The text of Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush. It's a fascinating read, although I don't believe it gives as much insight into Ahmadinejad's thinking as others have claimed; it's written in the format of the old exchanges of letters between Christian and Muslim kingdoms during the Middle Ages, a fashion which led to the development of the high points of both Christian and Muslim apologia. (i.e., arguments for why X is better than Y meant to genuinely convince believers in Y)

The contents themselves are somewhat interesting. There are attacks of the form "how can US policy X be consistent with Christianity," where X includes the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel, and American opposition to Latin American and African regimes. Next there's a bit on 9/11, with questions about failures of American intelligence and security and hints that the US government was complicit in it. (For those who haven't heard this before, it's a popular rumor in the Islamic world, along with the belief that the Jews were in on it)

The fact is, there are some very good points in this letter, and there are some that are total crap. Most fall somewhere in between. Tradition would require that Bush respond in kind (allowing, of course, an arbitrary amount of ghost-writing; even in the Middle Ages kings and caliphs weren't all masters of discourse), and frankly it would be quite straightforward to respond and skewer those arguments fairly thoroughly. The thing which I find most important about this letter is that it opens the door for a new form of discourse between the countries that may have much more of a chance of influencing matters than the American political team may realize: if Ahmadinejad is as serious about the tradition as this letter suggests he is, then rational argumentation may hold sway over him when it comes in through the appropriate channels.

(And, one may hope, our people would understand the virtue of writing such a letter both in English and Farsi, and adding appropriate honorifics and tropes where needed. A good medievalist in government would be quite helpful)

BTW, I posted the first part of the first paper to climatepapers

Per the previous post, I just created the climatepapers community. Everyone who's interested, sign on!

As a result of various conversations recently (and especially hearing Al Gore give his new talk a few weeks ago -- preemptive plug, when his new movie An Inconvenient Truth comes out, go see it. If it's half as interesting as his lecture it will be worth it), I've started to get very interested in learning about the state of the art in understanding the climate and how it's changing.

The short answer is somewhere between "real trouble" and "REALLY BIG trouble." But I'd like to understand things a bit more specifically than that.

To that end, I've started to assemble a list of papers that seem to represent the current state-of-the-art in the field, and this list is sure to grow as I read through more of them and follow reference chains. In fact, I'm planning on posting something soon with a generally readable summary of one of them.

But this got me thinking: Learning a subject is better done with many people. Would anyone be interested in forming an impromptu online journal club to learn about climate modelling, climate change, and all things related? (For those of you who haven't participated in these before, what would be involved is everyone picking a paper, [or part of one for a really long paper] reading it thoroughly enough to write a good summary and explain everything that goes on in it, and then posting their summary and having a discussion about it. A typical rate is every week, someone else is responsible for a paper. It's a great way to learn a new technical subject.)

The minimum background for doing this seems to be a reasonable science or engineering background; from what I've read of the papers so far, they don't have a lot of obscure jargon beyond "stratosphere" and "sea ice," just a lot of graphs, plots, and discussion of how they got them. For those without a heavy tech background, it should still be possible (and fun, and interesting) to be part of the discussion.

I've got a few papers in my list already, from the GISS-E group:
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Anyone interested?

Edit: It now exists: climatepapers. Join up!

Editorial by Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles about why he instructed the priests in his archdiocese to continue to provide charity and relief to illegal immigrants in contravention to a new federal law. Bravo to him!

Notice how, over the past five years, American airport security has gotten systematically more invasive, more edgy, and more unpleasant? Well, apparently it still hasn't gotten more effective to go with that. You can still transport as many bombs as you want aboard aircraft, just so long as they aren't hidden inside your shoe.

(Which, really, shouldn't surprise anyone. Fake security monitors objects and has lots of procedures; real security monitors people. But that requires extensive training and may involve things like profiling, which are politically unpalatable. Even the best physical security screening of luggage doesn't really achieve anything, since there are plenty of other places you could smuggle things aboard. [Left as an exercise for the reader -- I can think of some really fun ones that they'll never be able to screen for without causing a riot])

Well, three years since our fearless leader decided to start a land war in Asia. On this anniversary, we have an editorial by Donald Rumsfeld demonstrating that he really has no idea of what's going on around him (and is somehow still capable of confusing elections with democracy); an editorial by George Will showing that he does; and remarks by our President and Vice President where it's hard to tell if we're dealing with willful ignorance or congenital idiocy.

There is liquid water on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Well, it looks like some faith-based organizations are being extremely active in continued earthquake relief in Pakistan. Miltant Islamists, in particular. (Has our government really thought this whole faith-based routine through? cf. on Tuesday, the President ordered DHS to create a faith-based division. No word yet on which faiths will be invited to participate.)

(And the article cited suggests that "there is hope that [these] groups... are trading the mantle of militancy for social work." I'm not really sure why they think that radical groups engaging in social work means they're going to stop killing people; Hamas has been running schools and hospitals for years, in parallel with suicide bombing campaigns, and they're far from the only ones)

Yes, it looks like Rumsfeld has finally lost his last bit of touch with reality. "U.S. to rely on Iraqi forces to quell civil war" is the headline. Now, the Iraqi forces are in no small part involved in the civil war, but don't let that intervene.

Seriously, I can see how a civil war in Iraq could even be to the United States' advantage, but I would really like to know that we're doing our foreign policy on purpose rather than by accident, and that we have something resembling a sane operational plan for how to protect our own people there when the shit hits the industrial-sized fan.

I always knew that being in Israel occasionally made tourists go a little odd, but normally it happens in Jerusalem rather than Eilat. And, um, doesn't involve dolphins.

From Aviation Week: Secret two-stage-to-orbit plane program ends. I'd say it's pretty likely that these rumors are legit, and if so... damn, that's a beautiful bit of design. I wish we could reuse it (well, minus the use of insanely toxic fuels) for civilian purposes.

From Seed: A great article on Elizabeth Gould's research on neurogenesis and stress.

From Philip Greenspun: An interesting article on why there aren't so many women in science, which basically raises the question of why anyone would be in science. There's stuff to think about in there...

And if you're really bored, my own post from a few days ago with more politics stuff. I should really know better than to post long essays over the weekend...

Take a look at the following list of articles from the recent past:
Jewish man tortured and killed in France
Russia urges Hamas to change
Bombing of Shi'ite shrine leads to bloodshed
France reassesses its future after major riots
Map of the Cartoon Riots

We are standing on the verge of war, not the minor sort of war we've seen so far in Iraq, but an all-out war that could spread across the globe. But there are other counterpressures that could divert the flood into something wholly different.
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Flemming Rose, culture editor of Jyllands-Posten and the editor responsible for the decision to publish the famous cartoons of the Prophet, writes an editorial in the Washington Post explaining why he published them.

(And for the record, I am in entire, wholehearted agreement with Mr. Rose on this issue. I have no sympathy, none whatsoever, for the sorts of people who want everyone in the world to obey their tribal rules. I speak respectfully of the Prophet; but I will defend, without hesitation and with all due force, the right of anyone not to. And frankly, countries that sponsor 41-part television series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as a matter of government policy, really don't have much room to be complaining about the insensitive Danish free press. Let them choke on it.)

I don't know why this article hasn't been more widely noticed. Nir Rosen, a journalist for the NYTimes who is fluent in Arabic, went to Jordan and interviewed jihadis past and present, visited mosques, and generally brought back a vivid and interesting picture of what is going on there. It adds a lot of context to Israeli Gen. Naveh's recent undiplomatic remarks about the danger to the present regime in Jordan, as well as giving a good picture of where the major players in Iraq today are coming from.

(The article doesn't explain all the names as well as some articles do, though, so you may want to pop over to Wikipedia occasionally while reading it.)

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Anyway, this suddenly much-deeper rift (after Wednesday) between Sunnis and Shi'ites is as big a deal as the Hamas victory a few weeks ago was. Middle East politics is reshaping itself Right Now; everything could change course at the drop of a (probably bomb-laden) hat. Keep your eyes on the news. (And updates from here will continue)

Two bits from the Washington Post: An editorial by George Will about a president acting like a monarch - noteable since it comes from one of the leading conservative writers in the country. And a good history of the cartoon protests going on across the Muslim world.

On a lighter note, here's a London Tube Map with the names replaced by anagrams, and a standard Tube map for comparison. My favorite is the "Aleph & Tentacles."

Apparently, police investigations of prostitution in Spotsylvania, MD are very thorough:

According to the affidavit, after receiving a tip about possible impropriety at Moon Spa, two unidentified Spotsylvania detectives promptly visited the spa and each paid $60 for 30-minute massages in separate rooms. A woman known only as Mimi gave the detectives a bath, a brief massage and then performed a sex act on them. "For her services, 'Mimi' was paid a $50 'tip,' " Doyle wrote. Police made two more visits with similar results.

Just got back from seeing "Munich." The film was quite good, and a lot more apolitical than I expected. Even though it's about a specific historical event and its aftermath, after a while it becomes clear that the original event was almost incidental to the real story; the film itself is about moral choices, and what wars do to the people who fight them. The choice of original event (the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli olympic team in 1972 by Palestinian terrorists) seems to be more to give a clear simplicity to the beginning, and it makes the contrast with the progressing murkiness all the more relevant.

So if you've been avoiding this movie because it's too political, don't worry - it's not. It's a bit on the heavy side, but worth a watch.

Hmm. After hearing about this on the radio today, I figure it's time for some ( background on the Hamas victoryCollapse )

Murder at the Indonesian Consulate; this has the makings of a hell of a story, whatever was behind it.

And Condi Rice admits that the U.S. underestimated the political strength of Hamas.

"I've asked why nobody saw it coming," Ms. Rice said, speaking of her own staff. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."

Something important has happened in the Middle East: a terrorist organization, wholly unrepentant in its aims and bloody methods, has been elected as a government in a free election. Hamas has vowed to continue, turning its armed wing into a national army and, in effect, turning its campaign of mayhem into a formal war.
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Alberto Gonzalez defended the President's domestic espionage program today.

The biggest thing I see wrong with his statements is that they could apply equally well to anything: if those arguments are acceptable in this case, why do they not also allow the President to order summary execution of anyone suspected of involvement with an enemy? Does this theory acknowledge any limits at all to executive power?

The New York Times has a very short article about changing rules for credit on scientific papers. Somehow, a creative writer managed to sneak in a sample page from the "Journal of Imaginary Genomics" after these rules are implemented; it's worth the look.

The Stardust probe returned to Earth safely after a seven-year mission to collect comet dust. The return capsule landed safe in the Utah desert with about a teaspoon of the fundamental matter of the solar system, and is en route to Johnson Space Center.

Bush tours New Orleans, visits undamaged neighborhoods.