Still no time to write the big politics post summarizing the Lebanon War; I'll get to that soon, really. In the meantime, here's a post by bradhicks with a good update on some stuff from Pakistan.

"We're engineers. we don't always need to know why black magic works, we just sacrifice the chickens and hope for the best."

Yup, one of those nights.

The latest quarterly Pentagon report on Iraq was released today. (NYTimes story) It probably won't surprise anyone to hear that things are bad; Iraqi casualties went up 50% relative to last quarter. One number that particularly struck me is that total Iraqi casualties have reached 120 per day.

Think about this for a moment. If a terrorist action, or set of terrorist actions, were to kill 120 people in the United States, consider what the news would be like, what the inquests would be like, how long it would be remembered for. This has now reached the level of daily occurrence.

Technical aside: When trying to interpret the impact of this, we really need to scale things to the size of the population. The real number that affects the public as a whole in a mass casualty event is the average number of degrees of separation between a random person and a person affected. Simply scaling the number of people affected linearly -- the US has ten times the population of Iraq, it's as if 1200 people were killed here -- is incorrect, since as groups get smaller you're more likely to know someone else in it. Does someone know a good result on mean distance in very large social networks?

Shakespeare Santa Cruz is putting on a fantastic production of King Lear. It's still going for another week. Well worth the trek over the hill.

I recently picked up a very interesting volume of ancient Near Eastern primary texts of various sorts. It's got a bit of everything: mortuary texts, legal documents, letters, ostraka, hymns, temple rituals, legends. There's even an old Sumerian lullaby from about 4,000 years ago. The purpose of the book, according to its incipit, is both to provide sources relevant to the work of Old Testament scholars (that being the main category of Near East scholars when the first edition was written) and to provide enough other works to give you a feel for the context of the time.

Something I've been noticing while reading through this is how different the various cultures feel. The Hittites come off as warlike: not only do they have a lot of documents about war (that might be simple selection bias), but their approach to it is far more gung-ho than the others'. Not in a good way, in a "we like to kill people" sort of way. The Egyptian texts feel far more foreign than I expected: part of this is because they come so predominantly from tombs, but the culture seems to look towards a political center much more than any of the others. Even by comparison to royal texts from other lands, that country seems dominated by the overwhelming power of a single political entity. The Sumerian and Akkadian texts, on the other hand, feel almost familiar; the stories and concerns of the people feel like they wouldn't be out of place today.

I suspect that this is because we (I?) actually have a good deal more continuity of culture with the Sumerians. The Jews started out there, and came back later in Babylonian days; their old customs and ours are pretty hard to tell apart. And despite the fact that in history class we hear far more about the ancient Egyptians, we don't actually have much culture in common with them, and it's not clear that anyone really does; the break between the culture of the Middle Kingdom and the culture of Greek, and later Roman, Egypt was pretty deep. Whatever their powers may have been, the Ptolemies were no Pharaohs.

There's something very odd about reading texts from an old place, and realizing that they don't feel foreign to you. The world suddenly feels like it has some sort of structure. But I suppose that this firm an anchoring in history may be where a lot of the Middle East's problems come from in the modern day, too.

Again, not yet the big politics post. Instead, some interesting things:

Grigory Perelman declined the Fields Medal, as he has declined a host of other honors and awards in the past, for his proof of Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture. This conjecture basically states that there are eight basic pieces, and some simple surgery rules, out of which all possible three-dimensional compact surfaces can be built, and therefore we can classify all 3D compact surfaces. A compact surface is roughly speaking one that fits into a finite region; for example, in two dimensions, the surface of a sphere is compact, as is the surface of a donut, but a flat plane isn't. Proving Thurston's Conjecture also proves the Poincaré Conjecture, which roughly states that the only 3D compact surface that has no holes in it that you could wrap a string around (like you could wrap a string around the inner hole of the surface of a donut, and it couldn't shrink because it would get "caught") is a 3-dimensional sphere. It's a major problem in mathematics that has been open for over a century, and Thurston's conjecture is a regular tool of various fields of physics and applied math.

And perhaps even more excitingly, a smoking gun for the existence of Dark Matter has been found. A team pointed the Chandra X-ray observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and various other telescopes at a place where two clusters of galaxies had collided and gone through each other. They could clearly see that the "luminous" part of the galaxies had gone past one another and were well-separated, but 90% of the mass -- as visible by its gravitational effects on light -- was somehow still in the middle, and completely transparent. Apparently, the luminous matter had kept on going, but there was so much dark matter that the two big lumps from each galaxy cluster had rammed into each other and come to a stop. This confirms the existence of what's technically known as non-baryonic cold dark matter. "Dark" means that it isn't luminous or visible to the eye; "cold" means that it isn't a gas of photons or neutrinos, since those disperse much more quickly; "non-baryonic" means that it isn't made of any ordinary kind of matter, and we know that because of how transparent it is relative to its mass. (In fact, its transparency tells us that whatever it is doesn't interact electromagnetically very much, or perhaps at all.) Previous investigations have suggested that the universe is about 70% dark energy (which is not visible to the eye, but unlike dark matter, doesn't form clumps or shapes; it's just uniformly spread out), 27% dark matter, and 3% luminous matter; this experiment confirms the dark matter / luminous matter ratio, and all previous hypotheses about the dark matter, very beautifully.

Now, the next question is just what it is made of...

Speaking about Iraq, our president said: "We're not leaving so long as I'm president."

While I suppose we've all known this for a while -- given the unholy mess we're stuck in, there's really no way we're going to get out of there for many years to come -- it's interesting to see him completely give up on pretending that we're going to win the war Real Soon Now.

(Coming soon: A real write-up about the recent war with Hezbollah and what was going on behind the scenes. The short answer is "a hell of a lot.")

Edit: Will wonders never cease. Take a look at the transcript of another press conference, and search for the word "weapons of mass destruction." You will see our president openly and publicly admitting that the entire WMD rationale was wrong, and that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Thanks to xthread for the link.

The President has started circulating draft legislation to establish military tribunals for the trying of "enemy combatants," in response to the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling. (WP article here) Quick bullet points from this: An "enemy combatant" is defined pretty loosely, including an "individual who is or was part of or supporting Taliban or al Qaeda forces or associated forces," (sec 103B) without specification on the nature of the support. The bill establishes tribunals with authority up to and including the death penalty.

Good news: they allow defense counsel as per military rules, i.e. appointed by the court; civilian counsel is permitted if they satisfy various additional requirements (sec 215b2) they prohibit self-incrimination or evidence obtained via torture (sec 211). Defense has access to compulsory process for obtaining withesses "similar to" that of civilian courts. (sec 222.a) Certain punishments are explicitly prohibited: "flogging... branding, marking, or tattooing on the body... the use of irons, single or double, except for the purpose of safe custody." (sec. 228)

Bad news: Proceedings may be closed to the public, or to the accused, "upon a finding by the military judge that doing so is necessary to protect the national security, to ensure the safety of individuals, or to prevent disruption." (Sec. 216.c.3) In such a case the accused will be provided with a "redacted or unclassified summary of evidence... if it is possible to do so without compromising... national security interests." (216.c.4) There was a sentence "No evidence shall be admitted to which the accused has been denied access if its admission would result in the denial of a (fair trial?)," but that sentence seems to have been edited out. (216.c.4) The denial of hearsay evidence (sec 102.7.b), the right to a speedy trial, and the "technical rules for sworn and authenticated statements" (102.7.c) are explicitly rejected.

Mixed: Appeals go the "convening authority," i.e. the Secretary of Defense (sec 232) After all such appeals, the US Court of Appeals for the DC circuit has appellate jurisdiction.

Overall, this bill is marginally better than the pre-Hamdan situation, in that it allows for some judicial review of proceedings, but it still has the basic problems: anyone may be entered into this military system by the exclusive decision of the Secretary of Defense or designated officers, without the need for indictment by a grand jury, and while within this system several parts of the Constitution are effectively suspended. (Article III sec. 2 p. 3 [jury trial]; amendment V, first provision [grand jury] and arguably the fourth [due process]; all of amendment VI except for a weakened version of the right to counsel; amendment VIII, first provision [excessive bail]; article I, section 9 pp. 2 [habeas corpus]) In practice, this appears to be an imposition of martial law in parallel to civilian law: the military is entitled to try people by its rules whenever it sees fit. The best argument against that seems to be a trust that the government will not abuse this power, but that's a pretty poor argument when several stages of the bill explicitly remove the usual procedural safeguards that obstruct that. I'll also point out the slew of reports about the actual main uses of the Patriot Act: to obtain information in drug cases and other non-terrorism-related issues. Given an alternate legal procedure that's easier for prosecutors, they will systematically use it to go after people they see as bad; that's completely natural, but that's why we have the Constitution in the first place.

The President's own public statements indicate that the objective is to be able to hold such prisoners "for the duration of the war," but other statements of his indicate that the war is likely to be permanent, so I'll leave the details to the reader.

Now, in practice: this bill is unlikely to come to the floor very quickly, but it may be intended for use as a political football during the midterm elections. Those elections are likely to be crucial: if the Republicans lose substantial support, and especially if they lose control of one or both houses of Congress, all such procedures are likely to vanish pretty quickly; if on the other hand the Bush movement feels that they can claim even a tenuous mandate post-election, they are likely to push very hard for measures like this and stronger ones elsewhere.

Quick note: If you hear something in the news in the near future about the "Abu al-Fadal al-Abas Brigades" in Iraq, these are a new arm of Hezbollah which Iran has set up in Iraq, specifically to act as Iran's proxy fighters against the US. Apparently they moved from silent setup mode to active attacking mode on 4 Jul, and we can expect them to be trouble in the future.

Related: Notice that ever since Ahmadinejad took power in Iran, and made Mughniyeh his defense minister, Iran has been very actively founding Iranian-controlled terror groups in as many places as possible: AaFaA Brigades in Iraq, its old Hezbollah setup in Lebanon and Syria, its infiltration & takeover of Hamas in Gaza, etc. If I were running a government anywhere vaguely in that region that had a Shi'ite minority, I'd be keeping my eyes open for whatever satellite group Iran were setting up there. And note that this is an international network of professional terrorist groups with the systematic sponsorship, supply and control by a government that's trying to become a nuclear power: the worst hypothesis is confirmed.

Iran is gearing up for a major proxy war. If they set up these units in every Middle Eastern country with a Shi'ite population, they could effectively destabilize the local governments and install friendly regimes, or at least create friendly circumstances "on the ground:" the true creation of an Iranian sphere of influence. The other thing these teams are for is for fighting against the US/Israel alliance, which it views - quite rightly - as a competitor for geostrategic power in the region. Such a force would certainly back even non-Shi'ite groups to further its aims; (remember that Iran supplied weapons to the [Sunni] PLO for years) direct alliance with groups like al-Qaeda is less likely, since those groups have very strong ideological leanings which aren't that compatible, but these guys have the potential to be much more strongly unified.

The question of just how broad Iran's ambitions are is open: they want this network, they want ICBM's (they already have intermediate-range ballistic missiles, like the Shahab-3; once North Korea finalizes the Taepodong-2 ICBM, Iran will probably be the first customers), they want the Bomb. Do they want to take on China or India for regional power? Would they want to press engagement with US/Israel even beyond the scale needed to push them out of the area?

Another interesting question: How will Russia come down in this? They haven't decisively allied with either the US or Iranian side in this conflict, and have been willing to work with both. At some point it will probably become very difficult to do this. Which way it goes depends e.g. on how Iran decides to involve itself (or not) with Chechnya, but it could have a big impact on how much free rein Iran ends up getting in the Central Asian sphere.

There's something curious about this particular war: the politicians all seem to get what's really going on -- even the ones who are usually a bit dense -- but the media seems to have completely, utterly, missed the ball. So this is probably a good time to give a bit of backstory.

(The backstory to the backstory, if you haven't heard the news at all -- a few months ago, Hamas started firing missiles at Israel fairly regularly from Gaza. A few weeks ago, they raided and kidnapped a soldier, plus killing a few more. Israel demanded his return and parked armored divisions at the border; Hamas refused, and Israel rolled in the tanks, going for both the hostage's release and an end to the attacks. Then a bit after that, Hezbollah raided from Lebanon and kidnapped people as well; in response, Israel has essentially gone to war, and Lebanon has been getting bombed ever since. Various countries have said "bad Israel, you're overreacting" but the response has been very noticeably muted; in fact, the US, Europe, and even the Arab League aren't actually opposing Israel's actions very strongly at all, and Bush signalled today pretty clearly that he's going to wait at least another week before really trying to encourage a cease-fire at all. Why?...)
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Back in the US, had an excellent trip. I'll post a detailed trip report later, as well as a serious politics post about the situation in Israel -- there are some things that I haven't seen the media talk about at all.

Just an update, for those of you who haven't been watching this. A few days ago, Hamas attacked an Israeli position, killing two soldiers and capturing another one. They took him to somewhere in Gaza. Israel massed armored units at the border and warned them to return him at once.
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This isn't a big, world-shaking event; it's a regional crisis, with the potential for having real regional effects, but it's not something that you absolutely need to be following unless you care about Middle Eastern politics. In fact, I'm just posting this because I know a lot of people don't follow that, and may just want a quick summary of the week's news.

Edit: Here's a link to New York Times coverage of the various things going on. Not all the details, but a fair roundup of events with minimal editorializing.

There's got to be a moral in this story somewhere. Maybe it's a Masonic code.

Me: Here's a headline you don't see in civilized countries. "Fatah Gunmen Attack Parliament."
Officemate: Sure you do. Whenever Fatah comes and attacks people's parliaments.

Only in the Middle East...

The Washington Post on the Iraqi reaction, interviews in a Shiite neighborhood.

Al-Jazeera reporting the event and interviewing his family.

Ha'aretz reports on the Hamas response and his likely successor.

Debka talks more about succession.

Note the conflicting reports: Ha'aretz suggests Abd al-Rahman al-Iraqi and notes he was there when al-Zarqawi died, but Debka says al Qaeda has already named Abdallah bin Rashid al-Baghdadi. Meanwhile the most senior al-Qaeda figure in Iraqi is Wariya Arbili, and al-Qaeda also named Abdulhadi al-Iraqi as head of worldwide ops. Most of these people are largely unknown; note how many Iraqis are on this list, though, suggesting just how central Iraq has become to al-Qaeda in the post-Saddam era.

It's possible that all of these reports are true: if so, there's the opening for a really "interesting" succession battle. But that fight may be brief if one of the groups acts fast.

I really do try not to rejoice at other people's deaths, but sometimes it's tricky.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al Qaeda in Iraq, killed by US airstrike.

One of the more bloody-minded and vicious thugs of our recent past, the mastermind and chief encourager of hundreds of suicide bombings, aimed not only at Americans but at Iraqis, so that there would never be a sense of peace. He has the blood of thousands of civilians on his hands, and was actively continuing and accelerating his program of murder. He preached a variety of hard-line Islamism that made even the Taliban seem fairly moderate. In fact, he was far enough "out there" that his successors are likely to be more moderate - and less effective. Not something that happens so often in the Middle East.

Good job and congrats to all those involved on a difficult - and important - operation. This move likely just saved the lives of a few thousand civilians, and increased the chances of bringing this damned war to an end soon.

So far, we've got autumnflames and xthread interested in the 9:20 of An Inconvenient Truth tonight in PA. Any more takers?

If it's just the three of us, we can probably carpool -- xthread, where do you work? autumnflames, should I pick you up around 8:45?

Edit: Um, I should say, xthread, where can you be found at an appropriate time to go? I sometimes forget that my schedule isn't all that normal.

Reedit: This thread now moved to e-mail. If you want to go and aren't already on the thread, e-mail me.

Last night autumnflames and I went to see "Urinetown" at the San Jose Stage Company. It was excellent; the production was absolutely top-notch, from the acting to the lighting and choreography, the play itself is very funny, and you've got to love a musical which ends with a rousing cheer of "Hail Malthus!"

There's an odd little article in the Washington Post tonight about some people trying to put together a unity ticket for 2008, a bipartisan presidential ticket.
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Question for all you native (and fluent) speakers out there, especially language geeks:

I generally don't split infinitives in English. There's one case that I'm stuck on, though, because I'm not sure if there's another way to indicate the difference I have in mind: "not to do X" versus "to not do X." The former implies that X is not done, but possibly through inattention or accident; the latter, a usage borrowed mostly from the speech habits of computer scientists, implies that the not doing of X is a primary objective of one's actions.

Is there a more correct way to say this? It feels clunky every time I say it.

(What brought this to mind was a news article about the Clintons' married life, where they say that Mr. Clinton "has told friends that his No. 1 priority is not to cause her any trouble." When I read that, it seemed that "not" was modifying "is" rather than "cause," which would suggest that his next line ought to be "It's to make sure other people do! Wahahahaha!")

Tell me, what kind of government security force wears ski masks and walks around with machine guns pointing up? I mean internal security here, not even armies.

Anyway, your telling lead line for the day:

GAZA (Reuters) - Rival Palestinian forces faced off at Gaza's border crossing with Egypt on Friday after border guards loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas caught a Hamas official trying to smuggle in 639,000 euros ($804,000), authorities said. (NY Times)

Demonstration in Egypt quited by force: A while ago, two judges alleged that the parliamentary elections were fixed. (They were) The judges faced a disciplinary hearing for saying so, and there have been protests by the public against this for a while. Big protest today, put down with force by the government.

Further background on this: Egypt is run by a secular dictatorship. (Um, sorry. He's a president, really. Of course you can vote for anyone you want. It says so right here on the label, next to the nice man with the gun.) They're not particularly popular because the economy is, as usual, in the toilet. The Muslim Brotherhood is essentially the original radical Islamist group; they were founded in Egypt several decades ago, and most modern organizations of that sort claim some sort of descent from them. They originated in Egypt to resist the local government. While they have pursued terrorism, their other major tack is to get legitimate political power. Since the parliament and presidency are under tight control, they've been slowly taking over the judiciary: an increasingly large fraction (already in the mid-double-digits) of Egypt's judges are strict Islamists.

This is the sort of thing that has the potential to boil over into broader social conflict or even revolution. Egypt is the most populous Arab state; trouble in there could easily seep over the borders to Saudi, Jordan, etc. Watch it carefully: things may happen there soon which impact daily life in the U.S.

USA Today reporting that the NSA keeps logs of all calls in the US. Not really a big surprise.

Now, recently you may have heard Alberto Gonzales explaining to Congress how the NSA does not perform any surveillance inside the US without legal warrants, etc. Which is true... if you accept a definition of "surveillance" analogous to Clinton's definition of "sex." This might be enough legal cavilling to make what he said not strictly perjury, (or rather, that would be an issue if the Senate Judiciary Committee hadn't thoughtfully decided not to swear him in...) but I'd say it doesn't pass the smell test: this was surveillance by any plain-English understanding of the word.

So there you have the difference between the Clinton and Bush administrations: one prevaricates about his sex life, the other about the erosion of Constitutional liberties.

It occurs to me that it's not at all obvious why people worry about temperature changes of a few degrees. I thought it would be nice to have a few pictures showing why.

I went over to the University of Nebraska's web site and downloaded the daily temperatures for Lincoln, NE for every day from 1920 to 1998. Here's a plot of how the daily highs looked for just the summer months, June through August:



The blue area marks days over 95°F. I chose that temperature because (according to Purdue's site) this is a day hot enough to significantly "stress" a corn crop, i.e. knock down its yield by several percent per day. (Less hot days can do damage too if there isn't enough moisture, but 95 is trouble no matter what)

Now, the thing is: When people talk about the average temperature rising, what it means is that the center of this plot - the average daily temperature - moves however many degrees to the right. And every time you do that, more bars move into the "over 95" category. In fact, here's a plot of how many days per summer would be over 95 as the temperature goes up:



Right now, there are about 18 days per summer over 95. If the average temperature went up five degrees Fahrenheit, you'd suddenly have 38 - out of 92 days in June, July and August.

There's a bit more to it, too -- when people talk about a "3°C global temperature rise," what it really means is that some places (e.g. the Antarctic Ocean) get cooler, and some get a lot hotter. For example, Scenario A2, the worst-case scenario in the GISS-E paper that I've been talking about, talks about a 2.7°C global average temperature rise by 2100, but a 3.5 or 4°C (6 or 7°F) temperature rise for Nebraska.

It could be worse; the same model predicts 15 to 20 degrees F rise for India.

By the way, the second plot here is almost linear (for temperature changes up to ten degrees or so): the conversion is roughly that for every 1°C (local, not global) temperature change, you get an extra 7.4 days per summer above 95.

Anyway, this is the short science journalism post for the evening. Sorry if it isn't horribly polished.

I just finished reading through the second part of the GISS-E climate modelling paper. I'll write a summary later, either a technical one for climatepapers or a non-technical one for here, but that's going to take a while, and this is important.

Everyone, you need to read this document carefully, specifically sections 6-8, including the figures. Those sections require not much more than knowing what a standard deviation is and that a "climate forcing" means "any input to the ecosystem that can affect climate." The first five sections, short version, say that the model has proven pretty good at predicting global-scale climate change for 1880-2003, it's not as good at predicting regional change, and its main weaknesses are an ocean model that doesn't understand El Niño and a sea ice model that nobody really trusts. My professional opinion is that it's definitely good enough to rely on its numbers for global-scale analyses, but it may underestimate ice melting. (And the authors freely admit the latter)

Sections 6-8 talk about their models for the period 2003-2100, according to five models: "alternative", "2C", and three from the Intl Panel on Climate Change.

I know this is a bit of a technical thing to be asking people to read, but this is probably the most important thing that's crossed my desk in years, and we need to start planning urgently. Pay particular attention to figures 19, 20 and 22.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem. This outweighs anything on the political arena short of global thermonuclear war. I don't think I could summarize what IPCC scenario A2 would look like by 2100 and have you believe me; but I would say that that scenario implies a real chance of a major population collapse, up to and including extinction and certainly impacting the viability of civilization.

The good news is, the two best scenarios (Alt and 2C) would leave us coming out fairly OK, and both of those are reachable with modern technology and not too much trouble; getting from here to there seems to require policy changes rather than anything enormously terrifying. The figures in the paper describe what emissions goals we would have to hit.

I'll write up a more detailed summary later, and try to pull the key information out of this document.