!! They're spitting mad. They don't seem to notice that planes don't fly passengers in one direction only. That plane was going to turn around in London and fly right back to America, carrying more passengers. So what do you gain by not flying out there? You strand another whole planeload of passengers who were going to go the opposite direction!

Nutty environmentalists.

Chicago strikes at the heart of the drug problem

...by wanting to ban Ziplock bags with either length or width under 2". Like the ones I buy to store nuts or loose candy. Or the kind you get sewing and button repair kits in. Right, that'll fix the drug problem. Love this line: the ordinance will be an "important tool" to go after grocery stores, health food stores and other businesses. Yep; those are the ones to go after. Stinkin' grocery stores!

Captured laptop documents Venezuelan aid to FARC

Well, this has got to be embarassing. After killing the FARC leader Raul Reyes, the Colombians have captured a rebel laptop with all kinds of neat-o documents on it. Including discussion of what may be a $300 million gift from Chavez to the rebels: "Who, where, when and how will we receive the dollars and store them?" What to do, what to do?

It also reveals the US (who has some citizens being held hostage by FARC) has been making overtures to them in some odd way. I hope we're not really negotiating with this bunch, but I understand the motivation to do so. Weird is this passage, though:

Writing two days before his death, Reyes tells his secretariat comrades that "the gringos," working through Ecuador's government, are interested "in talking to us on various issues."

"They say the new president of their country will be (Barack) Obama," noting that Obama rejects both the Bush administration's free trade agreement with Colombia and the current military aid program.

Reyes said the response he relayed is that the United States would have to publicly express that desire.

Huh. Well, I'd like to see more about what that means!

Hillary pulls through

Well, I didn't expect this to happen last night: Clinton won both the Ohio and Texas primaries. The Democrats had both a primary (2/3 of the delegates) and a caucus (1/3) in Texas, and while Obama's ahead in the caucus delegates right now, they've not counted all of those, yet.

Now, I want McCain to win the general election, but I'm pulling for Hillary to get the Democratic nomination, since I think she'll be easier to beat. And I agree with Limbaugh's desire to see the Democrats stretch out their primary fight as long as possible. The longer they're beating up on each other, the less we need to do it. The best outcome would be a brokered convention, even. Besides causing more havoc on their side, it would simply be fun to watch. I haven't seen one of those in my lifetime.

Still, I wonder if an extended Democratic primary season is wholly good for our side. The longer their season goes on, the longer the press will be giving them the bulk of the attention. I've been listening to XM Radio's P. O. T. U. S. '08 channel, which is devoted to Presidential campain coverage, and the discussion is mostly about the Democrats, because they're the ones still debating amongst themselves. POTUS '08 has great coverage--I'm not complaining about them; it's inevitable the Democrats will attract more attention as long as there's an actual contest on their side.

Neat, fascinating weirdness in computer science

I mostly use computers for straightforward computational work (and for playing around on the internet), and I don't do a lot of fancy programming. For my astronomy work, I use IDL, IRAF, and SuperMongo (SM). IDL has a kinship with FORTRAN that makes it easy to pick up and simple to crunch your way through a heavy computational problem, and it's adapted for image processing, which we do a lot of in astrophysics. IRAF is its evil-mad-scientist cousin, which is also for image processing, but screwy to deal with and has a lot of black boxes. And SM is a language for making publication-quality plots, as well as calculating things from large tables.

When it comes to writing a quick program to calcuate what I need, I prefer IDL and its FORTRAN-like simplicity and directness. But I have a fascination with the varieties of programming languages out there, and especially the totally different concepts behind some of them. It's like breaking out of the Indo-European languages most of us reading this are familiar with (say, English, German, Spanish, Latin, Russian, and even Sanskrit and ancient Hittite), with their conjugations of verbs and declensions of nouns...and seeing how the Semitic languages work (Hebrew verbs have gender, and expressing the genitive case is done by putting two nouns next to each other). Or Vietnamese, which has neither plurals nor past tense, and differences in meaning come in part through the tone of voice.

In that vein, take a look at some of the "Esoteric Programming Languages" listed here in Wikipedia. If your familiar with the simpler BASIC or FORTRAN, see how different the concepts can be and still get the job done. One of my favorites is perhaps the extreme case of a single-instruction language. If chosen carefully, you can do any computation with clever arrangements of that one instruction!

I've taken too long in posting this and want to go on to something else, so I'll get back to it later--more weirdness in programming to come, as well as how this connects with frontiers of physics!

Scholarly shenanigans in Koranic studies?

Nuts--I couldn't find another s-word to put in that title. Oh, well.

Anyway: I've been excited to discover that Christoph Luxenberg's The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran has finally been translated into English. This had previously been available only in German, but it still made a real sensation when it was first published in 2002 or '03. You may have read about the conclusion that the supposed 72 "virgins" the islamist terrorists think they're going to get in heaven might actually be raisins. Really, though, it's not as silly as that: the pseudonymous author says that the passages of the Koran talking about the things in paradise are vague, and the passage that's been thought to refer to virgins awaiting the martyrs doesn't say that explicitly. It speaks of something "white" or "white-eyed" (I'm doing this from memory, so don't quote me on this), and while that's traditionally been thought to refer to virgins, the word is more usually applied to grapes (or raisins). And it would make sense in context, where it's describing the fruits of paradise. Literal fruits, in this case!

But back to our topic: it's now out in English, and I can't wait to get a copy! The publisher quite helpfully links to positive, mixed, and negative reviews of the book. The negative review is written by Angelika Neuwirth, of the Free University of Berlin. From what I've seen on the web, she's considered Germany's foremost Koranic scholar. In trying to find out more about her, I came across this recent notice in the American Thinker's blog. Apparently, the Bavarian Academy of Science had taken photographs of a number of early manuscripts of the Koran, and these photos were (incorrectly) said to have been destroyed during the bombings in WWII. But a scholar there had hidden the photos for decades and (from what I gather) lied about their destruction. His student was this same Angelika Neuwirth. (You can read the Wall Street Journal's article about this here.) She's now leading a team to study them, but very slowly, and without having released the copies of those early manuscripts. They're wanting to produce the first "critical edition" of the Koran--one which accounts for the textual variations amongst the manuscripts. This is the sort of thing that's been done for a long time with the Bible, but never before for Islam's holy book.

Considering the much more direct claim of divine authorship of the Koran and its comparatively recent origin, any textual variations are liable to cause some problems for Moslem theologians. This has been speculated about for some time, but someday, the world will see what those manuscripts actually say. 'Til then, this would all make for an interesting Moslem version of The DaVinci Code!

Georgia tries to sieze a piece of Tennessee

Given the ongoing drought across the South, I'd expect a bit of desperation, but this attempt by Georgia to redraw the Tennessee border takes the cake. The idea is that a border survey done in 1818 was inaccurate, putting the border about a mile too far to the south. It's intended to be the 35th parallel.

Nobody would have pursued this, if it weren't for the drought that's struck Georgia (as well as Tennessee, I'll note). If the border were moved northward, part of our Nickajack Lake (outside Chattanooga) would lie within Georgia, giving them access to a bunch more water right there.

Now moving an interstate border around in the early 19th century, when few people lived there, is one thing. But trying to fudge with it now, when lots of people have property running up to the state line, would cause a lot of problems!

I suspect this won't go anywhere. Tennessee's not allow it. The people who live in Tennessee now (but would become Georgians if the border were changed) are absolutely going to refuse to it. And even if we did agree to let it be redrawn, before anything ever got done, the drought would hopefully be over, and the real reason for pursuing the matter would be gone.

Also take a look at the comments of "dajedikidd" (2/8/2008 11:57:36 PM). He seems to know about surveying, and he gives good advice on the fact of errors (you'll always have measurement errors) and why you don't necessarily redraw a line because of them.

Social Privilege Quiz

Oh, dear. Some social scientist has put together a quiz on "Social Class" or privilege. I won't go over all of it here, but the guys at the Boar's Head Tavern have been tearing it up pretty good. (As well as Scalzi and Megan McArdle here and here.)

But to comment on a few of the questions which are poorly written for the purposes the author wants to use them:

*If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

How far out do we go? I've got one first cousin (out of about 16 or so) who's a pediatrician. Does that count?

Of course, if we talk about my conditions today, I'm a professor, myself. My wife is. And I've got other cousins getting their Ph.D.s right now. But I figure he means, "when you were a kid."

*If your family was the same or higher class than your high school teachers

How would I know?!?! In my upbringing, we were taught not to compare our family with others in this way! We didn't think in terms of "class," and my father never told me what he made. In fact, he explicitly said he would not tell us kids, so that we wouldn't go and compare ourselves with the other kids' families. It's poor quality upbringing that has people going around thinking about questions like these.

*If the people in the media who dress and talk like you were portrayed positively.

No. People who dress and talk like the East Tennessee hillbilly that I am are made fun of in the media. Aside from that, tough, people whom he wants to flush out as "privileged" would be more likely to answer "no" to this question, because that "class" is generally made out as the bad guys on TV and in the movies. I happen to be an exception, because there's a real stereotype against us Southern rural types that Hollywood still revels in.

*If you had or will have no student loans when you graduate.

Academic scholarships. Wonderful things.

*If your parent owned their own house or apartment when you were a child or teen

Out in the country, who doesn't?! If you're not a sharecropper, it's kind of hard not to own your own house ("or apartment"? Hah, hah, hah! I always thought the people who lived in apartments were ones to pity, whether or not they owned them.). Heck, the family living up the cove from us who were dirt-poor tobacco and cattle farmers and lived in a two-room cabin? They owned their own house, too. And probably a good 20-30 acres to go with it! Hardly had a cent to their names, but they owned a house and a decent bit of land, and that's more than I can say for the "privileged" class growing up in New York City, poor slobs.

*If there was original art in your house as a child or teen

Sure enough! Grandmother was something of an artist, and we had some of hers hanging on the walls. An old girlfriend of my dad's had also painted a nice landscape, and it hung above the mantle. Wait--so that puts me in the privileged class?

*If were read children's books by a parent when you were growing up

Of course. And I fail to see how this makes me more "privileged" than one who didn't. It has nothing to do with money or status or "social class." It has only to do with the care my parents took for me when they read those 95-cent Little Golden Books. Anyone could afford to do that, but not everyone would choose to!

Anyway, I dislike these sorts of things, just as a matter of principle. They're all about breaking down the good manners you were reared on--in not "keeping up with the Joneses" and not comparing your financial/social/etc. status with others--and trying to get you to obsess about it. [grumble]

Kentuck and Ohio in archaeological dispute

Here's some nearly local news for us: a boulder carved with a face, a house, and some names, has been recovered from the Ohio River after being submerged for 87 years. It's from Portsmouth, Ohio, and was probably a navigation marker along the shore there, from back in the early days of the city's settlement. Its existence was recorded by the late 1800s, and there are names of some of the early residents carved onto it.

For reasons that are beyond me, the government of Kentucky is claiming ownership of it, since it had sunk into the river (most of which is inside Kentucky's borders). Now, as much as I like the state of Kentucky, I've got to stand up against that attitude, here. It was, apparently, carved by residents of Portsmouth, Ohio, it stood on the Ohio banks (actually, the story doesn't say that, but I'm guessing, from the background information--if it had been on the Kentucky shore this whole time, that puts a different light on it!), and it was only lost to the waves around 1920. Since when does falling into the water mean the government of another state gets to claim permanent ownership, even after it's pulled back out?

The attitude of wanting government control by default is a nasty one. Or even, in this case, outright government possession by default! Even worse. Heaven help me if I find an arrowhead on the Ohio River banks!

Pravda on the Lost Cosmonauts

Instapundit had a link to this, the other day. Pravda has gone from being the official newspaper in Communist Russia (yes, I know it was the Communist Party paper, but they ran the country) to filling a niche in post-Commie Russia for news about UFOs, news of the weird, and conspiracy theories. (Incidentally, take a look at this article on the "USA plung[ing] into poverty." (I'm quoting the headline.) How do you like the photo that accompanies it? This, for a story about the percentage of Washington state (only) residents under the poverty level increasing from 10% in 2001 to 12% in 2005. I like the half-naked kids climbing onto the family wagon (pulled by a horse, of course), surrounded by piles of junk. Very illustrative.)

Aaaaanyway. Glenn had a link to this 2001 story about supposed cosmonauts before Gagarin, but who died during their missions. There have been rumors about this in the West for decades, and given the secrecy with which the Soviet space program was conducted, it's not surprising. But nothing's come of them, even after records were opened up. There is, even less surprisingly, plenty of stuff out there on the web about these. The Encyclopedia Astronautica has a whole list of the names that have popped up in the "Lost Cosmonaut" rumors over the years, and they've thrown in Maj. Tony Nelson and Roger Healy for good measure. (Find the link for "Lost Cosmonauts.") The latter two they must have had fun with, as their biographies are done totally deadpan. Mentions Major Nelson's wife, Jeannie Nelson (formerly of Baghdad), as well as some of his career milestones and some problems that popped up along the way. Like when he had bad eyesight, nearly keeping him from a flight, until it mysteriously fixed itself a day later. (One of the kids brightened up when I read this part, and she said, "I know that episode!") Includes his later Space Shuttle career. Longest-serving US astronaut!

I can only hope that Stalin and Lenin and the rest of their murderous crew are spinning in their graves, to find that Pravda now has "Showbiz" and "Style" sections, just like the decadent West! And isn't it interesting that it's Pravda, of all rags, that's trading in Communist cover-ups now?!

Bloch Heads

I wrote the other day about the embarrassment that Muslims feel at the actions of terrorists and that physicists feel at the actions of faculty protesters. But in fact the pope too must feel some embarrassment at the actions of some of his self-anointed efenders. At the same time that terrorists were twisting his words to justify their actions, there were those who stepped up to defend the pope by saying, "he was right to call Muslims irrational", although he did not call Muslims irrational. Now that activist faculty members are twisting his words in order to justify their actions, Benedict XVI has his defenders arguing, "he was right to condemn Galileo", although he did not condemn Galileo. Never mind what he actually said. It turns out that the internet is full of geocentrists (Who knew?), and they are quick to crown themselves with the papal tiara.

Most of these Galileophobes of the blogosphere are basing their condemnation of heliocentrism on arguments largely identical to those of Ernst Bloch, as quoted by then Cardinal Ratzinger in 1990:

According to Bloch, the heliocentric system – just like the geocentric – is based upon presuppositions that can’t be empirically demonstrated. Among these, an important role is played by the affirmation of the existence of an absolute space; that’s an opinion that, in any event, has been cancelled by the Theory of Relativity. Bloch writes, in his own words: ‘From the moment that, with the abolition of the presupposition of an empty and immobile space, movement is no longer produced towards something, but there’s only a relative movement of bodies among themselves, and therefore the measurement of that [movement] depends to a great extent on the choice of a body to serve as a point of reference, in this case is it not merely the complexity of calculations that renders the [geocentric] hypothesis impractical? Then as now, one can suppose the earth to be fixed and the sun as mobile.”

What is missing from this argument is that it was Galileo himself who first proposed the Principle of Relativity, that there is no such thing as absolute motion, but "there’s only a relative movement of bodies among themselves, and therefore the measurement of that [movement] depends to a great extent on the choice of a body to serve as a point of reference". It is precisely relative movement that is a Galilean invariant, that is, a quantity that is the same regardless of your frame of reference. And it is this Galilean invariant that means that the earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa, both in the sun's frame of reference and in every other inertial frame of reference as well.

To see an example of this, first consider this proof that the earth rotates on its axis, and that it is not stationary with the universe revolving around it every 24 hours. Abe and Bill are both on ships on opposite sides of the world on the equator. As Abe watches the sunrise, Bill is on the other side of the world watching it set. At that moment, due to the spin of the earth, Abe, sitting peacefully on the deck of his ship, is actually heading toward the sun at 1000 miles per hour. Likewise, Bill is moving away from the sun at 1000 miles an hour. The magnitude of their relative motion, the motion relative to each other, is thus 2000 miles per hour.

"Ah", but Abe says, "you are saying this from a geocentro-centric point of view. Your reference frame is the center of the earth. From my point of view, I am not moving at all. It is the sun which is moving toward me at 1000 mph, and my buddy Bill is moving away from the sun at 2000 mph." And Abe is precisely right. But what Abe and I both agree on is that the relative motion between him and Bill has a magnitude of 2000 mph. There is no getting around it, their relative motion is a Galilean invariant. The fact that Abe and Bill, both standing stock still on the surface of the earth, have a relative motion of 2000 mph is a sure sign that the earth is rotating, and it is rotating in every Galilean reference frame.

The same thing applies mutatis mutandis to the earth's revolution around the sun. "One can suppose the earth to be fixed and the sun as mobile", says Bloch, but can you really? I tell the geocentrist that he is moving 30 km/s around a stationary sun. "Not at all", says the geocentrist. "I am stationary. It is the sun that is moving 30 km/s."

Fine, in his inertial reference frame he is not moving, and the sun is. But in six months, in that same frame, he will be moving 60 km/s, and in the same direction as the sun, which will still be moving 30 km/s! In what sense, then, can the geocentrist continue to assert that he is not moving? Sure, he can construct reference frames where the earth is stationary for one instant every year, but he cannot escape the fact that the motion of the earth in January relative to the earth in July is 60 km/s. The relative motion of the sun in January to the sun in July, on the other hand, is negligibly small.

"But wait", says the Galileophobe, "Galileo believed in absolute space and absolute time. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (ESTR) did away with all that. Those Galilean invariants aren't invariant at all. The Galilean Principle of Relativity (GPR) is completely wrong"

Actually, at speeds characteristic of the solar system, those Galilean invariants really are very nearly invariant, and GPR is true. But let's cut our Galileophobe a break, and pretend that we are whipping by the solar system in a spaceship at 90% the speed of light. (In that case, GPR really doesn't work.) And as why fly by, we are trying to ascertain whether the sun goes around the earth, or the earth the sun.

Since GPR doesn't work, we cannot rely on the Galilean invariant, the relative motion of the earth in January and July, to answer our question. We can, however, rely on Lorentz invariants. One example of a Lorentz invariant is the 4 dimensional momentum of the earth in January relative to that of the earth in July. Like the relative velocity in GPR, this Lorentz invariant is constant in all inertial reference frames in ESTR. It is quite analogous to relative velocity in GPR, right down to indicating that the earth is rotating about its axis in every ESTR reference frame, and that it is revolving around the sun, and not vice versa, in every ESTR reference frame.

In a sense, Bloch and like-minded bloggers have internalized the Principle of Relativity too well, better than GPR, or ESTR for that matter, can hold. GPR and ESTR hold for translational motion, but not for rotation or revolution, as has been demonstrated by a straightforward application of these theories themselves. The reason for this is that translational motion is qualitatively different from rotation and revolution in its very definition. Unlike translational motion, rotation and revolution always imply acceleration.

Muslims and Physicists

On 12 September 2006 in Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture titled "Faith, Reason and the University — Memories and Reflections". In that lecture, the Pope quoted a question by Christian Emperor Manuel II Paleologus put to the Muslim Worthy Mouterizes. It was a rude question, asked "with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded", said the pope. He recounted this dialogue between the Emperor and the Worthy in order to demonstrate the difficulties involved in inter-religious dialogue, but very soon his lecture itself became a parable of the perils of that dialogue. The pope's words were repeated out of context around the world. Muslim terrorists used these words as an excuse to commit those actions for which they are always cooking up an excuse. In the days that followed, churches were burned and bombed, Christians were lynched, and most notably a nun was murdered along with her muslim bodyguards.

Muslims everywhere were mortified and embarrassed by the actions of their terroristic co-religionists. The killers of the nun have been arrested by the Islamic government of Somalia, and they will be punished.

But today it is the turn of Physicists to be embarrassed. The physics faculty at Sapienza, the university of Rome, have organized a protest against the pope's planned visit to the university. They have enlisted as allies in their protest Italy's radical homosexual movement, elements of which have called for the assassination of Cardinal Bagnasco, and the anti-globalization movement that rioted during the July 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. Those 2001 protests had left over 400 injured and 1 dead.

Needless to say, the pope did the decent thing and cancelled the visit. He released the text of his banned speech; a translation is available here, courtesy of Asia News.

So what exactly, are these physicists so outraged about? Benedict XVI had visited Sapienza before, but then he had been named Joseph Cardinal Raztinger. On March 15, 1990 he had given an address called "The Crisis of Faith in Science". At that time, the professors say, he said that the conviction of Galileo had been "rational and just". Appalling!

But just like the terrorists in 2006, the activists of 2008 had quoted Ratzinger quoting someone else, and had purposefully taken that quote out of context. National Catholic Reporter has provided a translation of the address here.

In his address, Ratzinger quoted the usual anti-science suspects. His longest quote was from the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who spouted off the usual drivel, that Einstein had refuted Galileo once and for all. Does the Earth orbit the Sun, or the Sun orbit the Earth? It's all relative! One is as good as the other! (Sheesh.) But the money quote was from agnostic anarchist Feyerabend, saying the "verdict against Galileo was rational and just". Ratzinger then went on to cite the illustrious physicist Carl Friedrich Baron von Weizsaecker who marked a direct path from Galileo to the atomic bomb.

So why was Ratzinger quoting all this negative spin about Galileo? Was he saying, "let's have more of this dirt on Galileo, let's pile it on!"? Not hardly. He was talking about a crisis of faith in Science, a crisis closely linked to post-modern philosophers. He used these philosophers as a negative example for Christians, "The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation and from being inscribed in a still greater form of reason..." Christians should resist the resentment that turns Galileo into a scapegoat for the atomic bomb or anything else.

The ultimate irony of the faculty's successful attempt to ban the pope is the text of the banned speech itself. Early on Pope Ratzinger mentioned his earlier address at Regensburg. Perhaps he had Regensburg on his mind when he warned of a danger to reason in the last paragraphs: "that reason in the end may bow to the pressures of partisan interests and instrumental value".

A neat, old, science fiction story, and science fiction in the service of ideology

I was listening to the old science fiction series "X-1" on XM radio last night, when they played an episode from 1956(?) entitled, "The Tunnel Under the World." It's taken from a short story by the (still-living) Frederik Pohl about a man who keeps repeating the same day, June 15th, but with slight variations. I won't spoil the entire plot, in case you get the chance to hear or read it, but you can read a summary of the short story in the first link above, which is only slightly different from the radio version. The story is a fascinating one and creepy when you discover the twists and revelations.

Anyway, I was impressed and looked up Pohl when I got home. It turns out that he was high-school friends with Isaac Asimov and that both were early members of a group of science fiction fans called the Futurians. Checking up on what the Futurians were, I found that they were a splinter group from another New York City sci-fi fan club, and they advocated sci-fi fans to push for ideology. Inevitably, this meant communism:

At the time the Futurians were formed, Donald Wollheim was strongly attracted by communism and believed that followers of science fiction "should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence".[2] It was to this end that Wollheim formed the Futurians, and many of its members were in some degree interested in the political applications of science fiction.

Yeesh! Nothing like the phrase "scientific world-state" to give you the creeps. Especially in the '30s.

Pohl himself was an outright member of the Communist Party, until he was expelled in '39. It was either because, as some say, the Party thought science fiction was escapist and didn't contribute to the building of the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatever, or, as Pohl says, that he rejected the Party line over the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Either way, he apparently remained a true leftist, and his writings display a satire of capitalism and advertising. Actually, I've got to say that the bit that comes through in "Tunnel" is well done and could have been written by a conservative, as well.

There's a whole weird history to this science fiction fan activity, something that I've never gotten into. I enjoy my sci fi movies, but I've rarely read any such books. Funny for an astrophysicist, right? So outside remarks by friends, I'm unaware of what all has gone on in this world. At one level, it seems so trivial (they're fan groups--not necessarily even writers, though many became such), but these guys clearly saw themselves as doing important work, and the Futurians were even claiming it was all in the service of the future "scientific world-state"!

Well, I'd intended to write more about the connections between "scientific socialism" and science fiction, but I'll just have to save it for later. I ought to close this off with the connections "Tunnel" has with other works: Simulacron-3 (1964; made into the movie "The Thirteenth Floor" in 1999) has a similar premise (I'm guessing the writer was familiar with the earlier work), and it in turn influenced "The Matrix" (1999). Interestingly, Stanislaw Lem wrote a short story in 1960 that dealt with some aspects of the same premise. Lem also wrote Solaris, which was made into the George Clooney movie a little while back. I just read the book, which is thought-provoking.

More new exoplanets

A nice article in the NYT about the discovery of a fifth planet around the star 55 Cancri (a faint star in the constellation Cancer). This is, I believe, the most extensive solar system yet found, outside of our own. It's exciting to see this many planets around a star, but beyond that, this helps us understand more about planetary system formation.

Until 1994, the only example we had of a planetary system was our own solar system. So when you read in textbooks how planets formed around stars, there was a lot of theory but only a single example. Now, knowing the laws of physics, we weren't just feeling around blindly. But it's always better to have multiple data points to test your predictions.

Now, we've found over 250 extrasolar planets (or "exoplanets"), we have a better idea of how they tend to look. But we still need to find more examples of multiple planets around a single star--a solar system. When we see the range of properties of solar systems, we'll be able to test the theories of planetary formation in greater detail. For instance, the presence of a single massive planet, like Jupiter, can affect or even inhibit the formation of other planets nearby. Witness the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Jupiter's tidal forces have prevented a major planet from collapsing from the debris there. In the 55 Cancri system, there's a similar wide gap near its largest planet (at least as far as we can tell today). In how many other systems will the same feature appear?

And there's always the chance that the now-crank Bode's Law has some natural basis. It's a particular power-law distribution of the planets, and while we don't expect that it has any force in and of itself, there are theories that would account for power-law distributions in general (cited at the bottom of that Wikipedia article). The discovery of new solar systems gives us more data to test these theories, too.

The travails of Antioch College

I'd read earlier in the year about Antioch College planning to close. This article says they may remain open a while longer, but things still aren't looking good. I'd never heard of Antioch until I was in college, myself, and Antioch became the subject of ridicule for their sexual harassment policy, which required explicit "verbal consent" at each stage of...let's say, "interaction." ("May I proceed to nibble on your ear, now?")

It wasn't a disapproval of premarital sex, of course. That was all well and good; you just had to stop and do the paperwork (so to speak) at each step along the way. To avoid a rape charge the next day, I reckon.

I've always thought keeping your pants on before you were married was a better solution to the problem, really, but that would be to impose a moral system on the whole enterprise, heaven forbid.

Anyway, though surprising that any college had put such a silly rule in place, it's not surprising it was Antioch that did it. Liberal bastion they:

The alma mater of Coretta Scott King, "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling and two Nobel Prize winners, Antioch College doesn't grade classes, encourages students to develop their own study plans and combines academic learning with experience through a co-op program in which students leave campus to work in various fields.

The reasons for their current problem confuse me a little. I simply don't expect 150-year-old colleges with their reputation(?) to leak students so badly. But I've read it could be from the administration's losing focus on the college and branching out too far with...well, "branch" campuses and other programs.

Link for Pakistan post

I forgot to link below. Here's the BBC story on Bhutto calling for protests against Musharraf's emergency rule. I reckon the big news is her split from Musharraf, after their earlier negotiations for her return.

The trouble in Pakistan

Grrr. Musharraf is breaking promises again, or it sure seems like it. Is it a coincidence that his declaration of martial law occurs just as Bhutto has returned for a revived political career?

I don't know...maybe it is simply a result of the Islamist attacks recently; it's so hard to tell from the news reporting whether there's been a sharp increase in their number since Bhutto's return or not. Obviously there was the large attack on Bhutto's arrival itself, but I haven't been aware of what else is going on in the country, differently from before.

I would have to think that Musharraf knows his arrangements with Bhutto (to run together, as it seems, for elected office) put him in a very public commitment to going ahead with democracy. Is he really going to turn opinion that strongly against himself for this?

Of course, he'd promised to hold elections a few years ago, too, and look where they are now. I really hope he upholds the deal that Bhutto's return implied. Pakistan's going to need democracy, and it's going to need to marginalize the radical Islamist elements within the society. Maybe the Musharraf/Bhutto arrangement could do that.

Clinton on Clinton

So Hillary's campaign is having to back away from some of Bill's comments on her rivals. Interesting. I remember that Hillary was occasionally an albatross around Bill's neck during his campaigns, and they'd have to hide her for a few months until the election was over. I'm a little surprised that Bill is now the one making comments they've got to repudiate.

Well, maybe that's too strong a word. Folks on the conservative side had wondered how helpful Bill would be to her campaign, but for different reasons. Which would have the stronger effect on people--his charisma and personal popularity, or memories of his behavior and the scandals?

Now Bill's compared Hillary's rivals' criticisms of her "candor" (they noted that she's been contradicting herself, so which of her statements are we to believe?) to the Swift Boat Veterans' ads against John F. Kerry. I'd like to say that that's an outrageous comparison...because it insults the Swift Boat Vets, but really, both were honest criticisms.

The AP article I've linked to (via Drudge) says that the swift boat ads "questioned John Kerry's patriotism," but I don't remember that at all. They certainly reminded people of his wild and apparently baseless accusations of war crimes against his compatriots and of the way in which he puffed up his war record, maybe dishonestly (the ads flat out said much of it was a lie).

Now, that's still a tough criticism, and Hillary's opponents haven't been that hard on her. If her campaign, Bill included, is going to make out that she's beyond any criticism, that criticism is beyond the pale, they're going to have a tough time selling that to the public.

Still, back when she ran for the Senate, she was at her most popular when she played up her victim status, wasn't she?

Lawsuit against Regnery

Hmmm...there's some unhappiness with Regnery Publishing's sales methods. They're accused by some of their authors of steering sales to outlets they're tied in with, thus cutting down on authors' royalties. A few, including Joel Mowbray, Bill Gertz, and Richard Miniter are even filing a lawsuit against the parent company.

Shame to see, regardless of what the truth is. I've got a couple of their books, and I like that they've been willing to publish conservative authors. They've been really helpful to conservative politics, and I'll be happy to see any rift here fixed.

The turnabout on that Armenian genocide resolution

My dad and I have both been asking, "What is the push to do this now?!" I've always accepted (or just assumed) that the massacre of the Armenians was a genocide, but as for the technical meaning of the word, I'm content to leave it to historians. I do not look to my Congress for history lessons. And nearly a century after the Armenians were slaughtered, it is not exactly a profile in courage to stand up against it. It does nothing more than make the Congressmen feel better about themselves and give their Armenian-descended constituents the satisfaction of having somebody poke a finger in the eye of the Turks. I sympathize with the Armenians and don't begrudge them wanting to have somebody do the latter, actually, but it's not the Congress' job to do it.

Congress should have asked themselves, (1) "Is this part of our job?", and (2) "Is this in America's interests?" The answer to both, I think, is "no." Furthermore, will it hurt America's interests? Clearly, it will. Turkey is threatening to invade Iraq. Possibly justifiably, considering the cross-border raids some Kurds have made, but obviously a Turkish invasion would destabilize the safest region of Iraq. And do we trust the Turks to be restrained in shooting Kurds? I'm not so sure.

What about Turkish cooperation with America in the Global War on Terrorism? It's a tentative thing already, but they're a necessary ally, and one of our few near the Middle East. Don't purposely go and tick them off! Not if you don't actually need to.

These meaningless resolutions are pointless and cheap in the best of times, but this one would actually have harmed American interests. I'm glad the Democrats are abandoning it.

And then there's this take.

Martian caves?

On a similar note, there's this discovery of caves on Mars. Or at least deep holes in the ground. They're on a volcano, so they're likely to be lava-related, rather than water-carved. They determined their nature by watching their temperatures, compared with their surroundings. Caves on Earth maintain a nearly-constant air temperature inside, day and night, summer and winter. These aren't perfectly constant, but their temperature swings are only one-third that of their surroundings. So if they're not complete caves, they're at least very deep holes.

Martian geology--no water?

(Via the Boar's Head Tavern) One group is claiming the evidence for water on Mars has evaporated.

OK, bad joke. They're saying that surface features that look like they're water-caused are either from lava flows (big canyons in the flatlands) or landslides (smaller gullies on hillsides).

I've long been hoping we'd find active water sites on Mars, so I'm not an objective reporter on this, but I'm skeptical. The evidence for water (both in the distant past and the immediate present) has been building up steadily for the past decade. Soil chemistry in the plains (I'll need to find a specific reference--going from memory, here) shows evidence of having been in standing water in the past.

And the gullies that open out from cliff faces don't show the scree-slope shapes that you'd expect from landslides--the have carved channels, with meandering. You need a liquid to do that. Rock and sand piles up higher in the middle of the slide and makes a convex feature. Water-carved features are concave, like what we see on Mars. These are the sites we've been seeing before-and-after photos of, demonstrating active geology, probably flash-flooding from water gushing out of the cliff.

The new data might undermine a few specific arguments, but I doubt they're going to sweep away all of the evidence that's been piling up since 1997.