Gay Jerusalem

Here's a rare victory for the forces of reason and humanity:

Jerusalem officially registered its first homosexual couple as married Monday, three months after a ruling by the High Court of Justice paved the way for same-sex couples to be listed in the Interior Ministry's Population Registry.

Israel thus leads such 'progressive' nations as France, Sweden, the UK and Australia in extending recognition to same-sex marriages.

Of related interest is this Wikipedia entry on Adelphopoiesis, an ancient Greek Orthodox rite for the 'making of brothers'. This tradition, long since fallen into disuse has been recently described by Yale historian John Boswell. Dr Boswell is accused of dodgy scholarship in the interests of normalizing gay marriage within the Christian tradition.

Build a Nuke for $150 million

The anonymous commenter in the story below made me curious. The comment refers to this news item. The seller apparently had graduated from selling dime bags of pot to harder items. "This stuff is really the bomb" he alledgedly said.

Doing the math - $150 million to buy enough weapons grade uranium for a bomb. Not affordable on an NIH grant. But perhaps within the reach of a state-sponsored terrorist group.

Georgian Justice

Seventeen year old Genarlow Wilson was jailed for 10 years and branded a child molester after concensual oral sex with a 15 year old. It's a shameful miscarriage of justice. District Attorney David McDade and Prosecutor Eddie Barker have failed to exercise the discretion necessary to prevent law becoming tyrrany. Their motive for destroying this guy's life seems to be a mix of arrogance and bigotry. Here's portrait of McDade with contact information.

Sign the online petition here.

UPDATE: Write to Georgia Governor Perdue here.

DNA on LSD

Claim:

FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

Somehow, I don't quite believe it. Surely the crystallographic information was sufficient.

All About Albania

Apparently

Albania is the only country occupied by the Nazis that had more Jews at the end of the war than at the beginning of the war, which is a reflection of Jews having sought refuge in Albania and survived.

I'm pleased to add a positive mental association with the word 'Albania'. My previous two associations are (1) the massive pyramid scheme that caused the Albanian economy to collapse in 1997 and (2) the writer Ismail Kadare whose book The Successor was a magnificent portrait of the paranoia surrounding a totalitarian dictator. This new cognitive connection tips my mental balance in favor of Albania.

Space Race is On

Ok, so China successfully used an anti-satellite missile to destroy one of its own aging weather satellites. Big deal. We can outdo that. I think we should launch an immediate strike against one of our own super-expensive ultra-modern spy satellites. Blast it into a zillion pieces. Then send another an even more expensive one right up in its place. Then we should flood the Grand Canyon for a Presidential boating trip and drain it in time for tourist season.

That'll show 'em.

The Inner Life of the Cell

Gorgeous - turn up the volume.

Who, How and Why Fish Love

The most significant difference between people and fish is only skin deep. We humans are covered in a thick sheath of dead cells, while the outermost layer of the fish is composed of living, slime-secreting cells.

Most scientists wave away the difference as an outcome of our terrestrial lifestyle. Cells require an aqueous environment to live in, so our skin acts as a wrapper, keeping the wet stuff in. Fish cells secrete slime, so the story goes, to lubricate themselves against the water, protect from microbes and form a tight waterproof seal around themselves.

But a different idea, originally proposed by Aldous Huxley has, to my knowledge, never been given full consideration by biologists. In The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley argues that slime substitutes for spiritual distance from the Divine Presence.

The slime of personal and emotional love is remotely similar to the water of the Godhead's spiritual being, but of inferior quality and (precisely because the love is emotional and therefore personal) of insufficient quality. Having, by their voluntary ignorance, wrong-doing and wrong being, caused the divine springs to dry up, human beings [Here, of course, he means to include fish. -Ed.] can do something to mitigate the horrors of their situation by "keeping one another wet with their slime" [He's quoting Chuang Tzu, a Taoist - Ed.

To my mind then, the slime that oozes from the integument of the fish is no mere physical barrier, but serves a lofty spiritual purpose. It is for self-love, a narcissism made necessary by their choice of an amoral lifestyle which distances them from the Universal Compassion.

NIH funding is tight, I thought I'd try that one out here first.

Simenon

I've taken to reading detective fiction by Georges Simenon on Friday nights. The Maigret novels are perfect for a single sitting. In 150 pages, Simenon conjures up a Paris populated by desperate criminals and gourmande policemen drinking red wine with lunch. The city abounds with sexual dalliances, hidden by the mist and fog, while our hero each evening returns home to his cosy wife and home. Simenon himself was known as the man of 10000 women - odd that his protagonist should be the very model of a faithful husband.

No Xenophobia in Saudia Arabia

The Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is considering banning the letter X:

The letter 'X' soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.

And let me tell you, the letter t isn't far behind.

Bashir to Patrol Self with Great Force

Once again, the African Union is set to install Sudanese genocidaire Omar al-Bashir in its chair. As such, he'd be running the organization charged with opposing his efforts to wipe out the non-Arab population of Darfur. No doubt he'll do a magnificent job, forcibly restraining himself and wrestling with his demons.

11386th Day Anniversary

Its now 11386 days since the UN adopted the, now-revoked, 'Zionism is Racism' resolution. For many it was this act that made the UN project irredeemable. I mention this today, because in Moynihan's book 'A Dangerous Place' he quotes the speech to the UN made by Herzog in the minutes before resolution 3379 passed. Herzog emphatically declared "We shall not forget those who spoke up for decency and civilization ; and I thank the delegations who expressed themselves against his pernicious resolution. We shall not forget those who voted to attack our religion and our faith. We shall never forget."

It's one thing to remember on yearly anniversaries. But never forgetting requires a special kind of determination. In that spirit, I record the voting records of the member nations of the UN on that day. It should be noted that among nations voting for the resolution on the 'Third Committee' (whose favorable vote permitted passage of the issue to the General Assembly), was Spain, curiously absent from the subsequent G.A. vote.

Voted yes: (72) The 25 sponsoring nations above, and additionally 47 nations: Albania, Bangladesh, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burundi, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, People's Republic of China, Congo, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, German Democratic Republic, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Laos, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mexico, Mongolia, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Cuba, Dahomey, Egypt, Guinea, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libyan Arab Republic, Mauritania, Morocco, North Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Yemen, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, and United Arab Emirates.

Voted no: (35) Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Central African Republic, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Fiji, Finland, France, Federal Republic of Germany, Haiti, Honduras, Iceland, Republic of Ireland, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Luxembourg, Malawi, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Swaziland, Sweden, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, United States of America, Uruguay.

Abstaining: (32) Argentina, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Burma, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Lesotho, Mauritius, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Thailand, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Upper Volta, Venezuela, Zaire, Zambia.

From the Wikipedia

Einstein's Equation

I just received David Bodanis' book, E=mc2 in the mail. I'm not a fan of popular physics books, as I feel that without the mathematical background, important concepts are conveyed by meaningless caricatures. With biology it's different - powerful ideas can be communicated without mathematical language and are accessible to the non-specialist.

However, this book looks great as it focusses on the history of ideas leading up to Einstein's famous 1905 publications. Its a treasure trove of anecdotes and I can't resist copying out a few lines from the introduction. Discussing the difficulty in grasping the meaning of 'Einsteins equation', Bodanis writes:

Even firsthand instruction doesn't always help, as Chaim Weizmann found when he took a long Atlantic crossing with Einstein in 1921: "Einstein explained his theory to me every day," Weizmann said, "and soon I was fully convinced that he understood it."

Vista - Digital Fortress

A succinct expression of why Microsoft has finally lost me

Vista is being marketed to content producers, not consumers. If Windows XP was Microsoft’s attempt to embed a browser into the operating system then Vista is the attempt to embed DRM.

Its really a shame. Now that I've logged a few hours with Ubuntu, I appreciate how slick Windows really is. Its fast, visually appealing and the foundation for a universe of cool software. And it manages to accomplish this without requiring the user to open a text box and type arcane commands. However, the advent of Vista means that learning shell scripts is simply the price of digital freedom.

Pamphlets Over Lebanon

Michael Totten's latest report from the Middle East is extraordinarily good. He visits Southern Lebanon, all the time under the watching eyes of the Hizbollah.

It looked – and felt – totalitarian in Bint Jbail. Everyone watched us. If Said was right that the locals weren’t allowed to speak freely (assuming they dissented from Nasrallah’s party line) it must feel totalitarian to people who live there as well.

Totten also has a piece out for The New Pamphleteer. The latter is the brainchild of Adam Bellow (son of Saul Bellow, and famously, author of In Praise of Nepotism) of which he said

My model, the one that I'm hoping to recreate, is an American pamphlet series published in the 1920s, called the "Little Blue Books." They were published by a Jewish, socialist newspaper editor, very eccentric, brilliant guy named Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. He was a very progressive figure and had a little publishing empire going in the Midwest. At some point he decided to put out pamphlets, which he charged a nickel for. It was strictly a mail order business. He sold these things for twenty years. And he managed to sell a hundred million pamphlets in five years. He was very close with the leading polemicists of the day, so some of them had original material. But the pamphlets were also an eclectic mix of history, poetry, proverbs, joke books, sex advice, household tips, occasional pieces of journalism.

Selling the Family State

Big news in the the Micronation biz:

A FORMER World War II fort in the North Sea, which was settled 40 years ago and declared a state with its own self-proclaimed royal family, is up for sale.

Sealand is six miles off the coast of the UK, and boasts its own postal service and football team. If anyone is free this weekend, perhaps we could borrow a dinghy and invade?

Image from Wikipedia.

Propaganda in the London Times

The Sunday Times reports that Israel is preparing to attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons. This seems unlikely, all the more so when we learn that one of the co-authors, Uzi Mahnaimi, claimed in 1998 that Israel was working on an ethnic bomb that would target its Arab enemies only.

No molecular geneticist with an even cursory knowledge of Israeli population demographics would give this idea a second thought. Genetic research confirms that Sephardic Jews share the genetic composition of the communities in which they hail from. In other words, while it's not impossible to imagine engineering a virus that attacked only certain genetic isolates - such a virus would target half of Israel's population. Moreover, only a crazed scientist would imagine that such a viral weapon wouldn't rapidly mutate to acquire broader infectivity.

The Israeli biological research community is as advanced as any in the world. The likelihood that it would countenance a self-immolating line of research is zero. A reporter who claims otherwise can only have an agenda of his own.

Manifold Merits of Linux

As this post is now overflowing with comments, a new post to discuss the merits of different Linux distros. Thanks to Ilan's comments. My summary of the front-runner distros is:

SLED
Pro: Wife-friendly
Con: Early stages of being consumed by Microsoft, DVD install

Ubuntu
Pro: Huge user community, vast array of packages ready to install
Con: Sluggish

Fedora
Pro: Long history of good support, lots of users
Con: Sluggish, requires DVD burn to install

Others in the running: Mandriva, Gentoo. Probably we'll all end up with different installations. Personally, as long as I can stream audio output to my Airport Express, as I currently do under XP with Justeport, I'll be happy!