Accidental Blogger

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  • Another WMD Turns Out To Be A Dud

    This is breaking news.  No need for commentary. The story speaks for itself.  The warmongers must find a new enemy soon – before the "Use By" dates on our own WMDs expire.  Let the demonization begin.

    WASHINGTON (CNN) — Iran halted work toward a nuclear weapon under international scrutiny in 2003 and is unlikely to be able to produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb until 2010 to 2015, a U.S. intelligence report says.

    A declassified summary of the latest National Intelligence Estimate found with "high confidence" that the Islamic republic stopped an effort to develop nuclear weapons in the fall of 2003. The estimate is less severe than a 2005 report that judged the Iranian leadership was "determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure." But the latest report says Iran — which declared its ability to produced enriched uranium for a civilian energy program in 2006 — could reverse that decision and eventually produce a nuclear weapon if it wanted to do so.

    Enriched uranium at low concentrations can be used to fuel nuclear power plants, but much higher concentrations are needed to yield a nuclear explosion.

    "We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely," the report says. A more likely time frame for that production is between 2010 and 2015, it concludes.

    Iran has insisted its nuclear program is strictly aimed at producing electricity, and the country has refused the U.N. Security Council’s demand to halt its enrichment program.

    National Intelligence Estimate summary (PDF)

    Monday’s report represents the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies. It suggests that a combination of "threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige and goals for regional influence in other ways," could persuade the Iranian leadership to continue its suspension of nuclear weapons research.

    Available intelligence suggests the Iranian leadership is guided "by a cost-benefit approach," not a headlong rush to develop a bomb, the report concludes.

  • The Lengthy Half-Life of the Printing Press (Andrew)

    I’m a reluctant technophile — working for a dotcom in the 90s  made me not so much a technophobe as a marketing-phobe — I enjoy new gadgets even as the utopian claims of advertising are an insult to the seriousness with which we regard the English language around here.  So I greet the Amazon Kindle, a new e-reader that allows for the inexpensive downloading of books and newspapers, with a mixture of interest and disdain.

    Kindle_shot On the positive side, newspapers have long seemed to me a place where for both economic and environmental reasons, electronic distribution makes a lot of sense.  It’s just that I enjoy the experience of reading the piecemeal, web version of newspapers far less than the actual hardcopy.  Something about unfolding all those big long pages is a lot more inviting than staring into my digital screen, which feels too much like sitting at my desk during the workday.  From a business standpoint too, the big ole ads in a paper version of a newspaper are a lot more arresting, which is why they sell for a lot more than their digital counterparts. 

    It’s just that everytime I take our weekly mountain of old newspapers out for recycling, I feel that twinge of Berkeley-induced guilt that this is a waste of paper, which as every environmentalist knows, Davidhiller_3 requires a very dirty fabrication process.  And I’m sure publishers like David Hiller, the LA Times executive whose entire raison d’etre seems to be downsizing his workforce, would love to cut  printing and delivery costs.  So a high-quality reader like the Kindle could be a way to combine the logistical advantages of electronic delivery while retaining some of the sensuality of reading a big ole paper, even if it means you have to mouse around a bit to see different sections of it.  ( To take things a step further, the Christian Science Monitor has a cool service where for $8/month, you can get a daily "treeless" .pdf of the entire actual paper).

    But I really can’t see electronic reading replacing books, particularly given the way I treat my books.  Can you imagine taking a $400 Kindle to the beach, or a cafe, or a bar?  The possibilities for spillage are somewhat horrifying.  And while I would certainly rather pay $10 rather than $35 for a new book, my own experience is that reading digitally is much more tiring than reading something on the page, for reasons that I don’t fully understand.  In my first grueling year of graduate school, I read Moby-Dick for literally about 13 hours a day to finish in time for seminar, and it’s hard for me to imagine spending that much time in front of a screen, no matter how good it is. 

    Then there’s the issue of marginalia, which I don’t believe the Kindle lets you make — but let’s say that in a future version, it would  When you’re in a real push like I was that first year, you don’t have the time or energy to make a touchpad register your note — the point of marginalia is a note to yourself as a reader, underscoring a critical point, paraphrasing a tough argument, drawing a connection with something else you read.  The last thing you want to do is have to fiddle with the technology. 

    Melville Anyhow, speaking of marginalia, one of my favorite examples is Herman Melville’s notation on an explication of King Lear, where he wrote: "Hold, hold, thou ass of a commentator!"  I think I’ll take his advice.  But not before admitting I haven’t tried the Kindle, so maybe it’ll make a believer of me. In his review,  Stephen Levy of Newsweek claims that reading books on the Kindle put him in a "trance-like zone," which he considers a good metaphor for intense reading (insert crabby English teacher wisecrack here).  But I’d certainly love to hear from anyone else who has used the thing, and other thoughts people have on this.

  • Khartoum Punishes British Teacher (Joe)

    New York Times:

     

    The British teacher in Sudan so = new SWFObject(“http://www.nytimes.com/packages/flash/multimedia/swfs/multiloader.swf”, “p958807”, “100%”, “25”, “8”, “#FFFFFF”);
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    who let her 7-year-old pupils name a class teddy bear Muhammad was
    found guilty on Thursday of insulting Islam and sentenced to 15 days in
    jail and deportation.

    Under Sudanese law, the teacher, Gillian Gibbons, could have spent six months in jail and been lashed 40 times.

    “She
    got a very light punishment,” said Rabie A. Atti, a government
    spokesman. “Actually, it’s not much of a punishment at all. It should
    be considered a warning that such acts should not be repeated.”

    British
    officials, meanwhile, were furious. As soon as the news broke that Ms.
    Gibbons had been convicted, the Foreign Office in London, which had
    called the whole ordeal “an innocent mistake,” summoned the Sudanese
    ambassador — for the second time in two days. * * *

    Ms.
    Gibbons, 54, has been in jail since Sunday, and Mr. Daair said her
    sentence would include time served, which means she will spend 10 more
    days behind bars before being sent to Britain.

    The case started
    in September when Ms. Gibbons, who taught at one of Sudan’s most
    exclusive private schools, began a project on animals and asked her
    class to suggest a name for a teddy bear. The class voted resoundingly
    for Muhammad, one of the most common names in the Muslim world and the
    name of Islam’s holy prophet.

    As part of the exercise, Ms.
    Gibbons told her students to take the bear home, photograph it and
    write a diary entry about it. The entries were collected in a book
    called “My Name Is Muhammad.” Most of her students were Muslim children
    from wealthy Sudanese families.

    The government said that when
    some parents saw the book, they complained to the authorities. In
    Islam, insulting the Prophet Muhammad is a grave offense, and in
    northern Sudan, where Khartoum is, it is a crime. The government said
    it was insulting to name an animal or toy Muhammad.

    Three thoughts:

    1. In no conceivable way did Gibbons insult Islam.
    2. Is this an attempt to divert attention away from shadier goings on in Sudan?  If so, it would have to be something pretty bad, because the ongoing genocide in Darfur is old news.
    3. Or is this a message to the West?: "GET OUT."  The punishment here is mostly symbolic: she’s banished and jailed for a week.  If, on the other hand, they had given her the statutorily allowed 40 lashes, Khartoum might have been bombed into oblivion or occupied by British troops.

  • An Israeli and A Palestinian Walk Into a Movie Theater….

    "An Israeli and a Palestinian are watching a Western. In the movie, a cowboy is riding bareback on a particularly wild horse. The Israeli, being aggressive, says to the Palestinian, "I’ll bet you 10 shekels he falls." The Palestinian, being impulsive, replies immediately, "I’ll bet you he doesn’t."

    The cowboy falls, and the Palestinian forks over 10 shekels. The Israeli, feeling that famous Israeli guilt, refuses them. Then he admits, "I’ve seen this movie before."

    The Palestinian replies, "So have I. But I thought he would learn from his mistake."

    So joked Saeb Erakat, the veteran Palestinian peace negotiator at the Brookings Institute in reference to the middle east peace talks under way in Annapolis. There is a slight problem though with Erakat’s premise. Bush is not a cowboy!

    [Link:  thanks, Confused]

  • Painting by the Numbers (Dean)

    "Very few artists have painted sunsets before, during and following major volcanic eruptions."

    —C. S. Zerefos, V. T. Gerogiannis, D. Balis, S. C. Zerefos, and A. Kazantzidis, Atmospheric effects of volcanic eruptions as seen by famous artists and depicted in their paintings, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, v.7, pp.4027-42, 4029 (2007)

    Turnersunset_2
    My scattered contributions to AB have included more than a few rants about the sciences encroaching on the arts by presuming to explain or account for them in purely scientific terms. Indeed, as recently as yesterday, Natalie Angier published an article about a researcher whose findings suggest that, as Angier puts it, "the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate." The subtext is that such an impulse will, with sufficient study, be wholly explicable in biological terms. I continue not to buy it, but that’s not what I’m about here.

    Instead, I want to highlight another story from today, courtesy of AP. It reports on the study from which I’ve drawn my epigram, a line which, frankly, reads like some of the best of John Ashbery’s disconcerting one-liners (for instance, "We were on the terrace drinking gin and tonics / When the squall hit."). Here, science uses works of art as artifacts for the study of climate change, notably by examining the red-green chromatic ratios in paintings of sunsets by artists working around the times and places where volcanic eruptions occurred. Glancing at the appendices to the study, one would think one were reading a journal of art history. There appear works by famous and lesser known artists—Turner, Rubens, Le Lorrain, Degas, among many others in a vast enumeration—paintings whose R/G ratios "provide proxy information on the aerosol optical depth following major volcanic eruptions," allowing the researchers to develop ways to begin to discern "environmental information content in art paintings."

    This is a fascinating undertaking, an interdisciplinary hybrid, remarkable at least because the two disciplines are so starkly grafted onto each other, the science picking up precisely where the art flags. Yet despite their clearheaded grasp of the utility as mere vessels of data of these paintings, the researchers can’t refrain from dabbling in the arena of aesthetics. They close with a quote by Turner, which they naively co-opt for their own purposes: “I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like.” I think I know what Zerefos and the other researchers intend by including this remark. However, although I know almost nothing about Turner, I highly doubt he intended so simple a reading. Certainly, his cryptic line doesn’t wholly support one.

  • The Prez and The Pretender

    Bushgore_apI know, I know. It’s been seven long years already.  I should be over it. But I am not. This picture twisted the knife wedged in my heart since January 2001. It is sweet irony nevertheless to see Al Gore, now a man of stature and serenity, in the White House standing next to Bush who is scrambling to slap together a "legacy" out of a bloody political tenure that is deep into Chapter 11.  The report here.

  • Secrecy and Deceit – A History Of The Crypto-Jews

    Secrecy_and_deceipt_2 Secrecy and Deceit is a detailed chronicle of Crypto Judaism in Spain, Portugal and their colonies in Latin America . David Gitlitz’s voluminous book – 600+ footnoted pages, is a meticulous account (much of it gleaned from Inquisition records)that traces the history of Iberian Jews between 1238 to 1992.

    A funny story I remember my childhood family physician telling us, went as follows:

    "In a tribal area of India (where most Christian missionaries preached the gospel and still do), an entire village had converted to Christianity after persistent prodding and promises of cash and clothing.  The villagers showed up every Sunday at the church in another nearby village and ostensibly did what they were expected to do as newly minted Christians. Some months later, the missionary came to check on the new converts in their own village and found to his horror that the villagers in their homes were going about their old ways, blithely performing Hindu rituals of offering food, flowers and lighting lamps at the shrine of the domestic deity. He asked with some indignation, "Why are you still indulging in heathenish ways? Didn’t you all become Christians?"  The villagers replied, with some puzzlement, "So what if we became Christians? Does that mean we’ve lost our faith?"

    Amin Maalouf would have extracted a whole chapter out of this exchange! The attitude of the Crypto Jews of Spain and Portugal was a bit like the villagers above except that their defiance was fraught with the risk of persecution and death. The pressure on the Jewish citizens to convert to Christianity, while common in most of Europe, was particularly acute in devout Catholic kingdoms like Spain and Portugal. A vital part of the urban commercial sector and advisers to kings and noblemen, Iberian Jews were held in high regard for their capabilities and education. But their prosperity and Jewish faith made them objects of suspicion, envy and contempt at the same time. Unable to withstand the pressures of being the perennial "other" of society, many Jews did in fact "voluntarily" convert for reasons that ranged from expediency, fear, the wish to belong and even out of a genuine conviction that Christ indeed was the Messiah of the Jews and hence Christianity was the logical culmination of what Judaism had taught and promised them. Voluntary conversion however soon gave way to coercion and intimidation that included curtailed civil rights and freedoms, extortion of cash and property, general humiliation in public places, ghettoizing, relentless proselytizing, imprisonment and even death. The only place where Spanish Jews were relatively free of religious persecution was in the mostly southern Andalusian regions under Islamic rule.

    Soon after Ferdinand and Isabella re-conquered all of Spain, the notorious Spanish Inquisition was established. Under the rules of the Inquisition, all non-Christians were banished from Spain. Many chose to leave. Those who remained or were unable to leave had no choice but to convert to Christianity. The Inquisition had jurisdiction over all Christians but its focus was mostly directed toward ensuring the orthodoxy of the new converts (Jews and Muslims) who were known as Conversos or by the derogatory term Marranos. The zealots of the Inquisition installed spies to keep an eye on the new converts’ way of life in the privacy of their own homes – whether they reverted to their heretic ways when no one was watching. The spies were among anyone the converts came in contact with – neighbors, merchants, co-workers, domestic servants and even their own Converso relatives. Since many had converted under duress and not out of conviction, there indeed were lapses. They continued to practice the old faith in secret, sometimes subverting the tenets of the new religion to fit their old beliefs, thus making them crypto practitioners of their ancestral faith while leading a Christian life in public. (The history of Portuguese Crypto Jews is similar but followed a slightly different time line)

    For the Jewish Conversos, some of the tell tale signs of Crypto Judaism that the spies looked for were:

    • Cleaning, bathing, wearing nice clothes on Saturdays
    • Lighting a candle on Friday nights in a secret place (basement, inside a clay pot or closet) not visible from outside
    • Fasting on Jewish high holidays, avoiding leavened bread at Passover
    • Sweeping toward the center of a room rather than toward the door
    • Separating utensils for milk and meat
    • Circumcision of male children in secret
    • Avoiding pork and not eating fish on Fridays
    • Praying while facing a wall 

    (more…)

  • Hot As A Pistol!

    Many thanks to my husband for sending me the link to this You Tube video. Enjoy.

  • Move over, Pisa!

    Leaning_towersA church tower in eastern Germany has overtaken the Leaning Tower of Pisa in its reckless inclination. The tower of the Church of Our Beloved Ladies by the Mountain sits on uncertain porous grounds with numerous cracks and fissures. It began tilting ever since it was built in 1382. Now it has outleaned its competitor in Pisa. The citizens of the the obscure town of Bad Frankenhausen where the church is located are justly proud of the distinction. The pride of the villagers in their crooked tower notwithstanding, engineers and town elders are worried. The tower is literally keeling over and is likely to crash unless it is straightened somewhat and its foundation secured. Once that is done, The Bad Frankenhausen tower will fall behind the Tower of Pisa to second place …. until it starts leaning again. 

  • McCain Wants to Reimport Drugs (Joe)

    We’ve certainly been critical enough of John McCain here at A.B. — and rightly so, given his indefensible support of the war, torture, etc.  But to be fair to the senator, he’s at least on the right side of something for once: prescription medications.  McCain is supporting the reimportation of drugs from Canada in order to cut costs to American consumers, and will support reimportation from Mexico and anywhere else once the proper safeguards are in place. 

    Granted, this doesn’t seem to go quite far enough — why limit drug importation from Canada to reimportation only?  But for once the conservative Republican is actually living up to his "maverick" label.  Good job, Senator!

    In other political news, the Clinton and Obama campaigns are fighting over exactly how much of a hack alleged journalist Bob Novak really is.  Meanwhile, John Edwards continues to look like the best of the Democrats.