Fighting over the name of God

Malaysia Says It will Appeal 'Allah' Ruling - WSJ.com

A fight is going on in Malaysia over a Catholic Malay language newspaper's court win against a government ban on its use of the word "Allah" for God. According to the above article:

The Arab word Allah has been used by Malay-speaking Christians for centuries, much as it is used by Christians in Arabic-speaking countries or in Indonesia, where, like Malaysia, the concept of a single deity was introduced by Arabic-speaking traders. Rev. Lawrence Andrew, editor of the Herald, says there's no other appropriate term for God in Malay.

The paper had a pretty good case:

The church's Herald newspaper filed a lawsuit in 2007 challenging a government ban on it using the word Allah as a translation for God, complaining that the prohibition discriminated against Malay-speaking indigenous tribes who converted to Christianity decades ago.

The newspaper has a circulation of about 14,000 and is available only in Catholic churches, although some Muslims have complained that it is possible to look up Malay-language material using the term Allah on the Herald's Web site.

Muslim activists mobilized almost as soon as the High Court's verdict was delivered. The National Union of Malaysian Muslim Students contended that Christian missionaries using the word Allah could trick Muslims into leaving their faith, and the influential Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement said it plans a demonstration against the verdict in Kuala Lumpur on Jan. 8.

The Malay-language Utusan Malaysia newspaper reported that the influential mufti of northern Perak state, Harussani Zakaria, called the verdict "an insult to Muslims in this country."

Some Muslim groups are planning protests for tomorrow. All pretty amazing, really.

UPDATE: a bit of church burning in KL overnight.

And a bit more on the background of the use of the word "Allah" by Christianity appeared in the Jakarta Post article on the arson attack:

Many Muslims in Malysia have refused to accept the argument that "Allah" is an Arabic word that predates Islam, and that it is used by Christians in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Indonesia regularly in their worship.

Can't they parachute in Karen Armstrong to sort this all out?

Very odd

Cellphone radiation is good for Alzheimer's mice

Regular exposure to an electromagnetic field identical to the ones produced by mobile phones seems to improve memory in mice with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease...

To the researchers' surprise, the memory of both normal and transgenic mice exposed to the electromagnetic field (EMF) seemed better by the end of the experiment than that of a control group of mice that were not irradiated.

Arendash speculates that radiation might increase the electrical activity of neurons, which could in turn improve the brain's ability to form memories. An experiment in 2000 found that if people were exposed to an EMF equivalent to mobile-phone radiation before they went to bed, their brain activity during sleep increased....

They found that the brains of transgenic mice that had been exposed to the EMF from two months old did not contain as many plaques as transgenic control mice of the same age that had not been exposed to the EMF.

What's more, in the older transgenic mice, which had already developed brain plaques before the experiment began, the EMF exposure seemed to have broken up and shrunken the plaques. Arendash say he doesn't know how the EMF could do this.

That's a very surprising finding, and as the article says, it would have to be replicated to be sure the effect is real.

Never liked Wimps

BBC News - Dark matter 'beach ball' unveiled

This article talks about the inferred shape of the presumed dark matter around the Milky Way. It seems it's not like a round ball, but a squashed one.

This is why I've never felt that WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) seemed like a good explanation. I mean, if they exist, why do they form squashed ball halos around galaxies in the first place? If they are weakly interacting with normal matter, why don't they exist in just a more or less random clumpiness right through the universe? I don't know that I have ever read much that addresses that issue.

As for large clumps of normal matter forming dark matter, that's always seemed kind of unlikely too, according to my gut reaction.

That's why the idea that there is something wrong with our understanding of gravity has always seemed to me to be just as likely, but MOND theories don't seem to be advancing much.

Poor Japan?

TigerHawk has an interesting post about Japan's debt problems.

The comments are worth reading too.

Not cold everywhere

BBC - Richard Black's Earth Watch: Arctic roots of 'upside-down' weather

That's interesting. According to Richard Black, while much of the Northern Hemisphere is having an unusually cold winter, some parts that are normally very cold aren't.

A very unusual talent

Frogs' secret disposal system revealed : Nature News

Plant thorns, spiny insects and even radio transmitters don't stick around for long inside tree frogs. Researchers have discovered that these amphibians can absorb foreign objects from their body cavities into their bladders and excrete them through urination.

Would be a good party trick if a human could do it.

Law, science and black holes

There's a very detailed and carefully argued article by a US Assistant Professor of Law about the LHC and safety concerns available at arXiv. (It would seem the article is to appear in the Tennessee Law Review, but I can't see if Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame, who is a Tennessee Law Professor, has noted it yet.)

It's very long, and I have only looked through the first half, but it seems very careful and accurate in its summary of the history of the scientific debate over its safety.

It even covers the concerns of Rainer Plaga, and agrees with my view that they never seem to have been adequately addressed.

The arXiv blog summary of the article is here. Both it and the original article are well worth a read.

UPDATE: hey, I've been Instapundit-ed! Thanks, and welcome all. There's a lot of old posts here about the LHC and black holes, but sadly you have to use the somewhat erratic search function to find them. (Why can't Google perfect search within the very blogs it owns?)

Sex in Malaysia, Part 2

Malaysian Polygamy Club Draws Criticism - NYTimes.com

Yesterday I posted about unfortunate young Malaysian couples getting a knock on their hotel room door from the Islamic "morality police" and facing charges.

Proving it's a land of contrasts, I suppose, is the above article about the increase in Islamic polygamy in the same country. One of the wives interviewed says:

“Men are by nature polygamous,” said Dr. Rohaya, Mr. Ikram’s third wife, flanked by the other three women and Mr. Ikram for an interview on a recent morning. The women were dressed in ankle-length skirts, their hair covered by tudungs, the Malaysian term for headscarf. “We hear of many men having the ‘other woman,’ affairs and prostitution because for men, one woman is not enough. Polygamy is a way to overcome social ills such as this.”

Well, only for those rich enough to provide support for the additional wives, one suspects.

However, it is interesting to note that further down in the article, one critic of the system points out that:

...she knew some well-educated, financially independent women in Kuala Lumpur, including business executives and lawyers, who had chosen to become second or third wives.

“Usually they marry late, they do a second or third degree, they put off marriage until later and they find it difficult to find an unmarried man,” she said. “One of them said ‘all the good men are either married or gay.”’

The women of Sydney who have the same complaint could have their predicament cured by some radical changes in the Marriage Act, then.

And if polygamy were allowed here, but only by men taking on wives richer than themselves, maybe even I could be persuaded of its benefits. :)

Nerd grief

The fall-out from Doctor Who

Caitlin Moran's description of her and her daughter's shared devastation at David Tennant's departure from Dr Who is pretty funny:

Dora and I did a good fifteen minutes of mother/daughter nerd-mourning together - crying whilst flicking through Doctor Who Magazine and saying "Oh that's a good Ood still". Then Dora progressed into the "anger" stage of bereavement: at one point shouting, "Tom Baker managed seven years - WHY COULDN'T DAVID?"

I didn't know she even knew who Tom Baker was. At that point I realised that whilst I was walking wounded, she was metaphorically doing a geek haemmorhage. As Dora lay on the floor, moaning, "WHY did he have to GO?", Pete had a moment of genius, and downloaded a Doctor Who audiobook, read out by Tennant. Comforted by the prospect of there being at least one more David Tennant adventure to be had, Dora finally fell asleep listening to it - AT SODDING 11.30PM

Big explosion noted

Runaway anti-matter production makes for a spectacular stellar explosion

University of Notre Dame astronomer Peter Garnavich and a team of collaborators have discovered a distant star that exploded when its center became so hot that matter and anti-matter particle pairs were created. The star, dubbed Y-155, began its life around 200 times the mass of our Sun but probably became "pair-unstable" and triggered a runaway thermonuclear reaction that made it visible nearly halfway across the universe....

Garnavich and his collaborators calculated that, at its peak, Y-155 was generating energy at a rate 100 billion times greater than the sun's output. To do this, Y-155 must have synthesized between 6 and 8 solar masses of radioactive nickel. It is the decay of radioactive elements that drives the light curves of supernovae. A normal "Type Ia" thermonuclear supernova makes about one tenth as much radioactive nickel.

"In our images, Y-155 appeared a million times fainter than the unaided human eye can detect, but that is because of its enormous distance," Garnavich said. "If Y-155 had exploded in the Milky Way it would have knocked our socks off."

Over 40 years ago scientists proposed that massive stars could become unstable through the production of matter/anti-matter particle pairs, but only recently have large-scale searches of the sky, like the ESSENCE project, permitted the discovery of these bright, but rare, events.

Maybe we just live in a lucky corner of the universe.

Playtime for lawyers

BBC News - France mulls 'psychological violence' ban

I didn't realise the French could be quite so silly.

Cool photo

The_view_from_Burj_Dubai_by_shebanx.jpg

Found this via comments to a Guardian piece on the new skyscraper in Dubai.

New Year in Malaysia

52 unmarried Malaysian Muslim couples face jail for hotel liaisons

Scores of officers fanned out across budget hotels in central Selangor state before dawn on Jan 1, knocking on doors and detaining unmarried Muslim couples who were sharing rooms, said Hidayat Abdul Rani, a spokesman for the Selangor Islamic Department.

The detained, mostly students and young factory workers, are expected to be charged with “khalwat,” or “close proximity,” which under Malaysia’s Islamic Shariah law is described as couples not married to each other being alone together in a private place.

“We chose to have this large-scale operation on New Year’s Day because many people are known to commit this offense while celebrating such a major holiday,” Hidayat said.

In Selangor, “khalwat” carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison and a fine.

Movies and kids

Sci-fi epic doesn't kid around: critics - Film - Entertainment - smh.com.au

My 9 year old son is very keen to see Avatar, but I finally checked the rating and found it was M. After speaking to a person who has seen it, I've decided not to take him.

This article quotes someone who believes that:

"...Avatar was not suitable for children under eight ''due to scary and disturbing scenes and violence'', and was ''not recommended'' for children eight to 12.

''Some of the research indicates that parents don't always know when their kids are handling a movie well,'' said Ms Biggins yesterday. ''There are longer-term impacts on kids that don't always show up at the time.

It certainly seems to me that some parents are ridiculously careless about what movies they take their kids to, and I particularly recall my surprise at the number of young boys that were in the cinema when I saw Terminator 2 back in the 1990's. I quite disliked the film anyway, and I suppose you could argue that most of the violence is robot on robot. But killing a guy with a metal spike through the eye, various other breakings of human bones, the general bleak, dark tone of the whole film, and a real lack of any particularly sympathetic characters to my mind made it one of the most obviously unsuitable films for under 10 year olds that I could imagine.

Basically, most parents seem to pay no attention to the classification a film receives.

Yurt on ice

Broadband, Yes. Toilet, No. - NYTimes.com

I haven't mentioned yurts for a while, but I see that the NY Times has an article with a good slideshow about a young family in Alaska who chose to live in one.

It apparently cost about $14,000, looks pretty nice to me, but does have the disadvantage of having an outside toilet and no running water for a shower or the dishes. (They walk to town to do the laundry and wash themselves.) Given that they live in a place that can get 17 feet of snow in a season, even I would draw the line at living with an outside loo in a place like that.

Decline of Great Britain, cont.

Forget Shameless: X-Factor holds up a truer mirror to the working class | Television & radio | The Observer

This article is mainly about the (to me) surprisingly successful British drama/comedy Shameless. I simply don't "get" the show, yet apparently semi-tragic "comedic" stories of the hopeless unemployed/working class characters of modern day Britain are appreciated by many people. To criticise such a show as being largely amoral and/or condescending is to invite the response that you are merely middle class twit, apparently:

The actor has pointed out that Shameless appeals to all sectors of the audience. "I've had people from right across the social spectrum tell me they get it," he said. "Sometimes reporters ask, 'Don't you think you're being a bit patronising about working- class people?' To which I say, 'Bollocks, you middle-class journalist!' If it was condescending, I'd know, because the people on the estates where we film would come and tell me."

But apparently some in Manchester have (finally) started to turn against it:

Bloggers on the Manchester Evening News website are not impressed. "In the beginning, it was edgy and fun. Now it is just tripe, it makes the people of Manchester and Salford look like low-life idiots," complains one..

Only now they are starting to realise that?

Annual mochi death toll post gets harder

Yes, I'm sure someone out there has been waiting for the annual "New Year's Japanese death toll from eating mochi" post. (If you Google "mochi deaths", my 2009 blog post on the topic comes up as No.1. I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing.)

Well, this year the task is proving much harder than normal, because for some reason it seems that no Japanese news source that publishes on the Web in English has carried the news.

Will this stop your blogger? No. I've had to track down the stories in Japanese, and then use Babel Fish to give the contorted translation. Here we go, from Yoimuri Online via Babel Fish:

The rice cake clogging 2 human death 1 person it is heavy the body

The accident where the senior citizens can plug having in the throat one after another, with investigation of the Yomiuri Shimbun Company, in 4 days December 31st - January 3rd, 10 people was carried by the hospital at least inside the prefecture, the inside 2 people died, 1 people became heavily the body of unconscious.

　According to the National Fire Prevention and Control Administra and the like of every place, 1st around 11 o'clock in the morning, the man of Ichihara city (68) to be carried by the hospital of the same city, prompt the death. 2nd, the man of Funabashi city (61) was carried by the hospital of the same city even around 11 o'clock in the afternoon, died promptly.

　In addition, was carried to the hospital 8 man and woman total of 70 - 87 years old in such as Chiba city and Asahi city.

And I think this might only be the problems mochi has caused in just one prefecture. (There's a report of a 60 year old man dying in Asaka.)

So who knows what the national death toll is? But in any event, the dangers of eating mochi on New Years certainly continue. (And, as with last year, terribly sorry to be sounding as if making light of unfortunate deaths.)

Update: for figures for the New Year 2010/2011, see my latest post here.

An enjoyable review

The legacy of Grace Kelly : The New Yorker

It's by Anthony Lane, so it's good.

The dangers and benefits of pretending

I thought the story in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday about the psychological dangers of actors playing dark roles was pretty interesting. I hadn't heard the story before that Daniel Day-Lewis quit Hamlet after seeing his own dead father on stage, or that Robert Downey Jnr partly blamed playing a cocaine addict in a movie for his own real life addiction.

As the article says, part of the problem is that Western training for actors has come to be dominated by method acting, by which actors are encouraged to internalise and experience the fictional character.

It is, in many ways, a little curious that this has become the dominant idea for actor training. After all, it only came to be popular in the mid 20th century, and at least two of the worlds most lauded actors, Olivier and Guinness, were not into it. Olivier is famously said to have told Dustin Hoffman to "just try acting", or similar words, although the veracity and meaning of that anecdote seems somewhat uncertain now. I am pretty sure it is fair to say that, although he could be extremely thoughtful about what he was doing, Alec Guinness also took a "craftsman" approach to acting which would disdain the need to internalise the role being performed. (I think he also used to say that his approach to acting over the years increasingly came to be one of whittling down the effects to a bare minimum, but maybe that was particularly encouraged by some of the characters he was later to play.) Harrison Ford, who is not the world's greatest actor but has been quite convincing in some serious roles, has also frequently made the comparison to it being a trade something like the carpentry that he did between jobs in his early days.

So if everyone knows that method acting is not essential, why do so many drama teachers still think it so important? I assume that it's because it gives a certain gravitas to the profession that is, after all, a very curious one that is very similar to child's play conducted in public. (Colin Firth, who I don't particularly find interesting as a actor, at least recognizes the semi-absurdity of the job.)

Talking about this reminds me that (I think) CS Lewis said somewhere that if you pretend something long enough, you start to believe it. I can't track down the quote now, but I remember it struck me as important at the time I first read it.

As a an aspect of the human psyche, it is something that can be used in both a positive or negative way. It is related to the idea that a lie repeated enough will start to be believed, but on the other hand, as Lewis said elsewhere: "Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbour; act as if you did."

Certainly, atheists can use it to attack religious faith as being no more than a matter of thoughtless indoctrination. (A point Lewis would surely have recognized, but you have to also concede that he did his fair share to get people to really think about their faith.)

But from the other side of the fence, it is a principle that can be used to justify a critical attitude of the (barely recognized by younger people especially) Freudian psychology which dominates Western thinking in many ways. Why, after all, should we be so concerned with understanding our subconscious landscape, and giving fulfillment to it, if it is something that can be "tricked" into believing stuff quite easily anyway?

The important point that CS Lewis, and the (now Catholic) philosopher Alisdair McIntyre might make is that Aristotle was right in his assumption "that man is as-he-happens-to-be and that this is distinct from man-as-he-should-be," and that "pretending" to the extent that it helps a person become the person they should be is a worthy thing. I really must get around to reading McIntyre one day.

If method acting made people think about this, it would serve something useful.

A New Year link miscellany

I've been off to the seaside for much of the last week, and there's a post about that on its way. But to get me back into blogging mode, here's a bunch of stuff that has caught my attention since I got back on the computer:

* The Australian ran an interesting article on one of the oddest UFO cases of the 20th century: the Australian missionary William Gill's detailed report of a sighting in New Guinea in 1959.

The case has received much attention over the years because of it strange combination of improbable details (humanoid figures seen on a platform floating above the mission by a whole group of witnesses) and the apparent believability of the missionary reporting it.

It was a sighting that lasted a long time, which is always immediate reason to believe it is Venus or a similarly bright astronomical object. But how do you mistake a planet as a platform containing a bunch of waving humanoids? Some skeptics have suggested that it was simply Gill's poor eyesight, but if so it's one of the strangest cases of mistaken identity from squinting at a point of light It also would appear that Gill never admitted that it was a hoax. It remains a very odd case.

* Slate magazine remembers Omni magazine with fondness. I'm glad I'm not on my own. At its height, it was a great read that I looked forward to every month, and I think I've still got some editions somewhere in the garage, if the silverfish haven't got to them.

* The Australian continues its bipolar approach to Tony Abbott, whose ascendancy seemed to be greeted with a lot of "Abbott brings the fight up to Rudd" guff, but the paper still has to concede that current polling indicates that regional areas still aren't going Coalition, and by all looks an early election will place Labor in a much better position than it is now. It will be an interesting year in politics.

* From Japan we learn that about university research that indicates that lightning (or just electric shocks) makes for a bigger shiitake mushroom crop. How on earth did the Iwate University come up with that research idea? Must be a distinct lack of things for the electrical engineers to do, is all I can say. (I think I've even walked through their campus too.)

* More depressingly (if you like Japan) it would appear the population dropped again in 2009.

* In the trivia department, I learned from the New Scientist Christmas edition that the Romans used to stew grapes in lead pots "leeching the sweet tasting metal into their food". I knew they used lead for cooking; I didn't know it was sweet tasting. It's rather unfortunate when a toxic metal tastes good.

* Scientific American had a short article on one of the big stirling engine solar power companies. (My early favourite, Infinia, seems to be much slower at getting into big production.)