Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee holds forth on energy consumption :
Mike Huckabee is a potential Republican nominee for the US presidential elections next November. "Who's your favorite author?" asked 7-year old Aleya Deatsch. Huckabee said it was Dr Seuss. That surprised her because she thought that someone grownup should be reading at a higher level. Her favorite author she admitted was C. S. Lewis.Huckabee is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, evidently. Here's what
he said on record: Here's what he said on record: "I think we ought to be out there talking about ways to reduce energy consumption and waste. And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is." [Via Cosmic Variance.] [Link]
Candidate Huckabee on evolution :
File under "Boneheaded Stupidity"."If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that's fine. I'll accept that," he said Friday. "I just don't happen to think that I did."
As for what should be taught in public schools, Huckabee said he wants "schools to acknowledge that there are views that are different than evolution."
Huckabee downplayed the role evolution should have in the election. "Is a President going to sit in the Oval Office and really make a decision on what's being taught in a third-grade class in Dubuque, Iowa, on creation or evolution?" he said. "The answer is no." [Link]
KXB of Sepia Mutiny links to the latest article by Fareed Zakaria on the Iran situation : Other broader aspects of the attempt to seek safety and stability in the world are seen in the very common preference for familiar rather than unfamiliar things (309), or for the known rather than the unknown. The tendency to have some religion or world philosophy that organizes the universe and the men in it into some sort of satisfactorily coherent, meaningful whole is also in part motivated by safety seeking. Here too we may list science and philosophy in general as partially motivated by the safety needs (we shall see later that there are also other motivations to scientific, philosophical, or religious endeavor).In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
Why does fear gain more attention than hope ? A. H. Maslow on the search for safety :
The United Nations + Vocabulary Test = FreeRice.com.
For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger.
There are apparently only 100 manuscripts of Ambrosian music, a style of medieval liturgical chanting, still in existence, and they recently discovered a new one. To listen to the music, click here.
Medieval history comes to life at Harvard University on Oct. 18, when students and guest musicians collaborate in the North American premiere of an 800-year-old chant repertory from Harvard’s Houghton Library.
One of the chants that will be performed was recently discovered by Thomas Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music at Harvard, in a collection bequeathed by Philip Hofer, founding curator of the Houghton Library Department of Printing and Graphic Arts.
“I was looking through several stacks of manuscripts to explore which would be good subjects of study for a graduate seminar, when I opened one and said, ‘Wait a minute…’” Kelly explains.
It’s a good thing he did. The manuscript turned out to be a book of Ambrosian chant, dating from the 14th century. Kelly estimates that there are only 100 complete manuscripts of Ambrosian music still in existence.
Ambrosian music is a style of liturgical chant that was practiced in Milan for centuries. The chant is named for St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. Although Gregorian chant is more familiar today, Ambrosian chant remained an important part of the medieval cultural scene well into the 15th century.
“We misrepresent medieval chant if we say it was all Gregorian,” Kelly says. “Ambrosian chant survived the spread of Gregorian chant, so it has a larger significance in understanding how music spread throughout the medieval world.”
[link updated]
One very cute cartoon from xkcd. Always, always sanitize anything you input into a computer.
Gamma rays from thunderclouds :
A report is made on a comprehensive observation of a burst-like $\gamma$-ray emission from thunderclouds on the Sea of Japan, during strong thunderstorms on 2007 January 6. The detected emission, lasting for $\sim$40 seconds, preceded cloud-to-ground lightning discharges. The burst spectrum, extending to 10 MeV, can be interpreted as consisting of bremsstrahlung photons originating from relativistic electrons. This ground-based observation provides first clear evidence that strong electric fields in thunderclouds can continuously accelerate electrons beyond 10 MeV prior to lightning discharges.
It has come to our attention that the famous farmer Mr. Bingo Singh, who had the dog named Jason, now has a blog. On occasion of this event, we present the BINGO blog song :
There was a farmer who had a blog, and Bingo was his name-O,
B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O,
And Bingo was his name-o.
There was a farmer who had a blog, and Bingo was his name-O,
Clap-I-N-G-O, clap-I-N-G-O, clap-I-N-G-O,
And Bingo was his name-o.
There was a farmer who had a blog, and Bingo was his name-O,
Clap-clap-N-G-O, clap-clap-N-G-O, clap-clap-N-G-O,
And Bingo was his name-o.
There was a farmer who had a blog, and Bingo was his name-O,
Clap-clap-clap-G-O, clap-clap-clap-G-O, clap-clap-clap-G-O,
And Bingo was his name-o.
There was a farmer who had a blog, and Bingo was his name-O,
Clap-clap-clap-clap-O, clap-clap-clap-clap-O, clap-clap-clap-clap-O,
And Bingo was his name-o.
There was a farmer who had a blog, and Bingo was his name-O
Clap-clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap-clap, clap-clap-clap-clap-clap,
And Bingo was his name-o.
A neat article on infinities.
Infinity offers many results that are at first counter-intuitive. A classic example is Hilbert's Hotel, which has infinitely many rooms, each one labeled by a natural number printed on the door: Room 1, Room 2, Room 3, etc., all the way through the natural numbers. One night, a traveler arrives at the front desk only to be told be the clerk that the hotel is full. "But don't worry, sir," says the clerk, "I just took a mathematics course at my local college, and so I know how to find you a room. Just give me a minute to make some phone calls." And a short while later, the traveler has his room for the night. What the clerk did was ask every guest to move to the room with the room number the next integer. Thus, the occupant of Room 1 moved into Room 2, the occupant of Room 2 into Room 3, etc. Everyone moved room, no one was ejected from the hotel, and Room 1 became vacant for the newly arrived guest.
If you thought Rubik's cubes were complex, here are the four- and five- dimensional versions of the same.
- Four dimensions: http://www.superliminal.com/cube/applet.html
- Five dimensions: http://www.gravitation3d.com/magiccube5d/
Dan Drezner wrote an oft-cited article in the Chronicle of Higher Education after being denied tenure at the University of Chicago. The article is worth keeping in mind as we charge into the brave new world of Web 2.0. As he explained in the article entitled "Can Blogging Derail Your Career?"., there are potential problems associated with blogging for those who are academics or wish to go into academia.
When I was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, a senior colleague once told me his secret to academic success: One bad article equals five great ones. His point was that the worst thing a scholar can do is to publish too much, as opposed to too little. Any substandard publication creates a black mark that is difficult to erase.
That point came back to me as I read about Yale's decision to reject Juan Cole for a senior position in Middle East studies — despite the recommendation of two departments to hire him. The combination of little to no comment from either Yale or Cole and the "star chamber" politics of hiring at elite institutions has led to speculation that Cole's prominent, left-wing, take-no-prisoners blog played a role in his nonhiring. That seemed to be the hope of Michael Rubin, of the American Enterprise crowd, when he wrote in the Yale Daily News that Cole has paid a price because he has "abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary." That was also the fear of Cole supporters like Philip Weiss, who noted in The Nation that "it is hard to separate Cole's scholarly reputation from his Internet fame." After I was denied tenure at Chicago last year, there was news-media conjecture that my blog was partly to blame, so Cole's story evokes an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.
Anyone know more about this, let me know.
Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity.
Just as a moving electrical charge creates a magnetic field, so a moving mass generates a gravitomagnetic field. According to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, the effect is virtually negligible. However, Martin Tajmar, ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH, Austria; Clovis de Matos, ESA-HQ, Paris; and colleagues have measured the effect in a laboratory. [ Link ]
1. water 2. sun 3. stone 4. gem 5. salt 6. coal 7. saltpetre 8. acid 9. flow 10. ____
Answer here.
And now we have, a guest post from Bill Scadlock ;)
Eight Planets? I don't think so
By William Scadlock
August 15, Houston
It is August 15, and that can only mean one thing! In exactly nine days, it will be one year since Pluto was deleted from the list of planets. Why post nine days before, you ask? The reason is, obviously, to protest this decision to delete Pluto. Nine is a great number, an excellent number. I see no reason to move away from nine planets. Don't get me wrong : I love the number eight. But, without naming any names, I will just say that some people have gotten tired of these unpredictable shifts in the number of planets.
Nine has worked for us in the past. And - mind you - it was not always nine. First, it was six. Then, with Uranus, it was seven. Less than seventy years after that, in 1847 to be exact (you will notice that we astrologers like to keep our figures straight), it was eight. Then one black day in February in 1930, it went all the way up to nine. Do we have to have keep changing our charts every eighty years or so? I don't think so. "This is one horrible decision as it has caused many astrologers to reconsider their science. Many an astrologist's chart, based until last year on the now disreputable physics of nine planets, has had to be revised," said Ra's al Ghul, known to his friends as Algol.
Algol plans to stage a demonstration next week headed towards the NASA offices in Houston accompanied by his daughers Nyssa and Talia. The march will start exactly nine hours, nine minutes and nine seconds before the midnight of August 24. Nyssa said she ultimately expected this to grow into a global movement. "People around the world are watching this. This is an important event for people who care about science and the future of the world," said the star of "Death and the Maidens" speaking yesterday from her headquarters in Northern Africa. "I care about the world. I even gave the computer technician at our headquarters the day off because I think it is some sort of thing in India tomorrow." A critical response to this has come from the scientific community. Barbara Gordon will stage a counter-demonstration also headed towards the NASA offices. Barbara Gordon has composed an anthem for the march, which I reproduce here with her permission :
Imagine there's no Pluto
It's easy if you try
No Hades below us
Above us only sky
Alright, folks, so we have heard what Barbara has to say. But look closely at what she says right here : "It is easy if you try". Easy? What's easy? Imagining there are only eight planets? I don't think so. And easy for who? Nobody, that is who. Nobody except some millionaires up in Gotham City. We common folk want our Pluto back. Not 13430 Pluto. Just plain Pluto. The millionaires can do what they want. According to Algol, last year's decision is part of a disturbing trend away from Ptolemaic astrology of the second century, when "astrology was the common man's science". "Astronomy and astrology have become play-things of the rich.", said Algol. "We must restore them to their rightful place as the means of predicting the next day in daily newspapers for the common man." Ptolemy looked up at the sky - mind you, none of this million-dollar telescope stuff - and saw seven objects. And seven objects only. That is why we have nine planets in our system. Algol said he imagined that the decision to remove Pluto from the list of planets was ultimately the work of "some millionaire superhero somewhere".
[link updated]
Guest post by Jason Todd.
Children and young adults had best not read this. I hope this will be sufficient warning.
Some people are calling it the greatest story ever told, but this event has been prophesied a long time ago. It is written : "And lo, the Day of Seven Wonders will come to pass and three times fortunate shall it be." And we know that 07/07/07 did came to pass, and it was on that date that the Seven Wonders were announced. Praise be to the Provider of the Seven Names!
But we must remember that this is merely the preliminary to the finish, the date referred to as the Final Date. For it is written : "Ere the Final date shall come, you shall celebrate the Sabbath twice." And we know that almost two weeks have passed since that date. We recall that one Fortnight after the Day of Seven Wonders is, in fact, 07/21/07. And that is tomorrow!
The astute reader has already noted that seven times three is twenty one. Coincidence? I think not. Dream on, non-believers! So, it shall be that tomorrow is that date. I remember how there was this one time when somebody told a friend of mine the ending to a story that he assumed the other person was familiar with. But that was not the case. That, obviously, spoilt the whole story for the other person.
In the spirit of not spoiling it for everyone, I shall say no further. I will merely add the fact that some persons, who shall not be named, are referring to tomorrow with the P word. Truly, they mock His name. It is a word that should never have been coined in the first place, but such has been done. Blasphemy? Perhaps. I will leave it you to decide. Yes, the End is Nigh, and tomorrow is that Date, a date that will live in infamy, a Date that will forever be known as the Potterdamerung.
Here are a few articles on ETFs that I thought I would share. They are all worth a read.
- John Bogle versus Jeremy Siegel : http://www.usatoday.com/money/markets/2007-04-16-index-faceoff-usat_N.htm
- WSJ : http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117694959066675054-gtFoC_Y7PfhEFZoUwP9G68kBKUY_20070427.html?mod=blogs
- The Economist : http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9044408
Michael Scheuer, the founding head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, on George Tenet :
Of course, it's good to finally have Tenet's side of the Iraq and 9/11 stories. But whatever his book says, he was not much of a CIA chief. Still, he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush -- denigrating good intelligence to sate the former's cowardly pacifism and accepting bad intelligence to please the latter's Wilsonian militarism. Sadly but fittingly, "At the Center of the Storm" is likely to remind us that sometimes what lies at the center of a storm is a deafening silence
This is not a joke. Here are the Top 10 Secrets They Don't Want You to Know About the Debates.
(10.) They aren't debates!
"A debate is a head-to-head, spontaneous, structured argument over the merits of an issue," Rice says. "Under the ridiculous 32-page contract that reads like the rules for the Miss America Pageant, there will be no candidate-to-candidate questions, no rebuttal to your opponent's points, no cross questions or cross answers, no rebuttals, no follow-up questions -- that's not a debate, that's a news conference."
(9.) The debates were hijacked from the truly independent League of Women Voters in 1986.
"The League of Women Voters ran these debates with an iron hand as open, transparent, non-partisan events from 1976 to 1984," Rice says. "The men running the major campaigns ended their control when the League defiantly included John Anderson and Ross Perot, and used tough moderators and formats the parties didn't like. The parties snatched the debates from the League and formed the Commission on Presidential Debates -- the CPD -- in 1986."
I was just watching on DVD the TV series "Jeeves and Wooster" based on the P.G. Wodehouse stories. Two thumbs up for the series, and two thumbs up to Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry for good performances.
It reminded me of the excellent British comedies - "Yes, Minister"/"Yes, Prime Minister" and "Tandoori Nights" - that ran on Indian TV years ago
An excellent article in the New Yorker on Vaman Ghiya, antique smuggler.
Early one morning in June, 2003, two dozen police officers drew their guns and prepared to raid a stately three-story brick-and-concrete home on a corner lot in Everest Colony, a quiet residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the Indian city of Jaipur. Several khaki-clad officers scaled the imposing stone wall surrounding the house, disarmed a guard, and opened the gate. Under the gaze of a security camera, the rest of the team filed silently onto the property. The raid was the culmination of a yearlong investigation and months of surveillance, during which officers had posed as vagrants and fruit peddlers. They had timed the strike for dawn, hoping to startle the inhabitants.
The officers called out, “Open the door!” and banged on the locked front entrance. They waited, but no one came. Then someone spotted smoke billowing from a third-floor window. The superintendent of police, Anand Shrivastava, ordered his men to break down the door. They ran upstairs to the master bedroom, where they found the owner, Vaman Narayan Ghiya, standing in his pajamas, hurriedly throwing documents into an improvised fire on the floor.
“How dare you?” Ghiya shouted. “How could you enter my house?” He cursed at the officers who rushed to restrain him, struggling and shouting, “You cannot touch me!”
Ray Bradbury has clarified that Fahrenheit 451 is actually not about censorship.
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He’s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled “Bradbury on censorship/television.”
As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’... This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”
He says the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as “walls” and its actors as “family,” a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.
Yes, yes. I can totally see it. I can totally see the piece in The Onion.
"Fahrenheit 451" not about censorship, "Moby Dick" not about whale
Can anyone prove that "Moby Dick" is about a whale? Was there really a whale at all? Can we really trust this fellow we have never met before, who would have us call him "Ishmael"? Are we going to fall for that one? No, no, no and no. No, I say. No.
Now, you too can own an integer. Want to know more? Step into our all new showroom created for customers just like you. For a limited time only.
Here's how we do it. First, we generate a fresh pseudorandom integer,just for you. Then we use your integer to encrypt a copyrighted haiku,thereby transforming your integer into a circumvention device capableof decrypting the haiku without your permission. We then give you allof our rights to decrypt the haiku using your integer. The DMCA doesthe rest.
EU adopted a measure outlawing Holocaust denial : two articles.
The draft law, which EU diplomats called a minimalist compromise, gained approval after six years of emotional negotiations, during which countries with vastly different legal cultures struggled to reconcile the protection of freedom of speech with protection of their citizens from racism and hate crimes.
From 3 Quarks Daily, the poem of the week :
On Shakespeare's birthday, April 23, Buckingham Palace announced the award of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry to James Fenton.
On February 17 last year, the TLS published three poems by Fenton, including "Memorial", which was originally commissioned by the BBC to honour journalists and their colleagues killed while covering wars. As a young man Fenton was himself a foreign correspondent, and was present at the fall of Saigon to the Vietcong in 1975. His experiences in Cambodia lie behind the long poem Dead Soldiers (1981)
Memorial
We spoke, we chose to speak of war and strife --
A task a fine ambition sought --
And some might say, who shared our work, our life:
That praise was dearly bought.
Drivers, interpreters, these were our friends.
These we loved. These we were trusted by.
The shocked hand wipes the blood across the lens.
The lens looked to the sky.
Most died by mischance. Some seemed honour-bound
To take the lonely, peerless track
Conceiving danger as a testing-ground
To which they must go back
Till the dry tongue fell silent and they crossed
Beyond the realm of time and fear.
Death waved them through the checkpoint. They were lost.
All have their story here.
JAMES FENTON (2006)
Here is a review of Martin Scorsese's latest movie "The String Kings".
The "String Kings", Scorsese's latest, is a highly violent but satisfying gangster movie, certainly on a par with Goodfellas or the Godfather trilogy, and does give the viewer insights into the raw and violent world of fundamental string theory research
Here is a picture of Elvis captured on film. He got off the train in Bangalore. When I visited Bangalore before I came to the US, Bangalore did not have the Elvis. I distinctly remember. It was the December of 1996.
They didn't study for the test => they wrote up snappy answers to the exam questions.
Medieval tech support on how to use a book. Accessible here.
Some blown pictures :
- Self-Portrait Of The Artist With Liquid Refreshment : http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/sosie.htm
- A portrait of the artist as a drawing man : http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/4selfportraits.htm
- Coca Cola shot : http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/coke.html
- Hosepipe : http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/hosepipe.html
- Waterfall : http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/waterfall.html
- Rescue : http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/rescue.htm
Here is an article on medieval Islamic tilework exhibiting decagonal symmetry patterns.
These girih tiles may have been used to generate a wide range of complex tiling patterns on major buildings from medieval Islam, including mosques in Isfahan, Iran, and Bursa, Turkey; madrassas in Baghdad; and shrines in Herat, Afghanistan, and Agra, India.
In some cases, Lu found girih tiles used to create patterns of two distinct scales on medieval Islamic buildings. This approach generates infinite patterns with decagonal symmetry that never repeats - also known as a quasicrystalline tiling, a phenomenon first described in the West in the 1970s by famed British mathematician Roger Penrose and more fully explained by Steinhardt and Dov Levine over the past 30 years.
Don't miss viewing picture #2 in the article. Classical excellence!
Here is a link to some unbelievably good two dimensional art that springs alive into 3-d. It is a neat reversal of the idea of perspective, isn't it? I had the chance to see the Duomo in Florence where
Brunelleschi had given his brilliant demonstration incorporating his idea of perspective. This, of course, later went on to inspire other Renaissance artists to use perspective in their own art.
A newly discovered insect has been named Gollumjapyx Smeagol.
Spanish scientists have discovered a new invertebrate insect in certain caves of Castellon province, which they have baptized Gollumjapyx Smeagol in honour of JRR Tolkien who created the character in his 'The Lord of The Rings' trilogy.
The new animal is of exterior origin, but has adapted to permanent living inside caves. The new invertebrate has all the properties of a subterranean insect: its skin has no pigment, and it has
extraordinarily large antennae, six feet and measures two centimeters in length.
Three strips from the excellent xkcd :
Bush announced yesterday that the U.S. would send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq. Here are the reactions from various media covering the announcement.
Time magazine ran a cover story on the expected announcement entitled "The Surge - does sending more soldiers to Iraq make any sense?". The troops are being sent with a mission not only to control the insurgency, but also to help stabilize the new government, to help local police establish law and order, restore electricity as well as other public utilities, go after Al Qaeda, etc. I couldn't help noticing a certain discrepancy in the actual number of additional troops to be sent versus proposed numbers :
"To create "the surge", Kagan and Keane proposed extending combat tours in Iraq to produce an additional 30,000 troops in Iraq over the next 17 months. Army tours would be lengthened from 12 to 15 months, and Marine deployments would stretch from seven to 12 months.'
Brad DeLong caught this, but apparently, the discrepancy between the proposed and the actual is even more :
But the original Keane-Kagan-Kristol "surge" plan proposed last fall said that we needed not 20,000 but 50,000 additional combat troops were needed to break the vicious circle of insurgency in Iraq. 50,000 is a "surge." 20,000 is more like a "wave".
...
Keane, Kagan, and Kristol appear to have scrubbed the American Enterprise Institute website of their original 50,000 number.
Nevertheless, I am astonished that I cannot find a single mainstream news reporter who finds the cutback of the proposed "surge" from 50,000 to 20,000 worth mentioning, even in passing, except for Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times: