Author: Mick Hartley

can do is sit back and watch the physicists fight it out amongst themselves, and hope they wake us up when it’s all sorted out.

Anyway, here’s a nice example of the sort of article I’m thinking of:

In the 1990s…a new possibility arose, as scientists came to appreciate the role of “branes” in higher-dimensional physics. A brane, generalizing the concept of a membrane, is simply an extended object: A string is a one-dimensional brane, a membrane is a two-dimensional brane, and so on, up to however many dimensions may exist. A remarkable feature of such objects is that particles may be confined to them, unable to escape into the surrounding space. We can therefore imagine that our visible world is a three-dimensional brane, embedded in a larger universe into which we simply can’t reach.

Yes, I understand that! Perhaps I’m going to learn something here. But then…

Gravity, as the curvature of spacetime itself, is the one force that is hard to confine to a brane; the extra dimensions must therefore have some feature that prevents gravity from appearing higher-dimensional. (For example, in four spatial dimensions, the gravitational force would fall off as the distance cubed, rather than the distance squared.) One possibility, proposed by Nima Arkani-Hamed, Savas Dimopoulos and Georgi (“Gia”) Dvali, is that the extra dimensions curl up into a ball that is small without being too small—perhaps as large as a millimeter across in each direction.

The extra dimensions curl up into a ball a millimeter across? Why not spread out into a cube three miles across? Or spin around like a hula-hoop? Or mix with the crowds at Royal Ascot? There’s no way of evaluating any of this stuff unless you’re one of the few who can operate at that level. Like I said, you just have to take their word for it. It’s like reading about the origin myths of some newly discovered tribe from New Guinea: it may be interesting at some level to learn about these things, but really for us amateurs it’s just more weird stuff, which doesn’t connect to much else except insofar as it’s what some (admittedly very clever) people believe to be true.

(I could go off at this point about how this is the way some cultural theorists see all science, because, lacking any scientific understanding, they imagine it always has that arbitrary quality, which leads them down the dead-end of post-modernism where origin myths may be just as true as scientific theories – but I’ll refrain.)

Both books under review get a good write-up, but I doubt I’ll be reading them. I have this sneaking hope that some genius will come along at some point and tie it all together – quantum theory, relativity, the whole works – and it’ll turn out that it does make sense after all, and we can forget that bullshit about “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” In the meantime why take up all that brain space, when in the end it’s “just somethin’ we’re gonna have to forget.”

reat, compared with that from chemical and biological weapons. It thought that the real nuclear threat lay in the future, in Saddam Hussein’s known interest in acquiring the capability.

k? The hadith means that we should fight them with sticks and stones.” This is not true. We either accept these things as fact or as a metaphor. If you cannot accept it as a fact then it’s a metaphor. As long as it is impossible to accept the facts…

But brothers, the Prophet has told us that the time will come when man will talk without using his voice – the cell-phone, the cordless phone. This cordless phone – where did it come from? From the earth. Plastic comes from petroleum. The wires, the iron, and the copper – where do they come from? From the earth. Furthermore, some communication devices are now made of wood. It is not impossible that “the tree and the stone will speak” refers to the advanced scientific instruments that warn you about people. Today you have, for example, early warning stations in Sinai. Early warning stations exist in the Golan. They give the Israelites information about the other side’s movements.

Host: Sir, this is if we interpret (the hadith) metaphorically. But isn’t it possible that the tree and stone will actually talk? That the tree itself will talk, and the stone itself will talk?

‘Ali Al-Faqir: Sir, it has been proven scientifically that the trees and the stones have languages of their own. But we don’t have the ability to invent the instruments that will convey the tree’s voice and the stone’s voice to us.

Science has progressed so much that there are instruments that are placed in gardens. The plant produces certain waves, which are received by the instrument, and the plant says: “I am thirsty, water me, I am sick, heal me.”

nst gay marriage; but they are weary of condemning Islamist regimes that execute citizens for being gay. Something has gone terribly awry…

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), told me that when George W. Bush was a governor, “there wasn’t a peep about the execution of juveniles in Texas. … Let’s not have double standards because it’s a different part of the world.” Foreman, who worked within the U.S. prison system for ten years, says that the United States still engages in “barbaric behavior” at home. “If we think that psychological torture and physical torture and rape and inhumane conditions are not part of our own criminal justice system, than people don’t have a clue about the reality of our nation, let alone the conditions of Guantánamo, let alone the sanctions to keep prisoners in Afghanistan.” To Foreman, it would be hypocritical for U.S. gays and lesbians to criticize Iran if they haven’t been criticizing America’s own prison system all along. Faisal Alam, founder of the Al-Fatiha Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit for LGBT Muslims, also used the news of the Iran hangings to point a finger at the United States. “While we condemn the executions of gay teens in Iran, we must remember that until March of this year, our own country was one of only five in the world that executed juvenile offenders,” Alam wrote in an August Washington Blade column.

Foreman’s and Alam’s comparisons are specious. America and Iran may both have flawed systems of punishing criminals; and, to be sure, juvenile executions are an illiberal practice, whether carried out in Houston or Tehran. But only Iran convicts those criminals simply because of their sexual orientation. That’s a pretty important distinction. Furthermore, U.S. gay rights organizations don’t have an inherent responsibility to take up the crusade for the rights of juvenile criminals; they do, however, have a responsibility to speak up when gays are executed simply for being gay. There’s nothing admirable about using one injustice as blinders for another.

Gay activists in the UK, like the irrepressible Peter Tatchell, have a better record.

The Guardian’s headline:

George Bush: ‘God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq’

The Independent’s headline:

Bush: God told me to invade Iraq

Normally there’s a fair degree of consensus across the broadsheets (as they used to be) as to what constitute the major stories of the day. Oddly in the Times this story is only mentioned on page 46, in a brief paragraph, after an account of Bush’s speech yesterday:

The White House has denied that President Bush said that he was instructed by God to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nabil Shaath, a former Palestinian Foreign Minister, said that he had heard Mr Bush say so during an interview for a documentary.

He said that in June 2003 he heard Mr Bush tell Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister: “God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan’, and I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’, and I did.”

An official for the Bush Administration said: “This account is false.”

So why are the Guardian and Independent making such a big deal of it? If they weren’t such respectable newspapers you could almost believe they had some kind of agenda to try and make Bush look as stupid as possible in order to pander to the prejudices of their readership.

At Wikipedia, a list of made-up words in the Simpsons, including “craptacular“, “cromulent“, “embiggen” (from the Springfield town motto, “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man”) , “tomacco“:

A tomacco is originally a fictional hybrid fruit that is half tomato and half tobacco, from the 1999 episode “E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)” of The Simpsons; the method used to create the tomacco in the episode is fictional. The tomacco became real when it was allegedly produced in 2003. The tomacco is one of the few made-up words in The Simpsons that resulted in real life application.

and not forgetting “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords“.

(via Welsh View)

ideals of the U.N.’s own charter–meant to promote peace, freedom and prosperity. Since the late 1980s, the Chinese government in Taipei has gone from martial law to free-wheeling elections, as the 23 million people on Taiwan have created China’s first full democracy. In recent decades, they have also leapt from deep poverty to the ranks of the world’s wealthier polities. The usual U.N. databases do not include Taiwan, but according to the CIA World Factbook, Taiwan’s per capita income these days is about $25,000–which in U.N. rankings would place it in the neighborhood of such highly developed nations as Italy and New Zealand, with almost 20 times the per capita income of Red China.

Taiwan has achieved this despite being evicted from the U.N. in the 1970s, to be replaced by the communist government. For Taiwan, there has been no place at the perennial U.N. conferencing on “sustainable development.” Taiwan was cut out of the U.N. picture years before the U.N. began its drumbeat for global taxation to support U.N. “millennium development goals.” And lo! Taiwan has blossomed beyond the wildest dreams of the U.N. aidocrats who, bereft of the defunct Oil for Food program, now hope to lavish yet more attention, and earn themselves many more U.N. per diems, in Africa. It’s enough to suggest the real secret of success might be to ignore the U.N.

ting for the state to pay for him to have a prostitute visit him at home.

Torben Hansen, who has cerebral palsy, which severely affects his speech and mobility, believes his local authority should pay the extra charge he incurs when he hires a sex worker – because his disability means he cannot go to see them. His case is currently being considered.

From commenter Andrew:

I used to think that there was merit in this type of social service, but an articulate friend convinced me otherwise. He argued that it was best to take such matters into your own hands. But then again he was a master debater.

If you don’t have the time, patience, or energy to wade through the 700 pages or so of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s “Mao: The Unknown Story“, then this review by Keith Windschuttle (via Milt’s File) may be the next best thing. As you’d expect from him, he doesn’t waste the opportunity to condemn Western fellow-travellers, from journalist Edgar Snow to the group of Parisians around the journal Tel Quel, who were duped by Mao’s socialist dystopia. Snow’s “Red Star over China” in particular was hugely influential in establishing the picture of Mao as heroic national liberator. Windschuttle wonders if Chang and Halliday’s book may not be equally influential:

Chang and Halliday’s book will be impossible to ignore. It will no doubt be banned in China, but will still circulate secretly and be more sought after for that. The tens of thousands of Chinese students now studying at Western universities will see it in the bookstores. The story its authors tell is so awful it will both shock the Chinese people and confirm many of the private anecdotes and rumors passed down within families. Rather than being the man who made the ancient Middle Kingdom stand up again, Mao was the one who brought it to its knees. This is a powerful story which Mao’s heirs will have great difficulty denying or suppressing. Just as Snow’s book helped install the regime, Chang and Halliday’s could help bring it down. If any single book in our own time has the capacity to change the course of history, this is it.

=”http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2005-10-04T160725Z_01_DIT457969_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-RELIGION-EVOLUTION-CARDINAL-DC.XML”>now stated that the theory of evolution is “one of the very great works of intellectual history.” As a commenter at The Loom remarks, perhaps the cardinal was politely informed by a higher authority that he’d “misread the tea leaves… One may not like Mr. Ratzinger much, but he’s not stupid.”