It's Been Scientifically Proven!

From MEMRI, via Cumudgeon's Corner :

The following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyed of the Egyptian National Research Center. Al-Majd TV aired this interview on January 16, 2005

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: The centrality [of Mecca] has been proven scientifically. How? When they traveled to outer space and took pictures of the earth, they saw that it is a dark, hanging sphere. The man said, "Earth is a dark hanging sphere – who hung it?"

Interviewer: Who said that?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: [Neil] Armstrong. Armstrong was basically trying to say: Allah is the one who hung it. They discovered that Earth emits radiation, and they wrote about this on the web. They left the item there for 21 days, and then they made it disappear.

Interviewer: Why did they make it disappear?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: There was intent there…

Interviewer: So it may be said that this suppression of information was significant.

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: It was very significant, since…the Ka'ba [in Mecca]… They said it emits radiation. This radiation is short-wave.

When they discovered this radiation, they started to zoom in, and they found that it emanates from Mecca – and, to be precise, from the Ka'ba.

Interviewer: My God!!

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: It was said…

Interviewer: Does this radiation have an effect?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: They found that this radiation is infinite. When they reached Mars and began to take pictures, they found that the radiation continues beyond. They said that the wavelength known to us… or rather the shortness of the wavelength known to us… This radiation had a special characteristic: It is infinite, and I believe that the reason is that this radiation connects the [earthly] Ka'ba with the celestial Ka'ba.

Imagine that you are the North Pole and I am the South Pole – in the middle there's what is called the magnetic equilibrium zone. If you place a compass there, the needle won't move.

Interviewer: You mean that the pull is equal from both sides?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: Yes, and that's why it's called zero-magnetism zone, since the magnetic force has no effect there. That's why if someone travels to Mecca or lives there, he lives longer, is healthier, and is less affected by Earth's gravity. That's why when you circle the Ka'ba, you get charged with energy.

Interviewer: Allah be praised.

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: Yes, this is a fact.
This is a scientific fact…

Interviewer: Because you are distant from…

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: Earth's magnetic fields have no effect on you in this case.

There's a study that proves that the black basalt rocks in Mecca are the oldest rocks in the world. This is the truth.

Interviewer: The oldest rocks? Yes. Has this been proved scientifically?

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: It's been scientifically proven, and the study has been published.

Interviewer: They took basalt rocks from Mecca…

Dr. 'Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: …Basalt rocks from Mecca, and investigated the places where they were formed.

In the British Museum there are three pieces of the black stone [from the Ka'ba] …and they said that this rock didn't come from our solar system.

I've already sent an e-mail about this to the Egyptian National Research Centre, and I'll update this post should I ever get a reply.

Told Ya

From The Australian :

Blog pundits claim CNN scalp

Of course, they've got it wrong : the idea wasn't to cause Eason Jordon to fall on his sword, it was to get what he said published, and let whatever consequences flow from that to happen however they may. You know, what bloggers were doing was reporting stuff. Most Journalists used to do the same, at one time, and some still do.

But at least Australian readers of this blog would have gotten the inside story, and in much greater detail, on the 8th, with analysis on the 13th. So The Australian is only a week behind. OK, 8 days, tops.

The Sentineli

This one's an article I promised back in January.

The recent massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean - now thought to have registered 9.3 on the open-ended richter scale - briefly brought a very isolated people into the limelight.

The people are the Sentineli, who voluntarily cut themselves off from the mainstream of humanity a long time ago. Most likely about 40,000 years ago, in fact.
From Andaman.org :

They are the quintessential Andamanese: to this day they live their primitive but comfortable and unhurried lives in complete isolation on a small island, they are hostile to all outsiders and they do not wish to change this state of affairs. Violence is the traditional way to ensure the undisturbed enjoyment of their way of life: even today, give the chance, they would kill strangers outright and they still hide from landing parties that look too strong to fight.
[...]
The island and its inhabitants have enjoyed a peculiarly charmed existence. Apart from a few brief visits during their 90-year rule, the British took very little interest in the island and for decades at a time seemed to forget its existence altogether. The Japanese were not long enough in the Andamans to meddle, especially since the island had no strategic importance. The Indians, too, took some years before noticing their forgotten island. The first official census after independence 1949 in 1951 failed to mention the Sentineli altogether.

Their charmed existence continues: the earthquake significantly enlarged their rather crowded island - it was on the landmass that rose rather than fell - and the sea turtles are coming back.

The Sentineli are Negritos - or, in somewhat un-PC terms, Pygmies. Dark skinned, curley haired, and short. Except that these people are tall pygmies. Again, from Andaman.org :

Even if we take the higest estimate of 500, how do they manage without all sorts of inbreeeding problems? And manage they do! Observations from off-shore Indian boat throwing gift coconuts into the water for the Sentineli to pick up have revealed them to be an extremely healthy, alert, wide-awake and cheerful people. They just do not like visitors. Quite a number of children have also been observed on such occasions and their average body size seems to be so tall ("seems to" because nobody has yet been close enough to lay a measuring tape on a Sentineli or stand next to one for comparison) that "pygmy" is probably a mis-nomer in their case. They all seem extremely healthy indeed.
[...]
[A Geneticist comments] Human evolution is fascinating and nothing that you say is a simple question of medical genetics. On the other hand, it is well known that reduction in genetic diversity (for example in the Pacific) led to a reduction in immunity against certain infectious diseases, and in the increased prevalence of diseases such as diabetes. It is well known, that the Polynesians went through a very tough genetic bottleneck, possibly stricter than the Sentineli. But the numbers recovered after their initial bottleneck and they were able to settle the whole of the Pacific.

The Sentineli are particularly enigmatic. We know a bit more about the other Andamanese islanders, and they are a peculiar bunch in their own right.

Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago east of India, are direct descendants of the first modern humans to have inhabited Asia, geneticists conclude in a new study.

But the islanders lack a distinctive genetic feature found among Australian aborigines, another early group to leave Africa, suggesting they were part of a separate exodus.

The Andaman Islanders are "arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet," a team of geneticists led by Dr. Erika Hagelberg of the University of Oslo write in the journal Current Biology.

Their physical features - short stature, dark skin, peppercorn hair and large buttocks - are characteristic of African Pygmies. "They look like they belong in Africa, but here they are sitting in this island chain in the middle of the Indian Ocean," said Dr. Peter Underhill of Stanford University, a co-author of the new report.

Adding to the puzzle is that their language, according to Joseph Greenberg, who, before his death in 2001, classified the world's languages, belongs to a family that includes those of Tasmania, Papua New Guinea and Melanesia.

Examination of DNA also reveals an interesting (pre)History :

Genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element passed down only through women, shows that the Onge and Jarawa people belong to a lineage, known as M, that is common throughout Asia, the geneticists say. This establishes them as Asians, not Africans, among whom a different mitochondrial lineage, called L, is dominant.

The geneticists then looked at the Y chromosome, which is passed down only through men and often gives a more detailed picture of genetic history than the mitochondrial DNA. The Onge and Jarawa men turned out to carry a special change or mutation in the DNA of their Y chromosome that is thought to be indicative of the Paleolithic population of Asia, the hunters and gatherers who preceded the first human settlements.

The mutation, known as Marker 174, occurs among ethnic groups at the periphery of Asia who avoided being swamped by the populations that spread after the agricultural revolution that occurred about 8,000 years ago. It is found in many Japanese, in the Tibetans of the Himalayas and among isolated people of Southeast Asia, like the Hmong.

The discovery of Marker 174 among the Andamanese suggests that they too are part of this relict Paleolithic population, descended from the first modern humans to leave Africa.

Dr. Underhill, an expert on the genetic history of the Y chromosome, said the Paleolithic population of Asia might well have looked as African as the Onge and Jarawa do now, and that people with the appearance of present-day Asians might have emerged only later. It is also possible, he said, that their resemblance to African Pygmies is a human adaptation to living in forests that the two populations developed independently.

A finding of particular interest is that the Andamanese do not carry another Y chromosome signature, known as Marker RPS4Y, that is common among Australian aborigines.

This suggests that there were at least two separate emigrations of modern humans from Africa, Dr. Underhill said. Both probably left northeast Africa by boat 40,000 or 50,000 years ago and pushed slowly along the coastlines of the Arabian Peninsula and India. No archaeological record of these epic journeys has been found, perhaps because the world's oceans were 120 meters lower during the last ice age and the evidence of early human passage is under water.

One group of emigrants that acquired the Marker 174 mutation reached Southeast Asia, including the Andaman islands, and then moved inland and north to Japan, in Dr. Underhill's reconstruction. A second group, carrying the Marker RPS4Y, took a different fork in Southeast Asia, continuing south toward Australia.

Other pieces of the puzzle can be found in a previous article, and over at Dissecting Leftism (of all places).

Yamato Sashimi

This one's an illustration of the nature of thought, and the Internet-aided human brain's (or in this case, a Human Brain's) capacity to form most unlikely linkages.

While leaving a comment over at Rocket Jones, in thanks for providing the link to the intriguing little translator described below, I got to thinking about the name "F5U".

Being a sometime military historian, this looked a lot like an obsolete US naval Fighter designation. F for fighter (as in F-4 Phantom), 5 as in "the fifth type of this particular aircraft (fighter etc) from that manufacturer", and U for Chance-Vought, an aircraft manufacturer. (This really odd system in described elsewhere in some detail.) A simplified version is still in use, and was adopted by the whole of the US Military in 1962. Before then, the US Army Air Force (and later US Air Force) used a similar version, ignoring the manufacturer. They'd got up to numbers over 100, as in "F-111" by 1962. The US Navy F-4 Phantom was (briefly) known in USAF service as the F-110, before the USAF decided to do things the Navy's way, and call it the F-4. That's why you have aircraft today called the "F-15", F-18" and so on, while in WW2 you had the "P-51 Mustang" (P for Pursuit, the old designation for Fighter). As you can see, the "F-111" designation shows the age of that particular design project : it pre-dates 1962.

Anyway...

I googled on "F5U" and got nothing but links to a particular type of computer chip. Then I remembered that the old US Navy designation for "Fighter" was "P" for Pursuit. And P's close enough to F, especially when trying to find the equivalent Roman Alphabet letter for the Japanese character "AR".

A Google on "P5U" got me a link to one of the quirkier aircraft ever built, the P5U "Flying Flapjack". Ah, Perfect! So I immediately wrote about that in the comment, I was sure it would be appreciated.

The initial site with data from FAS didn't include a picture. Now I knew from an old Webster's Encyclopedia Yearbook we acquired (it came with the house we first bought in Australia, formerly owned by a US Journalist), that you really have to see this aircraft to believe it.

So I Googled again, this time for an image. And soon found one, on a Japanese site, which fitted the whole tenor of the subject rather well.

But the Japanese site looked so interesting, that I had a traipse around it. And amongst other interesting things, I found this, which can only be described as "Yamato Sashimi".

The Yamato, by the way, is infamous amongst naval military historians as being the largest battleship ever built. SF fans may know it better through the "Star Blazers" animated series, featuring a re-floated version transformed into a Space (Battle)Ship. (The series is not long on hard science, as you can guess).

It will be a long time before can make an artificial intelligence that can do something like the above. Consider the different sources if information involved, the tenuous links between them. It's as weird and as wonderful as... Yamato Sashimi.

P5U or 75%

Two different versions of my first name, using Japanese Characters in different fonts :




Translation courtesy of JapaneseTranslater.Co.Uk

Hat Tip : Rocket Jones

My Little Golden Book about Zogg

Via Whacking Day, The Cuddly Menace.

Interestingly, the author's political views are rather different from my own, and even further away from Tex's. But true Wit - not just humour, but intellect - transcends politics.

He's also a great example of how intelligent people can differ radically over important issues.

Stark Idiocy

From Normblog :

Cook returns to the matter of WMD, and disarming Iraq, and whether Iraq was a threat, and is then asked by the interviewer, 'Would Saddam still be there?' Here is the money passage, Cook's reply to that question:

Umm... Well, that of course... the longer the period that passes... it is now some two years since the invasion... the longer, that becomes a speculative question. Anybody who has seen Saddam Hussein emerge from his hole and has seen the disordered, deranged mind that he now has, is bound to ask whether those that were actually saying at the time of the invasion that Saddam would fall in his time, would probably have been right by now.

The answer to this speculative question, which anyone with 2 neurons to fire together will immediately come up with, is No.

When teaching, I always told my students "There's no such thing as a stupid question - the only stupidity is not to ask". But here we have proof that I was over-generalising.

The question is, is Robin Cook a complete idiot thinking that he can "fool some of the people all of the time" with this outrageous whopper, or just plain Evil. Or both.

Hell, Joe Vialls has more credibility. BTW talking of the incomparable Joe, head on over to Whacking Day for Mr Vialls latest (Zionist Elite Prepares To Desert America). Tex is performing an admirable public service, reading the inimitable Mr Vialls so you don't have to. A specimen (and I use the word in its medical sense) :

The rugged and beautiful island of Tamania [sic] is a wanted war criminal's dream. Easily defended against attack, this remote redoubt offers a climate similar to New England. Recreational activities for jaded war criminals from America and Palestine include trout fishing in the many lakes and rivers, deer hunting in the mountains, and crayfish on the coast. Once properly 'persuaded' by the Jewish Mistaravim Praetorian Guardsmen, Tasmania's more attactive females [and small boys] will be happy to gratify the wide-ranging sexual perversions of the exiles.

Joe's only publishers are rampantly anti-semitic organisations like Stormfront and a few others. Few publish him more than once.

Still a few bugs in the system

More evidence that the ISS (International Space Station) is fulfilling a vital role in testing International Co-operation in space. From SpaceDaily :

A US-built orientation engine has failed aboard the International Space Station, leaving it uncontrollable and drifting, Russian media reported Thursday.

An undisclosed source at the Russian Mission Control Center told the ITAR-TASS news agency one of the U.S. gyrodynes, which provide precise orientation for the station, stalled Wednesday because of an incorrect command from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Russian controllers urgently switched on engines of the Russian segment of the ISS to return the station to its proper position, and orientation control was restored with the use of the U.S. gyrodynes within 5 1/2 hours, the source said, although more than 30 pounds of fuel were expended during the unplanned maneuver.

Note the emphasis on nationalities. We're still a bunch of unco-ordinated factions, not an International team. And while certain antedeluvian attitudes and management practices persist - in all factions - the situation isn't going to change for the better.

One of the World's Greatest Mysteries

...will be explained on February 18th.

I refer of course to the Klingon Forehead. What did happen between the 22nd and 24th centuries?

From StarTrek.com :

The Klingon forehead issue is a complicated one, because it has to take into account a number of factors if one is to stay true to the Star Trek universe as previously established (related feature). The simplest theories (e.g. "southern" vs. "northern" breeds) have to be thrown out because Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reprised three Klingon characters from the Original Series — Kor, Koloth and Kang — and gave them forehead ridges in "Blood Oath." Then there was "Trials and Tribble-ations," where the crew went back in time to Station K-7, looked around and said, "Those are Klingons??" They turned to bumpy-headed Worf for an explanation, and he would only say it's a long story and "We do not discuss it with outsiders."

Well said.

For the mainstream hypotheses advanced to explain this conundrum, the Jannissary, Evolutionary, Bio-Agent, Surgical, Hybrid, Cosmetic, Q-Continuum, and "Under-Resourced Creator" hypotheses, just read the StarTrek.com article on Klingon Discrepancy theories.

These make far more sense than some of the arguments advanced in favour of "Intelligent Design", the "Elders of Zion", or that the Ra^thergate memos are genuine.

Hat Tip : Alan K. Henderson over at Sasha Castel

Now Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head About Space, Missy

It seems Chauvin is alive and well and in charge of the Russian Space programme. From MSNBC :

After addressing students at Moscow International University, Professor Anatoly Grigoryev elaborated in comments reported by Russia's RIA Novosti news agency: "After all, women are fragile and delicate creatures; that is why men should lead the way to distant planets and carry women there in their strong hands."

Permission to Barf?

Grigoryev, 61, has been director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems in Moscow since 1988, specializing in spaceflight's medical factors. He is an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the Presidential Council on Sciences and Education, and has enormous influence on the selection and training of all Russian space travelers.
[...]
At present there are no women among the approximately 40 cosmonauts in the Russian space program. The last female cosmonaut, Nadezhda Kuzhelnaya, resigned last year after 10 years of training to become an airline pilot. On several occasions, her flight assignments aboard Soyuz space vehicles had been withdrawn and given to millionaire passengers or astronauts from the European Space Agency.
[...]
The first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, was launched into orbit in June 1963...
[...]
Tereshkova's husband, fellow cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev, elaborated: "Nowadays we keep our women here on earth. We love our women very much; we spare them as much as possible. However, in the future, they will surely work on board space stations, but as specialists ; as doctors, as geologists, as astronomers and, of course, as stewardesses."

As stewardesses. Of course.

Less than a month into her run, Lapierre suddenly encountered serious problems. She was twice forcibly French-kissed by the Russian team commander, and soon afterwards witnessed a 10-minute-long fight between two Russians that left blood spattered on the walls.
[...]
Following the incident, Gushin blamed Lapierre. His official report, which Lapierre has seen, saud she had "ruined the mission, the atmosphere, by refusing to be kissed." She should have been taken out, he wrote, and he also insisted that the foreigners had caused the fight.

I'd love to be present at a spirited, even vigourous conversation between some of these people and someone like HakMao.

Hat Tip : Cumudgeon's Corner

That's Entertainment

As reported in a previous article, CNN's Chief News Executive, Eason Jordan, stepped on his...., um, suffered a severe case of foot-in-mouth disease recently.

Now there's this, in CNN's Entertainment section :

CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan resigned Friday, saying the controversy over his remarks about the deaths of journalists in Iraq threatened to tarnish the network he helped build.

Jordan conceded that his remarks at the January 27 World Economic Forum were "not as clear as they should have been."

So, go looking through the CNN archives for previous reporting of this "controversy", and you get... nada. Zip. Tiddly-squat. Similarly for mainstream media outlets such as the LA Times.

Jordan is no minor corporate flunky. He was Chief News Executive of the Cable News Network. So why did he resign, especially since the transcripts and video from the conference had been blocked from release? As he's a major player in the World Economic Forum Council, selected extracts of the video that would have exhonourated him could have been obtained with a single word.

The overwhelmingly likely, even inescapable conclusion is that the problem Mr Jordan faced is that his words were "as clear as they might have been". So clear that they were (as many eyewitnesses claim) completely damning. A few minutes research on Mr Jordan's history of saying things like this would cast really severe doubts as to the credibility of the excuses he offered during his resignation.

But we'll never know, as the video won't be officially released.

What we do have is the highly entertaining story of mainstream media trying to figure out a way of reporting a major media and political event without having even hinted that the causative "controversy" existed.

Now it would take a severely irrational analyst to conclude that there was some Vast Mainstream Media Conspiracy. The problem is one of culture : there is insufficient variety of opinion in the wire services (dominated by an oligopoly of Reuters, AFP, and AP), and insufficient variety of opinion in the editorial staff of major news organisations. How bad is the problem? Not incurable, these things do tend to leak out after a while, and the Internet gives worldwide access to many of the local and regional news outlets (Podunk Pikayune-Intelligencer, Wagga Advertiser, Moose Jaw Gazette etc), as well as non-Anglospheric national papers such as the Straits Times. But the problem is bad enough so that we have things like the Eason Jordan affair, Ra^thergate, and so on.

The question is - what else are we missing? Not political stuff so much as other things of importance that we should be informed about, but which the monoculture of Mainstream Media editorial opinion means we never see?

Brain Shutdown as a Defence vs Rabies

Exactly 5 people are known to have survived a case of Rabies, having received innoculation after infection but before major symptoms appear. Until late last year, exactly none had survived after major symptoms appeared.

But the University of Wisconsin used an experimental technique, and the gamble paid off. From the New York Times of November 2004 :

A Wisconsin teenager is the first human ever to survive rabies without vaccination, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday, after she received a desperate and novel type of therapy.

Last month, doctors at the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa, a suburb of Milwaukee, put the critically ill girl into a drug-induced coma and gave her antiviral drugs, although it is not clear which, if any, of the four medicines contributed to her surprising recovery.

And from JSOnline of Nov 24 2004 :

Using an innovative approach, a team of eight specialists at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa intentionally placed Giese into a coma within an hour after her diagnosis on Oct. 19.

The goal was to protect her brain while the virus ran its course through her body, said Rodney E. Willoughby, the pediatric infectious disease physician who headed the care team.

Within three days, Giese was on a four-drug cocktail - two anti-virals that helped salvage her brain and two anesthetics. She was never given a rabies vaccine because it is considered ineffective once clinical symptoms develop.

"It was an informed gamble," Willoughby said. "We had an idea of what we wanted to do, but no one had done this in an animal model, so, yes, we jumped out of thin air."

The Rabies virus replicates inside the Central Nervous System, and does so so quickly that the body's immune system doesn't have time to mount an effective counter-offensive. By dramatically slowing down the metabolism of the brain, viral replication was reduced, giving the immune system the adequate time. The question was though, how bad would the damage from Rabies be, and would it be temporary (as theorised), or permanent?

Now there's good news and bad news. The damage is quite extensive, but indeed, it appears to be temporary.

From the Children's Health and Hospital System News of Decemeber 31, 2004 :

Although the effects of the illness - which attacks the nervous system - and the protective coma still are evident, tests conducted within the past few weeks leave Dr. Rodney Willoughby optimistic for a nearly full recovery with continued therapy.

"Medically, Jeanna is sound," Willoughby said. "On her MRI scans, there is slight evidence of her past rabies, as well as evidence for ongoing repair of her brain two months later. The MRI findings are mild enough to not be clinically important. We expect Jeanna will continue to refine her speech and coordination through therapy. She has had some extra movements that are subsiding. She's lost a lot of weight, muscle mass and flexibility that she needs to regain. We truly won't know whether her recovery is full until she shows us where her progress stops -- there's no limit currently. Intellectually, she can certainly go to back to high school and pick up where she left off."

And more recently, from ABC (the US one) news of Jauary 14 :

Thanks to that treatment, Jeanna made history by becoming the first person to ever survive rabies without receiving the vaccine. And last week, she continued rewriting the record books, going home a month before her doctors believed she could.

Her body is recovering, and her brain is now undergoing what doctors describe as a "rebirth," as it begins to rewire itself. Nerves are reconnecting to muscles and organs, including her heart.

As part of her rehabilitation, the teen is learning to use her arms and legs again and undergoing speech therapy to speak and swallow. Although she still has a long way to go, doctors continue to be amazed by her progress.

. Finally, from WBAY on February 8th :

Now, just four months after she was diagnosed with advanced rabies, Jeanna Giese is back to school.

Doctors tell us Jeanna's return to St. Mary's Springs High School in Fond du Lac is much earlier than expected.

She's still not able to play Basketball yet - the amount of brainpower required for such co-ordination is surprisingly high, compared with "higher brain functions" like composing a symphony, designing a computer network, or engaging in politics. But considering the really extensive damage, including problems with the brainstem leading to heart irregularities, such a recovery is remarkable. Yet another clue as to how much we don't understand about the mechanics of thinking.

But a teenage girl is now back at high school, with an undamaged personality and healing body, rather than being yet another medical statistic. And that makes this Brain post a rather happier one than others.

Durian DNA

Has anyone checked to make sure that the Durian really originated on this planet?

Carmel recently bought me one ($1.99 a kilo), knowing of my taste for them. And it was one of the very best I've ever tried. I don't know exactly which variety it was - Thai, yellow rather than white meat, with large seeds, and ripe before it split (so real Durian connoisseurs should be able to place it). Heavy on the garlic flavour.

The taste is indescribable. Imagine a kilo of Egg Custard, add a tablespoon of pineapple juice, add 1/4 of a cooked apple, half a pureed peach, a single strawberry, a tablespoon of butterscotch, a little each of almond and vanilla essences, then several cloves of garlic. An incredibly complex flavour that defies analysis.

When Carmel bought it, there was no detectable aroma (and she wondered why I gave her warning about the smell). Within 12 hours though, it started to hit peak ripeness, an so started to make its presence felt.

The Smell of Durian is legendary. Most hotels, airlines and so on in Southe East Asia ban the carrying of Durian anywhere near them. When just opened, the smell is puzzling, but not unpleasant. Within 30 minutes or so though, some chemical change occurs, and the atmosphere around it starts to smell something like over-ripe cheese, something like an open sewer, something like smelly socks, and in my opinion, most like a hamster that several weeks ago Went Where All Good Hamsters Go. Though up close, the Durian still smells puzzling, rather than nauseating.

Back to the smell again - from Durian Palace :

Meanwhile in the West, durians have gained a notorious reputation for their unfamiliar and strong aroma, largely as a result of Western travel writers and horticultural writers delighting in using snide phrases like "unbearable stench," "rotten onions with limburger cheese and low-tide seaweed," "French custard passed through a sewer pipe," or "like sitting on the toilet eating your favorite ice cream."

It's not helped by the fact that if you have a spoonfull of Durian, you'll still taste it many hours later. Oh yes, and chemicals in it interfere with your heat regulation mechanism, you get hot flushes, as if from a bowl of 5-alarm chilli.

Which brings me to the point : the Durian is the closest thing we have to an Unearthly Fruit. It tastes as if it really should have been grown on a planet circling Epsilon Eridani, or possibly 61 Cygni.

Blue Moon

From The Australian :

The first true colour image of Saturn reveals that the ringed planet is not the silver orb visible from Earth but a deep shade of blue.

Instead, the image - released yesterday by the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado - shows that Saturn's northern hemisphere is a soft azure, striped by the shadows of the planet's rings.

The blue hue is a moody backdrop for Saturn's icy moon Mimas.

"It's pretty cool, and it also happens to be a neat picture," commented Chris Tinney, a Sydney-based astronomer with the Anglo-Australian Observatory.

The good Astronomer's poetic imagery may not exactly up to the standard of Shakespeare... but nonetheless I agree, because his satellite imagery certainly is.

Do Not Meddle in the Affairs of Wizards...

...for they are subtle and quick to anger.

So said J.R.R.Tolkein.

With that in mind, have a look at what a Vanity Press called PublishAmerica said :

...As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction. Therefore, beware of published authors who are self-crowned writing experts. When they tell you what to do and not to do in getting your book published, always first ask them what genre they write. If it's sci-fi or fantasy, run. They have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home.

How delightfully... condescending.

Now have a look at an article on Wikipedia. About a book called Atlanta Nights :

Atlanta Nights was a collaborative novel written by a group of around 40 authors organized by James D. Macdonald, mostly science fiction and fantasy authors, under the pseudonym Travis Tea. The novel was deliberately made to be as awful as possible, as in the case of its spiritual predecessor Naked Came the Stranger (the working title of Atlanta Nights was Naked Came the Badfic), and was submitted to the alleged vanity publisher PublishAmerica as a hoax in response to comments posted by PublishAmerica on its website authorsmarket.net
[...]
PublishAmerica claimed to be more selective in choosing what works to publish, so Atlanta Nights was submitted to test their standards. The book was officially accepted for publication on December 7, 2004, but the hoax was revealed on January 23, 2005, before the book went to press. PublishAmerica retracted its acceptance the next day.

The authors subsequently published the book through print on demand publisher Lulu.com (ISBN 1-4116-2298-7), with all proceeds designated to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund.

Among the distinctive flaws of Atlanta Nights are a duplicate chapter written by two different authors from the same segment of outline, a missing chapter, and a chapter "written" by a program that generated random text based on patterns found in the previous chapters.

How bad is it? Just read the reviews from the Travis Tea website. Unlike Tim Blair, I cannot bring myself to type in a sample. Or should I say, "specimen". From a dingo. One with infected kidneys.

An extract (as in "extract of diseased dingo kidney") of Chapter 1, the foetid thing in its glorious entirety, and software to read it, are all available free.

If you download it, then (quite justifiably) complain that you were robbed at that price, don't blame me.

Hubble is Dying

And they've pulled the plug. From SpaceDaily :

NASA denied funding to service the Hubble Space Telescope in its proposed 2006 budget Monday, effectively ending the telescope's mission in two years.

Astronomers had hoped the US would allocate the estimated one billion dollars necessary to prolong the life of the satellite-based telescope, which has enabled scientists to look deep into space and unravel some of the universe's mysteries.

"Hubble is a spacecraft that is dying," said NASA comptroller Steve Moskowitz.
[...]
Astronauts have serviced Hubble four times, and many scientists hoped that a fifth service mission would be funded to enable Hubble to function to 2011. Currently, it is believed that Hubble's aging solar cells will provide enough energy to survive to 2007.

Previous posts on the subject here and here.

The main reason why no money was allocated is that there's considerable doubt as to whether a mission could be mounted safely within the 2-year timeframe, no matter how much money was thrown at the problem.

Control Panels

Police Suspect Foul Play

From the ABC :

There are two reports of houses being damaged by plucked chickens crashing through their roofs in Newcastle in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.

Warrick Slee says when he and his family returned to their Fletcher home on Sunday after a weekend away, they found a smelly house and eventually located a rotting animal corpse in the ceiling.

Last month, another resident of the same suburb reported a plucked chicken had crashed through the roof of his home.

Mr Slee says he did not believe it at first, but now he is not so sure.

"I think you know there's something unusual going on," he said.

Guess

Who wrote this :

I don't like to write about the Middle East. I don't even like to think about it. It's a dismaying quagmire of blind religious hatred and irrational Dark Ages thinking on all sides, impervious to logic or reason, perhaps the greatest imponderable stupidity in humankind's history. I give a slight moral advantage to the Israelis because at least they aren't exporting terrorism and the slaughter of innocents, as many of the Islamic countries in the area routinely do. They'll probably all kill themselves one day in a nuclear confrontation. (How's that for optimism?) I just hope they don't take the rest of the world down with them. This article in the New York Times is the latest example of the terminal sickness that afflicts the whole region: Palestinians Give U.N. Racism Talks a Mixed Message.

Or this :

Bush's speech last night was just pathetic. Obviously rehearsed, not a word unscripted, totally devoid of anything real or spontaneous. Very disappointing. I really hope he can find it in himself to rise to the challenge and act courageously, for once in his spoiled rich party boy life.

Answers here.

Some people learn from experience. Some people do indeed, rise to the challenge. Some don't.

All Things Come

...to He Who Waits.

Hmmmm. I'm not sure that's always true.

But in one case, maybe it is. And maybe not. The case is that of CNN Chief News Executive Eason Jordan.

An absolute age ago in Internet time (about a fortnight), Mr Jordan was unwise enough as to forget who his audience was at the World Economic Forum. Not a cosy coterie of the chattering classes, but people who represent a broad spectrum of opinion. People who wouldn't take his words as Gospel, but would fact-check his posterior.

From WorldNetDaily (not exactly an unopinionated or CNN-supportive site) :

In the "late edition" of the New York Times on April 11, 2003, Jordan was confessing on the editorial pages as to how he had been irresponsible and dishonest in his attempts to cover the news all the years that CNN had been the only "news" bureau allowed into Baghdad under the post-Gulf War Saddam era.

If you read the article (that's why I gave the hyperlink - so you could check for yourself), you'll see that the precis is objectively true. But that's old news. What's interesting is what Mr Jordan had to say more recently.

Here's how one eyewitness recorded the account at last week's World Economic Forum:

During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by U.S. troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-U.S. crowd) and cause great strain on others.

Other eyewitness accounts confirm the facts of the matter.

This story has been all over the blogosphere since immediately after the events described above. Yet if all you rely on is mainstream media for your news, you almost certainly won't have heard about it.

I regularly contribute to The Command Post, a news blog about Iraq (and other matters) with a fairly large readership.

Here's a quote of the rules about posting on it :

2. All items must have a professional news source and, when possible, a link.
3. Do not post information from other blogs unless you link that blog and they cited a credible media source. Cite and link both: "Instapundit reports that CNN is saying..."

So, after seeing the initial reports, I waited for such a blockbusting story to break in a credible news source - other than a blog. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, may patience was rewarded. Two pieces, one in an editorial in Toledo, Ohio, another in an Editorial in the Washington Times.

Interesting that editorials could be written about events that hadn't actually been reported in the news section.

But it now appears that Mainstraem Media's voluntary Vow of Silence over the matter may be about to break, big time.

CNN went to the extent of e-mailing various bloggers shortly after the event :

Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan’s remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions. Mr. Jordan was responding to an assertion by Cong. Frank that all 63 journalist victims had been the result of “collateral damage.”

Why not a press release? Because how could they make a press release about something that they weren't reporting?

Meanwhile the assertions by CNN have both been partly supported and challenged by various eye-witnesses. I won't include URLs : the links above should be enough to get you to the various eyewitness accounts.

The whole thing was video-taped. Yet the tape isn't being released, because everything was "off the record". Off the record, yet very obviously being recorded. And there's this little gem :

...many of us at Davos believed the session was on the record because it was conducted in a room called Sanada 1&2. Here are the official guidelines issued to media and potential bloggers before Davos began:

"On and Off the Record" Policy for AM 2005

All plenary sessions are fully "on" the record.

All sessions that are broadcast or webcast are "on the record" (for 2005 that means all sessions in the Congress Hall or Sanada 1 and 2)

Every other session is only "on the record" in terms of content. That is to say what was said can be reported : but it must not be attributed to any individual. However, should the journalist get the agreement of any participant to be quoted that is of course acceptable.

Naturally, all private meetings are off the record.

This policy is clear and simple and allows greater transparency. It can also be very simply and effectively enforced. Any transgression will lead to immediate withdrawal of badge and any future access to World Economic Forum events.

Clear enough? Except there was this response by Mark Adams, from the WEF :

My understanding was that since this session was not webcast or broadcast it was 'off the record'

Certainly, no announcement was made at the begining of the session - as far as I remember - that it would be on the record.

In any case - a session summary is available on our website and we will not be trying to get a transcript of the session.

The session summary doesn't mention anything about the US Army targetting journalists. Nada. Zip. As for the tape record? For internal use only, to help improve things next time. Such recordings are quite normal for many meetings, though none that I'm aware of where the Chatham House Rule is in force. But they could be telling the truth here.

Of course, if all you read is in the Australian Media, you probably haven't heard how the CBS network used forged papers dating from the 70's, but provably generated using a post-2000 version of Microsoft Word, to try to swing the US election Kerry's way (Rathergate). Nor that they're still saying that the documents "can't be authenticated", not that they're obvious fakes. So don't expect a report about CNN's News editor (allegedly) uttering demonstrably false anti-US propaganda to get reported either.

They're far too busy reporting more important stuff - like this.

UPDATE : Storm in a teacup, perhaps? Well, in breaking news, there's this, from the New York Sun :

This is not the first time that Mr. Jordan has spoken critically of the American military's conduct toward journalists. In November, he reportedly told a gathering of global news executives in Portugal called News Xchange that he believed journalists had been arrested and tortured by American forces.

And in October 2002, at a News Xchange conference, he accused the Israeli military of deliberately targeting CNN personnel "on numerous occasions."

Mr. Jordan's remarks might have shocked the American attendees, but they certainly played well among some in the audience. The Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens, who covered the panel for his paper, told the Sun that after the panel concluded, Mr. Jordan was surrounded by European and Middle Eastern attendees who warmly congratulated him for his alleged "bravery and candor" in discussing the matter.

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is Enemy Action." as Ian Fleming's Arch-Villain Auric Goldfinger once said.

Breathtaking

Via Normblog, a multimedia presentation of The Best of Hubble.

Give Fascism the Finger!

Cross-posted from The Command Post.

Thanks to Australian RadFem and UltraLeftist Blogger HakMao, you can now Give Fascism the Finger.

Badges, Fridge Magnets, and Coffee Cups are all available. Lest you think that Hell has frozen over and she's become all Capitalistic of a sudden, in a scathingly brilliant move that will appeal to both Left and Right, Marxist and Right-Wing Death-Beast alike, all proceeds ($2 per mug, and $1 per button/magnet) will be split between the IFTU (Iraqi Federation of Workers Trade Unions) and the Iraqi Pro-Democracy Party. (You know.. the bloggers behind Iraq the Model- the guys who met a bloke called George W. Bush recently...).

Finally, something we can all agree on, Red-state, Blue-state, Gay, Straight, even Australian. Let's all Give Fascism the Finger together.

In 3D!

Adding a new dimension to the classic game Pong.

Or perhaps you prefer the original.

The Last Kafeeklatsch

Fashion Ad for Gribaud

A Volley at the Guardian Blog

Serve :

A senior moronic U.S. Marine Corps general who is suffering from madcow disease said it was "fun to shoot some people" in Iraq and Afganistan. That is the present quality of all US generals. They are really suffering from "ABU GHRAIB SYNDROME".

Comments posted by: Abu Dajal at February 4, 2005 03:47 PM

Return :

The full quote was (source CBS)

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,"

"You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

Unlike the General, I'd take no pleasure out of shooting such pathetic bullying thugs. I'd be saddened as I pulled the trigger, sad that they're probably just products of a pathetic, bullying, thuggish culture. That may not make me any better than the General, it may even make me worse, but I'd pull the trigger anyway.

So Abu Dajal, beaten up any women lately? Sorry, that was unworthy of me. For what it's worth, I've not shot anyone recently, either.

Comments posted by: Alan E Brain at February 5, 2005 10:42 AM

Awaiting the linesman's decision.

20 Questions to A Better Personality

Actually, I quite like the one I've got. My Test Results, anyway. :

Wackiness: 26/100
Rationality: 50/100
Constructiveness: 34/100
Leadership: 32/100

You are a SEDF--Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an Evil Genius.

I knew that.

Hubble Replacement Revisited

In an earlier post on 25th January, I commented that :

The Robotic Rescue Scenario was the only one that stood a chance of being affordable. If the budgetary estimation for that is over $1 Billion, then it is probably cheaper and easier to replace the Hubble with a new, improved model.

Now here's some news (2nd February, one week later than my article). From SpaceRef.com :

The world faces a dilemma: how to keep the flow of science and discovery from the ailing Hubble Space Telescope alive. According to an international team led by Johns Hopkins University astronomers, the best answer may lie not in a robot-led or manned repair mission, but through the launch of a brand new, free-flying telescope called the "Hubble Origins Probe."
[...]
Intended to replicate and to improve upon the design of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Hubble Origins Probe offers an option that is low on risk yet high on scientific returns, according to Norman, principal investigator for the team that also includes Johns Hopkins astronomers Holland Ford, Warren Moos and Tim Heckman.

For instance, HOP would make use of instruments - the Cosmic Origins Spectograph (COS) and the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) - originally built to be installed on Hubble during its fourth service mission. In addition, it would include a new Very Wide-Field Imager that would "greatly enhance the original science mission of Hubble," Norman testified.

That Very Wide-Field Imager, slated to be built in collaboration with Japanese partners who will underwrite the cost, will allow scientists to map the heavens more than 20 times faster than even a refurbished Hubble Space Telescope could, Norman said. What's more, the new Japanese camera will be open for use by the worldwide astronomical community based on a peer review system in the same way that all Hubble instruments have been.

Norman told the committee that it would take an estimated 65 months and $1 billion to launch HOP

Told ya.

For those who CAIR

Via Cumudgeon's Corner, a story about people who protesteth too much.

Henry Ford would sell you a car in any color you wanted, as long as it was black, and network TV can depict terrorists of any kind, as long as they aren't Muslim. Fox TV's 24 is a drama about a terrorist hunter, Jack Bauer. During the show's lifetime, Bauer has gone up against Bosnian terrorists, German terrorists, South American terrorists, and terrorists from a shadowy and evil Halliburton-like conglomerate. But recently 24 has gotten into hot water by featuring Muslim terrorists ; or at least terrorists who look Middle Eastern. But while no Bosnian, German, South American or Halliburton exec contacted the network to complain about the way they were portrayed on the show, when Fox ventured into Islamic terror territory the network immediately aroused the ire of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

It is astounding that anyone would be offended by a fictionalized portrayal of the terrorist group that actually has perpetrated the largest terror attack, or attack of any kind, on American soil, but these are confused times.
[...]
Meanwhile, IslamOnline, a popular Muslim news portal run from Qatar, had its own ideas as to who was behind 24's introduction of Muslim terrorists. Fox Entertainment Group, it said, was "part of Jewish billionaire Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation." It asserted that 24's new plot direction was "hailed by Jewish groups and lobbyists as a bid to reveal Muslims' 'true nature,' " and noted that "Jewish writer Daniel Pipes wrote in the Israeli Jerusalem Post and the American New York Post hoping Fox would not bow to Muslim objections on the series."

IslamOnline dropped "Jewish" from in front of "billionaire Rupert Murdoch" when informed that Murdoch is not, in fact, Jewish,

Frankly, I'm surprised. They never let facts get in the way of a good "Zionist Conspiracy" story before.

...but the implication of the article is still clear: 24's introduction of Muslim terrorist characters was yet another in a long line of Jewish conspiracies.

Actually, I think the implication is that IslamOnLine runs virulently and poisonously anti-semitic rubbish. The New Improved (with 100% less Jewish Billionaires) article is as described. For equality of fact-checking, there's the Daniel Pipes article.

I guess I've just grown a little impatient with many vociferous Muslims. The whiners, the "it's all the fault of the JOOS" chorus. I've made allowances for the fact that if you've been taught since early childhood that a certain race are "Pigs and Monkeys", some of it will rub off, even if you're educated and cosmopolitan. God knows it took long enough in the American South, and anti-Black hysteria is still not totally extinct there. Racial prejudice is like having a loathsome disease though, it's something you try to cure, and hide if you can't cure it. Too often the most vociferous are people who should know better, and I'm getting a little antsy about it. If they keep this up long enough, soon people will believe that most Muslims (rather than a minority) are Racist bigots. Even me. Not because I'm ignorant (the usual cause of such Racism), but because I know them too well.

But then I remember the many Iraqis who I've corresponded with, and whose blogs I've read, and my rationality is restored. Somewhat, anyway. I'll treat individuals as individuals, not as instantiations of the class "Muslim", "Jew" or "Mongolian". And Racist Bigots as Racist Bigots, be they Muslim, Mongolian or Martian for that matter.

The 10 Greatest Songs and Molecular Computing

For those interested, my pick (in no particular order) for Norm's List of the Top Ten Greatest Songs (and the covers) was :

1. The Real Thing - Russel Morris
2. Bat Out of Hell - Meatloaf
3. Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty
4. California Dreamin' - Mommas and the Papas
5. My Island Home - Christina Anu
6. Rhiannon - Fleetwood Mac
7. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
8. Nights in White Satin - Moody Blues
9. Winter in America - Doug Ashdown
10. Wuthering Heights - Kate Bush

But as I told him :

50 would be a LOT easier.

I mean, I've missed out Petula Clark's "Downtown", the entire works of the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Beatles....

As it is, I picked No 4 (Stairway to Heaven), No 36 (California Dreamin) and No 61 (Nights in White Satin). Only 1 out of the top 10, and only 3 out of the top 98. Thereby proving... I'm not sure what. That my tastes differ from Norm's usual audience? That I'm letting my parochialism show (3 of my 10 are Australian)?

Now if you've never heard, or even heard of, some on my list, I can guarantee a treat for you should you listen to them.

Meanwhile, back at the (fractal) branch... or rather the Swinburne School of Mathematical Sciences here in Oz...

The aim of the Molecular Media Project is to use cells and atoms to perform useful computational tasks at the micron (10^-6m) and/or nanoscales (10^-9m) of organisation. There are 1000 mm in a metre (10^-3m)...

The Molecular Media Project is principally concerned with exploiting polymer and colloidal nano-agglomeration or biotechnology to control optical nonlinearity for new media applications. Digital data in the form of (i) still image, (ii) text, (iii) motion pictures and (iv) sound have all been modified at the micro/nanoscale.

This research overlaps chemistry, physics, microbiology, computer science, mathematics, engineering and performance art and design. Molecular Computing with cells and atoms is also useful for changing the structure and properties of digital audio. Molecular computing is a signal processing tool that works at near atomic resolution.

A sample set of contemporary music has been re-mixed using this method. The audio examples have not been edited in any way and were recorded as part of a live DJ set. Many of the recordings demonstrate frame-level sampling, mutation, cross-over, copying, distortion and extinction events that act to attenuate, replicate or recombine elements in the original recording into new sub-sets of digital information. Therefore, molecular computing is a practical use of nanotechnology for generating glitch and error. However, it differs from traditional cut-and-paste technique or granular synthesis by exploiting chaos, self-organisation and emergence at the resolution limit of the digital bits that make-up sound!

So here's 30 seconds in Mp3 of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb", as remixed by organic pigments, titanium dioxide, carbon black, aluminium or bronze powders and butane/propane propellant.

Re-Opening Old Wounds

Courtesy of Normblog, I was directed to an article by Alan Johnson that mocked the Guardian's usual idiotarian line of equating Vietnam with Iraq :

On September 4 1967 the New York Times published an upbeat story on presidential elections held by the South Vietnamese puppet regime at the height of the Vietnam war. Under the heading "US encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror", the paper reported that the Americans had been "surprised and heartened" by the size of the turnout "despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting". A successful election, it went on, "has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam". The echoes of this weekend's propaganda about Iraq's elections are so close as to be uncanny. (Sami Ramadani, writing in the Guardian, February 1 2005)

Alan Johnson's piece ephasises the differences between the recent Iraqi election and the (to Leftists, hopelessly discredited) 1967 Vietnam election.

But for once I agree with the Guardian.

Readers may now pick your jaws off the floor. Thank-you.

I originally started writing a letter-of-reply to Norm Geras (whose intellectual rigour, humour, honesty and just plain human decency I much admire and try to emulate, especially since he's an avowed an unashamed Marxist). But it soon became too long, so I'm writing it as an article instead.

G'day Norm

Re Chelm Leftists:

Being a RWDB, I have a different slant on things.

The thing is, I think many of the parallels are valid. The election of 1967 was rigged (it defies credulity that it wasn't, though I have no evidence), but the voter turn-out was huge, and certain elements of the VietCong used very similar tactics to those used by the "Insurgents" in Iraq. See Snopes on the subject . The VC's one big fear was that the People would vote - and they did.

A Potted history (no doubt biased) (and with details and dates refreshed via, of all things, an Encarta article) : the legitimate but corrupt (and rotten in every sense) Diem regime was overthrown by the usual Right-Wing Military Junta led by "Big Minh" who "restored order". A coup that the US gave tacit support to when Diem proved a little bit too odious and independant a puppet for them. Given Madame Diem's fanatic and bloodthirsty anti-Buddhism and Imelda-Marcos like habits, it's no wonder. Coup followed coup, some better, some worse, but like the post-Allende Chilean, Argentinian, Greek and current Myanmar military regimes, all incompetent and/or corrupt and/or oppressive. The last was Thieu's mob.

Thieu's regime was supposed to be legitimised by the vote in 1967, and (IMHO) despite the ovewhelmingly probable vote-rigging, he genuinely had enough popular support to be at least as "Democratic" as the VC. I'd say rather more, though you may disagree. That the Tet Offensive in 1968 failed so badly (militarily) because the People didn't heed the VC call to rise up provides strong evidence that I'm correct, IMHO. As does the performance of the ARVN at Xuan Loc in 1975. They were fighting for Democracy, not just a warlord.

Again IMHO the South Vietnamese government of Thieu was as Democratically legitimate as whoever the Iraqis end up electing. Unlike the current pro-Fascist left, I don't think that makes the Iraqis illegitimate, I think with hindsight the Thieu regime was genuinely popular (35% of the official vote IIRC, so not exactly *wildly* popular - especially given that they controlled the voting).

If only the USA and its then-puppet Diem hadn't queered the whole deal in 1955, just because the Communists would have legitimately won a whole-of-Vietnam election. The RWDBs of the time should have been more confident that thay'd win in the end, even if they lost in the short term. I'm sure you know more details about how the US lost its idealogical way than I do. Because we should have stuck by our principles, this was a major and self-inflicted defeat, and not the only one. We became to some degree what we were supposedly fighting against (I say "we" even though I wasn't born then.. but you know what I mean. What the mainstream Left is going through now.)

Still, Stalin was still warm in his grave, and as the Verona tapes have shown, the odious Tailgunner Joe McCarthy was more right than wrong (may his socks rot), though I'm sure we'll disagree on some of the details. You're at least as anti-Stalinist as I am, but I'm less willing to give credit for good intent when it comes to Communist agents. There was still too much Right vs Left rather than Right vs Wrong. At best it was Wrong vs Worse. But I digress.

Reagrdless of what they thought at a very tense time, when it looked like Bolshevik Communist Dictatorship was making steady advances against Democracy, we who called ourselves the "Free World" should have been a little bit less concerned with Realpolitik in the short term. Tens of millions died as the result, the "Evil Commies" eventually won by brute military force while the US was navel-gazing over Watergate, so it was all for naught. But ain't hindsight wonderful?

Thais may have a different opinion - the US, Australian, Korean, Phillipino etc dead may have saved Thailand the agony of a proxy-war, even if we did lose Laos and Cambodia. Laos has sort-of turned out alright - though their unbroken record of convictions for everyone whose ever been accused of anything in court doesn't fill me with confidence in their legal system. Vietnam has turned out rather better than we feared, no more oppressed at its worst than, say, Poland circa 1960, and currently well on its way to Oligarchical capitalism-by-osmosis, like China. With luck, they'll become like Taiwan/South Korea, then Singapore, Democratic even if not perfectly so. And we can still hope for even better, in the long term. But Cambodia was exactly as bad as we'd - or at least I'd - feared Vietnam would be (based on the thousands of teachers, priests, and intellectuals executed in Hue in 1968). Vietnam wasn't nearly as bad - though hundreds of thousands of Boat-people risked and in many cases lost their lives to escape, and although few in Vietnam today aren't proud of "their" performance in the Anti-American Imperialist War, Vietnam is by no means an "enemy state" like North Korea, or even Cuba. Or Saudi Arabia for that matter.

My point is that to us RWDBs, Thieu's decidedly imperfect regime, born from a military Junta and with perhaps 25% of the true vote, was nonetheless Democratically elected. That Force Majeure later overhrew it - that we of the right lost - doesn't alter that. If you like, he was our Allende (also a Democratically elected but less-than-perfect regime).

I therefore am forced to agree with Sami Ramadani, the parallels are striking.

The differences are equally striking - on one hand a National Socialist Dictatorship overthrown by military force, followed by a temporary Military Governor, then a local but unelected administration and a genuine (but imperfect) election for a genuine (but imperfect) Democratically elected government. With imperfections removed as circumstances permit in the future. Step-by-step, doing all that is possible as soon as possible.

On the other hand, a military junta controlling an election designed to "legitimise" it, with the US hoping that true Democracy would somehow take root, when most of the populace didn't really give a damn about which bunch of Oligarchs controlled them, and many of the remainder wanted both National Unity and Marxist Social Justice.

Maybe if the US had used the same tactics and strategy in Vietnam as they've used in Iraq - a 100% professional rather than a partial conscript army, and one whose field officers were rather more professionally competent and rather less "show ponies" interested in getting good efficiency reports and not caring about their men and their cause... Maybe if we'd have been more concerned about civilian casualties, and had had the technology to be more surgically precise... but mainly, if they'd have made a greater effort to make sure they were on God's side rather than God being on their side. If some of their opponents had not had a lot of justice on their side too (despite the instances of some VC lopping off arms of any kids that had been vaccinated by Americans. This happened, especially to minorities like the Hmong, there were racist psychopaths on both sides.) Maybe....

Conversely, if they'd had conscript armies, filled with disgruntled and disaffected troops, led by untrained and incompetent officers - "90-day wonders" - in Iraq, many unsure of their cause, then the Internet would have meant the US would not have had the will to fight as long as we have done. Cannon-Fodder is no longer an option, when the soldiers can write their own blogs, and tell it like it is.

Regards, AEB

Military Historians reading this will recognise that I was being grossly unfair to the US military in Vietnam, and especially to the many thoroughly competent officers and men who fought there. They were the majority, amongst them people like Colin Powell - but there were enough of the no-hopers, some in senior positions, to taint the institutional memory of events 40 years ago. McNamara had some really good ideas, but didn't grasp the essential difference between management and leadership. The militarily incompetent but genuinely caring Johnson was tippy-toeing trying to avoid "escalation" and WW III, and the Joint Chiefs didn't have the intestinal fortitude to resign in protest at some of his ignorant blunders, or alternatively, they were so unwise as to try to reform from within. Johnson, I can forgive. McNamara was an utter disaster, but maybe I would have made the same mistakes, metrics of performance are important when not misused.

An example, a wing of B-52's based on the coast in Thailand were given a "norm" of bomb tonnage to drop per month, regardless of circumstances. The bombs had to be dropped, or the Commanders would have been relieved, and more compliant (and less competent) replacements installed. The numbers had to add up. So at the end of the month, B-52s would take off, and while still in the circuit go a little way out to sea, drop their loads, return, refuel, re-arm, and continue until they'd "fulfilled their quota", just as if they'd been in the Soviet Air Force. Tonnage and sorties up, maintenance requirements down (due to the short trips, basically "touch-and-go's"), medals and commendations all round.

Oh well, it gave the Royal Thai Navy an excellent mine-disposal exercise area (which is where I came in, two decades later. Out of 12 exercise mines, our sonar found 14 - including 2 bombs which had evaded detection for all those years.)

I cannot imagine anything like this happening in any of the Coalition armed forces today. But that's why the US military has an almost superstitious fear of performance metrics like "body counts". Never again.

Readers should feel free to correct my errors, either by e-mail or in the comments section. It's a complex and painful subject, and I'm bound to have been unjust or just plain wrong in places. There was so much heroism and self-sacrifice, so much incompetence and duplicity in that costly and mismanaged war.

Great Moments in Journalism

From the New York Times of Monday 31st January :

The thing is certainly big - 30,000 tons heavier and 16 feet taller than a Boeing 747, with wings 50 feet wider. Its upper deck stretches the length of the plane, making room for as many as 840 seats, compared with a mere 416 in the 747. But is big still so beautiful? The biggest ship sank a long time ago, the fastest jetliner is retired, and the tallest skyscrapers don't have the same glamour since Sept. 11, 2001.

[...]

Correction: Feb. 2, 2005, Wednesday
An editorial on Monday about the new jumbo Airbus misstated the weight of the airplane. Its takeoff weight, fully loaded with passengers, freight and fuel, is hundreds of thousands of pounds heavier than the Boeing 747, depending on the configurations, not 30,000 tons heavier. It's an aircraft, not an aircraft carrier.

Tons, Pounds, what's the difference? Still, 10/10 for the self-deprecating good humour.

But what about the "biggest ship sank some time ago"? According to CBS, it's the Queen Mary 2.

World's Biggest Ship Debuts

Of course, that's CBS, so checking is needed. According to Cunard, the owners, she's only 150,000 tonnes. Currently, the largest ship in the world is the Knock Nevis, a Supertanker (VLCC - Very Large Crude Carrier) of 647,955 tonnes gross weight. And indeed, she was sunk.

It was built between 1979 and 1981, sunk by the Iraqi air force in 1986 during the Iran-Iraq War, and refloated in 1991.

Her plates have been worn too thin to be used in her original capacity, and she's now a floating oil storage depot.

So the NYT is, for once, right. The biggest ship *was* sunk some time ago. What the NYT doesn't say though is that she was re-floated. Either because they didn't know, or because they they were referring to the RMS Titanic, or simply because they never let inconvenient facts interfere with the point they want to push. Never mind.

From The Guardian, of the 2nd of February :

A militant group in Iraq claimed last night to have kidnapped an American soldier and threatened to kill him if Iraqi prisoners were not released within 72 hours.

The group posted on the internet what appeared to be a photograph of a soldier sitting in front of a black banner with a gun pointed at his head.

A statement posted with the picture said a number of other soldiers were killed when the hostage was kidnapped and suggested the group was holding other soldiers. The group did not say where the incident happened and there was no independent confirmation of the kidnapping.

The Command Post of the 1st of February has the photograph in question. Along with a relevant second photo.



Still no correction.

It's not as if I don't make mistakes. For example, I took what the BBC said as gospel not that long ago, without checking it. My fault. But I have readers who (politely) told me I was full of it, and updated accordingly, less than 24 hours later. Is it so much to ask of newspapers staffed by so-called "professionals" to do the same?

I guess it is. It took the Blogosphere less than 24 hours to not merely state that the photo was of an "Action Figure", but to identify the exact type, the maker, and post a photo showing all the accoutrements, the knee-pads, the grenadier's jacket (with grenades still in) etc. But the Guardian still hasn't caught up - or if it has, has decided to keep the old story anyway. Incompetence or Mendacity? We Report, You Decide.

UPDATE : As at 4th February, the Guardian didn't alter the original story, but instead put in Bold Friendly Letters at the top, the following:

Note: The photograph purporting to be a kidnapped Amerian soldier, published on the internet, was subsequently revealed to be a military action doll, as discussed further in our Newsblog posting here.

Kudos for them doing this, I can't think of a better way of handling the situation.

One Does not simply Walk into Mortdor...

This blog, which I freely admit is primarily for my own benefit, is something of a smorgasbord. I try to balance political posts with space science ones, season with some amusing and interesting URLs, and garnish with a sprig of Software Engineering.

There's been entirely too much froth-and-bubble recently, so here's something more serious.

Hat Tip : The Cheese Stands Alone.

(OK, I lied).

A Dr Who Theme Remixer

The Radiophonatron. It's a couple of MB of data, but worth every bit.

Hat Tip : ArtificeEternity

BONUS : Matrix Ping Pong, a small Japanese video clip that defies description.

Not In My Back Yard

Credit : Artifice Eternity.

And yes, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stoptheelevator/ exists. Their Files section even has a copy of the flyer suitable for printing.

Ancient European Astronomy

From the BBC's Horizon programme :

NARRATOR: Mapping the stars has been one of the great achievements of humankind. It is a task that has obsessed scholars and scientists for thousands of years. But no one knows when or where he first started to understand their movement, or write this knowledge down. What is for sure is that in the civilisations of the eat Egyptians and Babylonians depicted their important constellations as animals. But realistic star images did not appear until 1400 BC in Egypt. These had always been considered to be the oldest known to man. But all that seemed to have just changed. Everything now hung on the exact age of the disc. Was it really older than anything found before? Could it really date from before 1400 BC? Because the disc was made of metal they were unable to use the most accurate technique, carbon dating. So they turned to another method called associative dating. The disc had been found in the same hole and had the same soil level as two swords. Swords of a very particular design. The idea was that the age of these swords and the disc could be fixed. By comparing them with similar objects that had been successfully carbon dated. So Meller examined the swords in minute detail, and then he compared those details with every known type of Bronze Age sword. Eventually he came across pictures of swords that looked exactly like those from the hoard, and the date was stunning.

DR HARALD MELLER (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): Using the swords we could securely date the disc to 1600 BC.

NARRATOR: 1600 BC, it made the Nebra Sky disc the oldest accurate picture of the night sky in all history. Two hundred years older than the oldest images found in Egypt.

DR HARALD MELLER (ENGLISH TRANSLATION): The disc is the earliest concrete astronomical representation of the stars in the sky. It's the first representation of the universe in human history.
[...]
Prof MIRANDA ALDHOUSE GREEN: We can see that what is represented is something which marks the summer and the little solstices at sunrise and sunset. So an immensely complex picture is beginning to build up.

I've been of the view that the Late Neolithic and early Bronze-Age people of Northern Europe were considerably more advanced in the asronomical sciences that they're usually given credit for. Many of the megalithic monuments still standing from Brittany to the Orkneys can best be explained not as religious works, but as astronomical computers rather more advanced than a Sundial (also an astronomical computer, a simple one), but still just as elementally easy in operation.

I first came to this view when standing atop Silbury Hill, a few months before we left the UK for Australia. I'd been helping out my Dad with some surveying work - holding a Surveyor's Pole doesn't call for much knowledge, and a 10-year-old son is quite handy - and we'd recently visited Stonehenge.

It was obvious to a Surveying Engineer that to lay out Stonehenge accurately required at least 3 observation points on the horizon. Now Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge is located, has some good sites, high ground near the horizon, except in one direction: that of Avebury.

So you need a hill, just high enough to be visible on the horizon from Stonehenge, in the close vicinity of Avebury. Finding just such a man-made hill, made as a Ziggurat from easily workeable earth, and exactly the right height, would seem to be more than just a coincidence.

Silbury Hill, part of the complex of Neolithic monuments around Avebury in Wiltshire (which includes the West Kennet long barrow), is the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe and one of the world's largest. On a base covering over 2 hectares (5 acres), it rises 39.6m (130ft) high. It is a display of immense technical skill and prolonged control over labour and resources. Archaeologists calculate that Silbury Hill was built about 4600 years ago and that it took 18 million man-hours to dump and shape 248,000 cubic metres (8.75 million cu ft) of earth on top of a natural hill. Every man, woman and child in Britain today could together build such a mound if they each contributed one bucketful of earth.
The base of the monument is 167m (550ft) in diameter and it is perfectly round. Its summit is flat-topped and 30m (100ft) wide. We know that the construction took two phases: soon after work was started, a re-design was ordered, and the mound enlarged. It is constructed in steps, each step being filled in with packed chalk, and then smoothed off.

Any Engineer will recognise that phenomenon : a re-work due to a requirements change, and possible de-scoping due to cost.

It came as no surprise that the archealogical dig (just about to start when we got there) later failed to find anything of note, but did comclusively date the construction project to 1600BC. It's a surveyor's mound, made as cheaply and simply as possible (on top of an existing hill), and in the only place it could be, and at the same time as Stonehenge.

From a review of Stonehenge Decoded :

Stonehenge was constructed from about 1900BC to 1600BC. Appendix B tells how the movement of stones once each year from an initial fixed position will predict accurately every important lunar event for hundreds of years. This computer would need resetting about once every 300 years by advancing the stones by one space. Mankind generally used the cycle of the moon as a unit of timekeeping.

The most significant Stonehenge positions line up to point to some unique sun of moon position (Figure 12). Chapter 7 tell how they used an IBM 704 computer in 1961 to plot the Stonehenge positions (120 pairs of points) and calculated where the lines would hit the sky (p.105). Chapter 9 asks if the Aubrey holes can be proved to have been used as a computer? No, but it is the most reasonable solution proposed so far.

We don't need to posit Religious Devotion as the motive for building such simple computers. No need to invoke legends of "King Sil" or "King Arthur" for that matter. In an agrarian society, knowing when to plant to get statistically maximum yield was a matter of life-and-death.

The massive volcanic eruption of Santorini in 1628BC did in the great Minoan civilisation, but the climatic changes it engendered made life very difficult indeed in Northern Europe, for decades. Constructing this was a matter of Urgency.

It would only be reasonable to assume that other matters were also ruled by celestial cycles (there are few newspapers in our more enlightened age today that don't ahve an Astrology column). These "great mysterious circles" that are found throughout Northern Europe are simple calculators, as cheaply and easily made as they can be. Some may even be cheap knock-offs, made in imitation of the originals by later peoples who didn't understand the theory, and just aped the outside trappings.

Meanwhile, at about this time ( 1600 BC ), the Old Kingdom Hittites were battling the Mycenean Greeks (The Siege of Troy was nearly 400 years in the future). Paleo-Acheans whose word for those who don't speak their language and appear to say "Bar-Bar-Bur" has decended down to us. "Barbarians". I have no idea as to how advanced these "Barbarians" were in Music, Poetry, Philosophy or the Arts. But the evidence is now getting fairly conclusive that they were quite competent Astronomers and Engineers.

One of the great Raw Materials of the time - the equivalent of Oil today - was Tin. This comparitively rare metal is essential in making Bronze. And one of the easiest mined sources of Tin in Europe at the time was Cornwall. Mines have been found dating back to 2100BC, and the place was in full production around 1500BC. A sunken ship loaded with Cornish Tin ingots has been found, dated to about 1750 BC. Cornish Tin has been found all over Europe and the Middle East, so it would be unsurprising if the first great Egyptian Astronomers of around 1400BC hadn't had some contact via centuries-old, established trade routes, with these Northern Barbarians.

UPDATE : More on Stonehenge and associated topics (with lots of Link-y goodness) from Rocket Jones. Who can accurately describe himself as a Lapsed Druid.

Not a Walk in the Park

As reported earlier, the 2-man crew of the ISS (International Space Station) has just completed a 5-hour spacewalk to do maintenance and construction.

Now, via An Eternal Golden Braid, a hint that things may not have gone smoothly.

Behind closed doors, the origin of what one source called a "major close-call incident" and NASA's reaction to it are the subject of concern within the space agency and between the space station's U.S. and Russian partners.

U.S. astronaut Leroy Chiao and Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov spent five and a half hours working outside the space station last Thursday, performing a series of assembly and inspection tasks. It was the first spacewalk of the mission for the pair, who are halfway through their six-month stay on the station.

During the spacewalk, the station's stabilizing gyroscopes repeatedly became overloaded with a mysterious torque, and they had to be relieved periodically by firing rocket thrusters located on the Russian half of the station. On at least one occasion, and contrary to agreed upon mission rules, these thrusters appear to have been activated when the two crew members were working dangerously close to them.

This put them at risk of both thermal damage from the thrusters themselves and, more likely, to chemical contamination from the fuel used by the thrusters. Even in small amounts, any fuel splashed on the space suits could render the air toxic in the station when the men returned from their spacewalk.

That neither of those events actually happened isn't reassuring to those at NASA who want to know exactly how close the men were to the thruster plumes. Engineers at NASA who have spoken privately with MSNBC.com say they are studying the incident all the more intently because the next scheduled spacewalk, in March, could expose the crew to even more hazards of this kind.

There's also a worrying degree of disagreement about the ISS's propensity to rotate faster than the gyros can handle.

Meanwhile, NASA and Russia have conflicting theories about the cause of the "phantom torque" that is trying to push the station out of alignment during spacewalks.
[...]
NASA believes this force comes from water vapor sprayed out the back of the Russian-made spacesuits to keep them cool. The Russians, however, do not want to blame their suits, and insist the force comes from slight air leakage from their airlock.

"Until it is resolved," a source e-mailed, "we'll continue to have this problem for every [Russian] EVA."

In a related article, clues to the the cause of the misbehaviour of the Oxygen generators may have been found.

A late addition to the spacewalk was the inspection of exterior vents for the main oxygen generator and air purifiers.

The Russian oxygen generator has broken down repeatedly, and engineers speculated its vent might be clogged or corroded. The air-cleansing equipment also has a history of malfunctions.

Sharipov found a large patch of dark, oily residue on at least one vent and a white substance "he described it as a honeycomb" on the oxygen generator's outlet. "They're going to be very good pictures," he said as he photographed the goo.

There's still an awful lot about long-duration space missions we don't know enough about.
As a platform for performing Space Science experiments, the ISS is a crock. The vibrations caused by crew movement are enough to completely bollix up most microgravity experiments. It's vastly expensive, and there's almost nothing a series of far cheaper ( as in 1/10,000 of the cost) satellites could not have handled better.
But it's the "almost" that's important. As a platform for figuring out how people can live and work on long-duration space missions, it's invaluable, irreplaceable. Also, and equally importantly, for working out the bugs in the management of International space missions. Far better to detect the screw-ups and valid "differences of opinion" (like the ones to do with the spacewalk mentioned above) while "safely" in Earth Orbit than to try to do the same at close to a light-second's distance (Luna) or even further.