The Sydney Morning Herald revives the Koran in the toilet?

The Saturday Sydney Morning Herald print edition ran an article on Guantanamo Bay attributed to Con Coughlin from the Telegraph in London.

This line from the Sydney Morning Herald (sorry, no link seems available) caught my attention:

It is during incidents such as this that the guards have responded in controversial ways, such as the infamous incident of a Koran being flushed down a prison lavatory. But the guards are under instructions not to retaliate.

Strange, I thought, wasn't it well established that this was, at most, an allegation that the Pentagon strongly denied? Indeed, I was correct. In fact, when I searched the Telegraph to find the original article, I first found this one from last year, which notes that :

Southern Command said the inquiry had found five cases of "mishandling" of a Koran by US personnel, but no evidence it had ever been flushed down a toilet....

In the statement, Brig Gen Jay Hood, commander of the Guantanamo prison, said the inquiry found "no credible evidence" that a member of the military joint task force at Guantanamo ever flushed a Koran down a toilet. "The matter is considered closed," he stated.

Well, that Con Coughlin guy must be very slack, I thought, forgetting that his own paper reported how this was only ever an allegation hotly denied by the Pentagon. Furthermore, in this current climate of, shall we say, high excitability by Muslims, this is one allegation you don't lightly revive. (The Telegraph article I just quoted also noted that "at least 16" people had died in Afghanistan during rioting related to this story.)

But then I found the original Con Coughlin article which the SMH reprinted. Here is what the Telegraph web version actually says:

It is during incidents such as this that the guards have responded in controversial ways, such as abusing the Koran (the famous incident of a Koran being flushed down a prison lavatory is alleged to occurred during one such confrontation.) But fearful of a repetition of the prisoner abuse that occurred at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, the guards are under instructions not to retaliate.

"We have investigated 15 allegations of abuse against the camp guards," said a Guantanamo official. "Only five of them have been upheld, and the appropriate action has been taken against the guards."

For your convenience, the parts in bold are those left out by the SMH. What a difference an editor can make, deleting all reference to the words "alleged" and "investigation".

Of course, it is possible that the SMH lifted an earlier version of the article which appears now on the Telegraph website. I am not aware of any quick and easy way of checking.

But if that is not the explanation, this would be a pretty appalling example of editing designed to re-establish a hotly disputed and inflammatory allegation into fact.

UPDATE: In last night's version of this, the quote from the print version of the SMH was given as referring to "the famous incident"; but on re-reading the post this morning, I am pretty sure (without having the print paper with me at the moment) that it was actually "infamous incident". I have therefore amended the post, but will double check later today. Doesn't make any real difference to the issue.

Some housekeeping

I have fixed up some bad links I added recently over at the side.

Careful readers may note the addition of a very subtle "donate" button at bottom of the side bar. My fantasy as to how I become rich from this is that a millionaire who loves cats and has a schizophrenic son will read here about a possible treatment based on treating him for toxoplasma infection. The son is accepted for research project, and cured, and grateful millionaire gives blog writer a great deal of money in thanks for bringing this obscure bit of news to his attention.

Hey, we all have our fantasies...

Of course, even non millionaires are invited to compensate me for not doing my work bills while I blog during the day.

I also want to point out that a post which I consider important, the lengthy one about scientists possibly causing the earth's disappearance through the creation of thousands of mini black holes at the CERN particle accelerator, has now slipped off this front page. If you have not done so before, please read it, especially if you know any physicist type who is prepared to look into the arguments and not instantly dismiss them.

I really enjoy blogging, and because of this it has become very distracting at work. I must reduce the time I spend at work looking for stuff that I think is worth adding here. In particular, I do need to do some serious catching up on sending out bills.

I therefore intend no posts to here, if I can avoid it, for the rest of this week. I hope the world does nothing too interesting in that time.

Would a simple "yes" or "no" be too much to ask for?

AskPhilosophers.org

I found the above site via Philosophy Now, the only philosophy magazine I see at any newsagent.

The idea is that you can submit any question and one or more of a team of philosophers may try to answer it.

Of course, being male, one of the first sections I went to was on sex. The first question was about sex with animals. Guess what - the philosophical jury is still out on that one. Typical.

Update on Cats and Schizophrenia

Imperial College London - Scientists find stronger evidence for link between cat faeces and schizophrenia

I missed this update last month on the research that is indicating that at least some cases of schizophrenia are caused by cats. (Or at least toxoplasma gondii, which cats carry.) I have posted previously on this - my lengthiest post is here.

Dr Joanne Webster added: "By showing that drugs used to treat schizophrenia affect the parasite T. gondii, this does provide further evidence for its role in the development of some cases schizophrenia. It may be that anti-psychotic drugs work partly by parasite inhibition, and this could lead to new medicine and treatment combinations."

The researchers have already begun human clinical trials using anti-T. gondii treatments as adjunct therapies for schizophrenia with researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

A new (and previously unexpected) type of therapy that even helps a relatively small percent of sufferers would be a big advance.

Yay for Firefox

Security Fixes Come Faster With Mozilla

I must get around to putting one of their buttons on here one day.

Incidentally, I have put a link on this site to Sourceforge, which is a great site to go looking for open source software in all sorts of categories. While I guess no "hard core" gamer would likely bother with open source copies, I don't fall into that category, and free stuff for kids doesn't have to be perfect.

For myself, I have have found some open source astronomy and space simulation programs very good indeed.

Ritalin dangers

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Ritalin heart attacks warning urged after 51 deaths in US

From the above story:

Ritalin, extensively prescribed to calm hyperactive children in the UK, should carry the highest-level warning that it may increase the risk of death from heart attacks, US experts recommended yesterday.

There have been 51 deaths among children and adults taking drugs for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) in the US since 1999. Yesterday the UK licensing authority, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), said nine children had died in this country among a smaller population on medication. They declined to reveal the children's ages because of the possibility of identification.


This will soon be a big story in the Australian media too, given our fondness for the drug.

A post to Huffington Post I can agree with

The Blog | Gabriel Rotello: Huntington: 1 - Reformers: 0 | The Huffington Post

It's on the Cartoon Wars, and I don't think I disagree with anything it says. Maybe the first time ever that has happened.

Unhappy Lefty Enclaves

Welcome to the angst-ridden inner west - National - smh.com.au

The above article from the Sydney Morning Herald looks at why inner West Sydney, which is a very safe Labor area, comes up as the unhappiest place in Australia.

Anthony Albanese thinks it is because they all care too much:

The MP, Anthony Albanese, said the malaise of his constituents could be explained partly by their sense of compassion: "Most of them don't know anyone who voted for John Howard - or so they think - and they're frustrated," he said. "They can't believe there are people in Australia who don't support asylum seekers. Combine that with high mortgages, two working parents, a lack of child care, stress and lack of time, and it affects the quality of their life. "There's also a lot of inequality, with many indigenous, overseas-born and poorer people at the Marrickville end of the electorate - though often they can be the happiest."

That bit about the insularity of young Left leaning voters rings very true. As is the bit about their inability to believe anyone could disagree with them. This is all a part of many on the Left's rather "precious" belief that their version of morality in action is the only rational one.

Just in time for Valentines Day

The Australian: Marriage rollercoaster mostly downhill [February 13, 2006]

I am not sure how seriously to take this study, but I am pretty sure there have been similar ones with slightly different results.

(I thought I had read that some scientists believe that the timing of marriage breakups is related to the average time it takes children to become somewhat independent of parents - around 5 to 7 years. I could be wrong, though.)

A Mark Steyn moment

Toon-deaf Europe is taking the wrong stand

Tim Blair has already extracted a bit from the above Mark Steyn column, but the concluding paragraphs are more important:

"The issue is not "freedom of speech" or "the responsibilities of the press" or "sensitivity to certain cultures." The issue, as it has been in all these loony tune controversies going back to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is the point at which a free society musters the will to stand up to thugs. British Muslims march through the streets waving placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM." If they mean that, bring it on. As my columnar confrere John O'Sullivan argued, we might as well fight in the first ditch as the last.

But then it's patiently explained to us for the umpteenth time that they're not representative, that there are many many "moderate Muslims.''

I believe that. I've met plenty of "moderate Muslims" in Jordan and Iraq and the Gulf states. But, as a reader wrote to me a year or two back, in Europe and North America they aren't so much "moderate Muslims" as quiescent Muslims. The few who do speak out wind up living in hiding or under 24-hour armed guard, like Dutch MP Ayaab Hirsi Ali.

So when the EU and the BBC and the New York Times say that we too need to be more "sensitive" to those fellows with "Behead the enemies of Islam" banners, they should look in the mirror: They're turning into "moderate Muslims," and likely to wind up as cowed and silenced and invisible."

Just for a bit of colour

I saw someone demonstrating Corel Painter last week, and decided to play around with some much simpler software that came with a tablet I brought to play with last year. (Graphics tablets, even a little cheap one like mine, are a lot of fun.) The above picture is meant to be an "oil painting", but on here it sort of just looks like a grainy photo. (It should look a little better in a larger version if you click on it.) Corel Painter, though, really does a good job of letting you make an oil painting from a photo. (You have to do the paint strokes yourself, not just a "one click" choice.)
Update: I originally had different version of the picture here, but I have improved it and replaced with the one above.

More on the Cartoon Wars

It really is impossible to not comment on this matter, especially as I saw further demonstrations on SBS news tonight (which apparently took place after Friday prayers around the globe.)

Especially if you have never seen the Arab world's history of appalling cartoons of Jews and Israel, I suggest you have a look at an excellent post at The Thin Man Returns. It deals with the issue purely pictorially, and they have done an excellent job.

Of course, Tim Blair has been keeping track of the commentary from the press, and I have not felt a need to repeat what he and others have covered. However, I don't think he has linked to Matt Price's piece in the Australian today, which was quite personal and therefore more interesting than some of the punditry.

Last Wednesday, Philip Adams on Radio National interviewed Robert Fisk about the issue. Unfortunately, there are no transcripts of that show available; you have to listen to a recording of it on the Web. In the following recollection of the show, I may not be perfectly precise with the words, but I am confident it is generally accurate.

As shown in some appearances last year on ABC's Lateline, Fisk has become terribly rambling in the way he answers interviewers questions. He was at his worst with Adams.

Adams read out to Fisk an email that he (Adams) had received from a listener which made the point that it appeared that Europeans should be concerned that Muslims want to undermine the separation of Church and State which Europeans had to fight hard to achieve, and only achieved relatively recently in historical terms.

Fisk's response was a long ramble about how in Lebanon (he lives in Beirut) he is able to get on quite well with all the Muslims he has to interact with (including his maid, who was cooking his pizza lunch) and people he works with and knows on the street. He really went on and on about this, as if politeness demonstrated to a white male in Lebanon really answered the issue.

Then, towards the end of the ramble, Fisk stated that Muslims and Christians in Lebanon cannot marry. They have to go to Cyprus to do that. And he mentioned that the Lebanon Christian minority (although at 30-something percent, a pretty big minority) are badly discriminated against. (I presume he meant in other ways, but he gave no detail).

I immediately thought - "doesn't this support the letter writer's point?". But of course, Adams is notoriously sympathetic to Fisk's view of the world, and made no challenge at all. In fact he ended with a comment along the lines "so it is not an appropriate time to be bringing up Huntington's garbage about clash of civilisations." To which Fisk replied "exactly Uncle Phil [he definitely used the term "Uncle Phil"]..and I am glad you said 'garbage'".

(For the US take on religious based discrimination in Lebanon, see this link. They obviously don't view it as all that dire [perhaps especially for a Middle East country], but it is clear that the political and judicial system, with its ties to religion, is still a million miles for the separation of church and State that was the point of the email read to Fisk.)

To be fair, I would not have called myself a fully paid up subscriber to the "clash of civilisations" idea either; but what is so fascinating about the cartoon controversy is that what should be such a trivial matter is pushing me (and I suspect most of the Western populace) towards that school of thought much more than, say, a moderate sized terrorist attack like that on the London Underground. The latter is easily put down to a handful of madmen, but the cartoon issue causes one to despair at how thousands or millions of Muslims appear so capable of manipulation by their religious and political leaders.

(Of course, Muslims are not uniquely capable of manipulation - the German populace paid the price for its decade of madness in the 1930's. But with Islam, it seems to have been stuck in a medieval mind frame for some long, there is no obvious way that a liberal enlightenment is going to take hold within a similar time frame that the mad German quasi-religious nationalism was dealt with.)

UPDATE: I have now found a Robert Fisk opinion piece in which he makes all the same points he made in the interview above (but without the ramble about how is treated politely in Lebanon.)

The similarity he draws to the controversy 20 or so years ago over "The Last Temptation of Christ" (or for that matter, "The Life of Brian") is vastly exaggerated. Those movies attracted media discussion, some angry letters to the editor, and (apparently) one death when one person (not a mob) set fire to a cinema. But thousands on the streets torching US or British embassies? Demands that the movie makers be killed? I didn't notice much of that myself.

(Incidentally, I thought "Life of Brian" was likely to have a worse effect on belief than "Last Temptation", but that is a discussion for another time.)

Both the reaction to, and the nature of, the insult perceived by the faithful was vastly different. I think most Westerners seeing the cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb in the turban would realise it just as likely can be taken as a dig against the militant side of Islam alone, rather than at Mohammed himself. Or indeed it may reflect a Western perception of Islam overall that moderate Muslims could have chosen to try to refute, instead of allowing their radical parts help confirm it by violent reaction, and entering into the freedom of speech argument in a way which indicated that they do have a problem with separation of Church and State.

I suppose the meaning or intent of the cartoon is ambiguous, but it is hardly as if the Muslim leaders who chose to use it to inflame anti western sentiment were going to go on a TV talk show with the cartoonists to discuss it.

Anyway, the other point is that Fisk really seems to be trying to have it both ways in his article. He denies that the cartoons have anything to do with a "clash of civilisations," while also pointing out that radical Islam (which he seems to agree is dangerous) is making inroads in government in the Middle East as a result of Western approved democracy. He indicates that many Muslims want more moderation in their religion (let's hope that is true), but does not the political ascendancy of the radical elements helps support the notion of a forthcoming "clash of civilisations"?

Update 2: Readers of Tim Blair would already have been directed to a very critical review of Fisk's recent book on the Middle East. I am somewhat surprised to find that the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald (in "Spectrum") has printed a shorter, but almost equally savage, review of the book (although this is actually a re-print from the Daily Telegraph). At the moment I can't find a link to it. But I have found one to the New Youk Times review. It is more sympathetic, but still finds many faults with Fisk's approach:

"Journalists are not automatons but sentient men and women, and the "extinction of self" that supposedly scientific German historians once preached is an illusion. And yet Fisk's brand of reporting-with-attitude has obvious dangers. His ungovernable anger may do his heart credit, but it does not make for satisfactory history. His book contains very many gruesome accounts of murder and mutilation, and page after page describing torture in almost salacious detail. This has an unintended effect. A reader who knew nothing about the subject - the proverbial man from Mars - might easily conclude from "The Great War for Civilisation" that the whole region is mad, bad and dangerous to know, which is presumably not what Fisk wants us to think. Nor does he much abet the argument by George W. Bush and Tony Blair that Islam is essentially a peaceful and gentle religion. Most of the Muslims met here seem cruel and crazy, exemplifying Shelley's line about "bloody faith, the foulest birth of time." "

Why stop at 100?

Aljazeera.Net - Leaders call for calm in cartoon row

From the above report:

"As Muslim protests over the cartoons subsided on Thursday, a Taliban commander in Afghanistan warned that 100 fighters had enlisted as suicide bombers and Denmark said it feared for the safety of its troops in Iraq."

These guys seriously need to get a life. So to speak.

The kindest cut?

news @ nature.com-Cutting the risk of HIV-Male circumcision protects both women and men from infection.

The above story suggests that, especially in Africa, routine circumcision could make a big effect on the HIV rates.

This will send the anti-circumcision crowd into a frenzy of denial. The absolute fanaticism with which circumcision is criticised by some groups is really amazing. There is even a lot of stuff (about 138,000 Google hits) on the web about foreskin restoration (a lot of stretching involved.)

All seems to me to be ridiculously out of proportion, especially as there would seem to be kinder ways of performing a circumcision now than the old ways. But medicine is the subject of fads and disagreements just as much as other fields of human endeavour, and in Australia I believe it is quite difficult to find a doctor who will do one now unless it is clearly medically needed.

Sounds like a trap for young players

Guardian Unlimited | World dispatch | Bhanged to rights

While stupid Australian youngsters can hardly fail to know that possessing drugs in Singapore or Indonesia is a quick ticket to jail or worse, it would seem that there may soon be plenty of room for confusion by those on the Contiki tour of Europe as they swing from Amsterdam to Italy.

A new anti drug zeal has gripped the Italian government, it seems:

"A vote in the Italian parliament yesterday means that a new, zero-tolerance policy on drugs is almost certain to become law within the next couple of months. With the aroma of defiantly smoked cannabis floating in the air outside, lawmakers approved a measure that abolishes the distinction between hard and soft drugs and makes possession, as well as dealing, a criminal offence...

Yesterday's bill re-establishes the concept, abolished in 1993, of a normal daily supply as a way of distinguishing between drug-users and drug-traffickers. The task of fixing precise quantities for each drug will be delegated to the health ministry.

Anyone caught with more than the permitted amount will be liable to between six and 20 years in jail. Those found with less also risk trial and conviction, but the penalties will be a lot less severe....

How the proposed new law will affect foreigners is still unclear, but the original draft proposals included a provision according to which tourists found with even a single ecstasy pill would have their passports impounded."

At least the food in Italian jails might be better than here.

Around the blogs

* Andrew Norton over at Catallaxy does a sterling job looking at the David Throsby booklet "Does Australia Need a Cultural Policy?" launched last night by Cate Blanchett. Of course, if Cate was involved, you could always guess that the document was going to be an anti Howard diatribe. It is, and a boringly predictable one at that.

I really think that the public mood for substantial government funding of cultural matters has swung more or less permanently against it.

* Mark Bahnisch helps disprove his own argument that lefty's do a have a sense of humour - honest- by agreeing with wacky humourist Mark Latham's complaint that the ABC was not taking the last election seriously enough. (I am paraphrasing here: that complaint was directed againt Micheal Brissendon having too much fun in his commentary pieces).

* Tim Dunlop has a calmer moment reflecting that issues that involve a "conflict of goods" can make it particularly difficult for consensus views to be reached in liberal democracies. He even mentions that this is why the wiretapping issue in America is not biting politically as much as some think it should. Makes sense. But he has written a string of posts (go find them yourself, it's late) in which he has carried on as if the wiretapping issue is obviously a horrible travesty, legal opinion on this is all going one way, and has a go at a commenter by saying : "But I certainly accept your implicit point that you have nothing useful to contribute except bluster, lies and partisanship."

Where did the nice Tim Dunlop go?

A story on Islam in Indonesia

The Jakarta Post - Padang mayor defends sharia as good for development

From the above story, (which is well worth reading in whole):

"Padang Mayor Fauzi Bahar dismisses concerns about his mayoralty's gradual enactment of sharia, arguing that Islamic law is beneficial to development because it makes people more devout....

"Does religion hinder the government's effort?...It even helps it, right? So if I do something related to religion...so people are more devout...it will surely help improve morality, thereby boosting regional development as security will be assured, adolescent delinquency can be curbed and crimes reduced." "

But what exactly does this region require?:

" The mayoralty issued a bylaw in 2003 obliging junior high school students to be proficient in reciting the Koran, and since then has given an instruction on female students and civil servants to wear the headscarf in public, recommended crash courses in Islamic teachings during the Ramadhan fasting month as well as study sessions every Sunday morning for students.

Last month, it asked all mayoralty employees to pay alms from their monthly salary. "

So, it helps development by making its local government employees poorer?

And education wise:

" Like Padang, most cities and regencies have bylaws requiring the wearing of the headscarf by students and civil servants, as well as the ability to recite the Koran, beginning when they are young. Elementary school students who cannot read the Koran cannot move on to junior high, and people must be able to recite Koranic verses to marry."

Oh yes, this sounds just so helpful to economic development.

But note that there are objections to these developments:

" Academics and politicians have expressed alarm at the central government's inaction amid a flood of religion-based regional regulations with, they say, the potential to upset relations between religious groups, especially in encroaching on freedoms of minorities...

For Sudarto, director of Pusaka, a non-governmental organization promoting pluralism, the wave of regulations shows religion being manipulated by those in power"

This is all a worry.

The Economist on Hamas in Palestine

Palestine | To whom will Hamas listen? | Economist.com

A good article about the Hamas election win in the Economist.

From the article:

"Its campaign focused on domestic problems: corruption, lawlessness, unemployment. Its leaders talked mainly in slogans. The questions everyone is now asking are ones they simply did not expect to face. How will you form a government with no experience? Will you recognise Israel? Will your militias be absorbed into the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces? Will you implement sharia law? What concessions will you make to continue getting foreign aid?

They also highlight Hamas's internal differences. It decides things by consensus, and keeps its true leaders' identities secret, for fear that Israel will target them."

Reminds me of the Labor Party and unions here. Boom boom.

The King funeral

FrontPage magazine.com :: Cheapening Coretta Scott King's Legacy by Ben Johnson

I missed any TV news coverage of what happened at the memorial service of Coretta Scott King recently, but I noted that it had attracted a lot of comment from the Right over its "politicisation" by many of the speakers.

The above article gives a summary (from the Right's point of view) and it does indeed sound that it was taken as an opporunity to shaft Bush (who was in the audience) over every conceiveable current issue.

I like this bit of irony in particular:

"After the good reverend finished equating U.S. troops with terrorists – a section that drew a two-minute-long standing ovation at a funeral – Jimmy Carter tried his hand at it. Crying crocodile tears, Carter said everyday life became “difficult for them then personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretaps.” That, too, drew applause. (Later, the same crowd heartily cheered Ted Kennedy, whose brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, approved the secret government wiretapping that made the Kings’ lives so “difficult.”)"

Amazing.

Crustaceans to the rescue

ScienceDaily: Antarctic Krill Provide Carbon Sink In Southern Ocean

Today's second interesting story from Science Daily (above) is about how krill help reduce CO2 levels:

"Lead Author Dr Geraint Tarling from BAS says, "We've known for a long time that krill are the main food source for whales, penguins and seals, but we had no idea that their tactics to avoid being eaten could have such added benefits to the environment. By parachuting down they transport carbon which sinks ultimately to the ocean floor -- an amount equivalent to the annual emissions of 35 million cars -- and this makes these tiny animals much more important than we thought....

Krill live in the open ocean, mainly in large swarms and reach particularly high numbers in Antarctica. The migrations that they perform (called Diel Vertical Migrations, DVM) are a way of transporting carbon to the ocean's interior because they eat phytoplankton at the surface and excrete their waste at depth. Antarctic krill can grow up to a length of 6cm and can live for 5-6 years. They are one of the largest protein resources on Earth and can be fished easily with large nets for human consumption.

There is enough Antarctic krill to fill the total volume of the new Wembley stadium 1500 times. Spread out on the floor, they would cover the entire area of Scotland. The total weight of Antarctic krill is calculated between 50-150 million tonnes. "

I hate to be the person to point this out, but I presume that if we had less whales eating the krill, it would help reduce global warming.

Don't tell the Japanese whaling commission about this!

Mega engineering to keep climate warmer (you read that right)

ScienceDaily: Thousands Of Barges Could Save Europe From Deep Freeze

An interesting story above about how Europe could try to keep the Atlantic currents going which keep Europe warmer that it would otherwise be. (These are under threat from melting Greenland ice.)

8,000 barges pumping water at a cost of $50,000,000. Couldn't they just air condition the contintent for that price?

More on the cartoon affair

Guardian Unlimited | World dispatch | Drawn conclusions

The above commentary piece in the Guardian is pretty good.

Janet Albrechtsen on the same issue in the Australian today is strangely silent on the American response to the issue. She criticises European and Australian papers for not publishing the cartoons in a show of support for free speech, but I believe that the US media (except for the internet) has not gone out of it ways to publish them either.

(But then again, the US having a muted response is understandable in light of how publicity would likely lead to an increased risk to American defence force personnel already having a hard enough time in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would say that this is clearly behind the government's very conciliatory statement that sounded too soft.)

Anyway, I guess there is not much more to be said on this issue, and I will try not to post about it for some time.

Malaysia Star commentary on the cartoons affair

Press freedom mustnÂ’t be abused

From the article above:

" The action of the European newspapers has further worsened the perceived dichotomy between the West and Islam. They have not helped press freedom but have abused it. They are no different from some political newspapers, whether in Asia or West Asia, with their continuous anti-Semitic stance, negative remarks against Christianity or equating anything Jewish with Zionism."

This is completely overlooking the value of highlighting hypocrisy. And the cartoons are no where near as vicious and nasty as the anti-Semitic ones everyone has seen for years.

Why Israel attacking Iranian uranium facilities is a long shot

The Officers' Club: Meanwhile Back in Iran

See the above post for some speculation as to how Israel might possibly stage an attack on Iran. Seems kind of improbable to me.

Badly drawn cartoon as promised

Hey, it only took 10 minutes or so.

Some Muslims get it

IslamOnline - Views Section

In the interests of fairness, it should be noted that many Islamic commentators understand the harm that the violent demonstrations about cartoons are causing the reputation of their religion. See the link above for one.

Now that my previous post established that more cartoons might encourage democracy in the Arab world, I should point people towards the following "style guide" to drawing Mohammed:

"The hairstyle of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) is mentioned in a number of ahaadeeth, such as the following:

1 – His hair was neither curly nor straight....

It was narrated that Anas ibn Maalik said, describing the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him), he was of average height, neither very tall nor very short. He had a ruddy complexion, neither very white nor very dark, and his hair was neither curly nor straight. The revelation came to him when he was forty years old.

2 – His hair came down to his earlobes...

3 – His hair sometimes came down to his shoulders ...

4 – The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) used to dye his hair sometimes...

5 – He used to part his hair....

6 – The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) did his Farewell Pilgrimage when his hair was stuck together.

(This means) making some parts of the hair stick to others using gum or something similar, so that the hair is held together and avoids getting dirty and does not need to be washed....

7 – The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) sometimes used to braid his hair, especially when travelling, to keep it from getting dusty. "

Actually, the web site I got that from is full of interesting facts about the Messenger (as he is called). For example, if you ever wondered what the name of his camel was, well, that's a bit controversial:

"Of camels he had al-Qaswaa’, and it was said that she was the camel on which he made his Hijrah; and al-‘Adbaa’ and al-Jad’aa’. Were al-‘Adbaa’ and al-Jad’aa’ one and the same, or two different camels? There is some difference of opinion concerning this."

And I am sure you are wondering, how did he ride his camel:

"The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) rode horses, camels, mules and donkeys. He rode horses both saddled and bareback, and he used to make them gallop them on occasion. He used to ride alone, which was most of the time, but sometimes he would put someone behind him on the camel, or he would put one person behind him and one in front, so there would be three men on one camel. So he would sometimes let some men ride on his camel with him, and on some occasions he let his wives ride with him."

Surely you have to laugh at such a ridiculously detailed answer to a question that seems incredibly irrelevant to anything to do with religion.

Maybe someone is thinking I shouldn't poke fun at Islam this way; after all Christian monks used to argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But the point is that Christians don't worry about that any more, and we can recognise that medieval Christianity had many obsessions we now consider quite bizarre and therefore wryly amusing (the trade in relics, for example.) Anyway, I would hope that some Muslims agree that this sort of interest in the tiniest detail of their Prophet's life is sort of funny, and rather beside the main point of their religion.

Cartoon comments from Arab News

There Are 101 Ways to Skin a Cat

The link above suggests ways in which offended Muslim nations should retaliate against Europe:

"I recommend that we utilize a gradual and escalating approach to boycotting Western goods and services. Starting with luxury items and easily replaceable products as a first step that can be quickly and, relatively painlessly implemented.

We may then move on to more complicated items that require finding alternative sources and working with them to produce goods that match our specifications.

Finally we move on to products that we will need to build our own factories to produce.

This serves several purposes: One, it allows our businessmen to find alternatives to Western products in an organized way. Remember, it is not an easy task to rearrange trading patterns that have been in place for decades, if not centuries.

Second, it allows our economies to realign and adjust to the changed trading environment with a minimum of difficulty.

Third, it allows our non-Western trading partners to adjust their production to fulfill our needs."

Hmm. Sounds like the writer is encouraging the Arab countries to learn how to make stuff themselves instead of just buying it with oil money. Presumably, this will lead to a bigger middle class, which most people think is a preliminary step to having more liberal and democratic countries.

If that is the result - the West should publish more cartoons as soon as possible...

Tim Blair stands up

Tim Blair

It took a little time, but Tim has now posted the cartoons in question. Yay.

I am now waiting for some right wing death bloggers to come up with some more. (I wonder if Blogger is entirely happy with that prospect.) I don't want to see anything out and out nasty (not like you see in Arab papers against the Jews.) But it is kind of funny to think you could presumably draw a stick man, title it "Prophet Mohammed" and still be in trouble.

Update: Zoe Brain fires a broadside that is well worth looking at too.

Update 2: just to be clear about what I meant above: I think it would be interesting to have bloggers have a go at drawing original cartoons that depict Mohammed in a humourous context, but within the bounds of reasonable taste that those in the West or Far East would expect if the figure was, say, Jesus Christ, Bhudda or a Hindu god. I may have a go later tonight myself.

I don't think people should go out of their way to be offensive, but as several people have noted, the Danish cartoons were really very mild, even if the meaning of one or two was somewhat obscure. The one which seems to have caused most offence (the bomb in the turban) is correctly seen as an indictment of where certain strains of Islam are taking us; not an insult to Mohammed himself.

Incidentally, why didn't the makers of "South Park" get targetted when their "Super Best Friends" episode went to air in 2001? (I am not a fan of that show, but I did quite like that episode.) I believe that is Mohammed 3rd from the left in the screen shot here.

Comedians are dumb

Practising the dangerous art of sedition - Opinion - theage.com.au

I note that a bunch of comics who either can't or don't bother reading had another go at complaining about the revised sedition laws.

The article about this in the Age (linked above) is again clearly misleading:

"This afternoon a group of artists will descend on the Arts Centre, in St Kilda Road, and try their hardest to get arrested. Comic Rod Quantock will collect money for an unnamed terrorist organisation, cabaret artist Eddie Perfect will sing his ditty John Howard's Bitches and satirist Max Gillies will assume a stiff marionette smirk and do his utmost to make Prime Minister John Howard look like a twat.

If this isn't urging disaffection with the Government, what is? Such antics are hardly intended to arouse warm, fuzzy feelings for our elected leaders. Under new sedition laws, seditious intent is defined as urging disaffection against the Constitution, the Government of the Commonwealth, or either house of Parliament. Yet, chances are, when Sedition!, the concert, is performed at the Arts Centre this afternoon, nothing will happen."

As I have pointed out several times before, this idea that a person doing something with "seditious intent" (as defined above) is an offence under the legislation is simply wrong.

But can comics read for themselves? Can journalists from The Age? Seems not.

No apologies required

Drawn into a religious conflict - Los Angeles Times

The article above in the LA Times is quite a good one on the cartoons and Islam story.

After some historical background (which I presume is more or less accurate, but I am just taking it on trust), the writer (Tim Rutten) has this to say:

"The West's current struggle with a murderous global Sunni Muslim insurgency and the threat of a nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran makes it clear that it's no longer possible to overlook the culture of intolerance, hatred and xenophobia that permeates the Islamic world. The hard work of rooting those things out will have to be done by honest Muslim leaders and intellectuals willing to retrace their tradition's steps and do the intellectual heavy lifting that participation in the modern world requires. They won't be helped, however, if Western governments continue to pander to Islamic sensitivity while looking away from violent Islamic intolerance. They won't be helped by European diplomats and officials who continue to ignore the officially sanctioned hate regularly directed at Jews by the Mideast's government-controlled media, while commiserating with Muslims offended by a few cartoons in the West's free news media.

The decent respect for the opinions of others that life in modern, pluralistic societies requires is not a form of relativism. It will not do, as Isaiah Berlin once put it, to say, "I believe in kindness and you believe in concentration camps" and let's leave it at that."

The only problem I see is: just how much time does the West have to wait for Islam to be revised by its "honest Muslim leaders and intellectuals?" Not a lot, it would seem.

As you may expect, Christopher Hitchens also thinks the US is sounding too sympathetic to Islam. See his article in Slate here.

In the Wall Street Journal there is also criticism of the West (by and large) caving in too easily on this issue:

"The issue, though, is much larger than the question of how to balance press freedom with religious sensibilities; it goes to the heart of the conflict with radical Islam. The Islamists demand no less than absolute supremacy for their religion--and not only in the Muslim world but wherever Muslims may happen to reside. That's why they see no hypocrisy in their demand for "respect" for Islam while the simple display of a cross or a Star of David in Saudi Arabia is illegal. Infidels simply don't have the same rights."

I am waiting to see what Australian commentators have to say about this. I expect something wishy washy from Fairfax press, and presumably something more in line with the above pieces in News Limited.

On Alan Turing

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books

If, like me, you a bit about Alan Turing's work but not much about his personal life, the book review above is very interesting. Eccentric genius would seem an appropriate description. (Also gay, which seems not all that common amongst science types.)

The author of the review, Jim Holt, is (I presume) the same Jim Holt who wrote some excellent science stories in Slate magazine. For example, check his exploration of How Will the Universe End. He's a great popular science writer.

The Economist backgrounds the varieties of Islam

Political Islam | Forty shades of green | Economist.com

A lengthy article that is useful in understanding mad Islamists. Give them Madagascar, I say.

Now, the civility wars

The Australian: Peter Saunders: Don't blame Howard for decline of civility [February 03, 2006]

Much common sense is spoken by Peter Saunders in the above article.

I am well and truly sick of the spurious argument that "economic rationalism" means increased incivility. Apart from Left leaning commentators, does the average person in the street really believe this theory? Maybe some with liberal tendencies would say they do, but probably simply because it has been repeated so often they might assume its truth. I would like to know who first came up with the idea; certainly it has been done to death over the years by those such as Hugh Mackay and Eva Cox. But really, it is the triumph of sloganeering over common sense.

Anyone over 40 knows that there has been a gradual erosion in certain matters of civility since the 1960's that is impossible to plausibly tie to "economic rationalism". For example, the careless use of language regardless of the possible offence caused to the public (I am thinking of those who wear outright crude T Shirts while walking down a shopping mall, or teenagers who swear loudly while waiting for the bus, regardless of the little old ladies sitting next to them.)
"Road rage" is also a completely novel phenomena that I think rarely has anything to do with the quality of the car that annoys the offender.

On the other hand, certain types of incivility have diminished since the 1960's. I suspect that there are not a hell of a lot of catholic kids getting beaten up by State school kids these days.

But overall, yes I agree that incivility has been on the rise, but the reasons set out by Saunders in his article are correct. His ending is particularly telling:

"In the past, when the norms governing public behaviour were clearer than they are today, public figures such as teachers and police officers felt confident about expressing and enforcing them. They knew the rest of the community (including those higher up) would back them up. Today, this confidence is ebbing away. Last October, Sydney magistrate Pat O'Shane dismissed a case brought against a youth who had drunkenly sworn obscenities at police in a public street, and she ordered the police to pay the offender's costs of $2600. She told her court: "I'm not sure there is such a thing as community standards any more."

Statements like this from people in authority can cause huge damage. There are still community standards, but they take a hammering when prominent people such as magistrates refuse to acknowledge them.

If we want to safeguard civility, our teachers, politicians, broadcasters, magistrates and judges must understand how important it is for them not only to recognise that community standards of behaviour still exist, but also to defend them wholeheartedly and tenaciously. If we cannot rely on this, then we are indeed in trouble."

Yes indeed, a lot of the problem is the underlying relativism of much of the Left's moral reasoning, which erodes certainty as to the limits of acceptable behaviour. Yet they have the hide to try to deflect blame onto the bogeyman of economic rationalism.

Janet Albrechtsen on Howard's history

The Australian: Textbook case of making our past a blame game [February 01, 2006]

Janet's column in yesterday's Australia is an excellent piece. (Assuming she is fairly reporting what is in her child's history text.)

Teachers are a worry.

Desktop fusion is real

ScienceDaily: Using Sound Waves To Induce Nuclear Fusion With No External Neutron Source

One hopes that this may lead to something useful in terms of energy production in future.

Yes, it was as stupid as it sounds

Toxic fish advice kept secret - National - smh.com.au

This is an update to the post I did questioning the common sense (or lack thereof) in banning fishing in one area of a harbour, as if they can't swim.

And yes, scientists did realise it was stupid not to do more, but nothing happened for years. Great.

More on contraception & abortion

Is Abortion Bad? - Waiting for the condom crusade. By William Saletan and Katha Pollitt

The link above is to a Slate published exchange of letters between William Saletan (whose New York Times article I strongly recommended a few posts ago) and a critic of his approach.

He quotes more interesting poll results from the USA which indicate that the pro choice lobby really won't convince the public of much if it insists on abortion being just unfortunate, rather than an inherently bad thing. And, as common sense would indicate is appropriate, the later the abortion, the worse the public thinks of it.

Meanwhile, up with the sheep...

It's kind of fun to annoy people by talking about a movie I haven't seen and probably won't. Anyway, Brokeback Mountain was the subject of a decidedly gushing comment piece by John Heard in the Australian a couple of days ago. It is, presumably, not a bad movie, but this (emphasis mine) is a bit over the top, isn't it?:

"This curious tale of unabashed same-sex attraction written for the rigidly heterosexual cowboy genre wasn't just a hit in the obvious places, although the queues in Chelsea, New York City, went around the block on opening night.

Rather, it has been watched and re-watched by thousands in the south and especially in Texas, the most masculine, devout, George W.Bush-rearing state in the union.

The personal testimonies on the film's website, left by surprised, delighted or otherwise deeply moved, deeply ordinary Texans and other cowpokes and ranch folk are wrenching. The thought of "good ole boys" sitting down with popcorn and handkerchiefs to watch what is, ostensibly, a chick-flick in man-drag is stunning."

So how big a hit (commercially) is it? From Rotten Tomatoes, I see that it has earned $51 million in the US after 8 weeks in release, and took $6 million last weekend (presumably, there is a bounce in ticket sales from all the recent awards.) By comparison, something like "Fun with Dick and Jane", a poorly reviewed Jim Carrey comedy, has made $106 million.

My point is: until a movie reaches about $100 million in the US, it doesn't exactly have "big hit" written all over it. (King Kong took over $200 million and is considered a bit of a flop, but then it did cost about that to make. I presume there are few special effects up on Brokeback.) (Gosh it is hard to avoid trying to be funny about that movie.)

Speaking of movie hits, have a look at that Rotten Tomatoes link to see how much money the prominent Oscar nominated films have made this year. Not only has Hollywood seemingly decided to try to annoy all Red States, it has also apparently set poor-to-middling box office performance as a criteria for attention.

Some more Middle East thoughts

* On Hamas in the Middle East: Salon.com (of course) is trying to blame George W for the success of Hamas and wants to ridicule him over the failure of "democracy" to deliver acceptable outcomes. The argument that you can't expect democracy to have good results unless it is based "on a rule of law, on stable institutions, on basic economic security for the population, and on checks and balances that forestall a tyranny of the majority" initially sounds plausible, but on closer reflection it is all a bit "chicken and egg" isn't it? I mean, undemocratic governments don't have much incentive to set up well for up a system that is likely to kick them out, do they? And in the case of Iraq in particular, there was not exactly a hell of a lot of time to be spent on establishing the liberal society first before giving democracy a try, was there?

Maybe it comes down, then, to some liberals just believing that the Middle East should be left to flounder in its own mess. Maybe next century they will be ready for democracy..

But one further point that Juan Cole makes in his article (which, incidentally, has a particularly snide header, even for Salon: "How do you like your democracy now, Mr Bush?") perhaps shows the flaw in his pessimism. He writes (emphasis mine):

" To be sure, many Israelis believe that Hamas is only using the truce to rearm, that it will never change its opposition to the very existence of Israel, and that any negotiations with the Islamist group will only weaken the Jewish state. And Hamas' failure to speak clearly about its intentions does nothing to allay such fears. But no one has ever put Hamas to the test. Neither Bush nor Israel have ever made good-faith efforts to resolve the underlying issues, preferring to issue moralistic denunciations that ignore the reality on the ground."

As an article I linked to in a previous post noted, it is the fact that Hamas now has to take responsibility and not hide behind its "government" that actually gives some cautious ground for optimism.

Black holes at the CERN collider - will physicists bring the earth to a premature end?

In December, I did a short post referring readers to this website: www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/index.htm. I found the site intriguing, as the author did appear to have some knowledge of physics and made arguments which, at least on the face of it, appeared plausible and concerning. It's time I did a full post about this.

Background - how black holes may be coming to your neighbourhood

As James Blodgett (the author of the above site) explains, there is a large particle accelerator being built in Europe by CERN called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is expected to come "on line" in 2007. This is a huge project, which was the subject of a recent BBC background report here.

For a relatively straightforward explanation of how it is that black holes might be created by the LHC, see this article from Analog. My explanation (subject always to correction, as I am no scientist) is this:

Since at least 2001, which was presumably well after the LHC project was planned, physicists have realised that if there are large "extra dimensions" to the universe, the energies that might be required to create a microscopic black hole may be within the reach of the LHC. For papers describing this in full technical detail, try this one by Webber, and Blodgett cites others others in different parts of his website. Physicists are excited by the possibility, as it would really be a very new field of inquiry for particle physics.

The idea of there perhaps being large extra dimensions has become a popular theory relatively recently, but there has been a lot of work about it the last, I think, decade or so. (Also, see this search at the arxiv.org site to see the large amount of attention possible black hole production at the LHC is getting.) From what I understand, the large extra dimensions idea is different from, but not inconsistent with, string theory, which proposes that there are very tiny hidden extra dimensions bound up so tightly that no one has any idea yet how they can be verified experimentally.

Black holes are created by compressing stuff so tightly that its gravity prevents anything escaping, even light. (Although there may be a type of radiation from them anyway, as I will note below.) If other matter is nearby, they can suck it in and grow, as indeed is believed to be happening at many astronomically sized black holes throughout the universe. Sounds dangerous, and physicists have thought about the safety aspects of creating a micro black hole.

Back in 1999 there was a bit of media attention given to the RHIC accelerator in the USA, and whether it would cause the end of the earth, or even the entire universe, through production of a "strangelet" or other ways. A risk assessment paper was done on this, and it also considered whether black holes could be created at that accelerator. That paper is here.

The paper quickly concluded that there was no where near enough energy in that accelerator's collisions to create a black hole. They spent much more time on "strangelets", but concluded that they are a very small risk. The argument that clinches this is that cosmic rays (which are tiny, naturally produced, subatomic particles traveling at enormous speed) have been crashing into the planets and our moon for billions of years at much higher energies than what can be achieved in particle accelerators, and they have not caused the destruction of any solar system body yet. Work at lower energies is therefore also presumed safe.

There is a similar "risk assessment" style paper dated June 2002 on the LHC, which is a substantially more powerful collider.

This paper acknowledges that micro black holes might be created at the LHC, but also assumes that they will not be any danger to the earth because they are expected to evaporate (my term, not there's) almost instantaneously with their creation.

(Famous physicist Stephen Hawking predicted early in his career that black holes will, in effect, evaporate due to quantum effects at their edge. It's called Hawking Radiation, or HR in the rest of this post. The smaller the black hole, the faster the HR process, and the theory goes that a tiny black hole created in the LHC would instantaneously evaporate in a spray of subatomic particles. It would be this process by which the detectors would in fact know that a black hole had [very temporarily] been created. Black holes which absorb surrounding matter at a rate faster than they lose weight through HR will grow in size, but once there is nothing around them to "accrete", they will start losing weight again.)

The 2002 paper does not mention the 'cosmic ray' argument except in the context of strangelets. However, at the CERN website there is a page where this argument is referred to in the context of black holes too. See here, where it is said:

"It should be stated, in conclusion, that these black holes are not dangerous and do not threaten to swallow up our already much-abused planet. The theoretical arguments and the obvious harmlessness of any black holes that, according to these models, would have to be formed from the interaction of cosmic rays with celestial bodies, mean that we can regard them with perfect equanimity."

So - what's the problem?

Well, as Blodgett notes, and a search of the arxiv site confirms, that there are credible physicists who doubt that HR actually exists. Although astronomers believe they have strong evidence of massive black holes in the centre of galaxies, HR is too faint to be observed that way.

So, the fundamental problem comes down to this: the CERN risk assessment paper is based on HR definitely happening. They do not consider in any detail what may happen if a micro black hole does not disappear quickly.

What about the cosmic ray argument?

Blodgett notes that if cosmic rays create black holes, they would nearly always be doing it by a very fast particle (a cosmic ray) smashing into a relatively stationary one (a bit of the moon, say.) The micro black hole created that way should therefore have high velocity. This is quite different from the LHC process, which would create its high energy interactions by head-on collisions of 2 streams of particles traveling at similar speeds in opposite directions.

In the case of the LHC, the momentum of the particles would often cancel each other out resulting in potential particles (such as micro black holes) that are moving below the earth's escape velocity.

This is important, because all micro black holes would be so small that no one expects them to be highly interactive with ordinary matter, and a speeding one might zip through a planet in much the same way a bullet might pass harmlessly through a room full of balloons. Ones created in the LHC, on the other hand, have time to settle into the core of the earth, and lots of time to interact with matter there. It is also possible that the LHC will create hundreds of such black holes during its experiments. (Blodgett has obtained definite confirmation on this point from a physicist wrote a paper and who did correspond with him for a time.)

How fast could a stable micro black hole absorb other particles?

Blodgett readily acknowledges that micro black holes may not be capable of absorbing anything at a rate which represents a real problem anyway. His point is, however, that physicists do not seem to have done detailed work on 'worst possible case' scenarios because they assume that HR means this is just not going to be a problem in the first place.

Blodgett points out that at least one paper suggests that a black hole based on the 'extra dimensions' theory could have a larger radius than a 'normal' black hole in a universe without extra dimensions. He also raises the issue of conditions in the interior of the earth and how that would affect a micro black hole's accretion rate.

He worries, although without providing any real detail on his site, that there are some scenarios in which a dangerous accretion rate (with expotential growth of a micro black hole) is possible. Just how fast this may mean that it could eat the earth is not clear. I take it that Blodgett does not think it likely that the earth would disappear in such a hole in a day or a year. However, even if it may mean that the earth could end up as a tiny black hole within, say, 10,000 or a 100,000 years, wouldn't people be a little concerned about that?

What do I think of all this?

During the weeks since I found Blodgett's site, I have had email correspondence with him about his background and motives. He is not a physicist, but does have some qualifications in statistics and other topics. He certainly seems to have better maths than me.

He appears genuine; and not a "nutter".

What I like about his site is that he is open about being willing to be proved wrong.

He told me that he has tried to obtain some publicity for his site, with very limited success. He has tried contacting quite a few physicists, most of whom have been immediately dismissive.

I has some experience of this myself. I raised his site at a 'group blog' run by a bunch of particle physicists called Cosmic Varience. This particular thread was about what the LHC may or may not find. (Some people fear it won't turn up anything very new at all, at great expense.) My first comment was at comment no. 45. It is well worth reading the comments thread from that point on. Note the initial snide reaction of particle physicist Mark (who is one of the group bloggers).

I emailed James Blodgett and told him about the thread. He made a couple of subsequent posts; I think it is fair to say that Mark did not take well to being questioned by a non physicist. I ended with a polite request for further response to articles I found myself indicating that they is a lot of uncertainly about HR as a process, but did not get an answer.

Blodgett says this is fairly typical of the reaction he has received in contacting other physicists.

I have emailed a couple of other physicists who appear to know a lot about black hole theory about the issues (very briefly), and while I did receive an answer from one, it seemed clear that he had not read Blodgett's site in any detail.

There are threads on other physics forums about the issue, but none that I have read seem to have dealt with Blodgett's arguments in adequate detail.

My conclusions:

1. It is clear that the current published paper by the CERN safety committee is inadequate in that it bases its arguments regarding micro black holes solely on the assumption that HR does exist. For this point alone, I think Blodgett deserves praise.

2. I see no published evidence that particle physicists have taken seriously Blodgett's suggestion that the "cosmic ray" argument is a flawed analogy in the case of micro black holes from the LHC.

3. It is possible that, even without HR, accretion rates for micro black holes within the earth's interior might be so slow that the worst possible case is not worth worrying about. But again, I see no clear evidence that they have done the work of looking at "worst case scenarios".

4. It is possible that some physicists have done some calculations on the scenarios that Blodgett suggests and have formed the opinion that there really is no problem. If so, they are doing a terrible job at explaining to anyone asking the question whether Blodgett's concerns are misplaced. It certainly seems that some particle physicists simply don't like to be questioned about this. The fact that there is a huge investment at stake may help explain some of the animosity, although I am not suggesting that a physicist who realised there was a danger would try to hide it. I do wonder, though, whether it makes them not want to look into it in too much detail.

5. One other point I have not yet mentioned: if micro black holes can be created by cosmic rays and do evaporate via HR, then it should already be happening above our heads in the earth's atmosphere. New Scientist ran a story about that here. There is already work underway to see if the decay of such micro black holes can be detected. If it is, it would be a confirmation of HR really working, and the LHC could go ahead confident in that knowledge. It seems to me that a strong case could presently be made for not starting up the LHC until the search for atmospheric decay of 'cosmic ray' black holes has been given a good chance of success.

Also, a very recent article suggest that there might be another way of testing if "extra dimensions" exist. If they are confirmed, it would presumably suggest that the LHC will definitely create micro black holes, although it may not add much to the issue of whether HR works.

An appeal

This issue has not exactly caused me to lose sleep, but I have spent a fair bit of time reading on the internet about the issues, and thinking about it. It does worry me that a published risk assessment paper from CERN about the possible risk of their destroying the earth does seem to be clearly inadequate in detail when addressing micro black holes. Although I think Blodgett is not as transparent on his web site as he could be, his arguments make some intuitive sense to me.

If they re-wrote it to address the issues Blodgett makes, I would be much happier. But I get the impression that this has not yet happened because:

a. relatively few physicists think there is much risk of HR not existing (even though there seem to be quite a few credible papers on exactly this point)

b. the possibility of micro black holes being created at LHC was only realised a few years ago, and papers are still being produced at a great rate with new ideas about their possible character and fate. (Some papers suggest that a "remnant" will be left from the HR process. I guess that these are not thought to be potentially dangerous either, but the exact nature of such a particle has not been clearly explained in anything I have read);

c. Blodgett's questions are being asked by non physicists.

If any reader of this post has any contacts with physicists who are interested in addressing the issues Blodgett raises, please ask them to have a look at it for us. It's only the issue of the future of the earth at stake.

Update: in the interests of showing independence, I did not provide a copy of this to James Blodgett prior to posting. I have advised him of its existence, and invited him to comment if he thinks I have got any point wrong.

Also: only today I found this old thread on a physics forum site which contains posts by Blodgett and some responses he receives. They are well worth reading, especially the last one by him here.

Blodgett's point about the difficulty of trying to work out possible accretion scenarios when quantum gravity is not understood seems very valid. It is the apparent lack of response to these issues that worries me.

UPDATE SEPT 2008: I see that this post is still getting quite a bit of attention from people Googling for information now that the LHC is nearing operation.

Readers should be aware that I made many subsequent posts relevant to the topic after this one. As I don't tag my posts, the best way to find them is to go to the current page for my blog and use the search blog facility for "black holes".

The short story is that I had been somewhat relieved by the work published mid 2008 by Mangano that gave reasons why micro black holes could not be a danger. Then this month, I found that there was potentially a new reason to worry. The status of the Plaga suggestion of how Hawking Radiation itself might be a danger is unclear to me: Mangano says he makes a fundamental mistake, but I find it hard to follow.

A new book on North Korea

The Japan Times Online

See above for a review of a new book about North Korea from the British diplomat who opened the British embassy there in 2001. Sounds very interesting:

"The "labour camps" and the reports of human-rights violations are described, as is the bizarre and ghoulish way in which the dead Kim Il Sung has been retained as president and is "revered" in ways that make the cults of Stalin and Mao Zedong seem tame."

I would like to know more about that.

In the meantime, North Korea gets a mention in the media recently here (for raising the spectre of nuclear war), and here (in relation to worries that it may well sell plutonium to Iran as a shortcut to Iran making a bomb.) What "interesting" times we live in.

No comment

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Pathetic phalluses

Extracts from the above article (by the maker of a 3 part Channel 4 - where else - documentary on penis size):

"...an entire scene has grown up around so-called penis dysmorphia, and men are having their penises injected with silicone to gain size. For the men posting pictures of the results on the web, it is impossible for such malformed penises to become erect. But that is not the point, they say: they just want everyone to share in the beauty of their mental illness."

Now for some words of encouragement for your "average" male:

"Men born with abnormally large penises almost invariably find that their first sexual experiences are with men. I met men who said that, once they had reached their 20s, they realised they were straight rather than gay; so they suffered years of sexual confusion and misery.

Invariably, what most men would consider a blessing turned out to be a curse. What I found was that an unusually large penis had, without exception, made a misery of the lives of everyone we interviewed."

Have fun making your own comments...

Update: this seems as appropriate a post as any to also refer to the so-astonishing-it's- weirdly-funny body modification fetish of scrotal inflation. I found this last year, actually via a link from Little Green Footballs (just so you know I don't go deliberately looking for this stuff!) If you haven't seen it before, go to this report on an anarchist bookfair in San Francisco, scroll down to photo no. 6, and read the explanation. There's even a link to order your own "scrotal inflation kit".

I also found (by accident) a mention of its complications in the medical literature here. I like this line from the abstract:

"Patients who are considering scrotal inflation, as it is called in the lay literature, should be warned of the potential complications of this procedure."

Yes, but just how many men considering this procedure would first go to their doctor to ask "hey, I am thinking of inflating my scrotum with saline to the size of a melon. Any problem with doing that?"

How the future should look...

The Venus Project - The Redesign of a culture

If you like watching Thunderbirds because of its 1960's vision of how the future would look, have a look at the site above for nice eye candy of a similar kind.

Seems to be the home page of some self-styled futurist who wants to change the world. The site seems relatively low on detail, but lots and lots of pretty drawings of futuristic cities, building and stuff.

I used to love this sort of thing as a child in the 1960's. I remember one book in particular that had lots of similar drawings in it. It is also why I really liked EPCOT centre in Walt Disney World when I visited there is the late 1980's. (If you have a choice between the original Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida, go for Florida every time. It is like 4 different theme parks all run by Disney on a massive area of land. And you can visit NASA about a 100km away too.)

The future should look like the future, I say. But I have my doubts about Melbourne's Federation Square (not that I have seen it in the flesh yet.)

Welcome visitors

A kind reference to this site by Evil Pundit has resulted in my actually having more than a handful of visitors over the weekend. Welcome all. (Makes me wonder what happens if Tim Blair recommends a site!)

One of the fun things about having a site meter with some detail available is spotting where unusual visitors come from. I seem to have a very regular visitor from either Mauritius or South Africa (it shows on the site meter as from Mauritius, but when I search the ISP name it refers to South Africa.) This is assuming that I am not mistaking some automated thing that hits my site frequently for a person.

So Mauritius or South African person, who seems to check my site very frequently, care to make a comment so I know you are a person?

Daniel Pipes has his say on Hamas etc

The Australian: Daniel Pipes: Region not ripe for democracy [January 30, 2006]

A short, interesting item from Daniel Pipes in the Australian today (see above) about the problem with democracy in the Middle East. The key paragraphs:

"In brief, elections are bringing to power the most deadly enemies of the West. What went wrong? Why has a democratic prescription that proved successful in Germany, Japan and other formerly bellicose nations not worked in the Middle East?

It's not Islam or some cultural factor that accounts for this difference; rather, it is the fact that ideological enemies in the Middle East have not yet been defeated. Democratisation took place in Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union after their populations had endured the totalitarian crucible. By 1945 and 1991, they recognised what disasters fascism and communism had brought them, and were primed to try a different path.

That's not the case in the Middle East, where a totalitarian temptation remains powerfully in place."

His suggested approach:

"Western capitals need to show Palestinians that, like Germans electing Adolf Hitler in 1933, they have made a decision gravely unacceptable to civilised opinion. The Hamas-led Palestinian Authority must be isolated and rejected at every turn, thereby encouraging Palestinians to see the error of their ways."

Not sure how that would work out.

One thing I have never understood is what is it that passes for an economy in Gaza. If they have very little economic activity there, it makes it a bit hard to exert pressure that way. It would seem to me that a solution to the arab/Israeli problem should include giving the Palestinians something with which they can base an economy. But I am not sure if that has been factored in with past suggested "solutions" or not.

And one thing about Pipe's piece: a recent post over at Neo-neocon (a very classy blog, by the way) points out that talk of Hitler being democratically elected rather oversimplifies how he came to power.

Maybe more to come on this story?

Iraq's WMD Secreted in Syria, Sada Says - January 26, 2006 - The New York Sun - NY Newspaper

On the Hamas victory in Palestine

Emanuele Ottolenghi on Hamas on National Review Online

The piece above makes some good points. Forcing Hamas into the open, so to speak, may ultimately be a good thing.

SBS News tonight featured a piece on Mariam Farahat, the newly elected Palestinian mother who happily sent 3 sons to their death to achieve the muder of many Israeli civilians. The reporter used the term "sacrificed her sons" more than once, but without any qualification or doubt expressed that this is the appropriate term. Presumably, this is the term Mariam uses herself, but why doesn't the media use the same caution as they have often displayed when talking of the "war on terror", or the "Axis of Evil", where qualifiers such as "so-called" have frequently been used?

Mariam, by the way, has three other sons still alive and is saying she is willing to use them too.

The fact that she is popular because of the way she tearlessly sent them off to die, achieving nothing but (at least in the case of the one son she appeared with on the famous video) the deliberate killing of non-combatants, suggests that there is something seriously wrong with Palestinian Islamic psychology.

Is there no dark matter after all?

New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - Gravity theory dispenses with dark matter

OK now to cosmology. The story above is interesting in that it is about new work suggesting that its the theory of gravity itself which should be modified to explain the strange rotation of galaxies, rather than proposing that there is a huge amount of "dark matter" in the universe.

I had last year stumbled across another effort to deal with the problem this way (called the MOND theory, which is mentioned in the above story too.) It intuitively sounded to me a useful way to go.

The fact that the Pioneer spacecraft aren't travelling as they should also seems a big reason to question current theories of gravity, and this new theory apparently accounts for that anomoly adequately.

All sounds rather promising to me, and if the Pioneer spacecraft behaviour is a significant contributor to an overhall of the fundamental laws of physics, it will really confirm what space adovcates have argued for years - that part of the reason for doing it is for the unforeseen breakthroughs, as well as the more foreseeable one.

Time to start ordering the Australian hovercar?

Proof that being master of your domain is not as good

New Scientist News - Sex before stressful events keeps you calm

But - it has to be, ahem, PVI (penile-vaginal intercourse). Read the article, it's short.

More babies needed

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Germany agonises over 30% childless women

From the above story:

"Germany was plunged into an anguished debate yesterday about how to encourage reluctant couples to breed after new figures showed Germany with the world's highest proportion of childless women.

Thirty per cent of German women have not had children, according to European Union statistics from 2005, with the figure rising among female graduates to 40%. Germany's new family minister, Ursula von der Leyen, said that unless the birth rate picked up the country would have to "turn the light out"."

And this:

"In Europe 2.1 is considered to be the population replacement level. This table shows the mean number of children per woman (2004 figures)

Ireland 1.99
France 1.90
Norway 1.81
Sweden 1.75
UK 1.74
Netherlands 1.73
Germany 1.37
Italy 1.33
Spain 1.32
Greece 1.29"

Australia's rate: about 1.75.

It would be interesting if anyone could come up with convincing cultural explanations for the variations between the European countries. I can see some pointing towards how "macho" a culture is (reflecting on how much a father is prepared to put in to helping raise a child.) But are Greek men close to Spainish men in this regard? And what about Italians and their supposed fondness for their families? Why is their rate significantly below that of, say, France, which to my mind has much less of a traditional reputation for big happy families? And how about Ireland. Did they hold onto Catholic attitudes to family planning much longer than the Italians themselves did?

Of course, it may just be that looking for such over-arching cultural explanations is a mistake. But it is a fun game.

In any event, Mark Steyn's frequently raised concerns about much of western European committing demographic suicide seems very well placed.

More on abortion

Three Decades After Roe, a War We Can All Support - New York Times

By a further co-incidence to my recently posting about abortion, William Saletan (who writes for Slate and has written a book on the abortion issue in America) has written a piece in the New York Times (linked above) with which I can pretty much agree.

An extract:

"The problem is abortion - the word that's missing from all the checks you've written to Planned Parenthood, Naral Pro-Choice America, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Organization for Women. Fetal pictures propelled the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act through Congress. And most Americans supported both bills, because they agree with your opponents about the simplest thing: It's bad to kill a fetus.

They're right. It is bad. I know many women who decided, in the face of unintended pregnancy, that abortion was less bad than the alternatives. But I've never met a woman who wouldn't rather have avoided the pregnancy in the first place.

This is why the issue hasn't gone away. Abortion, like race-conscious hiring, generates moral friction. Most people will tolerate it as a lesser evil or a temporary measure, but they'll never fully accept it. They want a world in which it's less necessary. If you grow complacent or try to institutionalize it, they'll run out of patience. That's what happened to affirmative action. And it'll happen to abortion, if you stay hunkered down behind Roe."

This is not a million miles from what I said towards the end of my previous post.

He goes on to say (to the "pro choice" side):

"....you can't eliminate the moral question by ignoring it. To eliminate it, you have to agree on it: Abortion is bad, and the ideal number of abortions is zero. But by conceding that, you don't end the debate, you narrow it. Once you agree that the goal is fewer abortions, the only thing left to debate is how to get there."

And the idea is as follows:

"The pro-choice path to those results is simple. Help every woman when she doesn't want an abortion: before she's pregnant. That means abstinence for those who can practice it, and contraception for everybody else. Nearly half of the unintended pregnancies in this country result in abortions, and at least half of our unintended pregnancies are attributable to women who didn't use contraception. The pregnancy rate among these women astronomically exceeds the pregnancy rate among women who use contraception. The No. 1 threat to the unborn isn't the unchurched. It's the unprotected."

This makes a lot of sense. It is also why I could not wholeheartedly support the Right to Life movement, if it is still (as it was many years ago at least) dominated by those who take Catholic teaching against all contraception seriously.

I think Saletan is really spot on in showing a way forward here.

Update: I have corrected my initial mis-spelling of Saletan. I often go back and correct typos and my english after my initial post, and hope no one has noticed before I get to do the correction!

The Left and the religious right

spiked-essays | Essay | The curious rise of anti-religious hysteria

The link is to a decent essay from Spiked on the Left's anti-religious hysteria. (We're talking American Left verses the Christian Right. Islam does not get a mention.)

The essay touches many topics - the somewhat hysterical reaction to "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" from some quarters, the reaction against Intelligent Design, and how some on the the Left advocate the promotion of a Left-ish morality to assure those on the right that the Right does not have an exclusive hold on the field.

That last point is interesting, because the writer notes the apparent cynicisim of such approach.

"At the end of the day, politically motivated calls among liberals and the left for morality are not so far from the way in which Christians 'use' The March of the Penguins or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Both are cynical gestures driven by political calculations rather than by a moral inspiration that comes from the soul. What is particularly cynical is that these attempts to construct a 'moral dimension' are always aimed at others: those who apparently need 'simple' answers and 'meaning'. Such a cynical view of the public was clearly spelled out by William Davies of the London-based Institute for Public Policy research. 'The liberal, secular left has somehow to find ways of supplying citizens with emotional and metaphysical comforts even when it does not itself believe in such things', he warned (6)."

This last point (about the secular left not believing in "metaphysical comforts") seems very important to me, and I will add more to this post later.

More confusion over global warming

Baffled Scientists Say Less Sunlight Reaching Earth

Note this from the story:

"Goode's team says there may be a large, unexplained variation in sunlight reaching the Earth that changes over the course of two decades or so, as well as a large effect of clouds re-arranging by altitude.

How do the findings play into arguments about global warming and the apparent contribution by industrial emissions? That's entirely unclear.

"No doubt greenhouse gases are increasing," Goode said in a telephone interview. "No doubt that will cause a warming. The question is, 'Are there other things going on?'"

What is clear is that scientists don't understand clouds very well, as a trio of studies last year also showed.

"Clouds are even more uncertain than we thought," Goode said."

More documentaries you don't want to see

Film Article | Reuters.com

From the Reuter's story above:

"A wave of movies with messages swept through the Sundance Film Festival by its mid-point on Tuesday...

Former vice president Al Gore made the rounds at this top U.S. gathering for independent film, to promote the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," about his crusade against global warming.

Rosie O'Donnell came to this mountain town east of Salt Lake City with her documentary, "All Aboard! Rosie's Family Cruise," an inside look at the lives of gay families while on vacation."

Yikes...

Too Late

The Blog | RJ Eskow: Heads Up: Bush Is Winning the NSA 'Headline War' | The Huffington Post

I don't often quote something from Huffington Post that I sort of agree with, but here is someone complaining the nation's press are making Bush win "the NSA 'Headline War'":

"If Democrats aren't careful, this will help fortify the GOP's reputation as the "manly, defend-America -at-all-costs party" and the Democrats as the "wring-your-hands-over-the-rights-of-terrorists" party."

It's too late already.