Funmurphys: the Blog

Cool Map Sites

I've always loved maps. When I was a kid we had this Encyclopedia Britannica atlas that was simply beautiful, although the paper was so stiff it gave you wicked paper cuts. But on the web, you don't have to worry about paper cuts.

So if you've gotten tired of Mapquest or Google maps, it's time to move on to the maps at The Global Distribution of Poverty.

When you're done there, you can check out all the maps NASA's Hurricane Data Portal.

Maybe you would be interested in a map of early modern London. Maybe not.

If you are into real estate, how about Trulia or Zillow

Want to make your own map? Try Frappr.

Want to find out where all the historical markers are? Then use The Historical Marker Database, or course.

Or how about USGS?

Or how about the the Library of Congress Map Vault?

Or how about a site whose name says it all, Worldmap.org. If you can't find it there, can you find it anywhere? OK, it's concerned with Christian missions so you can find maps dealing with Christianity there.

The Driver Makes The Car

Have airbags and anti-lock brakes made us safer? The answer is no, according to a study by Dr. Mannering of Purdue University. And the reason is that people adjust their driving behavior to the safer cars:

The researchers used a series of mathematical equations in "probit models" to calculate accident probabilities based on the motor vehicle data and actual driving records. Using the data, the model enabled researchers to calculate the probabilities of whether drivers in different age and demographic categories would be involved in an accident. The models showed that the safety systems did not affect the probability of having an accident or injury.

The study represents the first attempt to test the offset hypothesis using "disaggregate data," or following the same households over time instead of using more general "aggregate" data from the population at large.

"By using disaggregate data, we have added to the credibility that our findings actually reflect offsetting behavior," Mannering said. "And the 2005 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fatality data released last month indicate that fatalities per mile driven in the United States have actually increased, which adds some aggregate validation of our findings."

If we make such an adjustment without even thinking while driving a car, think of all the other stuff we simply adjust to so that we are keeping something like risk constant, or even increasing risk while thinking we are lowering it.

If A Tree Is Not In The Forest, Can You Hear It Fall?

What tree doesn't like a forest? The Live Oak, which apparently is the introvert of the tree family. A study of the live oak by University of Florida researchers reveals that live oaks are under pressure in Florida (an no doubt elsewhere) from the encroachment of other trees:

It is an irony of nature that the successes of reforestation and urban forestry threaten live oaks, which in the past maintained the elbow room they needed from logging, cattle grazing and frequent fires, said Putz, whose work is published in the June issue of Forest Ecology and Management. “We are confusing our natural savanna heritage with forested landscapes and the tragedy is that the forest is killing live oaks,” he said. “If we allow other trees to grow up too close to the live oak, the live oak will die. Our research clearly establishes this fate in both rural and suburban landscapes.”

...

Based on these findings, Putz said he believes more than half of the live oaks in the city of Gainesville alone are in danger of being destroyed by encroaching trees, a process that can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years and is most rapid in the suburbs where lawns are fertilized.

The problem is widespread because suburban sprawl and forest expansion are threatening savannas and open-canopied woodlands in many parts of the world, Putz said.

“The trees of these savannas, from the oaks of California and Europe to the acacias of Africa and the legumes of tropical America, are all likely to suffer when forest trees encroach on their crowns,” he said. “In the U.S. alone, savanna is the natural vegetation all across the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas.”

Saving live oaks sometimes means having to kill other trees, which can be expensive, but preserving a single live oak can add as much as $30,000 to the value of a house, Putz said. Furthermore, having a live oak nearby is good protection against hurricane damage.

The Four Ecumenical Truisms

It is important for those of all faiths to recognize these four religious truths:

1. Muslims do not recognize Jews as God's chosen people.

2. Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.

3. Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the Leader of the Christian
world.

4. Baptists do not recognize each other at Hooters.

An Ancient Radiation That Haunts Dismembered Constellations

In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data
attributed to W. Edwards Deming

The rule of ABCD: Always Be Collecting Data
I can't find a good source for this one, I heard it years ago in a presentation but not all of the content from the pre-Internet years has found its way into Google's cache. If you have a source, please add a comment.

from Brick by Ben Folds Five

As weeks went by
It showed that she was not fine
They told me son its time to tell the truth and she broke down and
I broke down
Cause I was tired of lying

All this time I thought it was about a couple in their twenties, with the girl dying of some early onset cancer, with "They" being her doctors. But according to Frank Maynard's original Ben Folds Five Website

On the record, Ben wasn't much help [...] Since the song became so popular, it's been clarified that the song is indeed about a guy taking his girlfriend to the clinic for an abortion, and how he handles the situation. [...] he has stated (on the syndicated radio show "Loveline") that it was based on his experiences in the 12th grade, and that he had spoken with his girlfriend at the time and she said she didn't mind if Ben talked about it. In the article by David Daley in the February 1998 CMJ New Music Monthly, Ben says "It's the story of my senior year of high school, basically. More so, it's about the fact that it happens and there are emotional byproducts."

And, in closing...

'A,' 'B,' 'C.' 'A,' always, 'B,' be, 'C,' closing. Always be closing.
from Blake's speech in Glengarry Glen Ross (screenplay by David Mamet)

World's Smallest Gas Turbine Engine

MIT professors are trying to put a gas turbine engine on a chip. No, not because they are disciples of Schumacher, but because they are trying to build a better mousetrap, err, battery. The DOD is interested because they want to be able to provide soldiers plenty of power in the wilderness, or at least in difficult to supply situations.

Their microengine is made of six silicon wafers, piled up like pancakes and bonded together. Each wafer is a single crystal with its atoms perfectly aligned, so it is extremely strong. To achieve the necessary components, the wafers are individually prepared using an advanced etching process to eat away selected material. When the wafers are piled up, the surfaces and the spaces in between produce the needed features and functions.

...

The MIT team has now used this process to make all the components needed for their engine, and each part works. Inside a tiny combustion chamber, fuel and air quickly mix and burn at the melting point of steel. Turbine blades, made of low-defect, high-strength microfabricated materials, spin at 20,000 revolutions per second -- 100 times faster than those in jet engines. A mini-generator produces 10 watts of power. A little compressor raises the pressure of air in preparation for combustion. And cooling (always a challenge in hot microdevices) appears manageable by sending the compression air around the outside of the combustor.

This is one reason I like engineers - when they have fun, we all benefit.

Oddities Abound

If you think I'm obsessed with oddities today, you need to check this guy out, who links to a toilet seat museum and an MIT report on the effectiveness of tin foil hats. Indeed.

Diabetes, Not Obesity Kills

I count this as good news/bad news - obesity by itself carries no extra risk of early death, but diabetes sure is a killer. Since obesity is a significant risk factor in diabetes, and being overweight is no picnic, don't start ignoring your size. And in light of the last post about how scaring people into action is ineffective, this quote makes double sense:

"Telling an overweight person that they either need to lose weight or they will die is the wrong message," he says. "There is increasing evidence that aggressively treating diabetes and other risk factors that go along with obesity, like cholesterol and high blood pressure, is even more important than losing weight."

But JoAnn Manson, M.D., of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, doesn't buy the idea that diabetes alone is responsible for the increased risk of early death in people who are obese. Manson led the team which reanalyzed the CDC data. She tells WebMD that there is plenty of good evidence implicating obesity in death from cardiovascular disease and several types of cancer, as well as diabetes.

"There are clearly pathways through which obesity increases the risk of death that do not involve type 2 diabetes," she says.

Read This Blog Or Else!

"You can't scare people into getting fit or going green" says the Economic and Social Research Council. No word on if you can scare people into voting Republican. No rebuttle from the Catholic church or Jewish mothers, either.

The team identified 33 distinct strategies for changing intentions and behaviour across the 129 different studies. The most frequently used strategies provided general information, details of consequences and opportunities for comparison. Yet the most effective strategies were to prompt practice, set specific goals, generate self-talk, agree a behavioural contract and prompt review of behavioural goals. The two least effective strategies involved arousing fear and causing people to regret if they acted in a particular fashion.

Actually, I'm not sure how they got from the most effective strategy for a personal trainer to you can't scare people into adopting your position. I guess it 's the difference between you can't scare people into actually doing something about the environment but it's easy to get them to pay lip service to the environment, you know people who natter on about what you can do while doing nothing themselves.

Software That Can Sort Facts From Opinions

File this in the category of too good to be true: "A new research program by a Cornell computer scientist, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and University of Utah, aims to teach computers to scan through text and sort opinion from fact."

That will revolutionize the pundit business. I'm thinking lots of people will be surprised to discover just how much they read is opinion, not fact. And not just on op ed pages, either. But I'm not hopeful that the tack the researchers are taking will be able to measure anything beside how well a writer disguises his opinion as fact:

The new research will use machine-learning algorithms to give computers examples of text expressing both fact and opinion and teach them to tell the difference. A simplified example might be to look for phrases like "according to" or "it is believed." Ironically, Cardie said, one of the phrases most likely to indicate opinion is "It is a fact that ..."

The work also will seek to determine the sources of information cited by a writer. "We're making sure that any information is tagged with a confidence. If it's low confidence, it's not useful information," Cardie added.

So it's not like they are actually going to check the writing against facts; they are just going to look at how the information is presented, which means that ironically if you present opinion as fact the programs will take your word for it and flag it as fact. If you are careful and present your opinions as such, then the program will pick up on that and flag it as opinion.

In other words, the researchers are writing a program that uses the writer's opinion to sort opinion from fact in the writers work. Won't that be a great help. No word on a computerized sarcasm detector.

Deeply Disturbing

I found this article (h/t J Bowen) about a man from Huntington Beach who travelled to Lompoc to get, well, you'll have to read the article, but it brings new meaning to the phrase sowing wild oats, deeply disturbing. And I was disturbed more than most of you, because back when I lived in Huntington Beach I stayed in Lompoc on business a couple of times. And for the record, I wore a suit and had zero contact with horses.

Bigger Is Not Happier

The latest word on breast implants is a study from Canada that concludes that breast implants are safe - however, they are not effective. The researchers studied almost 25,000 women who had implants to determine that those who had cosmetic breast implants had the same mortality rate as the general public -- actually, it was lower -- but they had a significantly higher suicide rate -- 73% higher. The study authors concluded that the lower mortality rate was due to double selection bias - they were healthy and wealthy enough to undergo cosmetic surgery. So they compared the women who had other cosmetic surgery to the general public and got similar results - lower morality, higher suicide rate. So while the researchers say implants are safe (with reservations for individual complications), I say they are not effective since they do not seem to be a long term fix -- based on the increased suicide rate, they do not do what the woman is hoping for.

Pope Benedict and Islam

Isn't it amazing? The way mobs across Dar al Islam seem to hang on the Pope's every word, even scrutinizing obscure addresses that get zero press in nominally Christian countries, unless Dar al Islam expresses its displeasure and the Western Press is forced to cover it. Considering what a wonderful address it is, I suppose I should thank them for raising such a stink that I got to read it.

Before we get to the meat of the address, I'm going to tackle the so-called offensive part of the address, which is being labled as a call for inter-faith dialogue. Well, Benedict calls it a cultural dialogue, and from his remarks he's going way beyond churchman from Christianity and Islam having their own hootenanny. It's a call for everybody to dialogue within a framework of reason, and he tells the story that got the the Moslem world so riled up to make this point: "not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature."

Now, did he have to include

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached"?

I'd also like to point out that the press doesn't seem to be able to quote properly, as this article on CNN has trouble:

The pope enraged Muslims in a speech a week ago in Germany quoting 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who said everything the Prophet Mohammed brought was evil "such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

I'm not Catholic, and I have some theological bones to pick with Catholicism, but I have to say that at least the last two popes have been extraordinary leaders, each in their own way. I'm going to have to start reading the pope more since he's the only guy out there defending Western thought, practice,and culture these days.

I've excerpted the introduction and the conclusion to Pope Benedict's address and urge you to read the whole thing:

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

...

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

What more can I say?

Republicans and Me

I admit I was wrong. I thought that the theory that American system would create two parties that would be forced to the center in order to remain competative. This hasn't happened lately, as the two parties seem to be engaged not in a race to the center but to the poles, or in the case of the Republicans, never never land. I understand that the Democrats have moved to the left to satisfy the vocal minority out there, but I'm not entirely sure where the Republicans are going.

I don't consider myself a Republican for the reason I plump for principle over party. So while the Republican party has been the vehicle for conservatism, my loyalty is to conservatism, not Republicans. I'm both a social conservative and a fiscal conservative, so I'm prime Republican material.

My problem with the party these days is pretty much on the fiscal side, and I want to make something clear to Republican politicians - since you have (far) more control over the government than the culture, I judge you by the government under your control, and specifically for Congress the budgets under your control and the laws you pass.

For example, I'm against abortion for any reason besides saving the life of the mother, but I understand that (1) the laws on abortion has been taken over by the courts since 1973, (2) the attitudes toward abortion are not controlled by politicians. So guess what, as long as you do a good job on judges, you're off the hook. I realize how little you can accomplish, so I can't hold you accountable.

One last thing. While much is made about a revolt or dissidents in the party over interrogation techniques, I have to say finally. This is what the branches of government should be doing, and I have to wonder, where are the Democrats? At last we have a real discussion over issues, and the Democrats are nowhere to be found. So why vote Democratic if all they can do is partisan sniping?

The New Reality

My two favorite network TV shows (actually, the only two network TV shows I watch) are back, and with an extra dose of diversity. First up, Survivor is back and as I'm sure you know if you've kept reading past the word Survivor they've divided the contestants by ethnic background. In order to do that, they had to find 5 asian-americans, 5 african-americans, 5 hispanic-americans, and 5 white-americans to appear. They have never had any problems with the white-americans, but they had to recruit extra hard for the others. Interestingly enough the 3 teams that weren't made up of white-americans immediately worried about representing their people, as if 5 random strangers thrown together for the entertainment benefit of all americans really did somehow represent everybody of that ethnic background.

The Amazing Race launched it's tenth season last night and while not explicit, they too seem to have worked overtime to assure diversity. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The problem is that after Survivor voted off a black man, The Amazing Race took only 1 show to get rid of the Moslem AND the Hindu teams - with Phil reminding us when the Moslems got the ax halfway through the show that they promised the contestants surprises. Yeah, like early handicappers were picking those two guys to go all the way.

I suppose it's a sign of progress that a big network like CBS can go out of their way to have minorities suffer embarassing losses on their flagship reality series without worrying about repurcussions.

The Path to 9/11 (2)

Yes, I actually watched The Path to 9/11, except a chunk in the middle Sunday night. First up, the negatives. I did manage to catch two glaring errors: a couple of times they talked about scrambling F-16s and they showed the same clip of a F-14. I'm sure Lock-Mart would have been happy to provide a clip of a F-16 taking off. And then when they had the Tomahawk missile strike against Afganistan, they showed video of a Harpoon leaving a canister. I suppose the marketing for the land attack capability in the latest version of Harpoon went much better than I realized. Since I worked on Harpoon for a long while, I admit I enjoyed that goof.

Seriously, while I loved the no commercials, the shaky cam started to seriously annoy long before the end. My head isn't that unsteady, so it just comes across as fake. And I about laughed outloud towards the end when after the attacks Condoleeza Rice told Richarde Clarke, "Yes boss, we sure do need a strong white man to run things around here." (Or words to that effect.) Perhaps I'm wrong, but it strikes me that in a meeting with Rice and Cheney in it, Clarke is in fact chopped liver. I think Condi had far more to complain about than Maddy Albright, who came across as tougher than the rest of the Clinton cabinet combined and someone who should be negotiating on behalf of our country. Hell, as peaceful as I am I'd be ready to fix bayonet and charge uphill into machine gun fire if the character in the movie were leading the way.

Could they have found an older looking guy to play Cheney? He's not a bad looking 65 in real life, but in the movies they always have somebody playing him who looks like he hasn't smiled in 40 years and has one foot in the grave.

Here's the real problem with the movie, and any such look back - there are nothing but connected dots. The movie spans 8 years in 3 hours, and only included are the events that matter. So when watching the movie, of course its all so obvious. But in real life, there is all kinds of stuff going on, and separating signal from noise is very hard.

The fault for 9/11 lies squarely with al-Qaida, and neither the Clinton or Bush administrations. Yes, had some things been done differently, we might have been able to sniff out and stop the plot. So rather than looking back to point fingers, we should be looking back to figure out what are the things we can do better. And that just isn't happening.

The Science of Diversity

Does a diverse student body matter to a school? Has there been any study on its effectiveness at changing attitudes among students? OK, a study at long last a study has looked at this question and determined, that yes, "Children's racial attitudes may be related to ethnic composition of their school":

"These findings inform our knowledge about the role that contact with members of different ethnic and racial groups plays in children's intergroup attitudes," said Dr. Killen. "This contact, under the right conditions, can foster positive attitudes towards 'outgroup' members."

Social Cooperation

I have one last interesting bit from historian Willaim McNeil's Venice: The Hinge of Europe 1081-1797. Of course there is a lot more there, but you'll just have to read the book yourself.

It is more than passing interest to understand the rise and fall of particular civilizations, and to wonder at how Europe, once a backward part of the world, rose to world dominance in recent centuries. There was a time (i.e. the age of imperialism), not too long ago, that Europe pretty much ruled the world, either directly, through proxies, or through colonists. Now I'm sure there is more than a single explanation; I've thought about it before, and even wrote an essay stressing the importance of the political disunity of Europe, in effect, competing political firms in Europe beat monopolies in the two other great cultures of the time - Islam and China.

There is another strand to consider - social organization within Europe. Specifically, the ability of individuals to form organizations at a level other than family. McNeil addresses this phenomenon:

All complex societies develop ad hoc corporations. What was unusual about the Italian trading cities of the eleventh century (and northwestern Europe generally after about 1000) was the number and effectiveness of such arrangements. As compared to other peoples, the inhabitants of this hitherto rather backward portion of the globe proved strikingly capable of transcending kinship groupings and cooperating smoothly with persons who were not blood relatives but were recognized as belonging to some sort of wider in-group -- whether that in-group comprised the inhabitants of a village, the citizens of a town, speakers of a common mother tongue, or even the bearers of a common tradition of high culture, i.i the culture of Latin Christendom. These broader groupings rarely came into play; the operationally imporant transfamilial in-groups for medieval Europe were the inhabitants of a village and citizens of a town.

How was such an ability formed? The claim is that the moldboard plow, which was extensively used in Northern Italy and North Western Europe, forced non-family cooperation in those who used it. It was too big for a single family to use, so within the villages of the time people were forced to cooperate across family lines or lose out at plowing. This in turn fostered a culture that looked at cooperation across family lines as routine and expected in the context of another connection. This is not the case in many parts of the world, and generally in the poorer ones.

Mortality and Race

John Edwards liked to talk about 2 Americas while on the stump, but he was wrong according to the latest study of mortality in America. Wouldn't that be a great headline over the articles - "Edwards Lied"? OK, turns out there are eight Americas:
Asians, northland low-income rural whites, Middle America, low-income whites in Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley, western Native Americans, black Middle America, southern low-income rural blacks, and high-risk urban blacks. Although looking at the numbers, they could have had sixteen Americas by dividing each group by gender. I guess they thought that was excessive. Or they could have just divided it between men and women and then Edwards would have been right.

Hmm, is there any link between life expectancy and test scores?

Interestingly, based on Figure 1. Alaska and the frozen north seem to have the highest life expectancies - maybe we should all move to the Arctic to maximize our life expectancy.

I like the Middle America category - its neither race nor geography based, it's basically the left overs from the other seven. Middle America sounds so much better than Leftovers, though. Or average White People, which is overwhelmingly what the category is.

According to Figure 3, the difference in life expectancy between Asians and the next group, Americans who sey eh, is much larger than between any other groups.

Would they have made a much bigger deal about the gender difference if it were women on the short end of the life expectency? Just curious.

Why I Don't Understand "Medical Ethics"

I guess I don't undertand medical ethics. You'd think providing healthcare in the manner that causes the least deaths would be the most ethical way, right? Wrong, according to Dr. Sally Blower discussing the best strategy to treat AIDS in South Africa:

Using data from the KwaZulu-Natal province for their parameters, researchers from UCLA and the University of California, San Francisco, devised a mathematical model to predict the impact of drug allocation strategies that the South African government is implementing to treat 500,000 people by 2008. These data included birth rates, natural death rates and death rates stemming from AIDS.

They looked at three drug allocation strategies: one that would allocate antiretroviral drugs only to the city of Durban and two making them available in both urban and rural areas.

Of those, the Durban-only strategy would be the most effective in preventing new infections, reducing them by up to 46 percent -- amounting to preventing an additional 15,000 infections by 2008 -- compared with the two strategies that would include both urban and rural areas. The strategy also would avert the greatest number of deaths from AIDS and generate the least amount of drug resistance.

But major problems would emerge with that approach, said Sally Blower, professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and senior author of the study. Most important, this approach is against basic ethical principles guiding treatment equity and would lead to more urban/rural healthcare disparities than already exist.

"If there was rational planning, you could determine drug allocation strategies by balancing ethical objectives with epidemiological objectives," said Blower, a member of the UCLA AIDS Institute. "But it's obviously unlikely that this type of rational planning would or could occur. So it's much more likely that the actual drug allocation strategy will be determined by a mix of politics and feasibility."

She added: "Unfortunately, you can't have the maximum impact on the epidemic and be ethical."

I suppose it goes hand in hand with the whole no money for organ donors even if it increases organ donation because while the doctors, nurses, orderlies, janitor, and the hospital itself are being paid to perform the operation, it would just be wrong to pay the donor.

Fluid Dynamics Meets Finite Element Modeling

Researchers at Purdue University have created a simulation to study what happens when a airplane crashes into a building for use in studying the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. The researchers had earlier developed a simulation to investigate the 9/11 Pentagon attack.

"As a result of the Pentagon research, we have a better understanding of what happens when a tremendous mass of fluid such as fuel hits a solid object at high velocity," Sozen said. "We believe most of the structural damage from such aircraft collisions is caused by the mass of the fluid on the craft, which includes the fuel.

"Damage resulting solely from the metal fuselage, engines and other aircraft parts is not as great as that resulting from the mass of fluids on board. You could think of the aircraft as a sausage skin. Its mass is tiny compared to the plane's fluid contents."

...

Santiago Pujol, an assistant professor of civil engineering, worked with the researchers to develop experimental data to test the accuracy of the simulation by using an "impact simulator" to shoot 8-ounce beverage cans at high velocity at steel and concrete targets at Purdue's Bowen Laboratory. These data enabled the researchers to fine tune and validate the theoretical model for the simulation.

"We created a mathematical model of the beverage can and its fluid contents the same way we modeled the airplane, and then we tested our assumptions used to formulate the model by comparing the output from the model with that from the experiment," Sozen said.

Who says science can't be fun and relevant? I bet shooting the coke cans into steel and concrete targets was a blast -- the Mythbuster guys are so jealous. Personally, I'd worry about scaling up from 8oz coke cans to a plane weighing over 200,000 lbs, but that's just the engineer in me, but I understand the difficulty in trying to set up a test anywhere close to full scale. Of course, if they used beer cans, I can see that researchers might decide that enough data had been collected before they were all used.

OK, in all seriousness, this is some real science and engineering, and might even help with those people who claim it wasn't planes that brought down the towers or hit the Pentagon.

Islamic Reformation

I still hear people saying Islam needs a reformation (I suppose because they think that the reformation did wonders for the Christian world's politics). Callimachus at Winds of Change wrote a wonderful post on the subject a while back, You Say You Want a Reformation. While I don't disagree with his post, I think there is still more to be covered. First off, the title implies it but Callimachus doesn't follow up that a reformation really is a revolution, and not all, probably not even a majority, turn out well. The French revolution deposed a King and created an Emperor in his place. The Iranian revolution replaced a repressive and unpopular regime with a far more repressive and unpopular regime, and no doubt has made many Iranians understandably nervous about a second one any time soon. Any revolution carries the risk that things will only get worse.

Secondly, the protestant reformation didn't actually do what people who call for an Islamic revolution to do for Islam, namely get religion out of politics or change the nature of the religion. The reformed Catholic church was just as involved in politics afterwards, maybe moreso. Nor did it promote religious tolerance, as for instance the Spanish Inquisition was in part a response to the religous ferment at the start of the reformation. During the middle ages the Catholic church was an important political player for two reasons - it was the only universal institution in the Christian world, and it was a feuditory in the fuedal system - i.e a bishop was just another baron, and the Pope even was like a King in the Papal States. The wars that the reformation started did have the effect of strengthening the central state and ushering out the feudal system.

The Reformation did not fundamentally change the nature of Christianity, just it's organization. We can debate the proper role and balance of faith and works in the Christian life per the various Christian denominations, but they will agree upon what the faith should be in and what the works should be. Certainly the disagreements over theology that loom large within Christianity pale to insignificance as compared to differences with other religions.

Callimachus says that we are looking at an Islamic Reformation right now, and as he observes, not al religions are the same:

For another: There already was an Islamic Reformation. It happened while we were sleeping. The result is Wahhabi dominance, and Islamic Brotherhood, and Bin Laden. This is the Islamic Reformation. We're fighting it now.

...

When Christianity reforms -- when it goes back to its roots -- it tries to foreswear the world. When Islam goes back to its roots, it tries to conquer the world.

OK, I will disagree, Christianity does not foreswear the world. Instead it tries (with mixed success) to love people. Islam at root is a rule based religion, Christianity at root is a relationship based religion. And not only are we facing a current "Islamic Reformation", Islam had a failed but similar reformation at about the same time as the Christian one. From Venice: The Hinge of Europe 1081-1797, by history professor William McNeil:

Economic difficulties at home and the cessation of victory abroad had serious implications for Moslem thought and self-confidence. As long as success had continued to crown Ottoman standards, the Moslems of the empire could and did argue that the favor Allah continued to shower upon Ottoman arms attested the correctness of their faith. When successes ceased, the inference was obvious. Clearly, Allay was displeased; and the reasons were not far to seek. From almost the beginning of Islam, pious and fanatical puritans had taught that all innovation that went beyond the practices attested in the Koran was displeasing to God. This was a doctrine that demanded reformation of existing Ottoman religious practices every bit as radical as anything dreamed of by the Calvinist reform program for Christianity. The two movements coincided closely in time, for in the final decades of the sixteenth century and throughout the first half of the seventeenth, so called faki preachers inflamed popular discontents, already acute for economic reasons, by demanding uncompromising adherence to Koranic models of piety. The faki attacked the official hierarchy of Ottoman Islam for criminal laxity in condoning innovations of all sorts. They attacked the dervish orders no less vigourously for the heterodoxy of their opinions and ritual practices.

Despite their passion and popular following, the faki did not prevail and were never able to seize political power. Their cultural influence was negative, inhibiting all buth the rich and privileged from exploring novelties, whether intellectual or otherwise, for which Koranic sanction was lacking. Even long established rational science -- imported into Moslem learning in Abbasid times -- withered away as subject of instructions in public institutions of higher learning. Symbolic of this transformation was the fact that in 1580 Sheik-ul-Islam ordered the destruction of the sultan's private observatory. This institution had been as well equipped as any in Europe; but when popular preachers interpreted the outbreak of plague in Istanbul as a sign of Allah's displeasure at the sultan's impious efforts to penetrate God's secrets by astrological science, the observatory (which was, in fact, inspired by astrological curiousity) had to go.

The book goes on to say that religiously questionable pursuits, such as medicine, were abandoned to Jews and Christians, and that higher education became the memorization of sacred texts and their commentaries. Sounds similar to the problem we're facing today. And it sounds like that movement sowed the seeds of todays movement as well by setting the Islamic world up for failure in succeeding centuries, causing once again an attempt to return to the glory days of Islam.

Resistance To Change

I picked up a book at the library about Venice -- yes, inspired by my recent trip there (someday, and soon, I will actually get you there in the European Vacation series) -- and I managed to get a good one, Venice: The Hinge of Europe 1081-1797, by history professor William McNeill. Since it was written in 1974, no shadow of current political controversy touches it; yet I can't help but be struck by certain passages and their application to today:

Widely diverse reactions flow from encounters with new and superior cultural traits: successful borrowing or inventive adaptation within the receiving cultural context are relatively rare but of great historical importance because it is in such circumstances that additions to human skills and capacities are most likely to arise. Far more common, but historically less important, are the instances when men draw back, reaffirm their accustomed patterns of life, and reject the attractive novelty because it seems either unattainable or else threatening and dangerous. In such cases it may become necessary to reinforce accustomed ways in order to withstand the seductions inherent in exposure to what appears to be a superior foreign product. Cultural change, sometimes very far reaching, may thus paradoxically result from especially strenuous efforts to maintain the status quo.

But more importantly, is this what we are seeing in action today on the part of Islamofascist terrorists? An excessive reinforcement of accustomed ways? Is this why poverty has no correlation to becoming an Islamofascist terrorist, but exposure to the West does? Is it possible that the actual agents of 9/11, the Mohammed Attas and Hani Hanjours, as well as the mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed all of whom spent time living in the United States, only had their murderous intent reinforced, possibly created, by such direct exposure to a different culture.

Of course, the actions of al-Qaida et al. aren't directly entirely, or even primarily, at the West. Far more Iraqi's have been killed by al-Qaida operatives than westerners. Are we seeing extra strenuous efforts to maintain a status quo, or at least the illusion of one? While al-Qaida dreams of defeating the west, they also dream of ruling the Islamic world and imposing their brand of Islam on it. And to them, their Islam is the original, pure, untainted by foreigners Islam, the idea being to return to the status quo ante pernicious western influence.

Is then what we are experiencing a fight by a part of the Islamic culture against both the rest of the Islamic culture and the West over how much Islamic culture should be influenced by the West?

Interlaken Day 1 - Swiss National Day

Our first full day in Interlaken was Swiss National Day, which celebrates William Tell shooting an arrow off of his son's head and the attending discomfiture of the Hapsburgs way back in 1291. Hey, any excuse to throw a party. Seriously, you're much smarter to mess with Texas than Switzerland.

EVERYBODY IS SWISS ON SWISS NATIONAL DAY, EVEN AMERICANS IN A JAPANESE GARDEN

We didn't shoot any arrows, but what with an aperitif at the Casino in the morning, a parade down the Hohenweg in the afternoon, and fireworks at night, we truly had a full day. Tables and booths were set up all along the Hohenweg selling brats and beer from noon until long after I went to bed. The weather was cool with a low overcast and frequent periods of rain -- which is pretty much how the weather was the whole time we were there -- so we didn't mind too much that the only thing open were the the shops in town and vendors along the Hohenweg.

The casino was thronged (free drinks has that effect). Since the speeches were in German, I have no idea what they were about - political messages from local politicians or historians extolling the virtues of Swissdom. But they soon gave way to the universal language of music. Just as the Swiss are famed engineers for good reason, there is a good reason that "swiss music" draws a blank. It was there, and that's about all.

THE MILES DAVIS OF SWITZERLAND

WHAT'S MORE FUN THAN HARDERPOTSCHETE? NOTHING

The parade in the afternoon was a lot of fun, something that you would see anywhere in small town USA, if the town were in the middle of the Alps and swiss. The best part: no politicians. They had marching bands, and people dressed up in traditional clothing, although in this part of the world the clothing dates back centuries, not decades. They had Scouts, which is different outside of the US in that it is coed (please don't tell me about Venture crews, I know all about them). But they also had mounted men-at-arms (women too) to advertise the outdoor production of William Tell, the play. They had two sets of alpine horns - first was the guy above who really sounded good and got the biggest hand of the day, and then a group of five or six with horns so big they had little stands built in but when each person just blew a single note I thought to myself all that just to hear a single chord? First they had a herd of cows with enormous cowbells, and then later they had a herd of people with enormous cowbells. The people did sound more in unison, but you have to like seriously loud noise to like either group, so let's just say I'm not a fan of bone rattling bells. When the fire truck came through, they were squirting the crowd, and seemed to enjoy it when people in the upper stories of the buildings along the route responded by throwing buckets of water back. I'm just glad I wasn't underneath the worst offenders. The most fun for the kids were the harderpostschete, who despite their scary appearance brought forth laughter when terrorizing them.

That evening we enjoyed an ice cream cone -- which we did most days in Europe as the ice cream was delicious and cheap -- while waiting for the fireworks. Everybody else in town seemingly brought their own supply of fireworks, because everybody around the central park was setting off enormous quantities of their own before the professionals did. Even a group of older American tourists who arrived that day by bus and were leaving the next day had some. There was such a throng around the park the children who were parading around the park with their lanterns required a drummer and a couple of stout men in the fore to clear a path. I have to say the fireworks display was quite good, up to Fourth of July standards, and the nice thing was we only had to walk a block back to our hotel. It made for an exciting finish to a relaxing day.

The Path to 9/11

It's getting ugly out there. Real Ugly. All that dispicable letter from the Democatic Senators needs is Luigi Vercotti's signature "Things break, Colonel."

I'm sorry if the people who brought us It's the Ecomony, Stupid!" don't like a reasonably accurate (hey, it's TV, it will never be entirely accurate) examination of the past, but so be it. I'm looking forward to the original work, but fully expect ABC to cave.

Just check out Libertas, which has been on top of this story like Tom Maguire on the big Plame-out.

I'm trying hard not to get a case of Leftist Derangment Syndrome, but it gets harder with every provocation.

I Live

Just in case you're worried, I am alive. I've been busy personally and professionally (does that make me a professional? I suppose so) and I've been working on a couple of larger posts. While I'm not the best writer in the world, I'm no where near the fastest. I don't even rise to the level of half fast.

Outstanding Flight Photos

A friend emailed me a URL with some absolutely fantastic photos of an aerial journey across "the good ol' US of A" from California to Oshkosh for the fabled Airventure. One more vicarious tick in box of things to do before I die.